the Plan (1995) (50 page)

"Good. Get it ready before nightfall."

Decker left wondering what the hell had gotten into Wallace Litman--to have the owner of UBC personally direct a recovery operation on a stolen satellite dish seemed unusual. He didn't know that the presidency of the United States was hanging in the balance.

Wallace called Mickey back on the scrambled line at three-thirty that afternoon. He had everything set up and had some additional information.

Mickey picked up the phone on the second ring. "Yeah?"

Its me," Wallace said, preferring not to mention his name, whether the line was scrambled or not.

"Let's hear."

"We're set to pick up the signal. If they try and hit the satellite and if they're in New York City proper, we'll get a printout on the location to within a few feet. Also, engineering says they would be able to tell if a pirate signal tried to hit our transponder on the bird in space. They can see it in the control room. It's like the image wavers; they call it double illumination. They can notify stations to drop the feed. It would take us off the air, but it takes about four minutes to do it."

Mickey had considered ordering UBC to go dark but had eliminated the idea. It would be a big national news story and he didn't want that. . . . Also, he couldn't keep them from hitting another network's satellite. He felt pretty sure that Ryan and Colt would pick UBC for poetic revenge. People were like that. . . They made decisions based on emotion.

"Tell them to be ready. That material can't get on the air," Mickey said.

Wallace sat in the news director's office on the twenty-third floor looking out at the activity on the Rim. Joseph Alo didn't frighten Wallace. But his son, this little fat boy Mickey, he scared C. Wallace Litman more than impotence or death.

The New York City police and the FBI had thrown up a perimeter on all of the roads leading out of the city immediately after the police got Ryan's description from the truck driver. They figured Ryan and the others were the terrorists who were trying to assassinate Haze Richards. Why they had stolen the satellite dish, they couldn't fathom, but the federal government had told the NYPD to spare no expense. The new standing order was to shoot the fugitives on sight.

Sunday morning they camped in the mobile control center in the back of the eighteen-wheeler. They listened to the Sunday traffic on the turnpike a hundred yards away and tried to get some sleep.

At two in the afternoon, they huddled around the small desk in the mobile control center under dim red submarine lights while Babbling John Bally drew the floor plan o
f t
he basement of the Black Tower at UBC. He showed Ryan and Lucinda where the two backup generators were located. Then he drew the roof of Hertz Castle and began filling in the position of the satellite dish and the staircase. John labeled everything precisely in large print. He explained that the eighteen-wheel Peterbilt and its forty-foot box were too tall to fit into the parking structure. They'd have to park the mobile control center on the street below. The SNG trucks had been designed to fit in the parking garage and had once been kept on the roof there. Cole and John decided that if they parked the dish on the corner of the roof and the big truck on the street, they would have enough coaxial cable to hook the two units together if they strung a line down the fire stairs four stories to the street below.

Naomi took pictures of them grinning like Bonnie and Clyde Barrow before a Kansas bank job.

At five, they synchronized their watches. Ryan climbed into the eighteen-wheeler and Lucinda got in the seat beside him. They pulled the forty-foot box out of the Truck Mart. Babbling John Baily rode in the back with the control center equipment. The SNG truck with Cole and Naomi followed.

They had decided to stay on secondary streets to avoid being seen by the New York highway police. The huge truck rumbled through residential neighborhoods in Queens. The streets were strangely quiet as families gathered together for Sunday dinner.

As the sun set, New York City was washed in a red glow that clung to the underbelly of the threatening iron-gray clouds. They moved with the traffic along FDR Drive toward the financial district. A mile away, they saw the Black Tower of UBC rising thirty stories into the night sky. It seemed to Ryan to be beckoning them in black-glassed silence.

Or was it just giving him the finger?

Chapter
69.

RYAN PULLED THE EIGHTEEN-WHEELER TO THE CURB ON
John Street. The two-block-long street was perpendicula
r t
o Broadway and the lighted entrance of UBC was aroun d t he corner and half a block up. Ryan shut down the engin e a nd got out of the cab, then knocked on the side of th e t ruck.

Babbling John threw open the door and glared out at him. "You hadda hit every damn divot and pothole in the city? This is high-tech, delicate shit back here."

"I'm gonna go help Cole and Naomi. We'll come down and open the fire door."

"Don't forget this," John said as he handed Ryan a canvas bag full of tools he'd collected from the control center tool supply.

Ryan moved to the front of the parking garage, where Cole was out of the SNG truck, examining the bar arm that required a parking key card to raise. He and Ryan selected two wrenches from the canvas bag and began to unscrew the bolts on the arm.

Naomi was behind the wheel of the SNG truck and ha
d p
ulled it up in front of the gate to help disguise what they were doing. Finally, the last bolt came off and they pulled the metal arm out of the bracket. Naomi pulled the truck into the parking structure while Cole and Ryan reattached the arm. Three minutes later they were standing on ground zero at Hertz Castle. A half-moon threw a shaft of light through the clouds on the empty parking stalls. The forty-foot UBC satellite dish pointed its "flow gun" into space, looking like a huge, discarded umbrella Ryan and Cole looked up through a hole in the clouds at the stars. Somewhere, twenty-four thousand miles out there, a five-foot transponder was speeding through space at several thousand miles an hour in a geosynchronous dance with the earth.

If all went well, they would hit it in less than thirty minutes. . . . An electronic shot heard around the world.

They had parked the satellite truck in a spot where it could be lined up in the same trajectory as the main uplink. The smaller dish was dwarfed by the ten-meter uplink.

