Stabenow, Dana - Prepared For Rage

by Prepared For Rage(lit)

  "Gently," Akil said, embracing the younger man and kissing him on both cheeks, for indeed he was fond of Karim. They had fought side by side since the invasion of Iraq, in Mosul, in Baghdad, in Fallujah. He trusted Karim, he really did, or he did as much as he was willing to trust anyone. Zarqawi had taught him well in that respect. It was a wrench to sever his last tie from his old master, and Karim's skill really was unequalled at building and setting IEDs, but Akil's plans had no place for him and he held to his purpose. "Where I must go, you cannot follow."

  Karim had tears in his eyes. "But where do you go?"

  "First to Paris," Akil said, pointing at the next gate, where the agents were preparing to call the flight. "And then, who knows? Bush the Unbeliever says that it is better to fight us on our ground than for the Americans to fight us on theirs. I am beginning to believe he is right, Karim."

  He kissed Karim on both cheeks again and stepped back. "Go with God, little brother." He even smiled a little. "Go, now. They are calling your flight."

  He watched as Karim dragged his feet down the jetway, and he waited while the airplane backed away from the concourse. He waited while it made its ponderous way down the taxiway, he waited until it turned onto the runway, and he waited until he saw it lift off, rising swiftly into the air.

  He waited until it was out of sight before turning and walking past the gate that was boarding passengers for Paris in favor of another farther down the concourse, whose agent was just announcing preboarding for its flight to Barcelona.

  In Barcelona he checked into a quiet hotel a block off Las Ramblas. The next day he spent wandering through the city, guidebook in hand, dutifully admiring buildings by Gaudi. He tried to take a photo of La Pedrera, only to discover that his battery had died. He clicked his tongue, received a sympathetic glance from an American man, and put the camera away with a sigh.

  "There are lots of camera shops on Las Ramblas," the American said. Akil gave a rueful nod. "I should have checked it before I left home." The American drifted closer. "Where's home?" "India. Mumbai. And you? American?" The other man made a face. "Is it that obvious?" Akil laughed. "I'm afraid so. Are you here on business?" "I'm on leave. My ship is in Naples. I'd heard about the Maritime Museum. When I got my leave I flew over to have a look." "Navy?" "Coast Guard."

  Akil's smile vanished. "U.S. Coast Guard?" "Yes, really," the other said, laughing a little. "Is that so awful?" "No, of course not," Akil said, forcing himself to relax, by an act of will putting the smile back on his face. He cast a covert look around. They were not being observed so far as he could tell, and he knew he had not been followed to Barcelona. He had not spoken of his next plans to anyone. He looked at the other man, tall, slender, with coloring much like his own. Here was an opportunity it would be foolish not to embrace. He decided to pretend to a little knowledge. "You rescue people at sea who are in trouble?"

  "Among other things. You?"

  "I write computer software," Akil said, with a dismissive shrug. "Not quite as exciting."

  "Necessary, though," the other man said. "You should see our communications room on board ship. Looks like Mission Control at NASA during a shuttle launch."

  Akil bowed his head, accepting the implied compliment gracefully.

  "Adam Bayzani," the other man said.

  "Arjan Singh," Akil said. They shook hands. "What's at the Maritime Museum that is so interesting that you'd spend your leave in Barcelona?"

  "I don't know, haven't been there yet."

  What was at the Maritime Museum, among many other things, was a full-size replica of a galleon that fought at the Battle of Lepanto, the last sea battle to employ galleons. Bayzani was good company, and if his covert sideways glances were a little languishing it was nothing Akil couldn't deal with. They dined together that evening at one of Barcelona's many waterfront restaurants, during which Bayzani made a delicate but perfectly recognizable overture. Akil's rebuff was hesitant enough to leave room for Bayzani to hope. A prize was all the more valued if it was hard-won. They exchanged email addresses, shook hands, and parted.

  The next morning, his carefully casual wanderings brought him to a shop specializing in electronics from cell phones to laptops, where he asked to see the proprietor. A short, squat man whose butt and thighs were so massive they waddled independently of the rest of him, he listened to Akil's needs with eyebrows like black caterpillars politely raised over a swarthy, sweating moon face. "Of course," he said. "The battery is of no moment. The other, a few hours, no more. Over here, if you please, senor." He took Akil's photo, and repeated, "A matter of a few hours only, senor. Be pleased to return this evening after seven." And that evening Akil returned to the shop to pick up his camera, along with a set of identification papers in the name of Dandin Gandhi.

