Shadow Watch

EIGHTEEN

No matter how heavy Annie’s workload at the JSC, she’d routinely driven the kids to school every morning rather than hustle them off with their nursemaid, and she hadn’t wanted that to change while they were in Florida. When the phone rang she was helping them pack their book bags, impatient to get under way, having jumped out of bed, showered, and dressed almost immediately upon awakening from her dream long hours before sunrise.

She motioned for them to keep packing and snatched up the receiver.

“Hi,” she said. “This is Annie.”

“Good morning,” a man’s voice said at the other end of the line. “My name’s Pete Nimec. I’m from—”

“UpLink International.” She glanced quickly at the wall clock. Seven-thirty. Some people had their nerve. “Mr. Gordian called yesterday to tell me you’d be coming to Florida, and I’m very appreciative of your assistance. Hadn’t expected to hear from you so soon, though.”

“Sorry, I know it’s very early,” he said. “But I was hoping we could get together for breakfast.”

“No can do,” she said. “You caught me as I was practically heading out the door, and I need to get to the Cape—”

“Let’s meet there,” he said. “I’ll bring the coffee and muffins.”

She shook her head.

“Mr. Nimec—”

“Pete.”

“Pete, I’ve got a million things on my plate this morning, one of which is tracking down one of our more quirky volunteer investigators, and I haven’t got time—”

“I can tag along with you. If you don’t mind. Be a good way to gain my bearings.”

Annie glanced out the terrace door and considered his proposition. Bright sequins of morning sunlight glittered on the blue Atlantic water, where a small recreational sailboat was tacking along parallel to the beach. Dorset had promised a view, and a view she’d gotten. She wished she were of a mind to enjoy it, to try spotting those dolphins and manatees that were supposedly frolicking around out there.

“I really don’t think that’s advisable,” she said. “You may not realize how hectic and crowded it gets in the Vehicle Assembly Building. There are dozens of people scrambling around. Sorting, examining, whatever. It can be pure chaos.”

“I’ll stay out of everybody’s way. Promise.”

Pushy guy, she thought. Just what I needed.

“Look, there’s no sense in dancing around this,” she said. “Some of the things I’ll be doing today are highly sensitive. I realize we’re both on the same team, and it isn’t that I’m trying to keep any secrets. But right now I’m following up on a hunch that involves some highly technical particulars—”

“All the more reason you can trust me to stay out of your hair, since I won’t have the faintest idea what I’m looking at,” Nimec said.

“I’d still rather we try for later,” she said. “Maybe we can arrange to have lunch—”

“Mom, Chris keeps calling me monkey-face!” Linda shouted from the living room.

“That’s ‘cause she untied my shoelaces!” Chris rejoined.

Annie cupped a hand over the receiver.

“That’s enough, you two, I’m on the phone,” she said. “Your books packed?”

“Yeah!” In unison.

“Then go into the kitchen and wait for Regina to give you your snack money.”

“Chris called me monkey-face ag—”

“Enough!”

“Hello?” Nimec again. “You still there?”

Annie uncovered the mouthpiece.

“Sorry, I’m getting the kids ready for school,” she said.

“Understood, I’ve one of my own. A nine-year-old.”

“You have my sympathies,” she said.

“Lives with his mother.”

“She does then,” Annie said. “Where were we?”

“You were about to invite me to the Cape in exchange for me springing for lunch later on.”

She sighed in acquiescence. Roger Gordian had sent him, after all. And what harm could there be in letting him come?

“I’m not sure that’s quite my recollection, but okay, we can meet at the official reception area in an hour. With one stipulation.”

“Shoot,” he said.

“This is my show, and nothing’s to be disclosed to the press, or anyone else, until I explicitly give the okay. Acceptable?”

“Sounds fair to me.”

She looked at the clock again.

“Mommee!” Linda cried from the kitchen. “Chris said I stink like a monkey’s butt!”

“See you at eight sharp,” Annie said, and hung up the telephone.

