Project Cyclops Part 16

And he was indeed first out as they pulled into the sheltered awning of the terminal. The Athens morning sun was already burning through the growing layer of brown haze. He thought ruefully how it would look from the south, down around Piraeus, as they flew out. From there Athens seemed to be encased in an ugly brown tomb.

World air quality was yet another of the topics weighing on his mind these days. It was, in fact, a frequent subject of the long letters he addressed to another former student, an average-IQ Danish boy majoring in physics whom he had seen fit to flunk in junior-year thermodynamics.

Afterward Mannheim had taken the lad aside and bluntly suggested he might wish to consider a less intellectually demanding career path.

The advice had been heeded, and these days he was doing reasonably well at his cushy new job, down in Was.h.i.+ngton. Still, Isaac Mannheim felt it necessary to post the boy long typewritten letters from time to time concerning various avenues for self-improvement.

Yes, he had turned out reasonably well after all, considering, but he still needed to work harder. Don't be a slacker, John; n.o.body ever got ahead that way. The forty-second President of the United States, Johan Hansen, read his old professor's missives, usually written on the back of semi-log graph paper or whatever was handy, and dutifully answered every one of them. Maybe he was afraid he'd get another "F" and a humiliating lecture.

Isaac Mannheim stared around the half-filled terminal, wondering. The SatCom pilot usually met him right at the gate, but today n.o.body was there. Incompetent Greeks. This one, in fact, was particularly f.e.c.kless: just out of the Greek Air Force with no real grasp of the value of time.

Or had Dr. Andros forgotten he was arriving? That was hard to imagine, since he had talked with her just before he left Cambridge. One thing you had to say for her, she never forgot appointments. Strange.

No helicopter. No pilot. d.a.m.ned peculiar. He had no alternative but to phone Dr. Andros on her private line.

He walked over to the booth near the entrance to the terminal lobby and got some drachmas. Then he located a pay phone and placed the call.

She answered on the first ring. Good.

"Cally, what in blazes is going on down there?" He tried to open the conversation as diplomatically as he knew how. "I'm here, sitting on my b.u.t.t in the Athens airport, as though I had nothing else to do. I don't see Alex anywhere. Or the Agusta. You're going to have to get rid of that boy if this happens again. Where in h.e.l.l are they?"

A long uncomfortable pause ensued, and it sounded as though she was listening to someone else. Finally she answered in a shaky voice.

"Dr. Mannheim, it's been a very long night here. Maybe you--"

"Well, how did the power-up go? I need to go over the data with Georges right away."

"Dr. Mannheim, maybe--" The phone seemed to go dead. Then she came back on. "The Mark II is temporarily out of service. Can you take the ferry?"

"What! You know perfectly well that d.a.m.ned thing only runs once a week.

And that was yesterday. Now what about the Agusta?"

"It's . . . it's just not possible. So--"

'Tell you what, then, I'll just rent one here. It'll cost a few dollars, but I can't wait around all day."

"Isaac, I--" She never used his first name, at least not to him, but he took no notice.

"Don't worry about it. It'll just go into project overhead. Be a tax write-off for Bates." He laughed, without noticeable humor. "He understands all about such things."

'That's awfully expensive," she said, her voice still sounding strange.

"Maybe it'd be better to wait--"

"d.a.m.n it. I'll be there in a couple of hours."

"Dr. Mannheim . . ." Her voice would have sounded an alarm to most people. But then most people listened. Isaac Mannheim rarely bothered.

Especially where women were concerned. You simply did what had to be done. It was that simple, but most women seemed unable to fathom matters of such obvious transparency.

He slammed down the phone and strode out into the morning suns.h.i.+ne. The private aviation terminal was about a half mile down an ill-paved road, but he decided the walk would do him good. The breeze would feel refres.h.i.+ng after the smoky, stuffy terminal. The problem was, Athens was already getting hot. That's why he liked the islands. They were always cooler this time of year.

CHAPTER FIVE

7:48 A.M.

Vance stared up the mountain, puzzled. The silence baffled him, and then he realized why. He was not hearing the usual high-tension hum of transformers; nothing was operating. They had shut down the power.

He heaved a sigh, then dropped down beside a tree trunk and clicked out the magazine of the black Uzi. It had about fifteen rounds left, so the time had come to start making them count. Here, amid the brush, he had a chance to lie low for a while and figure out what to do next. Besides feeling thirst and fatigue, he had a throbbing sprain in his shoulder, incurred somehow during the crash of the chopper. But the pain was helping to clear his mind.

