After the next race, four more would go.
That night, Jason went to bed both exhausted and exhilarated. Sure, he was last on the scoreboard, but he had high hopes for the next day"s race - for it was a gate race, his and the Bug"s specialty.
As he slept an army of workers went to work reconfiguring New York City - erecting arched gates and towering barricades - preparing it for the Manhattan Gate Race.
CHAPTER TEN.
NEW YORK CITY, USA (FRIDAY).
Dawn on Friday found the streets of New York City eerily deserted. Not a single car, cab or truck could be seen on any of its wide boulevards - vehicular traffic was banned today.
If you moved through those streets, however, you would find that many of them were now fitted with high metal archways - race gates - 250 of them.
You would also find that dozens of the city"s streets had been blocked off - by ma.s.sive temporary barricades - transforming them into dead-ends.
The island of Manhattan had been turned into a labyrinth.
Every year the configuration of New York"s streets was altered - racers and navigators would receive a map of all the gate locations and dead-ends three minutes before racetime.
As with all gate races, the farthest gates were worth 100 points; the nearest: 10. And since no racer could possibly race through every single gate within the time limit, this was a battle of strategy - choosing the optimal course.
The time limit for the race was 3 hours.
The punishment for a late return to the Start-Finish Area was severe: 2 points per second.
So if you were a minute late, you lost a ma.s.sive 120 points.
The Manhattan Gate Race was also the only race in the New York Masters to operate under the "Car Over the
Line" finishing rule. Driver Over the Line wasn"t good enough in this race - your whole car had to make it back. The message was clear: go out, get through as many gates as you could, and get back on time.
Jason arrived in the pit area on Sixth Avenue very early on Friday morning.
Nervous, he"d slept fitfully and woken terribly early, around 4:30 a.m., so he decided to go down to the pits and tinker with the Argonaut.
He was looking inside its rear thrusters when a voice behind him made him jump: "Ooh, h.e.l.lo there! Why if it isn"t young Jason."
It was Ravi Gupta. The slightly creepy Indian fellow Jason had met in Italy - whom Jason had subsequently discovered was a leading bookmaker.
Gupta stood a few yards away from Jason, with his hands clasped peacefully in front of him - but he had arrived all-but silently, as if he had apparated out of thin air.
"What are you doing in here?" Jason asked. "This area is restricted."
"Ooh, I have been involved in racing for a long time, Jason," Gupta said slyly. "I know people."
"What do you want?"
Gupta held up his hands quickly. "Me? Ooh, nothing, Jason. Nothing at all. I thought you were lucky yesterday - ooh, yes, very, very lucky - with that crash on the last turn."
"A race is never over until everyone crosses the line," Jason said warily.
"Yes, ooh yes. So true, so true," Gupta said. "But now the simple fact of the matter is that you are in Race 2, the gate race, and everyone knows how much you like gate races. Feeling confident then?"
Jason didn"t like talking to Gupta - it was as if Gupta was plying him for information, looking for the inside scoop on how he would perform that day, so he could adjust his betting odds accordingly.
Too late Jason had realised that this had been exactly what Gupta had done in Italy.
Smiling, Gupta said, "Enjoying your new and improved Argonaut. I must say it looks a million dollars."
"It"s great," Jason said.
A door slammed somewhere. Jason turned. Saw a security guard walking down the length of the pits.
Jason swung back to address Gupta - only to find that the Indian had disappeared.
Gone. As suddenly and silently as he had arrived.
Jason scowled. "Hmmm..."
By 8 a.m., New York City was once again snowing with confetti. The city was absolutely overflowing with spectators. They lined every street, hung from office windows, lay on deckchairs on rooftops. Sizeable crowds gathered around the two 100-point gates in the Cloisters (at the extreme north of the island) and at the Brooklyn end of the long Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel (the southernmost point of the course), ever hopeful that this would be the year that a racer claimed both 100-pointers.
But by far the largest crowd of all lined Fifth Avenue: an unbroken mult.i.tude that stretched from the New York Public Library on 42nd St all the way down Fifth Avenue to the 4-way Start-Finish Line that stood beneath the Empire State Building at the junction of Fifth and 34th St.
The stage was set.
The crowd was ready.
