China Star

by Maurice Medland

  She fell into his arms and let her head rest on his chest for a few seconds, then pulled away.

  “No, Matt,” she said. “We can’t. Maybe if we ever get out of here, but not now.”

  He held both her hands in his and gazed at her with a sad little smile.

  “You’re right,” he said.

  “Get some sleep,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do tonight.”

  “Oh, we’re back to that again, are we?”

  Beth nodded. “Don’t worry. I can be really creative.”

  “Matt, wake up.”

  Matt felt long thin fingers pressing into his back, raking him awake. He rolled over and squinted into the light coming from the bathroom. Beth was hovering over him, kneeling on the edge of his bed, bouncing up and down like a little kid, smiling from ear to ear.

  “What is it?”

  “Wake up, sleepyhead. We’ve got work to do.”

  He blinked. She was wearing a blue jumpsuit with some kind of logo above the breast pocket. A security badge dangled from a bead chain around her neck.

  “Where did you get that?”

  Grinning, Beth jingled a ring of keys between her thumb and forefinger.

  “I went exploring while you were asleep. The old Chinese housekeeper snores like a train.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Probably.”

  “Where was Wu? Where were the others?”

  “Fast asleep, poor guys. The housekeeper left a pot of tea for us. I dumped in two boxes of Dramamine tablets and took it out to the guys. They scolded me for being out of my room but took the tea. I guess they thought it would help them stay awake.”

  “Where’d you get Dramamine?”

  “The medicine chest. Every room has some.”

  Matt rubbed his eyes and looked around.

  “What time is it?”

  Beth retrieved a small watch with a metal band from the front pocket of the jumpsuit and peered at it in the dim light.

  “According to Alena’s watch, it’s 0200. That’s two a.m. to you.”

  “Who’s Alena?”

  She pointed a thumb toward the picture on her security badge. “Alena Petrov, payload specialist. She’s a sound sleeper too, but she has good taste in underwear. Come on. You’ve been asleep for hours.”

  Matt looked at the green border on the badge, then at the logo on her jumpsuit, a springing tiger superimposed over a rocket at lift-off, the initials C.A.T. embroidered in red above it. He sat up.

  “What have you done?”

  “What women do. Men are hunters, we’re gatherers.”

  She went to her bed and picked up a folded blue jumpsuit with a stack of clean white underwear on top. She tossed the clothes to Matt and draped a security badge trimmed in green around his neck.

  “Matt Connor, meet Danya Baklanov, another payload specialist. Also a heavy sleeper, and like all men, he has no taste in underwear. Come on, get up. Let’s go.”

  “And do what?”

  “You’re a junkman, you should know how to make junk.”

  “I know how to salvage it, not make it.”

  Beth put her face close to his. “We can fix this. I figured everything out while you were asleep. Just help me get close to that satellite.”

  Matt looked at her. “You’re crazy, you know.”

  “Look, I’ve thought it through. It’s the only thing we can do.”

  “What if these people whose IDs and clothing you’ve stolen wake up?”

  “Stolen is such a nasty word. I like filched better. They won’t. They won’t be needed until later.” She shrugged. “At least, I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think so.”

  “I’m pretty sure. They’re assembling the rocket as we speak, in an environmentally controlled hangar somewhere. Then they’ll mate it with the payload. That’s when Alena, and Danya, and whoever else, get involved.”

  Matt took her by the arms. He’d never seen her so hyperactive. “Beth, calm down and listen to me. Do you know what you’re saying? It’s a bullet in the back of the head if we get caught. There won’t be any reprieve for this one.”

  Beth sighed. “I’ve thought about that, too. Look. Let’s be honest. We’re never going to be any older than we are right now. We’re not getting out of this, my cousin will see to that. If he ordered your entire crew killed, he won’t hesitate to kill us. Either way, we’re dead, so let’s get this thing stopped.”

  Matt looked at her. He was seeing someone he hadn’t seen before.

  “I wish I’d met you a long time ago,” he said.

  “You wouldn’t have been interested. Geek city.”

  “Beth . . .”

  “Come on, Matt. We can do it. What’s the worst that can happen?”

  Matt sighed. “I don’t want to see you get hurt. Ever.”

  Beth smiled, her eyes sparkling. “Oh, really?”

  Matt brushed a wisp of hair from her forehead. “Really.”

  “Well, that gives me just that much more incentive to survive. Let’s go.”

  “No.” He swung out of bed. “I’ll do it. Tell me where it is.”

  “I’m . . . not exactly sure. I know the satellite has to be stored close to the payload unit of the rocket. I just don’t know exactly where. Anyway, you wouldn’t have a clue what to do to disable it, once you found it.”

  “I’ll think of something.” Matt picked up the pistol lying on his nightstand. “If nothing else, I’ll put a bullet in it.”

  “Oh, that’s so damn typical. Men always have to shoot something. Then someone shoots you. Can’t you think of any solutions that aren’t violent?”

  “Oh, that’s right. You’re a pacifist.”

  “You say that as if there’s something wrong with it.”

  “Sometimes you have to use violence to stop bad people from doing bad things.”

