“What the hell?” one of them demanded.
“Get him out of there!” Banks’s voice shouted from behind. “He has no authorization. He’s not wanted in here at all.”
But Kieran tripped on the step up to the flight deck and went down on a knee. He braced a hand against one of the consoles to raise himself, but it slipped off and shot between it and an adjacent unit, causing him to sprawl sideways. Rough hands hauled him back onto his feet and ejected him back into the main cabin. “I just wanted to ask them about—”
“Get him helmeted up and off the plane!” Banks yelled. “If I hear one more word out of him, just throw him out as he is. I’ve had enough!”
* * *
It was a rueful-looking Kieran who stumped back down the Mule’s access stairs several minutes later and returned to the inflatable-frame cabin. But the smile that broke out across his face as soon as he got inside was unnecessary. Harry Quong was already tuning in to the two bugs—from the items sent by Leppo—that Kieran had planted, one in the main cabin of the Mule, the other underneath the c-com operator’s table in the nose compartment. The first was bringing tirades from Banks, still incensed over the “lunatic”; the latter, a resumption of ratings of girls in various bars in Lowell and Osaka that Kieran’s intrusion into the crew compartment had evidently interrupted.
In his contrived fall, Kieran had also found the cable shown in the installation drawings obtained by Harry Quong, which connected the c-com panel to the amplifier-driver unit feeding the antenna system, which was where message encryption and decryption were performed. Hence, messages traveling through the cable itself were not encrypted. Kieran had attached to the cable a small clip-on collar that would pick up the external magnetic fields generated by incoming and outgoing signals and transmit encodings of them to the Juggernaut via one of the devices that Chas and his crew had buried outside—it hadn’t been by accident that they had picked the area between the two camps to sort their equipment. So now the team had a tap into the Mule’s external communications link as well as bugs inside it.
Banks would no doubt forward a report of Kieran’s antics to his boss, Thornton Velte, at Asgard, which was the whole idea, and hopefully the essence of it would find its way to Gilder. If so, Gilder would probably order a check on the net to see what information on Keziah Turle could be dredged up. But that was okay—they would find him to be mildly eccentric and excitable, but highly regarded within his own circle. For most of the night Trevany, Juanita, and Dennis had been writing biographical and background notes, extracts from supposedly published papers, and other inspirations, and posting them on a net site that June had created for the purpose on behalf of the fictitious personality.
The tap on the Mule’s communications link quickly revealed that the use of supporting military had been approved from Asgard, and a force would be arriving later that day. In anticipation of this, the devices placed by Chas and his men included several remote-controllable miniature radio signal and interference transmitters near the area where the military’s aircraft would probably be positioned after it arrived. Meanwhile, Hamil, Juanita, and Dennis, after informing Banks that they needed a final visit to the Hole to tidy up their notes and recordings, had placed several more among the excavations. Also, while there, they had gone around touching up selected spots with fluorescent dyes from the Juggernaut’s lab that would activate at varying periods after being excited with ultraviolet light—which Kieran said would be emitted by the security devices that he predicted the military would deploy. Not especially surprisingly, the response from Banks had been aloof indifference. Finally, Rudi had sent Gottfried up among the crags overlooking the shelf to dispense a number of canisters that Kieran and Harry Quong had contrived for emitting smoke and releasing pressurized volatile liquids.
There was nothing more they could do for the time being but wait. Or maybe, Kieran suggested, they could always try praying to the protective spirits of the Ancients.