Thin Air (42 page)

"Come on, Cas," he crooned. "It's just a little sixty-cycle hum, a soothing tone. It can't hurt you; it never has before. You've always liked it, Cas. It brings relief, remember? The nightmares—you don't like the nightmares. You don't want them anymore, do you? Want to get rid of them once and for all? Come on, Cas—"

He had an amazing, hypnotic tone, once he got going, but the drinking had made him impatient. And when he realized Yablonski wasn't responding, he grew irritated. Yablonski was clutching his ears so tightly, his fingers had turned white. McCarthy rapped on his knuckles with the mike—gently at first then with increasing vigor, all the while keeping up his patter.

Hammond watched, seething. All he could think of was Jan at the safe house, Jan curled up by a fire, waiting for him to come back, by a fire...like Rinehart...a sitting duck.

"Come on, Cas, quit playing with me. It's not getting you anywhere. This is what you've wanted all your life: relief from the torment, from those endless dreams of men vanishing, crewmates slipping through walls, drifting to their deaths, exploding into infinity....Come on....Come on!"

McCarthy was shouting now and Hammond shook watching him slap Yablonski's wrists with the mike, torturing the man until Hammond didn't even realize he was on his feet, snarling, "You sonofabitch!"

The guard's machine gun appeared under his nose and he stopped.

Yablonski's head rolled from side to side as he slid lower in the bunk, trying to avoid the blows and shut out that voice. Strange animal-like sounds came from his throat. McCarthy leaned over, still coaxing him. He tried to pry one of Cas's hands loose.

That's what Yablonski had been waiting for.

Both his hands shot out. He pulled McCarthy's face down and spit the brandy he'd been holding in, his mouth right into the doctor's widening eyes. Then he shoved with flexed legs, caught McCarthy in the pelvis and sent him hurtling into the startled guard. Both went down in a jumbled heap.

Hammond grabbed the back of the chair and swung it over his head, aiming for the two men at his feet. McCarthy managed to roil away a split second before the chair hit. The guard caught a blow in the ribs. Hammond dropped on him instantly and got him in a neck lock.

Yablonski came off the bunk with a bellow. McCarthy was pawing for the door. Yablonski clamped a hand over his open mouth and pulled him back. McCarthy's hands groped for Yablonski's throat, trying to wrap the mike cord around it.

The guard's fingers quivered from Hammond's pressure on his carotid artery, but he still clawed for the trigger of the submachine gun. Suddenly, he shook violently, and Hammond felt something give in his neck.
 

The guard slumped and Hammond ripped the weapon from his lifeless fingers, reversed the barrel and clubbed McCarthy across the back of his skull.

McCarthy moaned once, then Yablonski let him slip to the deck where he was still.

Yablonski's breath came in shuddering gasps. He reached for the submachine gun.

"Give me that, Hammond," he muttered, a wild look on his face.

"Don't be a fool, Cas. One shot and they'll be all over us."

Yablonski raised his foot to kick McCarthy's face in.

"We've bought some time!" Hammond warned. "Now let's use it!"
      

Yablonski's foot hovered. Slowly, he lowered it to the deck, his terrible rage subsiding.

Hammond used his own shoulder holster to tie McCarthy, and a piece of the dead guard's shirt to gag him. Hammond checked the passageway, then the two men slipped out together. Hammond closed and bolted the cabin door.

They were outside, on the starboard edge of the navigating bridge. Silently, they made their way aft.

They went down the ladder, then kept low to the deck, which was still wet from the Philadelphia rains, and headed for the stern. In the semi-darkness under dimmed work- lights, Hammond could see that a heavy net covered the shed doors. Steel mesh vanished into murky water, cable strands glistening dully in the thin reflections.

"We're not going, to make it out that way," Hammond Whispered. Yablonski nodded.

Both men moved cautiously back to the starboard side and peered down the length of the shed. The platform and ramp beyond were deserted. The only sound they heard was the gentle lapping of water against the
Sturman's
hull.

They crept across the gangplank and down to the loading dock in silence. Hammond still carried the submachine gun.

Double steel doors were recessed into the back wall, a safety light glimmering over them. Hammond peered through the long window of the control room. It was empty. There were phones inside. If they could just get in there, call Smitty, get him to warn MAGIC....

He scanned the edges of the doors for any trace of wiring that would indicate a security system. Finding none, he slowly depressed the bar and pushed one door open.

Hammond went through first. Yablonski followed quickly, easing the door shut until it closed with a soft click, the echo swallowed up in a long, windowless hallway that stretched off to their right.

Hammond tried the door to the control room. It was locked. He was tempted to shoot it open, but that would be the end. They'd never complete the phone call. He gave up.

A faint light illuminated the far end of the corridor. Cautiously, they made for that light, past steel doors closed and numbered. Their feet scraped on a concrete floor.

They rounded the distant corner to face an open locker room some twenty yards ahead. They padded toward it, hugging the wall, every sense alert.

At the entrance, Hammond peered in. The room widened five feet on either side of the open entryway; there were green metal lockers on either wall and a pair of wooden benches down the center. And no one around.

They walked in and Yablonski sank down on one of the benches, his eyes scanning the lockers. Hammond went to the far exit, a pair of double wooden doors with a glass port in each. He looked through and saw another light where the next corridor made a bend to the left. Hammond propped the submachine gun up against one of the lockers. He jiggled a few of the doors. They were all locked.

"You want to open them?" murmured Yablonski.

Hammond nodded. "We could use some more appropriate duds—and this seems to be the nearest haberdashery."

Yablonski rose and grabbed one of the door handles.

"Put your hands up here," he said, "one above the other below mine. It'll cut down the noise."

"You've done this before?"