  “Well, not in this case.” Beth looked into his eyes. “Help me find it. I can disable it in such a way that they’ll never know. They’ll get it into orbit, and it won’t work. We can stop this whole thing without anyone getting hurt.”

  Her intensity was like a physical force. Finally, he nodded. “All right. Let’s go see what we can find. Only this time together.”

  “Now you’re talking.”

  Matt pulled on the clean T-shirt. He checked the safety on the pistol and shoved it down inside his briefs.

  Beth watched with an amused look on her face. “I think you’re beginning to like that.”

  “If we’re caught, I can’t let them find it. It’s our only ace in the hole.”

  “Just make sure it doesn’t go off. That could change our whole relationship.”

  Matt stepped into the cotton overalls and pulled the zipper up. The blue jumpsuit was similar to the poopy suits U.S. submariners wore as under-way uniforms. The legs were a little short, but other than that, not a bad fit. He looked at the black and white picture on the security badge. The plump face of Danya Baklanov, payload specialist, stared back at him. The Russian appeared to be in his mid-fifties and was as bald as an egg.

  “I don’t look a thing like this guy.”

  “There are over 250 people aboard this ship, all nationalities,” Beth said. “Chinese, Russians, Swedes, Lithuanians. Most of them working together for the first time. So long as no one looks closely at our pictures, we’ll be okay.”

  “How do they get around the language thing?”

  “It’s only a problem in launch control, an area of the ship that looks like mission control in Houston. Teams of technicians sitting in front of consoles, TV monitors overhead, the whole thing. They have two launch teams, one Chinese-speaking and one Russian-speaking. There’s a two-way translation service that keeps them on the same page.”

  Matt pulled the pant legs down on his jumpsuit. He felt awkward, but he thought Beth looked the part.

  He glanced at the picture on her badge. Alena Petrov was a hard-looking character. If they were discovered, he thought
he’d rather face a brigade of marines. He looked back and forth between the picture and Beth’s face, then smiled. “No contest.”

  “I think you’re biased.”

  Matt looked into her eyes, unnerved at the thought of any harm coming to her. He forced himself to focus on the business at hand. “Okay, where do we go?”

  “Logically, the assembly hangar should be on the first deck below the main deck.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the rocket has to be tilted up to transfer it to the launch pad.”

  “What about the satellite?”

  “That has to be located near the rocket, and it has to be stored in a separate compartment, in an environmentally controlled clean room. Logically, the compartment has to be near the nose cone. We’ll know it when we see it.”

  “What makes you think these badges will get us in?”

  “Alena and Danya are payload specialists. They have to have access to the satellite.”

  They were also green, the same color Beth’s cousin was wearing. With the senior colonel’s ego, green had to mean unlimited access. He nodded. “All right. Peek out and see where the boys are.”

  Beth opened the door a crack. “Exactly where they were before. They haven’t moved.”

  Matt stepped over the boxed meals left by the old Chinese housekeeper and pulled the door closed behind him. He steered Beth toward the exit, walking as softly as he could. Corporal Wu sat sleeping on the deck a few feet away from the two snoring security guards with his rifle across his lap. The clip had been removed, but it wouldn’t take the marine long to reload it if he woke up.

  Closer now, Matt could see that there was little chance of that. Corporal Wu looked dead to the world, with his head leaning into the corner and his mouth ajar. Beth’s Dramamine-laced tea, combined with the gentle rolling of the ship, had lulled him into a deep unconscious state.

  “Okay, where do we go from here?” he said when they were safely outside the crew’s quarters.

  “We need to go up three levels,” Beth said. “Let’s find the elevator.”

  “That looks like a roadmap ahead.” Matt walked up to a brass engraving mounted on the bulkhead. “Here we are. Emergency exits. There’s an elevator.”

  Matt lowered his head as they walked toward the elevator, but the people he passed along the way didn’t seem any more eager than he was to make eye contact at two in the morning. He stepped up and pressed the elevator button, hoping they’d have the car to themselves. The door opened, and two men and a woman drifted out, going in different directions. Matt stepped in and touched the button with the close arrows. Before the door closed all the way, a hand slid in between the gaskets. The door bucked open, and a man wearing a blue jumpsuit stepped in. He nodded to Matt and said something that sounded like Russian.

  Matt could tell by the tone that it was just friendly conversation, but he didn’t have a clue what the man had said. He smiled and nodded.

  The elevator door opened. Hanging back, Matt steered Beth in the same direction the man had walked. They followed him toward a set of swinging double doors with people in blue jumpsuits going in and coming out. A plump Chinese security guard stood at the door, checking badges. He gave theirs a cursory look and motioned them through.

  Matt walked through the door and looked around in wonder. The assembly hangar looked like a floating aerospace factory, with a shop floor the length of a football field. Gantry cranes moved overhead on tracks, flashing red and white lights, sounding monotonous beeps. Technicians in blue jumpsuits clustered around the assembly points, joining the three stages of the rocket. The engines of the first stage flared out before him. He craned his neck to see the opposite end of the hangar.

  Feeling conspicuous, he picked up a clipboard from a metal shop desk. Nothing gave you authority like a clipboard. He motioned toward the other end of the hangar and spoke in a normal voice, not concerned about being overheard in the din of the hangar.

