Sabri Ramirez stood watching as the last of the krytron detonators was
secured in the ganglia of wiring that surrounded the explosive Octol
sphere. Now one of the bombs was armed. He liked the looks of it. The
next--
"They haven't come back yet," Wolf Helling said, interrupting his
thoughts. "Do you think there was a problem?" He was warily watching
the bomb and its timer being assembled, trying to calm his nerves. This
was not like playing with a yellow lump of Sematach. One false move and
you would be vaporized. Any man who pretended it didn't scare him was a
liar, or worse, a fool. Maybe both.
The bomb did not frighten Ramirez; his mind did not dwell on risk. He
assumed the Pakis knew their job--they damned well better. No, his
current concern also was what had happened to Moreau. He had expected
his unit to return before now. So far they had taken over an hour on
what should have been a simple operation. With hostages dispersed in
three locations, Ramirez feared that things were getting spread thin.
Gamal had been keeping watch over the guards and the off-duty shifts on
Level Three of the accommodations facility, while Peretz was holding
things together in Command, but still it would be better if four of the
team were not out chasing over the island trying to find some rogue
guard. He had tried to reach them on his walkie-talkie, but so far he
had not been able to raise anybody. That was particularly troubling.
Why should all the radios suddenly go dead?
"If there was some difficulty up the hill, surely they're handling it."
Ramirez tried to push aside his misgivings. He actually felt it was
true, or should be true. He had checked out Moreau's credentials
carefully, investigating beyond the popular myth, and what he had found
did nothing to diminish the legend of the blond demon, Jean-Paul. . . .
"Now, we're ready to secure this baby into the payload container,"
Abdoullah was saying. "I measured it already, and it should fit with no
problem. But we'll need to hook up the detonators with the telemetry
interface, and for that we need
Peretz' input. He'll use the Fujitsu in Command to blow this thing, but
it all has to be synchronized with the trajectory control."
"He's there now," Ramirez said, "updating the trajectory runs. That's
scheduled to be completed in"--he checked his watch--"about twenty
minutes. When he gets through, we can go ahead with the detonators.
Everything is on schedule."
For some reason Abdoullah did not like the precise tone of Ramirez's
voice. Right, he thought, everything is on schedule. So when Shujat and
I have finished our part, what then? Will we be "accidentally" gunned
down, the way Rais was? You claimed that was a screw-up, but you're not
the kind of guy who makes that kind of mistake. Okay, so maybe Rais got
careless. Was that your way of making an example of him?
He motioned Shujat to help lift the first shiny sphere into the heat-
resistant Teflon payload container. On a conventional launch, the
container was designed to be deployed by radio command when the VX-1
vehicle had captured low earth orbit. The nose of the vehicle would
open and eject it, after which the satellite payload would release.
This launch, however, was--
"Hey, they're back," Helling announced, watching the door of the clean
room open.
Ramirez looked up, and realized immediately that something was wrong.
Jean-Paul Moreau's eyes seemed slightly unfocused, and his sense of
balance was obviously impaired --a man stumbling out of a centrifuge. He
also was rubbing at his ears, as though his head were buzzing.
"What in hell happened?" He had never seen anyone with quite this set
of symptoms before. They looked like men who had been too close when a
homemade bomb went off.
"The bastard was up on the hill, and he managed to get control of one
of the radars. Let me tell you, there's nothing like it in the world.
You feel your head is going to explode. I can barely hear." He then
lapsed into French curses.
Stelios Tritsis still had said nothing. He merely watched as Rudolph
Schindler and Peter Maier set down the RPG-7 and collapsed onto the
floor.
"Then let him go for now." Ramirez wanted to kill them all, then and
there. "But get that damned thing out of here." He indicated the
grenade launcher. "And the rest of you with it. Take turns getting some
sleep and report back to me at 0600 hours. We'll soon have our hands
full. The natives here are going to start getting restless. When that
happens, the next man who fucks up will have to answer to me."
They all knew what that meant.