The “quirky” volunteer Annie had mentioned to Nimec was a twenty-five-year-old research scientist named Jeremy Morgenfeld, whom she was able to reach on her cellular after depositing the kids at school — and just in the nick of time, Jeremy explained over the phone, since he’d been about to set out on his catamaran and had intended to remain incommunicado for the rest of the morning, his usual habit being to work no more than four hours a day, Monday through Thursday, beginning neither a moment sooner nor later than the stroke of noon. The living definition of a prodigy, Jeremy had graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a month before his sixteenth birthday with a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering, and had later gained four master’s degrees in that and other related fields, as well as three doctorates in the physical and biological sciences. By the age of twenty-one he had started up the Spectrum Foundation, an independent think tank financed almost entirely by the sale of its own diverse technological patents, with a small percentage of additional grant money coming from MIT in exchange for participation in several joint projects, which included what he was presently describing to Nimec as magnetohydrodynamics—

“Plasma theory,” Annie said. “You’ll have to excuse Jerry. Every now and then he likes to remind people that was once the exclusive subject of a MERF study.”

“That an acronym for something?”

“The Mensa Education and Research Foundation,” she said. “They’re interested in measuring the upper levels of intelligence… identifying the cultural, physiological, and environmental determinants of people with genius IQs.”

“Nature or nurture,” Nimec said. He was seated between them on the KSC tram, crossing from the reception area to the Vehicle Assembly Building. “The eternal debate.”

“Look, I’m not into making anybody feel dumb,” Jeremy said. Nimec guessed that was an attempt at being charitable. “But getting back to MHD, Annie’s definition is much too broad. It’s kind of like how every gerbil’s a mammal, but not every mammal’s a gerbil, you know? Plasma theory covers everything from the creation of the universe to these weird electrical surges in space I call Kirby crackle — after Jack Kirby, the comic book guy who outclassed all the megabucks special effects you’ve ever seen in sci-fi movies with only a pencil, an art board, and his imagination. Talk about genius.” Jeremy paused. “Anyway, MHD’s about the behavior of plasma in a magnetic field, which can lead to majorly immense practical applications. Power from atomic fusion, for example. It’s the cleanest way known to generate energy, assuming we can figure out how to build reactors that are big and powerful enough to do the job on a mass scale without turning them and everything around them to melted slag.”

“Better stop,” Nimec said. “You’re scaring me.”

“Why’s that?”

“Can’t talk about it.” Nimec kept a straight face. “Childhood trauma.”

Jeremy raised his eyebrows.

Pleased, Nimec sat back and regarded him with his old cop’s eye for noting standout physical characteristics: straight brown hair worn in a step cut, gold wire-framed glasses, smallish chin, teardrop-shaped whisker under his lower lip. Wearing a Boston Red Sox baseball cap backward on his head, a Red Sox T-shirt to match, baggy khaki shorts, and Nike sneakers sans socks.

Nimec gestured to the insignia on his shirt.

“Take it you’re a Red Sox fan,” he said, seeking a bit of common ground.

Jeremy nodded. “I have a place on Sanibel Island about an hour’s drive from where the Sox do their spring training, and fly down to watch them get primed every year.”

Nimec gave him a curious look. “Sanibel’s a couple hundred miles south and west of us, isn’t it?” he asked. “You told me that you were going out on your cat’ when Annie contacted you this morning… how’d you make it here so fast?”

“Easy,” Jeremy said. “Got a place in Orlando too. I’ve been staying there since Annie asked me to help with the investigation.” He leaned forward and gave her a wink. “My girl beckons, I come running.”

Annie smiled a little. “Jeremy and I met about three years ago when he arrived for payload specialist training in Houston.”

Nimec tried not to sound surprised. “You,” he said, “were an astronaut?”

Jeremy adjusted his glasses. He seemed suddenly uncomfortable.

