Chapter Two
7:58 p.m.
"Damn it!" Ramirez looked down at the weapons' readouts. "Did you have the Swatter armed? The system should have been off. If it was on, he could have detonated it by impact."
Peretz stared a second longer at the wreckage of the vessel below, then glanced back at his instruments and paled. "I thought it was . . . it must have malfunctioned. No fucking way—"
"Carelessness. Stupid carelessness." Ramirez bent his head and examined the wing, then checked the status readouts on the weapons system. "We lost the starboard rocket pod, too."
Peretz took one look and realized it was true. The rocket pod had been shorn away, leaving the tangled metal of the wing completely bare. But the Hind did not need its wings for stability; they were merely for armaments.
"Well, so what? I wasted the fucker, whoever he was." He tried a smile, sending a web of lines through his tan as the lights of the weapons panel played across his face. It was the way he always disguised nervousness.
Damn you, Ramirez was thinking. An Israeli cowboy. I would kill you on the spot except that I need you. It was an arrogant mistake, and I can't let it happen again. It won't happen again.
He turned and moved back up to the cockpit. "What's our status?"
"Sideslip is nominal," Salim reported grimly, his dark eyes glancing down at the churning sea only a couple of hundred meters below them. "I think we're going to be all right."
"We have just had an example of how an oversight can destroy an operation," Ramirez declared, turning back to the main cabin. "We will not succeed if we get careless, lose discipline. I have planned this operation down to the last small detail. You have all been briefed, over and over." He paused and examined the men. Sometimes he felt as if he were lecturing children, but these were no children. "Each of you knows what his job is. I expect you to do it with exactness and precision. The next oversight anyone here makes will be his last. Am I understood?"
There was silence, then finally a voice came from the litters in the darkened cabin aft, barely audible above the roar of the twin engines. It was Jean-Paul Moreau, the Frenchman. He hated flying, and he particularly hated flying with an Iranian at the controls.
"What the hell happened?"
"Someone on . . . presumably a raft of some kind. We took a couple of rounds of small-arms fire." He glanced back, making sure his voice reached Peretz in the weapons station. "The last Swatter was left turned on, armed, and it must have been hit. Probably the detonator. A stupid oversight."
"Looks like the mistake was mine," came the voice of Peretz, trying, unsuccessfully, to sound contrite. "Can't win them all, baby."
Back to his smart-ass self, Ramirez thought, still gritting his teeth in anger. But he pushed it aside. "Forget it. In this business you only look back if you can profit from your mistakes. We just learned what happens when we forget our mission. The matter is closed."
"Now"—he returned his attention to the main cabin— "when we set down at the facility, I expect total discipline. Nothing less will be tolerated. Is that understood?" He motioned Peretz out of the weapons station and took his place there.
Would these men hold together the way he required? As he looked them over, he felt confident. He had had enough experience to smell success.
Sabri Ramirez had definitely been around the track. Born in Venezuela almost half a century earlier, the son of a prominent Marxist lawyer, he had become an ardent revolutionary by age twenty. At twenty-five he went off to Cuba, but it was only later, while attending Patrice Lumumba University in the Soviet Union, that he discovered his true ideological core —it turned out he actually despised "the oppressed of the earth," along with curfews, books, and lectures. No, what he really wanted to join was not the Party, but the party—good living, women, fame. And he wanted the last most of all. After nine months his lack of ideological fervor got him summarily expelled. He actually felt relief.
With an eye to where the action was, he immigrated to Beirut . . . and prudently became a Muslim by conversion. Then he started making contacts—Beirut had always been a good place to make contacts. The payoff was quick. He was young, obviously brilliant, and he would do anything. In the early 1970s he was recruited by the terrorist group known as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and assigned leadership of its European unit. Off he went to Paris, the posting of his dreams.
