VAIL AND RODMAN ate sandwiches on the short flight to Cleveland. Two agents from the local FBI field office picked them up from the airport and brought them to the SWAT staging area three-quarters of a mile from the Hayder house on Whitman Avenue.
It was nearing 11:00 PM and the quiet, mature neighborhood was busier than usual—the presence of the tactical trucks on the street had everyone peering through their windows into the darkness.
In the back of their Bearcat vehicle, SWAT commander Fredericks outlined the preliminary work his team had done on the house where their suspect was located. He poked a finger at a map in a three-ring binder and showed them where they would be initiating the action.
“We’ve had eyes on the place and quietly evacuated the residences on both sides, as well as across the street,” Fredericks said. “Neither he nor his mother has gone anywhere.”
Vail glanced out the small rectangular windows. “What’s the plan?”
“We’ll do a knock and notice. I doubt Hayder wants a shootout with his mom in the house. But if he does, we’re ready. And where there’s one bomb there could be others. We’ll have vests for you two but we’d obviously like you to hang back and let us do our thing.”
Vail figured Rodman would bristle at that, but Fredericks did not know his skill set—or hers—and it was best to let their team execute without interference.
“So this guy set off a bomb at a NASA laboratory in Houston?” the commander asked.
“Unfortunately,” Vail said. “Yeah. More than that, we can’t say.”
“You know anything about why he did it?” Fredericks asked. “Disgruntled former employee?”
“Everything we know says he’s a pretty ordinary guy,” Rodman said. “No known beefs. No connection to NASA or the government. No motive at all as to why he’d do this.”
“Since he used explosives once, we’ll be sure to check for signs of booby traps and IEDs around the exterior.” Fredericks stood up. “Okay, well, we’ve got a job to do and we’re gonna do it. Hopefully in an hour you two will get a crack at asking him the why’s.”
They loaded up their trucks and drove to the Hayder house. They deployed around the periphery, Vail and Rodman camping out across the way behind a sedan.
The area was filled with mature, gnarled trees. Picket fences lined the street, with wide, grassy terraces between the curb and the sidewalks that fronted the homes. The Hayder residence reminded her of the shotgun homes in New Orleans: long and narrow, with a Victorian style roof.
“I don’t like hiding behind a car while someone else does the dirty work for me.”
“Figured you wouldn’t,” Vail said. “I don’t either. But these guys have had hours to prep. And we haven’t. This is what they’re paid to do, what they spend day after day training to do. Most important thing is we get this asshole somewhere quiet where we can question him.”
Rodman did not respond but she knew he had to realize she was right.
After finding no explosives, the SWAT officer knocked on the door and announced himself. Seconds later, a middle-aged woman answered. She looked surprised and—as any innocent citizen would—appeared scared by the presence of a group of armed men surrounding her house.
Vail could not make out what was being said, but the woman stepped aside and the officers entered. As the fourth one cleared the threshold, someone jumped from the second floor into the side yard.
“You see that? Hayder, the window—” Vail blurted, starting across the street. She had the Glock in her hands, Rodman behind her.
A shadow flashed to her left. Vail stutter-stepped toward the adjacent house, then ran forward. There he is.
“Police! Don’t move.”
Hayder turned toward her, appeared to raise his hands above his head in surrender—and then brought them down quickly.
Rodman fired. Hayder’s torso bucked, then dropped to the ground.
“WELL THAT SUCKS,” Rodman said. “Sorry. Didn’t see a choice.”
“I know,” Vail said as they approached the stilled body. “If you hadn’t fired, I would have. But it does suck. Big time.”
Fredericks came upon them at a gallop. “What the hell?”
“He jumped from the second floor window and ran,” Vail said as she hooked a gloved index finger around the trigger guard and lifted Hayder’s gun from the hard-packed dirt.
The commander spoke into his radio and updated his team.
“You find anything in there? Bomb-making materials? Weapons?”
Fredericks shook his head. “We’re still clearing, so it’ll take awhile, but nothing so far. Just a plain old middle-class home.”
