Vance twisted around and tried to see his watch. He couldn't make out the hands, but they both seemed to be pointing in the general direction of down. Whatever that meant exactly, the time had to be getting on toward dawn. The six hours that Cally had talked about, the six hours left before the liftoff: how much of that time was left? It had to be half gone.
What now? Maybe his cock-and-bull story had impressed the French hood enough to get him out of the room for a while, but it wasn't going to cut any ice with anybody who knew anything about lasers. Sooner or later, he was going to come back. Not something to let the mind dwell on.
One thing was sure: he felt like he had been run over by a truck. The blood from the beating was slowly starting to coagulate, crusting on his face. It had begun to itch, and something where his liver used to be was emitting stabbing bursts of pain. It would come, then subside, then come again. He tried to focus his eyes on the room, the piles of empty crates, wondering if maybe a sharp object was protruding somewhere, maybe something he could use to cut away at the cord that held his hands.
Nothing, and it was a stupid idea anyway, left over from too many B movies. But now his mind was beginning to attempt to function with a little more rationality, and along with that came the glimmerings of an idea. The bomb was aboard one of the vehicles and a countdown was under way, now being handled by Bill's supercomputer. There was no obvious way to stop it. Maybe, however, there was a not-so-obvious way. A last-minute reprieve. Assuming he ever got the chance.
He groaned and leaned back, wondering…
What happened next came so fast he couldn't really comprehend it at the time. Only later could he roughly reconstruct the dizzying confluence of events. But that was as it should have been. The door was suddenly slammed wide, and two smoke grenades plummeted into the room, followed by a flash grenade. Next, through the smoke and confusion three men dressed in black pullovers plunged through the opening and dropped to their knees, MP5s at the ready.
Jesus! He gasped for breath, blinded by the flash grenade but still trying to see through the billowing CS that was engulfing everything. In what seemed like less than a second, one of the men appeared by his side, and he saw a knife blade flash. A hand was slapped over his mouth as another rough set of hands yanked him from the chair. His legs were numb from the bindings, but they came alive as his weight went back onto them. Terra firma had never felt better.
The men's faces were all covered in balaclavas, but one of them gave two sharp clicks and, on that signal, they began to drag him out the door.
He knew better than to say a word. The whole operation had been carried out with clockwork precision and in perfect silence-except for the destruction of the door. Had there been any terrorists in the room, they would have been dead, scarcely knowing what had happened.
As they entered the hallway, one of the men pulled back his antismoke hood. "You look like hell," Willem Voorst said. "Can you walk?"
"In a manner of speaking." He felt pain shooting up through his wobbly legs. "I suppose I should ask what took you so long, only it hurts to talk. You weren't scheduled in for another day. What happened?"
"We moved up the timetable, though you'd be amazed how many people didn't want us to show up," Marcel remarked, his Belgian calm returning. “The entire U.S. Navy, to be exact. We were made to feel very unwanted."
“That's going to seem like a Welcome Wagon compared to what's coming up." He paused and tried to inhale the comparatively smokeless air of the hallway. "What's the plan? Do you want to try and take out Launch Control, or do you want to move on Command?…" That was when he saw Cally. "How did you get down here?"
"Somebody had to lead these guys in," she said matter-of- factly. Her face was scratched and her shirt torn. "No thanks to you. All we have to thank you for is blowing up the gantry"
He just groaned. "Things got complicated."
"But you waited until it moved over the explosive before you blew it. I saw the whole thing. How could you be so crazy!" Her anger was boiling. "That wasn't what we agreed to."
"Like I said, things-"
"Please, give me a break. If you worked for me, I'd fire you on the spot." It was clear she meant every word. "So after you screwed that up, what was I supposed to do? I had no choice but to get on the radio. Now look at the mess we're in. What happened?"
"To tell you the truth," Vance answered, "I'm not even quite sure myself."
"Great. Just great."
"It's a jungle out there."
"No kidding."
"Later. I'll tell all," he said lamely, wanting desperately to change the subject. "Right now, though, there's the matter of Ramirez. And by the way, it is him. We had a one-on-one."
"What did he tell you?" Armont asked, his interest suddenly alive. "Did he say what he wanted out of all this? Ransom or what?"
"We didn't make it that far. A personality conflict got in the way."
"No hint? Nothing?"
"Just that he knows exactly what he's doing. They're going to launch an atomic bomb. Kill a lot of people somewhere. And I don't think the payment of ransom is going to make them call it off. They're going to take the money, then go ahead and do it anyway." He rubbed a hand across his face, trying to feel a cut, then drew it away and examined the blood in the half-light, not quite sure what he was seeing. "But I still think that if we take him out, the rest of them will fold." He looked at Cally, trying to meet the outraged glare she was bestowing on him. "Any idea where he is now?"
'The last I knew, he was in Launch," she said, still visibly fuming.
“Then I guess that's the first objective."
"Jesus, do you want to go in shooting?" She looked around at the motley men of ARM. “Those are my people in there, you know, my friends. It could be a bloodbath."
"Doesn't have to be." Spiros had pulled back his balaclava and was shaking Vance's hand with an air of genuine contrition. Maybe trying to cheer him up after Cally Andros's blast. "Michael, I'm damned sorry about all this. The whole thing is my fault, really."
"Spilt milk," Vance replied. "Now we have to look ahead."
"Well, it's my spilt milk, as you say," Spiros declared, "and I want to clean it up myself. If all we need to do is take down Ramirez, I think I can get in there and maybe do it without too much in the way of pyrotechnics."
"What do you mean?" Armont asked.
"Let me go in by myself, alone. I've got a uniform, so I'll just be another Greek mechanic. At least we should try that first. See what I can do."
"Dimitri, that's a heroic offer," Armont said, "but-"
"No, it's not heroic, it's realistic. It's a chance, but one I think we should take."
"We don't stay in business by taking chances," Armont declared, vetoing him on the spot. "We go in as a team."
"All or nobody," Hans said. "It may not always be best, but those are the rules."
"Exactly." Armont closed out the subject. "All or nothing. So let's get out the blueprints and start assigning the entry-points."