by Tom Clancy
And so it went for another very, very trying half hour.
* * *
“Annie, I realize these are difficult times, but gotta say you’re looking magnificent.”
“That’s very kind of you, Mac.”
“Mac” was McCauley Stokes, the sixtysomething cable talk show moderator popularly known for his folksy interviewing style, ever-present ten-gallon hat, and gold clasped string tie, as well as his string of twentysomething silicon-enhanced wives — all of which served as trademark reminders of his virile, high-in-the-saddle Texas cowboy heritage. The rough-rider routine, however, was as ersatz as his current bride’s outrageous bustline. For while Stokes had been born in Texas, it was to parents who had been the third-generation beneficiaries of an oil family fortune, migrated to the exclusive blue blood community of Greenwich, Connecticut, when he was four years old, and raised and educated him in an atmosphere of pampered gentility, where the closest he’d ever gotten to a horse had been the viewing stands of the local polo grounds.
“Hey, I’m not just being polite, Annie, you really are something else. A woman to be admired in every way.” He tipped his hat. “We’re gonna cover a lot of ground with you tonight, a whole lot, I say…”
My God, he’s doing Foghorn Leghorn.
“… but before we get to Orion, let’s play catch-up, hear how you been holding up on the home front. Last time you were a guest, you’d just returned from six weeks in space, remember? That was back in, what, late ’99?”
“I believe so, Mac. It was after my third and final mission.”
“And since then we know you’ve suffered the loss of your husband, Mark.”
She inhaled, looking at Stokes in the monitor that, in this particular instance, had been provided to her by the studio technicians.
“Yes, that’s true. Mark died just over a year ago.”
“A woman like yourself — two children, high-octane career — it must be tough trying to lead an active social life. Have you dated anyone since Mark passed?”
Deep, deep breath.
“My professional and maternal responsibilities are very fulfilling, Mac. And about all I care to handle right now.”
“But a lady with your beauty, smarts, and class, with all your verve, catch me, has gotta have scores of young bucks locking antlers—”
Bucks? I don’t believe this.
“Mac, forgive me for interrupting, but I’m sure my personal affairs are of less interest to your viewers than the progress we at NASA are making with regard to the Orion investigation.”
“Then I just better put my tongue in a tooth corral and let you do some talking. But first, how about the lowdown how NASA’s gonna convince Roger Gordian to change his mind about bailing out of Brazil…?”
* * *
The place where Orion had been delivered into the world had become its morgue.
At nine-thirty P.M., an hour after her appearance on McCauley Stokes Live—which had concluded with a leering wink from the host, and was, blessedly, her final media engagement of the day — Annie Caulfield stood alone inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at the KSC, a structure that spanned eight acres at the north end of the Cape and rose 525 feet into the air, proportions that made the VAB the only indoor facility in America able to house the space shuttle’s orbiter, solid rocket boosters, and external fuel tank both before and after they were mated into a vertical stack.
About a month ago, one of the center’s two crawler-transporters had borne Orion across the three and a half miles from the VAB to Launch Pad 39A, its engines guzzling 150 gallons of diesel fuel per minute for the entire five hours it took to reach the pad. Earlier today, that same tracked vehicle had conveyed the spacecraft’s remains back to the building before the solemn eyes of NASA personnel like a funeral wagon for a slain Colossus. And now the charred and twisted segments of Orion lay spread across the floor of High Bay 1, smelling of smoke, burned fuel, and melted plastics — the acrid, resinous odor seeping into the processed air of the facility so that it stung the inside of Annie’s nose and made the lining of her throat feel swollen and irritated.
