by Tom Clancy
“No,” he said. “Nor do I see any cause to be suspicious. But I like to be ready.”
“And you honestly feel Tom Ricci’s the best person to get things in shape?”
Nimec paused again, no stranger to her skepticism in connection with Ricci.
“I appreciate your reservations and agree he’s a long shot,” he said. “But you ought to keep an open mind. At least meet the guy before ruling him out as a candidate for the job.”
She frowned. “Pete, I’m sure Ricci’s a good man, and if I wasn’t willing to give him a fair shake I wouldn’t be here. But if we’ve learned anything from Russia and Malaysia, it’s that UpLink’s global enterprises can put us smack in the middle of some incredibly volatile political situations. You and Vince Scull have both insisted we need to raise our security force to a higher level of performance so we can adequately respond next time we’re caught in the cross fire. I’m just agreeing with you, and proposing that someone with a less, shall we say, checkered background would be best qualified to implement the changes that have to be made.”
Nimec furrowed his brow. He’d heard her argument before, and certainly acknowledged that it had a degree of merit. But…
But what? Was he simply being mulish insisting that Ricci had what it took to help restructure a world-spanning organization that was, as Megan had suggested, increasingly coming to resemble the military in style and scope?
Surprised by his own doubts, Nimec gave the matter a rest and concentrated on his driving. The lake area behind him now, he made a left turn off Route 3 in the town of Belfast and got onto U.S.1 northbound, crossing the bridge that spanned the harbor inlet, then heading on along the coast. Here the roadside junk dealers were shuffled in with restaurants and summer resorts and had obvious upscale pretensions, their deliberately quaint shop fronts geared toward tourists rather than hardscrabble locals. Most had the word ANTIQUES hand-painted across their windows in ornate lettering. Many were closed for the winter. The motels, inns, and cottages were also battened down for the dregs of the season, their lawn signs wishing patrons a happy and joyful Christmas and inviting them back after Memorial Day.
They continued north on the coastal highway, talking very little for some miles, catching frequent glimpses of Penobscot Bay behind and between the tourist traps on the right side of the road — its shoreline extending in belts of jumbled stone and harsh wind-carved ledges, giving intimations of a primal wildness that seemed dormant rather than lost, capable of hostile reassertion. There was a constant sense of nearness to the sea, the sky swirling with gulls, the water refracting enough pale sunlight to lift some of the cloud cover’s gravid heaviness.
“It’s much different here from inland, isn’t it?” Megan said at length. “Still sort of forlorn, but, I don’t know…”
“Beautifully forlorn,” Nimec said.
“Something like that,” she said. “There’s a disconnection from the rest of the world that makes me understand why Ricci chose this place to hide out. If you’ll pardon my choice of words.”
“Nothing wrong with it,” Nimec said. “That’s exactly what he’s been doing for the last eighteen months.”
Nimec nodded toward a green and white road sign ahead of them that read:
ROUTE 175—BLUE HILL, DEER ISLE, STONINGTON
“Looks like we’re coming up to our turn,” he said. “Another forty minutes or so and you’ll be meeting my friend and former colleague for yourself.”
As it happened, he was right about the turn but wrong about the length of time remaining on their trip, for only ten minutes later Megan Breen got her introduction to Tom Ricci… as well as two local law-enforcement officers.
It was by no means a pleasant encounter for any of them.
Nor was it one Megan would soon forget.
2:00 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time
It always struck Nordstrum as fascinating that Roger Gordian, who had made opening up and changing the world through telecommunications a crusade, rarely opened himself up to the world, and possessed the most contained and unchanging nature of anyone he knew. But that sort of contradiction seemed a familiar story with men of towering accomplishment, as if by directing vast amounts of energy outward to achieve their broad public goals, they drained off reserves that most ordinary people applied to their private lives.
Or maybe I’m getting carried away and Gord just likes his furniture, Nordstrum thought as he entered Gordian’s office.