He had long fantasized about making himself a legend as one of the world's leading terrorists, and he was soon succeeding beyond his fondest imaginings. In 1974 he graduated from the PFLP and formed his own group. A Middle Eastern gun-for-hire, it was known as the Organization of the Armed Arab Struggle. The designation, he thought, had a nice revolutionary ring, which he had long since learned mattered. His new enterprise—terrorism-to-go—soon attracted such major clients as Libya and Iraq. Among his more celebrated achievements were the bombing of a French Cultural Center in West Berlin, exploding a suitcase bomb at a Marseilles railroad station, and placing an incendiary device aboard the French "bullet train."
Although he never had cared about ideology, he appreciated the importance of a correct political stance in the Islamic world, and therefore he frequently posed as the leader of an "armed struggle" against the "Zionist Enemy." But always, however, at a profit. He had, in fact, perfected the fine art of extortion, pressing the "reactionary" regimes of Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf sheikdoms into paying protection money disguised as "revolutionary donations." After he engineered the 1975 OPEC incident in Vienna in which eleven oil ministers were taken hostage, and then blew up a seaside resort, killing a Kuwaiti official, he began receiving regular payoffs from all the Gulf states.
Finally, in 1984, he closed out operations under the OAAS name, moved to Damascus, and began training Syrian intelligence agents. By that time, he had become a chimera, a legend whose nickname, the Hyena, was linked to every car bomb in Europe. And by that time also, the Hyena (a name he despised) had become the stuff of popular fiction, as well as of dossiers on three continents.
Having reduced terrorism to a science—a boring science —he then temporarily retired. But now, after the American invasion of the Middle East, he had decided to come back for one last score, to do what he had been dreaming about for years. The Americans had unwittingly provided the perfect opportunity. Why not seize it? This time, however, he wanted to do it himself, not with an army of half-crazed radical Muslims. . . .
He stepped up to the cockpit and examined the rows of gauges. "Hold the airspeed under a hundred knots. And make sure you keep her on the deck."
Then he checked down below. "Peretz, this time make sure all the weapons stations are switched off. That's off."
The Israeli nodded, this time without his usual grin.
Now the Hind had begun its final approach. The low-light TV showed a small landing pad approximately thirty meters on each side with a private helicopter parked in the middle of a black and white bull's-eye in the center. He knew that ARM—a group he had long hated—had ringed the island with a first-class industrial security system. Five years ago, he recalled, they had killed three of his operatives in Beirut, in a futile attempt to kill him. What's more, it never made the papers. Typical. The security system they had developed for the island was good, but it made no provision for this kind of penetration. It pleased him to at last make fools of them.
"We're coming in," Salim announced. He touched the rudder pedal with his left foot to hold their heading and grasped the collective pitch lever as he eased the engines toward idle. “There's already a helo on the pad. Looks like a new Agusta."
"I know about it. Just set down next to it, inside the landing perimeter. I want this to be simple."
Tonight, he knew, they had scheduled the first full power-up of the Cyclops. Everything depended on how that test went, but he couldn't postpone the takeover any longer. This was it. . . .
Abruptly he wondered if the damaged wing wou
ld affect stability on touch-down? They would soon find out.
8:10 p.m.
The current swept him inexorably southward, while behind him the bundle of planks that remained of Odyssey II was dispersing rapidly. He cursed himself for having lost the Ross DSC radio. On the other hand, he considered himself lucky just to be in one piece. Luckier than the crewmen of the USS Glover. It was heartrending. Seeing a tragedy coming and not being able to stop it: that was the worst possible nightmare. He wanted to go back to try and help, but the sea made it impossible.
He pulled himself over the bobbing, drifting mast, feeling it slam against his face as the sea tossed it like a matchstick. All around him lethal splinters of Odyssey II sliced through the water, jagged spears driven by the swell. The dark engulfed him, lightened only by the billowing remains of the Navy frigate now some thousand yards away.
Somewhere, dear God, it's got to be somewhere. Let it still be strapped to the mast. The idea seemed stupid at the time, but now . . .
He felt his way down until his fingers touched a slippery nylon cord. Was it . . . yes.
Maybe there is a God.
The straps were tangled, which was not supposed to happen, and fragments of cypress planking from the sides of the ship had punctured the nylon cover, but his Switlik search-and-rescue raft was still dangling from the remains of the mast. Now for one more minor miracle: Could he manage to pull it free before everything disappeared into the dark and the swell?