“Not exactly,” Annie interjected, moving in for an obvious save. “Non-NASA payload specialists fall into a unique category and are chosen by a sponsoring organization — usually a concern that’s arranged to perform a set of low-gravity experiments or launch some orbital hardware aboard a flight. These would include chemical and pharmaceutical companies, educational institutions, military contractors, and communications outfits like your own.”

“And the Spectrum Foundation?” Nimec said.

Annie nodded.

“At the time Jeremy was doing a study on crystal formation.”

“Crystallization patterns under varying environmental, thermodynamic, and thermochemical conditions,” Jeremy said. “Here’s an example: Everybody’s heard the old saw that no two snowflakes are alike, but that’s one of those sucky oversimplifications that always gets corrupted into a popular fallacy. Way back in the nineteen-thirties Ukichira Nakaya, a brilliant professor from Hokkaido, charted all the basic forms of snow crystals, and the temperature and moisture conditions that cause them to occur. His work laid some of the groundwork for research by another high-wattage Japanese scientist named Shotaro Tobisawa, who studied and described the crystallization of various chemical substances under controlled-implosion conditions.” He ran a fingertip down over his small tuft of beard. “Another example: Drop a nuke of a specific megatonnage somewhere, you get a predictable, unvarying type of mineral and atmospheric crystal formation in equally specific zones radiating from the blast epicenter. We’ve known that since Los Alamos. But the kinds of research I’ve been talking about are just the first steps toward understanding these phenomena. It’s one thing to know what set of conditions will result in a certain kind of crystal geometry, and another to figure out why they do. That fascinates me, because it leads into a whole area of physical law that’s virtually uninvestigated. Nobody thinks much about it now, but in the future when we get to areas of deep space exploration like terraforming or genetic adaption to other planetary environments, that sort of knowledge can be applied toward—”

“Jer,” Annie said. “We’re moving off-point.”

He frowned, shrugged.

“They said I wasn’t a team player,” he said.

Nimec looked at him. “Who’s they?”

“The director of the National Space Transportation System, plus his two deputies, plus the associate administrator of the Office of Space Flight. An amorphous group of gods known to us mortals as the Lords of the Great Kibosh,” Jeremy said. “The only NASA exec who spoke up for me was Annie, but even she couldn’t duck their lightning bolts.”

“Didn’t you say payload specialists fall outside government management?”

“Subject to final approval by the agency,” Annie said. “Jeremy being somewhat unorthodox in his ways, certain people at the top came to feel he might develop personality differences with his crewmates, and that those differences could blow up out of proportion in the extended confinement of a shuttle mission.”

“They thought I was a total pain in the ass, is what Annie’s trying to tell you without offending me,” Jeremy said. “You know that payload specialists don’t even have to be American citizens? But somehow I can’t go up for a miserable ten days without driving everyone else aboard to either leap into the void or dump me out of the cabin without a spacesuit. At least according to NASA.”

Annie smiled fondly and reached over to pat his arm.

“Jeremy could have handled it, and the crew could’ve handled him,” she said. “The upside to the whole affair is that he and I got acquainted, and have stayed friends ever since.”

“I’m here for you, babe,” Jeremy said, pitching his voice down to an exaggerated macho tenor.

The tram stopped to discharge its three passengers on the east side of the VAB. Annie was the first off, and as she led the way toward the huge building’s guarded personnel entrance Nimec picked up on an abrupt change in her demeanor. There was a tension beneath the surface he could almost feel her struggling to control, a hurriedness to her step that hadn’t been evident when they’d left the reception area for the tram. Whatever was on her mind was something she’d chosen to keep to herself, and he could only admire her poise and composure in doing so.

The floor of the high bay area was as chaotic as she’d warned him it would be, but it was the organized chaos of people faced with a serious and complex task, and operating under intense pressure. He’d known it in combat, known it at police crime scenes, known it all too frequently since joining Roger Gordian’s operation; it was part of the game he’d played throughout his entire professional life. What struck him in this instance, however, was the absence of accompanying background noise, the purposeful silence of the men and women Annie had drawn together for her team, some in NASA coveralls, others in civilian clothes, dozens of them scurrying everywhere around and past him. Their silence, and the sheer amount of debris that had been collected here. As his eyes swept the enormous room, he knew it would have been impossible to fully comprehend the annihilating magnitude of the explosions that had wracked Orion on the launchpad without seeing these remains firsthand.

