Shadow Watch pp-3 Read online

  Yes, in her mind, in her heart, she was right there in the spacecraft with them, right there, experiencing what they went through at every stage.

  It was T minus five minutes and counting.

  Annie listened to the voices in her phones.

  “—Control, Orion here. APUs juicing up,” Jim was saying. “It’s HI green for one and two, starting three, over.”

  “Roger, proceed, over,” the controller replied.

  “Okay, we’re three for three. Humming away.”

  “Roger, Orion. Beautiful.”

  Annie felt her eagerness building. What she’d heard indicated that the hydrazine-fed auxiliary power units that would gimbal the space shuttle’s main engines — or SSMEs — during ascent were on and functioning normally.

  They were down to the wire.

  She continued listening in as the shuttle went to independent power and its external tank pressured up. Beside her, Gordian stared out the heavy windows facing the pad with rapt fascination. Only the controllers were speaking now; this close to liftoff, firing room protocols required absolute silence from everyone but those in the launch communications loop. The rules were strictly observed, although Annie guessed the overwhelming exhilaration of the moment would have rendered her speechless even if they hadn’t been.

  At T minus two minutes the controller declared they were okay for launch, and Annie felt the expectant tingling that had started in her fingers rush through her entire body.

  She would remember checking the countdown clock on her console at T minus six seconds — when Orion’s three SSMEs were to have ignited exactly a half second apart in a sequence controlled by the shuttle’s onboard computers.

  Instead, it was when things went wrong.

  Terribly, unforgettably wrong.

  From the time Annie picked up the first sign of trouble over her audio link to the disaster’s tragic final moments, everything seemed to worsen with dreadful rapidity, giving rise to a stunned, dreamlike sense of unbelief that, in a way, would almost prove a blessing, numbing her to the full impact of the horror, allowing her to cope with what might otherwise have been overwhelming.

  “Control… I’m seeing a red light for SSME Number Three.” The urgent voice belonged to Jim. An instant later Annie heard something else in the background, the piercingly shrill sound of the master alarm. “We’ve got a hot engine… LH2 pressure’s dropping… smoke detectors activated… there’s smoke in the cabin….”

  Shock bolted through the control room. Her eyes going to the video monitor, Annie reflexively clenched her hands into fists. As she’d glanced at the screen, an inexplicable streak of brightness had shot from Orion above its main engine nozzles.

  The controller was struggling to remain calm. “We’re aborting at once, copy? Evacuate Orbiter.”

  “Read you…” Jim coughed. “I — we… hard to see… ”

  “Jim, white room’s back in position, get the hell out of there!”

  Annie swallowed hard. She had performed the emergency evac drill many times during her flying years, and knew it as well as anyone. The “white room,” a small environmental chamber, was at the end of the crew-access arm, which reached from the service tower to Orion’s entry hatch. Having automatically retracted soon after the ten-minute hold was completed, it now had been moved back into place. According to established abort procedure, the crew was to exit the hatch, then quickly pass through the access arm to a platform on the opposite side of the tower, where five high-tension slide-wires ran down to an underground bunker 1200 feet away. Each wire supported a steel basket that was large enough for two or three astronauts, and would deliver them to a nylon catch net at the opposite end.

  But first, Annie knew…

  First they needed to reach the baskets.

  On the screen, she could see flames discharging from the SSMEs in bright orange-white bursts. Oily black plumes of smoke had enveloped the pad and were churning up around the spacecraft’s aft section and wing panels. The blaze was hot, and it was getting hotter. While Annie believed Orion’s thermal shields might prevent its exterior fuselage from catching fire, the heat and fumes in its interior compartments would be lethal to their occupants. And if the fuel in the ET or solid rocket boosters ignited…

  But she refused to let her mind go racing down that path. Her hands still tightly balled at her sides, Annie sat with her attention riveted on the monitor. Communication between Jim and the firing room had broken off, and she could scarcely make sense of the confused, anxious, overlapping chatter of the controllers in her headset.

  Come on, she thought. Keeping her gaze on the screen, waiting for the crew to emerge from the spacecraft. Where are you?

  Then, suddenly, she thought she saw several figures appear on the railed platform on the west side of the service structure — the side where the escape baskets were located. But the distance of the video cameras from the pad, and the obscuring effect of the smoke, made it hard to be immediately certain.

  Annie watched and waited, her eyes still narrowed on the screen, locked undeviatingly on the screen.

  She had no sooner grown convinced that she had, in fact, spotted Orion’s crew, or at least some of its crew members, than the first explosion rocked the service structure with a force that was powerful enough to rattle the LCC’s viewing window. Annie seemed to feel rather than hear that sound, feel it as a sickening, awful percussion in her bones, feel it in the deepest part of her soul as a huge blast of fire ripped from the tail of the shuttle, leaping upward, engulfing the lower half of the stack.

  She snapped forward in her seat, mouthing a prayer to any God that would listen, watching the tiny human shapes on the tower scramble into the rescue baskets as the flames rose behind them in a solid shaft. She couldn’t distinguish one from another, nor even be certain how many of the astronauts were on the platform. From her perspective they were barely larger than insects.

