Part Fourteen
Scott didn't realise he was weaving from side to side of the beaten-earth track until he felt Gordon's arm snake around his waist, and his brother's shoulder push up under his arm. He'd been putting a brave face on since they woke, trying not to show how much his limbs were aching, how hot and shaky he felt, or how frequently waves of dizziness were sweeping over him. Clearly he hadn't fooled his little brother.
Guilt ate away at him. Bad enough that Gordon had been the one to fetch their pack and the blankets the night before, vanishing and returning before Scott even noticed. Scott should be helping his brother cope, not giving him another thing to worry about. They were both exhausted, foot sore and dressed in clothes still damp from their unexpected soaking. Gordon's feet had been so swollen after yesterday's long walk that it had been a struggle to get his sneakers back onto them, and Scott's were little better. This cold, or 'flu, or whatever, was just an unnecessary complication.
"I'm okay."
Scott forced himself to concentrate. He straightened, supporting his own weight, but grateful for Gordon's help and welcoming the closeness nonetheless. He smiled down at his little brother, and Gordon smiled back tentatively.
"Are you sure, Scotty?" he asked, eyes and voice worried.
"I'll be fine," Scott assured him, betrayed by the croak in his voice and the fact that walking and talking simultaneously had left him short of breath. He gave Gordon's shoulders a gentle squeeze and sighed, focusing on putting one foot in front of the other and letting his little brother do most of the steering for both of them.
They'd been walking pretty much since dawn, waking early and uncomfortable enough that they felt no desire to linger by the cool, mist-wreathed coastline. They'd made their way back to the rough road cautiously, finding a second set of tyre tracks crossing those they'd been following, suggesting that the jeep had passed them by in the night. Relieved, but keeping their ears open for any hint of a return, they moved onwards, more hopeful now that the track was smoother and the going easier.
"What's the date?" Gordon's question caught Scott off guard and he had to stop and think about it, adding the two nights they'd spent on the island and the dreadful night of the storm onto their days at sea.
"Uh, the twenty-fourth, I think. Why?" His voice rasped out of his throat, and Gordon threw him a quick sidelong glance before answering in an easy, almost chatty, tone.
"Oh, I was just wondering if Johnny's summer school was over yet. I can't believe he wanted to do more lessons instead of coming with us. Okay, I guess some of his friends were doing this maths thing but it still seems kind of funny, doesn't it, Scotty?" Gordon didn't give him time to answer, continuing his monologue without a pause. "In any case, I hope John's been having a good time, but I was wondering if he was home during the days 'cause Allie must be really bored by now. I mean, having Mom to himself must be kinda nice, but he has that all year when we're at school, and what if it's raining back home? There's only so many times Mom can watch the same movie without going kinda nuts, although I don't know. Mom never seems to get bored, does she? I know sometimes she gets a bit mad with me when I'm naughty, but I can kinda see why and Allie isn't so naughty when I'm not there, so I guess…"
Scott listened, fascinated and with a faint smile. When they'd first set out Scott had tried talking as they walked to keep his brother's spirits up. Now he realised that Gordon was doing the same for him. It was kind of astonishing to listen to the way his little brother's mind worked. By the time Gordon had been born, Scott had already been at school during the days. He hadn't got to watch Gordon learning how the world worked the way he had with Virgil and John. Most of what he'd seen of his little brother was at weekends and in holidays, when the fourth-born child was competing for attention against three elder brothers and the family baby.
"…And I guess maybe John must be home by now because he'd want to know what was going on, because Johnny's like that and he wouldn't go into school when there's interesting stuff going on at home…"
He'd always sort of had the impression that Gordon talked and acted mostly without thinking, taking the world as it came. True, some of Gordon's mischief-making suggested that there was a fiendishly complex brain lurking somewhere behind those amber eyes, but Gordon had always been less of a stickler for the rules than his eldest brother, more impulsive than Virgil, and far less inclined to stick to plans or schedules than John. Part of that was probably just being six years old, of course. What he hadn't suspected was the part that was deliberate – Gordon struggling to figure out a way to be different from his brothers. What was clear, even from his rambling stream of consciousness, was that Gordy took in an awful lot more of what was going on around him than Scott had ever suspected.
