The zenith angle (31 page)

It was just—he had to know. If he did not learn the whole truth about this evil weapon and its capabilities, he would never have another quiet night in his whole life. Don’t call it war. Call it science.

“This is only a recon mission,” he told his three employees, for the tenth time. “No rough stuff from you tough guys. We’re here to be the eyes-on-target. We infiltrate. We observe activities, intentions, and capabilities. We record and we verify. We plant remote sensors. Then we exfiltrate. Nobody sees us. Nobody hears us. Nobody gets hurt. Nobody gets shot. Because this is real, live cyberwar.”

“I never pack heat,” said Hickok.

“We don’t get caught this time,” Gonzales agreed.

“If we get caught, will the President pardon us later? Never mind, man, okay, I got no guns anyway!”

“Okay then,” Van said. “Let’s go ahead and roll.” He tucked the headset into his right ear. The four-man team did not have to roll very far. Following their highly detailed satellite maps, they left their rented camper and strolled through the pines to the edge of the Facility’s fence. They found a ragged valley where the builders had run their fence under an old, sickly-looking box elder tree. The night was dark and gusty, with thin overcast. Wind tossed the spreading tree limbs. Box elders had weak wood. It wasn’t much labor for four men to throw a grapnel rope up in the tree, time their heaves with the wind, and rip the old tree apart, nicely crushing the fence.

No alert defenders rushed over with any Jeeps and machine guns, because, after all, they were just astronomers, and it was just a tree falling in the wind. The four intruders climbed up the fallen tree limbs and over the smashed fence. Van was careful not to snag his civilian clothes.

“Loan me that oxygen mask,” said Van to Hickok. “This altitude’s killing me.”

“Can’t you carry this tank yourself?” said Hickok, rubbing under his black foam kidney-pad. “I got enough gear, that’s for sure.”

“No I can’t carry it. An oxygen bottle looks way too much like a detonation bomb.” Van huffed at the plastic mask. Relief flooded his body.

As planned, the four of them split into pairs. Gonzales and Wimberley, the B team, were tackling the Network Operation Center. Van and Hickok were going uphill to covertly inspect the Weapon of Mass Destruction.

Hickok set to work to hijack a small electric golf cart for the long ride up to the observatory. This wasn’t hard. The astronomers had quite a lot of golf carts, and most of them still had keys in them. Hickok detached his helmet mike. “You know what I miss in a cyberwar gig?” he said. “I miss the air support. No Pave Low, man. No C-130s. For Air Force Special Ops, man, that is hard.”

“I was completely crazy to hire those two Cyberspace guys,” Van mourned.

“No you weren’t,” Hickok said. “I hate to say this, but nowadays, most all the ‘special’ in Special Ops comes from the private sector.”

“I’m crazy because there is nothing up there, Mike. I’m doing this because I am paranoid. There is no weapon up there. We’re not gonna find anything. That is a half-completed telescope.”

“No it isn’t.”

They drove the electric van silently, in darkness, slowly and without opposition, up to the site of the observatory. They manhandled the cart out of sight, down a talus of construction debris. Van threw a camouflage net over the cart. Van was new to handling camouflage nets. There was a real art to it. Hickok produced the folding, spindly antenna of a multiband burst-radio net. He pointed it down the hill toward the Facility.

Gonzales came in at once, clear as crystal. “We got an incoming vehicle now,” Gonzales reported. “A big black limousine. I’m making four—no, five occupants. Wow, this thermal imaging rocks!”

Wimberley was breathing heavily into his helmet mike. “It’s quiet inside the dorms. Just a lot of sleepy astronomers. That Network Operation Center, though. A whole lotta lights on up there.” They heard the whisper of his rubber-soled boots as Wimberley moved closer to his surveillance target. “I’m gonna unlimber this shotgun mike.”

“That would be Carew inside that place,” Van told Hickok. Hickok pulled down his Nomex mask. His face, already hard, grew harder still.

“You guys copy all that noise here?” Wimberley reported. His sensitive shotgun mike was picking up the rubbery thud and falsetto vocals of London-style Indo-disco. Bhangra music. “That’s sure not like any kind of music I know. Lemme see if I can filter that noise out.”

