Powersat (The Grand Tour)

by Bova, Ben

  Dan went to the sofa, under the Vickrey painting of a little girl standing beneath an umbrella on a rain-slicked parking lot. He sat squarely in the middle of the plump cushions. Jane took the armchair at one end of the sofa, so Dan shifted over toward her.

  “Would you like a drink?” she asked.

  “Do you have any Armagnac?”

  Jane called for Tómas and asked him to find the tequila she had left in her bedroom. “Do we have any …”She turned to Dan. “What was it?”

  “Armagnac.”

  Tómas’s gray brows rose a millimeter. “I will look in the bar, sir.”

  Once he left the room, Jane asked, “What in the world made you fly up here in the dead of night like this?”

  “I wanted to see you.”

  She tried to frown at him. “Dan, what happened the last time—”

  “Was wonderful.”

  “I’m a married woman.”

  “You don’t love him. You love me.”

  “But I’m still married to him.”

  His brow furrowed. “Yes. We’ll have to do something about that.”

  Tómas returned carrying a colorful ceramic tray that bore Jane’s shot glass of tequila and a trio of bottles.

  “There is no Armagnac, I’m sorry to say,” he reported. “Perhaps one of these will do?”

  Dan scanned the labels and found a bottle of Presidente. “This will be fine,” he said.

  Tómas poured him a snifter of the brandy and departed.

  Dan sipped, then said, “I had hoped you’d pop down to Matagorda tomorrow instead of waiting until Sunday.”

  “I have a full day tomorrow,” Jane lied. “Then your ceremony Sunday morning, and then I’ve got to fly to Los Angeles for Morgan’s big rally there Sunday night. Monday I’ve got to get back to Washington for the Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery.”

  “That’s a full weekend, all right,” Dan admitted. “The Memorial Day ceremony’ll be at the Tomb of the Unknowns?”

  “Monday afternoon. The president’s going to be there, of course.”

  “Of course. But do you have to be?”

  Ignoring his question, she asked, “You said you had a surprise for me.”

  “Yep.”

  “What is it?”

  “If I tell you, it won’t be a surprise.”

  Jane studied his face for a moment. Then, “I’m not going down with you tomorrow, Dan. I’ll be there first thing Sunday morning, when Morgan and the other VIPs arrive.”

  “Chaperons,” he muttered.

  “You don’t need a chaperon,” she said fervently, “you need a keeper.”

  Dan laughed. “Yeah, maybe.”

  Very seriously, Jane said, “Dan, there’s nothing we can do. I can’t risk upsetting Morgan’s campaign. We’re planning to announce that we’re married just before the convention starts, for god’s sake.”

  “Okay. After he’s elected and all safely ensconced in the White House you can announce that you’re divorcing him.”

  “Be serious!”

  “I am serious,” he said. “About you.”

  She said nothing for a long moment. Dan got up from the couch and bent over and kissed her.

  She pushed away. “You’re sleeping in one of the guest bedrooms tonight.”

  “Sure,” he said. They both knew it wouldn’t work that way.

  High over the Atlantic Ocean, al-Bashir stretched out in his bed. One of the advantages of leasing a private jet plane, he thought, is that you don’t have to sit up all night in one of those uncomfortable reclining chairs.

  He had spent the day in the hilltop villa just outside Marseille, inspecting the makeshift control station that his aides had installed there. Much of the equipment was old, almost antique, but al-Bashir satisfied himself that it would work well enough. Not up to NASA standards, of course, but it would get the job done. Some of it was stolen. Most of it had been leased from the Russians. It had worked well enough for them over the years. The technicians would be able to disassemble it quickly and leave no trace of their work for the police or Western intelligence agencies to find.

  Al-Bashir had barely caught a glimpse of the beautiful Mediterranean during his hurried last-minute inspection of the control station. He flew in, let the technicians demonstrate the equipment for him, and immediately took off for Texas again. He kept his clock on American Central Daylight Saving Time throughout the trip.