  He had already checked out of his hotel. He went directly to the station and boarded an overnight train for Bilbao, where he boarded a plane for Paris de Gaulle. In Paris he took the Metro to Gare du Nord and a train for Amsterdam. From Amsterdam, he took a train to Germany.

  Nowhere was his identity questioned. Truth to tell, except when he boarded a plane, his papers were almost never checked. The European Union was very accommodating to travelers.

  4

  HOUSTON, NOVEMBER 2006

  She'd been named to the astronaut program five years before. She'd lived, worked, hoped, prayed for the day when she would be named to a shuttle crew.

  In another four years, the shuttle program would end. The space shuttle would be retired, and NASA would move on to the next new thing. The next new thing was sounding a lot like the old new thing that scientists had been advocating for years, the return of the big dumb rocket, reminiscent of the days of the Saturn V. Preferably a big dumb unmanned rocket.

  Atlantis was already scheduled to be cannibalized for parts for Discovery and Endeavour. The astronaut corps could hear the clock ticking down on the time left. There was already covert talk of what they were going to do after.

  After, Kenai might open a vein and climb into a nice warm tub.

  Today, she'd been named to a shuttle crew.

  It was, however, nothing like she had imagined it would be. She had imagined joy unconfined, trumpets sounding, bells pealing, the exploding of champagne corks. She had imagined calling her parents and hearing their pride, and their fear. She had imagined the envy of her peers in the astronaut corps.

  She hadn't imagined the spare, dry voice of Joel Minster, director of flight operations, informing them that there would be a sixth member of their crew, not an astronaut. What, in their more charitable moments, the astronauts referred to as a part-timer. Joy unconfined was checked, to be replaced by a stunned silence when they found out who it was.

  "Please tell me you're kidding, Joel," Kenai said at last, with as much control as she could muster up on the spot.

  Joel, known to some as the Great Conciliator and to others as the Great Suck-up, spoke her thought out loud. "I don't know what you're complaining about, Kenai. You've got your first mission. Doesn't happen to everyone."

  Won't happen to a lot of them, was the thought in everyone's mind. And picking public fights with the man who might one day be in charge of assigning her to a precious second wasn't the smartest thing she could do, so this time she bit her tongue and kept her mouth shut.

  Joel tucked his clipboard beneath an arm, gave a general nod, and left.

  The door had barely closed behind him when the trash talk ensued.

  "I don't know about you but this is just what I want on orbit, some dipshit rich kid fucking around on board." Bill White, an ex-Navy test pilot flying his second mission as pilot, was furious.

  "We're launching the replacement for the Hubble, we're launching a communications satellite and an orbital observatory, we're conducting how many experiments is this mission up to now?and on top of all that we've got to babysit some spoiled brat?" This not-quite-shouted comment from Mike Williams, a mission specialist with a postdoc in astronomy and astrophysics
from the University of California who divided time into par-sees and as a result was usually the most patient and laid-back of astronauts. Today he waved long, lanky arms in emphasis, accidentally knocking the back of one hand against a table edge. He swore, which shocked them all into momentary silence, and sucked his bloody knuckles.

  Into that silence stepped Laurel Freeman, a physicist from Stanford. She was almost sputtering with rage, but then Eratosthenes was her baby and as payload commander she took as a personal insult anything that affected its timely and successful deployment. Her father had been a stevedore on the Long Beach docks and in times of stress it showed up in her vocabulary. She was short and burly with a square face beneath a mop of untidy brown curls and it wasn't much of a stretch to imagine her offloading containers herself.

  When Laurel paused for breath the mission commander stood up. "All right," Rick Robertson said. His voice was low and even, which had the natural effect of making them all shut up so they could hear him. "This is what's been handed to us. It sucks. Are any of you ready to give up your seat in protest?"

  None of them were. There wasn't one of them who wouldn't have volunteered to be ballast on this mission or any other. Rick knew it. They all knew it. Rick was a test pilot from Texas Tech by way of the Air Force. This was his third shuttle flight and his second as commander. At five feet seven inches, he held himself with such parade-ground erectness that he seemed six feet tall. He looked at Kenai and said in his slow drawl, "Anything to add, Kenai?"

