Jennifer crossed the fingers again. “It can’t hurt,” she said, and Gaspar flashed his easy smile.
“I suppose not,” and then he crossed his fingers.
There were twenty of them in the bunker, unkempt men in tropical dress, staring at computer screens and babbling French phrases into headset microphones. Each of the screens was filled with columns of data that changed by the second, inspiring nods, grunts, and satisfied smiles.
“Bon!” Gaspar said over and over in response to reports called from Henri. He turned to Jennifer. “Absolutely perfect. It’s never gone smoother.”
She nodded in agreement, even though she couldn’t confirm Gaspar’s assessment. Jennifer understood just a few of the phrases and even then had no idea of what they signified. But as long as Gaspar kept saying “Bon,” she assumed that nothing serious could be going wrong.
Through the small slit windows on the front wall she could see the ten-story Ariane 4 rocket that was still wedded to a gantry a quarter of a mile away. On top was a dart-shaped pod that held Pegasus III, her company’s $200 million communications satellite. Put into a precise parking orbit over an exact point on the eastern coast of Brazil and it would earn back its cost every few months for the next fifteen years. Miss the orbit and Pegasus III would become the latest addition to a growing armada of space junk, flying around uselessly until it incinerated itself in the earth’s atmosphere. Even though she didn’t know all the rules, Jennifer was definitely playing at the high-stakes table.
“Deux minutes!” Henri announced.
“Two minutes and counting. Everything is go,” Gaspar translated. In the distance, the gantry backed away, leaving the rocket a delicate finger pointing at the heavens.
The Ariane team had included her in everything since she had arrived from New York—the technical meetings, the rehearsals, the positioning of the payload, even the dangerous process of fueling the bird. She had sweated her way through the jeans and khakis she had bought for the trip and was now wearing borrowed shorts and a men’s T-shirt. At each step the team seemed to defer to her judgment on whether they should proceed to the next task. But it was simply the deference that good business managers show to their best customers. Jennifer had paid for the rocket and was footing the bill for the launch. It was a big bill, already over $120 million, and there were no refunds for failure.
When Martin Pegan had first come up with the idea of a privately owned satellite network, there were no commercial launching companies such as the Ariane group. Rockets belonged to government agencies, and communications satellites were the exclusive property of the international telephone cartel. Satellites should have been the end of long-distance charges. After all, a telephone call via satellite doesn’t travel much farther to reach someone across the country than it does to reach someone next door. But telephone companies weren’t planning on sharing the savings with their customers.
That was Pegan’s big idea, low-cost telephone and video communications from rooftop to rooftop. He had persuaded an American company to build him a satellite. When American aerospace companies refused to sell him a rocket, he had turned to the French at Ariane, who were building a launch center in the old prison colony in French Guiana. His first satellite, Pegasus I, had blanketed North America, carrying telephone traffic, pager messages, sporting events, movies, and business data over private circuits. Pegasus II’s footprint spanned the Pacific, linking Asia to North America. Now Pegasus III was hoping to close the loop around the Western world, linking North America, Europe, and the Near East. Once in orbit, it would make Pegasus the world’s largest private communications company.
“Une minute!” Henri chanted.
Jennifer nodded before Gaspar had time to translate. They were down to the final minute.
Martin Pegan would have groomed a son to take over the business. But there was no male heir. Instead, there were two daughters, Catherine and Jennifer, emerging from college with no particular skills in communications technology and no burning interests in business management. He bribed them both into graduate school; Catherine chose to study business while Jennifer grappled with the rudiments of telephony. Together, he hoped, they might someday replace him at the helm of his venturesome company. But someday came sooner than he planned.
