MICHAEL CRICHTON

But that was before the Zaire army SAMs began exploding all around them.They were still eighty miles south of the intended drop zone, circling over Kiganiterritory, wasting time and fuel. It looked as if their daring plan, so carefullyworked out and confirmed by computer, was suddenly irrelevant.And to add to her difficulties, she could not confer with Houston; the computerrefused to link up by satellite. She spent fifteen minutes working with the portableunit, boosting power and switching scrambler codes, until she finally realized thather transmission was being electronically jammed.For the first time in her memory, Karen Ross wanted to cry.“Easy now,” Munro said quietly, lifting her hand away from the keyboard. “Onething at a time, no point in getting upset.” Ross had been pressing the keys overand over again, unaware of what she was doing.Munro was conscious of the deteriorating situation with both Elliot and Ross.He had seen it happen on expeditions before, particularly when scientists andtechnical people were involved. Scientists worked all day in laboratories whereconditions could be rigorously regulated and monitored. Sooner or later,scientists came to believe that the outside world was just as controllable as theirlaboratories. Even though they knew better, the shock of discovering that thenatural world followed its own rules and was indifferent to them represented aharsh psychic blow. Munro could read the signs.“But this,” Ross said, “is obviously a non-military aircraft, how can they do it?”Munro stared at her. In the Congolese civil war, civilian aircraft had beenroutinely shot down by all sides. “These things happen,” he said.“And the jamming? Those bastards haven’t got the capability to jam us. We’rebeing jammed between our transmitter and our satellite transponder. To do thatrequires another satellite somewhere, and—” She broke off, frowning.“You didn’t expect the consortium to Sit by idly,” Munro said. “The question is,can you fix it? Have you got countermeasures?”“Sure, I’ve got countermeasures,” Ross said. “I can encode a burst bounce, Ican transmit optically on an IR carrier, I can link a ground-base cable—butthere’s nothing I can put together in the next few minutes, and we needinformation now. Our plan is shot.”115