The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [116]
“I never pack heat,” said Hickok.
“We don’t get caught this time,” Gonzales agreed.
“If we get caught, will the President pardon us later? Never mind, man, okay, I got no guns anyway!”
“Okay then,” Van said. “Let’s go ahead and roll.” He tucked the headset into his right ear.
The four-man team did not have to roll very far. Following their highly detailed satellite maps, they left their rented camper and strolled through the pines to the edge of the Facility’s fence. They found a ragged valley where the builders had run their fence under an old, sickly-looking box elder tree. The night was dark and gusty, with thin overcast. Wind tossed the spreading tree limbs. Box elders had weak wood. It wasn’t much labor for four men to throw a grapnel rope up in the tree, time their heaves with the wind, and rip the old tree apart, nicely crushing the fence.
No alert defenders rushed over with any Jeeps and machine guns, because, after all, they were just astronomers, and it was just a tree falling in the wind. The four intruders climbed up the fallen tree limbs and over the smashed fence. Van was careful not to snag his civilian clothes.
“Loan me that oxygen mask,” said Van to Hickok. “This altitude’s killing me.”
“Can’t you carry this tank yourself?” said Hickok, rubbing under his black foam kidney-pad. “I got enough gear, that’s for sure.”
“No I can’t carry it. An oxygen bottle looks way too much like a detonation bomb.” Van huffed at the plastic mask. Relief flooded his body.
As planned, the four of them split into pairs. Gonzales and Wimberley, the B team, were tackling the Network Operation Center. Van and Hickok were going uphill to covertly inspect the Weapon of Mass Destruction.
Hickok set to work to hijack a small electric golf cart for the long ride up to the observatory. This wasn’t hard. The astronomers had quite a lot of golf carts, and most of them still had keys in them.
Hickok detached his helmet mike. “You know what I miss in a cyberwar gig?” he said. “I miss the air support. No Pave Low, man. No C-130s. For Air Force Special Ops, man, that is hard.”
“I was completely crazy to hire those two Cyberspace guys,” Van mourned.
“No you weren’t,” Hickok said. “I hate to say this, but nowadays, most all the ‘special’ in Special Ops comes from the private sector.”
“I’m crazy because there is nothing up there, Mike. I’m doing this because I am paranoid. There is no weapon up there. We’re not gonna find anything. That is a half-completed telescope.”
“No it isn’t.”
They drove the electric van silently, in darkness, slowly and without opposition, up to the site of the observatory. They manhandled the cart out of sight, down a talus of construction debris. Van threw a camouflage net over the cart. Van was new to handling camouflage nets. There was a real art to it.
Hickok produced the folding, spindly antenna of a multiband burst-radio net. He pointed it down the hill toward the Facility.
Gonzales came in at once, clear as crystal. “We got an incoming vehicle now,” Gonzales reported. “A big black limousine. I’m making four—no, five occupants. Wow, this thermal imaging rocks!”
Wimberley was breathing heavily into his helmet mike. “It’s quiet inside the dorms. Just a lot of sleepy astronomers. That Network Operation Center, though. A whole lotta lights on up there.” They heard the whisper of his rubber-soled boots as Wimberley moved closer to his surveillance target. “I’m gonna unlimber this shotgun mike.”
“That would be Carew inside that place,” Van told Hickok. Hickok pulled down his Nomex mask. His face, already hard, grew harder still.
“You guys copy all that noise here?” Wimberley reported. His sensitive shotgun mike was picking up the rubbery thud and falsetto vocals of London-style Indo-disco. Bhangra music. “That’s sure not like any kind of music I know. Lemme see if I can filter that noise