Siege of Lightning

CHAPTER THREE SSMEs

A tall female senior engineer walked past the guard station that led to the Mobile Launch Platform. She flashed her badge and waved at the guards, who smiled and waved back.

“Morning, Vera.”

She knew them both. Vera Baumberger had been a Rocketdyne engineer since the summer of 1972, when Rockwell International won the 2.6-billion-dollar contract to design and build the space-shuttle orbiter, mandated to fly one hundred times each, and capable of six flights per year. The contract, Vera recalled, included system-integration responsibility, where Rockwell would guarantee that all components — including Martin Marietta’s External Tank, Morton-Thiokol’s Solid Rocket Boosters, and Rocketdyne’s Space Shuttle Main Engineers — worked together.

She limited herself to saying “Hello” as she made her way under the colossal platform resting on six twenty-two-foot-tall pedestals over the concrete pad. Kennedy’s three MLPs, initially built for use in the Apollo/Saturn V program, were 160 feet, long 135 feet wide, and stood twenty-five feet high. The single square opening in the center of the platform that allowed hot exhausts from the Saturn V to escape into the flame trench during lift-off had long been replaced by three openings — two for Solid Rocket Booster exhaust and one for SSME exhaust. Vera walked toward the orbiter engine-service platform, which had been positioned beneath the MLP and raised by a winch mechanism through the SSME exhaust hole to a position directly beneath the three engines.

Vera approached the base of the service platform and started going up the steps. This section of the pad was fairly crowded, and with good reason, she decided. With the launch less than forty-eight hours away, people moved in all directions performing final checks. Each inspection team had responsibility for a specific section of the orbiter. In Vera’s case, she was the team leader responsible for all three Space Shuttle Main Engines.

Vera had been with the SSME design and test team from the start of the project back in 1972. From that point on the engineering crew had faced an uphill battle to iron out numerous flaws in the original design of the powerful engine, particularly in the turbopumps. The SSME was essentially an engine which put out highly pressurized steam obtained by burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. The high pressure was generated by the rapidly burning fuel going through the nozzle and erupting at the throat of the engine at very high velocity. This concept required special pumps to accelerate the liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen through the nozzle. Rocketdyne’s solution to the problem became the high-pressure turbopump, which, although it worked beautifully on paper, turned out to be plagued with design flaws. The pump had two main problems: a whirl mode — instability caused by vibration of the turbo blades when rotating at very high speeds — and a lack of adequate cooling for bearings. These two problems tended to mask each other and were extremely difficult to identify. To make matters worse, the only way to check the results of a design improvement was by test-firing an engine.

Vera frowned when she recalled the dozens and dozens of SSME firing tests she’d participated in at the National Space Technology Laboratories in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. The pump experiments caused SSME explosion after explosion, damaging so many engines that NASA had to double the number originally ordered. By 1980 the whirl problem had been resolved and Rocketdyne had developed an efficient way of delivering a sufficient amount of coolant to the bearings to avoid the disastrous turbopump overheating.

Vera shifted her gaze up and watched three members of her team standing on the elevator platform that extended upward to the engine bells. From that platform, several access scaffolds went up to the base of the engines.

“Hi, Vera,” said one of her technicians when he saw her.

“How’s the system check going?”

“Fine. No problems yet.”

“Good. Let me take a look.” She easily climbed up the twenty-foot-tall vertical ladder to the elevator platform, walked to the access scaffold under the number-three SSME, went up the scaffold, and reached her team on the platform.

“All right. Let me take a look at the manifold valves. You and you, get a lifter and bring my equipment up here.”

“Right away,” responded two members of her team as they went down the scaffold, leaving her with one young technician still in training. Almost ignoring him, she moved around him on the platform and leaned over and peeked inside the space between the nozzle’s base and the open heat shield. Her hands moved automatically, doing what they did best. She manually performed one final check as her trainee looked on.

“We’ve already checked the entire system three times today,” he noted.

“You can never check these engines enough times. Now hand me a flashlight, please.”

Her subordinate handed her a black flashlight. Vera grabbed it with her right hand and trained the flashlight on the manifold valves that controlled the flow of liquid hydrogen through pipes that ran all around the nozzle. They appeared normal. Next she inspected the high-pressure turbopumps. The larger ones for liquid hydrogen, the smaller for liquid oxygen. They looked normal. She lowered the beam of light until it reached a black box. It had a tube coming out the front. The tube went into the hydrogen turbopump at one end and came out the other, returning to the back of the box. The tube carried precious coolant to the pump’s bearings. The black box was the coolant pump.

