Siege of Lightning

by R. J. Pineiro

  A knock on the door made him reach for his Beretta. He pulled it out of the Velcro-secured holster.

  “Stone? You in there?”

  Hiding the weapon behind his back, Cameron approached the door and opened it. Outside stood two large muscular men in their late twenties, dressed in two-piece suits and overcoats. One held a can of soda in his left hand and a paperback in his right. The second man kept one hand inside a coat pocket while holding up two identification cards with the other.

  Amateur hour, thought Cameron as he briefly eyed each of the rookies and checked their IDs. Never compromise your hands.

  “I’m heading back to the embassy to get some sleep,” Cameron said, holstering the Beretta. “Call me if she comes around, and please do me a favor and stay frosty. Trash the reading material, keep your hands free at all times, and split up. One outside in the hall and the other near her bed, but away from the windows. Switch places every half hour.” Without waiting for a response, Cameron grabbed his coat and walked past the startled duo.

  * * *

  Cameron arrived at the American Embassy thirty minutes later. He used the elevator instead of the stairs, like most everyone else in the building. Tired and nauseated from lack of sleep, he didn’t feel like exerting the additional effort, especially after fighting a petulant morning crowd in the Metro. He pushed the button and the elevator doors closed.

  Cameron briefly closed his eyes and yawned. His mind automatically began to go through a list of possible explanations for last night’s incident, but he shook the thoughts away. Rest first, then analyze.

  The doors opened. Cameron stepped away from the elevator, turned left, and walked toward his room at the other end of the narrow hall. As he pulled out his key, he noticed a white piece of paper folded in half and taped to his door. Cameron pulled it off and read it. A note from his case officer. A meeting with the French police had been set up for later that day at the hospital. A meeting? What’s going on? Are these the same cops who didn’t have a clue about the shooting last night? Could they have really come up with something useful since then? He exhaled and accepted the fact he would have to wait a few more hours before finding out. He unlocked the door.

  Although he had a fairly small room, he didn’t have to share it with another operative as had been the case in Mexico City. Cameron reached for the small Sony stereo system next to the single bed and tuned into Armed Forces Radio, one of the few English-speaking radio stations in Europe. He barely heard the music as his eyes drifted toward the only photograph in the room, a black-framed eight-by-ten standing over the stereo. It showed him and three members of his old platoon in Vietnam. Three that never made it back alive. Cameron’s eyes filled when he focused on the blonde skinny kid with one arm around Cameron’s neck. A young private by the name of Jim Skergan, a good kid from the steel towns of Pennsylvania. Cameron had known him for only a few months. He instantly regretted the thought, but the memory came rushing back, just as it had hundreds of times before. Skergan’s eyes pleaded with Cameron. Go, Cameron. You can…make it on your own. I’ll hide…and wait…for you to…come back.

  Cameron managed to shake the thought away, and his eyes focused on his war decorations, also framed, next to the photograph. His hypocritical ribbons and medals, as he thought of them. Decorations given to him after he had left Skergan to die at the hands of the savage Vietcong. Cameron didn’t deserve them. Skergan did. The private had been the one that had offered to die to save Cameron. He had been the one that had convinced Cameron to save himself.

  War decorations. Nothing but meaningless scraps of cloth and metal that reminded him of his past, yet he had kept them for all these years. He loathed their sight, but he had hung on to them to remind himself of past sins. Cameron saw them as a path to atonement, a path to redemption through self-inflicted mental punishment.

  Cameron glanced at the photograph once more. As he eased himself on the bed and he closed his eyes, Skergan’s face filled his mind again. Go Cameron. You can make it on your own…

  CHAPTER THREE

  SSMEs

  LAUNCH COMPLEX 39, PAD A. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FLORIDA

  A tall female senior engineer walked past the guard station that led to the Mobile Launch Platform. She flashed her badge and waved at the guards, who smiled and waved back.

  “Morning, Vera.”

  She knew them both. Vera Baumberger had been a Rocketdyne engineer since the summer of 1972, when Rockwell International won the 2.6-billion-dollar contract to design and build the space-shuttle orbiter, mandated to fly one hundred times each, and capable of six flights per year. The contract, Vera recalled, included system-integration responsibility, where Rockwell would guarantee that all components—including Martin Marietta’s External Tank, Morton-Thiokol’s Solid Rocket Boosters, and Rocketdyne’s Space Shuttle Main Engineers—worked together.

  She limited herself to saying “Hello” as she made her way under the colossal platform resting on six twenty-two-foot-tall pedestals over the concrete pad. Kennedy’s three MLPs, initially built for use in the Apollo/Saturn V program, were 160 feet, long 135 feet wide, and stood twenty-five feet high. The single square opening in the center of the platform that allowed hot exhausts from the Saturn V to escape into the flame trench during lift-off had long been replaced by three openings—two for Solid Rocket Booster exhaust and one for SSME exhaust. Vera walked toward the orbiter engine-service platform, which had been positioned beneath the MLP and raised by a winch mechanism through the SSME exhaust hole to a position directly beneath the three engines.

