Project Cyclops Part 15

With his hand on the stick, he activated the fire b.u.t.ton. He might not be able to hit anything, but he'd definitely get somebody's attention.

The machine gun just below him erupted, a deadly spray that knocked sparks off the hurricane fence surrounding the pad as the chopper slowly revolved around. Somewhere now off to his left came a new burst of automatic fire. He found himself in a full-scale firefight, trapped like a tormented bull in a pen.

But the Hind was up and hovering . . . and also beginning to slip sideways because of the damaged wing. He grappled with the collective pitch lever in his left hand, trying to regain control, but he didn't have the experience. The chopper was now poised about ten feet above the ground, its engines bellowing, nosing around and drifting dangerously.

He'd lost control. As it tilted sideways, the fence began coming up at him, aiming directly for the nose bubble. Even more unnerving, though, was the heavyset terrorist in a black pullover who was standing directly in front of the bubble and firing his Uzi point-blank. Worse still, he was handling it like second nature.

The plastic splintered with a high-pitched shriek as the rounds caught it head-on. The curvature had helped before, but now the gunman was able to fire straight into it. The game was about to be up.

He ducked for the floor of the c.o.c.kpit just as the bubble windscreen detonated, spewing shards of plastic both outward and inward. Now the helicopter was coming about and lifting off again, pulling up strands of the wire fence that had gotten tangled in the landing gear.

No time to worry about it. He rose up, grasped the collective, and urged more power, trying to compensate for the torque. But the mottled gray behemoth was increasingly unstable, shunting sideways, drifting over the security fence and spiraling upward toward the mountain that bristled with SatCom's communications gear. The gunner holding the Uzi slipped in another clip and raised up to finish him off, but at that instant Vance squeezed the fire b.u.t.ton one last time and the man danced a pirouette, disappearing from view.

As he started to spiral in earnest, more automatic fire ricocheted off the fuselage. Then came a sickening whine.

The stabilizer, he thought. They must have hit the d.a.m.ned stabilizer.

This is going to be a very short trip.

Panic caught him as the Hind started into autorotation, round and round like a b.u.mper-car ride at an amus.e.m.e.nt park.

He cut the power--hoping he could bring her down using the energy stored in the blades--then quickly put the right pedal to the floor, held the collective down, and tried to keep rotor speed in the green. He was drifting to the east now, headed for a copse of trees halfway up the mountain.

Not a bad place to set down, he thought, and started to

flare the blades with the stick, hoping he could bring her in with the collective. The Hind was still spinning in autorotation, but not yet dangerously. Slowly, slowly . . .

He was about thirty feet above the trees when a splatter of automatic fire erupted from the open doorway. He whirled around to see the terrorist he'd bulldozed into the fence now hanging onto the metal step and trying to pull himself in.

What now . . . !

The man--Vance guessed he was pushing forty, with a face of timeless brutality--was covered with blood and his aim was hampered by trying to hold the Uzi as he fired one-handed, the other hand grasping the step.

He was cursing in German. . . .

At that instant the Hind took a sickening dip, and the Uzi clattered onto the doorway pallet as the terrorist relinquished it to try to hold on with both hands.

But he was losing it, his hands slippery with his own blood, and all that held him now was the torn section of his own shirt that had somehow sleeved over the step. Then his grasp gave way entirely, and he dangled for a moment by the shirt before it ripped through and he fell, a trailing scream. He landed somewhere in the trees twenty feet below, leaving only the shirt.

In the meantime the Hind continued spiraling and drifting down, and Vance looked out to see the gray granite of the side of the mountain moving toward him, with only a bramble of trees in between. But at least the chopper's autorotation was bringing him in for a soft crash.

He braced himself as a clump of trees slapped against the side of the fuselage. Then the twelve-ton helicopter plunged into them, its landing gear collapsing as it crunched to a stop. He felt himself flung forward, accompanied by the metallic splatter of the rotor collapsing against the granite, shearing and knocking the fuselage sideways in a series of jolts. As the two turboshaft engines automatically shut down, he held onto the seat straps and reflected that this was his first and probably last turn at the stick of a Hind. And all he'd managed to do was total it.

Heck of a way to start a morning.

The Uzi was still lying on the floor of the cabin, while the shirt of the man he had shot was wrapped around the metal step and lodged beneath the crushed landing gear.

When he reached back and checked to see that the Walther 9mm was still secured in his belt, he noticed that his arm had been lacerated by the jagged plastic of the shattered canopy. He noticed it, but he didn't feel it. He was feeling nothing, only a surge of adrenaline and the certain knowledge he had to get out fast, with the Uzi.

He scooped it up and stumbled through the doorway, to the sound of muted gunfire down the hill, as the other two hoods continued to advance.

He had the German's automatic now, but the last thing he wanted was a shootout. Nonetheless, rounds of fire sang around him as he ripped the black shirt loose from the chopper's step and felt the pockets. One contained what seemed like a small leather packet.

He yanked it out, then plunged in a direction that would bring the Hind between him and the other two a.s.sailants. But when he tried to catch his footing in the green bramble of brush, he fell on his shoulder and rolled, feeling a spasm of pain. Christ, this was no longer any fun!