Nimec surveyed the feverish activity a while longer, then realized Annie and Jeremy had already gone on ahead, walking side by side, leaning their heads together in private discussion. He started after them, but on second thought decided to hang back. Though he’d met her a scant half hour ago, he already suspected Annie Caulfield had good reasons for whatever she did. And he had given his word not to crowd her.

He watched them walk up the broad transfer aisle stretching away before him and climb onto one of the movable work platforms, where four or five investigators were gathered over several large sections of the spacecraft. Annie spoke with them briefly, projecting an easy, gentle authority — paying close attention to their comments, patting one woman on the shoulder with the same sort of open, unself-conscious warmth she’d shown Jeremy on the tram. Nimec again found himself singularly impressed by her bearing.

When the group left the platform a few moments later, plainly at Annie’s request, she and Jeremy hunkered into what reminded Nimec of a palaeontologist’s crouch and began shuffling amid the wreckage, occasionally exchanging comments and pointing things out to each other.

After a bit Nimec figured it would be okay to join them.

Annie acknowledged him with a nod as he reached the foot of the platform, and then waved him over, continuing to inspect one of the shuttle fragments. A soldered clump of tubes and valves in a cracked, scorched housing, it was attached to a component that, though also burned and dented, nonetheless retained something of an identifiable bell shape. Nimec thought he could make an educated guess about what it was, but didn’t, not aloud anyway, wanting to give them some more breathing room.

Finally Annie glanced up at him from her crouch.

“You’re looking at what’s left of a main engine,” she said, confirming his hunch. “The shuttle has three of them below the vertical tail fin. It’s no secret that the recorded dialogue between Orion’s flight deck and ground control tells us a red warning light went on at T minus six seconds, and indicated Main Engine Number Three was overheating.”

He nodded. “This it?”

She paused before answering, then said quietly, “SSME Three was essentially vaporized in the initial blast. SSME Two, which was situated right beside it at the aft end, is being partially reassembled from what little of it we’ve been able to recover. You’re looking at SSME One. I’m not sure why, but it’s been left relatively intact. The engines are in a triangular configuration, and this would have been at the apex, so maybe its position above the other two allowed it to escape the worst brunt of the explosions in some way. That’ll be determined. What’s important to me right now is that we have it to study.”

“These mothers feed off a potent mixture of cryogenic liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen,” Jeremy said. He was bent over the opposite side of the engine bell. “Annie’ ll correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the propellants in a shuttle engine generate 1.7 million newtons — that’s equivalent to, what, about 375 thousand pounds of thrust at sea level. Makes it the most efficient dynamo of a power plant ever built. On the other hand, the ignition of hot hydrogen gas can be savage unless it’s precisely regulated. Remember the Hindenberg.”

“Which means exactly what regarding Orion?” Nimec asked.

“Getting back to the shuttle-to-ground communications record, it’s apparent that a problem developed with the flow of liquid hydrogen fuel,” Annie said, her face solemn. “Again, this is information that’s been very widely circulated in the media, so I doubt I’m saying anything you don’t already know. One of the last things Jim… Colonel Rowland… said to the controller was that LH2 pressure was dropping. Then he broke off for a second.”

Nimec had listened attentively, but felt a little baffled. “If I’m following this at all, you’re implying a reduction in liquid hydrogen pressure may have caused the increase in engine temperature that in turn sparked the fire. But I’d think it’d be the other way around — less fuel, less burn.”

“Yeah, sure, unless the pressure drop is in these here strands of spaghetti,” Jeremy said. He gestured toward one of the clumps of mangled tubing behind the engine bell. “They channel the LH2 into the walls of the engine nozzle and combustion chamber before outletting them to the preburners—”

Nimec raised his palm to stop him.