Why had she driven here tonight in her UpLink-leased Saab, making a detour to the Cape before heading back to her condo from the television studio, calling ahead to let her kids’ nursemaid — Sown in from Houston with her family, also courtesy of Roger Gordian — know she’d be an hour late getting home? She scarcely needed to be reminded that her trip to Florida was no all-expenses-paid dream vacation won after a bouncy performance on The Price Is Right, or a knock on the door by someone from Publisher’s Clearinghouse. She had been here at Canaveral only the week before, when the scorched wreckage in the aisles around her was still a commanding, majestic vessel about to pierce the upper limit of the atmosphere. When Jim Rowland had pointed to the Turnip patch on his chest, mouthing their old training class motto to her, flashing his crooked little grin before entering the silver bus that had carried him to his death. When Orion had been something other than a name that would be forever synonymous with tragedy and irrevocable loss.
Terra nos respuet.
No, she did not need any reminders about the reason she was in Florida.
Annie looked around the vast floor of the room, her brows drawn into a contemplative M above her eyes, deep grooves bracketing the comers of her mouth. If the explosion had occurred even seconds after Orion began its ascent, the debris would have been scattered across the bottom of the Atlantic, which would have made its reclamation a prolonged and arduous task requiring a flotilla of recovery ships and scores of divers. But because the fire had taken place prior to liftoff, almost every part of the craft — from the smallest, still-unidentified scraps of scorched metal, to the gigantic bolts that had held the stack together, to large sections of the Orbiter’s delta wings and fuselage — had been salvaged from the launchpad area, then brought here to be tagged and audited like bodily remains awaiting a coroner’s exam. What word could she use to describe her feelings about that? Encouraged? Thankful? It seemed obscene to use either in a context of such utter grimness and heartache.
The segments of the craft and equipment numbered in the hundreds, a few of them relatively unscathed, most damaged by flames and smoke. Tomorrow she would run herd over the first group of forensic specialists to inspect these parts that could never again add up to a whole… no, not even if every last screw and inch of wiring had been recovered. There would be a fresh round of interviews with newspeople, mountains of paperwork, a long list of phone calls — including Roger Gordian’s promised briefing on the Brazilian incident. She needed some rest. A shower, a peek in at the kids, then bed.
So why on earth hadn’t she gone directly home instead of coming to view this terrible, oppressive scene after everyone but the uniformed men in the gatehouse had left for the night?
Annie frowned, trying to think of an answer to her own question — and then suddenly realized that her need to do some thinking might very well be the answer. Or most of it anyway.
If she’d been asked to grade her own first-day-on-the-job media performance, Annie believed she might at best find herself deserving of a C minus. The coverage had veered in a direction she had not meant for it to take… and worse yet, had been torn from her grasp by the newshounds and begun to feed off their intentional and unintentional distortions. What had originated with Gary HoneyVanilla’s offhand question about the possibility of Roger Gordian withdrawing from Brazil had led several media outlets to assert there were “rumors”—plural— of an UpLink pullout by midday, a word that hardened into “reports” at her afternoon press conference — thank you, Allen Murdock — giving the story a false legitimacy, and inciting fervid debate about its ramifications for ISS on Crossfire and kindred early evening shout fests some hours later.
Insofar as Annie could continue tracing its genesis, the next permutation of the story occurred when one of the early evening network news broadcasts blended an analysis of the day’s speculation into its overall coverag
e, creating an ambiguous muddle of fact and fiction that was later used as source material by yet another national news program. It had all culminated with the rootin’-tootin’ McCauley Stokes asking Annie how NASA meant to stop UpLink’s pullout as if it were an actuality rather than something that had sprung from Gary HoneyVanilla’s imagination.
Hence, the story had incredibly gone through seven distinct stages over the course of a single news cycle, and Annie had needed to spend most of her air time with Stokes addressing the compounded inaccuracies rather than getting out the information she’d wanted to present. And despite her repeated clarifications, dismissals, and denials, it was now almost certain that tomorrow would kick off with a swarm of Stokes-derived headlines about the UpLink retreat — adding more quick-to-solidify layers of nonsense to the story, while increasing the self-perpetuating momentum that had allowed it to snowball over the last twenty-four hours.
And it’s going to keep rolling over me unless I start being a lot more careful choosing my words, Annie told herself. This isn’t like anything I’ve dealt with before, and I need to get real about the sort of media glare I’m under.