  “Think it’s up there?”

  Beth nodded. “It has to be.”

  Walking along the perimeter of the shop floor, skirting small work groups, Matt couldn’t help stealing glances at the gray and white rocket laid out alongside him. There seemed to be no end to it. He counted his footsteps. The first stage had to be well over 100 feet long.

  The second stage was somewhere in the neighborhood of forty feet long. The third stage appeared to be about half that. The first and second stages were already joined together. The bulk of the activity seemed to be centered around joining the third stage with the second.

  Approaching the payload unit, Matt could see that it added another forty feet or so to the overall length of the rocket. He couldn’t get over the size of the thing. It had to be at least fifteen feet wide at the widest point, and well over 200 feet long.

  He came to a stop by the nose cone, amazed they’d gotten this far without being challenged. He held the pencil to the clipboard as though discussing something on it with Beth.

  “Okay, Sherlock, where’s the satellite? If it’s already inside, we’re screwed.”

  “It wouldn’t be mated yet. It has to be around here somewhere.” Beth pointed to an imaginary item on the clipboard and glanced around.

  Matt followed her eyes to a large door off to the side. Looking up, he could see a gantry crane track that ran on a curved path from the payload unit to the door Beth was looking at, like a railroad spur. Next to the large door was a smaller door with a Chinese security guard posted by it. They glanced at each other and started for the door.

  The guard saw them coming and pulled himself upright. He handed Beth a clipboard with a sign-in sheet. Matt glanced down and felt his insides go cold. The signatures on the sheet were in Russian or Chinese. There was no way he could fake either. To his amazement, Beth scribbled a name in what looked like Russian and without hesitating signed another name on the line below. She marked the time on both lines with a flourish and handed it back.

  “Ni zai gan shenme?” What are you doing? The guard pointed to Matt, then to the sign-in sheet.

  Beth jerked her head toward Matt and said in Mandarin, “He thinks he’s too important to sign his own name.”

  The guard looked at Matt with dull eyes. “Who is he, this big-shot friend of yours?”

  “He’s no friend of mine,” Beth said. “He’s my boss.”

  The guard looked at the signatures. Matt could tell by the look on his face that he couldn’t read them, but it would be a loss of face to admit it. The guard shrugged.

  “All bosses are the same.” He waved them through.

  Matt closed the door and slumped against it, relieved to be inside, amazed to see that they had the compartment to themselves.

  “I didn’t know you knew Russian.”

  “I don’t. Those signatures are gibberish.”

  Matt nodded toward the door. “Should we lock it?”

  “No, that would set off all kinds of alarms. If someone comes in, we’ll just have to fake it.”

  Matt felt a chill go through him. He chalked it up to the cold artificial air of the clean room.

  “Let’s get it done and get out of here. Where is it?”

  “Right in front of you.”

  Matt looked up. A black sphere the size of a small car sat on a stainless steel dolly, connected by cables to several pieces of monitoring equipment and a power supply. A movable scaffold with steps leading up to a work platform stood next to the satellite.

  “What do we do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What the hell do you mean, you don’t know?”

  “Calm down, I need to think.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Matt said. “You said you knew how to disable it.”

  “I do, sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “Shut up. I need to figure this out.” Beth started pacing. “If we can disconnect the onboard computer that controls the thermal management system . . .” She looked up. “That panel up there, the one that
looks like a triangle with rounded corners?”

  “I see it.”

  “I think the control panel’s behind that.”

  “You think?”

  “It has to be. They have to have access to the control panel. It has to be in there.”

  “You’d better be right.”

  “We’ve got to get it off.”

  “It’s held on with torque screws. You need an air gun to get them out.”

  “Too noisy. We’ll have to do it by hand.”

  “Okay, but you’d better be right.”

  Matt found a small kit on a workbench with a ratchet screwdriver and every size of torque bit he was likely to need. Beth had maneuvered the platform into position and was waiting for him on the work station, looking at the panel. He mounted the steps and tried three bit sizes before he found the right one, a T-20. He slipped the bit into the screwdriver and started backing out a screw. It took all the strength he had to break the seal and get it started, but once he had, it turned easily.

  “What do we do once we get this thing off?” he said, spinning the ratchet.

  “We’ll disconnect the on-board computer that controls the thermal management system of the laser, the part I designed. There should be six wires. Disconnect the green one. It won’t work, but it won’t show up in their diagnostics. At least it shouldn’t.”

  Matt worked in silence for several minutes, breaking seals, backing out screw after screw.

  “This is taking too long,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at the door. “There are a million screws in this thing, each one an inch long and with fine threads. Can’t we use the air gun?”

  “Too much noise. They’d hear it outside the compartment.” Beth started down the ladder. “I’ll see if I can find another screwdriver. Maybe if you can get them started, I can back them out.”

  To relieve the tedium, Matt made it a little contest to see how many screws he could get out before she got back. He got caught up in the process and lost track of how long she’d been gone. He had the procedure down now, and it was going faster. He removed the last screw and lifted the panel off. He poked his head inside. A stainless-steel panel with multi-colored wires connected to it lay before him.