by Tom Clancy
Asked about the composition of this fact-finding team — and apparently mindful of the widespread criticisms leveled upon NASA in the wake of Challenger — Yarborough replied that it would include personnel from both inside and outside the organization, and promised more specific information about its makeup within days.
According to the prepared text of the statement, Mr. Gordian will take a “personal role in the probe,” and “see that it includes a top-to-bottom review of safety procedures at his ISS production site in Brazil,” where the station’s components are being manufactured under UpLink’s overall management.
Gordian’s assurance is viewed as a sign that he intends to avoid the divisive, public finger-pointing in which NASA and its contractors engaged after Challenger’s ill-fated launch fifteen years ago….
When Nimec and Megan spotted the police cruiser, it was parked at the gravel shoulder of the road, about a car length behind a red Toyota pickup, its roof racks throwing off circus strobes of light.
The two officers, who had obviously arrived at the scene in it, were scuffling with a third man outside the pickup.
One of the lawmen was fortyish and burly and wore a Hancock County deputy’s uniform and badge. The other was perhaps twenty years younger and forty pounds leaner and wore a State of Maine warden’s uniform and badge. The civilian, a tall, dark-haired man in a green chamois shirt, tan goose-down vest, jeans, and hiking boots, was standing out on the road with his back pressed up against the driver’s door of his truck. The warden was jammed halfway inside the door, his head under the steering column, his body bent across the front seat, his backside sticking almost comically out of the cab. The deputy had the pickup driver’s collar bunched in his fist and was attempting to wrestle him away from the door, but he was putting up a hard fight, shoving the deputy back with one hand, throwing punches at his face and neck with the other. The cop had an open cut below his right eye. A pair of mirrored sunglasses lay on the blacktop near his feet, one lens popped out of the wire frame. He was shouting furiously in the pickup driver’s face, but neither Pete nor Megan could make out what he was saying through the windows of their Chevy.
“What in the world’s going on up there?” she asked, peering out her side of the windshield.
Nimec breathed deeply and slowed the car.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But you see the guy in the green shirt?”
She glanced over at him, reading his face. “Pete, don’t tell me.”
Nimec breathed again.
“Tom Ricci,” he said.
She looked outside again, rolling down her window to try and hear what the shouting was about.
Unable to pry him away from the truck, the thickset deputy had switched tactics and moved in on Ricci, throwing his greater weight against him, getting him in a clinch. Standing his ground, Ricci caught him on the cheek with two quick overhand punches, then followed through with a right uppercut to the jaw. The deputy rocked backward on his heels, breaking his hold, his Smokey the Bear hat sailing off his head to the ground, where it flipped over once and then landed beside the broken sunglasses.
“You crazy son of a flatlander bitch!” he shouted, spitting blood. “I’m tellin’ you, move away from that door or you’re gonna be in deeper shit than you already are!”
Ricci stood there looking at him, hands balled into fists. The warden he’d pinned in the door squirmed a little, and Ricci kicked him in the back of the shin with his heel. A string of curses gushed from inside the cab.
Ricci seemed to pay no attention to them. Nor were any of the men yet paying attention to the Chevrolet that had eased to a halt some ten yards down the road.
“I already explained how it has to work,” Ricci told the deputy. “I get to keep my product, your boy Cobbs gets to pull his ass out of the air. Otherwise we can all stick around here from now till Saint Swithen’s Day.”
The deputy wiped his mouth, glanced at the red-flecked saliva on his hand, and spat again.
“You got balls,” he said, glaring. “Givin’ me orders, expectin’ me to believe some concoction about—”
“The catch is legit, Phipps.”
“Says you. As Cobbs tells it, you ’n’ your crackpot tender were way out past your zone.”
“We can talk about Dex later. You and Cobbs saw my license.”
“But I didn’t see where your boat was, or where you was divin‘, or where you come up, and besides, that’s all his area of respons’bility.” Phipps poked his chin out at the pickup. “You let Cobbs be ’n’ leave us the totes without any more carryin’ on, maybe I let you slide for assaultin’ an officer.”
“Two officers! Don’t you let the wicked fuck forget about me, Phipps!” Cobbs shouted from inside the cab. His head was still wedged beneath the steering wheel. “Don’t you goddamn let him—”
Ricci kicked Cobbs with the heel of his boot again and his sentence ended in a yelp of pain.
Phipps released a heavy sigh.
“Two officers,” he said.
“Two crooked officers.”
Phipps frowned indignantly.
“That’s it, no more crap from you,” he said, dropping his hand to his holster and bringing out his side arm, a.45 Colt automatic.
In the Chevy, Megan turned to Nimec.
“Uh-oh,” she said. “Looks like trouble.”
He nodded and reached for his door handle.
“Sit tight,” he said.
“Pete, you sure it’s wise to—”
“No,” he said. “I’m not.”
And then shouldered open the door, exited the car, and walked toward the pickup over the narrow country road.
That was when Sheriff’s Deputy Phipps seemed to take notice of him — belatedly and for the first time. He cast a quick glance at Nimec, then past him at the parked Chevy, keeping the pistol trained on Ricci… who had also partially turned in Nimec’s direction.
