The Plan

Chapter 65.

JOHN BAILY STOOD ON A CORNER IN A DIMLY LIT SUBURB outside Manhattan. It was almost midnight when he saw a gray Ford cruise past with a woman behind the wheel.

John remembered Cole Harris from UBC and couldn't stand him. Cole had been demanding and brusque and treated the people in engineering like servants. But hatred obeys the law of relativity, and John hated the brass at UBC worse than bleeding hemorrhoids. He relished the chance to show them how vulnerable they were. He'd told them that they didn't have adequate security at Hertz Castle, which is what he had named the roof parking lot adjacent to the thirty-story Black Tower. The lot, reserved for visiting executives, was loaded with rental cars all parked right in the shadow of the huge ten-meter dish that was the network's main East Coast link to the Galaxy Four geosynchronous satellite UBC used to rain its signal across the United States. "The bird" was one of the new hybrid satellites that could broadcast C-band as well as K-U band uplinks.

"John, over here," a voice whispered from the darkness, breaking his thought. He turned and saw Cole Harris standing in the shadows away from the streetlight. John walked over to the IR. He noted, with some satisfaction, that time had not been kind to Cole Harris. He had lost some hair and had the sallow, undernourished look of a racetrack lout, but he still wore the yuppie uniform. Tie and suspenders over pleated pants and lace-up wing-tip shoes.

"Great to see you," Cole said, grinning, slapping the tall, skinny engineer on the back, hoping to elicit a response. He didn't get one. The gray sedan pulled up, and Cole opened the back door to usher the engineer into the car.

"This is Naomi," Cole said, introducing the woman behind the wheel.

"Pleased to meet you," she said.

"Yep," he replied and that about covered it, all the way back to The Angler.

They arrived back at the hotel around one o'clock in the morning. Cole introduced John Baily to Ryan and Lucinda.

"John knows all about the network's technical facilities. He's the RF engineer."

"RF?" Lucinda asked.

"Radio frequency," Cole explained.

"So, how do we do it? How do we kidnap the signal?" Ryan asked.

John had one topic on which he was willing to speak in full sentences and that was the physical plant at UBC. He'd designed it, or most of it. He'd kept it running. He'd devoted his life to it. He had repaired, rebuilt, and juryrigged all of the equipment in the early days when money had been short. The switching panel he decided to make at home would have allowed the network to go from the main uplink to the backup with absolutely no phase jitter or flutter. Currently, you had to shut one system down and then turn on the other, waiting for the forty-five seconds of black that was scheduled between each hour of broadcast. That time was used by affiliate stations for local ads and station IDs.

He'd been accused of stealing and had been fired for cause. He lost his job, his pension, and his life's work. He had been unable to get a similar job elsewhere and was now a maintenance man at a junior high school.

"Thing you gotta understand is how it works," he said. He'd often described the system to visiting executives, so he had the speech prepared and could do it on autopilot. "The network owns two transponders on the Galaxy Four satellite. They broadcast on two transmitters simultaneously-one for the East Coast and mountain time zones called the ETB feed and the WTB for the western time band. The satellite is twenty-three thousand, four hundred miles out in space and the signal goes up from the big C-band dish at Hertz Castle to the bird out in space," John continued. "The power to run the transmission is hardwired from the building and is called shore power. There's two backup five-hundred KVA generators in the basement of the Black Tower that can run the main C-band dish in case the shore power is interrupted; the ten-meter dish runs on a range of four to six gigahertz. If there's a shore-power failure, it automatically switches to one of the backup generators in the basement, which supplies the dish with lower power, something like eight or nine hundred kilowatts, but still enough to get a clean bounce-back signal from space."

"What's a gigahertz?" Ryan asked.

"One gigahertz is a thousand million cycles per second. Doesn't matter, really; all you have to know is we gotta take out the shore power and both generators to put the network off the air."

"We have to do two things," Cole explained. "First, we have to kill the signal at UBC Central, then we have to have our own taped broadcast ready to go. We need to steal an SNG remote truck. That truck has a smaller dish and it runs on a K-U band. We line it up on the satellite and, as soon as we blow the power on the main and backup generators, we transmit our pirate signal."

"In order to do it, we need to shoot our pirate signal up before we blow the main feed while they're still in that forty-five seconds of black," Babbling John said. "The trick is to make it so smooth that the hundred and eighty local affiliate stations can't see the signal waver."

"Why is that?" Naomi asked.

"Every local station watches the signal like a hawk," Cole explained. "If they suspect the network feed is being tampered with, they'll call UBC Central, and they'll find out those guys on the Rim have been knocked off the satellite. Then they'll drop the network feed and put up a `stand-by.'… We'll be off the air locally all over the country." These were problems Ryan had never considered.

"The people in the control rooms are gonna see it if we don't do it smooth," John picked up. "You get an effect called double illumination. They're gonna know somebody is screwing with the signal. If we get on the bird, we're only gonna have about ten to fifteen minutes and then they're gonna find us. They can figure out where we're broadcasting from very easily and we'll have enough cops for a parade."

"Okay," Cole said. "Here's how we do it…" And he laid out the rest of the plan.

As he listened, Ryan had butterflies worse than before the Notre Dame game at South Bend his junior year. That game ended in disaster. He'd dropped the ball in the end zone for the go-ahead touchdown just as the gun sounded. If he dropped the ball this time, the gun would probably be the last thing he ever heard.

"UBC has ten SNG trucks scattered around the country and several mobile control centers," John said. "The trick is gonna be to find one we can get our hands on."

"Okay. Naomi, you and I are gonna produce this special," Cole said, clapping his hands, suddenly energized.

"We need videotape editing equipment. We're gonna have to break in someplace. The show must go on."

"They've got video equipment at the school where I work," John said. "It's one a' the reasons they hired me, to help set up the video lab."

Big stories were like that. When things started to go right, they went right in bunches. Cole had already forgotten all the bad breaks that had been exploding in clusters around them.