Vera raised an eyebrow when she noticed a small white cylinder strapped to the side of the coolant pump, almost out of sight. The cylinder — whatever it was — definitely did not belong there. She set the flashlight over a wide pipe to her right and used both arms to pull herself through the one-meter opening.

The main engine compartment was crowded with pipes and wires. Recovering her flashlight, she trained it on the small cylinder, and blinked twice in silent astonishment when she realized what it was. The cylinder had a small digital readout indicating 00:04:00. She had found a timer with a small actuator motor. The arm of the motor was connected to the manifold valve on the side of the coolant pump that controlled the flow of coolant to the liquid hydrogen trubopump’s bearings. If her guess was correct the timer would shut off the valve four minutes after lift-off, at a time when Lightning would be at a very critical phase of its ascent. Without coolant the bearings would overheat in a fraction of a second, overheating the turbopump and inducing a fire which would result in a tremendous explosion. She had seen those explosions many times before.

“This is sabotage,” she murmured.

“Excuse me?” said the trainee ten feet below her.

“Ah… nothing. Just talking to myself. Hand me a pair of wire cutters, would you?” Vera decided this was highly classified information. Someone had definitely attempted to sabotage the orbiter and she would make sure the information reached the appropriate authorities, namely the center’s director.

The technician handed her the wire cutters. Vera disconnected the small cylinder from the valve, put it in her pocket, and shook her head. Whoever did this knew exactly what to do. Since the timer would not kick it until after liftoff, the General Purpose Computers would not diagnose a problem. Damn!

“Wait here for the others and tell them this engine is fine,” she said as she walked to the edge of the platform.

“All right.”

She was about to reach for the rail to crawl down from the scaffold when she felt a shove from behind. Before she could react, her body flipped over the short safety rail.

“Ahhh!” Vera twisted her body in midair and slapped both hands against the array of pipes hoping to grab one, but failed. She hit the welded steel edge of the elevator platform with her back, bounced, and fell for another thirty feet, finally crashing headfirst against the concrete stand.

In one of twelve cubicles inside a computer room on the third floor of the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters, George Pruett removed his thick glasses and rubbed his eyes and the bridge of his nose. Grimacing, he looked at the heavy lenses, the result of ten years of staring at computer screens.

Working for the Office of Computer Services within the Directorate of Science and Technology, George had been given the colossal task of writing and debugging a series of algorithms designed to detect patterns in a variety of government agencies related to job-switching, promotions, resignations, and several other patterns, including deaths. He knew the reason the Agency had given him such a task was the same reason the CIA had lured George from his previous job with the NSA a year ago by doubling his salary: George was a computer genius. There was no algorithm he couldn’t write, no computer he couldn’t break into, and certainly no programming language he couldn’t master in a fraction of the time it would take one of the other CIA senior computer science analysts, like the ones working behind the Sun Sparks workstations in the other cubicles of the large room.

George also sat behind a Sun, which not only had access to the CIA mainframe computer in the adjacent room, but also had its own stand-alone hard disk — the place where his programs resided.

He put his glasses back on and gazed at the array of small half-inch-by-half-inch icons, seven across by nine down on the screen. Each icon had a three-letter acronym that described a government agency. Some acronyms were straightforward, like IRS. Others he’d learned as his program evolved. The INS, for example, stood for the Immigration and Naturalization Service. In these instances — which were quite a few — where three letters were not enough to describe an agency fully, the acronym described only part of the name. George knew the meaning of all of them.

The icons were color-coded according to the “relevance” of the pattern as defined by the algorithm, which he had programmed to detect and accumulate events for the previous month only. A white-bordered icon meant there were no significant changes in that particular government agency. Yellow was borderline, a possible pattern probably worth investigating. A red border meant the algorithm had definitely detected a pattern of some sort that might or might not be significant to the user, and had flagged it.

George looked at an icon in the center of the array. It had a yellow border — the third such icon he’d seen in the past two hours. He read the letters NAS. George wondered what was happening at NASA.

His right hand reached over the mouse connected to his workstation. He slowly dragged it over the mousepad and brought the screen pointer inside the icon. He clicked the left button on the mouse twice. The screen suddenly changed. All of the icons disappeared as the screen displayed “NASA” across the top. On the left-hand side of the screen he read the list of possible pattern-generating parameters. He noticed the DEATHS parameter blinking.

George grunted his curiosity and grabbed a cup of coffee next to the Sun. He took two small sips and frowned at the coffee’s bitter taste. He set the cup down and placed his hand on the mouse once more. Again the screen changed.

