Vance felt the cold steel rails, glistening lightly in the thin moonlight, and wondered how long it would take to set the charge.
He also wondered if his impromptu bomb would work as planned. It should. In the shop Cally had led him directly to a cache of British-made gelignite, left over from the days of excavation. He had shaped a so-called "diamond" charge which, when wrapped around a rail and detonated with a fuse, would produce shock waves that would meet at the center, then be deflected at right angles, shattering the metal. It was a little-known bomber's trick-one he learned from Willem Voorst-that usually produced total deformation and fracture.
He had insisted that she let him handle this one alone, claiming there was no need to endanger two people, and finally she had agreed. Dr. Calypso Andros: she had already proven she could take control of a situation, like the one up the mountain, and handle it. That cool would come in handy later.
He also liked her New York street smarts. Yet beneath it all, he sensed something was wrong. She mentioned some guy named Alan, then clammed up. Funny. Reminding a woman of some old boyfriend could be a mixed blessing. Sometimes you got to take credit for the other guy's failings…
Well, that cuts both ways. Admit it, he finally lectured himself. Calypso Andros reminds you of Eva Borodin.
She was the temperamental Slavic beauty who had been the love-on and off-of his life. That was the bottom line. He still wore her wedding ring. He had loved her more than anything, and after she left he had tried everything he could think of to help forget her. None of it had worked. Even now, here, the thought of her kept coming back…
But enough. Concentrate on the job at hand and get going.
Quickly he began securing the soft explosive. Although his instinct still was just to blow the whole gantry and have done with it, he agreed with Cally that that was a no-no. The idea was sabotage, not demolition. The difference might not be all that subtle, but there was a difference.
The gantry, a huge derrick on wheels, was illuminated by intensely focused floodlights from a battery across from the vehicles. The tracks were about sixty meters long, which suggested the distance it had to be away from VX-1 before the vehicle could lift off. So if he could destroy the tracks close enough, the gantry would be stuck in place, making a launch impossible.
The gelignite should do it, he told himself. The charge was going to wrap almost perfectly around the rails. This ought to be a snap…
At that moment, he felt a tremor in the rails and looked up to see the lights on the gantry flicker as its motors revved to life. Then it started rolling; like a monolith, slow and assured, it began inching away from the vehicle and toward him.