Chaingang

18

SOUTH OF WATERTON

It took a three-way clearance to get past the guards at the control center: one had to pass visual, palm-print, and spectrographic ID checks, and as the honcho liked to say, “everything from a metal detector to a bullshit detector.” There were detection devices visible as one made one's way past the armed guards in the hallway, but neither the visible detectors nor the visible guards were the ones with the real teeth.

The honcho led the VIP civilian into the deadlock between the two nine-and-a-half-inch steel-sheathed doors, a “lock vault” in the jargon, and they stood there for a few long seconds waiting for the duty sergeant to pop the inner door.

“Evening, sir,” the duty man said smartly.

The honcho nodded and escorted his guest past a desk where a rather attractive woman sat, staring at them as they strode by. Neither rank nor civilian brass impressed anyone inside the control complex. There were no salutes here. The attractive woman was too busy to salute, for example. In her left ear she was listening for the order to execute, which in this case was a literal order. It would mean that the individual or individuals who had just gained admittance to this highly secret chamber were not to be allowed to leave. There was no such order, and she removed her right trigger finger from the .22-caliber pistol concealed under the desk. She happened to be a world-class handgun champion, and she'd miss her period before she'd miss a head shot at that range.

“Who has him?"

“Red tracker."

“Good.” They walked over to the appropriate cubicle where a civilian sat with his hands on a control console and his eyes glued to an electronic display.

“That's the subject. That little blip right there,” the honcho explained. “Probably gone nighty-night, but—” he shrugged “—one never knows. We stay on him right around the clock. Change these monitor teams constantly. Helluva lot of manpower, but it pretty much assures us that he doesn't take off. He's in a twenty-five-mile radius of protection—that's his kill zone. And if he sets one big toe outside it..."

“You guys pick him up?"

“No, sir. We dust him right there."

“How do you keep an eye on him? It looks like there would be so many places he could go, you know?"

“We've got two hundred people in place. Eyeball surveillance. Every move recorded—sound-on-film. Overflights. Infrared. Satellites—he belongs to us every second. We own Big Boy."

They watched the tiny, glowing pinpoint of light with a mixture of unspoken anxiousness and proprietary pride. There was a kind of pioneering feeling inside the control center, a sense that one was part of a history-making endeavor.

The COMSEC and NEWTON SECURE systems interlinked with the on-line terminals served by OMEGASTAR, the mobile tracker that had been developed to monitor the man who was the core of SAUCOG'S continuing experimental research program.

Inside his weird brain a microscopic servomechanism (one that had cost a millionaire CEO his job when a Japanese firm beat his San Jose chip company to the punch and delivered the goods to Uncle first) happily rested, sending out its perpetual emission to whosoever might receive it.

Whosoever, in this control complex, watched the glowing screens of the Omni DF MEGAplex Secure Tranceiver Auto-lock locator Relay unit and movement-detection monitor.

Every telephonic, radar, infrared, seismic, satellite capability known to engineering science (and whose battery never needed replacing) tuned in, hooked up, plugged in, switched over, clicked on, and down-linked the signal from the eye in the sky—the cyclops that received the continual transmission that emanated from inside Chaingang Bunkowski's head.

Owning “Big Boy” was one thing. But taming him—ah, that was an altogether different can of worms.