Then he considers addressing his words to Diana, and the thought surprises him. She’s the first name that pops into his head, and he decides it has something to do with hers being the last smiling female face he saw before launch.
For the tiniest moment, the idea of her feels like a focal point, an inspiration, a reason to struggle hard to come back.
And just as quickly that sparkle of thought evaporates.
At my ripe old age of forty-four, I’m that worst of all white Anglo males, the middle-aged dad with a mid-life crisis, and I’ve been feeling for a long time like I’ve wasted the last twenty years, or at least that I went down the wrong road somehow.
No, no, no,he thinks. I’m not going to sit up here and whine in print.
He pauses, aware of a vague pain in his stomach, at first not recognizing the symptoms of simple hunger. There’s a selection of protein bars and other packaged food in a side compartment that he’s already raided, and he pulls one of the stowed bars out of the ankle pocket of his flight suit and wolfs it down with a water chaser from his squeeze bottle. Food is one of his lowest priorities.
He’s distracted by the sun disappearing over the horizon again, the beauty of the rapid change from ruddy red to deep purple and inky, star-studded black absolutely amazing. He wonders whether, when it’s all over and he’s… wherever… beauty like this can still be perceived. Maybe it’s even prettier there. Wherever “there” is.
Heaven.He has his own definition, probably born of too little intimacy in the last few years. He’s enjoyed poking fun at straight-laced male friends who still think sex is a four-letter word. “Heaven’s right here,” he’s fond of saying as he enjoys the shock value, “In the arms of whatever pretty female you can find.”
But in his early years he’d occasionally fallen in love so deep he couldn’t eat or think for weeks.
There was, for instance, Linda Hammel, and he smiles at the warm memory, wondering where she is. He has never discussed her with anyone. His folks would have been scandalized, and her father would have killed him. But now…
He looks at the keyboard, suddenly excited at the prospect of reliving those moments, even if only through a dreamy window of words.
All right, let’s begin unconventionally. I’ve got to start somewhere, and both I and whoever I mention will have been long dead by the time you, my reader, find these words, so I think I’ll tell you about my happiest times, my teen years, and my first real love.
Chapter 20
The President pauses before unlocking the bathroom door and walking back into the world. He shakes his head to think that the only privacy the most powerful leader on the planet can have is in his private water closet, but too often it’s true.
He rummages through his pants pocket for a breath strip, aware of his growing case of coffee breath, and does a quick reassessment of his image in the mirror before drying his hands and opening the door. As usual, several people are hovering right outside and waiting for him, this time the number includes the White House Air Force liaison officer.
“Ready, Mr. President?” she asks.
“Yes, Kim. Lead the way.”
They quickly move into the inner chamber of the Situation Room, a small conference room festooned with communications equipment and liquid crystal screens.
Colonel Kim Wallenda lights up one of the screens, a real-time image of an Air Force hangar complex in Nevada undulating in the morning heat. One of the hangar doors is open, with nothing but black visible inside.
“Good show and tell, Kim, but why?”
She looks taken aback, but she knows this President and knows it’s not a challenge.
“Just an establishing shot, sir. To be honest, I just put it up there to show off our real-time video capabilities.”
“Let’s get to the details.”
Charts and tables alternately fill the screen with the top secret deployment details of a standby force ordered quietly into existence by President Reagan in the early eighties.
“As you know, sir, Longbow has been on pad alert since its inception as an antisatellite killer, and our planes have been scrambled only twice, but never used for an actual kill. We have a total of fifteen of these specially modified F-106s ready in six different locations, all shown on the screen. The original tests used F-15s, but the 106 has a bigger weapons’ bay. The one for this mission has to come from Holloman in New Mexico, because of the target’s orbital path. The only real challenge is computing and flying the precise path to lob the missile into the right window. We can reach as high as a six-hundred-fifty-mile orbit.”
“And the thing we’re trying to hit is at three hundred ten miles, right?”
“Yes, sir. Now, what you’ve essentially asked us to do is change the course of this rogue object by a kinetic kill. There will be an explosive charge on the missile’s second stage, but we’re relying on the energy transfer of the kinetic impact to blow the shroud off course just enough to miss ASA’s spacecraft. But just fragmenting it isn’t enough, so we’re using an oblique trajectory, almost forty-five degrees to its course. Hopefully, not even fragments will remain on the same collision course.”
“Are we absolutely sure… is NORAD sure… that the collision course is valid and that we really need to do this?”
Another woman at the far end of the table in civilian clothes nods.
“Yes, sir. I just spoke with General Risen at NORAD. Their continuous orbital path reassessment still shows a high probability of a dead-on collision if there’s no change.”
“Very well. Jim? Objections on this decision from the Pentagon’s perspective?”
“Nothing new, Mr. President. As far as our overseas friends and adversaries, we’re going to show ’em our… ah…” The President can see the Deputy Secretary of Defense suddenly realizing there are women present, tough and professional as they may be, and it’s momentarily amusing to watch him founder as he looks for an expression less earthy than what was on his lips.
“Showing them our what?”
“Muscle, sir.”
“Uh-huh.” Even the two women are chuckling under their breath as he tries to continue with some dignity. “It’s… a worry, revealing what we’ve got, but we’ve long since made it clear we were not going to comply with archaic treaty restrictions that are questionable, anyway. And this is not hostile use.”
“As soon as we’re done, I’ll phone Moscow and explain what’s happening. Him first, then NATO. So, how about State? Kevin?”
“No objections, sir. The only countries able to perceive what we’re doing by direct observation probably need to be warned we have this capability.”
“It’s thirty-year-old technology, Kevin. I doubt even popular science would be too impressed.”
“Yes, sir, but we pretended to abandon it. So, whether we’re using Star Wars-pulsed beam plasma systems or throwing large rocks with a guidance package, it all comes down to the same thing. If it’s up there, we can bring it down.”
The President closes his notebook and looks at each of them. “All of us understand that this will solve only one of the problems. What I’ve ordered NASA to try to do is far more problematic and risky, but if there’s anyone breathing up there… and we all think there is… we’ve got to do our best to bring him back. Kim, let me know the moment you launch.”
Her “Yes, sir” is spoken to his back as the President swings out the door, trying to imagine for a second how it would feel to be trapped in a spacecraft with no communications. The news that most likely the civilian passenger is the only survivor continues to chill him.