“And a typical middle-class family,” Rodman said.
“With a murderous son who sets off bombs and murders NASA personnel for no reason,” Vail said.
“Lots of cash under the mattress,” a voice said over the two-way.
Sounds like we just found the reason.
“Ten-four. How much we talkin’ ’bout?”
Seconds passed. “Looks like about fifty grand, give or take.”
“Under the mattress?” Rodman said. “Do criminals really do that?”
“They do,” Vail said. “Harder to steal what’s under you while you’re sleeping. Apparently with a gun stashed in your night table. Some bury cash underground, but that’s not always possible if the dirt’s frozen with snow or ice. And sometimes the cash gets wet or eaten by bugs. Shit happens.”
“So what’s going on here?” Rodman asked. “Someone paid him to set the bomb?”
Fredericks jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Gotta get back to my team. Your forensic people can look around in … maybe a couple hours, give or take.”
Vail watched Fredericks jog back toward the house. “Yeah, given everything we know about Hayder—which is obviously a little lacking—it does look like someone paid him to do this.”
“But who?”
“Who is right,” Vail repeated, looking down at Hayder. “But if we figure out ‘why him,’ we may have the answer as to ‘who.’”
“He’s got no connection to anything or anyone,” Rodman said.
“And that right there could be the reason. No one would ever suspect him. He’s not on anyone’s radar. Law-abiding citizen, responsible, working hard to make a living and not doing such a great job of it. Still living with his mom.”
Vail crouched and let her gaze run the length of Hayder’s body. “We should get away from here. Media’s gonna be by any minute.”
“So this was all about money?” Rodman asked as they headed away from the house. “That’s it? He was willing to kill for fifty grand?”
“People have killed for far less.” She chuckled. “You don’t want to know the going rate—but it ain’t much, my friend.”
They crossed over to the next block, away from the knot of law enforcement personnel.
“We can’t assume he was the one who killed the NASA worker,” Vail said. “Most likely someone else did the murder, then handed off the key card to Hayder. My guess is Hayder had no idea what was going on. Probably had no clue the backpack he was bringing into the NBL had a bomb inside.”
“How can we know for sure?”
Vail blew some air from her lips. “Could take years to solve. We may never know. Our best shot is boots on the ground police work. It’s a public case and until we prove otherwise, it was an act of terrorism. The FBI will investigate Hayder. Knox will feed us anything we need to know.”
Vail called the director to report in while Rodman arranged for a ride to a nearby motel.
Thirty minutes later they were getting a room at the local Holiday Inn. Ten minutes after that, Vail was fast asleep.
10
Astronaut Training
Vandenberg Air Force Base
The alarm blared from the small devi
ce on his night table, a no-frills wood cabinet beside a no-frills twin mattress pushed against one wall of the room where Aaron Uziel slept.
Hector DeSantos opened one eye. “Shut that thing off.”
Uzi wind-milled an arm around and slapped the buzzer with his fist, quieting the noise. But five seconds later, bright ceiling lights lit up and the double groan that emerged from their mouths sounded like a backup chorus for a B-side of a failed ’80s rock band.
Uzi swung his legs off the bed and trudged toward the bathroom, a few steps ahead of DeSantos.
Fifteen minutes later they were sitting down at the breakfast table. Carson and Stroud were already there, appearing chipper and focused.
“You guys sleep okay?” Stroud asked.
“Oh yeah,” DeSantos said sardonically. “Fantastic.”
“Good morning, good morning, good morning!” A smiling Bernie Anderson appeared from behind a wall wheeling a stainless steel cart with several plates. He went about setting them out in front of each of the four men.
Uzi and DeSantos sat there a second studying the spread.
“Nonfat Greek yogurt with walnuts, honey, cinnamon, blackberries, blueberries, and chia seeds,” Anderson said as he poured coffee into their empty mugs.
“Bagel?” DeSantos asked. “Toast?”
