Powersat

Matagora Island, Texas

“You jes keep that A-rab away from my hangar,” Niles Muhamed said, almost in a growl.

Dan leaned back in his desk chair and stared at the scowling technician. He couldn’t remember the last time Muhamed had made the hundred-yard trip from Hangar B to his office.

“What’s the problem, Niles?”

“No problem,” Muhamed said, standing tensely before Dan’s ornate desk. “I jes don’t like him snoopin’ around the oh-two.”

“Has he been in the cockpit?” Dan asked.

“That’ll be the day!” Muhamed snorted. “I don’t let nobody touch that baby ’cept Gerry and his ground crew. Nobody else gets closer’n ten feet.”

“So what’s al-Bashir done that bothers you?”

Muhamed’s frown turned from suspicious to puzzled. “Nothin’ I can put a finger on. He’s jes slippery, you know, like he’s always askin’ questions and tryin’ to figure out what’s goin’ down:’

Spreading his hands, Dan tried to explain, “Niles, he’s our pipeline to the money that’s keeping us going. It’s natural that he wants to know what we’re doing.”

“Natural, huh?”

“I’ve given him a pretty free hand to look at anything he likes,” Dan admitted. “He’s been all over the place.”

“Yeah, well you jes tell him to stay outta Hangar B. I don’t want nobody messin’ with the oh-two.”

Dan thought, I can tell al-Bashir that we’re closing off the hangar as a security measure, this close to starting up the powersat. He’ll see the necessity of that.

“Okay,” he said to the scowling technician. “I’ll tell him. In fact, you can keep the hangar closed to anybody but the plane’s crew.”

With a single curt nod Muhamed turned around and marched out of the office, leaving Dan musing about security. Wouldn’t hurt to keep Hangar B sealed off, he thought. Al-Bashir can poke into the control center or anyplace else he likes, but we’ll keep tight security on the spaceplane. That’s our most vulnerable spot. We’ll keep him away from it. Probably not necessary, but Niles is right: don’t let anybody screw around with the plane. One crash was more than enough.

Later that day Dan was in the satellite control center, trying to look calm and confident, but he could hardly restrain an urge to jump up and down like a little kid or turn cartwheels all along the rows of consoles. He settled for loosening the tie that was already pulled away from his unbuttoned collar. Lynn Van Buren stood beside him, wearing her usual dark pantsuit and string of pearls.

Standing at the double-doored entrance to the big room, Dan and his chief engineer watched with a mixture of admiration and excitement as the engineers went through their checkout routines at the rows of consoles lined across the windowless cinderblock control center. An oversized display screen covered one wall. It showed an electronic map of the southwestern part of the United States, northern Mexico and Baja California, and a large swath of the Pacific Ocean. West of the Galápagos Islands, precisely on the equator at 106 degrees west longitude, glowed a single bright red dot: the location of the powersat 22,300 miles above the ocean.

“It’s all going smoothly,” Dan said, rubbing his hands together nervously.

“Smooth as a baby’s bottom,” agreed Van Buren. She looked serious, even dour, her round face unsmiling.

“White Sands checks out okay?” he asked.

Van Buren nodded. “They’re ready to receive right now.”

“We could turn the bird on now, couldn’t we?”

Van Buren hesitated a fraction of a second. “Give us the next two days to triple-check everything, chief. You don’t want a fizzle on Sunday in front of everybody.”

“Yeah, right,” said Dan. “But I want a preliminary start-up Saturday afternoon.”

“I know. We’ve got it in the schedule. Ten-minute test run.”

“Make it half an hour.”

She cocked a brow at him. “Chief, the magnetrons and everything else come up to full power output in less than a minute. A ten-minute prelim run is plenty of time to make sure it’s all working.”

“Half an hour,” he repeated.

“It’s not necessary.”

Dan grinned at her. “Do it for me, okay?”

With the resigned expression of an engineer who is doomed to satisfy silly demands from management, Van Buren shrugged her chunky shoulders and acquiesced. “Okay, half an hour.”

“Good.”

He practically danced out of the control center and across the parking lot that separated the building from Hangar A. A crew of safety-masked painters up on scaffolds were spraying robin’s-egg blue over the gray cinderblocks. Dan wanted the place to look new and clean and bright for the camera crews that would descend on them Sunday morning.

He was still in a happy mood as he breezed past April’s desk and entered his private office. She came in right behind him, a PDA clutched in her hand.

“We just got a call from Governor Scanwell’s office,” April announced as Dan slid into his desk chair. “He’ll be here for the turn-on ceremony Sunday morning.”