"…And you know, that's a pretty interesting tree over there. Daddy told me that trees can be as tall and wide under the ground as they are over it. The roots and things spread out so far and deep. That's why they don't fall over when you push on them…"
Okay, now Gordon was sounding a little desperate. To Scott's jaded eyes, the tall tree Gordon had indicated looked remarkably similar to its peers. He took a deep breath, coughing as it caught in his throat. Walking close by his side, Gordon shook with the force of the cough wracking Scott's body. He hesitated, his long monologue coming to an end. Not letting them stop their steady walk, Scott gave him a reassuring smile, catching his breath and only wheezing a little when he pointed up.
"Look at that cloud, Gordy. Doesn't it remind you of an airship? A big blimp, floating over a baseball game?"
Gordon gave it due consideration, glancing down when he stumbled on the rough road surface and then back up.
"Uh-uh. Not a blimp."
Scott looked sidelong at his little brother, surprised by the certainty.
"What do you see then?"
"It's a whale. A big whale swimming through the sky. See those clouds over there? The scrappy little ones? They're the fish and they're swimming away from him, but he's hungry so he's swimming faster than they are, see?"
The large, puffy cloud did indeed seem to be closing on its higher-altitude peers, carried on a faster air-stream. Scott watched as it reached them, closing his eyes again and trying not to sway when tilting his head back sent a wave of dizziness through him. He opened his eyes to find they'd come to a halt, Gordon's hands steadying his back and his brother's worried eyes on his pale face. Gritting his teeth, Scott started walking again.
"You know Mrs Forster at school?"
"Sure, she taught me and John and Virgil too."
"I don't think she likes me very much. I heard her telling Mom that a fourth Tracy was more than she'd bargained for when she started teaching. She said I was unique."
Scott sighed. "That doesn't mean she doesn't like you, Gordon. We're all pretty unique."
"Right, she said that you'd always wanted to jump to the end without the bits in the middle, and that was really annoying because you were usually right and shouldn't be, and that Virgil wanted to know how things worked rather than what to do with them, and that Johnny was really tough because he already knew all the answers…" Just like that, Gordon was off again, launching into a long commentary on the poor grade school teachers who had already taught three of Jeff Tracy's children and were now facing an equally precocious and individual fourth.
It was perhaps three hours after they'd set out, making depressingly slow progress but progress nonetheless, when Scott stopped, forcing Gordon to stop too or overbalance them both. He turned, letting his arm fall from Gordon's shoulders as he looked behind them
"Look, Gordy," he said, his voice little more than a hoarse whisper. "We're climbing."
From the visual survey he'd made on the banks of the inlet last night, Scott had known they were walking uphill, but he'd been far from certain how much progress they'd made. True each step seemed harder than the one before, but he'd been half-convinced that he'd imagined the steepness of the slope they'd been toiling up for most of the morning. Looking back at the inlet, and beyond that jungle, spread out below them, he was reassured that not all of his difficulty had been down to aching limbs and a weary mind and body.
Gordon seemed less than enthused with the view. "Don't like this island," he said shortly.
Scott looked down at him, taking a step away so he could see his brother's face. He smiled, gesturing up-slope. The road twisted and turned, trees blocking their view of its path. Despite that, the horizon in that direction was visibly foreshortened, their view of the jungle canopy suggesting that the land beneath was rising.
Swallowing hard to moisten his throat, Scott drew in a deep breath and tried to sound as normal and eager as he could. "I'll bet you that there's a house just over that ridge. We're almost there, Gordy. We have to be."
Gordon brightened, looking up at the road ahead and then back down towards the inlet and the bulk of the island beyond it. "And then we'll find a radio and call Mom and she can come find us."
"Yeah," Scott agreed softly, wishing he could believe it would be that easy. He remembered the glimpse of a distant reflection he'd seen from the east bank of the inlet, and the ambivalent feelings it inspired. The realisation that they might be close to whatever traces of civilisation this island boasted brought with it the alarming idea that they must also be close to whoever had laid the traps, and to the men who had spoken so casually of 'dealing with' Scott and his little brother. Instinct told Scott that they ought to get off the road. Simple practicality told him that cutting through the forest, uphill and already exhausted, wasn't an option.
Sighing, he pulled their last bottle of water from the bag, letting Gordon swallow several large mouthfuls before taking a reluctant swig himself. They hadn't passed any streams or pools since leaving the salt-water inlet that morning, and Scott's determination to save most of their drinking water for his brother could only take him so far. He had a sneaking suspicion that his dizziness was at least partly due to dehydration. Given the amount of water he had to be loosing in sweat, that would hardly be a surprise. He capped the half-empty water bottle, putting it in the pack beside their last meal before swinging it back onto his shoulders.