George studied the new display, which included two names, brief biographical descriptions of the individuals named, and a cause of death for each. The first one was Claude Guilloux, a well-known French rocket scientist who had been killed a few days earlier in an auto accident. Interesting, thought George, wondering why his algorithm had grabbed someone who was not associated with NASA. The he smiled when he remembered that his program would enter not only anything associated with a particular agency itself, but also any relevant occurrences in that agency’s field.

George had begun to read the second entry when he was interrupted by the analysts in the other cubicle getting ready to leave for lunch.

“You sure you don’t want to come, George?” asked a fairly new female analyst as everyone headed for the glass door on the left side of the rectangular room.

George got up and glanced at her over the short cubicle wall. “Ah, no, thanks,” he replied. “I’ve got a few errands to run.”

“You kidding?” asked a man in his late thirties as he zipped up his jacket. “That’ll be the day when George joins us for lunch. I gave up on him about six months ago.”

George raised an eyebrow and grinned. He had better things to do with his free time than spend it chewing the fat with CIA analysts talking about their problems at work and at home. He heard enough of that just by sitting in that room with them, and besides, George already had had more than his share of problems in life. His father, a former senior CIA operative, had mysteriously died almost ten years before in East Berlin, shortly after George’s seventeenth birthday. When his mother sustained permanent injuries in a tragic hit-and-run accident four years later, George had been forced to become the head of the household practically overnight, taking care of her and his two younger sisters. While working two jobs to help support his family, George had finished college and gotten his degree before he turned twenty-three.

No, George decided, he definitely didn’t feel like listening to his coworkers’ problems during his free time. With his mother in a wheelchair, George and his two sisters took turns going home during lunch to look after her. During the days when one of his sisters went home for lunch, like today, he spent his time enjoying the only other activity that filled his life besides computers: reading spy novels. George read them by the dozens. He simply couldn’t ever get enough, even as a teenager, when he’d visualized his own father playing the roles of the main characters. A love for clandestine work had been part of the reason he’d chosen the intelligence field after college. He had wanted to be a field operative, follow his father’s footsteps, become a Cold War master spy, but reality had fallen far short of expectations when George had failed the rigorous physical examination required for all operatives. He just wasn’t the physical type, and that revelation had nearly crushed him. But he had hung in there. He’d still wanted to be a part of it, to live up to his father’s memory. And so, with a computer engineering degree and a minor in political science, he had joined the National Security Agency right out of school.

As the lunch group left, George sat back down and read the second entry in the computer list. Vera Baumberger, a Rocketdyne engineer working at Kennedy Space Center on the new orbiter Lightning, had accidentally fallen off a platform at the launchpad and died from a fractured skull.

George leaned back in his swivel chair. He read both entries once more looking for something else that could indicate a possible connection, but nothing seemed obvious. The incidents appeared to be totally unrelated. Hardly a pattern, George thought, but that was the reason why the program only highlighted the icon in yellow — a possible pattern.

He clicked back to the main screen. So far he had nothing relevant for Clandestine Services, the department George reported to, which also happened to be headed by his own uncle, Thomas H. Pruett.

George didn’t mind indirectly working for his father’s older brother. In his mind, George knew the Agency had hired him for his top-notch computer skills, but as in any other large corporation, he was concerned about rumors of favoritism spreading around the Agency. As it turned out, in the year since his arrival at Langley, George had only seen his uncle a few times, mostly outside work, when Thomas Pruett visited George’s mother. As head of Clandestine Services, his uncle was a busy man.

Also known as the Directorate of Operations, Clandestine Services was primarily composed of the so-called “area” divisions. These divisions corresponded roughly to the State Department’s geographic bureaus. His uncle had explained to him on his first day that it made a lot of sense, since most CIA operators in foreign countries worked under State cover. The largest division was Far East, followed by Europe and Western Hemisphere. George worked indirectly for Western Hemisphere and Europe since his algorithm concentrated mostly on aspects of those two areas. His data — assuming he came up with anything of significance — would first go to the office of Chief Europe Ronald Higgins, who also happened to be acting as Chief Western Hemisphere, and if the information was deemed significant, it would then be presented to the elder Pruett.

George had stopped by his uncle’s office the day before to drop off a small birthday present from his mother, but his uncle’s secretary had told him that Pruett had been out of the country for almost two weeks and would not be back for another day, something that didn’t surprise George one bit.

George locked his system and headed for the parking garage.

Cameron eyed the young CIA agent guarding Marie’s door, and nodded approvingly at the rookie’s hands-free-and-ready posture. He went into the room and smiled when he saw Marie sitting up, eating a bowl of soup. The second agent sat next to her bed drinking coffee and reading the paperback. Cameron shook his head. The agent quickly got up and left the room.