Odd digital muffling. A woman’s shrill voice emerged faintly, her words strained like spaghetti in a metal colander. “You cannot talk to a lady like that, Tony! You dare not say a thing like that to me—”

Van broke in. “Wimberley?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Never mind the subject’s personal life. Go use your thermal imaging on the electrical station. I want to see if he is routing any wind power through those big fiber optics tonight.”

Gonzales spoke up. He was calm and focused. “My limousine people are heading straight for that network center. I think we’re gonna have ourselves one big party.”

Van examined the big door to the observatory. It was stoutly padlocked. It was a simple brass padlock, but there wasn’t need for more security than that. This Facility was very isolated. And, after all, they were just astronomers.

Van set after the padlock with a digital pick from Hickok’s utility vest. This pick was new, and British. It was the size of a large fountain pen. It used fiber optics to probe the inside of the lock, then calculated the shape of the ridges on the key. When the computation was over, the butt of the pick slid out a nicely formed piece of stiff wire. It was awful what MI-5’s new e-gadgets could do to the security inside conventional mechanical locks. Van really hoped it would be a good long time before normal thieves caught on to this.

Van carefully scraped the lock open. When his hands stopped trembling, he enjoyed more oxygen and had a gulp of Gatorade from Hickok’s canteen. It was windy and freezing up here. He put on his gloves as well as his black hat.

Wimberley reported in. “Those generators sure give off a lot of heat! How much power is in those windmills?”

“Half a megawatt each,” said Van. Wind power was intermittent—sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. That made wind energy particularly easy to steal. Who would notice if you shaved off some electrical power in a big storm passing through the western U.S.?

“Four people left the chauffeur behind in the limo,” reported Gonzales. Gonzales was puffing a little after hefting his ninety-five pounds of rucksack cybergear uphill, at a dead run, after a moving car. The effort didn’t seem to bother him much. “Subjects were two men, two women. I’m at the Network Center now, and I’m making nine people in the ground-floor room behind this wall. If this millimeter radar works.”

“It was working okay when I left Washington,” Van told him.

“Then it needs improvement,” said Gonzales. “The limo has Colorado license plates. It’s registered to Pinecrest Ranch.”

That was quick, thought Van. And so far, it had been really quiet. Maybe they would actually get this operation done on time.

Van pulled hard at the observatory door. The weather-stripping popped open with a hermetic smack. Van stepped inside the observatory’s vault. The place was empty. It was delightfully warm.

“Real toasty in here,” said Hickok. He unbuckled his helmet.

The telescope—that diva of the skies—looked pretty much like she had last time Van had seen her. There had been some additions on the ground, though. A new set of a dozen stacking, folded chairs. Coffee mugs and a big coffee decanter. A new, large designer desk—a multishelfed thing with power strips, big enough to call a console. And, standing near the door, a handsome little Japanese telescope. The little scope was some top-end toy for a rich stargazer hobbyist, sitting on a sturdy tripod. Van walked to the big desk. It held a scattering of CDs and technical documents. He looked under it and behind it. A set of travel bags had been stowed under there.

A black fabric rifle case. The hunting sure was great around here.

Hickok rounded the giant telescope in awe, his nozzled head tilted back. “Check this thing out!”

“I’ve seen it,” Van said.

Hickok pulled off his helmet. “I meant with these infrared scanners.”

Van slipped Hickok’s too-tight Kevlar helmet over his own ears. The bridge of his glasses crunched up against his nose.

Then the diva showed him her true colors.

The Lady wore a bloody crown.

A glassy ring of pulsing light. Ten thousand photo-multipliers, the sensors meant to lift the faintest glow of distant stars from the surface of the mirror. They had become a spider crown of red-glowing eyes. In the infrared of Hickok’s heat detector, they winked, they twinkled. They were red-hot. The optic pipes that carried light away could also bring light in. And the mirror that brought light down from the zenith could also shine light up into the sky.

Van gave Hickok his helmet back.

“You know what chaps my ass most?” said Hickok. “That son of a bitch had the guts to build a spacewar weapon in Colorado. Hell, that’s where they
train the Air Force.
”

Gonzales reported. “The party is breaking up. I’m painting them with the spotter. You copy that now, Team A?”

Hickok opened his command-and-control laptop. The map on his screen was like a little military sandboard. Four blue triangles. A little cluster of unsuspecting red squares. “I copy, B.”

Two red squares veered off from the others. A blue triangle zipped after them in pursuit. “I’m gonna move in to catch these two with my parabolic mikes,” Gonzales said.