He paused inside the doorway, giving the room a bemused visual audit, comparing the way it looked now to how it had looked a decade ago, a year ago, or the previous autumn, when he’d last been inside it. Not to his surprise, everything was precisely the same — and in the same condition — as always. The place was a testament to careful upkeep, a paradigm of maintenance and preservation. Over the years, Gord’s desk had been refinished, his chair reupholstered, the pens on his blotter refilled, but heaven forbid that any of them ever might be replaced.
“Alex, thanks for coming.” Gordian got up from behind his desk. “It’s been too long.”
“Gord and Nord, together again for one outstanding SRO performance,” he said. “How are Ashley and the kids?”
“Pretty good,” Gordian said. He hesitated. “Julia’s moved back home for a while. Personal reasons.”
Nordstrum gave him a meaningful look.
“Husband with her?”
Gordian shook his head.
“The dogs?”
“Probably napping on my sofa as we speak,” Gordian said, and then motioned Nordstrum toward a chair.
Slam, Nordstrum thought. End of subject.
They sat facing each other across the desk. There was, to be sure, an aura of bedrock consistency and dependability here that Nordstrum, who had left his Czech homeland, a White House cabinet appointment, a D.C. town house, possessions, lovers, and most recently his multifaceted career behind with a lightness of foot equal to Fred Astaire sliding across a dance floor, found impressive and reassuring. It wasn’t as if time was standing still — Gord’s hair was a little grayer and thinner than it used to be, his once-petite secretary had filled out around the hips, and on the positive side, both had managed to stay reasonably in line with current fashions. But through tide and tempest, Gord’s office was Gord’s office.
“So,” Gordian said. “How’s temporary retirement agreeing with you?”
Nordstrum raised his eyebrows. “Temporary? You need to check your sources.”
“Spoken like a true journalist,” Gordian said. “Alex, you’re under fifty and one of the most competent and knowledgeable men I know. I’d just guessed you would eventually want to get back to work.”
“I won’t reject the compliments,” he said. “Fact is, though, that after the crypto brawl, and almost being hijacked aboard a nuclear submarine, and getting frozen so far out of the White House that its gardening staff fends me off with hedge clippers if I get too close, I don’t feel the urge to be anything but a couch potato.”
Gordian sat there without comment for several moments, Mount Hamilton visible through the window behind him, thrusting high above San Jose’s urban development, extending the atmosphere of benign yet unassailable permanence beyond the confines of the room.
“I know you were at the Cape for the shuttle launch,” Nordstrum said. “I’d tuned in to watch it on CNN.” He shook his head. “A god-awful tragedy.”
Gordian nodded.
“Not something I’ll ever forget,” he said. “The sense of loss… of personal grief in that control room can’t be described.”
Nordstrum looked at him. “I’ve been assuming,” he said, “that Orion’s why you got in touch.”
Gordian met his gaze and slowly nodded again. “I was conflicted about it,” he said. “While I respect your wish to stay free of involvement, I could use your advice. A great deal.”
“Every time I think I’m out of it they pull me back in,” Nordstrum said.
Gordian gave him a thin smi
le. “Thanks for sparing me the full Pacino impression.”
“Don’t mention it.”
There was another pause. Gordian steepled his fingers on the desk, looked down at them, then looked up at Nordstrum.
“You wrote an analysis of the Challenger disaster for Time magazine back in the eighties, before we knew each other,” he said. “I never forgot it.”
“And I never knew you read it,” Nordstrum said. His brow creased. “That was my first major piece. If recollection serves, we met a month or two after its publication.”
“At a Washington cocktail party thrown by one of our mutual acquaintances,” Gordian said.
“Coincidence?”
Nordstrum waited.
Gordian didn’t respond.
Nordstrum sighed, giving up.
“After Challenger went down, the media struck up the tune that NASA and the space program were finished,” he said. “I remember hearing this constant rattle about how an entire generation of children had suffered permanent emotional scarring from having viewed the explosion on television, and innumerable comparisons between that event and JFK’s assassination, and predictions that we would never be able to recover or muster the will to go into space again.”