"Onwards and upwards?" he suggested, smiling wanly at his brother.
Gordon started up the path with a renewed keenness, buoyed by Scott's suggestion that their ordeal might be nearly over.
"Gordon! Don't run off ahead! It's not safe."
Gordon slowed, the hopeful expression on his face fading a little and the edges of his enthusiasm dulled by a memory of the day before. He dropped back, never far ahead, glancing constantly back at Scott to check the older boy was following. Scott hurried after him, trying not to stumble, keeping his eyes on his little brother's back in order to guide himself in a straight line. As narrow and focused as his vision had become, he almost missed the side-road.
"Stop a minute, okay, Gordy? Look at this." His first attempt at speaking came out as barely more than a croak. He had to repeat himself, raising his voice, before his little brother noticed that he'd fallen behind and came running back.
They were not far below the crest of the ridge, Scott judged, the island's tall volcanic peak basking in the morning sunlight on their left. The track had become a better-defined, broader road, no longer showing the tyre-marks they'd been following but instead a rutted surface that spoke of relatively frequent use. It was as his eyes traced the interweaving grooves, left after the last rain and baked hard by the sun, that he noticed a few of them curving onto a narrower spur, breaking to the right. Trees arched over this trackway and the canopy closed above it, the strip of bare earth not wide enough to leave clear sky above.
Gordon eyed it uncertainly.
"But, Scotty, you said we were almost there."
Scott winced at his little brother's protest. He could hear the longing in Gordon's voice and he felt it himself.
"Yeah, but remember that jeep we were following?" He ran a hand through his hair, stiff between his fingers with dust and perspiration. "We're walking straight up their path to the front door. Don't you think that might be a bad idea?"
Gordon's face fell. "They wanted to hurt us."
Scott nodded sombrely. They hadn't seen any sign of traps since they'd crossed the inlet. Even so Scott suspected that they existed, just set back a little from the main road, where they'd intercept anyone coming in from the coast rather than from the house he hoped, prayed, was ahead of them. Turning off from the main road, they'd have to be cautious, but it might be worth the extra effort the detour would require.
"When you're sneaking up on someone, you try to come from behind," he reasoned aloud. "You know that, right, Gordy? Well, this path kind of has to go up the hillside or into it, and I reckon we're not far from the top of the ridge now. What if the house, or village or whatever it is, is right on the top, directly above us now? I'm wondering if maybe we can find a back way in. Sneak up on them and find their radio before they find us."
He gave his brother a worried look of assessment. They'd gone beyond footsore now. Scott had got so used to the pain that he scarcely noticed it unless he stumbled or stubbed his feet on something. Gordon was pale, his face pinched with that same pain and his eyes deeply sunken with exhaustion. If this went wrong, they probably wouldn't have the energy to come back down the path and try again. By far the easier option would be to stay on the main road and see what happened. On the other hand, if he had a choice between fighting for a chance to get his little brother safely home, or giving up now and walking straight into the arms of whoever had set those traps, Scott knew which way he'd rather go down. From what he was getting to know of Gordon, he was pretty sure the younger boy felt the same.
"What do you say, Gordy? Shall we go sneaking?"
Gordon nodded. He came to Scott's side, offering his support once again and, together, they stumbled into the shelter of the trees.
Travis had intended to stay and answer any questions Mrs Tracy might have. The moment the boys and their mother entered Jeff Tracy's hospital room, it was obvious he was superfluous to requirements. He didn't think the family even noticed when he excused himself, and he had a word with Mina Evans before he left, leaving details of their hotel booking and his own contact numbers with her for when Lucille Tracy remembered she might need them.
Vaughan was seated at his desk when he walked into the squad room back at headquarters. The man was sipping at a coffee and flipping through some of the paperwork in Travis' case file, asking Kearney and the chief occasional questions. He gave Travis a frown when he walked in.
"I thought you'd be staying at the hospital. Now you're reconnected to the world outside, it won't be long before the Tracy name gets out. 'Scott' and 'Gordon' are common enough, but when the media gets hold of 'Jeff' or 'Virgil' and starts joining the dots, you're going to have a circus down there."