They went to work in silence. Cole unhooked the one-inch coaxial cable that was wound like a fire hose on a wheel on the back of the SNG truck. Cole opened the fire door on the roof, and, while Naomi made sure that the line didn't kink, Ryan grabbed the heavy two-inch plug and moved into the concrete-enclosed staircase. The metal stairs rang as he moved down, pulling the heavy cable after him. He was down two flights when his leg began to feel wobbly under him. He stopped for a minute to rest. The wounded leg seemed almost healed but sometimes the muscles didn't work right. It weakened at unpredictable times.

"What's wrong?" Cole whispered down at him.

"My leg. I'll be okay," he whispered back. He started down again, moving slower this time until he got to the fire door at ground level. "You better take a look at this," he called up to Cole, who came pounding down the red metal staircase to where Ryan was standing.

"Some kinda alarm on the door." They looked at the pewter fire handle that opened the door.

"Shit," Cole said. The control truck was ten feet away on the other side of the door, but they couldn't get to it without setting off the alarm. Cole looked at his watch; it was seventeen minutes to six. Ryan still had to get to the basement in the building half a block to the east. He had to get the exterior service door open, disable the shore power, and destroy the two backup generators--all in less than a quarter hour. They didn't have time to screw around with a fire door.

"We gotta risk it," and, without waiting, Cole pushed it open. Immediately a bell started ringing somewhere in the parking complex.

"Kaz, you're a shitty guardian angel," Cole said, ignoring the alarm, as he handed the cable to Babbling John, who hooked it into the side of the truck. John and Cole moved into the darkened control room, leaving Ryan outside.

Inside the big truck's control room, John started to heat up the equipment. Cole sat in the director's chair while Babbling John looked at the monitors as, one by one, they lit up.

"Okay, let's see if we can get a downlink," John said.

He turned on the global positioning systems, which told him on a computer readout exactly where they were on earth, printing out the latitude and longitude. It also told him in what direction the dish on the roof was pointing and the axis of the trailer that it sat on. All of this information was stored in the computer. Then John punched in the Galaxy Four access code and the GPS interfaced with the satellite in space. The portable dish four floors above began to rotate, slowly changing its position, aiming its "flow feed" antenna at the satellite.

On the roof, Naomi jumped as the little dish began to move beside her. She photographed it with her Nikon motor-drive while it first elevated then rotated to the east, looking for the UBC transponder on the Galaxy Four satellite. She could hear the alarm bell still ringing far below, but she tried not to let it bother her. Naomi Zhu had been trained in covert operations. She knew nothing ever went the way it was planned. Half of being good at fieldwork was being able to improvise.

In the control room, John Baily was waiting for the dish on the roof to access the satellite. He was looking for the UBC signal so he could pull it in on a downlink--none of which could be traced. The ATIS only registered when they transmitted. Once he had the network feed, he would make minor manual adjustments to get rid of electronic noise. Once he'd cleaned up the signal, he would have the same images on his five monitors in the truck that the Sunday crew in the Rim control room had on their monitors. Then he and Cole heard the three electronic beeps that told them that the GPS had found the transponder on Galaxy Four. A few seconds later, the typed words they were both waiting for appeared on the main line monitor: "Satellite Acquired," it said in white block letters at the bottom of the screen. In seconds, they were watching the Game of the Week postgame show from the Jets locker room. Akmad Rashad was interviewing a defensive back named Calvin Hobbs: "We was just getting good reads and tryin' to keep interior containment. . . It was a team effort," Hobbs said, grinning on all five monitors.

Ryan and Lucinda had fifteen minutes to get the rest of the job done. They had gone over the plans earlier that afternoon with John and Cole.

Babbling John had been hunched over his schematic drawings in the dimly lit control room at the Truck Mart. He showed them where the exterior door at UBC would be located. It would be locked. "But," he said, "I still got the key. Assholes forgot t' take it from me."

He had pulled his heavy ring out off his belt. Why, Ryan wondered silently, did X-over-Y geeks always carry fift
y k
eys on giant key rings attached to their belts? One of life's mysteries.

John removed a key and handed it to Ryan. "I can't guarantee they didn't change the locks on this door, but knowing them guys, my guess is no." Ryan put the key in his pocket. "They got two big exhaust ports coming out about ten feet over the door that leads down there. Those ports are for the two generators in the lower basement. When the shore power is pulled, the generators kick on automatically. They're both air-start, five hundred KVAs. They get turned on by a blast of air instead of a starter motor. Between the time the shore power is out and the building goes dark, these things will be up and running in less than six seconds, turning the power back on throughout the building. You gotta take the gennies out first, then go for the shore power. Do it the other way and you're gonna give 'em time to phone out. All the phones in there are on computers. You blow the power and those assholes're gonna have t' shout out the windows to get help."

Nothing in Ryan's experience prepared him for what he was about to do. He and Lucinda moved around the side of the building, finding a small alley that separated UBC from the Federal Bank building next door. The space between the two huge high-rises was the size of a lane just wide enough to allow service trucks to pull up to the doors. He looked up as he felt the first drops of icy rain hit his neck "It's raining," he said to Lucinda.

"Probably isn't gonna change much."

He marveled at Lucinda and her courage. She was right there beside him. If nothing in Ryan's existence had prepared him for this, he wondered what it must be like for her.

They found the door John had told them about. Ryan took out the key and stuck it into the lock. It slid in smoothly and turned. Ryan opened the door and, just that easily, he and Lucinda stepped onto the ground-floor service entrance of UBC.

The stairwell was well lit, the poured concrete walls shiny and smooth, reflecting the banks of humming overhead fluorescent lights. They moved slowly down the wide metal staircase. Ryan felt his leg tightening but he pushed on. John had said that the power room was in the lower basement. They would have to go down a long, lighted corridor, and the double doors at the end of the hall should open with the same key that had let them in from the alley. They could hear constant humming from ten servo-mechanisms, as air conditioners and elevator motors turned on and off, whining to life and then thumping off with pneumatic precision.