He flailed with one hand to keep his head afloat, while his fingers grappled with the bowline knot. Finally the knot loosened, and he wrenched it loose.
Jesus, is there going to be anything left? Would it still inflate?
He grappled with the fiberglass canister that contained the raft, then popped it open. With his last remaining strength he pulled on the tether, discharging the bottled carbon dioxide that caused the Switlik to hiss to life. Part of it. He realized the lower buoyancy tube had been ripped to shreds by the 12.7mm machine gun of the Hind that had destroyed the mast, but the upper one had somehow escaped intact. So he was half-lucky.
It was yellow, hexagonal, and it looked like heaven. He had never used one before, and he had never realized how it felt. Like an oversized inner tube.
With a surge of relief, he pulled himself aboard, inching in as he felt the swell pound over him, and then he drew out the folding oars and extended them. With his new course he knew he would miss the harbor at Kythera recommended by Bates—no way could he battle the current and make it. The vagaries of wind and sea were driving him almost due south. It was the direction the chopper had taken—straight for the little island of Andikythera.
Could they breach SatCom's security and get in? Probably. The setup installed by ARM was industrial-level only. He had cautioned Bill about that.
He grimaced and plied his strength to the two small aluminum oars. The way the wind and seas were taking him, he would find out soon enough. Again he lamented the loss of the radio—with it he could get out a Mayday alerting any ships around that might mount a rescue of the frigate's survivors. He also could try warning the SatCom facility that trouble was headed their way. The problem was, the Hind had a top speed of over a hundred and fifty knots. If Andikythera was its destination, it probably was already there.
The cold sea stung his face and the tossing waves were making him slightly seasick, but he felt alive again. Almost by instinct he looked up to try to find the stars, loving how crisp and striking they could be over the Aegean. Nothing yet, but there were glimmers in the north. A good sign. The storm was blowing over now, the clouds starting to open up again.
If Bill tries the radio, he'll probably figure I've just vanished from the earth.
He half felt like it. As the cold autumn waters of the Aegean surged around him, its six-foot waves washing over his partially inflated Switlik, he thought about Bill Bates. He was a friend, a very good friend. Was he about to be in trouble?
Although Bates was a world-class executive, he also was a dedicated family man. He had a model wife back in Arlington and two model sons, both deposited in model private academies. His wife, a blond WASP old-fashioned enough to have the same family name as a prominent Philadelphia bank, never seemed to tire of her charity obligations, so it was his sons he took with him sailing in the summers. That was how Vance had met him, sailing with the boys in the Bahamas.
Bill was highly regarded in industry circles as the CEO's CEO, and not without reason. For one thing, less inconsequential than most would think, he looked the part. His steel-gray hair was always trimmed to the precise millimeter, his tanned cheeks were forever sleek from a workout at his club, or whatever club was handy on his perpetual travels. He had once claimed he knew the location of more health clubs than any man in America.
Best of all, though, he knew how to raise money. When he described a pending enterprise, he did it with the gleaming eye of the true believer. Even in a dicey investment environment, he always generated the enthusiasm sufficient to ensure that a new stock issue sold out and closed higher than the offering price on the day it was floated. The man could sell sunlamps in the Sahara.
He competed hard in everything he did. When he decided, some years after he and Vance had become acquainted, that he wanted to spend summers racing, he did not bother buying his own yacht; instead he flew to Nassau and leased the fastest boat he knew. At that moment, the vessel filling that description was the Argonaut, owned by Windstalker, Ltd. It was a forty-four-foot sloop, highly regarded throughout the racing fraternity. Its owner, however, never let any of his three yachts out of the harbor without first undertaking a personal checkout of the new skipper—even if it was an old friend.
Vance remembered it well. Bill manned the helm, a mahogany wheel always kept well polished, and they were making a solid eight knots on the Speedo. It was one of those mornings in the islands when everything seemed as clear as a desert sky. No cruise ships were scheduled into the harbor, and the stinkpot powerboats were mercifully in limited supply. The wind was perfect and the water as smooth as a glittering mirror. Best of all, Bates was handling the helm as though he had been there all his life.