About twenty feet away was an even denser copse of cypress scrub than the one he had crashed in. If he could make that, he told himself, he'd have some cover. He just had to get there in one piece.

Half scrambling, half rolling, he headed for the thicket of trees, occasionally loosing a round of covering fire down the hill. Then he felt the scratchy hardness of the low brush and threw himself into the bramble. Dirt spattered as rounds of fire--or was it flecks of granite?-- ricocheted around him, and then he felt a nick across one shoulder--he was not sure from what. A couple more rounds cut past, but now they were going wide.

He collapsed into the dense bramble and tried to catch his breath. What next? The Uzi still had a half-full clip. Maybe he could hold them off.

He stilled his breathing and listened, but heard nothing. The mountainside was deathly quiet, so much so he could almost hear the crash of waves on the sh.o.r.e below. It was probably only wishful imagination, but the quiet gave hope he might temporarily be out of danger.

He turned and looked up the mountain, finally able to see it clearly.

The near hillside was covered with brush, the only objects visible above the green being the tip of a high-tech jungle. SatCom had a h.e.l.l of a communications installation. Outlined against the blue sky were huge parabolic antennas used for microwave uplinks, a phased-array transmission system for powering the s.p.a.ce vehicles, a myriad of dishes for satellite uplinks and downlinks, and various other antennas used for conventional radio. It was all set inside a high-security hurricane fence with a gray cinderblock control hut at the near corner.

Well, he thought, with that battery of antennas, there's surely a way to do what has to be done next. . . .

This time he wouldn't waste radio access with Maydays.

9:35 A.M.

As the landing announcement sounded through British Air flight 1101 from London to Athens, Isaac Mannheim took off his thick spectacles, wiped them futilely with a greasy handkerchief, settled them back, and stared down. The plane was now on final approach, and he had already taken down his flight bag and stuffed it under the seat in preparation, ready to march off.

Mannheim was professor emeritus at MIT, Department of Engineering, and he retained the intellectual curiosity of a mischievous schoolboy. He had the flowing white hair of a nineteenth-century European philosopher, the burning eyes of a Jules Verne visionary, the single- minded enthusiasm of a born inventor, the discursive knowledge of a Renaissance man, and the self-a.s.surance of a true genius--which he was.

Wearing a tweedy checked suit, a frayed brown overcoat, smudgy horn- rims, and a Boston Red Sox baseball cap, he also looked every bit as eccentric as his reputation said. The baseball cap was tribute to another of his eclectic concerns--the statistics of that particular team. Those he kept on a computer file and subjected to daily updates.

As Issac Mannheim saw it, he was the undisputed father of Project Cyclops; Bill Bates was merely in charge of its delivery room down on Andikythera. It was a half-truth, perhaps, but not entirely untrue either. He had dreamed up the idea and proved in his MIT lab that it could work. The rest, he figured, was merely scaling it up--which any dimwit with half a billion dollars could do with ease. He had already seen to the hard part.

Mannheim liked to check in on his baby every other week, just to make sure that Bates--who was going to make a fortune off his idea--was doing it right. Although the long flight to Athens and then the helicopter ride down to Andikythera were starting to make him feel his seventy- five years, he did not really mind. When you're my age, he'd claim, you don't have time to sit around on your b.u.t.t all day.

He always flew British Air from London rather than taking a direct Olympic flight from Boston, mainly because he was an Anglophile but also because he wasn't quite sure he trusted Greek maintenance. Isaac Mannheim was old school in all things.

As the tires screeched onto the asphalt, he glanced out the window again, marveling how small the Athens airport was. But then his mind quickly traveled on to other pressing matters: namely, the day's agenda. He was anxious to go over the power-up data number by number with Georges LeFarge. The young French Canadian had been his best student in Cambridge, ten years ago, and Isaac Mannheim was secretly pleased, very pleased, that Georges had been given a leading role in the project. Together, years ago, they had ironed out many of the technical problems in the system. The work back then had been done on a lab bench, and a shoestring, but LeFarge knew everything that could go wrong. With Georges as Director of Computer Systems here, Mannheim knew the project was in good hands, at least the crucial computer part of it.

When the doors opened, he was one of the first to step out of the BA 757 and down the steel stairway onto the runway. He reflected that he'd had a good flight this time, with only an hour layover in Heathrow's infamously crowded Terminal Four. Now, as the airport bus arrived to carry the bleary-eyed London pa.s.sengers into the Athens terminal, he antic.i.p.ated getting an early start on the day.

He glanced down toward the far end of the airport, the civilian aviation terminal, expecting to catch sight of Bates' blue-and-white- striped Agusta helicopter. Funny, he couldn't see it today; usually you could.

It was odd; they were always here, waiting. Customary promptness was just one more example of how well that young Dr. Andros was handling the project. He chafed to admit it, but she was pretty d.a.m.ned good.

Although he had long scoffed at the idea that women could compete successfully with male engineers, he had to admit she was as professional as any male project manager he'd ever worked with.

Carrying his overstuffed black briefcase in his left hand and his tattered nylon flight bag in his right, he waited till the airport bus was almost full before stepping on. Airport buses, he noted as an engineer, operated on the old-time LIFO computer storage principle: last in, first out. No random access.