Orbit

Chapter 39

Somehow, Geoff Shear is thinking, he’s going to need to do something really special for Dorothy Sheehan. Not that he’s given to overt displays of appreciation beyond NASA award dinners and other official stroking, but in this she’s succeeded against overwhelming odds.

Word that the launch went to a hold and was then scrubbed brings a smile to his face. He assumes the scrub was for being out of the launch window, but there’s the slightly puzzling news of fuel overpressure in one of the shuttle’s tanks—and the call for an emergency evacuation of the crew. But even those developments can’t dilute Geoff’s smug feeling of restored control.

His cell phone is vibrating in his pocket and he whips it out, expecting the female voice he hears to be his wife’s. But this voice is different. Frightened and tense. It takes him a few seconds to realize that he’s talking to Dorothy herself.

“Why are you calling?” he asks, puzzled. She knows better.

“I’m in trouble, sir. I think I’ve been discovered.”

“What did you say? I heard we just scrubbed down there. So, thanks for everything you were doing down there to keep us safe…”

“The fuel overpressure is real. It’s… unexpected.”

“Well, of course.”

Geoff feels his mind racing. How to deal with this? Any call could be monitored and if anyone should know that, it’s Sheehan, which means she’s seriously frightened, and dangerous.

“Where are you calling from?” he asks.

“I’m outside now, in my car, and getting out of here.”

“Why are you calling?”

“I… I guess I just need some coordination since my purpose here is done. All the safety checks and such.”

“Well, Dorothy, your assignment was clear. Double check to make certain we weren’t pushing safety limits. Just come home.”

Now he hears a telling hesitation.

“Well, sir,” she says, her tone hardening. “I got this call and I responded as requested.”

Five seconds of silence pass before she speaks again, her voice this time low and serious and no longer pleading. “You’re going to let me twist in the wind, aren’t you?”

“What does that mean? Dorothy, if you’ve… done something improper, then you need to tell security about it. I have to go. And this call never happened.”

He punches the phone off and erases the number from the display, a small chill climbing his back as he realizes his cellular bill will have also captured the number.

The phone is vibrating again and he sees her number and punches the button to reject the call, erasing the second record of the number before depowering the phone altogether, feeling off-balance. Sheehan was supposed to be rock solid reliable, his own ex-CIA operative with steely nerves and endless resources. How could she crack? And after all, the only thing that’s happened is a launch scrub for an apparently legitimate reason. This is all containable, he tells himself, remembering the moment he decided to trigger the so-called nuclear option. The launch would have had to be scrubbed anyway! But knowing that doesn’t soothe him, and with the sixth-sense survival instincts of a high-level bureaucrat, he can already hear footsteps behind him.

Sergei Mikhailovich Petrov is not surprised to find himself precisely where he expected to be: on orbit, four hundred ninety-eight kilometers above the planet and precisely one hundred fifteen kilometers behind the private American spacecraft.

He glances at his companion, Cosmonaut Mikhail Rychkov who is hunched over his computer display.

“Our closing rate is what?”

Mikhail punches another button and replies without looking over.

“Forty meters per second.”

There will be a turnaround and a braking burst from their main engine necessary in forty-eight minutes, followed by the delicate task of carefully approaching the winged craft from beneath and slightly ahead. In the rushed briefings and preparations of the previous two days, the plan coalesced only as far as parking the Soyuz just above the private space plane and sending Mikhail out on a dangerous spacewalk with the spare pressure suit they plan to stuff into Intrepid’s airlock.

The right leg pocket of Mikhail’s suit is brimming with black markers able to take the exposure to the vacuum of space. Using a white poster-board and a tethered cloth, he’ll write instructions in English for Kip Dawson to read through the forward windscreen.

At least, that’s the plan. The backup is equally risky, given the size of their space suits and the tiny airlock on Intrepid; Mikhail has substantial doubts whether he can fit inside if he has to go in to prepare Kip for the transfer.

Sergei has the high-powered binoculars out and is searching the void ahead, a smile forming on his face that Mikhail notices.

“You see him?”

“Da! And he’s still flying backward, facing us, which will make it easier, I think.”

Had a wayward buffalo wandered into and through the control room, the effect would have been much the same. The disbelieving looks on the faces of the control room technicians accompany a stunned paralysis as their collective minds try to grasp the fact that every monitor, including the big-screen display, has suddenly burst back to life with numbers, graphs, and information coming from Intrepid!

The first technician to get to his feet glances at the door, then back at the screen, wanting to call Arleigh Kerr in from his office but not wanting to look foolish if this is some sort of hallucination.

Or maybe, Chuck Hines, the assistant flight director thinks, we’ve somehow triggered one of the training simulation tapes.

“What the hell is this?” someone else is asking.