"Think we can get her up to ten knots?" he'd asked, shielding his eyes as he studied the genoa, a gleaming triangle of white above the bow.
Vance had leaned back and tested the wind. "Give her a little touch on the helm, to starboard, and I think she might come through for you." He was proud of his recent refurbishing of the boat—the latest Northstar digital satnav gear, brand-new sails that cost a fortune, a complete renovation of the instrument station down below.
Bates tapped the wheel and the genoa bellied even more. "I like this fucking boat a lot, Mike," he declared. "So here's the deal. I want to lease her for three months, take her to Norfolk, get a crew together, and get everybody comfortable with her."
"I think we can talk." Vance had to smile. The yacht would be in good hands, and a three-month charter was a dream come true for a guy in his business.
"Matter of fact, I wanted to ask you to help me out with something else, too. Some security work."
"Hey, I'm just a simple charter-boat operator. Not my line."
"Don't bullshit me, pal." He laughed. "You know SatCom is building a new industrial facility in the Aegean."
"A private space facility."
"I think American technology is getting a bum rap, Michael," he said with sudden seriousness. "I plan to change that."
"The Journal says you want to try and give the Europeans a run for the roses."
He looked over, the wind whipping his glistening hair. "You keep in touch pretty damned good for a simple sailor. But I tell you, if we succeed, we'll literally change the way space is used. I'll be able to put a satellite into orbit for a song. Just between us, I'm building the biggest private spaceport anywhere. The French operation in Guiana won't hold a candle to it. I've already got ten geostationary orbital slots locked up with the Wor
ld Administrative Radio Conference. Even NASA better keep a grip on their jockstrap."
"Where's the money coming from? The usual suspects?"
"Who else." He laughed, then tapped the helm slightly more to starboard. "The stock was over-the-counter and it was hell and gone in three fucking hours. Bang. Out the door. Matter of fact, it's now trading almost fifteen percent above the original offering price." He shrugged. "I should have issued more. But like a stupid son of a bitch, I had a failure of nerve. Didn't go with my instincts."
"Next time, how about letting me in on the action?"
"You're a goddamn piece of work, Michael. And so's this boat. Tell you what. I'll make you a deal. I figure you're expecting about four thou a week for this baby, correct?"
"Anything for a friend."
"Right." He laughed. "I want her for twelve weeks. So . . . what if I paid you with some of my personal SatCom stock? Fifty thou worth at the current price? How's that sound?"
"Deal," Vance said, without hesitation. He'd heard a lot of big-time bull in the charter business, but Bates was a straight shooter. The temporary gap in cash flow was going to make meeting the three mortgages—one for each boat—tough, but he liked the sound of the project."
"This isn't going to leave you strapped, is it?" Bates looked a trifle worried.
"I'll manage. As I always say, two in the bush is worth one in the hand."
"Michael, half the time you don't have a pot to piss in. I know that. You're the lousiest personal-finance manager I know." He laughed out loud and tapped the helm, bringing her to port a notch. "Which is one of the world's great ironies, considering what you do for ARM."
"You hear things, too." He had never really discussed his ARM work with Bates.
"You're good. I know that. Word gets around." He paused. "Matter of fact, I wanted to ask you a favor. I was hoping you could work up a contract for me with your people. As I said, I need some security for that facility in Greece."
"What kind?"
"That's for your guys to say. It just has to be good. We're going to be installing some proprietary technology that's light-years beyond anything that's ever been seen before. And we're going to rock a lot of boats in the business. There're a hell of a lot of Europeans who'd love to know what we're up to. There's a real chance of industrial espionage."
"So what's the program? Perimeter surveillance? Security guards? We could probably arrange the subcontracting."
"I'd appreciate it. Your guys know Europe, the local scene. I've got a feeling that's going to be important."
