Instead he shifted in his seat and appraised the newcomer with a sidelong glance. As Jack circled the chair, Farrow thrust out his long legs to block his path. Bauer’s eyes narrowed, but he said nothing. Instead he stepped around the man, turning his back on his prisoner for just a moment.
Max Farrow leaped out of the chair and lunged at Jack, hands outstretched and reaching for Bauer’s throat.
Jack was ready. He effortlessly sidestepped the clumsy charge, then grabbed the man’s wrist with his left hand. He stepped around Farrow, twisting the man’s arm behind him. Farrow was thin, but he was sinewy, and his resistance was substantial. Using leverage, Jack applied even more pressure, until the pain was enough to drop Farrow to one knee.
Bauer attempted to rattle the man further by raising his voice. “You want to hurt me?” he shouted. “Is that what you want? You want to hurt
With his right hand, Jack reached into his leather jacket. When it came out again, the hand was circled by a carbon steel knuckle duster. With soft rubber surfaces to grip the hand and protect the wearer, the high-tech version of the old brass knuckles hugged Bauer’s right fist like a glove.
Farrow saw metal and his eyes went wide. “What are you gonna do to me? I have rights! You can’t hold me prisoner! You have to turn me over to the cops, you bastard!”
He’d made demands, but Farrow’s panicked voice was anything but commanding.
“You’re going to tell me a story, Max.” Jack voice was a hoarse whisper. “You’re going to tell me where you got that computer in your pocket.”
“No way, asshole. I’m not a rat—”
Jack brought his brass fist down on the man’s chin, cutting the sentence short.
“You’re going to tell me where you got that computer, Farrow. Do you hear me?”
Farrow spit blood and stared at the floor. Jack yanked the man to his feet, and shoved him into the chair so hard the cheap orange fiberglass cracked.
Grunting, Farrow kicked out. His boot heel barely missed Bauer’s knee.
“Where did you get it?” Jack demanded again.
Farrow tried to rise. Jack backhanded him, then shoved his own boot into the other’s chest. With a sharp snap, the chair broke in half, spilling Max Farrow along with dozens of fiberglass shards onto the concrete floor. Jack avoided another kick, hauled the man to his feet again and shook him by his lapels.
“The computer, Farrow…”
“Go to hell.”
The mast had been constructed overnight, a fifty-foot steel skeleton rising from the middle of a concrete square exactly five hundred feet away from the hangar itself. The tower’s spidery struts were painted in a dun and rust-colored pattern, which blended perfectly with the desert terrain. This was part of strategy to render it nearly invisible to satellite surveillance, even in the brilliant glare of the scorching afternoon sun.
The massive microwave emission array that would soon be mounted atop that tower was impossible to camouflage, however. Roughly the size and shape of Subzero refrigerator, with what appeared to be a thousand little radar dishes mounted on a side panel, the system weighed over a ton. It had to be towed to the site by tractor and lifted into place with a crane. The device’s visibility had forced the two hour delay in its final placement — a wait that infuriated the Team Leader of the Malignant Wave project.
Regal in high heels and pearls, a spotless white lab coat draped on her ballerina physique, Dr. Megan Reed pushed a cascade of strawberry blond hair away from her freckled face. Frowning, she whirled to confront a young Air Force corporal from the Satellite Surveillance Unit at Groom Lake.
“How much longer before it’s clear and we can proceed, Corporal Stratowski?” she barked in a voice that belied her feminine appearance. In fact, a few airmen remarked in private that her harsh, demanding tone sounded more like a drill sergeant’s.
“Three minutes, sixteen seconds, Ma’am,” the corporal replied. “I’m tracking the satellite now. It’s nearly out of range.”
Clad in crisp blue overalls, Corporal Stratowski hunkered down in front of an open laptop, eyes locked on the animated display. The computer rested on a stack of packing crates, on its screen a red blip marked the space vehicle’s path and trajectory on a digital grid map.
With an impatient glare, the woman turned away from the corporal and strode to the hangar door. With each step, her cornflower blue summer skirt billowed around her long legs. At six-foot-one, Megan Reed was taller than almost everyone else on the Malignant Wave team. But she didn’t need her Amazonian presence to intimidate others. Her harsh managerial style, acerbic personality and drive for perfection in herself and others had been quite enough to alienate her from most of her staff.
Ignoring the thick framed glasses now tucked in her pocket, the team leader stooped low, to squint through a small porthole set in the wall-sized hangar door. Outside the sky was blue and cloudless. Beyond the boundaries of the Air Force facility, the desert horizon was a series of stacked layers of browns, mauves and rust reds fading into the firmament. The wind kicked up, and the camouflaged tower was momentarily obscured by a tornado of swirling sand.
With an impatient gesture she turned her back on the desert, scanned the interior of Hangar Six. Her team of technicians, researchers, and support personnel — numbering seventeen in all — lolled casually on packing crates or in folding chairs. The air conditioning inside the hangar was inadequate and many had succumbed to the sleepy warmth.
For an instant, Dr. Reed locked eyes with Beverly Chang, who was fully alert and fidgeting with a plastic cup of tea. The thirty-something cyber specialist appeared as tense and nervous as Megan Reed felt.
“Ninety seconds and we’re in the clear. The satellite will be out of range,” the corporal announced — a statement that elicited a groan from Dr. Reed.
“Why did this have to happen today, of all days. Just hours before a critical test in front of a VIP from the Senate Defense Appropriations Committee?” she complained.
“Actually, you should be flattered, Dr. Reed. You got their attention,” Stratowski replied.
“Who? The Chinese? Are you telling me they’re interested in my demonstration? How do they even know about it? This project is top secret. Or did you security boys drop the ball again?”
Scratching his nose, Corporal Stratowski peered at the tracking screen. The young man’s pale pink complexion had been cooked lobster red in places by the desert sun. His hair had been cropped so short it was hard to tell whether the color was blond or brown.
“This is no coincidence, Ma’am,” the Corporal explained patiently. “
The Chicoms went to a lot of trouble to stage this fly over. They have a whole bunch of photo reconnaissance satellites that pass over this facility on regularly scheduled visits. We know their trajectory and adjust our schedules accordingly.”
“Yeah,” said Dr. Phillip Bascomb. “But those are old fashioned film-return satellites using technology that’s twenty years out of date. By the time the payload is dropped back to earth, the film recovered by the Communist Chinese military and evaluated by their intelligence ser vice, the information is twelve hours old and likely obsolete.”
A microwave specialist and a critical member of Dr. Reed’s team, Bascomb often displayed a wide range of knowledge that reached beyond his academic field of study. Under his lab coat, he was a stylish dresser, but his affection for the latest designer casual was belied by his refusal to part with a ponytail and walrus moustache — both streaked with gray, both holdovers from his late ’60s Berkeley days.
“If these satellites are so outmoded, then why all the paranoia?” Dr. Reed demanded.
“Ask Big Brother,” Dr. Bascomb quipped, jerking his head in the Corporal’s direction.
