Shadow Watch (1999)

by Tom - Power Plays 03 Clancy

  “This your first launch?” she asked.

  “Other than as a tourist, yes,” he said. “When our kids were, well, kids, my wife Ashley and I got a car pass and took them to see an Endeavor takeoff from the public viewing site. That was spectacular enough, but to be inside an actual firing room ...”

  “Makes your fingertips tingle and your heart go pitterpat,” Annie said.

  He smiled. “Guess I can assume you haven’t gotten blase about it yet.”

  “And I never will,” Annie said, smiling back at him.

  A moment later Gordian rose as NASA Administrator Charles Dorset arrived, clasped his hand, and bore him off to meet a group of officials in one of the adjacent rooms.

  “So what’s next?” Megan asked Annie, leaning across Gordian’s vacated chair. “With so much going on at once it’s hard to absorb everything.”

  “Don’t sweat it. Sending human beings into space is a complicated process,” Annie said. “Even the astronauts can’t remember all their tasks without cue cards, and that’s after years of training and a full dress rehearsal.”

  “Are you serious? About the cards, I mean.”

  “They stick ’em right on the instrument panel,” Annie said. “One small step for man, a giant step for Velcro.” She glanced at her wristwatch. “To give you a sense of where we stand, there’s about an hour left till takeoff, and everything seems to be looking good. The closeout team’s already secured the side hatch, and in a little while they’ll be leaving the pad for the fallback area. Prelaunch checks started hours ago and are automatically sequenced by the computers, but there are a lot of switches aboard that spacecraft, and right about now the crew’s going to be making sure they’re in the correct positions.”

  “The number of personnel jammed into this room comes as a revelation,” Megan said. “I’ve watched launches on television and expected we’d have plenty of company ... but there have to be, what, two hundred people at the consoles?”

  “Good guess,” Annie said. “Actually, the total’s a little higher, maybe around two hundred fifty. That’s half as many as there were back in the days of Apollo, and a third less than were needed just a few years ago. The new CLCS—that’s Checkout and Launch Control System—hardware and software we’ve been adding have consolidated most launch operations.”

  Gordian was working his way back from the aisle. “Sorry to have left in the middle of our conversation, but Chuck wanted me to meet some of his deputies.”

  Chuck to you, Mr. Dorset to me, Annie thought. In the future, she would remember trying to conceal her amusement out of concern Gordian might take offense. I suppose it really is first names all around for some of us.

  Megan had turned to Gordian. “I wasted no time picking Annie’s brain while you were gone. It’s been quite an education.”

  “I hope one more eager pupil won’t be too much trouble then,” he said, taking his seat.

  Annie smiled. “Not at all. As long as we keep our voices down, you can both ask any questions you’d like.”

  Which was precisely what they did for the next fifty minutes or so. Then, at T minus nine minutes, a hold was put on the countdown and a waiting hush fell over the firing room. For the most part, the ground controllers sat at their stations in silent readiness. Across the room, however, the Mission Management Team—a group of key NASA officials and project engineers—began having quiet, serious discussions, a few reaching for telephones on their consoles.

  Annie noticed her new acquaintances looking intently over at them.

  “The hold’s altogether routine,” she explained in a low voice. “Gives the astronauts and ground personnel a chance to play catch-up with their task list and see if any last-minute corrections are necessary. It’s also when the managers make their final assessments. Some of them will want to teleconference with engineers in Houston before committing to the launch. Once they arrive at their individual determinations, they’ll take a poll, see whether there’s a consensus that it’s okay to proceed.” She motioned toward the lightweight headphones on her console, then at two additional sets in front of Gordian and Megan. “When the event timer starts again, you’ll want to put them on and eavesdrop on the dialogue between the cockpit and ground operators.”

  “The polling you mentioned,” Megan said. “Does it take very long?”

  “Depends on the weather, technical snags that might have cropped up along the way, a bunch of factors. If one of the managers gets uneasy over something in his daily horoscope, he could theoretically force a postponement,” Annie said. “Though I’ve never heard of that happening, there have been some oddball occurrences. Five, six years ago, for example, a Discovery launch was tabled for over a month, thanks to a pair of northern flickers.”

  Gordian looked at her. “Woodpeckers?”

  “You know your birds.” Annie grinned. “Unfortunately, these two were pecking at the external fuel tank’s insulation covering instead of tree trunks. After it was repaired, an ornithologist was called in to scare off the little pests. I think he wound up hanging owl decoys around the pad area.”

  “Incredible.” Gordian shook his head. “I don’t remember hearing anything about it.”

  “Tales of the Cape. I can tell more of them than you’d ever want to hear.” Annie chuckled. “But have no fear. Based on what I see, it’ll be an easy ‘go’ today,” she said.

  And she was correct. Shortly after making her prediction, Annie saw the management team take their launch positions and reached for her phones. On the big wall screen across the room, a closed-circuit video feed showed what was usually referred to as “the stack”—this consisting of the Shuttle’s two solid rocket boosters, its massive 150-foot external fuel tank, and the Orbiter—in its vertical launch attitude. But Annie knew the spacecraft from the inside out, knew it as only someone who had flown aboard it could, and saw other vivid, detailed images in her mind’s eye: Jim and his pilot, Lee Everett, harnessed into their seats on the flight deck, the sun streaming into the nose of the vehicle and reflecting off the lowered faceplates of their helmets. Payload Specialist Gail Scott and Mission Specialist Sharon Ling directly behind them, the remaining three crew members below in the mid-deck. All of them in sitting positions on their backs to reduce the effects of g-forces on launch and ascent. Though she had never experienced space sickness, Annie knew they would have time-release scopolamine patches behind their right ears to alleviate potentially debilitating symptoms caused by acceleration and a microgravity environment.

  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? Where’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.