Shadow Watch (1999)

by Tom - Power Plays 03 Clancy

  The tram stopped to discharge its three passengers on the east side of the VAB. Annie was the first off, and as she led the way toward the huge building’s guarded personnel entrance Nimec picked up on an abrupt change in her demeanor. There was a tension beneath the surface he could almost feel her struggling to control, a hurriedness to her step that hadn’t been evident when they’d left the reception area for the tram. Whatever was on her mind was something she’d chosen to keep to herself, and he could only admire her poise and composure in doing so.

  The floor of the high bay area was as chaotic as she’d warned him it would be, but it was the organized chaos of people faced with a serious and complex task, and operating under intense pressure. He’d known it in combat, known it at police crime scenes, known it all too frequently since joining Roger Gordian’s operation; it was part of the game he’d played throughout his entire professional life. What struck him in this instance, however, was the absence of accompanying background noise, the purposeful silence of the men and women Annie had drawn together for her team, some in NASA coveralls, others in civilian clothes, dozens of them scurrying everywhere around and past him. Their silence, and the sheer amount of debris that had been collected here. As his eyes swept the enormous room, he knew it would have been impossible to fully comprehend the annihilating magnitude of the explosions that had wracked Orion on the launchpad without seeing these remains firsthand.

  Nimec surveyed the feverish activity a while longer, then realized Annie and Jeremy had already gone on ahead, walking side by side, leaning their heads together in private discussion. He started after them, but on second thought decided to hang back. Though he’d met her a scant half hour ago, he already suspected Annie Caulfield had good reasons for whatever she did. And he had given his word not to crowd her.

  He watched them walk up the broad transfer aisle stretching away before him and climb onto one of the movable work platforms, where four or five investigators were gathered over several large sections of the spacecraft. Annie spoke with them briefly, projecting an easy, gentle authority—paying close attention to their comments, patting one woman on the shoulder with the same sort of open, unself-conscious warmth she’d shown Jeremy on the tram. Nimec again found himself singularly impressed by her bearing.

  When the group left the platform a few moments later, plainly at Annie’s request, she and Jeremy hunkered into what reminded Nimec of a palaeontologist’s crouch and began shuffling amid the wreckage, occasionally exchanging comments and pointing things out to each other.

  After a bit Nimec figured it would be okay to join them.

  Annie acknowledged him with a nod as he reached the foot of the platform, and then waved him over, continuing to inspect one of the shuttle fragments. A soldered clump of tubes and valves in a cracked, scorched housing, it was attached to a component that, though also burned and dented, nonetheless retained something of an identifiable bell shape. Nimec thought he could make an educated guess about what it was, but didn’t, not aloud anyway, wanting to give them some more breathing room.

  Finally Annie glanced up at him from her crouch.

  “You’re looking at what’s left of a main engine,” she said, confirming his hunch. “The shuttle has three of them below the vertical tail fin. It’s no secret that the recorded dialogue between Orion’s flight deck and ground control tells us a red warning light went on at T minus six seconds, and indicated Main Engine Number Three was overheating.”

  He nodded. “This it?”

  She paused before answering, then said quietly, “SSME Three was essentially vaporized in the initial blast. SSME Two, which was situated right beside it at the aft end, is being partially reassembled from what little of it we’ve been able to recover. You’re looking at SSME One. I’m not sure why, but it’s been left relatively intact. The engines are in a triangular configuration, and this would have been at the apex, so maybe its position above the other two allowed it to escape the worst brunt of the explosions in some way. That’ll be determined. What’s important to me right now is that we have it to study.”

  “These mothers feed off a potent mixture of cryogenic liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen,” Jeremy said. He was bent over the opposite side of the engine bell. “Annie’ ll correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the propellants in a shuttle engine generate 1.7 million newtons—that’s equivalent to, what, about 375 thousand pounds of thrust at sea level. Makes it the most efficient dynamo of a power plant ever built. On the other hand, the ignition of hot hydrogen gas can be savage unless it’s precisely regulated. Remember the Hindenberg.”

