Powersat

Matagorda Island, Texas

Dan craned his neck looking up at the clean, lean line of the gleanting white booster and the graceful silvery swept-wing spaceplane perched atop it, its needle nose pointed into the bright morning sky. The weather had turned friendly, blue sky dotted with fat puffs of white cumulus clouds sailing sedately on the breeze coming in from the Gulf. He could smell the tang of the sea and the sweet odor of the distant pines.

You’d never know a hurricane had blown past here a couple of days ago, Dan thought. The launchpad had been cleaned of the scrub and debris that had littered the area in the aftermath of the storm. The puddles and outright ponds of rainwater had either been pumped dry or evaporated in the sunshine. To Dan’s happy relief all of Astro’s buildings had survived Fernando with only minor damage. His Jaguar had suffered the most: its ten-year-old fabric top had ripped off in the storm and the car’s interior looked like a swimming pool when he went out to check on it

Could have been a lot worse, he said to himself as he slowly walked around the perimeter of the launch platform, admiring the booster-and-spaceplane combination. The gantry structure had been rolled away from the platform; only the umbilical tower stood beside the booster, with a pair of heavy electrical cables running from it to hatches in the top of the booster and just below the wing root of the spaceplane.

“You look happy, chief,” said Lynn Van Buren, pacing along beside him. Like Dan, she wore a hard hat with her name stenciled onto it just below the stylish Astro Corporation logo.

“Rocket’s on the pad and all systems check, from what you told me,” Dan replied. “Why shouldn’t I be happy?”

“What do we do now?” she asked.

Dan leaned his back against the sturdy steel railing of the platform and gazed up again at the spaceplane, thinking, She’s built to fly. She shouldn’t be sitting here on the ground. She ought to be up in the sky, where she belongs.

“All the checkouts complete?” he asked Van Buren.

“Aye-yup. All the connectors are mated and all systems are functioning. Batteries and fuel cells fully charged.”

Dan looked into the engineer’s hazel eyes. She seemed amused, expectant, as if the two of them were playing a game and she knew what his next move would be.

“Is the plane fueled up?” he asked.

A hint of a smile curved her lips slightly. “Nossir. The mating test is done with the upper stage empty.” He saw in her face that she was thinking, You know that, chief.

Dan played the game, too. He looked around the platform, down to the ground where a trio of technicians were fussing with an auxiliary generator, out to the blockhouse where the launch crew directed tests and launches, then back to Van Buren’s anticipant expression.

“I want a full-up test,” he said. “A full propellant load in the spaceplane, just as if we were going to launch.”

“But we don’t have any LOX or liquid hydrogen. The facility blew up, remember?”

Lowering his voice, Dan told her, “There’s a truck convoy on its way here with enough LOX and aitch-two to fill the bird’s tanks. They’ll arrive tonight, after most of the workforce has gone home.”

Van Buren looked only slightly surprised. She asked, “So we fuel her up tonight?”

“Yep. With a minimum work crew.”

The engineer nodded. “And then what?”

He grinned at her. “And then you and your top five people take a little trip to Venezuela.”

Her eyes went wide. “Venezuela?”

“Gotcha,” said Dan.

Claude Passeau was in the office that Dan had loaned him, in the engineering building that flanked Hangar A.

Dan popped his head past the office’s open doorway and asked cheerily, “Want to go to lunch?”

Passeau was busily tapping at his computer keyboard. Without looking up from the screen, he said, “It’s not quite eleven A.M.”

“I know,” Dan said, stepping fully into the tidy little office.

Dan had given the FAA administrator a corner office with two windows, and Passeau kept it as neat as if it were his permanent residence. The other FAA and NTSB people got claustrophobic cubicles with shoulder-high partitions and barely enough room for a desk and a wastebasket.

Sitting in the hard plastic chair in front of Passeau’s desk, Dan said, “I thought I’d tootle over to Lamar for some local frog’s legs.”

Passeau looked up from the keyboard. “Frog’s legs? Really?”

“The size of drumsticks,” said Dan.

Passeau stifled a laugh when they walked out onto the parking lot and he saw the rusted, dented old Chevrolet twodoor hatchback sitting in Dan’s space.

“It belongs to the guy who’s fixing my ragtop,” Dan explained crossly. “The only loaner he had, he claimed.”

Passeau shook his head. “How the mighty have fallen.”

Dan shrugged apologetically. “Needs a muffler, too.”

As Dan drove the rattling, growling Chevy to the ferry, he said to Passeau, “You know, Claude, you look kind of peaky.”

“Peaky?”

“Tired. Overworked. What with the hurricane and all, you must be pretty stressed out.”

“Are you saying that this would be a good time for me to take a vacation?”

Driving up the bumpy ramp onto the ferry, Dan said, “I think so. The Riviera’s very nice at this time of year.”

Passeau smiled knowingly. “Dan, my friend, don’t you think it would be just a little conspicuous for an underpaid and overworked government official to take a vacation on the Riviera?”

“Maybe,” Dan conceded.

Passeau said nothing as the ferry chugged to life and pushed away from the pier. Dan felt the waves of the bay surging beneath them. Passeau seemed unfazed by the chop.

“Actually,” Passeau said mildly, “I believe it’s time for me to return to my office in New Orleans. This investigation can be finished up from there.”

“No vacation?” Dan asked.

“Not at this time,” Passeau replied smoothly. “Perhaps later, after my final report is finished.”

“I see.”

“If you’re still in business by then.”

Dan glowered at him.

That evening April and Kelly Eamons planned their strategy.

“This could be nothing at all,” April repeated for the twentieth time as she dressed for her dinner date.

“You said he was flashing a wad of money,” Eamons said, sitting on April’s bed.

“He talked about a lot of money,” April replied, pulling the sleeveless, sequined gunmetal top over her dark gray slacks. “He was sort of drunk.”

“In vino veritas,” said Eamons.

“But he wasn’t just bragging about money,” April said, thinking back to her hurricane-party conversation with Kinsky. “He kept saying he had to take care of numero uno: feather his own nest, that sort of talk.”

Resting her chin on her fists, Eamons said gloomily, “It’s the only lead we’ve got.”

April fastened a string of faux pearls around her throat, studied them for a moment in the full-length mirror on her clothes closet door. The glittery sleeveless top was highnecked, but she thought it looked kind of sexy, nonetheless. The slim-cut slacks accentuated her legs without looking slutty. Trying to remember how tall Kinsky was, she decided to wear low heels.

Turning to Eamons, she asked, “Do you really think Len might have had something to do with Joe Tenny’s death? And Pete Larsen’s?”

Eamons’s face was puckered into a frown of concentration. “From what you’ve told me about Kinsky, no, frankly I don’t. Probably at worst he’s taking money to keep somebody informed about what’s happening inside Astro.”

“Like a spy?”

“Industrial espionage. Happens all the time. If Tricontinental and this Japanese firm are maneuvering to take over Astro, it makes sense that one of them would want an informant inside the company. Possibly both of them.”

April shook her head and went into the bathroom to put the final touches on her makeup.

“That makes me a counterspy, then?” she called through the open bathroom door.

“You just be damned careful with him,” Eamons said, getting up and walking to the door. “He might be just an informant, but the people he’s talking to could be damned dangerous.”

“I know,” April said without turning her head from the mirror above the sink.

“Just be your charming self. Listen a lot, talk a little. I’ll follow you at a discreet distance.”

Pressing her lips together to blot her lipstick, April asked, “Do I look okay?”

“You look terrific,” said Eamons, with a sly grin. “I wouldn’t mind taking you to New York myself.”

April felt her cheeks burn.