by Tom Clancy
Finally she lowers her hand from her mouth.
"Yes," she says. "It's me, hon. I'm here. "
He slips his right arm partially out from under his blankets and beckons her with a feeble wave. His face is still a blur, but she has no difficulty seeing the gesture.
Her eyes fall briefly on the sleeve of his pajama.
"Come over here, Annie, " he says. "Hard to talk when you're standing there by the door. "
She steps forward into the room. His sleeve. Something about it isn't right, something about the color of it--
"Come on, what are you waiting for?" he says. Pulling his arm further out from underneath his blankets and tapping the safety rail of his bed. "You belong with me. "
There is a harshness in Mark's voice, an anger that has become huge within him in recent days--but although Annie often brushes up against its sharp outer edges, she is aware that the cancer is its real target. In the beginning it had flared up from beneath the surface only on occasion, but its progression has matched that of the disease, consuming him, ravaging his personality. He is resentful of his loss of independence, resentful of his inability to care for himself, resentful of his neediness ... and beyond all else resentful of having his future stolen from him by something as insipid and indiscriminate as an uncontrollable growth of cells. Annie has come to accept those feelings as constants that she is helpless to relieve, and can only hope to skirt past on delicate tiptoes.
She wades through the filmy light toward her husband. His IV stand and the wall of beeping instruments are on the left side of the bed, so she walks around its foot to the right and rolls back his plastic hospital tray in order to approach him.
Suddenly his hand reaches over the safety rail and clutches her wrist.
"Give it to us, Annie, " he says. "Let's hear how sorry you are. "
She stands there in shock as his fingers press into her with impossible strength.
"We trusted you," he says.
His fingers are digging deeper into the soft white flesh under her wrist, hurting her now. Though Annie knows they will leave bruises, she does not attempt to pull away. She looks at Mark across the bed, wishing she could see his face, mystified by his words. Their hostility is more intense, more cuttingly directed at her than at any time in the past, but she can't understand why.
"Mark, please, tell me what you mean--"
"My girl," he breaks in. "Always in a hurry, rushing from one place to another without a look back. "
She winces as his grip tightens.
Us. We.
Who can he be talking about? Himself and the kids?
Annie can scarcely guess.
No, that isn't the truth. Not really.
The simple, inescapable truth is that she's afraid to guess.
His grip tightens.
She wishes she could see his face.
"You were supposed to be responsible. Supposed to look out for us, " he says.
Annie still doesn't pull away, absolutely refuses to pull away. Instead she moves closer to him, pressing up against the bed rail, thinking if she could just see his face, if they could just see each other eye-to-eye, he would stop this nonsense about her leaving him--
The thought is abruptly clipped short as her eyes once again fall on his sleeve. The color, yes, the color, how had she failed to identify it right away? She doesn't know the answer, but realizes now that what he's wearing isn't a pajama, its carrot-red color and heavy padded fabric marking it as, of all things, all impossible things under the sun, a NASA flight/reentry suit. At the same instant this occurs to her, the quiet beep of the instruments measuring her husband's vital functions pitches up to a shrill alarm, an earsplitting sound she recognizes from some other place, some other when.
It is a sound that makes her gasp with horror.
The faceless man in the bed is shouting at her at the top of his voice: "H2 pressure's dropping! Look for yourself! Check the readings!"
On impulse, Annie shoots her gaze over to the right side of the bed, recognizes the forward consoles of a space shuttle where she had seen hospital instruments only moments before. For some reason this causes her little surprise. She takes in the various panels with a series of hurried glances, her eyes leaping from the master alarm lights to the smoke-detection indicators on the left-hand panel of the commander's console, and then over to the main engine status displays below the center CRT.
Again, what she sees is not unexpected.
"Stay calm, Annie, we're on the fast track now! Better reach for that ejection lever or nobody's making it home!" the man in the bed practically howls, and then wrenches her arm with such violence that she stumbles off balance and crashes forward against the rail. She flies across it, whimpering, throwing out her free hand to check her fall. It lands on the mattress beside him, preventing her from sprawling clear across his chest.
"The world spits us up and out, so where's our goddamned parachute?"
He keeps holding onto her right arm, keeps shouting at Annie as she braces herself up over him with her left. Though their faces are just inches apart, his features are still too distorted for her to make them out.
Then, suddenly, the sense of disconnection she had experienced in the waiting room recurs for a fleeting moment, only now it is as if she's been split in two, part of her watching the scene from high above while the other struggles with the man on the bed. And with this feeling comes the whole and certain knowledge that his face would not belong to her husband if she could see it; no, not her husband, but someone else she has loved in a very different way, loved and lost. Annie doesn't understand how she knows, but she does, she does, and the knowledge terrifies her, seeming to rise on the crest of a building hysteria.
"Where's our goddamned parachute?" he shouts again, and yanks hard at her wrist, pulling her down onto himself. As she finally tries to break away, Annie catches another glimpse of his clutching fingers ... and sees for the first time that they are horribly burned, the fingernails gone, the outer layer of skin sloughing off the knuckles, baring raw, strawberry-red flesh underneath.