“You blind, mister?” Phipps said. One eye on him, the other on Ricci. “Or did you just happen to miss what’s going on here?”
Nimec shrugged.
“Tourist,” he said. “We’ve been waiting awhile.”
The deputy said nothing. He looked at the Chevy again, this time suspiciously checking out its front tag.
“It’s a rental,” Nimec said. Stalling, trying to cook up some kind of plan that would extricate Ricci, not to mention himself, from the situation.
Whatever the hell the situation was.
“Wife and I are headed for Stonington,” he said. “Figured I’d ask when we might be able to pass.”
Phipps stared at him, vexed and confused.
“You see,” Nimec said, “we’ve got reservations at an inn that they’ll only hold for another half hour. And being that we just drove all the way up from Portland on Route 1—”
“Which is what you’re gonna have to swing back around onto,” Phipps interrupted. “Right this minute.”
Nimec shook his head.
“Sorry,” he said. “Can’t do that.”
Phipps looked incredulous. “What did you say?”
“Can’t do that,” Nimec repeated, knowing he’d really stepped into it now. “There aren’t any other inns open. Being that this is the off-season.”
Phipps flushed. Though he was still pointing his gun at Ricci, his attention had turned fully to Nimec.
“Another fuckin’ flatlander, why the fuck we let them people into the fuckin’ state of Maine?” Cobb screamed from inside the truck, his voice only slightly muffled. “You better arrest the whole queer bunch of them, Phipps, ’cause my back’s gonna snap like a twig I stay stooped over like this!”
Phipps eyed Nimec with a kind of hostile exasperation, unconsciously wagging his head, looking uncertain about what to do next.
An instant later Ricci made the decision for him. Taking advantage of Phipps’s distraction, he suddenly stepped away from the door of the pickup, caught hold of his outstretched gun hand at the wrist, and bent it sharply
backward, simultaneously turning sideways and snatching the pistol with his free hand.
Phipps released a cry of pain and surprise as the pistol was torn from his grasp. He was still gaping in disbelief when Ricci’s leg snapped forward and up in a powerful front kick, the ball of his foot striking him in the broad, chunky stretch of his stomach. The air whoofing out of him, he stumbled backward and landed hard on his bottom, his legs wishboned in front of him.
Cobbs, meanwhile, had pulled his head out of the pickup’s open door and come charging at Ricci from behind. But before he had gotten more than a couple of feet, Ricci spun in a smooth circle on his left leg, his right leg swinging parallel to the ground and thrusting out at the knee, catching Cobbs in the groin with a roundhouse kick. He flew back against the side of the car and doubled over, groaning, his hands between his thighs.
Ricci ejected the Colt’s magazine and tossed it into the spindling roadside brush, then shoved the gun into his vest pocket. Nodding at him, Nimec rushed over to Cobb and took his pistol from its holster. Its clip joined the one that was already in the bushes.
Ricci knelt over Phipps and patted down the bottom of his trouser legs.
“Nothing there to say peekaboo?” he said.
Phipps glared and shook his head.
“Okay,” Ricci told him, stepping back. “Here’s how it goes. We’re all driving off, me with my catch, you two without your guns, our friendly tourist with his nice wife and rental car. You forget about this thing, maybe I don’t report the little scam you and Cobbs tried running on me to Fish and Game or the attorney general’s office down in Augusta. You really behave yourselves, maybe I won’t tell anybody in town how I kicked both your asses and disarmed you barehanded. In two seconds flat.”
Phipps continued glaring at him in baleful silence for another moment, then slowly nodded.
“Good,” Ricci said. “Stay right where you are until I’m gone. Ground needs thawing anyway.”
Phipps snorted, hawked over his shoulder, and looked back up at him. “How the hell am I supposed to explain losing my gun?”
Ricci shrugged.
“Your problem,” he said.
Behind them, Cobbs was still leaning against the pickup, moaning and clutching himself. Ricci turned, strode over to him, grabbed his shoulder, and shoved him roughly away from the truck. Cobbs tripped and fell on his side, drawing his knees toward his chest.
Ricci looked at Nimec, then moved up close to him.
“Poor bastard should’ve kept his hands off my ignition keys,” he said in a voice too low for the others to hear. “Welcome to Vacationland, Pete. Better get back in your car and follow along behind me. I’ll explain everything once we’re at my place.”
* * *
They had come in from the rugged plateau country of Chapada dos Guimarães, a convoy of four dusty jeeps bumping along the unpaved track in the deepening dusk, traversing the seventy kilometers to their destination with arduous slowness. After many long hours of riding shotgun in the forward car, Kuhl had finally seen the compound through a break in the overhanging foliage, and then ordered their headlights dimmed and their vehicles pulled off the road.
Once under cover of the trees, he turned to his driver. “Que horas são?”
The driver showed him the luminous dial of his wristwatch.
Kuhl studied it a moment without comment. Then he glanced over his seat rest and nodded to the man behind him.
“Vaya aqui, Antonio.”