The two girls had just finished their studies and joined the company when a routine physical discovered cancer in Martin’s gut. With his wife dead and his daughters still immature, Martin needed to find a way to keep the company together after his death. Take it public, he was advised, and leave each of the girls a fortune in stock. Sensible, but it didn’t take into account the bond between the man and the company he had fought to create. Pegan hadn’t merely bought Pegasus Satellite Services. He had conceived it, nurtured the concept to life, and then fought governments and global cartels to bring it to birth. Its name was a derivative of his own, its growth the echo of his own energy. He needed a clone of himself to run it.
Those had been his thoughts when he met Peter Barnes, only in his mid-thirties but already making a name for himself in high-tech business. Peter had pioneered new ideas in light-wave communications, outmaneuvered larger competitors, and landed Pegasus as one of his prime customers. Martin bought the company, claiming he was seeking vertical integration. Actually, it was Peter Barnes he was after. Peter could run Pegasus until the girls were ready to take over.
“Dix … neuf … huit …” Henri began tolling the final seconds of the countdown. Gaspar’s grip on Jennifer’s hand tightened. She felt her mouth go dry, even as she felt the rivulets of perspiration under her oversize T-shirt.
White smoke puffed out from under the missile, replaced instantly by bright jets of blue flame. The control bunker began to tremble, the windows rattling.
“Ignition!”
“Here we go,” Gaspar whispered.
“Trois … deux … un … DECOLLER!”
The rocket began to lift, slowly, uncertainly. Jennifer’s breath caught. Something seemed wrong. It was wobbling, more unsure of its footing than anxious to leave the ground. She glanced quickly at Gaspar. His eyes were squeezed shut. “Liftoff!” he announced.
Just barely, Jennifer thought. A few feet at most. All around the room voices were chattering in French. They seemed calm and professional, with no hint of emergency. But still, the Ariane 4 seemed to be going nowhere.
Martin Pegan had died just two years after hiring Peter Barnes, leaving the company with its single satellite aloft and another scheduled to fit into a slot over the Pacific. Its debts were enormous, but the income from Pegasus I was carrying the interest, and Pegasus II promised to turn the enterprise profitable.
Peter Barnes became president, compensated with a minority share of the business that could make him vastly wealthy. He had promised Martin to grow Pegasus Satellite Services, protect its assets, and pay its debts. But the deathbed commitment he made to his mentor was to nurture Martin’s daughters until they were ready to assume full responsibility. And the deathbed advice Martin had given his daughters was to trust Peter completely.
With Pegasus III, Peter would honor his obligation to grow the company to its potential. He had already met his commitment to the daughters. Catherine was now in charge of marketing operations, finding new customers for the company’s services. Jennifer was in charge of network operations, expanding and maintaining the satellite system. Both had sharpened their skills and earned the respect of their organizations.
Space appeared under the rocket. The jets of blue flame turned white as they lifted the Ariane 4 out of the initial cloud of smoke. It gained speed and climbed past the narrow window openings. Jennifer looked down at her monitor. Outside cameras framed the rocket perfectly as it eased past the horizon and accelerated into space.
Then the noise stopped. The bunker was no longer vibrating or the windows rattling. The thunderous rumble that had begun with ignition became a distant hum.
“You did it,” Jennifer congratulated Gaspar.
He leaned back in his chair and shook his head. “Not yet. This is just the beginning. Now it has to find its orbit.”
She watched the monitor until the rocket had turned into a tiny dot of light. At that point, the Ariane had separated from its first stage. The second stage, with its expensive cargo, was two hundred miles out over the Atlantic, fifty miles high, and traveling at almost three thousand miles an hour.
Gaspar left his place by Jennifer’s side and walked down the line behind the monitors. He peered intently over shoulders, spoke a few words here and there, and finally arrived at a conference with Henri. He was smiling when he returned.
“A small course correction, already accomplished,” he announced.
“Where is it?” she asked.
“Over Africa, directly above the equator. So far everything is right on schedule.”
“What do we do now?”
“Just wait. The Seychelles will take over in another minute, and then they’ll pass her on to Tahiti. We won’t have control again for …” Gaspar turned to his computer, tapped a few keys, then concluded, “Six hours. You might want to get some rest.”