She wants to scream, tells herself she must scream, thinking... still without knowing why... that it might somehow bring her ordeal to an end. But it refuses to come, it is trapped in her throat, and all she can do is produce a small cry of anguish that is torn to shreds by her vocal cords even as she wrings it out of them--
Annie awakened with a jolt, her heart knocking in her chest, the trailing edge of a moan on her mouth. She had broken out in a cold sweat, her T-shirt plastered to her body.
She looked around, taking a series of deep breaths, shaking her head as if to cast off the lacy remnants of her dream.
She was home. In Houston, in her living room, on her sofa. From the TV in the kids' room she could hear the Teletubbies carrying on with manic effervescence. On the carpet at her feet, her newspaper was still folded to the article she'd been reading when she'd fallen into an exhausted sleep. Its headline read: "AFTERMATH OF TRAGEDY." Above the columns of text was a photo of Orion in its catastrophic final moments.
Annie bent her head and covered her stinging eyes with her palm.
She'd flown back from the Center after having been there since very early that morning and attended meeting after meeting in which the participants--NASA executives, government officials, and representatives of the various shuttle and ISS contractors--had ostensibly been trying to sift through what they knew about the accident and lay out a preliminary framework for an investigation into its causes. Instead, they had spent the majority of the time staring at one another in dazed silence.
Perhaps, Annie thought, it had been a mistake to expect anything more constructive so soon after the explosion. At any rate, she had felt nothing but a sense of leaden futility by the end of the final session, and been grateful for the chance to go home.
Home sweet home, where she could take her mind off what had happened, enjoy some light reading and a refreshing nap before getting started on dinner.
/>
Her hand still clapped over her eyes, she felt a small, bleak smile touch her lips.
An instant later the tears began streaming between her fingers.
The barrett rifle against his shoulder, his cheek to its stock, Antonio aligned his target in the crosshairs of its high-magnification sight.
Moments after leaving Kuhl's vehicle, he had scurried up a tree that afforded a direct line of fire with the guard station, and was now half-sitting, half-squatting in the fork of its trunk, his feet braced on two strong branches. The thirty-pound weapon ordinarily required a bipod for support, but here on his treetop perch he'd been able to rest its barrel over his upraised knees.
He inhaled, exhaled, gathering his concentration. A series of dry trigger pulls had helped him find a comfortable body position and make minor adjustments to his aim. He would be shooting across a distance of over nine hundred yards, and could not afford to be even slightly off balance.
There were two guards inside the booth. One stood at a coffeemaker, pouring from its glass pot into a cup. The other sat over some papers at a small metal desk. He would be the second kill. The man on his feet would have greater mobility, and a mobile target always had the best chance of escape, requiring that it be the first to be taken out.
Antonio took another inhalation, held it. The guard at the coffee machine had filled his cup and was putting the pot back on its warming pad. He raised the coffee to his lips, but would never get a chance to drink it. In a practical sense he was already dead. The booth's bullet-resistant window would be easily penetrated by the tungston-carbide SLAP rounds chambered in Antonio's weapon, doing the men behind it no good at all.
"Mi mano, su vida," he whispered, releasing his breath. As always before a kill, he felt very close to God.
He pulled smoothly on the trigger of his weapon, his eye and forefinger welded in seamless action.
His gun bucked. A bullet split the air. The window shattered. The guard spun where he stood and went down, the coffee cup flying from his hand.
Antonio breathed again, took aim again.
Still behind his desk, the second guard barely had the time to turn toward his crumpled partner before another bullet whistled in from the night and caught him in the left temple, tearing through his skull and snapping him up and out of his seat.
The sniper remained in position a short while longer, wanting to be thorough, watchful of any hint of movement in the sentry booth. Nothing stirred in the pale yellow light spilling from its blown-out window. Satisfied he'd gotten two clean kills, he shouldered the rifle, and was about to slip from the tree when a fluttering sound overhead gave him momentary pause.
A glance up through the foliage revealed that he'd been none too hasty in executing his task.
The jump team had arrived and was descending from the darkness.
FOUR
MATO GROSSO DO SUL SOUTHERN BRAZIL
APRIL 17, 2001
CLEARING THE PERIMETER FENCE BY A HUNDRED METERS, Manuel dropped his gear bag on a tether and continued his descent into the compound. He was aware of his teammates floating in behind him, aware of the ground rushing up.
Now he pulled his left toggle to turn into the slight westerly wind, trimmed more altitude, waited until he felt the bag land below him with a thump, and hit the quick-release snap to disengage it. An instant later, he drew both toggles evenly down to his waist to flare the chute. It collapsed in on itself, spilling air.
He landed softly on the balls of his feet.
His chin low to his chest, Manuel let himself move forward in a kind of loose-legged trot, remaining upright, checking his momentum as he separated himself from the canopy. The others, meanwhile, had come rustling to the ground on either side of him. Most of them were also on their feet, but one or two had dropped a little harder, tumbling onto their backs and sides in fluid parachute landing falls.