Dan’s heart skipped a beat. That means Jane will be here, too, he immediately thought. Maybe she’ll come Saturday. No, he warned himself. Don’t expect that. It’s too much to hope for.

“He’ll be flying in from Austin with six or seven guests,” April added.

“Great,”said Dan. “The more the merrier.”

“You can expect a lot more pickets out by the gate on Sunday, too,” April said.

“More than today?” Dan’s security chief, Mitch O’Connell, had told him that the ecofreaks were waving placards at the cars coming in for work in the morning and screaming obscenities at their drivers.

“Mr. O’Connell says there’ll be a lot more. He’s worried they might try to get through the gate Sunday and disrupt everything.”

Dan thought for a moment. “I’ll have to talk to Mitch about it. Maybe bring in a crew of rent-a-cops for the day.”

“Governor Scanwell will be flying in, so he won’t have to come through the gate,” she said.

“Yeah. But when those nuts see the TV trucks rolling up to the gate they’ll get frantic. Their big chance for publicity.”

April looked worried. “You don’t think they’ll actually disrupt things, do you? Or cause damage?”

“Maybe we ought to hire a SWAT team,” Dan grumbled.

Late that afternoon Asim al-Bashir walked into Dan’s office unannounced; he simply smiled at April as he went past her desk, rapped once on the jamb of Dan’s open door, and stepped in.

Dan looked up from his computer screen, more curious than annoyed.

“I just want to let you know,” al-Bashir said without preamble, “that I’ll be out of town for the next day or two.”

“Houston?” Dan asked. “Don’t tell me you’re going to get Garrison himself to come down for the turn-on.”

Al-Bashir chuckled. “No, Garrison isn’t interested. Actually, I’ve got to fly to Europe for a meeting.”

“Will you be back Sunday?”

His smile remained in place, but the expression in his eyes changed subtly. “Oh yes,” said al-Bashir. “I’ll be here Sunday. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

“Aren’t you the least bit nervous?” Gilly Williamson asked.

Malfoud Bouchachi closed the drawer into which he had placed the few clothes he’d brought with him. “No,” said the Algerian. “I find that I am strangely calm.”

Williamson shook his head in admiration. The two men were in the bedroom they would share until they were launched into space. Outside the room’s only window the flat parched vastness of Kazakhstan stretched to the bare brown hills on the dusty, barren horizon.

“A strange place to die,” Williamson muttered.

“We will not die here,” said Bouchachi.

“I know. But still…” Williamson took in a breath of dry, dust-laden air, and coughed. “Better than a fucking hospital ward, I suppose.”

“We will accomplish much more than we ever could otherwise. Our deaths will be meaningful.”

Sitting on the thin mattress of his bed, Williamson smiled bitterly. “Nobody’s death is meaningful, friend.”

“You are a Christian?” Bouchachi asked.

“I was a Catholic.”

“And now?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.”

Bouchachi nodded knowingly. “Ah, I understand. I have been promised a martyr’s reward in Paradise.”

“D’you believe it?”

“Sometimes. It doesn’t really matter. At least, that is what I tell myself when my faith weakens.”

“Fuck all,” Williamson said fervently. “We’re all going to die, no matter what we do. Sooner is better than later.”

“If your death accomplishes something.”

“Oh, we’ll accomplish something, all right. We’ll take half a million with us.”

“That many?”

“At least.”

The two men had trained separately for six months, Bouchachi at Star City, on the outskirts of Moscow, Williamson at the Chinese space center near Beijing. Neither of them knew how to pilot a spacecraft; that would be Nikolayev’s task. Their assignment was to reach the power satellite and turn it into an instrument of mass murder. Money from The Nine fueled their mission: al-Bashir and his cohorts funneled tens of millions of carefully laundered dollars into Russia, China, and Kazakhstan. Williamson’s family would be told that he died in an automobile accident in Hubei Province, near the site of the Three Gorges Dam project; they would receive a hefty pension from a construction firm owned by al-Bashir. Bouchachi, whose family had been killed three years earlier in an Algerian government raid against a fundamentalist sect’s home village, had no need of such arrangements.

Williamson got up from the creaking bed and walked to the screened window. Bouchachi went back to meticulously rearranging his few clothes and moving his prayer rug from the bottom to the top drawer of the room’s only bureau. By standing to one side of the window and craning his neck, Williamson could see a tall, white-painted rocket booster standing on one of the launchpads.

“Come look,” he said to his comrade. “They’ve got our bird up.”

Bouchachi turned and glanced out the window. “Our ride to Paradise,” he muttered.