Jennifer left the bunker and climbed into the Jeep that the launch company had put at her service. She drove the paved road to the housing compound where they had put her up in a two-room suite. She stripped off the sweat-soaked clothes, pulled on a one-piece swimsuit and a terry robe, then drove to the small, stony beach that was part of the Ariane property. She drove to the water’s edge, threw off the robe, and without pausing ran headlong into the modest surf. She dove into the first breaker, and when she surfaced, she was out well beyond the waves. She shook the water out of her eyes, gave a strong kick, and then rolled into a smooth, well-trained stroke. In college, her specialty had been the sprints, but she didn’t hesitate to set off for a mile swim out to the farthest point of land and then back to the beach. It was refreshing to leave the last week’s tensions behind her.
The launch was her responsibility. She had taken the market research from her sister and fitted the satellite’s coverage to include the most important markets in its footprint. Not that she had ever run a formula or touched a screwdriver. The aerospace vendor had armies of engineers who specialized in those things. What she had done was develop specifications and evaluate lab predictions, trading area of coverage for intensity of coverage and swapping less important regions for more profitable target markets. There were months of studies, long and angry meetings with her suppliers, and days of patient bartering with Catherine and Peter. Catherine insisted on coverage criteria that Jennifer couldn’t always deliver; Peter set cost limitations that she couldn’t always meet. They had been difficult partners, just as she assumed each of them would label her a difficult partner.
Then there had been the tradeoffs with the launch-company engineers. Again, she had no useful knowledge of their art, only requirements for a precise positioning to maximize the satellite’s design capabilities, an elegant orbit that would prolong its service life, and cost control to preserve her allotted budget. Gaspar, she guessed, would also call her a difficult partner.
But she had done her job well, and despite inflamed tempers and bruised egos, Jennifer knew that she had earned everyone’s respect. Catherine, never easy to get along with, had congratulated her in the end. When Peter reviewed her final launch plan, he had smiled and touched a finger to his forehead as if tipping his hat. Then, in the final seconds of the countdown, Gaspar had clutched her hand to steady his own nerves as well as hers. This was where her father wanted her to be, she knew. Right in the top ranks of the company he had built. And she guessed that he probably didn’t want her to stop there. Maybe she was ready for the next step.
But for the moment all that was out of her hands. Pegasus III was hurtling around the other side of the globe at five times the speed of sound, losing speed slowly as it climbed to a higher and higher orbit, its momentum gradually coming into balance with the earth’s gravity. None of her efforts could succeed until it was carefully throttled back to a speed that would hold it in orbit over a specific spot on earth. And even then, nothing was accomplished until it powered itself up and showed that it could receive a signal from anywhere in Europe and pass it down to the East Coast of the United States, or relay an American broadcast to anywhere in Europe.
Jennifer stroked back through the surf and let a wave push her back onto the beach. Then she lay down on top of the terry robe and stretched herself luxuriously in the tropical sun. “Just five minutes,” she told herself. Her indoor complexion, nurtured by long days in the office, would burn very quickly.
She had a nice figure, athletic rather than sensuous, practical rather than fashionable. By Barbie-doll standards, she was two thick in the thighs, too wide at the waist, and too flat across the chest. Yet, in every dimension, she was within an inch of the ideal female of her age. Jennifer didn’t mind being seen in a bathing suit, but she was a bit self-conscious in the ladies’ locker room.
Her hair was no particular color, a common shade somewhere in the spectrum between brunette and blond. She had never colored it and wouldn’t even consider a different shade, at least until she had some gray to hide. She had it razor-cut in a barbershop to keep it short and manageable, and used a brush only after a shower. “Please let me get you an appointment with Nicholas,” her sister begged her at least once a month. “You look like you’re auditioning for a motorcycle gang.”
