Vanishing Point - Marc Cerasini [13]
Grunting, Farrow kicked out. His boot heel barely missed Bauer's knee.
"Where did you get it?" Jack demanded again.
Farrow tried to rise. Jack backhanded him, then shoved his own boot into the other's chest. With a sharp snap, the chair broke in half, spilling Max Farrow along with dozens of fiberglass shards onto the concrete floor. Jack avoided another kick, hauled the man to his feet again and shook him by his lapels.
"The computer, Farrow..."
"Go to hell."
* * *
12:14:58 p.m. PDT
Hangar Six, Experimental Weapons Testing Range
Groom Lake Air Force Base
The mast had been constructed overnight, a fifty-foot steel skeleton rising from the middle of a concrete square exactly five hundred feet away from the hangar itself. The tower's spidery struts were painted in a dun and rust-colored pattern, which blended perfectly with the desert terrain. This was part of strategy to render it nearly invisible to satellite surveillance, even in the brilliant glare of the scorching afternoon sun.
The massive microwave emission array that would soon be mounted atop that tower was impossible to camouflage, however. Roughly the size and shape of Subzero refrigerator, with what appeared to be a thousand little radar dishes mounted on a side panel, the system weighed over a ton. It had to be towed to the site by tractor and lifted into place with a crane. The device's visibility had forced the two hour delay in its final placement — a wait that infuriated the Team Leader of the Malignant Wave project.
Regal in high heels and pearls, a spotless white lab coat draped on her ballerina physique, Dr. Megan Reed pushed a cascade of strawberry blond hair away from her freckled face. Frowning, she whirled to confront a young Air Force corporal from the Satellite Surveillance Unit at Groom Lake.
"How much longer before it's clear and we can proceed, Corporal Stratowski?" she barked in a voice that belied her feminine appearance. In fact, a few airmen remarked in private that her harsh, demanding tone sounded more like a drill sergeant's.
"Three minutes, sixteen seconds, Ma'am," the corporal replied. "I'm tracking the satellite now. It's nearly out of range."
Clad in crisp blue overalls, Corporal Stratowski hunkered down in front of an open laptop, eyes locked on the animated display. The computer rested on a stack of packing crates, on its screen a red blip marked the space vehicle's path and trajectory on a digital grid map.
With an impatient glare, the woman turned away from the corporal and strode to the hangar door. With each step, her cornflower blue summer skirt billowed around her long legs. At six-foot-one, Megan Reed was taller than almost everyone else on the Malignant Wave team. But she didn't need her Amazonian presence to intimidate others. Her harsh managerial style, acerbic personality and drive for perfection in herself and others had been quite enough to alienate her from most of her staff.
Ignoring the thick framed glasses now tucked in her pocket, the team leader stooped low, to squint through a small porthole set in the wall-sized hangar door. Outside the sky was blue and cloudless. Beyond the boundaries of the Air Force facility, the desert horizon was a series of stacked layers of browns, mauves and rust reds fading into the firmament. The wind kicked up, and the camouflaged tower was momentarily obscured by a tornado of swirling sand.
I can't see the damn thing with my naked eyes from five hundred feet away! How can any satellite— even the most advanced— spot it from Earth's orbit? Dr. Reed mused, convinced this was another futile exercise. Another way for Air Force Security personnel to justify their pointless existence!
With an impatient gesture she turned her back on the desert, scanned the interior of Hangar Six. Her team of technicians, researchers, and support personnel — numbering seventeen in all — lolled casually on packing crates or in folding chairs. The air conditioning inside the hangar was inadequate and many