He pressed the intercom on his telephone.
“Yes, General?”
“Get me the Xichang space center,” he said. “I want to speak with the prime minister at once.”
“Yes, sir.”
Tam Li would tell the prime minister why he had assigned those men to the boosters, and why he must let them finish their job.
It was important, he would say, to protect them from the attack Chou Shin had been planning.
FIFTY-THREE
The voice on the loudspeaker was confident and proud.
“Launch minus sixty!”
Hood did not need a translator to know what he was saying. The digital countdown clock on the wall had just slipped under an hour. Not that he had a translator. Anita had gone downstairs with the rest of the observers. Hood had gone into the reception area as Le had suggested. There was a guard seated behind a gunmetal desk. There was no one else in the room. Hood had indicated to her that he wanted to use the phone, but she shook her head. When he tried to use it anyway, she rose and called someone’s name. The other guard entered. Hood backed off.
The launchpad was too far away, or he would have run over and attempted to find the marines himself. He tried his cell phone again. Then again. As the seconds slipped away, the only option Hood seemed to have was getting a ride to the gate to try to find Mike somewhere around the perimeter. But even if he succeeded, that left very little time to actually locate a potential problem.
“Hood.”
Hood turned to the desk. The woman was addressing him. She held the telephone toward him. Perhaps Rodgers had found him.
“Yes?” Hood said as he snatched the phone.
“Sir, this is Dr. Yuen, a fuel specialist on this project,” he said. “I am translating for the prime minister. He says that he spoke with the general and is satisfied with the conversation.”
“He is? What about the individuals he spoke with?”
Hood waited while the scientist translated. Either Tam Li was very convincing, or the prime minister was extremely gullible. In any case, there was one way to know for certain.
“The prime minister has allowed them to return to their duties.”
“Ask him if he is sending men with them,” Hood said. This was insane. The guy they were investigating vouches for himself, and Le accepts that?
Hood waited again.
“Mr. Hood, the prime minister is coming to the Technical Center,” Dr. Yuen informed him. “He will be there in five minutes. He said he will talk to you there.”
“Right,” Hood said. “More time wasted.”
“Sir, we invented rockets,” the scientist said. “We were going through these trials centuries before your ancestors were born.”
Hood did not respond. Built into that statement was the prerogative to venture and to fail. There was no way to argue with that kind of thinking.
Hood hung up. He needed to get in touch with Rodgers now. He smiled at the guard and reached for the keypad. The guard laid a hand across it.
“Le Kwan Po,” Hood said with authority.
The woman replied with equal authority. She rose and did not remove her hand. She gestured toward a seat and then toward the stairs leading to the bunker. Obviously, those were the only options Hood had.
Hood held up an index finger. “One call. One. Please.”
The guard shook her head and, pointing, repeated the options. Hood was about to pull her hand from the phone.
“Who do you wish to call?”
Hood turned at the familiar voice. Anita was standing at the top of the bunker staircase.
“I need to talk to an associate,” Hood said. “Please.”
“Apparently, my father was right.”
“Excuse me?”
“He was afraid his decision might bother you,” she said.
Hood walked toward her. “He was right about that, yes. I am not so sure he is right about the rest. I need to talk to someone for just a moment,” Hood said calmly, evenly.
“Mr. Hood, I do not wish to be unreasonable, but we are here to witness a launch—”
“And I pray that is what I see,” Hood told her. “I need to ask an associate just one question, Anita. We are desperately short of time, and you have nothing to lose. I promise, this will be brief.”
Anita regarded him for a moment. “All right,” she replied, then said something to the guard. The uniformed woman removed her hand from the keypad. She glared at Hood as she sat back down.
“One brief call,” Anita cautioned him.
“Thank you,” Hood said to them both.
He get an operator and gave him the number of Rodgers’s cell phone. Because this phone was a land line, and because Rodgers was outside the base, Hood hoped the call would get through the satellite dish interference.
It did not. After a long, discouraging silence, Hood disconnected the call and stood there.
“Is there no answer?” Anita asked.
“No.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Let’s go downstairs now—”
“Not yet,” Hood said quickly. He punched in a second number. “I need to try again.”
Anita was clearly unhappy, but she did not protest. Not with words, at least. Her expression said it all.
This time he did not call Mike Rodgers. He called someone else he hoped could help him.
FIFTY-FOUR
Intelligence work and patience have a long history together. Whether it was breaking codes in World War II or reconnaissance against the Persians by the warriors of Sparta before the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., this was not work that could be rushed.
Bob Herbert weathered patience impatiently. That was both a strength and a curse. He looked for fresh leads while he waited for old searches to bring results. He had a problem, though, when those new leads took him nowhere. When every road he studied was a dead end. When there was simply not enough information to go off road, or enough lift to hoist him aloft so he could study a bigger picture.
It was then that Herbert felt trapped. And when he felt trapped, Bob Herbert kept hurling himself at the problem until his head hurt, until his heart raced, until he wanted to scream. Until he sat in his chair and wept from frustration and blamed his wheelchair and, by extension, the fact that the U.S. embassy had been bombed in Beirut and he was there at all. But most of all he blamed himself for choosing this life instead of opening a tavern in Mississippi and playing guitar on open-mike night and never worrying about anything that happened beyond the confines of the small Southern town where the air was muggy and close, and you were safe because absolutely no one came there who did not belong there.
Herbert had always imagined he would go back to Philadelphia, Mississippi, when he retired. He wished he could go now, but to do so meant to acknowledge defeat. Under those conditions his retirement would be a trap and not a release.
The intelligence chief sat behind his desk at Op-Center. He did not want to go home and be useless. It was better to stay here with the night crew and at least have the potential to do something. But that still did not make him feel like the hub of a wheel around which activity turned. He was helpless and he was desperate, and not just to prevent a possible explosion in Xichang. Motion defined him. Without it, he had no idea who or what he was.
It was worse because Rodgers and Hood were not there. They were always pitching ideas. Even if Rodgers was knocking them foul, he was still swinging the bat. It was action.
There had been virtually none of that since Viens had come to his office the day before. Herbert had asked for more information about the blips on the Pacific Rim. Unfortunately, when the photo recon officer compared current satellite images to past photographs, nothing stood out. The process was called ODA: overlay dissonance analysis. It was similar to what astronomers did when they compared celestial photographs from different nights. If something were out of place in the heavens — such as an asteroid approaching the earth — ODA let them know it. The process was a little more complex with intelligence work. Past military maneuvers were compared to current maneuvers, along with the responses of surrounding nations. Computers sounded an alarm if there were anything out of the ordinary. So far, the Pacific Rim activity had not caused anything like that. The NRO had picked up the explosion on the Zhuhai airstrip, and that obviously had a place in the overall picture. But no one knew how or why or when. Certainly no one knew whether it was somehow related to the launch.