"No problem." The truth was, this was exactly the kind of no-risk work the boys at ARM liked. Nobody shooting at you. "I'll put in a call to Paris if you like. Something probably can be arranged."
"Good." Bates nodded, as though a handshake were already involved. One more thing off his checklist. "Mainly I want some physical-security stuff. You know—fences, alarms, that kind of crap."
"We've got a guy in Athens who specializes in that. He won't give estimates over the phone, but if you'll let him look over the site, he'll price the job for you right down to the drachma. With various options. But you'd be smart to go with his top-of-the-line recommendation. Try to nickel and dime him and he'll walk. I've seen him do it."
"So what's this so-called 'top of the line' likely to run me?" Bates had asked.
"Well, there are the systems you can see and the ones you can't." He'd laughed. "The ones you can't see cost more."
"I already told you I need the best."
"Then you probably want to go MAD," Vance said, his eyes hiding a twinkle.
"What the hell are you talking about?" He looked over, annoyed and puzzled.
"Magnetic anomaly detectors. You bury special transmitting cables beneath the ground, outside the perimeter, so that they build an invisible electromagnetic field around and above their location. Anything—doesn't even have to be metal—that enters the field will distort it. If you go with the Sentrax system, made by an outfit in Switzerland called Cerberus, you can have the whole thing linked to a central console that displays the layout of the perimeter on computer screens."
"Sounds good. We're practically going to have computers in the bathrooms."
"Won't come cheap."
Bates shrugged into the wind. "As long as you guys don't ask for the store, I see no problem. I've budgeted for security, and there's always contingency money."
"I'll see what I can do." He had glanced up and ascertained that the sun had passed the yardarm. But even if it had not, what the hell. He saw the prospects for a fat commission looming. "How about a Heineken?" He was reaching into the cooler in the well.
"You read my mind."
"By the way, want to tell me the location of the site? You've managed to keep that out of the papers so far. I'd guess it's probably an uninhabited island, right?"
"Good guess. It's north of Crete, about twenty square kilometers. It's privately owned, but I've just signed a long- term lease."
Vance tried to envision the place. Most of the Greek islands tended to be granite, with nothing growing on them but scrub cedar. "What's the terrain like?"
"That's actually what makes it so attractive. Cliffs all around the shoreline—you couldn't put in with so much as a dinghy—and then one really marvelous deepwater inlet. But the best part is, the interior is mostly level and perfect for what we need. And there's a granite mountain at one end that's ideal for our telemetry."
"A protected docking location and a natural telemetry base."
"Right. All the electronics will be set up high above the launch facility, and we can use the inlet for bringing in materials. We should only have to dredge it a bit and sink some pilings. It's well along. I've already signed off on a lot of the prime contracts." He stared at the blue horizon and adjusted the wheel again. "And I'll let you in on another secret, Michael. I've bet the ranch on this one. The stock offering wasn't nearly enough to capitalize the enterprise. I've had to raise money from everybody in town—junk bonds, the fucking banks, you name it. Just the hardware ran close to three hundred million. I've even put up my stock in all my other companies. If this project doesn't fly"—he laughed—"literally, I'm going to be joining America's homeless. I even put up my house in Arlington. Worth two million, and I owned the goddam thing free and clear. I'll just have to hand over the keys. Dorothy'll kill me."
"Then we'll make sure nobody snoops." He popped open an ice-cold beer for Bates, then one for himself. "From land or sea."
"Land or sea." Bates hoisted his icy green bottle.
"Which actually raises an interesting question." He took a sip, cold and bracing. "How about security from the air? Flyovers, that kind of action?"
"Let them come. There'll be nothing to see. Except for the launch pad and telemetry, everything's going to be underground. There're a lot of caves on the island—like that famous one on Antiparos. We're going to use those for the computers and assembly areas. And what we can't find in place, we'll just excavate."
It's beginning to sound a little too pat, Vance found himself thinking. But that's what security experts were for. They were the guys who got paid to find holes in a project like this. . . .
The thing that kept gnawing at his mind, however, was the phrase "by land or sea." All along he'd worried about penetration from the air. Had he been right after all?