“No sir,” Anderson said. “We’ll be limiting carbs. My orders are—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” DeSantos pursed his lips, resigned to forgoing his usual eggs, bacon, and home fries.
“You guys feeling good about the mission?” Uzi asked.
“Hell yeah,” Carson said. “We’ve been at this a year and a half. We’ve been itching to go for a few months now. We figured it’d be soon, but the Chinese launch lit a fire under the brass’s asses.”
Stroud chuckled. “And pretty soon they’ll light the biggest fire of all under ours.”
THEY SPLIT INTO TWO TEAMS, Stroud and Carson assigned to their final tune-up simulations in the Orion crew module while Uzi and DeSantos met Kirmani in a classroom three doors down from the dining hall.
When they walked in, Kirmani was huddled with a cadre of men and women who were wearing large earmuff protectors. They were fussing over orange uniforms and bulky white garments, all of which were draped across thick hangers on a heavy-duty mobile clothing rack.
Kirmani consulted his watch and nodded approval. “We’re going to spend the first fifteen minutes fitting you for your pressure suits—that’s what they’re called. You wanna call them space suits, fine, we’ll know what you mean.
“The white, bulky ones are EVAs, or extravehicular activity suits, for when you’re on the lunar surface. The orange ones are the ACES—or advanced crew escape suits—and are known around here as pumpkin suits. They’re the ones you’ll be wearing in the crew module for launch and reentry as well as the trips to and from the Moon. Boeing’s designed a new Starliner suit, which is a lot more comfortable, but we haven’t rolled it out yet. So we go with what we’ve got.”
A man dressed in jeans and a blue work shirt pulled out a measuring tape and asked to see DeSantos’s hands.
“These pressure suits are not off-the-rack sizes,” Kirmani said. “They have to be fit to you individually.”
“Bespoke,” DeSantos said.
“Fancy term, but yes. We’ll be taking over a hundred different measurements, most of which will involve your hands. The gloves have to fit well because it’s hard enough working in a low gravity environment wearing an oversize pressure suit, but put on a set of bulky, stiff gloves and then try to operate equipment … and you’ll quickly realize why we’re making such a fuss over them.”
DeSantos extended his right hand and the tailors went to work. “Is it cool to be talking about our mission with … them in the room?”
“That’s why they’ve got the noise-cancelling headphones on. Music is being piped in, rather loudly. They’re used to it. We can talk freely. Now, because of our schedule, we don’t have the usual amount of time to fit these suits to you. The contractor that’s been making NASA’s EVA suits since Apollo designed these specifically for this mission, using their I-Suit model as a base. Your pumpkin suits will be made by the same company that makes the NASA launch and reentry suits.
“These good people are going to work all day and through the night so that when you get up tomorrow morning you’ll be able to try them on. Any adjustments will be made on the spot. Two identical suits of each type will then be made in case one gets damaged during training.”
While the man working on DeSantos took the measurements, his assistant was doing the same with Uzi’s hands.
“So here’s a quick and dirty top-down view of the white EVA suits. There’s no oxygen on the Moon, so if something goes wrong with the suit, you’ll lose consciousness within fifteen seconds. Your blood and body fluids will boil or freeze because there’s little or no air pressure and the surface temperatures are extreme—minus 250 degrees Fahrenheit in darkness to 250 degrees in direct sunlight. Your skin, heart, and other internal organs will expand because of the boiling fluids.”
“So if we take these things off,” Uzi said, “we’re dead.”
“It really is that simple, gentlemen. You get a cut in the suit, you’re dead. Your glass helmet cracks, you’re dead.”
“I see the pattern,” DeSantos said. “We need them, and we need them to work properly, to survive.”
“Thank God they didn’t send me idiots.” Kirmani stepped over to the rack, where tubes and a large white backpack were hanging. “Bottom line, your pressure suit must be airtight so that when it’s pumped with oxygen, it doesn’t leak. It’ll provide a pressurized atmosphere—and remove the carbon dioxide that you breathe out. It maintains a constant and workable internal temperature. It’ll also protect you from micrometeoroids and, to some degree, from radiation.”