  “Which means exactly what regarding Orion?” Nimec asked.

  “Getting back to the shuttle-to-ground communications record, it’s apparent that a problem developed with the flow of liquid hydrogen fuel,” Annie said, her face solemn. “Again, this is information that’s been very widely circulated in the media, so I doubt I’m saying anything you don’t already know. One of the last things Jim ... Colonel Rowland ... said to the controller was that LH2 pressure was dropping. Then he broke off for a second.”

  Nimec had listened attentively, but felt a little baffled. “If I’m following this at all, you’re implying a reduction in liquid hydrogen pressure may have caused the increase in engine temperature that in turn sparked the fire. But I’d think it’d be the other way around—less fuel, less burn.”

  “Yeah, sure, unless the pressure drop is in these here strands of spaghetti,” Jeremy said. He gestured toward one of the clumps of mangled tubing behind the engine bell. “They channel the LH2 into the walls of the engine nozzle and combustion chamber before outletting them to the preburners—”

  Nimec raised his palm to stop him.

  “Whoa,” he said. “Back up a second. I’m still not clear on how less equals more in this instance.”

  “That’s ’cause a very important word I used to describe the state of the liquid hydrogen must’ve slipped past you,” Jeremy said. “Namely cryogenic.”

  Annie saw Nimec holding back his irritation at being patronized.

  “As Jeremy said,” she broke in, “the SSMEs operate with a high level of efficiency. That’s in part because the propellants are used for multiple purposes. To remain in a liquid state hydrogen has to be kept super-cold ... to give you an idea of how cold, bear in mind that it vaporizes at any temperature above minus 423 degrees Fahrenheit. As a solution to the problem of critical engine overheating, the designers of the SSMEs found a means to divert some of the liquid hydrogen fuel throughout the engine with a system of ducts before it finally makes its way to the preburners. There’s a pair in each of the main engines, and their function is to ignite the very hot hydrogen vapors that result from the combustion process before they can accumulate and ignite in the engine bell. If you ever watch a video of a liftoff in slow motion, you’d can see the preburners shooting the gas out below the bells as thousands of tiny fireballs.”

  Nimec looked at her. “So you’re telling me that a significant dropoff in LH2 pressure would have caused the engine to overheat and the preburners to fail... leading to an explosion of the free hydrogen vapors in the engine bell.”

  “That’s what Jim was telling us. Or trying to. He would have known where in the engine the liquid hydrogen pressure had critically decreased just by looking at a gauge on his instrument panel. But with everything happening so fast ... the cabin filling with smoke ...”

  “He never finished saying what he wanted to.”

  “Which was that the LH2 pressure was dropping in the preburner ducts.”

  Their gazes met. Nimec saw the moist, overbright look in her eyes, realized she was fighting back tears, and found himself on the verge of reaching out with a comforting hand. Instead he stiffened, caught wholly off guard by the impulse.

  Turning to Jeremy, he said, “When we were on the tram you mentioned the difference between knowing what happens given a certain set of conditions, and understanding why it happens.”

  Jerem
y visibly wavered.

  “I was talking about snowflakes,” he said.

  “Then talk to me now about explosions,” Nimec said. “What do you think made the LH2 pressure drop? And if it occurred in Engine Number Three, why are there fused cooling ducts in Number One? How could the identical problem simultaneously occur in at least two of the three separate engines?”

  Jeremy looked to Annie, still hesitant. He was waiting to see how much she wanted to share, and would say nothing more without her okay. Nimec decided he liked him a little better for it.

