by Tom Clancy
“Laparoscopic exam revealed metastic tumors in the liver and gallbladder,” he says rapidly. “Statistically common once the disease has spread from the intestine to so many of its associated lymph nodes. Would have had a better chance with three lymphomas, but five is quite a bad crop. Very, very unfortunate. ”
Annie sits very still as she listens, but can feel herself crumbling from the inside out, truly crumbling, as if her soul is made of brittle, hundred-year-old plaster. She gives him a decimated look.
“He’ll be gone in five months,” she says, the absolute certainty behind those words filling her with horror and bewilderment. She feels weirdly detached from the sound of her own voice, almost as if she hasn’t really spoken at all, but is listening to a tape recording of herself, or maybe even some flawless impersonation issuing from a concealed intercom.
Dr. Lieberman regards her a moment in that serious yet matter-of-fact way of his. Then he shrugs his sleeve back from his wristwatch, glances down at it, and holds it out to her, turning his arm to display the dial.
“Yes, five months, three days, to be precise,” he says. “We’re on the fast track now. Time runs by until there’s none left. ”
Perplexed by his comment, Annie looks at the watch.
Her eyes quickly grow enormous.
Its face is a blank white circle. Perfectly featureless, without digits, hands, or markings of any kind.
She feels another chunk of herself give way.
Blank.
The face of the watch is blank.
“Stay calm, Annie, it tends to run a bit ahead,” Lieberman says. “There’s still a chance for you to say good-bye. ”
Annie suddenly finds herself out of her chair, and this time makes no attempt to catch her magazine as it spills off her thighs, landing on the floor at her feet. From the corner of her eye, she sees that the cover, which has partially folded under one of the interior pages, consists of a photo of a shuttle and launch tower consumed by a roiling ball of flame. Its bold red copy — also less than altogether visible from where she stands — screams something about an explosion involving Orion, one of the mid-schedule ISS assembly flights.
Confusion churns within her. How can this be? Orion’s mission is still a couple of years off, and besides, the article had been an overview of the ISS program… at least she’d thought it had…
All at once Annie isn’t sure she remembers, just as she’d initially been unable to remember being at the hospital. Her memory seems a flat, slippery surface without depth or width.
“Your husband is in Room 377. But you already know that, you’ve been there before,” Dr. Lieberman is saying. He gestures toward the far end of the corridor. “Not often enough, perhaps, although I’m no one to talk. We’re both busy professionals. ”
Annie watches Lieberman turn in the opposite direction, her eyes following him as he starts up the hall. While his voice had remained neutral, that last remark had been superloaded with accusation, and she is unwilling to let it pass. He might think it is his God-given prerogative to relate his test results without climbing down off his perch to tell her what he means to do about them, but if there is some criticism he wants to level at her, then he damn well ought to be saying it in plain English.
She starts to call out to him, but before she can utter a sound, Lieberman pauses and looks back at her, giving her a thumbs-up.
“Turnips first and always,” he says, and grins. “I’d advise you to hurry. ”
Then he tips her a little salute and hustles up the hall, dwindling in perspective like a motion picture character about to vanish over the horizon.
I’d advise you to hurry.
Her heart stroking in her chest, she forgets about Lieberman and whirls toward the room in which her husband lies dying.
In instant later Annie is standing at its door. Breathless, she feels like she’s come running over to it at full tilt, yet has no sense of her legs having carried her from the waiting room, of physically moving from point A to point B, of transition. It is as if she’d been staring at Lieberman’s back one moment, and found herself here in front of the door the next, trying to stop herself from falling to pieces in spite of the death sentence that has been pronounced upon her husband.
For his sake, trying to hold up.
She takes a deep gulp of air, another. Then she reaches for the doorknob, turns it, and steps through into the room.
The light inside is all wrong.
Odd as it may be for her to register this before anything else, it is nevertheless what happens. The light is wrong. Not exactly dim, but diffuse enough to severely limit her vision. Although she can see the foot of her husband’s bed without any problem, things start to blur immediately beyond it. As if through a layer of gauze, she sees the tubes, fluid drains, and monitor wires that run to the bed, sees the outline of Mark’s legs under the blankets, sees that he is resting on his back, but his face…
She thinks suddenly of those televised news reports in which someone’s features are concealed to protect his or her anonymity, the sort that might involve use of a hidden camera, or show crime suspects being led toward their arraignments by the police. Pictures in which it almost looks as if Vaseline has been dabbed over the part of the frame in which the person’s face ought to appear.
That is how Annie sees her husband from the doorway of Room 377 in the hospital where he will die of cancer in five months and three days. Five months, three days that have somehow collapsed into a dreadful and inexplicable now.
“Annie?”
Mark’s voice is a hoarse whisper. Its weakness shakes Annie, and for an instant she thinks she is going to burst into tears. She covers her trembling lips with her palm.
“Annie, that you?”
She stands there, trying to regain her composure, the room silent except for the quiet beeping of the instruments at Mark’s bedside. The fuzziness of the light makes her feel strangely lost and isolated, like a small boat adrift in fog.
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.