stage lit off about a thousand miles downrange. In the control bunkers at the Cape, the engineers and technicians noted that everything was still going as planned, as befitted a launch vehicle whose ancestry dated back to the late 1950s. The third stage burned out on time and on profile. The payload, along with the fourth, or transstage, now awaited the proper time to ignite, kicking the payload to its intended geosynchronous height, from which it would hover over a specific piece of the earth's equator. The hiatus allowed the control-room crew to top off their coffee, make necessary pit stops, and review the data from the launch, which, they all agreed, had been about as perfect as an engineer had any right to expect.
The trouble came half an hour later. The transstage ignited early, seemingly on its own, boosting the payload to the required height, but not in the expected place; also, instead of being perfectly placed in a stationary position, the payload was left in an eccentric path, meandering in a lopsided figure-eight that straddled the equator. Even if it had been over the right longitude, the path would negate its coverage of the higher latitudes for brief but annoying periods of time. Despite everything that had gone right, all the thousands of parts that had functioned exactly as designed, the launch was a failure. The engineering crew who managed the lower stages shook their heads in sympathy with those whose responsibility had been the transstage, and who now surveyed launch control in evident dejection. The launch was a failure.
The payload didn't know that. At the appointed time, it separated itself from the transstage and began to perform as it had been programmed. Weighted arms ten meters in length extended themselves. Gravity from an earth over twenty thousand miles away would act on them through tidal forces, keeping the satellite forever pointed downward. Next the solar panels deployed to convert sunlight into electricity, charging the onboard batteries. Finally, an enormous dish antenna began to form. Made of a special metal-ceramic-plastic material, its frame 'remembered' its proper configuration, and on being heated by sunlight unfolded itself over a three-hour period until it formed a nearly perfect parabolic dish fully thirty meters in diameter. Anyone close enough to view the event would have noticed the builder's plate on the side of the satellite. Why this was done was itself an anachronism, since there would never be anyone close enough to notice, but it was the custom. The plate, made of gold foil, designated the prime contractor as TRW, and the name of the satellite as Rhyolite-J. The last of an obsolete series of such satellites, it had been built in 1981 and sat in storage - at the cost of over $100,000 per year - awaiting a launch that had never actually been expected, since CIA and NSA had developed newer, less cumbersome electronic-reconnaissance birds that used advanced signal-gathering equipment. In fact, some of the new equipment had been attached to this obsolete bird, made even more effective by the massive receiving dish. Rhyolite had been originally designed to eavesdrop on Soviet electronic emissions, telemetry from missile tests, side-lobes from air-defense radars, scatterings from microwave towers, even for signals from spy devices dropped off by CIA officers and agents at sensitive locations.
That didn't matter to the people at the Cape. An Air Force public affairs officer released a statement to the general effect that the (classified) launch had not achieved proper orbit. This was verified by the Soviets, who had fully expected the satellite to take a place over the Indian Ocean when, in fact, it was now oscillating over the Brazilian-Peruvian border, from which it couldn't even see the Soviet Union. Curious, they thought, that the Americans had even allowed it to switch itself on, but from yet another 'fishing trawler' off the California coast, they monitored intermittent scatterings of encrypted transmissions from the satellite down to some earth station or other. Whatever it was sending down, however, was of little concern to the Soviet Union.
Those signals were received at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, where technicians in yet another nondescript communications van, with a satellite dish set outside, began calibrating their instruments. They didn't know that the launch was supposedly a failure. They just knew that everything about it was secret.
He finally made the road, and he really ought to have stayed in the mud, but he wanted to lie down on a dry, clear place, which he first scanned with his AN/PVS-7 night scope. No snakes. He took a deep breath, then removed the plastic canteen from its holder. They'd been on the move for six hours, covering nearly five miles - which was really pushing it - but they were supposed to get to this road before dawn, and get there unseen by the OPFOR - the opposing force - who were warned of their presence. Chavez had spotted them twice, each time, he thought, a pair of American MPs, who weren't really soldiers, not to his way of thinking. Chavez had led his squad around them, moving through the swamp as quietly as... as a snake, he told himself wryly. He could have double-tapped all four of them easily enough, but that wasn't the mission.
'Nice job, Ding.' Captain Ramirez came down beside him. They spoke in whispers.
'Hell, they were asleep.'
The captain grinned in the darkness. 'I hate the fuckin' jungle. All these bugs.'
'Bugs ain't so bad, sir. It's the snakes I don't like.'
Both men scanned the road in both directions. Nothing. Ramirez clapped the sergeant on the shoulder and went to check on the rest of the squad. He'd scarcely left when a figure emerged from the treeline three hundred yards away. He was moving directly toward Chavez.
Ding moved backward under a bush and set down his submachine gun. It wasn't loaded anyway, not even with the wax practice bullets. A second one came out, but he walked the other way. Bad tactics, Chavez thought. Pairs are supposed to support each other. Well, that was too bad. The last sliver of moon was dropping below the top level of the triple-canopy forest, and Chavez still had the advantage of his night scope as the figure walked toward him. The man walked quietly - at least he knew how to do that - and slowly, keeping his eyes on the edge of the road and listening as much as looking. Chavez waited, switching off the scope and removing it from his head. Then he removed his fighting knife from its sheath. Closer, only about fifty yards now, and the sergeant coiled up, drawing his legs under his chest. At thirty feet, he stopped breathing. If he could have willed his heart to stop, he'd have done that to reduce the noise. This was for fun. If this had been for-real, a 9mm bullet would now reside in the man's head.
The sentry walked right past Ding's position, looking but not seeing the form under the bush. He made it another step before he heard a swishing sound, but then it was too late. By that time, he was facedown on the gravel, and he felt the hilt of a knife at the back of his neck.
'Ninja owns the night, boy! You're history.'
'You got me, sure as hell,' the man whispered in reply.
Chavez rolled him over. It was a major, and his headgear was a beret. Maybe the OPFOR wasn't MPs after all.
'Who are you?' the victim asked.
'Staff Sergeant Domingo Chavez, sir.'
'Well, you just killed a jungle-warfare instructor, Chavez. Good job. Mind if I get a drink? It's been a long night.' Chavez allowed the man to roll into the bushes, where he, too, took a pull off his canteen. 'What outfit you from - wait a minute, 3rd of the 17th, right?'
'We own the night, sir,' Chavez agreed. 'You been there?'
'Going there, for a battalion staffjob.' The major wiped some blood from his face. He'd hit the road a little hard.
'Sorry about that, sir.'
'My fault, Sergeant, not yours. We have twenty guys out there. I never thought you'd make it this far without being spotted.'
The sound of a vehicle came down the road. A minute later the wide-set lights of a Hummer - the new and larger incarnation of the venerable jeep-appeared, announcing that the exercise was over. The 'dead' major marched off to collect his men, while Captain Ramirez did the same.
'That was the final exam, people,' he told the squad. 'Get a good day's sleep. We go in tonight.'
'I don't believe it,' Cortez said. He'd hopped the first flight from Dulles to Atlanta. There he met an associate in a rented car, and now they discussed their information in the total anonymity of an automobile driving at the posted