The race would begin at 9 a.m.
CHAPTER ELEVEN.
NEW YORK CITY, USA (FRIDAY) RACE 2: THE MANHATTAN GATE RACE.
12 racers. 250 gates. 3 hours. 8:59 a.m.
The twelve remaining racers in the Masters Series sat poised on the square-shaped Start-Finish Line, three to a side, pointing in the four cardinal directions - their initial starting direction determined by lot.
Then the clock struck 9:00 and - bam - the lights went green.
They were off.
Jason had drawn an east-pointing grid position - the most sought-after were the northward ones, since the key point-scoring area was in the mid-to-north section of the island - and while all the racers around him blasted off to the east and then turned north, he just swung around completely on the spot and - at the Bug"s instruction - darted due south down Fifth Avenue, heading for the southern half of the island.
But one other driver also headed south, staying close behind Jason.
Fabian.
And as Jason weaved his way southward, whizzing through the picture-postcard gates at Washington Square Park, the World Trade Center Memorial and Wall Street, it quickly became apparent that Fabian hadn"t just followed Jason southward.
Fabian was following Jason everywhere.
Every single time Jason turned for a new gate, Fabian turned after him.
"G.o.dd.a.m.nit, Bug!" Jason yelled. "He"s tailing us! He doesn"t trust his own navigator, so he"s using our raceplan!"
"Tailing" in a gate race (in the southern hemisphere it was called "sequencing") wasn"t unheard of: it was technically within the rules, but it was also regarded as a cheap and cowardly way to race.
All the way down Manhattan, the crowds cheered the Argonaut on...
...cheers that became boos as the purple-and-gold Ma.r.s.eilles Falcon shot by a split-second later.
Through more gates at the south-western corner of the island. Every time the Argonaut pa.s.sed through an archway, that gate emitted a shrill electronic ping: Bing! Bing! Bing!
The Bug"s raceplan was near perfect - plotted to pa.s.s through the maximum number of worthwhile gates while by-pa.s.sing those that offered only minimal points for inordinate effort.
And all the while, he kept Jason close enough to the pits for necessary mag replacements and coolant refuellings.
By the time they took their second pit stop at the 1-hour mark, the Argonaut was sitting on an incredible 750 points - and in the lead!
Unfortunately, Fabian - because he was following exactly the same course - was on the same number of points and thus sharing the lead.
But then Jason did something unexpected.
He went south again, this time taking the superfast route down the FDR.
He was going for the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. And the prized 100-point gate at its end.
Fabian visibly doubted whether or not to follow, but in the end, he did.
In hindsight, it was a very canny plan - take on the tunnel with six full-strength mags, a full tank of coolant and no distractions.
The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel came into view, and without missing a beat, the Argonaut shoomed into its yawning maw, closely followed by the Ma.r.s.eilles Falcon.
A minute later, Jason emerged at the turnaround at the other end of the long tunnel - the Brooklyn end - to be met by the roars of the crowd gathered there, and he banked hard, swooping through the 100-point gate...
Bing!
...before he roared back into the tunnel to start the return journey.
But while Jason was plundering the southern areas, others were progressing well in the northern half of the island.
Chief among them were the two USAF racers: Carver and Lewicki.
They were gate race specialists, the US Air Force priding itself on its pilots" abilities to most efficiently navigate any course.
Word was, Carver and Lewicki"s Air Force navigators trained on state-of-the-art computer navigation simulators for ten hours a day, so that optimal race-plotting became almost second nature to them.
But when it was revealed at the 1-hour mark that at 740 points each, they were both ten points behind the leaders, Jason and Fabian, the crowds and the commentators went wild.
The television commentators - with the help of their own course-plotting computers - immediately a.n.a.lysed Jason"s possible raceplans based on his course-plotting so far.
"Check this out," one of them said. "From the start, Chaser went south, while everyone else went north. Now, he"s coming back north, where the streets aren"t as congested with other racers anymore, and he"s stealing solid 20-point gates on his way. And now look here - he"s just jumped onto the Henry Hudson Parkway, still heading north. Now where could he be heading? Okay, here comes the computer"s a.s.sessment of his plan: what the h.e.l.l - ?"
The same thing happened on every other sports channel.