He looked up at her expectantly, got to his feet. “You’ve got something?”
“Not your dinky li’l beacon,” said the commander.
“Then what?”
“A wicked powerful beam coming from a location just a few klicks outside Marseille. Looks like a communications signal uplinking to a satellite.”
“A satellite? We’re looking for a tracking beacon from an individual—”
“I know that,” said the commander. “But this signal wasn’t there yesterday. Wasn’t even there when I came on shift this morning. We—”
An Air Force tech sergeant came up, saluted smartly, and handed her a photograph. “Just in, ma’am. The location of the signal near Marseille.”
The homeland security deputy director looked over the commander’s shoulder at the picture.
“It’s a villa.”
“Nice place,” said the commander.
“There’s a lot of cars parked out front:”
“No antennas in sight. But that doesn’t mean anything.”
“Do you think that’s where our person is?”
The commander shrugged. “Maybe. But we’ll never pick up her beacon while they’re beaming out that whopping signal.”
Dan heard the anxiety in Van Buren’s voice. “If they’ve concentrated the beam they could do some bad damage.”
“I know,” he said. “Get Senator Thornton on the phone. Her private number’s in my computer. Tell her everything we know. Tell her it’s from me.”
“Okay. I’m on my way.”
Dan clicked his suit radio back to the suit-to-suit frequency. “Gerry, how soon can we dock?”
“Which docking port do you want to use?”
“The one back down by the control shack.”
Adair nodded inside his fishbowl helmet. “Okay. Gimme five minutes.”
“Make it three.”
Adair laughed.
“What’s funny?” Dan snapped.
“I was going to say three, but I figured if I did, you’d say two.”
Jane glanced past the edge of the awning up at the sky as the president droned on. Clouds were building up, looking grayer and more threatening every moment. She suppressed a giggle. Maybe the big bore will get rained out. What a pity.
The president and the VIPs stood beneath the plastic awning, but the crowd gathered out beyond them was in the open. We’ll stay dry enough, Jane thought But they’ll all have to run for shelter. Such a shame—they won’t hear the end of the president’s platitudes.
Denny O‘Brien was out there, sweating in the midst of the crowd. Damned hot for May, he thought. Looking up, he saw that the rain clouds which had been building thicker and grayer for the past hour or more were breaking up. No, he realized. They’re not blowing away. A hole’s opening up in the middle of ’em. Like somebody’s carving a hole right through the thick bank of clouds. And the hole’s getting bigger. He could see blue sky through it.
His cell phone buzzed with the signal it gave when the call was intended for the senator. Her cell phone was turned off, of course. Nobody took incoming calls when they were standing near the president, especially when the man was giving a speech.
While the people around him glared disapprovingly, O’Brien flicked his phone open and squinted at the screen. Matagorda? That’s where Dan Randolph’s outfit is.
He put the phone to his ear. There was so much static on the phone that he could barely understand the caller.
“Slow down!” he hissed. “Talk slower and clearer.”
“Get the president under shelter!” Van Buren’s voice said urgently. “Not in a car or anything metal. They’re beaming a lethal level of microwaves at him!”
“What kind of a stunt do you—”
“It’s no stunt!” Van Buren screeched. “They’re trying to assassinate the president! With microwaves from the powersat!”
Powersat
Dan was the first one through the hatch and into the docking port. Without waiting to see who was following him, he cracked open the port’s outer hatch and pulled himself out onto the flat surface of the powersat.
And his breath caught in his throat. Stretching out in every direction was the vast sunlit surface of the satellite, like a huge man-made plain set in the midst of the star-studded infinity of space. The flat surface glinted darkly, like polished obsidian, as tens of thousands of solar cells greedily drank in the Sun’s unfailing energy. Beyond the edge of the powersat he saw the gleaming blue sphere of the Earth, flecked with swirling white clouds. Farther still, the small pale battered crescent of the Moon grinned lopsidedly at him.
No time for sightseeing, Dan told himself sternly. The broad surface of the powersat was studded with cleats, handholds where safety tethers could be attached. Dan had no time for that. He grabbed the nearest cleat and began pulling himself down the hundred-yard-thick edge of the satellite, heading for its underside and the bulbous enclosure of the control station, zipping along from one handhold to the next like a speeding torpedo.
“Hey, boss, you’re supposed to use the tether!” a distressed voice sounded in his earphones.
“You use ’em,” Dan said. “I’m in a hurry.”
Back when he had worked for Yamagata, Dan had won bets from other workers in sprints across smaller structures. He grinned to himself. I haven’t lost the knack.
But then he saw two other figures in dull orange spacesuits heading for the control station, coming up from the other direction. This is going to be a race, after all, he said to himself.
Although Denny O‘Brien was in terrible physical shape, his mind was sharp. While the president droned on, O’Brien pushed through the crowd toward the nearest Secret Service agent. There may have been a dozen others that he didn’t notice, but this guy had the stone face, the special eyeglasses, and the sports jacket that covered his Uzi, despite the wilting heat.
“I’m Senator Thornton’s senior aide,” O’Brien said breathlessly, holding his plastic ID under the agent’s nose. “I’ve just got word there’s an assassination attempt going down.”
The agent’s stone face went slack-jawed.
“Who’s in charge? We’ve gotta get the president to safety right away!”
Dr. Supartha could not believe her eyes. Usually the emergency room was fairly quiet on a holiday afternoon; it wasn’t until the night shift that the drunks got themselves into accidents or fights. But here in the middle of the afternoon, almost a dozen people had come into the hospital, seven of them already dead, all of them showing the strangest symptoms.
Dr. Supartha had thought it merely a coincidence when the first two came to her attention. Heat prostration? She shook her head. The outward symptoms might have suggested that, but this was something far different, far worse.
By the gods, she thought, these poor devils look as if they’d been cooked.
There was always the danger of missing the next cleat and going sailing off the powersat out into space, Dan thought as he sped along toward the control station. Without a tether to anchor you, you’d go sailing into the wild black yonder forever. Unless one of your buddies came out and picked you up.
No time to worry about that. Those two strangers were heading for the control station, and they weren’t up here to do any good. They’ve already replaced our antenna and moved the satellite to aim at Washington.
Jane’s there! he suddenly realized. These bastards could kill her!
He redoubled his efforts to get to the control station before they did. In his helmet earphones he heard Adair and the others shouting to him, warning him that he was taking foolish chances. Yeah, he answered silently. Let me slow down and play it safe while they wipe out Washington with Jane in it.