Perhaps subconsciously, then, another reason she’d come here was to let the reality of the task confronting her fully sink in. Perhaps her initial awkwardness — and occasional defensiveness — in publicly dealing with the aftermath of Orion stemmed from a reluctance to entirely acknowledge what had happened in her own mind. She had assumed a responsibility that would not permit her the shock or denial that were the normal early stages of grief, and had compelled her to take a wrenching shortcut to acceptance. No sense condemning herself for that, but her future effectiveness demanded that she understand and confront her mistakes.
She walked slowly around the room, working her way between the mutilated fragments of what once had been Orion. On this side of her were some cracked thermal tiles, on that side a skeletal mound of aluminum ribs and spars from its airframe, over there an almost unrecognizable chunk of the pilot’s console with a thatch of fused cables dangling from its blown-out rear panel. At her feet, she could see an elevon that must have become detached from the edge of a wing in one of the explosions that had rocked the firing room where she had been a hapless witness to the disaster.
Here, in this place, acceptance was inescapable, and that was also largely what had steered her along past home, the kids, and the chance to get some much needed sleep. And there was one final motivation for this self-guided tour of Hell, one last thing she’d needed to contemplate in absolute solitude… one last thing, while she’d known she would be willing and able to lay herself open to the worst of possibilities.
Amid all the noise pollution that had bombarded her throughout the day, all the half-baked theories she’d heard and tried to deflect, all the craziness, there had been a single burr of speculation that had attached itself to her thoughts and defied her persistent attempts to brush it off. It had first been put to her by the sharper-than-he-seemed Gary Honey Vanilla near the end of their interview.
“… given the nearly simultaneous timing of the two incidents, and knowing that Orion’s primary cargo was a lab element of ISS, has a connection between what happened in Brazil and the shuttle blaze been considered?”
Not by her, not until that moment. But she had been considering it on one level or another ever since.
What if there were proven to be a link between Orion and Brazil?
What if someone had intentionally caused the disaster?
What if Jim Rowland had not perished because of some accidental failure of construction or technology, but a willful, murderous act of destruction by someone who wanted badly enough to keep the launch from taking place?
She stood there in the mortuary silence of the bay, her hands laced behind her back, the crescent-shaped lines around her mouth deepening and deepening as these questions proceeded along their dark, ceaseless orbit through her mind.
What if?
THIRTEEN
SOUTHEASTERN BRAZIL APRIL 21, 2001
In the months after the catastrophic derailment of the Sao Paulo — Rio de Janeiro night train that left 194 passengers dead or seriously injured, there would be many separate investigations with respect to its surrounding conditions and circumstances. To no one’s particular surprise, their findings proved contradictory and disputatious, and led to a prolonged blizzard of litigation. The railroad line and its insurers would blame the company from which it leased the track, citing as factors a plethora of signaling, switching, and maintenance problems. The track owner and its insurers would point their fingers right back at the rail line, alleging a laxity of safety precautions overall, and specifically accusing the engineer, Julio Salles, of job dereliction. Attorneys for the victims and victims’ families would side with the track owner following a computer analysis by accident-reconstruction experts who were hired in support of their class action lawsuit.
Upon Salles’s suspension without pay pending settlement of the various torts, his personal lawyers argued that he was being scapegoated by the rail line and the track owner for their own negligence, while also dragging the corporation that had designed the train’s new electro-pneumatic braking system and Doppler speedometer into the legal cross fire with claims that both systems had malfunctioned in the moments preceding the wreck.
The Brazilian government commission charged with reviewing the incident would take eighteen months and three thousand pages to tamely state their opinion that the facts were inconclusive and endorse an arbitrated agreement between the host of plaintiffs and defendants. With issuance of this white paper report as impetus, deals were cut between nearly all the opposing camps — the sole holdout being Julio Salles, who remained adamant that he was without culpability and insisted his reputation had been irreparably sullied by the allegations leveled against him. Yielding to advice from counsel, he eventually accepted an offer of retirement with full pension and back pay in exchange for a halt to court proceedings and public contention, but would privately continue to feel embittered toward the company to which he had given thirty years of his life, and sink into a deep depression.