  “The other night I came here after everyone else was gone, just to do some thinking,” Annie offered at length. “I’d had a tough day wrestling with the press and needed to get my head straight....” She trailed off a moment, then shook her head. “But that doesn’t matter. What does matter is I stayed a long time. Much longer than I expected, in fact. Walking around, looking over the pieces of wreckage we’d started to assemble. When I saw this engine, I noticed that the internal damage seemed far greater than the damage to the exterior of the housing. And started ask to ask myself the same things you just asked Jeremy.” She paused again, exhaled. “I’ve requested assistance from the Forensic Science Center in San Francisco. It’s at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, I don’t know whether you’re familiar with them—”

  “They did evidence analysis on the Unabomber case, the Times Square and World Trade Center bombings in New York, probably hundreds of other investigations,” Nimec said. “UpLink’s had a relationship with them for years, and I’ve worked with them personally. The LLNL’s the best group of crime detection and national security experts in the business.”

  She nodded. “They’re sending a team of analysts with an ion-store/time-of-flight mass spectrometry instrument.”

  “Which means you’re looking for residual by-products of a blasting material,” he said. “IS/TOF-MS allows the trace-particles analysis to be done right here in this building ... avoids deterioration that can take place by transporting the sample to a lab.”

  “Yes.”

  Nimec mulled that over for a while.

  “In acts of sabotage, you have to work quickly and on the sly and that’s how errors are sometimes made,” he said. “If you’re good at destruction, you know that the way to take the possibility of a foul-up into account ... to anticipate and keep it from happening ... is to be redundant. Get your hands into three engines, though all you need is one to go bad. If I’m reading you right, then whatever made Engine Three—and maybe Engine Two—overheat was supposed to have done the same with Engine One, but didn’t. Or at least not to the extent intended.”

  “That’s a reasonable explanation, yes, if we assume a deliberate and successful effort was made to destroy Orion.” Annie breathed. “We’ll see what the mass spectrometry and FSC analysts give us. Meanwhile, Jeremy believes it likely there was such an effort.”

  “More than likely,” Jeremy said. “I’d bet anything on it.”

  Nimec looked at him.

  “What makes you sound so definite?”

  “Remember a second ago, when I was talking snowflakes, and you wanted to talk explosions?”

  Nimec had already gotten enough of a feel for Jeremy to realize the question wasn’t rhetorical.

  “Uh-huh,” he said.

  “Well, it happens we were already on the same page. An offshoot of my work in thermodynamic crystal geometry, which involves various types of controlled explosions, has been an interest in blast geometry.”

  “Somehow,” Nimec said. “I had an inkling.”

  “I know you did.”

  Nimec gave him a nod.

  “Tell me what you’ve got, Jeremy,” he said. “Why so definite?”

  “In simple language,” Jeremy said, “a certain type of chemical reaction equals an explosion equals a pattern. And to me the splay, burn, and scoring patterns in this engine had to have been made by tiny thermal charges—could’ve been something like noncommercial RDX—that were meant to destroy the hydrogen fuel turbo-pumps, but only partially did the job.”

  Nimec considered that a second and nodded again.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “S’okay.” Jeremy put his hand on the ruined engine, peering at Nimec through the lenses of his wire glasses. “You want to come around this side, I’ll show you what I mean.”

  A comradely overture.

  “Yeah,” Nimec said. “That’d be good.”

  “There’s something I kept to myself at the VAB,” Nimec told Annie half an hour later. “Wasn’t sure how much to say in front of Jeremy.”

  They were having coffee in the KSC commissary, his offer of lunch scaled down because of her packed schedule, Jeremy now on his way back to Orlando.

  She watched him intensely over her cup.

  “Go on,” she said.

  “In some instances terrorists will want to leave a footprint of sabotage without taking credit for the act. It’s been an increasing trend over the last decade. Lets them have it both ways—they put the fear into you without bringing heat down on themselves.”

  Annie kept her eyes on him.

  “You think Main Engine One wasn’t meant to be destroyed ? That the attempt was just supposed to look as if it were botched?”

  “I think it’s a distinct possibility.”

  She was silent awhile. Then a pale little smile touched the comer of her lips. “That must have occurred to Jeremy too. My guess is he wasn’t sure what to say in front of you.”

  “Could be.” Nimec noticed himself noticing her smile and redirected his eyes toward the tabletop. What was with him? They were colleagues and these were inappropriate circumstances for such things. Weren’t they? He was looking at her again before he knew it. “He’s certainly smart enough.”