“You very strongly attacked that notion.”
“Yes, for a whole list of reasons,” Nordstrum said. “It allows a terrible accident to be packaged as a neat blend of pop psyche and sensationalism for the nightly news and the Oprah show. It completely discounts human resiliency and says we’re compelled to act as we do by external forces that are beyond our control. Maybe worst of all, it assumes failure to be a given, and then relieves us of responsibility by promoting a linear fiction, a simplistic cause-and-effect explanation for that failure. ‘Don’t blame me, blame my psychological deficits.’ In my opinion, nothing could be more misleading and demoralizing.”
Gordian looked at him. “You see why I miss having you around, Alex,” he said.
Nordstrum smiled a little.
“Lay a soapbox at my feet and that’s what you get,” he said after a moment. “At any rate, the central point of my article was that blaming Challenger for the loss of public confidence in NASA was getting causes and symptoms totally mixed up. We all grieved for the astronauts who died aboard that spacecraft, but the agency’s tarnished reputation after the accident didn’t result from a national trauma. It was a consequence of institutional problems that had been developing and compounding for quite a while, and the ugly blame game that erupted when the Rogers Commission, and later the Augustine Report, brought them to light.”
“Concluding that NASA’s internal bureaucracy had gotten so large there was a total disintegration of authority and decision-making procedures,” Gordian said. “Each manager had become lord of his own kingdom, and their feuding had broken down vital lines of communication.”
“That’s the short version, yes. But it misses too much that’s really disturbing. Information about the O-ring weakness and other potential launch hazards was suppressed — consciously, actively suppressed — because those managers were looking out for their own competitive interests to the exclusion of everything else. Funding needs, political pressures, and production deadlines drove agency officials to lower the bar on safety practices. A lot of people were worried about the launch, yet nobody wanted to be the one to stand up and make the decision to scrub. It wasn’t that they intended to put the astronauts at increased risk, it was that they’d succumbed to a kind of organizational group-think that conditioned them to see the risks as being less serious than they clearly were. With every launch, they became more like problem gamblers, telling themselves their luck would hold and everything would work out okay. They made their mistakes with their eyes wide open.”
Gordian had been watching Nordstrum quietly as he spoke. Now he crossed his arms on the desktop and leaned forward over them.
“Alex, it isn’t the same with Orion,” he said. “The space agency is a different entity these days. More cohesive and goal-oriented. More transparent in its internal operations. Its standards have been restored. I never would’ve committed UpLink’s resources to ISS if that hadn’t been demonstrated to me.”
Nordstrum looked thoughtful.
“Gord, you may be sold,” he said. “But the currency of trust NASA built up with the public during its Mercury and Apollo years is almost depleted. Selling them is going to be a problem.”
“You aren’t sounding very sanguine.”
Norstrum expelled a breath. “The accident creates uncertainty even for those of us who believe in space research. And long before Orion, a great many taxpayers, maybe a majority, considered the program a wasteful frittering away of their money. For its critics, a forty-billion-dollar international space station, with hundreds of millions going to bail out the Russians — who couldn’t pay for their end despite Starinov’s pledges to the contrary — is emblematic of that waste. They haven’t seen any practical value in it and nobody’s done an adequate job of making them feel otherwise. And now, with the death of Colonel Rowland…” He spread his hands. “I wish I could be more optimistic.”
Gordian leaned further across the desk.
“Okay,” he said. “What do we do?”
Nordstrum sat quietly for several moments before answering.
“I’m not your paid consultant anymore. Not a newspaper columnist. I can only speak to you now as someone who sees the workings of government and big industry as countless other people in this country do, from the outside through shaded windows, and maybe that’s a good place to come at this from, maybe it makes it easier to be their voice.” He paused. “Convince them, convince me, that the Orion investigation is going to be completely aboveboard. I don’t want to hear about its progress from some evasive media spokesman who believes his primary responsibilities are to spin the facts and keep me mollified while those in the know go about their work in secrecy. I’m sick of those types and am going to hit the clicker the instant they show their faces on my TV screen. When something surfaces that hurts, let it hurt. For once, just once, I want the truth straight up. And I want it from someone I can trust.”