Yeah, Chuck thinks. That’s it. A computer display training tape. He looks away from the main display screen to answer the question, his heart still racing as if he’d jumped out of the path of an oncoming truck. “Okay, we’ve accidentally triggered an old simulation run, everyone. Let’s stop it and figure out how it got triggered.”

“Ah… Chuck?” One of the occupants of the front tier of monitors is standing, and she turns toward Hines, her blonde hair swinging across her cheeks from the move.

“Yes?”

“Look at the time signature.”

“Sorry?”

“The time signature. Look at it.”

“What’s your point?” Chuck asks, fatigue masquerading as irritation noticeable in his tone.

Arleigh Kerr has entered the room and is standing now, taking in the slightly surreal scene, and Chuck can see him in his peripheral vision.

“My point is that the time and date stamp are current. Today. As in now. Chuck, this isn’t a simulation. This is Intrepid’s live telemetry back online! Chuck, he did it!”

Griggs sits heavily in his office chair, waiting for the confrontation with Dorothy Sheehan, feeling certifiably old. Despite the continued presence of the shuttle on the pad rather than on orbit, the system worked, but the net effect has been depressing.

He hears a door opening at the end of the corridor leading to his office, the assigned locus of the meeting he’s ordered. It will take less than a minute for the footsteps to reach his door.

Griggs pushes a crystal paperweight around in a small circle on the desk. It’s an expensive thank-you from a past launch crew, an intricate replica of the shuttle in flight on a tiny pedestal, his name engraved on a gold plaque at the base, but for some reason it feels like the stereotypical gold watch, marking the end of a career.

Admitting he’s tired is hard, but he’s coming to it more often these days, and the past week has pushed his limits. He’ll have to think about that. John Kent has years of fight left, but—as he’s loved to put it over the years—his get up and go has, this time, really “got up and went.”

“Griggs? We’ve got Miss Sheehan here.”

He snaps to mentally, being careful not to change his relaxed, almost slouched position in his swivel chair. There are times to sit on the throne behind the desk, and there are times to come around to the chair facing his small couch and be more approachable. This is one of the throne times.

“Everyone come on in.”

A somber delegation files into the room and he sees Dorothy Sheehan’s been cuffed. The head of security for the space center follows with one of his officers, trailed by Cully and the head of the legal staff. Sheehan’s glare is meant to melt steel, but the fear in her eyes is ruining her act.

“For God’s sake, Nelson, take those cuffs off this lady. What’s she going to do? Run out and steal the shuttle?”

“We did catch her trying to run out of the front gate, so to speak,” the security chief says while pulling out his cuff key and unlocking her.

“Twenty miles per hour is hardly running out the front gate,” Dorothy says, her voice subdued and tense.

“Have a seat, Miss Sheehan,” Griggs says, motioning to the couch.

She complies, her eyes boring into his face as he looks at the others with a smile and then locks on hers.

“You’re familiar,” Griggs begins, “with the old term ‘red-handed’?”

“Look, I don’t know what you think you’re doing…”

Griggs raises his hand, stopping her. “Honey…” he sees the lawyer and the human resources chief stiffen at the term and throws a smile at them. “Hey, guys, lighten up. I run this place.” He looks back at Sheehan. “So, Miss Sheehan, would you care to tell us precisely why you were attempting to sabotage the launch of our little rocket out there?”

“I was doing no such thing!”

The moment has arrived, Griggs thinks, and he comes forward slowly in his chair, letting his stocky build shift toward her like an old grizzly leaning forward to sniff its frozen, terrified prey.

“Honey, let’s get one thing really straight, okay? We have you. We have the evidence to put you in a federal prison, probably for life, and the only thing that you have to cling to right now is the hope that if you tell me who, what, where, when, how, and why—including every conversation in exquisite detail you had with Mister Geoffrey in Washington leading up to your actions—I might decide it’s the bigger fish who need frying. Now you’re a big girl. Nod your pretty little head if you understand, and let’s cut the bullshit and get to, as they say out in West Texas, the nut-cuttin’.”

“You want to deal?” she asks, triggering a broad grin from Griggs.

“You have no idea how much,” he says. “So you cut the cards, Ma’am.”

She nods, her eyes on her manicured fingernails drumming the table in front of her. The drumming stops and her jaw clenches. Her eyes become mere slits as she fastens them on his and speaks through tightened lips. “If I’m allowed to walk, I’ll give him to you in a sealed box.”

“You do that, Sheehan, you walk. You’ll never set foot on a NASA installation again in this life, but you won’t have to limit the rest of your days to having an intimate relationship with a cell mate.”

“Please cut the sexist crap and answer one question,” she snaps. “Do we have a deal?”

“Well, if you can deliver, l’il sister, then yes. We have a deal.”

She nods. “All right. So happens, I have tapes of just about everything Shear and I discussed. And because of where they were made, they’re admissible.”