'Unless you indicate otherwise, I intend to make a grab for that. Once I have it, Gallagher here can slow herself down by grabbing hold of me. Then we get on with erecting this sunshade.'
There was a pause on the line. 'Looks good,' Schulz said quietly.
'Here we go,' Ruffin announced to no one in particular. The floatcam was probably broadcasting this, he guessed. Somewhere down on the earth they were watching these two unwieldy figures in oversized white suits floundering around in space, trying to hook themselves onto a hunk of metal that held a black butterfly wing pointing back at the sun. The fingers of his big glove closed around the aluminium strut and Bill Ruffin was amazed to discover that, for one short moment afterwards, his eyes had closed of their own accord.
'Sir?' Schulz's voice said out of nowhere.
'We're here,' Ruffin announced, and knew they'd be hollering and clapping in those distant places just then. He fastened a temporary line to the structure of the satellite, then looked across at Mary Gallagher. She had grabbed hold of his sleeve, steadied herself, and was already working on the canisters.
'Point the floatcam at the base of the satellite,' Schulz ordered. 'The central section facing out towards you.'
Ruffin peered at the flat end of Sundog, like the bottom of some gigantic beer can, and moved the camera around so that it was in view. 'What am I looking for?'
'One big single LED. It should look green.'
Ruffin peered at the metallic plate. The light was there, all right. And it was green too. 'Got it.'
'We see it too,' Schulz said. 'Green means Sundog is primed and active. When the system goes to standby, that light should go to orange. Don't go anywhere near the damn thing then. Wait till it's red. That's total shutdown. It's dead bar a couple of backup circuits.'
'Understood,' Ruffin replied.
'Also,' Schulz added, 'if you trigger some kind of response mechanism, all the defensive weaponry is behind that plate. It has to retract before it can deploy. We built it like that so no one could see what was in there. If you see something moving, we got problems.'
'Right,' Ruffin said dryly. 'We'll know when to run and hide.'
It was a two-person job to erect each shade, and they'd been through this as much as they could down on the ground. The panels were made of fine, silver-coloured fabric, tightly packed into the container. On each side of the wing there was a ribbed, airtight tube with a small pressurized canister of oxygen built into the base. The idea was to point the device away from Sundog, back to the Shuttle, hit the activate button on each canister simultaneously, and watch the shade unravel slowly. When each was erected, it was attached to the aluminium centrepiece and drawn into position.
Ruffin checked on the position of the floatcam and watched Gallagher finish the final portion of the central strut. 'You people down below got a good view from there?'
'Yeah,' Lieberman's voice said.
'Here we go…' He and Gallagher nodded at each other, hit the button on their side of the canister, and watched the shade unfurl slowly in space, like the wing of a silver butterfly that had just emerged from the chrysalis. When it reached its full length, the two ribbed channels that fed the gas along the edge of the wing met on the semicircular end. The final result, Ruffin suddenly realized, was going to look like one of those old-fashioned ceiling fans that were now back in fashion in fancy hotels hunting for some period appeal. Slowly, not missing a single detail, they fastened the wing to one spoke of the circular centrepiece.
'Perfect,' Ruffin muttered, and looked at the Shuttle. It was getting farther away than he'd expected. The long lifeline linking them to the exterior was now a low ellipse. Sampson had done his best to make the drifting spacecraft match the progress of Sundog, but the limitations imposed on them made it hard. The two were just slightly out of kilter, drifting apart. Ruffin pushed the thought to the back of his head and got back to work on the other panels. Gallagher was ahead of him already and he could guess what was going on in her head. She'd seen the line paying out too.
It took thirty minutes to erect all four wings of the shade system and attach them to the centrepiece. By that stage the thing looked so much like a giant fan from some Mexican flophouse that Ruffin thought he could taste cold margarita at the back of his throat. The ground people had kept commendably
quiet throughout. There was, he guessed, nothing you could say.
He admired the big shape floating out between them and Arcadia now, and knew it would only take a few more minutes to manoeuvre into position, then wait patiently for Sundog to cool down and lapse into silence before starting the final part of the job. The line back to the ship was close to taut, had a slowly diminishing sag to its length.
'We're ready to put this thing in place,' Ruffin announced to everyone who cared to listen. 'But before we do, we need to break the link with the ship. This thing's drifting too strong for us.'
He nodded at Mary Gallagher and, in unison, they unhooked the clasps on the slim white nylon cord from their suits and let the line float away from them, out into the empty blackness of space, severing their one possible point of contact with a piece of the planet they called home.
Bill Ruffin took one last look at the blue emptiness of the Pacific beneath them and said, 'Let's get this done.'
CHAPTER 45
Strategy
Three hours earlier Larry Wolfit had been playing with the imaging system in the makeshift headquarters of McCarran when there was a commotion at the door and a bunch of people walked in, Tim Clarke at their head.
Wolfit gulped audibly, stood up, and said, 'Mr President.'
'Yeah, yeah,' Clarke replied, waving his hand at the team of people in the room. This was both Bureau and Agency now, trying to work alongside each other, and if the breakthrough was going to come anywhere, he guessed this was where it would be. 'Let's cut straight to the quick, shall we? None of us can rely on the Shuttle alone, and even if that bet does come off we still need these people reined in. That job seems to have fallen to you. All I want is the short demo, a picture of where we are.'
Wolfit looked at Helen Wagner, who stood behind the President, with Dan Fogerty, Dave Barnside, and Ben Levine making up the rear. She nodded.
'This is a Bureau operation, Mr President,' he said cautiously. 'I don't want to tread on anyone's toes.'
'Larry,' Fogerty said, 'this is your toy, and it's your people back in Langley who are pushing the buttons. You kick off, okay?'
'Sure,' Wolfit replied, and sat down, swivelled the chair back to the screen. Clarke walked over, stood at his back, and stared at the digitized aerial photography on the monitor. 'Where's this?'
'Northeast Nevada, sir, close to the Utah state line. The town you can see there' — Wolfit reached forward and pointed to a cluster of light on the monochrome picture — 'is Wend-over, smack on the border. If I pull out a little we'll see Wells to the west. That's I-80 joining them. You see the continuous line?'
'Sure,' Clarke said. 'When I said demo I didn't exactly mean the real basic stuff.'
Helen intervened. 'What the President is trying to ask, Larry, is how are we doing?'
'Not so good. You understand anything about how this works, sir?'
'No.'
'Well, what we have here is a whole set of digitized aerial photographs of the area. We got these from the Army, which has this kit too, but since we wrote the software it made sense for us to run the job. These are satellite pictures, good for a pretty sharp image of anything down to about six feet or so in size. The resolution is amazing, but that makes it all a little harder, of course, since there's so much data to process before you can find what you want.'