by Tom Clancy
"As we expressed in our initial statement to the press, we're quite firmly committed to using experts from inside and outside the space agency--"
"When you say outside experts, I find myself wondering where they'd be drawn from, this being an occurrence that's had few historic parallels. Other than Challenger, and Apollo 10 before that, nothing else gratefully comes to mind ... and I do want to emphasize the word gratefully. "
"I understand the basis of your question, Gary. But we've learned a great deal from the accidents you mention, and many of the people who helped determine what occurred in those instances are available for consultation--or even active participation--in our investigation. Also, while it's true that the shuttle is a unique and advanced spacecraft, many of its systems and subsystems share a common baseline with the technologies used in other modern flying machines. Consequently, there's a wide pool of authorities from government and civil aviation who can be of tremendous assistance to us."
"Does that mean the FAA and National Transportation and Safety Board will be involved?"
Name the two agencies that nobody but nobody trusts, why don't you? Might as well ask about the possible inclusion of former KGB operatives, or maybe Nixon's White House plumbers while you're at it.
"We'll be working alongside those groups to get to the bottom of what happened, and may very well include representatives from both as part of our team's composition. However, we've already had many specialists from the aerospace industry and other parts of the private sector volunteer their expertise, and we will certainly be taking full advantage of it. What matters to me is that the job gets done, and I'm inclined to engage anyone who can have constructive input, regardless of his or her professional affiliation."
Gary Somebody-or-other paused a beat. Though Annie was looking directly into the bland eye of a television camera and had no video monitor with which to see him long distance, she suspected he was getting instructions from the control room.
A moment later her suspicion was confirmed.
"I'm being told we're short on time, so some final questions," he said. "We've heard from various sources that there's been a break-in at an UpLink International facility in Brazil, where critical elements of the International Space Station are being manufactured. Several accounts indicate that a military-style assault force was involved. Can you tell us anything about this?"
Have to get back to you on that one. Soon as somebody gives me more than the Cliff Notes version of what's going on over there. Which may eventually happen if I'm lucky.
"To be frank, I've spoken with Roger Gordian just once since my appointment as head of the probe, and didn't have a chance to discuss the matter at length--"
"Can you confirm that there indeed was an attack on the plant?"
"Apparently a break-in, to use your characterization of the incident, did take place and was contained by UpLink security forces. That's all I've gotten up to this point, but I plan to be in further touch with Mr. Gordian sometime today or tomorrow, and will hopefully have additional information to share with you afterward."
"Any idea about the size of the attack force, what they were after, or who might have been sponsoring them?"
"No, none. I really do wish I could tell you more right now, Gary, but everyone needs to try and be patient."
"Still, I must ask you--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?"
"I have no knowledge that would lead me to believe that, and don't think we should go too far with that kind of speculation. NASA maintains a very close relationship with UpLink, and we'll be keeping track of any developments in Mato Grasso that could impact on the program. I intend to be absolutely forthcoming to the press about whatever we learn, bearing in mind that we need to be careful about any details that might jeopardize the safety of UpLink personnel abroad."
"So you're not concerned about Roger Gordian suspending operations at the plant? If the stories coming out of Brazil turn out to be true?"
Huh? Suspending operations? Where'd that come from? Feel free to whip something up out of thin air, why don't you, Gary?
"No, I've heard nothing at all to indicate that's being contemplated."
Another pause.
"Unfortunately, I'm being signaled that we're coming up on our daily 'Keep Your Lawn Lean and Green' segment. Please accept our prayers and best wishes as you move forward with your investigation. I hope you'll return to give us an update."
"Thank you, Gary, I'm sure that I will," Annie said.
Onward, she thought.
It was at her afternoon press conference that Annie detected an emerging thread to the coverage, one that was being gradually twisted through a journalistic hook with sales figures and ratings points as the intended catch.
She'd scarcely taken a breath after having completed her opening statements when an Associated Press reporter opened the Q&A by shooting his hand into the air and jumping from his seat in front of the podium like a kindergartner desperate for his teacher's permission to visit the potty.
"In your appearance on a national television broadcast earlier today, you discussed Roger Gordian closing down his International Space Station plant in Brazil due to an attack on its grounds by armed militants," he said. "Can you elaborate on that situation for us?"
"As I stated before, I've heard nothing whatsoever about any such closing, and have to point out that your categorization of the intruders as militants is incredibly premature--"
"But you confirmed that a break-in took place, am I correct?"
"Yes, though break-in was the interviewer's phrase, not mine," she said. "My purview is the Orion probe and that's where I wish to keep my focus. In my prepared comments a moment ago, I explained that the shuttle's remains are being transported from the launch site to the Vehicle Assembly Building for reconstruction, a procedure I've been busy coordinating throughout the day. The remainder of my time has been spent working out procedural guidelines for the investigation, selecting members of our team, and doing everything I can to let the press know what we're up to."
Annie motioned to another print man, Allen Murdock, a staff reporter with the Washington Post.
"To stay with the issue my colleague from AP just raised," Murdock said, "when asked on television whether the events in Brazil could have been linked to Orion, you stated you had no knowledge of it--quote, unquote--but refrained from dismissing the possibility outright. Does that mean there may be signs that they're related acts of sabotage? And if so, who do you believe might have been responsible for them?"
"Allen, I don't think it serves me any purpose to parse words. 'No knowledge' means precisely that--"
"But it's well known that Roger Gordian has been a steady proponent and financial backer of ISS for many years. If the reports of his company closing up shop in Brazil were to prove accurate, wouldn't it be reasonable to conclude that the decision was precipitated by a serious threat to his employees?"
That makes, what, three qualifiers in a single sentence?
"You're asking several questions at once, all of them hypothetical, and I'd rather stick to the facts. Again, I'm not sure how this notion about UpLink abandoning the program originated, though it seems to me it's based on a supposition drawn from a misrepresentation of some remarks that were made on the air earlier, which I think everyone here would agree can really get things in a tangle."
Next!
She pointed to a fresh face. A young woman swimming amid a school of combative males. Sisterly kinship. Feminine rapport. Her press pass identified her as Martha Eumans from CNBC.
Martha stood. "Should UpLink decide to withdraw its support of ISS, whatever the reason, how seriously would it impact upon the space station's future prospects ... ?"
And so it went for another very, very trying half hour.
"Annie, I realize these are difficult t
imes, 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 coverage, 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 imaginati
on.
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.