  Vera approached the base of the service platform and started going up the steps. This section of the pad was fairly crowded, and with good reason, she decided. With the launch less than forty-eight hours away, people moved in all directions performing final checks. Each inspection team had responsibility for a specific section of the orbiter. In Vera’s case, she was the team leader responsible for all three Space Shuttle Main Engines.

  Vera had been with the SSME design and test team from the start of the project back in 1972. From that point on the engineering crew had faced an uphill battle to iron out numerous flaws in the original design of the powerful engine, particularly in the turbopumps. The SSME was essentially an engine which put out highly pressurized steam obtained by burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. The high pressure was generated by the rapidly burning fuel going through the nozzle and erupting at the throat of the engine at very high velocity. This concept required special pumps to accelerate the liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen through the nozzle. Rocketdyne’s solution to the problem became the high-pressure turbopump, which, although it worked beautifully on paper, turned out to be plagued with design flaws. The pump had two main problems: a whirl mode—instability caused by vibration of the turbo blades when rotating at very high speeds—and a lack of adequate cooling for bearings. These two problems tended to mask each other and were extremely difficult to identify. To make matters worse, the only way to check the results of a design improvement was by test-firing an engine.

  Vera frowned when she recalled the dozens and dozens of SSME firing tests she’d participated in at the National Space Technology Laboratories in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. The pump experiments caused SSME explosion after explosion, damaging so many engines that NASA had to double the number originally ordered. By 1980 the whirl problem had been resolved and Rocketdyne had developed an efficient way of delivering a sufficient amount of coolant to the bearings to avoid the disastrous turbopump overheating.

  Vera shifted her gaze up and watched three members of her team standing on the elevator platform that extended upward to the engine bells. From that platform, several access scaffolds went up to the base of the engines.

  “Hi, Vera,” said one of her technicians when he saw her.

  “How’s the system check going?”

  “Fine. No problems yet.”

 
“Good. Let me take a look.” She easily climbed up the twenty-foot-tall vertical ladder to the elevator platform, walked to the access scaffold under the number-three SSME, went up the scaffold, and reached her team on the platform.

  “All right. Let me take a look at the manifold valves. You and you, get a lifter and bring my equipment up here.”

  “Right away,” responded two members of her team as they went down the scaffold, leaving her with one young technician still in training. Almost ignoring him, she moved around him on the platform and leaned over and peeked inside the space between the nozzle’s base and the open heat shield. Her hands moved automatically, doing what they did best. She manually performed one final check as her trainee looked on.

  “We’ve already checked the entire system three times today,” he noted.

  “You can never check these engines enough times. Now hand me a flashlight, please.”

  Her subordinate handed her a black flashlight. Vera grabbed it with her right hand and trained the flashlight on the manifold valves that controlled the flow of liquid hydrogen through pipes that ran all around the nozzle. They appeared normal. Next she inspected the high-pressure turbopumps. The larger ones for liquid hydrogen, the smaller for liquid oxygen. They looked normal. She lowered the beam of light until it reached a black box. It had a tube coming out the front. The tube went into the hydrogen turbopump at one end and came out the other, returning to the back of the box. The tube carried precious coolant to the pump’s bearings. The black box was the coolant pump.

  Vera raised an eyebrow when she noticed a small white cylinder strapped to the side of the coolant pump, almost out of sight. The cylinder—whatever it was—definitely did not belong there. She set the flashlight over a wide pipe to her right and used both arms to pull herself through the one-meter opening.

  The main engine compartment was crowded with pipes and wires. Recovering her flashlight, she trained it on the small cylinder, and blinked twice in silent astonishment when she realized what it was. The cylinder had a small digital readout indicating 00:04:00. She had found a timer with a small actuator motor. The arm of the motor was connected to the manifold valve on the side of the coolant pump that controlled the flow of coolant to the liquid hydrogen trubopump’s bearings. If her guess was correct the timer would shut off the valve four minutes after lift-off, at a time when Lightning would be at a very critical phase of its ascent. Without coolant the bearings would overheat in a fraction of a second, overheating the turbopump and inducing a fire which would result in a tremendous explosion. She had seen those explosions many times before.

  “This is sabotage,” she murmured.

  “Excuse me?” said the trainee ten feet below her.

  “Ah…nothing. Just talking to myself. Hand me a pair of wire cutters, would you?” Vera decided this was highly classified information. Someone had definitely attempted to sabotage the orbiter and she would make sure the information reached the appropriate authorities, namely the center’s director.