“Whoa,” he said. “Back up a second. I’m still not clear on how less equals more in this instance.”

“That’s ’cause a very important word I used to describe the state of the liquid hydrogen must’ve slipped past you,” Jeremy said. “Namely cryogenic.”

Annie saw Nimec holding back his irritation at being patronized.

“As Jeremy said,” she broke in, “the SSMEs operate with a high level of efficiency. That’s in part because the propellants are used for multiple purposes. To remain in a liquid state hydrogen has to be kept super-cold… to give you an idea of how cold, bear in mind that it vaporizes at any temperature above minus 423 degrees Fahrenheit. As a solution to the problem of critical engine overheating, the designers of the SSMEs found a means to divert some of the liquid hydrogen fuel throughout the engine with a system of ducts before it finally makes its way to the preburners. There’s a pair in each of the main engines, and their function is to ignite the very hot hydrogen vapors that result from the combustion process before they can accumulate and ignite in the engine bell. If you ever watch a video of a liftoff in slow motion, you’d can see the preburners shooting the gas out below the bells as thousands of tiny fireballs.”

Nimec looked at her. “So you’re telling me that a significant dropoff in LH2 pressure would have caused the engine to overheat and the preburners to fail… leading to an explosion of the free hydrogen vapors in the engine bell.”

“That’s what Jim was telling us. Or trying to. He would have known where in the engine the liquid hydrogen pressure had critically decreased just by looking at a gauge on his instrument panel. But with everything happening so fast… the cabin filling with smoke…”

“He never finished saying what he wanted to.”

“Which was that the LH2 pressure was dropping in the preburner ducts.”

Their gazes met. Nimec saw the moist, overbright look in her eyes, realized she was fighting back tears, and found himself on the verge of reaching out with a comforting hand. Instead he stiffened, caught wholly off guard by the impulse.

Turning to Jeremy, he said, “When we were on the tram you mentioned the difference between knowing what happens given a certain set of conditions, and understanding why it happens.”

Jeremy visibly wavered.

“I was talking about snowflakes,” he said.

“Then talk to me now about explosions,” Nimec said. “What do you think made the LH2 pressure drop? And if it occurred in Engine Number Three, why are there fused cooling ducts in Number One? How could the identical problem simultaneously occur in at least two of the three separate engines?”

Jeremy looked to Annie, still hesitant. He was waiting to see how much she wanted to share, and would say nothing more without her okay. Nimec decided he liked him a little better for it.

“The other night I came here after everyone else was gone, just to do some thinking,” Annie offered at length. “I’d had a tough day wrestling with the press and needed to get my head straight….” She trailed off a moment, then shook her head. “But that doesn’t matter. What does matter is I stayed a long time. Much longer than I expected, in fact. Walking around, looking over the pieces of wreckage we’d started to assemble. When I saw this engine, I noticed that the internal damage seemed far greater than the damage to the exterior of the housing. And started ask to ask myself the same things you just asked Jeremy.” She paused again, exhaled. “I’ve requested assistance from the Forensic Science Center in San Francisco. It’s at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, I don’t know whether you’re familiar with them—”

“They did evidence analysis on the Unabomber case, the Times Square and World Trade Center bombings in New York, probably hundreds of other investigations,” Nimec said. “UpLink’s had a relationship with them for years, and I’ve worked with them personally. The LLNL’s the best group of crime detection and national security experts in the business.”

She nodded. “They’re sending a team of analysts with an ion-store/time-of-flight mass spectrometry instrument.”

“Which means you’re looking for residual by-products of a blasting material,” he said. “IS/TOF-MS allows the trace-particles analysis to be done right here in this building… avoids deterioration that can take place by transporting the sample to a lab.”

“Yes.”

Nimec mulled that over for a while.