Maybe, he thought, he could find some provisions stowed in the Hind, left or overlooked. A stray canteen or some MREs. But did he want to risk going back down?

The answer was yes because--even more important--the radio might still be operating. It was definitely time to activate the warranty on this job.

But first things first. Who are these creeps?

Hoping to find out something, he pulled out the leather packet he had retrieved from the terrorist's torn s.h.i.+rt and cracked it open. Crumpled inside was a wad of Yemeni dinars, and a crinkled ID card in German. On the back was a phrase scrawled in English ... it looked like The Resistance Front for a Free--it was smudged, but yes--Europe.

Back when he and Bates had first talked about the security question, Bill had insisted ARM focus on industrial security. Truthfully, there hadn't been any real thought given to ant.i.terrorist measures. It had just seemed unimaginable. Looked at another way, though, Bates had been trying to be cost-effective, had gambled on an a.s.sumption. Now it was beginning to look as though that had been a bad bet.

Although for a ground-based setup Dimitri's handiwork-- contracted out of Athens--was top-notch, it had made no provisions against aerial penetration. From land or sea. That haunting phrase kept coming back.

But Bill had laughed it off, and the client was always supposed to be right.

Besides, the SatCom facility already had a nest of radars up on the hill, there as part of the Cyclops and also to monitor the local weather. Why clutter up the place any more? The fact was, these guys had probably come in under the facility's electronic eyes anyway, using the Hind's ability to detect an interrogation and keep low enough to avoid a significant radar signature. The background noise from the choppy sea must have been enough to mask their approach.

Maybe Spiros should have considered that, but at this point such meditations amounted to Monday-morning quarterbacking. So now the parameters of the job had changed, from industrial security to counterterrorism. SatCom was fortunate in its choice of security services, because an ARM job always came with a guarantee: if a problem came up, the boys would be there immediately to solve it. Which meant that alerting Paris was now his first priority. Until reinforcements arrived, though, he was ARM's on-site rep.

Lots of problems came to mind. First off, he was operating on the perimeter: he had no map of the facility, no idea where to find the hostages. However, the communications station up the hill represented a redoubt he probably could defend reasonably well, unless they brought up some really heavy artillery. Maybe there would be some way to disrupt the proceedings, provide a diversion.

Sooner or later, he figured, there's bound to be some action out of the U.S. air and naval base down at Souda Bay, on Crete. Hopefully somebody down at Gournes had picked up his Mayday.

But even if they had, could they send in a team? This was Greek soil, and Greeks tended to be fussy about their sovereignty. Now that NATO had no idea what its new mission was, America's heavy presence in Europe more and more looked like Yankee imperialism. They might convince the Greeks to let them bring in the Navy SEALs or even the ant.i.terrorist Delta Force from Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina, but that would require a lot of negotiation, might take days.

Time could run out by then. And the Greeks had no capability themselves to do anything but make matters worse.

He looked down the hill, toward the half-visible wreckage of the Hind.

Okay, he thought, time to see about that radio. Slowly he rose, chambered a round in the Uzi with a hard click, and started through the brush. The Greek scrub tore through his thin s.h.i.+rt and rasped at his skin, while the morning sun, glimmering off the proud silver spires of the vehicles at the other end of the island, beat down. The island remained eerily calm, the sleep of the dead. The takeover was complete, no question about that.

Through the brush the wreckage of the Hind showed its mottled coloring, a mix of grays and tans among the green of the branches. As he approached, he could discern no sign of his attackers, which either meant they were pros and lying in wait for him or they were amateurs and had fled.

He looked around the copse of scrub cypress, then gingerly stepped through the open doorway. By some miracle the electronics were still lined up in rows of readiness, lights and LEDs glowing. A tough bird.

And the radio was still operating, and on. Dawn had long since ripened the clear blue of the sky, and he could feel the beat of warm suns.h.i.+ne on the shattered bubble of the canopy. Now, he knew, the terrorists would be scanning the military frequencies, so it was time to be circ.u.mspect and use some caution for a change.

He checked it over. Good, it had sideband. That was perfect, because he figured they probably wouldn't monitor those offbeat marine frequencies. If he could raise Spiros in Athens, he could then contact Paris. They could put together a team overnight and fly it down.

He fiddled with the sideband channels, hoping. He heard some amateur action and a s.h.i.+p-to-sh.o.r.e--funny, he thought, that the minute yachtsmen put to sea they're anxious to get in contact with someone on dry land.