Travis sighed, giving the man a wary look. It was one thing to have a powerful contact a couple of thousand miles away, quite another to have a stranger who outranked you sitting at your desk. Coates intercepted the criticism before Travis could phrase a polite reply.
"There's a uniformed officer in the ER, and another two of my men undercover in the hospital. They'll call for backup if they need it." The chief inspector was frowning, his thoughts clearly paralleling those of his subordinate. He held Vaughan's eyes, challenging for dominance.
Travis backed his boss up without hesitation, He crossed his arms, narrowing his eyes at the man in his chair. "We might not have astronauts wondering our corridors, but we have a fair few celebrities come through Dominga on their travels. We're not about to fall over in astonishment because Jeff Tracy decided to holiday down here, or let the media turn a missing persons investigation into a debacle."
The NASA man backed down first, off his territory and knowing it. "I just thought I ought to warn you," he noted, making the comment an oblique apology. "I'm sure you have the situation covered."
There was a noticeable rise in the temperature, the icy tension thawing. Kearney's tense expression settled into its normal amiable grin and his colleagues exchanged satisfied looks as Travis shrugged the leather jacket off his shoulders. Coates had displaced one of their junior officers, pulling his chair around so he could face their visitor. Travis just perched on Mike's desk, nodding gratefully when his partner stood to pour another mug of coffee.
"Virgil seemed better when you left for the hospital," Kearney observed quietly, handing the welcome caffeine infusion over.
Relieved for the boy's sake, Travis nodded. He gave a brisk shake of his head, blowing on the drink to cool it.
"I thought it was going to backfire for a while there. When he saw the jet he went all but catatonic."
Vaughan looked up at that, his expression sombre.
"Do you know the first thing young John said when he saw the aircraft? 'Scott ought to be here, he'd love this'. I imagine Virgil was thinking much the same thing."
There was a moment's silence. Travis broke it, shaking his head.
"Have the search planes left yet?" he asked.
Coates grunted a confirmation. "Vaughan's jet took readings all the way in. Apparently the boffins are confirming that 'Induction residue flux has fallen below the critical threshold', whatever the hell that means. Practical upshot: we've got the radios back, we're networked to the rest of the world again, and the air-sea rescue flight took off about five minutes after you left the airport. They didn't look as pretty as Vaughan's little jet, but they'll get the job done."
Kearney grinned at their visitor, shaking his head. "You do have some impressive toys over there at NASA."
"EM shielded," Vaughan volunteered. "If I was bringing Lucille and the boys with me on the first flight in, I wanted to make damn sure it was safe."
"Which kind of brings me to my point," Travis said quietly. He'd been studying the NASA man since he arrived back into the office, wondering how to raise the question that was bothering him. "What are you doing here? Okay, so Jeff Tracy's firm has some contracts with you people. And okay, this whole thing is kind of the fault of the Weather Station. Does that really rate NASA Security, the head of NASA Security, playing babysitter with Tracy's wife and kids?"
Vaughan gave him a steady look. "Tracy Industries is the major contractor on three of our largest projects, and Jeff Tracy won those contracts through hard work, good business and his own expertise. It's definitely in the Agency's interests to ensure that his company isn't disrupted. More than that though, when Jeff walks down the street, do you think people say 'look, there's Jeff Tracy the construction engineer' or 'Jeff Tracy the businessman'? Perhaps twenty years down the line they might. Right now, it's 'there's Jeff Tracy the Astronaut'. As long as his public persona reflects on NASA, the Agency's going to have a stake in it when something happens to him. When Lucy called us, she knew that we'd do everything we could to reunite her with Jeff and the boys, not just because we were partly responsible for what had happened, but because Jeff Tracy is important to us too."
Kearney was nodding as if what Vaughan said made perfect sense. Coates was looking a more sceptical, a lifetime of cynicism making him wary of apparent altruism. Travis just nodded. He put down his coffee mug on the desk beside him and took a deep breath. His eyes fixed on those of their visitor, searching them.
"Then you're not here because you think what happened on the Weather Station was sabotage, and that Tracy was a deliberate target?"
Travis' question fell into a sudden silence. Coates and Kearney both looked astonished, as if the idea hadn't occurred to them. Vaughan's rigid lack of reaction alone spoke volumes.
"You said you were looking into it," Travis noted. "Why would security look into a technical fault, unless it wasn't a pure malfunction?"