“In acts of sabotage, you have to work quickly and on the sly and that’s how errors are sometimes made,” he said. “If you’re good at destruction, you know that the way to take the possibility of a foul-up into account… to anticipate and keep it from happening… is to be redundant. Get your hands into three engines, though all you need is one to go bad. If I’m reading you right, then whatever made Engine Three — and maybe Engine Two — overheat was supposed to have done the same with Engine One, but didn’t. Or at least not to the extent intended.”

“That’s a reasonable explanation, yes, if we assume a deliberate and successful effort was made to destroy Orion.” Annie breathed. “We’ll see what the mass spectrometry and FSC analysts give us. Meanwhile, Jeremy believes it likely there was such an effort.”

“More than likely,” Jeremy said. “I’d bet anything on it.”

Nimec looked at him.

“What makes you sound so definite?”

“Remember a second ago, when I was talking snowflakes, and you wanted to talk explosions?”

Nimec had already gotten enough of a feel for Jeremy to realize the question wasn’t rhetorical.

“Uh-huh,” he said.

“Well, it happens we were already on the same page. An offshoot of my work in thermodynamic crystal geometry, which involves various types of controlled explosions, has been an interest in blast geometry.”

“Somehow,” Nimec said. “I had an inkling.”

“I know you did.”

Nimec gave him a nod.

“Tell me what you’ve got, Jeremy,” he said. “Why so definite?”

“In simple language,” Jeremy said, “a certain type of chemical reaction equals an explosion equals a pattern. And to me the splay, burn, and scoring patterns in this engine had to have been made by tiny thermal charges — could’ve been something like noncommercial RDX — that were meant to destroy the hydrogen fuel turbo-pumps, but only partially did the job.”

Nimec considered that a second and nodded again.

“Thanks,” he said.

“S’okay.” Jeremy put his hand on the ruined engine, peering at Nimec through the lenses of his wire glasses. “You want to come around this side, I’ll show you what I mean.”

A comradely overture.

“Yeah,” Nimec said. “That’d be good.”

“There’s something I kept to myself at the VAB,” Nimec told Annie half an hour later. “Wasn’t sure how much to say in front of Jeremy.”

They were having coffee in the KSC commissary, his offer of lunch scaled down because of her packed schedule, Jeremy now on his way back to Orlando.

She watched him intensely over her cup.

“Go on,” she said.

“In some instances terrorists will want to leave a footprint of sabotage without taking credit for the act. It’s been an increasing trend over the last decade. Lets them have it both ways — they put the fear into you without bringing heat down on themselves.”

Annie kept her eyes on him.

“You think Main Engine One wasn’t meant to be destroyed? That the attempt was just supposed to look as if it were botched?”

“I think it’s a distinct possibility.”

She was silent awhile. Then a pale little smile touched the comer of her lips. “That must have occurred to Jeremy too. My guess is he wasn’t sure what to say in front of you.”

“Could be.” Nimec noticed himself noticing her smile and redirected his eyes toward the tabletop. What was with him? They were colleagues and these were inappropriate circumstances for such things. Weren’t they? He was looking at her again before he knew it. “He’s certainly smart enough.”

Annie quietly drank some more coffee.

“Two questions,” she said. “Would UpLink find it acceptable if I inform the press that we are now cautiously progressing along a line of inquiry that may link Orion to the incident in Brazil?”

“We wouldn’t have a problem with that,” he said.

“Next question,” she said. “If it was sabotage, do you have any idea who may be responsible?”

He thought a moment, then made a decision.

“I think we could very soon,” he said. “Our outfit has a small satellite ground station in Pensacola. I’m getting flown there from Orlando by a corporate jet at four o’clock this afternoon. We’re conducting an operation you may want to observe.”

She chewed her lower lip contemplatively, holding the coffee cup, steam floating up in front of her face.

“I need to get home to the kids.”

“It’s a short trip,” he said. “I’ll arrange for the plane to take you back soon as we’re finished.”

Silence.

Annie took another drink from her cup, then lowered it onto the saucer.

“Count me in,” she said.