Two years to the day after the disaster, Salles would mark that tragic anniversary with a lethal, self-inflicted gunshot wound to his head in the one-bedroom Sao Paulo flat he shared with his wife, making him in a very real sense its 195th human casualty.
In the end, what happened to the train in the hilly darkness along the line between Barra Funda station and its intended destination would remain a mystery.
* * *
It was 11:00 P.M. when the plain gray van pulled onto the roadside embankment a quarter of a kilometer west of where the railway track took a sharp bend along the steeply descending valley wall. The driver immediately cut the ignition and headlamps, then sat behind the wheel studying the rail bed. Although the night was moonless and starless, its darkness untinctured by village lights here in the sparsely populated hill country east of Taubate, he could see the signal post up the tracks through the lenses of his NVGs.
He briefly lowered his goggles and turned toward the rear of the van to give the order. A pair of men dressed in black, balaclava masks over their faces, emerged from the vehicle’s side door. They untied the fastening cords of the tarpaulin that bedecked its roof, then pulled the tarp to the ground to expose a twelve-inch-diameter dish antenna mounted atop the van.
They folded and stowed the tarp, climbed back inside, and made some final calibrations. The dish rotated ninety degrees to the east and spotted on the automatic railway signal. Behind them in the van’s cargo area, a small mobile generator hummed faintly in the dead quiet.
Facing front, the driver put the NVGs up to his eyes again and glanced to his left, westward, the direction from which the train would come rolling down the hillside. Then he shifted his attention to the signal post. When the moment came, the dish would bathe it with a wideband pulse lasting several hundred nanoseconds — less time than it took to blink — then turn on its axis and
emit another short, pulsed beam as the train entered its line of sight. According to the Russian, Ilkanovitch, that was all that would be required.
What was the clever little message he had asked the Albanian to deliver with the rest of the material?
A test and a taste.
Soon Kuhl would see for himself whether either was to his pleasure.
At five before midnight he heard the rumble of the train in the distance. While he knew the open acoustics of the valley would make the train sound closer than it actually was, Kuhl’s teeth came together with an eager click. It would appear within minutes, chugging along at close to seventy miles an hour on the straight downhill gradient.
He watched the signal, which was now displaying a yellow “slow” aspect.
The clank and rumble of the train grew louder.
Closer.
Kuhl watched the signal. He thought he perceived a rise in the generator’s hum, a crackle in the air around him, but doubted it was anything more than his gaining anticipation.
The first pulse was initiated.
Kuhl watched.
The yellow light fluttered off, on, off. Then stayed off.
A breath hissed through his teeth. His jaw muscles tight, he whipped his head to the left and saw the approaching locomotive’s lights splash across the ties. Then it nosed into sight below him, the figure of the engineer visible through the windows of its raised cab, a long, streamlined set of passenger cars hugging the slope behind it.
The dish rotated silently on the roof of the van and released its second pulse.
* * *
She was tall, tan, young, lovely, and from Ipanema, just like the girl in the old song. Christina from Ipanema, could you believe even her name rhymed with the title?
Darvin had met her in a bar at Barra Funda station, where he had stopped for a martini while waiting for his train. He’d been sitting there sipping from his glass, thinking about the big-money deal he’d clinched for his company in New York — well, his father-in-law’s company, if you wanted to nitpick — when she came walking along, just like in the song, strutting right past the bar in this light, scoop-backed, flowery cotton shift — dia — mond earrings, black pearl necklace, chic mehndi lotus tattoo on her bare shoulder, her hips swaying to the rhythmic Afro-samba music blasting from the P.A. system, her hands loaded with shopping bags from the expensive boutiques downtown. Christina from Ipanema.