Vaughan sighed. "This stays in this room," he insisted, catching the gaze of each of the three detectives, and looking around to check that the only junior officer still in the room was out of earshot.
Travis nodded, his suspicion confirmed. "The station was sabotaged."
"I'm not saying that until someone can show me how it was done. If it was deliberate, no one can figure it out. But…" Vaughan laid down the satellite image he'd been glancing at and rubbed a hand over the top of his head, smoothing his hair back in a nervous gesture. "The tech guys are telling me that there's just no way this was a straightforward malfunction. Just one thing going wrong wouldn't be enough to trigger a storm like that. We're talking more like eight or nine separate systems, all failing in precisely the right way and in the right order, and then returning to perfect operating status immediately afterwards. "
"Someone generated a storm, did all this," Kearney waved a hand to indicate the interference and disruption, "just to kill Jeff Tracy?" He stood, pacing their corner of the room. "I don't mean to be glib about this, but wouldn't it just be easier to get hold of a gun and shoot the man?"
Coates rolled his eyes at his subordinate. Vaughan though seemed to take the question seriously.
"I'm about eighty percent sure now that Tracy wasn't targeted. There were literally only a handful of people who knew Jeff was bringing the boys out here, and fewer still who knew to within a hundred miles where the Santa Anna was going to be. The intersection of that group with those with enough access and knowledge to even begin to think of this narrows to one person. In my opinion, there is simply no way that Commander Dale had anything to do with this. Environmental logs put him asleep in his room when the induction pulse was sent, and every member of the space station crew swears that he worked as hard as any of them to get control back and stop it."
He shook his head, leaning forward across the table and scowling into nowhere.
"Dale and Tracy have been friends for over a decade. I can't find a scrap of evidence or even a rumour that he was harbouring any kind of grudge against Tracy, or that their relationship was anything but close friends. Neither Jeff nor Lucy is a poor judge of character and they've trusted him with the boys more than once. Hell, for that matter, those kids are impressively quick on the uptake too. Jim Dale is genuinely devastated by what happened. The Agency has already turned down his offer to resign once, and I'm not sure he's going to keep taking no for an answer." Vaughan sighed, looking up at the Domingan detectives with a serious expression. "I've got people going through the rest of the Weather Station staff now on the off chance that one of them heard a stray comment or picked up on gossip about Tracy's whereabouts. Quite honestly, though, to be there in the first place they've already passed such a battery of psychological and security tests that I can't imagine we're going to find anything."
"You mean it was pure fluky bad luck that got Jeff Tracy and his boys caught up in this?" Coates asked sceptically.
"I still need to talk to Tracy, see if he can shed any light on anyone who might want to hurt him."
Travis grimaced, shaking his head. "You say the guy is important to you, and you're going to tell him that this wasn't an accident? That two of his sons were most likely murdered because someone was nursing a grudge against him? I've only spoken to the man twice, and even I can see that will destroy him."
Vaughan met his eyes, sombre. "That's why I'm here first. I wanted to see if you'd found anything else that might explain why he ended up at the centre of the storm."
Kearney sighed, shaking his head. Travis found himself frowning instead, a stray thought niggling at him.
"Tracy's not the only ex-NASA employee in the area," he said slowly. "That storm hit just forty miles north of San Fernando. Is it possible that Villacana was the target?"
Kearney gave a brief, startled laugh, coming to an abrupt halt and staring at his partner. "Now that's one guy I wouldn't mind throwing a storm at."
Vaughan raised an eyebrow, his expression guarded. "Auguste Villacana. Made a fortune with a novel encryption algorithm when he was seventeen years old. We employed him out of high school. Made important contributions to several projects before his lack of empathy and associated borderline personality disorder made it obvious he wasn't a team player. Worked on two solo projects, both of which were cancelled for not showing sufficient progress. Left NASA, went into business for himself and had three major product launches, none of them successful, before retiring at age twenty-four and buying San Fernando."
"His 'personality disorder' might have been borderline then," Travis noted, frowning. "It's anything but, now."
Vaughan was looking thoughtful. He leafed through the file on the desk in front of him, pulling out Travis' report on the previous day's expedition to San Fernando, and the satellite image that included both the Santa Anna and Villacana's private island.
"What makes you think he was the target?"