Cameron stopped halfway to her bed. She wore a white hospital gown.

“How are you feeling?”

She looked up and studied him briefly. “Fine. Much better. Do you believe my story now?”

Cameron exhaled. “Yes. We believe your story.”

She smiled. “Good. Thanks. Your two colleagues told me what you did. I guess I owe you one.”

“No problem. I was just doing my job.”

The door opened. Cameron’s case officer, Richard Potter, walked in the room. A couple of inches shorter than Cameron and forty pounds heavier — most of it around his waist — Potter gave the impression of someone who spent too much time behind a desk. The CIA official closed the door and approached the bed.

As Cameron went through the introductions, the door opened again. A middle-aged, well-built man wearing a suit under a brown overcoat stood in the doorway. The man briefly introduced himself as the Prefect of Paris police. Cameron could barely see his lips move underneath a thick but well-kempt mustache.

The Prefect removed his coat, set it on a chair next to Marie’s bed, and faced his audience of three.

“I’m afraid our initial assessment that the single-car collision was purely accidental was incorrect,” he began to say. “We think Monsieur Guilloux was murdered—”

“Damn! I knew it! I told you, Cameron,” Marie said. She turned to the Prefect. “I also tried to convince inspector Roquette, but he wouldn’t believe me. I think my husband was killed because of what he had discovered at Athena.”

“That’s possible. You do know that Inspector Roquette was killed last night at the hotel?”

“Yes,” responded Marie. “I found that out from the CIA agents outside. How was he involved in all of this?”

The Prefect briefly ran a finger over his mustache. “We have reason to believe that Inspector Roquette was responsible for your husband’s death.”

“Well, that makes some sense,” noted Cameron. “That would certainly explain why he brushed Marie off when she asked him about the investigation.”

“That’s right… bastard!” exclaimed Marie. “Wait a second. Who killed Roquette then?”

“We’re working on that right now,” said the Prefect. “We have a couple of good descriptions from witnesses. They all saw a man with gray hair and beard running out of the hotel.”

“That’s right,” agreed Cameron. “I saw him, too. You think he killed Roquette?”

“At this point we’re working under that assumption.”

Cameron tilted his head. “Do you think he was killed to break the link with the people that actually wanted Guilloux dead? According to Marie, they could be Athena’s upper management.”

“We’re trying to establish that right now. That’s all I’m at liberty to say at this moment, but please rest assured that the police are handling the case under my direct supervision. There is no need for your agency to be involved any further.”

“Just answer this,” Cameron pressed further. “If Marie’s suspicion is true, and her husband was killed because he had information that incriminated Athena in the destruction of the Russian spacecraft, then wouldn’t that make it an international incident?”

“If that’s true, yes,” the Prefect responded. “But until that is established, I can’t talk about the case anymore. This is a French police matter. We appreciate the help you have given us, but I’m afraid the matter no longer concerns you.”

“The hell it doesn’t!” Marie snapped. “The last time I was told by police that matters were being handled was the day before Roquette tried to kill me! And the only reason I’m still alive is because the CIA came to my rescue. Now after all of that you’re telling me you want the CIA out of it?”

“I’m afraid the Prefect is correct,” Potter said, cutting in. “This matter is not for the CIA. Not yet anyway.”

Although not very pleased, Cameron accepted Potter’s decision. The police would handle it for now.

The Prefect grabbed his coat, mentioned to the group that two of his men would be there within the hour to replace the CIA agents, and left the room.

Potter glanced at Cameron. “Ready?”

“In a minute, sir. I’ll meet you down by the car.”

“Two minutes. Remember, the French are in charge now. It’s their show.”

“Yes, sir.”

Potter left the room. Cameron waited until the door was closed. He sat by the edge of the bed. Marie frowned and stared out the window. Her room overlooked the Observatorie de Paris.

“You okay?”

“I guess.”

“Well, I’ve been ordered to stay out of it, but that doesn’t mean I can’t keep in touch. You should be out of here by tomorrow.” He reached into his coat pocket. “Here’s my direct number at the embassy. If there’s anything you need, anything, please give me a call. All right?”

She turned and looked at him. He felt overwhelmed by her green eyes. Even without any makeup, Marie was a beautiful woman. Slowly, her frown changed to a slight smile. “All right. Thanks. Thanks a lot for everything.”

“My pleasure.” He put his hand over hers. “Bye now.”

He got up.

“Au revoir.”

Cameron smiled. “Au revoir, Marie.” He turned around and walked outside.