The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [58]
“Look, doc, I wouldn’t be coming here to y’all if there hadn’t already been investigations,” said Hickok, producing a much slimmer folder in a different shade of blue. “The bird worked fine on launch—just a few shakedown bugs. She didn’t start acting serious weird till a year ago. Believe me, we had plenty of people watching her.”
Van looked at the light blue folder without touching it. Something deep in him was hooked by this situation. His curiosity had been set to tingling.
Van sensed something peculiar here. Michael Hickok was a very scary guy, but he just didn’t feel like a smooth political operator who was out to play pin the tail on the donkey. Hickok just didn’t seem bright enough to be capable of a scheme that complicated. Maybe Tony Carew had never personally met Michael Hickok. Just possibly, there was some big, dumb, simple mistake here. Something that had gone wrong a long time ago, that Van could put right.
“So, is the bird tumbling?”
“Nope. She’s solid as a rock.”
“Noisy links? Bandwidth too tight?”
Hickok shook his handsome head. “She can talk to the ground.”
Van had to like a guy who called a satellite “she.” “You might have some antenna obscurations. Are you getting a lot of SEU’s?”
“What’s that again?”
“‘Single Event Upsets.’ ”
“Look, doc, I can follow most of this, but I’m just a simple country boy who is ex-Air Force Special Operations Command,” said Hickok. “You want a solid air-to-ground spotter link for a Predator drone in the back end of nowhere, then I am your man. Rocket science, that’s a little beyond me. But I can sure see it’s not beyond you. Let’s talk some turkey here. You look to me like the kind of man who can get this job done!”
Van was flattered. Then he sensed a trap snapping shut. Oh, yeah, this was the honeypot principle at work here: no overconfident hotshot could resist a sweet appeal to his ego. It amazed Van how good it felt to be played for a real sap.
“It’s not likely I’ll ever repair a satellite for you,” he said. “The CCIAB is a policy board.”
“But there’s money waitin’ on the table! You could hire people! And people tell me this Grendel machine of yours is twenty years ahead of our time.”
Now Van knew that he was being played for a sucker. “That may be so, but Grendel also takes a whole lot of my work time. All of it, really. I’m sorry to turn you down.”
Hickok’s face darkened. He was not the kind of man to take a rejection kindly. It was clear he’d had more than his share lately. “It’s like that, is it?”
“Like what?” Van said.
“You can’t deliver! You’re one of those R&D guys, so you’re always chasing the next hot biscuit. You’re all velocity and no vector!”
Rage flared within Van like a match on crumpled fax paper. “Look, pal, you’re coming to me, I didn’t come to you. Why should I care? Take a hike.”
“Why should you care? We’re in a war now, Jack! I got buddies of mine freezing their ass off in the ’Stan, and you’re sitting here with this faggoty dot-com stuff!” Hickok flicked a finger onto Van’s halogen desk lamp with a light aluminum clink. “That is America’s next-generation spy-sat, you egghead dork! It could save the lives of American soldiers out in the field! But not you, no, you’re too good for that!”
With a heroic, life-changing effort, Van got his searing temper back under control. He wasn’t going to punch a guest inside his own office. Besides, something deep in him told him he was confronting a very dangerous man here, somebody who could kill him easily. “Look, Mr. Hickok, if I’m not serious about this war, then what the hell am I doing in a damn secret bunker in West Virginia? You wanna tell me my job? Sit down here and start coding. See how far you get.”
“That’s what I’m asking from you, doc.”
“Go to hell. The KH-13 is a sorry piece of junk. It’s gonna fall out of the sky like a bank vault. You want that thing to