  As he drifted to sleep, lulled by the steady thrum of the jet engines, he fantasized about having April in bed with him. She’ll be thrilled to fly a private jet to France, he thought. She’ll be happy to please me for that.

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  The director of the Central Intelligence Agency was not happy about coming in to the office on the Saturday morning of the long weekend. “It’s a good thing the Orioles aren’t in town,” he muttered darkly to his aides as he took his chair at the head of the long, polished table.

  Only three other people were in the conference room with him, two of them women. The long windows that swept across one entire wall were covered with thick drapes. The air conditioning was so frigid that the director felt slightly uncomfortable even with his vest and jacket on. The entire front wall was a smart screen that showed, at the moment, a map of the world.

  One of the women, a top analyst from the Asia desk, took the chair at the director’s right and pecked at the laptop computer she had brought with her. A grainy telephoto image of a freighter tied to a dock appeared on the smart screen.

  “Our people in Singapore,” she said, “reported a shipment of arms and explosives arrived in port last night.”

  “From?” asked the director.

  “Calcutta, if the ship’s manifest can be believed.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Satellite tracking shows the freighter originated in Shanghai.”

  The director rocked back in his chair. “Chinese weaponry. Damn.”

  The man sitting across the table from the analyst was from the satellite surveillance office. He chimed in, “It could be heading for the rebels in Myanmar.”

  “Or Sri Lanka,” said the other woman.

  With a shake of his head, the director asked, “Then why put in at Singapore?”

  “They’re not off-loading,” said the analyst. “Not yet, anyway.”

  For this they called me in on a holiday morning, the director groused to himself. Aloud, he said, “What’s your assessment?”

  “Terrorism,” said the analyst.

  “In Singapore?”

  She shook her head. “Indonesia. The fundamentalist guerrillas must have closed a deal with the Chinese. Oil for guns.”

  The surveillance man on the other side of the table countered, “The guerrillas don’t have control of the oil fields.”

  “Not yet.”

  They argued the point back and forth until the director silenced them. “Okay,” he said. “Notify the authorities in Singapore. They can search the ship, impound the arms.”

  The analyst grinned. “And they’ll be a lot tougher on the smugglers than we could be.”

  “If they’re not bought off,” muttered the surveillance man.

  The director pointed a finger at him. “They won’t be, if they know that we know what’s going on.” Turning to the analyst, “I don’t want our source of information compromised.”

  She nodded agreement.

  “Anything else?” the director asked, anxious to get back to his home and an afternoon of gardening.

  “Some unusual shipments of electronics gear near Marseille,” said the other woman.

  “Drug equipment?”

  “No,” she said. “Electronics. Several truckloads.”

  “Maybe some frogs are starting a rock band,” snickered the surveillance guy. The others chuckled.

  “That’s it, then?” asked the director.

  “Unannounced rocket launch from Baikonur,” the man said. He tapped at his laptop, and a crisp
satellite view of the launch center in Kazakhstan filled the screen.

  “Anything unusual?”

  “We don’t know what the payload is, but it’s big. They used their heaviest booster.” With a pencil-slim laser pointer he highlighted one of the launch stands. “And it looks like they’re setting up for a manned mission, as well.”

  “Resupply for the space station?”

  The man shook his head. “Wrong orbit for that.”

  “It’s not a missile, is it?”

  “No, no worries about that. But it’s a big payload, unidentified and unannounced. Might be a scientific mission. Or a communications relay.”

  “Why wouldn’t they announce it?”

  The surveillance man shrugged exaggeratedly. “You know the Russians: a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

  The director frowned at him. “Our job is to solve riddles, whatever they’re wrapped in.”

  Nodding glumly, the surveillance man said, “We’re watching, sir. Wish we had some HUMINT on the ground, though.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” said the director, already halfway out of his chair. “Tomorrow.”

  Dawn was just beginning to brighten the Oklahoma sky when Dan awoke gradually, like a scuba diver rising slowly from the dark depths toward the sunlit surface of the sea. As he opened his eyes, for an instant he didn’t recognize where he was. Then he turned his head and there was Jane sleeping peacefully beside him. He grinned and turned on his side to cup his body against hers.