“And the radio?” Uzi asked.
“All hooked into the suit—and the backpack, which I’ll get to in a moment. Once you’re outside the spacecraft, the radio will enable communication with one another as well as ground controllers. One thing we’ve been working on, in association with DARPA,” he said of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, “is a heads-up display built into the helmet glass. We’ll spend some time on that too, so you’ll know how to use it.”
Kirmani stepped over to the cart and lifted up a three foot by two foot device. “This is your primary life support system. PLSS for short. It’s been refined quite a bit since Apollo, but the function’s still the same: it’s got air, lithium hydroxide to remove carbon dioxide, water, and electrical interfaces.”
DeSantos looked at the hulking white backpack. “How much does that thing weigh?”
“About forty-five pounds,” Kirmani said. “But once you put it on in the lunar module, it’ll be weightless. And when you step outside onto the lunar surface, it’ll tip the scale at seven pounds. The suit and the PLSS are a set. Whenever you leave the lunar module, you’ll be wearing both.”
Uzi nodded at the pressure suit. “Looks like we’ll need help getting it on.”
“It’s a bit of a process. You start by putting on a diaper, which—”
“Wait—what?”
“The suit takes a long time to get into and out of. Last thing you want is to have to pee as soon as you finally get the thing on and the gloves attached.” Kirmani lifted up a thin gray garment. “After the diaper you’ll put on a layer of polypropylene underwear, followed by wool long johns that have tubes running through them to circulate cold water around your body to keep you cool. Next comes a G-suit, which is a giant compression stocking that inflates to keep the blood in your torso and brain. In zero or low gravity, your heart doesn’t work very well.”
“How much training time are we gonna get in these things?”
“Every minute we can spare. In a perfect world, your two colleag
ues would still be alive and getting ready to launch with Carson and Stroud. But this isn’t a perfect world, so you two are it.”
The person measuring DeSantos’s hand turned it over and moved on to the palm.
“Tomorrow we’ll be doing a simulation of zero-G and reduced-gravity atmospheres on NASA’s DC-9 Weightless Wonder. Also known as the vomit comet. It’s a modified cargo jet with an empty, padded fuselage.”
“I know about it,” DeSantos said. “They fly a parabola by climbing at a very steep angle. The pilot then sends us into a sharp dive.” At that moment, anything and anyone inside the plane falls to the ground at the same rate, creating the sense of weightlessness. “I felt zero-G in my T-38 flight training.”
“Not like this,” Kirmani said. “The sensation’s the same—you’ll feel the blood rising in your chest and face—but in your training you were strapped into the jet’s seat and it only lasted a couple of seconds. In space, you won’t be belted down, so suddenly your feet won’t be touching the ground and you’ll be floating toward the ceiling. You’ll need to learn how to balance and control your body, how to move and restrain yourselves in the zero-G environment. A little push can send you rocketing toward the opposite wall. And there’s no up or down—you’ll feel like you’re upside down, as if the craft rolled 180 degrees. But in fact your body won’t have moved at all.”
Uzi lifted his brow. “Good thing we’ll have some time to practice.”
“You have to feel it to get the hang of it. When the time comes, I want you to react and not have to think about how to react.”
11
Opsig Situation Room
The Pentagon
After a delayed flight out of Cleveland, Vail and Rodman arrived at OPSIG headquarters at noon. Rodman briefed the other team members on what transpired with Alec Hayder while Vail checked in with the analyst who had been helping her locate the suspected mole.
Rodman walked in and sat down beside her. “Anything?”
Vail clicked and then highlighted a field in her Excel spreadsheet. “Finally got the list from Peabody while we were in Cleveland. It was beyond unmanageable, but we pared it back to 279 names. I looked at the profiles, evaluated access, motivation, connections or travel to red flagged international countries, looked at who was in debt … you know the drill.” Then again, he’s never been a cop. Probably doesn’t know the drill.
Dark Side of the Moon Page 8
