Vance twisted around and tried to see his watch. He couldn't make out
the hands, but they both seemed to be pointing in the general direction
of down. Whatever that meant exactly, the time had to be getting on
toward dawn. The six hours that Cally had talked about, the six hours
left before the liftoff: how much of that time was left? It had to be
half gone.
What now? Maybe his cock-and-bull story had impressed the French hood
enough to get him out of the room for a while, but it wasn't going to
cut any ice with anybody who knew anything about lasers. Sooner or
later, he was going to come back. Not something to let the mind dwell
on.
One thing was sure: he felt like he had been run over by a truck. The
blood from the beating was slowly starting to coagulate, crusting on
his face. It had begun to itch, and something where his liver used to
be was emitting stabbing bursts of pain. It would come, then subside,
then come again. He tried to focus his eyes on the room, the piles of
empty crates, wondering if maybe a sharp object was protruding
somewhere, maybe something he could use to cut away at the cord that
held his hands.
Nothing, and it was a stupid idea anyway, left over from too many B
movies. But now his mind was beginning to attempt to function with a
little more rationality, and along with that came the glimmerings of an
idea. The bomb was aboard one of the vehicles and a countdown was under
way, now being handled by Bill's supercomputer. There was no obvious
way to stop it. Maybe, however, there was a not-so-obvious way. A last-
minute reprieve. Assuming he ever got the chance.
He groaned and leaned back, wondering . . .
What happened next came so fast he couldn't really comprehend it at the
time. Only later could he roughly reconstruct the dizzying confluence
of events. But that was as it should have been. The door was suddenly
slammed wide, and two smoke grenades plummeted into the room, followed
by a flash grenade. Next, through the smoke and confusion three men
dressed in black pullovers plunged through the opening and dropped to
their knees, MP5s at the ready.
Jesus! He gasped for breath, blinded by the flash grenade but still
trying to see through the billowing CS that was engulfing everything.
In what seemed like less than a second, one of the men appeared by his
side, and he saw a knife blade flash. A hand was slapped over his mouth
as another rough set of hands yanked him from the chair. His legs were
numb from the bindings, but they came alive as his weight went back
onto them. Terra firma had never felt better.
The men's faces were all covered in balaclavas, but one of them gave
two sharp clicks and, on that signal, they began to drag him out the
door.
He knew better than to say a word. The whole operation had been carried
out with clockwork precision and in perfect silence--except for the
destruction of the door. Had there been any terrorists in the room,
they would have been dead, scarcely knowing what had happened.
As they entered the hallway, one of the men pulled back his antismoke
hood. "You look like hell," Willem Voorst said. "Can you walk?"
"In a manner of speaking." He felt pain shooting up through his wobbly
legs. "I suppose I should ask what took you so long, only it hurts to
talk. You weren't scheduled in for another day. What happened?"
"We moved up the timetable, though you'd be amazed how many people
didn't want us to show up," Marcel remarked, his Belgian calm
returning. "The entire U.S. Navy, to be exact. We were made to feel
very unwanted."
"That's going to seem like a Welcome Wagon compared to what's coming
up." He paused and tried to inhale the comparatively smokeless air of
the hallway. "What's the plan? Do you want to try and take out Launch
Control, or do you want
to move on Command? . . ." That was when he saw Cally. "How did you get
down here?"
"Somebody had to lead these guys in," she said matter-of- factly. Her
face was scratched and her shirt torn. "No thanks to you. All we have
to thank you for is blowing up the gantry"