  The rainbirds above the pad had activated, flooding it with water. For a long, excruciating moment Annie could see nothing through rising clouds of steam and smoke… nothing except the hideous glare of the fire raging, unquenched, around the shuttle.

  And then one of the baskets was released. It arced toward the ground with tremendous speed, moving away from the tower just as a ragged tendril of a flame shot through its metal framework, lashing greedily at the platform. Horrified, Annie could still see members of the team on that platform, their bodies outlined against the flaring edges of the blaze. And then a second basket was released, descending the slide- wire ten or fifteen seconds behind the other — a delay that would have been unacceptable during practice aborts. Annie wondered about it briefly, but pushed her thoughts aside before they had a chance to fully form.

  Yet she had seen what she had seen… and would later reflect that the thoughts you tried not to let into your head sometimes turned out to be the ones that took deepest hold, lingering with the tenacity of restless ghosts.

  The next few minutes were sheer torment. Along with everyone around her, she had been unable to do anything but wait for the astronauts to resume communications from the bunker. Wait, and stare at the monitor, and try not to surrender to the madness of what she’d been witnessing.

  There was silence. And more silence.

  Annie gnawed at her bottom lip.

  Finally she heard an excited voice in her headset.

  “Launch Control, this is Everett. Second basket’s down and I think we’re all—”

  He abruptly broke contact.

  Annie sat without moving, her heart slamming in her chest. She didn’t know what was going on, didn’t even know what she was feeling. The relief she’d experienced upon hearing Lee’s voice had gotten all tangled up with profound despair. Why had he ceased to respond?

  Control was hailing him now. “Lee? Lee, we’re reading you, what is it?”

  Another unbearable measure of silence. Then Everett again, his tone distraught, almost frantic: “Oh, God, God… where’s Jim? W
here’s Jim? Where’s…?”

  Annie would remember little about the moments that followed besides a sense of foundering helplessness, of the world closing in around her, seeming to suck her into an airless, shrinking hole.

  And there was one other thing that would stand out in her memory.

  At some point, she had glanced over at Roger Gordian. His face pale, his posture somehow crumpled, he appeared to have been violently thrown back into his seat. And the empty, blown-away look in his eyes after hearing Lee’s anguished question—

  It was a look that told Annie he knew its answer as well as she did, knew it as well as anyone else in the room.

  Colonel Jim Rowland…

  Jim…

  Jim was gone.

  TWO

  VARIOUS LOCALES APRIL 17, 2001

  5:00 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time

  They had left Portland international jetport in a rented Chevy that had seen better days, taking the Maine Turnpike north for over a hundred miles to the Gardiner terminus, where it merged with the interstate leading by turns northwest and northeast past Bangor to the Canadian border. Now the traffic, sparse since the Bath-Brunswick exits, had entirely dissipated, leaving theirs the only car on a road flanked by a profusion of evergreens and a variety of hardwoods denuded by the long, sedentary New England winter.

  The toll stop was unmanned, with no barricade or surveillance cameras, and an exact-change basket that took the requested fifty cents or whatever the driver’s conscience decided was adequate.

  Pete Nimec fished two coins out of his pocket and tossed them in.

  “Quarters?” Megan Breen said from the passenger seat. They were the first words she’d spoken in almost an hour. “Never knew you were such a choirboy.”

  He regarded her through his dark sunglasses, his foot resting lightly on the brake.

  “You should’ve looked closer,” he said. “They were Canadian coins some toll clerk stuck me with on my last trip to this state. Been waiting to return the favor ever since.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “A year,” he said. “Or so.”

  Nimec drove on through. About fifteen miles beyond the toll he turned right at the Augusta exit, stopped for gas, then continued past some worn-looking strip malls and a couple of traffic circles onto Route 3, a hilly stretch of two-lane blacktop rolling eastward toward the coast.

  Beside him, Megan looked out her window and fell back into preoccupied silence. The sky was a drab gray sheet of clouds, the wind becoming increasingly aggressive as they neared the coast. It sheered off the sides of the car, skirling into the interior through invisible spaces between its doors and frame, blowing across the dashboard in chill currents that slowly brought the heater into submission. In between long unvaried stretches of woods there were filling stations and junk dealers, and more filling stations and more junk dealers, few with any customers, the scenery rambling on with a kind of lowering, stagnant monotony that seemed endless. Meg could have easily believed the haphazard piles of reclaimed sinks and bicycles and Formica tabletops and dishes and garden rakes and knickknacks being hawked out of shacks or trailers along the road had been accumulating for decades and never went anywhere at all.

  Shivering, she sank her chin deeper into her collar. She was wearing a black leather jacket, blue jeans, and black ankle boots. Her thick auburn hair was pulled back in a ponytail under a duckbilled Army field cap.

  Nimec thought she looked uncharacteristically tired around the eyes.