  She awoke with a start, then relaxed and grinned over her bare shoulder at him. “You’re poking me.”

  “Your snoring woke me up,” he said.

  “I don’t snore. And you’re poking me.”

  “Natural reaction,” said Dan. “There’s only one way to cure it.”

  “Only one?” she teased.

  “There are certain variations,” he admitted, stroking. her flank.

  “Such as?”

  It was full morning when they finally got out of bed and showered. Dan made an elaborate show of peeking out into the corridor to make certain none of the servants saw him coming out of Jane’s bedroom.

  “I’ll go mess up the bed in the guest room,” he whispered to her.

  She tossed a towel at him. “Go to the kitchen and tell the cook what you want for breakfast. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  Dan waltzed down the corridor and found the kitchen.

  “Buenas dias,” he said brightly to the cook.

  She gave him a fishy look. “What you like for breakfast, sir?”

  Dan almost blurted that he needed a batch of vitamin E. He caught himself, though, and ordered huevos rancheros with grapefruit juice and black coffee.

  Jane came in just as the cook put Dan’s eggs on the table before him. She slipped into the padded chair in the breakfast nook beside him, her expression very serious.

  “Dan” she said, leaning close to him, “this isn’t going to work.”

  His lighthearted mood evaporated.

  “What we’re doing is wrong, Dan,” Jane said earnestly. “Just plain wrong.”

  “Felt good to me,” he mumbled.

  “Be serious!”

  He looked into her beautiful, troubled eyes. “For what it’s worth, this is driving me crazy.”

  “We’ve got to stop.”

  “Or tell Scanwell what the score is.”

  “No! We can’t do that.”

  “I could.”

  “Dan, no!”

  “I could walk right up to him tomorrow and say, ‘Hey, pal, your wife and I are in love with each other.’”

  “Please, Dan.”

  “It’s the truth, isn’t it?”

  “That’s only part of the truth.”

  He felt a dull, sullen resentment building up inside him. “And the rest of it is that you think his becoming president is more important than you and me.”

  “It is, Dan. It truly is.”

  “Is it?”

  “It’s important to your work, too,” she said earnestly. “It will mean so much. To all of us. To everyone.”

  Glancing down at his untouched breakfast, Dan pushed his chair back from the table. “Okay, you go get your husband elected president. I’ve got to get back to the office and get that satellite running.”

  Jane made no attempt to stop him.

  MATAGORDA ISLAND, TEXAS

  Dan’s foul mood only worsened as he flew the Staggerwing back to Matagorda. He tried to forget about Jane and the mess his personal life was in. Yeah, he told himself as he banked the biplane around a massive thunderhead that was building up above the Texas plain. Forget about her. That’s easy. Like forgetting about breathing. Think about business, he commanded himself. Get your mind off Jane and Scanwell. Stop thinking about them together.

  All right, concentrate on business. What if something goes wrong with the satellite? You’ll have every VIP you could coax down to Matagorda standing there watching. What if something goes wrong? You’ll be laughed out of business, that’s what. Like that old Vanguard rocket, back in the beginning of the space age. Everybody in the world watching and it blows up four feet above the launch stand.

  So what can I do about it? Dan asked himself. We push the button and the powersat doesn’t turn on. Some glitch. Something goes wrong. The Staggerwing bounced through a layer of turbulence as he began his descent toward the airstrip at Matagorda. I ought to have the spaceplane ready to go, Dan realized. Have the bird on the pad with Adair and a maintenance crew ready to take off at a moment’s notice. That’s what the spaceplane’s for, after all. Quick reaction. Immediate access to orbit.

  As he cranked down the biplane’s landing gear and lined up on the airstrip Dan made up his mind. Put the spaceplane on the pad, have her ready to go if an emergency comes up. That means the launch crew has to come in to work today and the rest of the weekend, too. Garrison’s comptroller won’t like that.