"He leapt to the conclusion that the storm was deliberate pretty damn quickly." Travis leaned forward, reaching for the transcript of his conversation with Villacana and leafing through it. "It hadn't even occurred to me until something he said. I'd swear he didn't know about Tracy, and wouldn't have cared if he did. But I'm betting that no one at NASA threw Villacana a huge leaving party and offered tearful farewells when he went. Is it possible he riled someone badly enough that they'd come after him?"
Vaughan shook his head, frowning absently at the photograph taken three hours before the storm. "I looked through the file when his name came up. Consensus opinion seems to have him down as pretty much irrelevant. Extremely smart, but he peaked scientifically at seventeen and all but burned out in his early twenties. We see kids like that come through all the time at the Agency. For someone to use one of the world's most secure pieces of equipment as a weapon a decade later? Quite honestly, he's just not important enough for anyone to have invested this much effort in."
His frown grew deeper and he tapped at the scrap of post-it note attached to the photograph, arrow pointing at San Fernando. "What's this for?"
Travis frowned, trying to place it himself. "Oh! When I spoke to Tracy last night, he spotted something on 'Fernando I was going to look into."
"The radio receiver?" Vaughan's expression had become focused, intent, as he studied the picture. He gestured towards the magnifying glass still resting on the corner of Kearney's desk. Travis passed it to him, slipping down from the desk and coming forward so he could see the image too. "I'm just a security officer, but I've seen enough satellite pictures of them to know what a radio dish looks like. I guess you people use them for computer connections out here?" He glanced up at Coates for a nod of confirmation, and then back down at the picture, frowning thoughtfully. "This looks pretty large for that kind of communications dish. May I?"
He gestured towards Travis' computer, an inquiring expression on his face. Travis nodded, rounding the desk to unlock the screen before pulling up a window for their visitor to work in. Vaughan tunnelled into the NASA system, pulling down a new satellite image and starting a second downloading. He opened the first on the screen, zooming in on an image of Dominga.
"Dominga is the state capital, so you should be pretty well connected, right? Where's your communications system located?"
Squatting by the desk, Travis took over, moving the image across the screen until the field outside town with its pair of satellite dishes was centred. He frowned from the new image to the glossy printout. "The one on San Fernando has to be three times the size. Five times maybe"
A pop-up told him the second image finished downloading and automatically he clicked through to it, finding himself looking at a more recent image of Villacana's private island. He slipped into his chair as Vaughan vacated it, frowning as he magnified the image more and more.
"That dish is just below the main house, right? Overlooking the inlet to the east?" He glanced back at the printed, pre-storm image to check. "So why aren't I seeing it? How old are these pictures, Vaughan?"
Vaughan was looking equally perplexed. "About an hour. What with waiting for the residue to threshold and then for dawn, they're the first clear pictures we've been able to get of Dominga and this area since the typhoon."
"Could the dish have been blown over in the storm perhaps?" Kearney suggested. "Wrecked?"
Vaughan and Travis both shook their heads.
"That thing was big. Pictures this good, we'd see the wreckage."
"Besides, the typhoon didn't touch the island, remember? San Fernando probably didn't get winds much above mild storm force."
Coates was looking grim. He'd moved along with Travis and Kearney so the four of them were tightly clustered around the screen. Now he stepped back from the desk and folded his arms.
"Is this relevant?" he asked reasonably.
Vaughan's expression was intent, his eyes narrowed. "If Villacana has that sort of radio dish, it means he's dealing with large volumes of data traffic. He might be less withdrawn from the rest of the world than I was thinking. If he thinks he was the target, that might mean he has an idea about who hijacked the weather satellites. Everyone at the Agency's been thinking that with as much security as the Weather Station has, it had to be internal, but Villacana's algorithms are the first line of defence on the computers. He might have some idea who'd be able to crack them."
"Worth another visit to the island?" Travis wondered. "The helijets are safe to fly now, right? We could be there in forty minutes rather than two hours."
"Oh, I definitely want to see San Fernando. Covering a dish that big can't be easy. I want to know what this man is trying to hide."
Coates grunted. "I'll get onto the airport to prep the police helijet. I should be able to rustle up a pilot for you within the hour. But Vaughan, you'd better get a move on. If this happened once, it'll happen again. You people have put a damn great gun to all our heads, and it's still up there."
Vaughan looked intensely grim, and Travis could see the sleepless nights and long hours of hard work in his weary expression. "Believe me, Chief Inspector. I am very well aware of that fact."