  He'd deliberately mispronounced her name again, and it worked to defuse the situation. "It's KEE-nigh, not Kenya." She paused long enough for the delay to be felt. "Sir."

  There was a very small laugh, but Rick gave her a brief, approving smile.

  "Who's this guy again?" Bill said, his flush subsiding.

  Rick consulted the bio Joel had handed him. "Well, at least he isn't a prince."

  "The shuttle program already has its quota of princes," Mike said with feeling.

  "Also U.S. senators," Laurel said, still steaming. "And U.S. representatives."

  Heavily, Rick said, "He is a sheik, however."

  "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph," Bill said. "And what lame-ass experiment is he bringing along?"

  "Way-ull," Rick said, drawing out the word in the best Chuck Yeager imitation so dear to all aviators, "he ain't got no lame-ass experiment. We are deploying his satellite."

  "The ARABSAT-8A?" Kenai said. "He's a Saudi?"

  "No, Qatari," Rick said. "His family has a controlling interest in a media conglomerate." He paused, and then, with obvious reluctance and not a little apprehension, said, "A media conglomerate which owns, among many other things, Al Jazeera."

  There was a moment of charged silence. Media coverage was a de facto part of any shuttle mission, but that didn't mean that any of them regarded the press as anything but the bane of their collective existence. They'd all been burned by the incautious remark in front of the wrong reporter, and they'd all learned to keep a discreet distance, especially lately, when astronaut adultery and boozing on the job, not to mention sabotage, were making more headlines than successful missions. The news that they would be spending seven days cooped up in the small confines of a shuttle on orbit with an owner of one of the largest and most influential international television networks in the world was news they did not welcome. In fact, "Oh, fuck me," Laurel said, and slammed out of the room. Mike wasn't far behind her and his language was even more colorful.

  Bill looked at Rick. "Well, that went over well."

  "They'll be all right," Kenai said loyally, and spoiled it by saying, almost pleadingly, "Is he going to be broadcasting on orbit?"

  "Ya think?" Rick said.

  They sat in gloomy silence for a moment. "The sun's about over the yardarm," Bill said.

  Rick looked at the clock on the wall. "It's five o'clock somewhere," he said, and looked at Kenai. "Join us?"

  "Building 99?"

  Rick shook his head. "Too touristy. I know a place."

  THEY GATHERED AROUND A TABLE IN A SMALL, DARK DRINKING establishment where the varnished wooden bar had a brass foot rail and the booths were upholstered in real leather. The bartender knew Rick by name, and the two people sitting at opposite ends of the bar looked up briefly and incuriously and then got back to the more serious business at hand. Bill had scotch, no ice, Kenai had a beer, and everyone had a good laugh, including the bartender, when Rick ordered a cranberry cosmopolitan. "I like the color of it," Rick said, refusing to be shamed into a more manly drink. "It looks like the sky over the folks' ranch at sunset."

  They drank while reading their part-timer's bio. "He's studied communications and aviation, it says."

  "Where?"

  Bill tapped the bio. "It says here."

  "Where here?"

  Bill shrugged and handed Kenai the folder. "Doesn't name any schools. Doesn't say if he soloed. Doesn't say if he stuck it out anywhere long enough to pick up a degree. Looks like a kid with ADD whose daddy has too much money."

  The bio was only a page long, and even that had been padded." 'Hobbies include skiing, scuba diving, and polo'?" Kenai tossed the bio on the table. It slid into a puddle of beer, and the paper quickly absorbed it, leaving a big brown stain. "Oh yeah. This is gonna be fun."

  The two men were veterans of military aviation programs and both had seen action in the Gulf. Kenai wasn't military but she had spent the last five years in rigorous training, including flying in the backseats of T-38s, training in vacuum chambers and sea survival, and she'd been CAPCOM on the last shuttle flight. They'd all stood up under severe stress and performed, and performed well. Rick, Mike, Kenai, Bill, and Laurel had worked together, played together, partied together, and on occasion, mourned the loss of a comrade together. They knew each other and they trusted each other not to screw the pooch in an emergency situation, of which there had to be six or eight on offer every second of any mission.