  The plane’s wheels touched the concrete with a screech and twin puffs of rubber. Dan let it roll to the end of the strip, thinking, If we have the spaceplane ready to go, even if there’s a glitch the news media will have a launch to photograph. So we’ll spend a little more of Garrison’s money, so what.

  It was nearly noon by the time he pushed through the double doors of the newly painted control center building. Standing in the midst of the quietly tense technicians, Lynn Van Buren yanked off her headset when she saw Dan coming up the aisle between the consoles toward her.

  “Glad you could make it,” she said, a grin dimpling her cheeks. “We were about to start her up without you.”

  “I was unavoidably detained,” Dan muttered.

  Eying him up and down, she said, “My god, chief, your clothes look as if you’ve slept in them.”

  Dan broke into a wolfish grin. “That, I did not do.”

  “Lucky girl.”

  “Are we investigating my sex life or getting the powersat on the air?” he demanded, trying to sound severe.

  “Everything’s up and running, chief. Everybody’s in place. Even Mr. al-Bashir dropped in.” She pointed to the Tunisian, who was sitting at one of the spare consoles, a headset clamped over his dark hair. Dan felt his face tighten into a frown. Al-Bashir’s sticking his nose into every damned thing, he grumbled silently. Then he thought, He’s your conduit to the money; you’ll just have to put up with him.

  Everything seemed to be humming along efficiently, Dan saw. The technicians were bent over their tasks at their consoles, display screens flickering with images and data.

  He went to the console where al-Bashir was sitting and tapped him on the shoulder. Al-Bashir looked up, startled for a moment, then relaxed into a smile.

  “This is exciting,” he said.

  Nodding, Dan said, “It sure is.”

  Something in al-Bashir’s eyes troubled Dan. There was more than excitement there, more than anticipation. The man’s eyes glowed as if this moment was going to be a personal triumph for h
im.

  Dan heard himself warn, “Don’t touch any buttons.”

  Al-Bashir chuckled politely. “Not to worry. Your Mrs. Van Buren has disconnected all the controls on this keyboard. I am a passive spectator, nothing more.”

  But his eyes told Dan there was a lot more going on than that.

  Excusing himself, Dan went back to where Van Buren was standing in the central aisle.

  “I want the spaceplane on the pad, ready for launch. Now.”

  “Now?” she gasped.

  “Now. This afternoon. Get Gerry Adair and the maintenance geeks and tell them to hold themselves in readiness for an immediate launch.”

  “But why? What’s—”

  “Today is Saturday,” Dan said, jabbing a finger at her for emphasis. “Tomorrow’s the big turn-on in front of all the VIPs, right?”

  Van Buren nodded, still confused by his insistence.

  “If anything goes wrong with the test today, if anything screws up at the big ceremony tomorrow, I want a crew ready to belt the hell out of here and get up there and fix the bird. Understand?”

  Recognition finally dawned in Van Buren’s eyes. “Oh. I see. But everything’s been going so well—”

  “Murphy’s Law, Lynn. If anything goes wrong I want us to be able to fix it. Pronto.”

  “For what it’s worth, chief, I don’t think it’s going to be necessary.”

  “Do it anyway.”

  “It’ll be so damned expensive.”

  “Do it!” Dan snapped. “To hell with the money. I want to be ready for any emergency.” Then he let a hint of a smile bend his lips slightly. “Besides, it’ll give the camera crews some sexy footage, with the spaceplane sitting up there ready to go at an instant’s notice.”

  “Okay,” she said reluctantly. “We’ll have to get some LOX and hydrogen here, PDQ. They’ll charge premium rates, you know.”

  “Let’em,” Dan said. “It’s Garrison’s money.”

  Van Buren went to the central console and picked up its phone. After a few minutes she returned to where Dan was standing, arms folded across his chest.

  “Okay. Adair and the crew are entitled to overtime pay, and flight pay, too, if they have to go up.”

  Dan grunted.