And then they were up and slipping free of their harnesses. They hurried to recover their bags and collect the equipment inside them--grenades, plastic explosive charges, and upgraded FAMAS rifles like those that would be used by the extraction team. Exchanging their jump helmets and goggles for combat helmets with optical display units, they donned dark special-purpose visors, coupled the electronic gunsights on their rifles to the helmet-mounted displays, lowered their monocular eyepieces, and then stealthily moved out at their leader's command, splitting into three groups of four.
If the information they had obtained was correct, it would only be seconds, at most minutes, before their presence was detected.
Along with other things of vital interest to their employer, that information would be well tested as the night ran its course.
The employees at the facility mostly called them "hedgehogs."
Rollie Thibodeau, who headed the night security detail, preferred the term "li'l bastards," grumbling that the way they responded to certain situations resembled human behavior a bit too closely for comfort. But Rollie was technophobic to an extreme degree, and being a Louisiana Cajun, felt an inborn obligation to be both voluble and contrary.
Still, when he was in a generous mood, he would acknowledge their value by adding that they were "smart li'l bastards."
In fact, the mobile security robots weren't very bright at all, possessing the approximate intelligence of the beetles and other insects that hedgehogs of the living, mammalian variety preferred to dine upon. And while they could function as surrogates for human beings in performing a host of physical tasks, scientific experts of an Asimovean bent would have contended it was improper, or at the very least imprecise, to even define them as robots, since they were incapable of autonomous thought and action, slaved to remote computers, and ultimately monitored and controlled by human guards.
True robots, these experts might assert, would have the ability to make independent decisions and act upon them without any help from their creators, and were perhaps twenty or thirty years from actual development. What existed now, and what laymen wrongly considered to be robots, were actually robotlike machines.
These conflicting definitions aside, the hedgehogs were versatile, sophisticated gadgets that had been put to effective use patrolling the four-thousand-acre ISS manufacturing compound in Mato Grosso do Sul. Through a rather complicated agreement with the Brazilian government and a half-dozen other countries involved in the space station's construction, UpLink International had managed to win administrative and managerial control of the plant, simultaneously assuming blanket responsibility for its protection--something the Brazilian negotiators had been finagled into thinking was an expensive concession on UpLink's part, but which had actually pleased Roger Gordian and his security chief, Pete Nimec, to no end. If their experience operating in transitional and politically unstable nations had taught them anything, it was that nobody could look out for them as well as they could look out for themselves.
The hedgehogs unarguably made looking out for themselves easier. "R2D2 on steroids" is how Thibodeau described them, and in its own way that was an apt representation. Their omnidirectional color video cameras were encased in rounded turrets atop vertical racks or "necks," giving them a vaguely anthropomorphic appearance that many female staffers found cute--as did quite a few of the plant's male employees, though rarely by open admission. Mounted on tracked 6x6 drive platforms, they were quick, quiet, and capable of maneuvering across everything from narrow corridors and stairwells to rugged, heavily obstacled outdoor terrain. Products of UpLink's own R&D, they boasted a wide range of proprietary hardware-and-software-based systems. Their hazard/intruder detection array included broad-spectrum gas, smoke, temperature, optical flame, microwave radar, vehicular sonar, passive infrared, seismic, and ambient light sensors. Their clawed, retractable gripper arms were strong enough to lift twenty-five-pound objects and precise enough to pick the smallest coins up off the ground.
Nor were the hedgehogs limited to merely sounding the alarm should they find something amiss. They were, rather, midnight riders and f
irst-wave militia rolled into one, ready to neutralize threats ranging from chemical fires to trespassers on command. Packed aboard their chassis were fluid cannons that could unleash highpressure jets of water, polymer superglues, and anti-traction superlubricants; 12-gauge sidewinder shotguns loaded with disabling aerosol cartridges; laser-dazzler and visual stimulus and illusion banks; and other fruits of UpLink's ambitious nonlethal weapons program.
There were a total of six hedgehogs at the Brazilian compound, four posted near the borders of its approximately rectangular grounds, an additional pair safeguarding its central buildings. Each of the ground patrols encompassed an entire perimeter line and a parallel sector reaching inward for one hundred meters, and each mechanical sentry on that beat had been given a nickname whose first initial corresponded with the first letter of the direction it covered: Ned toured the northern perimeter, Sammy the compound's south side, Ed its eastern margin, Wally its western. The two indoor sentries were Felix and Oscar, assigned to the factory and office complexes respectively. On average, a hedgehog would patrol for eight to ten hours at a stretch before having to recharge its nickel-cadmium batteries at one of the docking stations along its route, with more frequent pauses in the event of an increased task load.
And so they went about their rounds, smooth-running and tireless, responding to an anomalous motion here, an unusual variation in temperature there, investigating whatever seemed not to belong, relaying a stream of environmental data to monitoring stations attended by their human supervisors, and alerting them to any sign of danger or unauthorized entry along the fenced-in margins of the compound.
An invasion from above, however, was another matter altogether.
The hedgehog was midway through its third tour of the facility's western quadrant when its infrared sensors picked up a wavelength reading of twelve to fourteen microns--the distinctive heat signature of a human being--some fifty yards in front of it.