rear bumper pulled a trail of dust.
After several months of bleak duty, the sergeant had his routine down to a fine science. In the three minutes it took for the car to travel up the road, he changed into a neatly pressed uniform and was standing at attention beside the gate that barred access through a tunnel into the open core of the long-extinct volcano.
On closer scrutiny he saw that it was a Navy staff car. He stooped and peered in the side window. “This is a restricted area. Do you have permission to enter?”
The driver, in the whites of a Navy enlisted man, motioned a thumb over his shoulder. “Commander Gunn in the back has the necessary entry papers.”
Proficient, businesslike, Rudi Gunn had wasted no precious time in seeking permission to dismantle the huge dish antenna in the middle of the Palawai volcano on Lanai. Unraveling the convoluted thread through the bureaucracy to track down the agency that held jurisdiction over the antenna and then confronting the department that operated the space communications facility would be a month-long expedition in itself. The next chore, an impossible one, would be to find a bureaucrat willing to take responsibility for allowing the dish to be taken down and temporarily loaned to NUMA.
Gunn eliminated the useless red tape by merely having NUMA’s printing department dummy up an official- looking requisition form in triplicate, authorizing NUMA to relocate the antenna to another site on the Hawaiian island of Oahu for a secret project. The document was then signed by several workers in the printing department, on lines under lofty fictitious titles. What normally would have taken the better part of a year, before being officially denied, took less than an hour and a half, time mostly spent in setting the type.
When Gunn, wearing his uniform as a commander in the Navy, was driven up to the gate outside the tunnel entrance and produced his authorization to dismantle and remove the antenna, the sergeant in command of the deserted facility was dutifully cooperative. He was even more cooperative after assessing the exquisite form of Molly Faraday sitting next to Gunn in the backseat. If he had any thought of calling a superior officer for official confirmation it quickly melted as he stared at a convoy of large flatbed trucks and a portable crane that followed in the tracks of the staff car. Authority for an operation of this magnitude must have come from the top of the ladder.
“Good to have some company,” the sergeant said with a wide smile. “It gets pretty boring up here with nary a soul to talk to while I’m on duty.”
“How many are you?” asked Molly sweetly through the rear window.
“Only three of us, ma’am, one for each eight-hour shift.”
“What do you do when you’re not on guard duty?”
“Lay on the beach mostly, or try and pick up single girls at the hotels.”
She laughed. “How often are you able to leave the island?”
“Every thirty days. Then five days leave in Honolulu, before returning to Lanai.”
“When was the last time an outsider visited the facility?”
If the sergeant realized he was being interrogated, he didn’t show it. “Some guy with National Security Agency credentials came and poked around about four months ago. Hung around less than twenty minutes. You’re the first to visit since him.”
“We should have the antenna down and out of here sometime late tonight,” said Gunn.
“May I inquire, sir, where it’s going to be reassembled?”
“What if I told you it was going to be scrapped?”
“Wouldn’t surprise me in the least,” said the sergeant. “With no repair or maintenance in the last few years, the old dish is beginning to look like it’s been worked over by the elements.”
Gunn was amused at seeing the marine stalling while enjoying the opportunity to talk to a stranger. “May we pass through and get to work, Sergeant?”
The sergeant snapped a salute and quickly pressed a button that electronically swung open the gate. After the staff car passed out of sight into the tunnel, he watched and waved to the drivers of the trucks and crane. When the last vehicle disappeared inside the volcano, he closed the gate, entered the guard compound and changed back into his shorts and aloha shirt before releasing the pause button on his VCR. He adjusted his virtual-reality headset and reversed the cassette tape until he rejoined John Wayne in blasting away at the Indians.
“So far so good,” Gunn said to Molly.
“Shame on you for telling that nice young boy you were junking the antenna,” she chided him.
“I merely said, ‘what if?’”
“We get caught forging official documents, painting a used car to look like an official Navy vehicle and stealing government property ...” Molly paused and shook her head in wonder. “They’ll hang us from the Washington Monument.”
“I’ll gladly pay the price if we save nearly two million people from a horrible death,” said Gunn without regret.
“What happens after we deflect the acoustic wave?” she asked. “Do we return the antenna and reassemble it?”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.” He stared at her, as if surprised she asked the question, before smiling devilishly. “Unless, of course, there’s an accident and we drop it on the bottom of the sea.”
Sandecker’s end of the project was not going one-tenth as well. Despite relying heavily on the Navy’s old admiral buddy system, he could not convince anyone with command authority to temporarily loan him the aircraft carrier Roosevelt and her crew. Somewhere along the chain of command between the President and the Admiral in Command of Pacific Fleet Operations someone had spiked his request.
The admiral was pacing the office of Admiral John Overmeyer at Pearl Harbor with the ferocity of a bear who’d lost its cub to a zoo. “Damn it, John!” snapped Sandecker. “When I left Admiral Baxter of the Joint Chiefs, he assured me that approval to use the Roosevelt for the deployment of an acoustic reflector was a done deal. Now you sit there and tell me I can’t have her.”
Overmeyer, looking as sturdy and vigorous as an Indiana farmer, threw up his hands in exasperation. “Don’t blame me, Jim. I can show you the orders.”
“Who signed them?”
“Admiral George Cassidy, Commanding Officer of the San Francisco Naval District.”
“What in hell does some desk jockey who operates ferryboats have to do with anything?”
“Cassidy does not operate ferryboats,” Overmeyer said wearily. “He’s in command of the entire Pacific Logistics Command.”
“He’s not over you,” stated Sandecker sharply.
“Not directly, but if he decided to get nasty, every transport carrying supplies for all my ships between here and Singapore might be inexplicably delayed.”
“Don’t stroke me, John. Cassidy wouldn’t dare drag his feet, and you damn well know it. His career would go down the drain if he allowed petulance to stand in the way of supplying your fleet.”
“Have it your way,” said Overmeyer. “But it doesn’t alter the situation. I cannot let you have the Roosevelt.”
“Not even for a lousy seventy-two hours?”
“Not even for seventy-two seconds.”
Sandecker suddenly halted his pacing, sat down in a chair and stared Overmeyer in the eye. “Level with me, John. Who put the handcuffs on me?”
Obviously flustered, Overmeyer could not hold the stare and looked away. “That’s not for me to say.”
“The fog begins to clear,” said Sandecker. “Does George Cassidy know he’s being cast as a villain?”
“Not to my knowledge,” Overmeyer answered honestly.
“Then who in the Pentagon is stonewalling my operation?”
“You didn’t hear this from me.”
“We served together on the Iowa. You’ve never known me to expose a friend’s secrets.”
“I’d be the last man to doubt your word,” Overmeyer said without hesitation. This time he returned Sandecker’s stare. “I don’t have absolute evidence, mind you, but a friend at the Naval Weapons Testing Center hinted that it was the President himself who dropped the curtain on you, after some unnamed snitch at the Pentagon let your request for an aircraft carrier slip to the White House. My friend also suggested that scientists close to the President thought your acoustic plague theory was off the wall.”