  The technician handed her the wire cutters. Vera disconnected the small cylinder from the valve, put it in her pocket, and shook her head. Whoever did this knew exactly what to do. Since the timer would not kick it until after liftoff, the General Purpose Computers would not diagnose a problem. Damn!

  “Wait here for the others and tell them this engine is fine,” she said as she walked to the edge of the platform.

  “All right.”

  She was about to reach for the rail to crawl down from the scaffold when she felt a shove from behind. Before she could react, her body flipped over the short safety rail.

  “Ahhh!” Vera twisted her body in midair and slapped both hands against the array of pipes hoping to grab one, but failed. She hit the welded steel edge of the elevator platform with her back, bounced, and fell for another thirty feet, finally crashing headfirst against the concrete stand.

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  In one of twelve cubicles inside a computer room on the third floor of the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters, George Pruett removed his thick glasses and rubbed his eyes and the bridge of his nose. Grimacing, he looked at the heavy lenses, the result of ten years of staring at computer screens.

  Working for the Office of Computer Services within the Directorate of Science and Technology, George had been given the colossal task of writing and debugging a series of algorithms designed to detect patterns in a variety of government agencies related to job-switching, promotions, resignations, and several other patterns, including deaths. He knew the reason the Agency had given him such a task was the same reason the CIA had lured George from his previous job with the NSA a year ago by doubling his salary: George was a computer genius. There was no algorithm he couldn’t write, no computer he couldn’t break into, and certainly no programming language he couldn’t master in a fraction of the time it would take one of the other CIA senior computer science analysts, like the ones working behind the Sun Sparks workstations in the other cubicles of the large room.

  George also sat behind a Sun, which not only had access to the CIA mainframe computer in the adjacent room, but also had its own stand-alone hard disk—the place where his programs resided.

  He put his glasses back on and gazed at the array of small half-inch-by-half-inch icons, seven across by nine down on the screen. Each icon had a three-letter acronym that described a government agency. Some acronyms were straightforward, like IRS. Others he’d learned as his program evolved. The INS, for example, stood for the Immigration and Naturalization Service. In these instances—which were quite a few—where three letters were not enough to describe an agency fully, the acronym described only part of the name. George knew the meaning of all of them.

  The icons were color-coded according to the “relevance” of the pattern as defined by the algorithm, which he had programmed to detect and accumulate events for the previous month only. A white-bordered icon meant there were no significant changes in that particular government agency. Yellow was borderline, a possible pattern probably worth investigating. A red border meant the algorithm had definitely detected a pattern of some sort that might or might not be significant to the user, and had flagged it.

  George looked at an icon in the center of the array. It had a yellow border—the third such icon he’d seen in the past two hours. He read the letters NAS. George wondered what was happening at NASA.

  His right hand reached over the mouse connected to his workstation. He slowly dragged it over the mousepad and brought the screen pointer inside the icon. He clicked the left button on the mouse twice. The screen suddenly changed. All of the icons disappeared as the screen displayed “NASA” across the top. On the left-hand side of the screen he read the list of possible pattern-generating parameters. He noticed the DEATHS parameter blinking.

  George grunted his curiosity and grabbed a cup of coffee next to the Sun. He took two small sips and frowned at the coffee’s bitter taste. He set the cup down and placed his hand on the mouse once more. Again the screen changed.

  George studied the new display, which included two names, brief biographical descriptions of the individuals named, and a cause of death for each. The first one was Claude Guilloux, a well-known French rocket scientist who had been killed a few days earlier in an auto accident. Interesting, thought George, wondering why his algorithm had grabbed someone who was not associated with NASA. The he smiled when he remembered that his program would enter not only anything associated with a particular agency itself, but also any relevant occurrences in that agency’s field.

  George had begun to read the second entry when he was interrupted by the analysts in the other cubicle getting ready to leave for lunch.

  “You sure you don’t want to come, George?” asked a fairly new female analyst as everyone headed for the glass door on the left side of the rectangular room.

  George got up and glanced at her over the short cubicle wall. �
��Ah, no, thanks,” he replied. “I’ve got a few errands to run.”

  “You kidding?” asked a man in his late thirties as he zipped up his jacket. “That’ll be the day when George joins us for lunch. I gave up on him about six months ago.”

  George raised an eyebrow and grinned. He had better things to do with his free time than spend it chewing the fat with CIA analysts talking about their problems at work and at home. He heard enough of that just by sitting in that room with them, and besides, George already had had more than his share of problems in life. His father, a former senior CIA operative, had mysteriously died almost ten years before in East Berlin, shortly after George’s seventeenth birthday. When his mother sustained permanent injuries in a tragic hit-and-run accident four years later, George had been forced to become the head of the household practically overnight, taking care of her and his two younger sisters. While working two jobs to help support his family, George had finished college and gotten his degree before he turned twenty-three.