There was a light rap on the door. Al-Bashir opened it, and the Asian woman came in, dressed in a miniskirted skintight outfit, pushing a rolling cart covered with a damask tablecloth. It bore a dinner for two in covered dishes, an ice bucket containing a bottle of champagne, and two long-stemmed glasses.
In silence, the woman wheeled the cart to the middle of the room, then looked questioningly at al-Bashir.
“You may go,” he told her, “for now. I’ll call you when we’re ready for you.”
April felt icicles prickling along her spine.
“Look, Mr. al-Bashir—” she began.
“Call me Asim.”
“I didn’t ask to be brought here, and I’d like to go back home. Right now.”
Al-Bashir shook his head pityingly. “I don’t think you’d like to be back in that pig’s nest in Texas, April. It’s going to be very ugly there. In a few hours mobs will be tearing down Astro Corporation and looking for Dan Randolph’s blood.”
Her knees went weak. “What? What do you mean?”
“Several thousand Americans have been killed, including the president of the United States, very possibly. They were all killed by Dan Randolph’s power satellite.”
April sagged down onto the bed, speechless. Smiling contentedly, al-Bashir went to the champagne bottle and began undoing its cork.
Powersat
Williamson saw the American in his snow-white spacesuit racing like a lunatic toward the control station. But the bugger’s too late, Williamson told himself. He and Bouchachi reached the hatch of the domed enclosure well ahead of the Yank.
“You stay at the hatch and hold him off,” Williamson told Bouchachi. “I’ll go in and knock out the controls so they can’t turn the power off.”
“Hold him off?” Bouchachi asked, his voice little more than a squeak in Williamson’s earphones. “How? With what?”
Williamson considered giving the Algerian the knife he’d used on the cosmonaut, but thought better of it. Better save it in case I need it, he said to himself. Tapping the array of wrenches and other tools attached to Bouchachi’s belt, he said, “Whack him on the helmet hard enough to crack it open.”
“But the others!” Bouchachi pointed to the half-dozen other Americans making their way slowly, hand over hand, toward them.
“By the time they get here it’ll be too late.”
“But they’ll kill us!”
“We’re goin’ to die anyway, right? In another little while you’ll be in Paradise, chum, with your seventy-two virgins.”
Williamson ducked through the hatch, into the control station. Bouchachi turned and saw that the American was only a bare few meters away. He fumbled at his waist for the biggest wrench he had.
Too late. The American launched himself like a missile at Bouchachi. The two spacesuited men collided soundlessly. Bouchachi felt the wind knocked out of his lungs. He grappled with the American, trying to keep him away from the hatch, and they both went sailing, tumbling head over heels, across the broad expanse of the powersat.
Dan wrenched one arm free of his opponent and grabbed a cleat. He felt his shoulder pop from the sudden strain; a streak of agony ran along his whole right side. The other guy was hanging on to him with both arms, their helmets bumping. Dan could see that the guy was some sort of Arab.
With his free left hand Dan reached behind the guy’s helmet and pawed at the strap holding the man’s life-support backpack. The guy’s eyes went frantic and he pushed away from Dan. Still hanging onto the cleat despite the pain in his shoulder, Dan pulled up both his booted feet and kicked the bastard in the gut as hard as he could. The man went spinning away, arms and legs flailing as he tumbled off into space, dwindling rapidly in the distance.
With his usable left hand, Dan made his way from cleat to cleat until he was at the hatch of the control station.
The other intruder was inside the dome, his boots hooked into foot loops on the floor, his body half bent in the simian crouch that people unconsciously assume in zero gravity. The only light inside the dome was from the control board’s colored display screens and lighted gauges. Dan saw it reflecting off the intruder’s helmet. He was poring over the board, Dan realized, trying to figure out how to disable the controls. Then he pulled a sizable wrench from the tool set at his belt.
He’s going to smash everything! Dan saw.
With a roar that the intruder couldn’t hear Dan launched himself at the man headfirst, banging into him and sending the two of them bouncing off the curving wall of the tight little control dome. Fresh agonies of pain shot through Dan’s right shoulder. Where the hell’s the rest of my gang? he wondered as he recoiled away from the intruder.
The bastard still had the wrench in his fist, and he pushed off the wall to fly straight at Dan.
With a grim smile, Dan realized that this bozo didn’t know shit about fighting in zero-g. Flicking his boots against the loops studding the floor, Dan edged sideways and his attacker sailed right past him and into the other side of the dome. He bounced away, turned an inadvertent somersault, then righted himself and faced Dan again.
By now Dan had moved to the control panel, standing in front of it. “You want to wreck the controls,” he said, knowing the other couldn’t hear him, “you’ll have to get past me first.”
The intruder hesitated, hanging weightlessly a few inches above the floor. He threw the wrench at Dan, sending himself into a hopeless spin. Dan caught the wrench in his good hand and hefted it menacingly. “Thanks, pal. Now come on over here so I can give it back to you.”
But there was a knife in the man’s gloved hand now. Dan saw its slim blade glint in the faint light from the control screens.
Anchoring one boot in a foot loop, Dan hurled the wrench back at the intruder. The man ducked in reflex action, and the motion started him tumbling again. Dan glided out from the foot loop and slipped behind the flailing intruder, locking his legs around the guy’s waist and grabbing his knife hand. The two of them bucked and banged off the control board and the dome’s curving wall for what seemed like an hour to Dan.
At last he heard Adair’s voice, “What’s going on here, a rodeo?”
“Ride him, boss!”
“Christ, the sumbitch’s got a knife!”
All six of Dan’s crew jammed into the dome and overpowered Williamson. One of the women ended up with the knife.
“Why don’t we just stick this up his ass?” she snarled. Dan was already at the controls, shutting down the magnetrons. “Uh-uh. We want him alive and able to answer questions.”
One by one, in swift succession, Dan turned off the magnetrons, poking at the control board with his left hand. A string of red lights sprang across the control board. His right shoulder was flaming with pain now, as the adrenaline ebbed out of his blood.
“Radio Van Buren and verify that we’ve turned off the power,” Dan said, suddenly so tired and hurting that he wanted to curl up and go to sleep.
The Oval Office
The president was livid.
“They tried to kill me!” he kept repeating, shouting almost, as he paced furiously back and forth behind his huge ornate desk. “Some motherfucking bastards tried to kill me!”
The director of homeland security had never seen the president so enraged. “It wasn’t just you, Mr. President. More than six hundred people have died—”
“I don’t give a shit! They were after me!”
The secretary of defense—an old friend and a veteran of many private tirades—just sat on the plush little sofa by the empty fireplace and bided his time. Sitting across from him in the Oval Office were the secretary of state and the president’s national security advisor.