Jennifer rarely used makeup. An occasional touch of lipstick, usually a pale color, to add definition to a small and purposeful mouth. And maybe mascara to frame eyes that were described on her driver’s license as hazel. But foundation, blush, and eye shadow were nowhere in her arsenal.
At five feet six inches, 130 pounds, she was practically the definition of normal, though distinctive in her inquisitive squint, the determined set of her jaw, the intensity of her listening, and the economy of her speech. Jennifer took life seriously, and her appearance was testimony to the fact.
She was on her feet the moment she began to feel the sun burning her legs, and drove the dirt path back to her room with nearly expert shifts of the Jeep’s noisy gearbox. She tossed through the laundry that had just been delivered and selected jeans and a man-tailored shirt. She slipped bare feet into tennis shoes, dried her hair and arranged it with a towel, and, in a completely frivolous gesture, tied a colorful scarf around her waist. Then she drove back to the bunker where the station in Tahiti was reporting on the condition of Pegasus III.
“Perfect! Right on trajectory,” Gaspar reported. He was clutching a cigar in his teeth, indicating that celebration would soon be in order.
“When can Miami try?” Jennifer asked, referring to her company’s uplink on the Florida peninsula. Her people in Miami would be the first to contact Pegasus III and begin routing traffic to European test sites.
Gaspar shrugged. “Another hour. Maybe two.” His part of the operation would be concluded successfully once the satellite was parked in orbit. If it failed to communicate, that would be the fault of the satellite manufacturer. It was too early for the satellite manufacturer to be lighting up a cigar, but Gaspar and his Ariane team were very close to success.
Tahiti supplied data that the engineers in Guiana pored over, and then Guiana handled the last details of parking Pegasus III in its permanent home. Henri worried the satellite into its exact parking orbit, then lit a cigar of his own. “Try Miami,” Gaspar finally announced.
Jennifer watched data flash over the broadband connection with her company’s uplink as each one of the satellite’s transponders was addressed and given traffic to forward. Test sites from Finland to Egypt, from the Canary Islands to the Black Sea, reported contact. Slowly, her elation began to fill her smile, until Gaspar was able to offer, “A cigar. Cuban, of course. You can’t get these in America.”
She shook her head. “Another half hour. And then maybe some of that French champagne instead.”
The engineers waited, watching her a
nxiously, as Pegasus III established its place in the global network. When Jennifer jumped to her feet and held two thumbs up, they screamed their applause. In an instant, corks were popping around the control room, and within seconds, a flute of Dom Perignon was in every hand. The launch was perfect and the satellite fully operational. Another financial empire had been launched, and the two rich little Pegan sisters were richer than ever. Jennifer took a full bottle, raised it to her lips, and then threw her head back. A moment later, she had her first taste of a genuine Cuban cigar.
“Heaven,” Gaspar said, throwing his arms around her. “And there’s Russian caviar waiting.”
Jennifer was laughing hysterically. “Let’s not keep it waiting any longer.”
They poured out of the control bunker into the waiting bus and sang their way back to the dining hall at the housing compound. Jennifer was still focused enough to notice Gaspar’s hand resting on the small of her back, touching her skin under her shirt. But she was too overjoyed to care about the details.
At the party she danced easily in and out of the arms of the engineers, stood atop the piano while she faked the words to a recorded rock-and-roll beat, and laughed her way through a competition that required each loser to down a shot of Calvados. She was more than a bit tipsy when she took the microphone, expressed her gratitude for the skill and dedication of the people who had put her payload into orbit, and bid all a good night. By midnight she was in bed trying to fall asleep, despite the sensation that the room was spinning.
When the telephone began ringing, Jennifer assumed it was the alarm clock and tried all the snooze and sleep buttons before spotting the flashing light on her station button. She dragged the handset into her bed and tried “Hello” three times before she was able to make a sound.
“Jennifer?”
“I think so.”
“Are you in bed?”
Good Sister, The Page 2
