Powersat (The Grand Tour) (17 page)

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Authors: Ben Bova

BOOK: Powersat (The Grand Tour)
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D
ealing with any government agency usually drove Dan slightly crazy. The Houston field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was no different.
He had spent the Sunday after his brief, bitter meeting with Jane back at his office at Matagorda Island, going through the motions of catching up on his work, but actually mulling over his options. Accept Tricontinental’s offer? Al-Bashir seemed decent enough, genuinely interested in the powersat. Okay, so I sell Garrison fifteen percent of the company’s stock. At a billion five, that drives up the stock’s price very nicely. What have I got to lose?
Your company, answered the sardonic voice in his head that always tempered his fantasies. Garrison will start with al-Bashir on your board and then before you know it you’ll be out on your ear, wondering how the hell they did it to you.
Well, there’s Yamagata, Dan countered. Sai’s been interested in power satellites right from the git-go. Hell, I got turned on to the idea by him. A strategic alliance between his corporation and mine makes a lot of sense.
Right, sneered the voice. Until Yamagata sucks the guts out of your operation. He wants that spaceplane design. He might be a buddy, but he’s a businessman first. He’ll feel bad about it, maybe, but he’ll step over your dead body if he has to.
Dead body, Dan thought. He made a mental note to phone the Houston office of the FBI to see how their investigation was going. The following morning, after several levels of bureaucratic double-talk, he finally reached Special Agent Ignacio Chavez, the man in charge of the Astro investigation.
Chavez seemed polite and businesslike on the phone. On Dan’s desktop screen he looked serious, but not officious: solid, chunky face; heavy black moustache; thick black hair. He offered to fly down to Matagorda to meet with Dan.
“That won’t be necessary,” Dan said, studying the agent’s square, strong features. Plenty of Native American in him, Dan thought as he went on, “I have a business appointment in Houston on Thursday. Can we meet then?”
Chavez agreed to a meeting first thing in the morning: seven-thirty A.M. Dan flew to Houston Wednesday evening and stayed overnight in a hotel, only to find the next morning that the federal building was closed to everyone except government workers. Two overweight security guards sat behind the reception desk in the lobby.
“Offices don’t open until eight-thirty,” said the fatter of the two. “You must have heard the time wrong.”
Frowning with impatience, Dan insisted, “No, he said seven-thirty. Can’t you call his office?”
Obviously unhappy about it, the less corpulent of the guards leisurely looked up Chavez’s number and phoned. “No answer. He’s not in yet.”
Dan huffed. “Okay. I’ll wait.”
“Not inside the lobby, sir,” said the bigger guard. “Security regulations.”
“I can’t sit here and wait for him?”
“No, sir. Security regulations.”
Dan opened his sports coat. “I don’t have any explosives wired to me, for double-damn’s sake. You can search me if you want to.”
“Regulations, sir. You’ll have to wait outside:” The second guard put his hand on the butt of his pistol.
Grumbling and fuming, Dan stomped across the lobby and pushed through the glass doors. It was already feeling steamy out on the street. Cars and trucks were growling sluggishly along. Why do they call it the rush hour? Dan asked himself. Nobody can move faster than ten miles an hour.
Nettled, Dan groused outside, glancing up at the clouds that threatened rain. He had a lunch meeting with al-Bashir and Garrison. The car he had rented at Hobby Airport was parked in the garage across the street. The parking attendants were up and working at seven-thirty. Why isn’t the double-damned FBI?
“You must be Mr. Randolph.”
Turning, Dan recognized Chavez from their phone conversation. The man was carrying a white paper bag with the McDonald’s golden arches logo on it.
“Right on time,” Chavez said, with a smile that showed gleaming white teeth.
Dan glanced at his wristwatch. Its digital display showed precisely 7:30. He’d arrived a few minutes early, as usual.
Feeling better, he followed Chavez back into the lobby, suppressing a triumphant sneer as he signed the visitors’ register at the reception desk, and then went with the agent into the elevator.
“The guards told me the offices don’t open until eight-thirty,” Dan said as the elevator doors closed.
“That’s right,” said Chavez. “I like to come in early. I can get a lot done before everybody else arrives and the phone starts ringing.”
Chavez’s office was a cubbyhole, but it had a window. Nothing to look at but the blank wall of the parking garage across the street, Dan saw, but in the bureaucratic world of government agencies a window was an indication of some status in the pecking order.
Chavez slid behind his desk, pulled a cardboard box from the bag, and opened it. Dan saw two small round rolls stuffed with what might have been eggs and bacon.
“I brought an extra one for you,” Chavez said. Then he swiveled around in his chair, bent down and opened a cooler. “Coke? Apple juice? Hey, I’ve even got a bottle of Perrier in here! Wonder who left that here?”
Dan accepted the egg sandwich and the Perrier. Before he could ask Chavez anything, the agent started to boot up his desktop computer.
