“Unfortunately, there's nothing comic about the news I just received from Paul.” He told Zavala about the missing liner. “Could you assemble the rest of the setup while we're in the air?”

Zavala winced. “Possible, but not advisable. It would be like trying to stuff a sausage on the run.”

“What if there's no choice but to try?”

Zavala looked at the hectic activity and scratched his head. “I never could resist a juicy sausage. C'mon while I break the bad news to my right-hand man.”

The man Zavala had been reviewing blueprints with was Drew Wheeler, an amiable Virginian in his forties who was a NUMA specialist in the logistics of moving big payloads around the world. Austin had worked with Drew on a few projects where heavy equipment was needed in a hurry. Wheeler's tendency to think things through, as if he were mentally chewing on a plug of tobacco, could drive people who worked with him to distraction. But they soon learned that he had a knack for laying out complex plans in his head so they could be executed seamlessly.

Austin asked how things were going and got the typical Wheeler response. He cocked an elbow on one hip and squinted at the plane from under his eyebrows like a farmer trying to figure out how to remove a tree trunk from a field. “Well,” he said, pausing before he answered. “Things are going okay.”

“Are they okay enough to get this plane off the ground tomorrow morning?”

Wheeler chewed the question over for a moment before he replied. “What time tomorrow morning?”

“As soon as you can make it.”

Wheeler nodded. “I'll see what I can do.”

He ambled back to the plane as if out for a casual walk. Austin wasn't fooled. “I'll bet you a bottle of Pancho Villa tequila that Drew's already figured out how to do this.”

“I know him well enough to recognize that's a sucker bet,” Zavala said.

“A wise decision. Where did you get the plane?”

“You'd be surprised what you can lease these days if you've got deep pockets. It's the 200F freighter, a modified version of the passenger 747. It's got a capacity of nearly 250 thousand pounds. The main problem was to get all the hardware you see lying around into the plane without having to crack it open like a can of sardines. We tossed the problem around awhile with Hibbet and Barrett,” Zavala said. “I had it in my mind that we'd have to go with massive generators like the ones we saw on the transmitter ship. But Barrett said it wasn't necessary. We could use smaller generators, just more of them.”

“What about the coil?” Austin said.

“That gave us the biggest headache. I'll show you what we did.”