  “Wonder who’d buy those old throwaways,” she said. “I don’t know,” he said. “You’ve got to keep in mind that everything in this part of the country has an afterlife, including inanimate objects.”

  “Sounds unholy.”

  He shrugged. “Some might call it Yankee frugality.”

  She gave him a wan smile, leaned forward, and turned on the radio, but the Boston all-news station she’d been able to pick up earlier in the ride had grown unintelligibly faint. After almost a minute of listening to static drift, she pushed the “Off” button and sat back.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Probably better for you.”

  She glanced over at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “We saw the newspaper headlines at the airport, heard the updates on the radio driving out of Portland,” Nimec said. “I’m no less anxious to hear about the Orion investigation than you or anyone else. But it gets to where you know there won’t be any developments for a while and are just letting the media beat you over the head with information that’s already been reported a thousand times over.”

  “I’m not prone to self-abuse, Pete.”

  “That wasn’t my meaning. But I can’t help thinking it might’ve been better for you to postpone this trip—”

  “We had an agreement. You show me yours, I show you mine.”

  “Nice way of putting it,” he said. “Still, you’ve had a rough couple of days.”

  Megan shook her head.

  “Rough is what happened to those shuttle astronauts. To Jim Rowland and his family. I just want to know the reason it happened,” she said. “I never understood, at least not fully, not viscerally, why it almost always becomes important for the loved ones of plane crash victims to learn the minute details of what went wrong with the aircraft… whether it was engine failure, structural problems, pilot error, whatever. I thought sometimes that knowing wouldn’t change anything for them, wouldn’t bring anyone back. That it might be better if they were encouraged to try moving on and letting the investigators do their work.” She shook her head again. “What bothers me now is that I could’ve been so damned thick.”

  He sat very straight behind the wheel, his eyes on the road. “That won’t get you anywhere. It’s hard to put yourself in people’s shoes when such extreme circumstances are involved.”

  She didn’t say anything. Outside, the repetitive sequence of gas stations and ramshackle shops had been interrupted as they came up on Lake St. George State Park, its wooded campgrounds extending up the rugged granite hillside on their left, the smooth gray opacity of the lake spreading out to the right. Wet and heavy with snowmelt, the carpet of fallen leaves along its near bank seemed lasting and immovable, wholly resistant to the wind’s attempts to sweep it apart.

  “You obviously consider our appointment worth keeping,” she said finally. “Enough so you didn’t rush off to Florida.”

  He shrugged. “The FAA and a half-dozen other federal agencies are already on-site, and that’s not counting NASA’s in-house people. Gord’s also pushing his agency contacts to let UpLink send in a group of its own technical personnel as observers. But a launchpad accident is altogether outside my area of expertise. At the Cape I’d just be in the way. Here I can get something accomplished. We—”

  Nimec suddenly paused, clearing his throat. He had been about to say, We need to find a replacement for Max, and was grateful he’d caught himself before the words slipped out.

  Before his recent death, Max Blackburn had been Nimec’s second in command in UpLink’s security division, a role that had evolved into his becoming the designated troubleshooter at their international facilities, particularly in hot spots where his covert skills sometimes became indispensable. But there was a high price to be paid for Max’s eagerness — even overeagerness — to put himself at personal risk. Max had not died peacefully in his sleep. Far from it, he had gotten killed long before his time, killed in a way Nimec still found difficult to accept or even think about. And in his efforts to avoid thinking about it today, he’d almost forgotten the rumors that Blackburn and Megan had been briefly involved in an intimate relationship.

  Perhaps, then, the shuttle accident — terrible as it had been — wasn’t the only reason for her moodiness. No matter how delicately he tried to frame it, how convenient it was that neither of them had mentioned Blackburn’s name at any point on the way here, there was no hiding the fact that finding someone to take his place was the reason
they had traveled to Maine. If Colonel Rowland’s shadow had been hanging over them since they’d left San Jose that morning, then so too had Max Blackburn’s.

  “We need to shore up our end of things,” Nimec resumed, choosing his words with care. “Those new robot sentries we’re using at the Brazilian ISS plant are fine and dandy, but well-trained manpower’s the foundation of any security operation. We need to beef up our force strength and tighten the organizational structure there. And that really ought to go double for the Russians in Kazakhstan.” He paused. “I only wish Starinov wasn’t under parliamentary heat to keep us out of the loop. You’d expect our saving his skin a few years ago would help on that front, but it’s actually worked against us. Seems his government has made proving it can look out for itself a point of nationalistic pride. Typical paranoid Russkie thinking, you ask me. Give them another two centuries and they still won’t have gotten over Napoleon taking Moscow.”

  “As if we’ll ever forget it was one of their politicians who ordered Times Square leveled at the turn of the millennium.”

  “Not to be compared. Pedachenko was a rogue and a traitor to his own country. And last I heard, Napoleon wasn’t an American—”

  Megan raised her hand. “Wait, Pete. We can get into all that later if you want. But there’s something you said a second ago… were you implying that you suspect the shuttle explosion wasn’t an accident?”