Van adjusted his earpiece.

Stolen voices swam into his head. Tony Carew.

“There were sixteen carts out here tonight,” Tony remarked. “Now there are only fifteen.”

“You
counted
them?” said a woman’s voice.

“No, honey. I’ve got an eidetic memory. It’s my gift.”

“It’s so cold and windy out here! Let’s take the limo. Make those stupid Chinese take these ugly little carts.”

“These delicate roads won’t hold up the weight of their big limousine,” said Tony. “That’s why we use all these carts. Anjali, it’s a sensitive matter to demonstrate the capabilities of my instrument. You don’t see nice old Mr. Liang or nice old Mr. Gupta complaining about this.”

“Your stupid clients don’t have to wear sleeveless dresses.” The cart’s tires crunched. The voices faded out of range.

Gonzales came back in. “The male and female just departed in a Facility vehicle. They are riding up toward your telescope, Team A. Okay, I am painting two more groups now. I am making . . . four men in that first party. Two men, two women in the second party. Hold on here, whoa. We have got two bodyguard types inspecting the vehicles.”

“Those bodyguards brought guns,” said Hickok knowingly.

“We don’t know that,” Van protested.

“No professional would do this sort of thing without a gun,” said Hickok. “I don’t care if they’re Chinese, Indians, or goddamned Martians.”

“I’m running this operation,” Van pointed out, “and I don’t have a gun.”

Wimberley broke in with a yelp. “Hey, I don’t have a gun either! Everybody said not to bring any guns!”

Hickok sighed. “Would it break y’all’s heart if I’d brung along one little Beretta in my ankle holster?”

“Hey, I can skip back to the truck and fetch us two MP5s and a Mossberg twelve-gauge,” said Gonzales eagerly. “Wouldn’t take me ten minutes!”

“No, no, no!” said Van. “Keep your eyes on the prize!”

“The boss man’s right,” said Hickok. “We came here to play cyberwar. Fred, you break into that party room and bug it. Kid, I want to see you break into that Network building. Get real busy with those desktop Tempest bugs. Me and the professor are gonna plant audio up here. Then we all retreat outside the structures. We hide out under our camou tarps. We just listen and we record. That is the Policy. We stick with the Policy.”

The Policy was good and sensible. The Policy did not involve any sudden trips to an emergency room. Hickok slapped his translucent Wi-Fi bugs to various discreet surfaces. Van tuned the bugs into audio channels on his laptop. Then, with time ticking for the arrival of their guests, Van and Hickok went outside to shut and lock the observatory door.

The instant Van shut the observatory door, the audio signals from within the building completely vanished.

“I thought you said this structure was made of straw,” said Hickok.

“Looks like they used some copper mesh in that straw.” Sensitive instruments needed electrical shielding.

“Then if we want to overhear ’em when they’re inside there, we gotta improvise,” Hickok said tightly.

“We gotta go back inside there and hide ourselves.”

“That leaves nobody outside here to lock this door,” Van pointed out. “If they find this place unlocked, then they’ll know we’re in there.”

Hickok froze in confusion. He looked at the padlock, and then he gazed down the mountainside. “I can see those headlights coming fast.” Hickok began to pray under his breath. “Lord, I, your soldier, am called upon to perform tasks in isolation, far from familiar faces and voices. With help and guidance from my God, I will never surrender, though I be the last. If I am taken, I pray that I may have the strength to spit upon my enemy . . .”

“I’m going inside,” Van told him. “You run the team awhile, okay? If they catch me, I was just curious.”

Van slipped inside the observatory. He ran across the floor, kicked some heavy luggage aside, and hid himself beneath the big console desk.

It took Tony some time to key his way through the jiggered lock.

Distant conversation. Van stuck an earpiece into his ear and turned down the light on his laptop screen. The audiobugs worked splendidly, sending him six different audio streams. It was like he had six ears.

“Try to be nice to Mrs. DeFanti,” said Tony. “She’s been through a lot of emotional pain over all this.”

“Why don’t you call her ‘Katrina’ to me?” said the actress girlfriend viciously. “It’s ‘Katrina’ you are always calling her, so sweetly, face-to-face!”

“Honey lamb, if the former ‘Li Huping’ wants to be ‘Katrina DeFanti’ now, why is that a problem? Give me the word, and you could be ‘Angelie Carew.’ That would look great on a nice new American passport.”