He fell silent, studying the brawny shoulder of Mount Hamilton through the window.
The silence lasted awhile.
At last Gordian unfolded his arms, lifted them off the desk, and reclined in his chair so slowly Nordstrum could hear every creak of its burnished leather as a separate and distinct sound.
“Anything else?” he asked.
“As a matter of fact, yes.” Nordstrum checked his watch. “Don’t let another news cycle go by without a statement to the media. There’s still time to put one out before the end of the business day. And before the six-thirty network broadcasts.”
Gordian smiled a little.
“Hell of a mouthful,” he said. “Just like the old days.”
“The sole difference being,” Nordstrum said, “that in the old days I got handsomely compensated.”
* * *
Their insertion technique highly modem, their means of delivery an airborne relic, the twelve HAHO jumpers vaulted from a blacked-out DC-3 that had carried Allied troops on missions of liberation during World War II.
This was a very different sort of mission, plotted by men with very different objectives.
The propeller-driven transport had flown from a hidden airstrip in the Pantanal, a sprawling wetlands in central Brazil, to within a dozen miles of their drop zone outside the frontier city of Cuiabá. While a traditional parachute jump might have occurred at an altitude of three thousand feet, they were ten times that distance from the ground when they exited the plane. It was a height at which the atmosphere was too thin to support human life and where, even in the tropics, the extreme cold could damage the flesh and freeze the eyelids shut.
Survival for the high-altitude-high-opening team therefore hinged upon specialized equipment. Oxygen canisters rigged to their jumpsuits made it possible for them to breathe. Protective goggles
allowed them to keep their eyes open in the frigid, lashing wind. Pullover face masks and thermal gloves offered insulation against the worst effects of exposure.
Free fall through the moonlit sky was brief. Their airfoil-shaped chutes released moments after they jumped, unfolding front to back, then from the middle out to the stabilizer edges — a sequence that checked their deployment until they were just below the backwash of the props, reducing the opening shock.
Their canopies filled with air, hands on their steering toggles, the jumpers descended at an initial rate of about eighteen feet per second, passing through a high layer of cirrocumulus clouds composed of supercooled water and ice. Fastened to their harness saddles, the bags containing their assault weapons doubled as seats that helped distribute their weight and compensate for drag.
The lead jumper was a man who had gone by many names in the past, and presently chose to be called Manuel. He snatched a glance down at the altimeter atop his reserve chute, checked his GPS chest pack unit for his current position, and then signaled the HAHO team to form up in a crescent around him. He wore a small, glowing blue phosphorous marker on his back, as did three of the other jumpers. Another four had orange markers, the remaining four yellow ones. The colored markers would allow them to maintain close formation as they glided through the inky darkness, and provide easy identification when they broke off into separate groups on the ground.
For now, however, it was vital that they stay together through their long cross-country flight, silently riding the night wind, sweeping down and down toward their target like winged, malicious angels of death.
THREE
VARIOUS LOCALES APRIL 17, 2001
FROM AN ASSOCIATED PRESS BULLETIN:
Space Agency and UpLink International Pledge to Keep ISS on Track Despite Shuttle Disaster
Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral-In a joint statement released late this afternoon through NASA press spokesman Craig Yarborough, agency officials and Roger Gordian, whose firm, UpLink International, is chief contractor of the ISS project, have declared their undivided commitment to resuming assembly of the orbital station as soon as possible. “We will reach beyond loss and grief,” Yarborough said in his opening remarks, and then went on to announce the formation of an investigative task force to determine the cause of the blast, which has reawakened grim memories of the 1986 Challenger accident that claimed the lives of seven astronauts and nearly crippled America’s space program.