  Annie quietly drank some more coffee.

  “Two questions,” she said. “Would UpLink find it acceptable if I inform the press that we are now cautiously progressing along a line of inquiry that may link Orion to the incident in Brazil?”

  “We wouldn’t have a problem with that,” he said.

  “Next question,” she said. “If it was sabotage, do you have any idea who may be responsible?”

  He thought a moment, then made a decision.

  “I think we could very soon,” he said. “Our outfit has a small satellite ground station in Pensacola. I’m getting flown there from Orlando by a corporate jet at four o’clock this afternoon. We’re conducting an operation you may want to observe.”

  She chewed her lower lip contemplatively, holding the coffee cup, steam floating up in front of her face.

  “I need to get home to the kids.”

  “It’s a short trip,” he said. “I’ll arrange for the plane to take you back soon as we’re finished.”

  Silence.

  Annie took another drink from her cup, then lowered it onto the saucer.

  “Count me in,” she said.

  NINETEEN

  VARIOUS LOCALES APRIL 23/24, 2001

  IT WAS 2:00 P.M. PACIFIC DAYLIGHT TIME, APRIL twenty-third, in San Jose, California.

  It was 5:00 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time in Pensacola, Florida.

  It was 6:00 P.M. Brazilian Daylight Time in the central Pantanal.

  It was 3:00 A.M. the following day, April twenty-fourth, in Kazakhstan.

  The variations in dates and time zones made no difference to UpLink International’s Hawkeye-I and -II hyperspectral high-resolution imaging satellites, nor to the relaying and data-processing equipment used to establish a real-time downlink to receiving stations in each locale—these only being machines, as Rollie Thibodeau readily pointed out to Megan Breen from behind a notebook computer on his hospital tray.

  To the people involved in this synchronized monitoring operation, on the other hand, the whole process of coordination was a howling, troublesome bitch.

  As Rollie was also free and quick to note.

  Tom Ricci rubbed his eyes. Had it really been less than seve
nty-two hours since he’d left Maine, its deepwater urchin beds, and the reclusive life he had cultivated for over two years behind? Something like that, he guessed. So much mental and physical distance had been covered between then and now, it was hard to keep track. There had been the flight to San Jose, his meeting with Roger Gordian, the formal offer from Gordian to join UpLink in what had to his surprise become a position—its official title being Global Field Supervisor, Security Operations—that he would hold jointly with a guy named Rollie Thibodeau, who, if memory served, was the other candidate for the job mentioned to him by the high-and-mighty Megan Breen back in Stonington. There had been his acceptance of the offer despite reservations about working in partnership with Thibodeau, someone he’d never met, someone very much liked and preferred by Breen, a woman toward whom Ricci had taken an automatic dislike, which impression had seemed in his eyes to be a two-way street filled with bumps, potholes, and inevitable collisions. Only Ricci’s fidelity to the commitment he’d given Pete Nimec had overcome his second thoughts about agreeing to the modified proposition in Gordian’s office.

  All of which had preceded his express shipment to Kazakhstan, a severe, inhospitable place populated with equally severe, inhospitable Russian military and scientific personnel whose antagonism toward him was more than a little reminiscent of his old friend Cobbs. They were indignant about his having taken command of site protection at their Baikonur Cosmodrome prior to the space launch. They had bristled at his front-line deployment of Sword patrol units and defensive systems. They viewed his assistance as gross interference, and had let him know it at every possible turn.

  He wondered how much worse his reception would have been if they’d known this was, more or less, his first day on the job.

  Fatigued and out of joint, his biological clock in jagged contention with the time displayed on his wristwatch, Ricci sat at an onboard vehicle computer in the trailer that was his mobile command center and logged onto UpLink’s secure intranet server via cellular modem, waiting for pictures from space that his instincts told him were about to reveal complications that would make every problem he’d encountered since his arrival in Central Asia—if not since his farewell urchin run with Dex—seem piddling by comparison.