Wasn't that just great? Ryan almost laughed at his incredible stupidity. Just what else of himself would he destroy? But did it matter?

His work mattered. That he was sure of. That was what had landed him in this mess, one way or another. That was the prime destructive factor in his life, but he could no more leave that than he could change anything else.

"Nancy, please ask Mr Clark to come in."

John appeared two minutes later. "Aw, hell, Doc!" he observed almost immediately. "Now, what's the wife gonna say?"

"Not a thing."

"Bet you're wrong on that." Clark turned to open a window for ventilation. He'd quit a long time before. It was the one vice that he feared. It had killed his father. "What do you want?"

"How's the hardware?"

"Waiting for your go-ahead to build it."

"Go," Jack said simply.

"You got a go-mission order?"

"No, but I don't need it. We'll call it part of the feasibility study. How long to slap things together?"

"Three days, they say. We'll need some cooperation from the Air Force."

"What about the computer side?"

That program has already been validated. They've taken tapes from six different aircraft, and smoothed out the noise. It's never taken them more than two or three hours to do an hour of tape."

"Mexico City to B.C. is "

"Depending on weather, just under four hours, max. Doing the full tape will be an overnighter," Clark estimated. "The President's schedule is what?"

"Arrival ceremony is Monday afternoon. The first business session is the following morning. State dinner Tuesday night."

"You going?"

Ryan shook his head. "No, we're going to the one a week earlier - geez, that's not too far off, is it? I'll call the 89th Wing at Andrews. They do training hops all the time. Getting your team aboard won't be hard."

"I have three capture teams selected. They're all ex-Air Force and Navy elite spooks," Clark said. They know the business."

"Okay, run with it."

"You got it, Doc."

Jack watched him leave and lit up another.

CHAPTER 29

Crossroads

MV Carmen Vita cleared the Straits of Gibraltar right on schedule, her Pielstick diesels driving her at a constant nineteen knots. The crew of forty officers and men (this ship did not have any women in the crew, though three of the officers had their wives with them) settled down for the normal sailing routine of watch-keeping and maintenance. They were seven days out from the Virginia Capes. On her deck and stowed below were a goodly number of standard-sized container boxes. These actually came in two sizes, and they were all loaded with various types of cargo which the captain and crew neither knew nor cared very much about. The whole point of contamenzation was that the ship was used exclusively as a contract-hauler, much as a trucker was used by various businesses. All the ship's crew needed to worry about was the weight of the containers, and that always seemed to work out rather uniformly, since the containers themselves were always loaded to reflect what a commercial truck could legally pull along a public highway.