  Now they were being asked to accommodate a stranger, an unknown, unschooled, untrained, 330 miles up, for over two point one million miles, for seven days, one hour, six minutes, and sixteen seconds, with nothing between them and vacuum but a thin metal shell. It was an awfully long time, during which one error could put all their names on the Astronaut Memorial at the KSC Visitor Center. It was not one of the honors to which Kenai, a type A competitor like any other astronaut, had ever aspired.

  "This is basically your NASA sales incentive," Bill said. "We'll give you a seat on the shuttle if you hire us to launch your satellite."

  "Pretty much," Rick said. It wasn't anything that hadn't been done before, but no one liked it, least of all the astronauts. It burned mission specialists in particular, because the line to get into space was already long enough, and to have someone unqualified, inexperienced, a joyrider for crissake, jump in ahead of them was almost unbearable. A few couldn't bear it and quit. Everyone else stuck it out but none of them were happy about it.

  And it was a mission commander's nightmare. "We'll run him through shuttle emergency escape procedures, how to eat, sleep, use the toilet." Rick fixed them with a beady eye. "But mostly we make it very, very clear that he doesn't touch anything. If he can be trained to take a shit without his ass touching the seat, do it."

  They finished their drinks and went home, not as light of heart as a newly named Prime Crew ought to have been.

  THE NEXT WEEK KENAI AND BILL WERE SCHEDULED FOR ONE OF THE unending meet-and-greets that astronauts were assigned to around the country, to show the NASA flag to the various services and contractors that designed, built, maintained, and manned the infrastructure that made shuttle operations possible, and to remind them of the real men and women flying the craft and operating the equipment the contractors built. They strapped into a T-38, Bill on the stick, Kenai in the backseat, and took off for Miami and the U.S. Coast Guard base there.

  The Coast Guard was a substantial presence offshore during shuttle launches, deflecting clueless sailors, gaping rubbernecker
s, and on occasion even alligator poachers from taking their boats in too close to the Cape during countdown and launch. Rick's first launch had been put on hold at T minus thirty when a charter boat skipper in a thirty-five-foot Carolina Classic pretended to have lost power and was drifting ashore with the current, all the better for his four drunken clients to snap photos of themselves in front of the shuttle standing white and gleaming against the gantry. At eight hundred dollars a day each they were probably expecting something other than being boarded by a Zodiac full of irritated Coasties, their skipper arrested and their boat commandeered, but that was what they got, and the shuttle raised ship after only a sixty-minute delay, which had to be some kind of record. Rick told them that the astronauts on that mission had been of one mind when informed of the reason for the hold: to limber up the big gun on the foredeck of the cutter and blow the offending boat out of the water.

  Today they landed in Miami and were picked up by a starstruck chief petty officer who couldn't take his eyes off Kenai, who had to remind him more than once that he was veering over the line into oncoming traffic. It was only after Bill offered to drive that the CPO managed to focus on the road. When they got to District 7 headquarters they discovered that the CO had mustered the entire workforce in the parking lot to greet them, many of whom wanted their pictures taken with the astronauts. Bill said a few words, Kenai said a few more, and many, many photographs were taken, after which ordeal Kenai's new love slave hustled them out to the Munro, a high-endurance cutter 378 feet long that would head up offshore security during their launch.

  The Munro also had its entire crew on parade and the helo, a Dolphin HH-65, rolled out for their inspection. The executive officer, a stunner who looked like Naveen Andrews, welcomed them with a smile and a firm handshake and introduced them to the Munro's captain, whose handshake was equally firm and who invited them to join him for lunch after their tour of his ship. Kenai and Bill repeated their thank yous and were happy to accept, after which the captain commanded his crew to fall out and go to their duty stations. He vanished up a ladder and the XO, one Lieutenant Commander Mustafa Azizi, proceeded to run Bill and Kenai's butts off over Munro from bow prop to aft steering and all points above, below, and in between, including a stop in the Combat Information Center, or Combat for short, a cool, dark room the width of the ship's beam filled with banks of computers and monitors. It was located amidships, two decks down from the main deck. "This is where everyone comes when it's rough or hot," said OSC Cutburth, a tall, laconic man with a shaved head, batwing ears, and a grin part saint and part Satan. The operations specialist chief radiated a quiet pride in his domain and in his crew. They were the only members of the crew who didn't have tans.