SatCom. On the brink. High-risk all the way, but what a dream. Almost there, and now this.
He found himself thinking about his wife, Dorothy. She had been supportive—she always was—from the very first. Maybe after eighteen years of struggle she had had misgivings about gambling everything on this one big turn of the roulette wheel, but she had kept her thoughts to herself. Which was only one more reason why he loved her so. She had been all their married life, always there with a real smile and a hug when the going got the roughest. It made all the difference.
But now, now that the whole enterprise was in danger of going down the tubes, he felt he had let her down. For the first time ever. Even his briar pipe tasted burned out, like ashes. He had taken every cent he could beg or borrow and had gambled it all on space. Only to have a group of monsters barge in and wreck everything. Now what? He honestly didn't know.
He had flown an A-6 Intruder in Vietnam, but hand-to-hand with terrorists was something else entirely. The bastards had shut down all the communications gear when they moved in. The phones were out, the radio, and even his personal computer terminals had been shunted out of the system. He could count and he knew what automatic weapons could do. No, this one was out of his control.
He glanced around his office, paneled in light woods and hung with photographs of Dorothy and the two boys—his favorite was during a regatta in Chesapeake Bay. There also were photos of the Cyclops system and the VX-1 vehicle, the latter caught in the austere light of sunrise, the blue Aegean in the background.
He shook his head sadly, rose, and made his way out into the cavernous room that was Command. The fluorescent lights glared down on a depressing sight—the staff disheveled and living in stark fear—one armed hood at the computer, another lounging by the doorway. . . .
12:45 a.m.
Georges LeFarge looked up to see Bates coming out of his office and into the wide, vinyl-floored expanse that was Command. He assumed the CEO had been sitting moodily in his office, dwelling on the imminent foreclosure of SatCom's creditors. He must have been puffing up a storm on his pipe because a cloud of smoke poured out after him. And he looked weary—his eyes told it.
Nobody down at Launch Control knew they had been taken over by terrorists. Peretz had carefully made sure that all communications from Command were monitored and controlled. Number One had gone down there, but he apparently had managed to fool everybody into thinking he and all his hoods were SatCom consultants. One thing you had to say for them, they were masters of deceit. Number One could pass for a high-powered European executive, and he was playing the authority thing to the hilt.