"Keep thinking," he said. "I don't have any ideas either, but somebody better come up with one."
"Well, let's go back up on the mountain before they find us here," she said finally, clearly itching to get going and do something. "We're going to screw these guys, wait and see."
Vance nodded, wishing he could believe it as confidently as she did.
10:49 p.m.
Sabri Ramirez stood watching as the last of the krytron detonators was secured in the ganglia of wiring that surrounded the explosive Octol sphere. Now one of the bombs was armed. He liked the looks of it. The next—
"They haven't come back yet," Wolf Helling said, interrupting his thoughts. "Do you think there was a problem?" He was warily watching the bomb and its timer being assembled, trying to calm his nerves. This was not like playing with a yellow lump of Sematach. One false move and you would be vaporized. Any man who pretended it didn't scare him was a liar, or worse, a fool. Maybe both.
The bomb did not frighten Ramirez; his mind did not dwell on risk. He assumed the Pakis knew their job—they damned well better. No, his current concern also was what had happened to Moreau. He had expected his unit to return before now. So far they had taken over an hour on what should have been a simple operation. With hostages dispersed in three locations, Ramirez feared that things were getting spread thin. Gamal had been keeping watch over the guards and the off-duty shifts on Level Three of the accommodations facility, while Peretz was holding things together in Command, but still it would be better if four of the team were not out chasing over the island trying to find some rogue guard. He had tried to reach them on his walkie-talkie, but so far he had not been able to raise anybody. That was particularly troubling. Why should all the radios suddenly go dead?
"If there was some difficulty up the hill, surely they're handling it." Ramirez tried to push aside his misgivings. He actually felt it was true, or should be true. He had checked out Moreau's credentials carefully, investigating beyond the popular myth, and what he had found did nothing to diminish the legend of the blond demon, Jean-Paul. . . .
"Now, we're ready to secure this baby into the payload container," Abdoullah was saying. "I measured it already, and it should fit with no problem. But we'll need to hook up the detonators with the telemetry interface, and for that we need