Stephen Cannell - The Plan

Mickey had considered ordering UBC to go dark but had eliminated the idea. It would be a big national news story and he didn't want that. . Also, he couldn't keep them from hitting another network's satellite. He felt pretty sure that Ryan and Colt would pick UBC for poetic revenge. People were like that. . They made decisions based on emotion.

"Tell them to be ready. That material can't get on the air," Mickey said.

Wallace sat in the news director's office on the twenty-third floor looking out at the activity on the Rim. Joseph Alo didn't frighten Wallace. But his son, this little fat boy Mickey, he scared C. Wallace Litman more than impotence or death.

The New York City police and the FBI had thrown up a perimeter on all of the roads leading out of the city immediately after the police got Ryan's description from the truck driver. They figured Ryan and the others were the terrorists who were trying to assassinate Haze Richards. Why they had stolen the satellite dish, they couldn't fathom, but the federal government had told the NYPD to spare no expense. The new standing order was to shoot the fugitives on sight.

Sunday morning they camped in the mobile control center in the back of the eighteen-wheeler. They listened to the Sunday traffic on the turnpike a hundred yards away and tried to get some sleep.

At two in the afternoon, they huddled around the small desk in the mobile control center under dim red submarine lights while Babbling John Bally drew the floor plan of the basement of the Black Tower at UBC. He showed Ryan and Lucinda where the two backup generators were located. Then he drew the roof of Hertz Castle and began filling in the position of the satellite dish and the staircase. John labeled everything precisely in large print. He explained that the eighteen-wheel Peterbilt and its forty-foot box were too tall to fit into the parking structure. They'd have to park the mobile control center on the street below. The SNG trucks had been designed to fit in the parking garage and had once been kept on the roof there. Cole and John decided that if they parked the dish on the corner of the roof and the big truck on the street, they would have enough coaxial cable to hook the two units together if they strung a line down the fire stairs four stories to the street below.

Naomi took pictures of them grinning like Bonnie and Clyde Barrow before a Kansas bank job.

At five, they synchronized their watches. Ryan climbed into the eighteen-wheeler and Lucinda got in the seat beside him. They pulled the forty-foot box out of the Truck Mart. Babbling John Baily rode in the back with the control center equipment. The SNG truck with Cole and Naomi followed.

They had decided to stay on secondary streets to avoid being seen by the New York highway police. The huge truck rumbled through residential neighborhoods in Queens. The streets were strangely quiet as families gathered together for Sunday dinner.

As the sun set, New York City was washed in a red glow that clung to the underbelly of the threatening iron-gray clouds. They moved with the traffic along FDR Drive toward the financial district. A mile away, they saw the Black Tower of UBC rising thirty stories into the night sky. It seemed to Ryan to be beckoning them in black-glassed silence.

Or was it just giving him the finger?

Ryan pulled the eighteen-wheeler to the curb on John Street. The two-block-long street was perpendicular to Broadway and the lighted entrance of UBC was aroun d t he corner and half a block up. Ryan shut down the engin e a nd got out of the cab, then knocked on the side of th e t ruck.

Babbling John threw open the door and glared out at him. "You hadda hit every damn divot and pothole in the city? This is high-tech, delicate shit back here."

"I'm gonna go help Cole and Naomi. We'll come down and open the fire door."

"Don't forget this," John said as he handed Ryan a canvas bag full of tools he'd collected from the control center tool supply.

Ryan moved to the front of the parking garage, where Cole was out of the SNG truck, examining the bar arm that required a parking key card to raise. He and Ryan selected two wrenches from the canvas bag and began to unscrew the bolts on the arm.

Naomi was behind the wheel of the SNG truck and had pulled it up in front of the gate to help disguise what they were doing. Finally, the last bolt came off and they pulled the metal arm out of the bracket. Naomi pulled the truck into the parking structure while Cole and Ryan reattached the arm. Three minutes later they were standing on ground zero at Hertz Castle. A half-moon threw a shaft of light through the clouds on the empty parking stalls. The forty-foot UBC satellite dish pointed its "flow gun" into space, looking like a huge, discarded umbrella Ryan and Cole looked up through a hole in the clouds at the stars. Somewhere, twenty-four thousand miles out there, a five-foot transponder was speeding through space at several thousand miles an hour in a geosynchronous dance with the earth.

If all went well, they would hit it in less than thirty minutes. . An electronic shot heard around the world.

They had parked the satellite truck in a spot where it could be lined up in the same trajectory as the main uplink. The smaller dish was dwarfed by the ten-meter uplink.

They went to work in silence. Cole unhooked the one-inch coaxial cable that was wound like a fire hose on a wheel on the back of the SNG truck. Cole opened the fire door on the roof, and, while Naomi made sure that the line didn't kink, Ryan grabbed the heavy two-inch plug and moved into the concrete-enclosed staircase. The metal stairs rang as he moved down, pulling the heavy cable after him. He was down two flights when his leg began to feel wobbly under him. He stopped for a minute to rest. The wounded leg seemed almost healed but sometimes the muscles didn't work right. It weakened at unpredictable times.

"What's wrong?" Cole whispered down at him.

"My leg. I'll be okay," he whispered back. He started down again, moving slower this time until he got to the fire door at ground level. "You better take a look at this," he called up to Cole, who came pounding down the red metal staircase to where Ryan was standing.

"Some kinda alarm on the door." They looked at the pewter fire handle that opened the door.

"Shit," Cole said. The control truck was ten feet away on the other side of the door, but they couldn't get to it without setting off the alarm. Cole looked at his watch; it was seventeen minutes to six. Ryan still had to get to the basement in the building half a block to the east. He had to get the exterior service door open, disable the shore power, and destroy the two backup generators-all in less than a quarter hour. They didn't have time to screw around with a fire door.

"We gotta risk it," and, without waiting, Cole pushed it open. Immediately a bell started ringing somewhere in the parking complex.

"Kaz, you're a shitty guardian angel," Cole said, ignoring the alarm, as he handed the cable to Babbling John, who hooked it into the side of the truck. John and Cole moved into the darkened control room, leaving Ryan outside.

Inside the big truck's control room, John started to heat up the equipment. Cole sat in the director's chair while Babbling John looked at the monitors as, one by one, they lit up.

"Okay, let's see if we can get a downlink," John said.

He turned on the global positioning systems, which told him on a computer readout exactly where they were on earth, printing out the latitude and longitude. It also told him in what direction the dish on the roof was pointing and the axis of the trailer that it sat on. All of this information was stored in the computer. Then John punched in the Galaxy Four access code and the GPS interfaced with the satellite in space. The portable dish four floors above began to rotate, slowly changing its position, aiming its "flow feed" antenna at the satellite.