“I’ve got to tell you, Mr. Randolph, that our investigation of your accident hasn’t gone very far. We’re patched into the loop with the FAA reports, but so far there’s nothing to indicate foul play.”
“That’s probably because we haven’t been completely honest with you,” Dan admitted.
Chavez put down his McMuffin, untouched, his dark brown eyes glittering with sudden interest. “Oh? What do you mean?”
“My chief engineer developed a theory about how the plane was sabotaged. I told him not to discuss with anybody.”
“Why in the hell did you do that?”
“We didn’t know who in the company might have sold us out. Could’ve been anybody. So we started snooping for ourselves.”
The special agent’s face showed what he thought of amateur sleuthing.
“Besides,” Dan went on, “as far as we could tell, the FBI’s investigation of the accident was strictly pro forma.”
Chavez was deadly serious now. “I’ll need to talk to this engineer of yours.”
“He’s dead. Killed in a so-called accident.” Before Chavez could react to that, Dan added, “And another of our employees, a guy that my engineer suspected, committed suicide a few nights ago.”
“And you’re just coming to me now?”
Defensively, Dan answered, “I don’t have any proof of any of this. No evidence at all. But it all fits together.”
“Maybe,” Chavez said. He reached for his McMuffin, took half of it in one bite. “Maybe,” he repeated.
“Well, what can you do about it?”
Chavez chewed thoughtfully for a few silent moments. Then, “I’ve been liaising with the chief of the FAA accident team.”
“Passeau.”
“Yeah. How much does he know about all this?”
“I’ve spoken to him about it. He was working with Joe Tenny, my chief engineer, until Joe was killed.”
“That hydrogen tank explosion?”
“Right.”
“And who’s the man who committed suicide?”
Dan went through the entire story with Chavez twice again, even going into technical details about how the spaceplane’s onboard computer might have been overridden by a powerful transmitter sited somewhere along the plane’s ground track. Chavez had finished his breakfast and a can of Coca-Cola by the time Dan had gone through the story again. Dan’s McMuffin lay untouched on its paper wrapper at the edge of the agent’s desk.
Shaking his head, Chavez said, “This is a helluva time to come clean with us, Mr. Randolph.”
“I guess so. I just didn’t know what else to do.”
There was a rap on Chavez’s door and a pert redhead popped in. “Oh! Sorry. I didn’t know—”
“Come on in, Kelly. Mr. Randolph, this is my partner, Special Agent Kelly Eamons.”
She looked more like a high school cheerleader than a special agent of the FBI, in Dan’s eyes. Knee-length skirt, pretty legs, toothy smile. She sat down and Dan went through the whole tale once again. Eamons listened with complete seriousness.
Then she looked at Chavez. “Nacho, we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.”
Chavez nodded gravely. He stood up and put out his hand. “Thanks for coming in, Mr. Randolph.”
“Dan.”
“Okay, Dan. I’m Nacho, short for Ignacio.”
Dan took his proffered hand. “Where do we go from here?”
“You go back to your office, or your meeting, whatever. We go to work on your case.”
Dan thanked them both and left. As he stepped through the office door he noticed Kelly Eamons picking up his untouched McMuffin with a frown of distaste and dropping it into the wastebasket.
D
an and Lynn Van Buren walked slowly around the sleek, needle-nosed spaceplane. Even sitting here in the hangar she looks eager to fly, Dan thought. Dan wanted to reach up and touch her smooth, cool metal skin, but he could feel Niles Muhamed’s fiercely proprietary stare boring into his back.
“How’d your meeting with Garrison go?” Van Buren asked as they walked slowly around the craft.
“The old man’s sitting tight and waiting for me to cave in,” said Dan. “Funny, but I got the feeling al-Bashir is willing to bend a little.”
“Are you going to cave in? A billion and a half—”
Dan frowned at her. “Ever hear of Frank Piasecki?”
She thought a moment “Wasn’t he one of the early helicopter pioneers? Invented the heavy-lift chopper, the one they called ‘the flying banana.’”
“Right. He got himself into the same fix we’re in, needed capital to keep his company going. So he let the Rockefeller brothers stick their nose under his tent.”
“Oh-oh. I can see where this is going.”
“Yep. Next thing you know, Piasecki’s kicked out and the money boys sell his company to Boeing. It’s Boeing’s Vertol division now and dear old Frank is moldering in his grave.”
Van Buren said nothing, but from the expression on her face Dan thought she understood.
“So how’s oh-two coming along?” he asked, pointing to the spaceplane sitting on the hangar floor.
“She’s ready to go,” Van Buren said, grinning. “She’s a real flying machine.”
He grimaced. “Tell it to the FAA.”
“They won’t allow it? Not even unmanned?”
Dan looked down at her. Van Buren was a good two inches shorter than he. “Don’t you mean ‘crewless’? You’re getting politically incorrect, kid.”
She didn’t laugh, didn’t even smile. “I’m beginning to understand why you don’t want the government involved in anything you do.”
