The buggy stopped and a man appeared, dressed in the same grey uniform as the guards. He was an ugly man, aged in his thirties, with round cheeks, thick lips and curling, ginger-coloured hair. There was something about his face that didn’t look quite real. His skin was deathly pale, as if he never stepped out into the sun. Alex could see the man’s paunch pressing against his overalls. He wasn’t just unfit. He looked ill.
“Good afternoon, Mr Drevin,” he said. His voice suited his appearance. The words came out in a strained, unpleasant whisper as if he had something caught in his throat.
“Good afternoon.” Drevin turned to the two boys. “This is one of the most important people on the island,” he explained. “His name is Magnus Payne and he’s the head of security.” He looked at Payne. “You haven’t met my son, Paul; and his friend, Alex Rider.”
The security man nodded at Alex. “Nice to meet you, Alex,” he said, and at that moment Alex was conscious of two things. Although he knew it was impossible, he wondered if he’d met Payne before. And there was something else. Something that felt wrong. But what?
“I should warn you that Payne has complete control over this side of the island,” Drevin was explaining.
“You must do what he tells you. And please don’t try to get past here without his authorization.”
“What’s the point of a security barrier?” Alex asked. “This is an island. If someone wanted to break in, they could just swim round.”
“Razor wire,” Magnus Payne rasped. “Under the water. They could try, but it would be rather painful.” He raised a hand and the gate slid open, activated from inside the checkpoint. Payne climbed into the buggy next to Drevin and the four of them continued to the launch area.
Alex had seen many amazing things in his life, but the sight before him was something he knew he would never forget.
The rocket was right in front of him, on the edge of a flat, empty area, pointing towards the sky and supported by two steel arms reaching out from a huge gantry. It was at least fifty metres tall, slender and more beautiful than anything Alex could have imagined. He had seen rockets in museums; he had watched launches on TV. But this was different. It was surrounded by a vast, blue sky which seemed suddenly endless. And yet, sitting there, it seemed to radiate the power that was contained in the four solid rocket boosters that would, very soon, blast it into space. About twenty people were working around it. The rocket dwarfed them, making them look tiny.
“We call it Gabriel 7,” Drevin said, and he couldn’t keep the excitement out of his voice. “It’s an Atlas 2AS
rocket. You can just make out the payload.” He pointed to a bulging shape close to the rocket’s tip. “It’s covered with an aerodynamic fairing,” he went on. “It has to survive the ascent through the atmosphere.
But underneath, there’s a glass and steel observation module weighing 1.8 tonnes. It will take the Atlas just fifteen minutes to carry it into space, and the day after tomorrow it’ll be up there, three hundred miles above our heads. The heart of Ark Angel!”
Paul shook his head. “It’s really cool!”
“Cool?” Drevin snapped. “I despise this modern teenage slang! You use ghetto language to describe what you can’t even begin to imagine. Coot? Is that all you can say?”
“What about the other rocket?” Alex asked.
He had seen the second gantry from the plane. It was further along the shore, a clear distance from the Atlas. The second rocket, slightly smaller, also seemed to be waiting for blast-off. More people surrounded it, working on the final preparations.
“Mr Payne?” Drevin turned to his head of security.
“We’ve brought forward the launch,” Payne explained in his rasping voice. “We plan to send it up immediately after Gabriel 7.”
“Why?” Alex wondered.
“We are involved in a series of long-term experiments,” Drevin said. “We need to know more about the effects of weightlessness on the human body. The second rocket is a Soyuz-Fregat. It will carry a model of the human system into space.”
“What does that mean?” Alex asked.
“An ape.”
“I didn’t realize you were still allowed to use animals.”
Drevin shrugged. “It’s not ideal. But there’s no other way.” They drove to the first of the brick buildings. It was the largest in the compound, with three satellite dishes pointing up at the sky. “This is the control centre,” Payne told them. “The other buildings are for storage and construction. We also have sleeping quarters and recreation facilities. There are more than sixty people working on the island.”
They went in, along a corridor and into a large room with slanting windows looking out onto the launch site. Above the windows was a giant screen, blank at the moment but ready to transmit pictures of the launch itself. There were about twenty computers, arranged in two groups, facing each other. One group was marked COMMAND, the other TELEMETRY. To one side Alex noticed a conference table, a dozen chairs and another screen. A huge board with hundreds of light bulbs spelt out various information including LTST—local true solar time—the space equivalent of GMT. There was less to the control centre than Alex had imagined. In many ways it was like an oversized classroom.
A man had stood up as they came in. He was short but thickset, and looked either Chinese or Korean with neat black hair, wire-framed spectacles and a pencil moustache. He was dressed like a businessman in a smart jacket and tie. The clothes couldn’t have been less appropriate on a Caribbean island, but of course the climate in the control room was conditioned. Alex could feel the sterile air blowing cold on his bare arms and legs.
Drevin introduced him. “This is Professor Sing Joo-Chan, the flight director here on Flamingo Bay. We were very lucky to be able to recruit him from the Khrunichev Space Centre.”
“How do you do.” Sing spoke with a cultured English accent. He shook hands with Alex and Paul, but the dark brown eyes behind the glasses showed no interest in them at all. They were children. They had no place here. That was what the eyes seemed to say.
“This is where it all happens,” Drevin went on. “We’ll be controlling both the launch and the docking procedure from here. Of course, most of the procedure is computerized. But we have a camera fitted into Gabriel 7’s nose. Travelling three hundred miles at the speed of light, it takes about 0.001 seconds for the images to be relayed back
