Yet all too soon both the rainy season and the Challenger disaster had quickly dampened their lofty plans. With the shuttle program on an indefinite hold, until the cause of the explosion was determined and subsequently corrected, the crew had done its best to fill in the empty hours. Andrew was soon to learn that the world’s wettest spot, Mt. Waialeale, lay only a few dozen miles to the east. As might be expected with such a neighbor, the station had been deluged by weeks of constantly pouring rain. A boring routine had then followed, as the NASA tracking team strove to keep busy by assisting the military whenever possible.
It was immediately after the monitoring of a submarine-based launch that the crew had been invited to attend a reception at the Navy’s Barking Sands facility, on Kauai’s southwestern shore. Happy to escape the confines of his cramped trailer, Andrew had found Barking Sands a most congenial site. Not only had the sun been shining brightly on the afternoon that he arrived there, but it had also been the fateful day that he was to meet Wendy. Things would never be the same afterwards.
From her lips had come the stories of the island’s natural history. This had included tales of the mysterious menehune, the so-called “little people,” who had supposedly made Kauai their home, decades before the first Polynesians arrived. In fact, it was while on a subsequent visit to the Kokee tracking station that Wendy had told him of the tales of the menehune ghost-marchers, who wandered the hills of Kokee to this very day. Though he had taken such yarns lightly, his feelings towards Wendy had become more serious as each day passed. Now that he had moved in with her, he was even considering marriage.
For a confirmed bachelor, this could prove to be a dangerous turn of events.
As he passed the twenty-five-hundred-foot marker, Andrew contemplated the events of the past few months and found his mood lightening. He would do his duty for his country, get Baker operational, and then return to his love to ask her to share the rest of her life with him. His lips curved in a satisfied smile, but suddenly the sky above darkened and soon he was in the midst of a blinding downpour. After switching on both his windshield wipers and lights, then decreasing his speed, Andrew did his best to stay on the winding roadway. Twice, his tires slid onto the muddy shoulder. Twice, he managed to return to the pavement.
Just when he was considering pulling over to let the storm vent itself, the rains halted as quickly as they had begun. In their place was a ghostly, thick fog. Again, he struggled to stay on the road, yet seconds later the fog was gone, to be replaced by a sunny, brilliantly blue morning sky. A mile later, he guided his jeep to the right and began his way up the quarter of a mile of pavement that led to NASA’s Kokee tracking station.
Inside the compact, concrete structure, Dr. Max Lindsay sat before a twelve-by-eight-foot perspex screen. Projected here was a full-scale map of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. With practiced eyes, the facilities director studied a single. Hashing blue light, just visible over the Barents Sea, at the country’s northernmost extremity. Shifting his unlit, well-battered briar pipe from one corner of his mouth to the other, Lindsay grunted anxiously.
So far, the morning had produced little news of a positive nature. Only an hour ago, the Ground-Based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance (GEODSS) station located on Diego Garcia, in the midst of the Indian Ocean, had notified them that Keyhole Alpha was loosing its orbit quicker than they had anticipated.
Their original calculations had given the platform up to seventy-two hours of survival time.
Whatever the exact time of the doomed satellite’s final demise, it was Dr. Lindsay’s responsibility to make certain that its replacement was on line the second that Keyhole Alpha failed.
Shifting his line of sight to the right, he watched a single, seated, white-smocked technician feed Alpha’s exact coordinates into the computer. Beside him was a vacant terminal. It would be from this position that Baker would be reactivated. Checking his watch, Max Lindsay wondered what could be keeping the man responsible for this allimportant task, senior technician Andrew Weston. If Weston didn’t arrive soon, Lindsay would have to transfer this duty to Sunnyvale.
The staccato click of hard-soled shoes echoed off the tiled floor behind him. He didn’t have to turn around to identify who those steps belonged to. Captain William Maddox had been stationed at Kokee for almost a month now. As NASA had become involved with more military projects, the Air Force had thought that it was fitting to have one of their own around to monitor the station’s activities.
At first. Dr. Lindsay had been genuinely upset with such a presence and had expressed himself vocally. He had argued that not only would the officer get in the way, but having such a figure around would be a complete waste of the taxpayers’ money. The NASA crew was most capable of doing its routine work without a military flunkie continually snooping over its shoulders.
When his superiors had failed to get the officer recalled, Lindsay had reluctantly accepted the fact that they’d have to make the best of the situation. As it turned out, this was more difficult than he had anticipated, for Captain William Maddox was one of the coldest, most uncommunicative individuals that Lindsay had ever met.
Hardly ever breaking a smile, the dour-faced captain often seemed more like a robot than a human being. What really bothered Lindsay was the officer’s complete lack of a sense of humor. In a place with such tight confines as the Kokee facility, trading a joke or two was often the only way the staff could relieve itself of tension. Why, Lindsay didn’t even know if the man had a family or not. All that he knew was that Maddox was a graduate of the Air Force Academy, and had been assigned to the Consolidated Space Operations center in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
When the sound of clicking footsteps halted immediately behind him, Lindsay redirected his complete attention to the perspex screen. The blinking blue light had crossed the Arctic Sea and was well into Siberia by now. After smoothing down the two perpetually wild tufts of gray hair that lay beside each of his ears, Lindsay efficiently addressed his keyboard. As the lighted screen of his monitor blinked alive, a deep, no-nonsense voice spoke up from behind.
“What’s Alpha’s ETA over the Tyuratam ICBM fields, Doctor?”
Expecting just such a query from Maddox, Findsay answered without hesitation, “Approximately eleven and a half minutes, Captain.”
“And what’s the probability that Alpha will survive this pass?” continued the Air Force officer coolly.
Again Lindsay addressed the keyboard.
“We still show the odds at better than fifty percent that Alpha will break up somewhere over the Indian Ocean.
Diego Garcia is presently relaying to us the latest GEODSS data.”
“I’m afraid that answer’s not good enough, Doctor,” retorted the captain.
“Must I remind you again of the importance of this pass? If there’s even a slight chance that Alpha won’t make it, Keyhole Baker had better be ready for backup.”
With this, the captain stepped to Lindsay’s side and directly caught his glance. Returning the officer’s hard, probing stare, Lindsay answered firmly, “The present data indicates that Alpha will indeed be good for this one last look. Captain Maddox.”
“Well, for our country’s sake, it damn well better be,” returned the officer.
“There’s no denying that the Russkies are up to something at Tyuratam. The last half-dozen passes show an unusual amount of activity there. The two most recent fly overs indicate that this activity is centered around the loading of a new type of warhead. Intelligence is damn nervous, and I don’t blame them. Without these photos, the Soviets could be preparing a first-strike and we’d never know it until the missiles were already on their way. By that time. Doctor, it would be too late for all of us.”