He glanced quickly over at the shorter man. Holding the bottle by its neck, he had smashed it against the side of a building, shaken off the paper bag, and was waving its jagged stump at Scull. Beer and suds were running down the wall where he’d shattered it.
Scull grinned slightly. The guy swiped the bottle stump at him, shaking droplets of liquid from the pointy spurs of glass. Scull felt a rush of air against his face and slipped backward an instant before it would have torn into his cheek. Then he reached into his jacket pocket, brought out a thin metal OC canister, and thumbed down its sprayhead. A conical mist discharged from its nozzle into his attacker’s face. The guy gagged, dropped the broken bottle, and began to stagger around blindly, clutching at his face as the pepper spray dilated the capillaries of his eyes and swelled the soft membranes in his nose and throat. Scull shoved the canister back into his pocket, spun him around by the shoulder, and drove an uppercut into his middle. The guy sagged to his knees beside his friend, gasping for breath, thick ropes of mucus glistening on his chin.
Scull looked down at him without moving. Disoriented, his eyes red and teary, the guy still hadn’t quit. He struggled to pull himself upright and somehow managed to get his knees under him. Scull swung his leg out and kicked him full in the face. He dropped back to the ground, his hands covering his nose, blood spurting through his fingers.
“Should’ve stayed down,” Scull muttered.
Perry realized that he still had the taller guy’s gravity knife in his hand. He folded the blade into the handle and slipped it into the back pocket of his trousers.
Then he felt a tug on his sleeve. The old woman. She had stepped forward, a smile on her plump, upturned face.
“Spasibo,” she said, thanking him in Russian. She pulled two oranges from her canvas bag and held them out for him to take. “Bolshoya spasibo.”
Perry put his hand on her arm.
“Thanks for offering, Grandmother, but you should keep them for yourself,” he said, motioning for her to return the fruit to her sack. “Go home now. Bishir yetso.”
“We’d better get out of here ourselves,” Scull said.
Perry glanced both ways. A crowd had begun to gather around them. The cars and buses had continued their slow progress along the street, though many rubberneckers were pausing at the curb to get a look at the commotion.
“Yeah,” he said. “Still want that drink?”
“I’m thirstier than ever,” Scull said.
“Then lead the way,” Perry said.
They hurried off down the street.
EIGHT
It seemed to Gordian that Dan Parker had been watching his back for as long as they’d known each other… which was now something like thirty-five years. In Nam, when both served with the 355th Tactical Fighter Wing, he had been wingman to Gordian’s lead in the countless bombing runs they had made over enemy territory. Going low against VC strongpoints in their F-4 Phantoms, they had learned the difficulty of hitting camouflaged, dug-in targets with their payloads at speeds approaching Mach 2—and come to understand the importance of developing guided weapons systems that would allow pilots to drop their ordnance in tight spots without having to fly multiple passes over their objectives, while practically holding their fingers up into the wind to decide which way it was blowing.
Gordian’s final day in a warplane — and in the war, for that matter — had been January 20, 1968, when he was downed during a close-support mission about four miles east of Khe Sanh. Ditching out of his fiery cockpit over an enemy-held ridge, he had scarcely shucked his parachute before he found himself surrounded by a bristling ring of North Vietnamese machine guns. As a pilot, he had been a prized catch, able to provide information about Air Force tactics and technology… and valuable enough for his captors to put him in a specimen cage rather than mount his head on a trophy wall. But throughout his five-year imprisonment in the Hanoi Hilton he had kept what he knew to himself, resisting carrot-and-stick coercions that had ranged from promises of early release to solitary confinement and torture.
Meanwhile, Dan had completed his second tour of duty in ’70 and returned to the States with a chest full of military decorations. The son of a prominent California congressman, he’d successfully pressured his social and political contacts to get a Red Cross pipeline through to Gordian. The humanitarian teams had provided basic medical treatment, delivered letters and care packages, and reported back to Gordian’s family about his condition, all despite an uncooperative North Vietnamese government that had done little more than pay lip service to the Geneva Convention.
Dan’s efforts on his friend’s behalf hardly stopped there. As the Paris peace talks staggered toward a cease-fire agreement, he had twisted arms to ensure that Gordian was among the first prisoners of war to be released. And although Gordian emerged from captivity weakened and underweight, he was in vastly better shape than he would have been without Dan’s unfailing support.
In the following decades, that support would reach across to the professional arena even as their friendship and mutual respect took on increasingly greater dimension. Their experiences in Vietnam had left both men convinced of the need for technology that would combine advanced navigation and reconnaissance capabilities with a precision missile delivery system. Together they had been forced to rely on guesswork time and again when making their strikes, placing their lives in jeopardy and causing unnecessary collateral damage to civilian locations. And Gordian had never forgotten that he owed his incarceration in a POW camp to a Russian surface-to-air missile that he hadn’t seen coming. While things had changed dramatically since the advent of smart weapons, there was still a lack of integration — a gap, so to speak — between infrared-targeting and radar surveillance systems.
By the late eighties, Gordian had begun to see how it was at least theoretically possible to fill that gap using modern satellite communications… and Dan was in a position to help him obtain the funding he needed to make those ideas a reality. Having followed in his father’s footsteps, he had pursued a career in politics, and in his third term as a congressman from California occupied seats on several House allocations committees. His confidence in Gordian had been instrumental in shaking loose underwriting grants which, added to Gordian’s own huge investment of corporate profits into R&D, opened the way for the development of GAPSFREE, the most impressive jewel in UpLink’s wire-and-silicon crown.
In terms of its adaptability to existing avionics and communications hardware, GAPSFREE was almost too good a package to be believed. Interfacing with orbital Global Positioning System satellites, it allowed the pilot or weapons officer of a fighter plane to know exactly where he was in relation to his target, or what was targeting him, providing real-time data relayed directly from the satellites to onboard navigational computers, and using synthetic-aperture radar to peer through fog and battle smoke. The system was also light and compact enough to be enclosed in a weapons pod that could be affixed to hardpoints on even low-tech aircraft like the A-10, transforming them — in combination with some cockpit modifications — into lethal fighter-bombers able to launch the smartest of smart weapons. This versatility made GAPSFREE the cheapest and most effective guidance system for missiles and precision guided munitions ever designed.
Not surprisingly, it also made Gordian’s firm the worldwide leader in recon tech.
And made Gordian a very, very rich man.
Having reached this sort of professional milestone, many entrepreneurs would have retired, or at least rested on their laurels. But Gordian had already begun pushing his ideas toward their next logical phase. Parlaying his tremendous success, he expanded his corporation in numerous ways, moving into dozens of countries, opening up new markets, and absorbing local chemical, communications, telephone, and industrial holdings on all four continents. His ultimate goal was to create a single, world spanning, satellite-based communications network that would allow phone transmissions to be made inexpensively from a mobile phone — or fax, or modem — to a destination anywhere on the globe.