Antonio returned the nod. He was dressed entirely in black and had a Barrett M82A1 sniper’s rifle across his lap. Accurate to a range exceeding a mile, it utilized the same self-loading, armor-piercing.50-caliber ammunition normally fired by heavy machine guns — bullets capable of pounding through an inch or more of solid steel armor. The weapon’s incredible firepower and semiautomatic action were its notable advantages over other sniper guns. On the negative side, it was weighty, long-barreled, and would kick back with a recoil matching its destructive performance. But Antonio’s targets would be shielded, and he would need to penetrate that shield at a considerable distance.
Slinging the Barrett over his shoulder, he opened his door and slipped from the jeep into the darkness.
Kuhl settled back and looked out the windshield. His team was right on schedule despite the wearisome inconveniences of their ride. There was nothing to do now except wait for Antonio to complete his work, and then for the others to arrive and give their signal. Perhaps he would even be able to glimpse them coming over the treetops.
They sat in absolute silence, hard, lean men in black combat outfits, their faces daubed from chin to forehead with camouflage paint. All but the sniper who’d gone on ahead carried French FAMAS assault rifles fitted with modular high-explosive munition launchers and day/ night target-tracking systems.
Still undergoing field trials by the French military, these adaptations of the standard FAMAS guns represented the state of the art in small arms, and were not slated for mass production or issuance to general infantry troops until 2003—two full years in the future.
Kuhl always made it a point to stay ahead of the game. It cost money, true, but unless one was willing to accept failure, the expense was more than acceptable. And he himself was paid handsomely enough that he didn’t mind spreading the wealth.
Impatient, he raised his night-vision goggles to his eyes, swung them from the compound’s checkpoint gate to the pair of men occupying its sentry booth, then studied the irregular outline of the buildings that lay beyond. He wanted nothing more than to get moving. While his team might be outside the observable range of the compound’s guards, he had seen enough in his mercenary career to know that only a fool or an amateur neglected to consider the unpredictable, and that each passing second brought an increased risk of discovery. It mattered little how well they formulated their plans, or how careful they were in bringing about their execution.
Secrecy, he thought. It was an essential requirement of his profession, and yet the very idea paradoxically seemed a joke. In an age when satellites could photograph a mole on your chin from somewhere up in space, there were no true blind spots, and nobody was ever out of sight for long. The best one could wish for was temporary concealment. If his men failed at that, if they were noticed too soon, all their elaborate precautions would be worthless.
Kuhl sat, watched, and waited. In his taut silence, he could almost feel that gigantic, damnable eye overhead, looking down, pressing down. Seeing what it wanted to see, peering through every shadow, its relentless gaze scouring the world….
Yes, Kuhl felt it up there, he did, and was only hoping it would once again blink as he went about the lucrative business of destruction.
“There’s smoke in the cabin. Elevated CA 19-9 and CA 125 levels. LH2 pressure’s dropping. Terra nos respuet. ”
Annie feels her book about to slip off her lap, catches it just in the nick of time. She blinks once or twice, completely out of sorts, guessing she’d sunk into a light sleep while reading on her sofa.
She had been reading, hadn’t she?
She readjusts the book and glances up at the man standing in front of her, the man whose voice startled her from her doze. In his midfifties, he has reddish-brown hair, a full mustache, and is wearing a white doctor’s frock. Phil Lieberman, she thinks. The oncologist who has taken over her husband’s case, not exactly the type to make house calls. She wonders what he’s doing in her living room, wonders whether one of the kids might have let him in the door… but then suddenly realizes that this isn’t her living room after all, isn’t even part of her home, and that the children are nowhere around her.
She straightens, blinks again, rubs her eyes.
The chair on which she is sitting is contoured plastic. The air has a recycled quality and carries commingled antiseptic and medicinal smells. The walls are an institutional noncolor.
It abruptly dawns on her that she is in the hospital.
In the hospital, in the third-floor waiti
ng room that has become so numbingly familiar over these past few months, and where she must have dropped off like a stone with an open book on her lap. The hospital, of course. However strange it might ordinarily seem for her to have forgotten, these are far from ordinary days, and her brief disorientation is understandable in view of what’s been happening in her life. She has gone for weeks with precious little rest, rushing from her husband’s bedside to her training sessions at the Center and back again, trying not to neglect the kids amid her compounding pressures. It would not be the first time lately that the effort of keeping everything together has caught up to her without warning.
Looking at the doctor, she begins fidgeting nervously with the edges of the book — actually, she sees now, it is a magazine, a dog-eared copy of Newsweek with a featured piece about upcoming space shuttle launches connected with the ISS program — the magazine, then, that is spread across her thighs. The doctor’s expression is unrevealing, his voice without intonation, but there is a sobriety in his eyes that sends a cold, silent shiver running through her.
“Like the old Titan rockets,” he says. “Third stage fires, you’re up and out. ”
“What?” she says. “What was it you—”
“Mark’s latest tests, we need to discuss their results, ” he interrupts with the kind of patronizing abruptness medical professionals seem to take as their right, an exalted privilege bestowed on them the moment they recite the Hippocratic Oath. It is as though even the ones capable of showing some compassion — and Annie acknowledges that Lieberman has, by and large, been decent with her — must insist on reminding you they have other patients, other cases, more urgent demands than having to explain their findings.