"The terror of P.S. 146."

Hammond braced his hands across the locker door. Yablonski squeezed, then twisted suddenly, snapping the handle off. Hammond's palms had absorbed most of the sound. He opened the locker and found a white lab coat with a name across the breast pocket. He grabbed a hard hat sitting on the shelf and slipped it on his head. A little big, but all the better, It would conceal his eyes. He ripped the nameplate off the coat and shrugged into it.

Cas broke into another locker and got a similar outfit for himself. Just before he swung the second door shut, Hammond reached in and snagged an aluminum clipboard. "Good prop," he said.

Yablonski shrugged. "What about the gun?"

"A little conspicuous," Hammond said, and deposited the submachine gun in the locket, then closed it. "Let's see how far we get with just the disguise."

Yablonski smiled grimly. "Fine, but if we run into trouble don't shoot anybody with that clipboard."

They went through the double doors, eased down the next corridor and around the bend. They ignored an elevator and took a stairway to the next floor.

Muffled sounds of activity floated down the corridor. Moving briskly, they headed for the noise, looking for all the world as if they owned the place.

The room they entered was two hundred feet long and two levels high. The ceiling was networked with catwalks, tracks, and overhead gantries. The floor was flat concrete and around the walls were electronic monitoring stations to which various projects were hooked up. A forklift zipped by on electric motors, carrying a large square piece of machinery to another side of the room. Men moved about, dressed exactly like Hammond and Yablonski, in white lab coats, even carrying clipboards. And in a central area, technicians were clustered around a low scaffold surrounding the silver shell of something Hammond recognized immediately.

He looked for cover and spotted several rows of metal bins along the near wall, supply stations for wiring and parts. He nudged Yablonski and they moved behind the bins. Hammond set his clipboard on the edge of one. Yablonski pulled out two boxes of wiring and they made a show of taking inventory while they watched what was going on.

Hammond pointed out the scaffold and the silver shell and whispered to Yablonski, "That's satellite casing for an orbital instrument package. This must be the assembly station for the Vandenberg project they're working on."

"Nice to know something around here is legitimate."

Three men in lab coats and hard hats were placing a panel inside the casing. They slipped it through the opening and hooked it up. Hammond wondered if that casing already contained the weapons guidance system everybody was fussing over. A supervisor on the floor watched a computer readout. One of the men on the scaffold shouted down, "Third module in place!" The supervisor nodded, picked up a phone and dialed.

Gradually, Hammond became aware that all work had stopped. Everybody was standing quietly, waiting.

Hammond and Yablonski stood uneasily by the bins, continuing to list parts on the clipboard, wondering if the sudden quiet meant their escape had been discovered.

A door at the opposite end of the room opened to admit a small group of technicians, who moved quickly toward the scaffolding. Dr. Edmond Traben, President of MTL, was in the center of them. Two men followed, pushing a flatbed dolly on which was a three-foot-high piece of machinery covered with a tarp.

They stopped at the scaffold and Traben climbed a short ladder to join the technicians crouched around the silver casing. He stuck his head in for a personal inspection. Satisfied, he withdrew and motioned to a man on the catwalk above.

The hook of a chain hoist was lowered from the ceiling by a hydraulic motor. One of the men nearest the flatbed grabbed the descending hook while the other gently pulled the covering off the concealed device.
 

Hammond sucked in his breath: it was another teleporting pedestal.
      

Stunned, he watched them guide it off the dolly. It rose slowly toward Traben and the waiting technicians, and Hammond followed its arcing path, mesmerized.

"That's it!" He snapped out of it. "They're going to put one of those up in space! There
is
no goddamned weapons guidance system," he hissed, "or if there is, these technicians believe that pedestal is part of it!"

The pieces fell into place. With a receiving station in orbit, Bloch could virtually eliminate the enormous expense and materiel required to launch space stations and orbiting satellites. He could send up a vault like the one in his Georgetown bathroom as well as an army of men in spacesuits, supplies, prefabricated and pressurized sections for living quarters, weapons systems....Hell, the guidance device was small potatoes. What if he sent up a couple of homemade ICBMs with nuclear warheads? He could beam anything he wanted up to this little station...
anything.

The possibilities were staggering...and endless.

The pedestal had stopped moving. One of the technicians stood on the edge of the scaffold platform and guided it into place, the overhead chain following on its wheeled track.
      

Hammond shuddered. Smitty had said that MTL was supposed to deliver the satellite package to Vandenberg Air Force Base in four weeks. Some package, he thought. It was about to be stuffed with the Cracker Jack prize of all time.

He turned to Yablonski and muttered, "We've got to stop them."
      

"With what? Your clipboard?

Hammond looked at the men clustered around the scaffolding. It would be suicidal to barge through and start ripping out wires and gear. How much could they accomplish before they were dragged down and battered senseless? They had to try something that was as much a diversion as an assault.

"Why don't we just go out the far door and get to a phone?" Yablonski suggested, angry that Hammond was willing to chance everything when they were so close to safety. "They're not ready to launch that thing."

Hammond shook his head. "I can't risk another Navy snafu." He glanced back at Traben coldly. "Besides, I owe them a few."

His eyes scanned the room, stopping when he spotted a fire hose in a glass case on the side wall. He pointed it out to Cas.

They left the clipboard at the bins and sauntered toward the wall, Hammond muttering instructions and Yablonski nodding as they approached the hose case.

"It's wired to an alarm system," Yablonski whispered, his face fixed in a forced smile.

Hammond didn't care about the alarm; in fact, it would probably help create the confusion they wanted. But he was trying to estimate the hose length. What if he couldn't get close enough to the scaffold? It would be too late to turn back. Still, it was their only chance.