Siege of Lightning

AUTHOR’S NOTE AND UPDATED ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

When I first wrote Siege back in 1990–1991 (it was originally published by The Berkley Publishing Group as an original paperback in April of 1993), George H. W. Bush was our president, Johnny Carson still hosted The Tonight Show, Cheers dominated the TV landscape, and Dances with Wolves won the Academy Award for Best Picture. In addition, Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm—the liberation of Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s grip — were in full swing. At the time, NASA was busy building the Space Shuttle Endeavour to replace Challenger, lost in that tragic accident on January 28th, 1986. Interestingly enough, the novel was originally titled Flight of Endeavour, but my editor at Berkley, Andrew Zack, talked me into changing Endeavour for a fictional shuttle, Lightning. And while he was at it, Andy also changed the title.

Back then, a lady named Kay Grinter from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Public Affairs Office at Kennedy Space Center was immensely helpful by providing me with massive amounts of technical information on the orbiter, mission events, crew systems, and general operations at KSC. This time around, Al Hallonquist, fellow classmate at Florida Air Academy and also an Aerospace Historian Life Member, published author, and maintainer of the www.mercury13.com, provided an updated technical review of the manuscript and made helpful suggestions. Al is also the guy who runs the astronauts show side of Spacefest. In addition, Al was able to get Robert Lee “Hoot” Gibson, Captain, USN Ret. and also former NASA astronaut, to answer a few space shuttle questions. Thanks also to Dennis Jenkins, aerospace author, for insight and perspective.

Back then I had editorial support from Gary Muschla, who helped me clean up the early version of the story, as well as from Matthew Bialer, my agent at William Morris, and, of course, from the great Andrew Zack, one of the finest editors in the business. This time around, I was lucky to be connected to Todd Barselow, from Auspicious Apparatus Press, who manually transcribed the story from an old and yellowed paperback into a Word document, and then gave it a full scrub in preparation for its new release as an eBook, audiobook, and also new paperback. And along the way, my good friend, Alice Frenk, performed a final clean-up of the manuscript. All errors that remain are my mine and only mine.

My wife, Lory, was there back then (as she continues to be by my side today) listening to my frustrations, complaints, and ideas. Her patience never runs out during those long nights and weekends when this and other novels are written and rewritten.

We Roman-Catholics seem to have a specific saint for just about everything. The saint for impossible causes is St. Jude. Since getting a novel published comes very close to that, I chose to pray to him a while back. I guess it paid off 26 years ago, and it continues to pay off today. Thank you, St. Jude.

This novel was originally inspired by those unforgettable words delivered by President Ronald Reagan at 5pm EST on January 28th, 1986, on the eve of the Challenger disaster. I thought it appropriate to finish this introduction with his closing remarks.