“Damn! We’ve got the best spacecraft that’s ever been built, and we can’t even get it off the double-damned ground.”
Nodding sympathetically, Van Buren said, “Passeau won’t allow it?”
With a bitter laugh, Dan replied, “He said he can’t stop us from launching it, that’s not under his jurisdiction. But he won’t give us permission to fly in U.S. airspace. That is under his jurisdiction and he won’t allow it.”
“Damn.”
“I can’t blame him,” Dan admitted. “His higher-ups would fry his balls if he let us fly the bird before the accident investigation has found the cause for the crash.”
“Double damn,” Van Buren said fervently.
Dan grinned at her. “You’re starting to sound like me.”
“Great minds run in similar ruts, chief.”
Dan ambled slowly around the silvery, stubby-winged spaceplane one more time, thinking of all the red tape he’d been forced to go through to be able to operate his company. He almost laughed when he remembered his chief counsel’s face as the lawyer told him they needed a fireworks permit from Calhoun County before they could launch a rocket from Matagorda Island. Fireworks! Dan thought That’s where a
sixteen-story-high, twelve-hundred-ton rocket booster fit into the local bureaucracy. Fireworks.
“What’s funny, chief?” Van Buren asked as they walked out of the hangar into the bright hot morning sunlight.
Squinting in the glare, Dan said, “We’ve got all the permits we need to launch a booster, don’t we?”
She shrugged. “Guess so. That’s a problem for the legal department, not engineering.”
“As long as it’s not a crewed launch, nobody aboard.”
“The spent booster breaks up over the Atlantic,” Van Buren said. “But the spaceplane has got to come back here and land.”
“And the FAA won’t approve a flight plan, even crewless,” Dan repeated.
“What’re you driving at, chief?”
Dan quickened his pace, heading back to Hangar A and his office. The plump Van Buren chugged along beside him, puffing.
“Okay. We launch out over the Gulf, same as usual. Can you work out an orbit so that the spaceplane’s reentry track isn’t over the States?”
“Not over the U.S.?”
“Right,” Dan said, pushing through the personnel hatch in the hangar’s closed sliding doors. “The bird’s orbit can cross the States; it’s high enough above controlled airspace so the FAA doesn’t have anything to say about it. But when it comes in for reentry it’s got to stay out of U.S. airspace.”
Following Dan up the stairs toward the catwalk offices, Van Buren puffed, “She’s got … some translational … latitude …”
At the top of the stairs Dan whirled on her and pointed his index finger like a pistol. “Work it out, Lynn. Fast. And don’t let anybody else know about it.”
“But—”
“No buts! Get it done.”
She saw how utterly serious he was. “Okay. You’re the chief.”
“Nobody else on this,” Dan warned. “Use your laptop and keep it with you wherever you go.”
She grinned at him, her cheeks dimpling. “Even when I go to the toilet?”
“Even when you’re making love,” Dan answered.
He watched the engineer as she hurried back down the stairs and toward her office, a nondescript woman in a plain dark blue blouse and matching slacks. And a brain that might be the difference between keeping my company or selling out to the sharks, Dan thought.
He breezed into his office, waving hello to April at her desk as he passed. She always looked startled when he bounced in like that. But she didn’t try to stop him or tell him that he had calls to answer or meetings to see to. Good, Dan thought as he slid into his desk chair. He booted up his desktop computer and saw that he had a clear agenda right through to two P.M., when the chief accountant was due for his weekly funeral dirge. And then a telephone conference with two of his biggest shareholders, in preparation for the coming quarterly meeting of the board of directors.
So what am I going to tell the board? he asked himself. Do I say we’re hanging on by a fingernail or do I tell them the truth and say we’re hanging, all right, and not by the neck, either.
The office is so damned quiet! he realized. We’re slowing down to a walk. Worse, a limp. In another few weeks we won’t even be able to crawl. Unless …
It can work, Dan thought as he swiveled the chair to look out at the midmorning scenery. Quiet outside, too. None of the bustle of trucks coming in and out, people hustling from building to building, boosters being towed out to the launchpad. This company is dying, sinking beneath the waves and gasping for air.
He jumped to his feet and stepped to the window that overlooked the hangar floor. Only a half-dozen FAA people meandering among the bits of wreckage. Dying, he repeated to himself.
Well, by god we’ll go out with a bang, not a whimper.
Launch the spaceplane on its booster. Unmanned. The whole flight under control from the ground. But not from here. From a remote site, someplace where the murdering sons of bitches can’t find us. Once the bird’s in orbit, shift the orbit so that when it reenters it’s not over any part of the U.S. If the saboteurs don’t know where the ground track is, they won’t be able to screw up the flight.
And then land the bird. Back here in Matagorda? She’d have to fly into U.S. airspace for that. Maybe we ought to avoid that altogether. I’ll have to work with Lynn on that.
He laughed aloud. Passeau will shit a brick!
Dan didn’t realize how hard he was laughing until April poked her head through his door and asked if he was all right.

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