“That’s the short version, yes. But it misses too much that’s really disturbing. Information about the O-ring weakness and other potential launch hazards was suppressed — consciously, actively suppressed — because those managers were looking out for their own competitive interests to the exclusion of everything else. Funding needs, political pressures, and production deadlines drove agency officials to lower the bar on safety practices. A lot of people were worried about the launch, yet nobody wanted to be the one to stand up and make the decision to scrub. It wasn’t that they intended to put the astronauts at increased risk, it was that they’d succumbed to a kind of organizational group-think that conditioned them to see the risks as being less serious than they clearly were. With every launch, they became more like problem gamblers, telling themselves their luck would hold and everything would work out okay. They made their mistakes with their eyes wide open.”
Gordian had been watching Nordstrum quietly as he spoke. Now he crossed his arms on the desktop and leaned forward over them.
“Alex, it isn’t the same with Orion,” he said. “The space agency is a different entity these days. More cohesive and goal-oriented. More transparent in its internal operations. Its standards have been restored. I never would’ve committed UpLink’s resources to ISS if that hadn’t been demonstrated to me.”
Nordstrum looked thoughtful.
“Gord, you may be sold,” he said. “But the currency of trust NASA built up with the public during its Mercury and Apollo years is almost depleted. Selling them is going to be a problem.”
“You aren’t sounding very sanguine.”
Norstrum expelled a breath. “The accident creates uncertainty even for those of us who believe in space research. And long before Orion, a great many taxpayers, maybe a majority, considered the program a wasteful frittering away of their money. For its critics, a forty-billion-dollar international space station, with hundreds of millions going to bail out the Russians — who couldn’t pay for their end despite Starinov’s pledges to the contrary — is emblematic of that waste. They haven’t seen any practical value in it and nobody’s done an adequate job of making them feel otherwise. And now, with the death of Colonel Rowland…” He spread his hands. “I wish I could be more optimistic.”
Gordian leaned further across the desk.
“Okay,” he said. “What do we do?”
Nordstrum sat quietly for several moments before answering.
“I’m not your paid consultant anymore. Not a newspaper columnist. I can only speak to you now as someone who sees the workings of government and big industry as countless other people in this country do, from the outside through shaded windows, and maybe that’s a good place to come at this from, maybe it makes it easier to be their voice.” He paused. “Convince them, convince me, that the Orion investigation is going to be completely aboveboard. I don’t want to hear about its progress from some evasive media spokesman who believes his primary responsibilities are to spin the facts and keep me mollified while those in the know go about their work in secrecy. I’m sick of those types and am going to hit the clicker the instant they show their faces on my TV screen. When something surfaces that hurts, let it hurt. For once, just once, I want the truth straight up. And I want it from someone I can trust.”
He fell silent, studying the brawny shoulder of Mount Hamilton through the window.
The silence lasted awhile.
At last Gordian unfolded his arms, lifted them off the desk, and reclined in his chair so slowly Nordstrum could hear every creak of its burnished leather as a separate and distinct sound.
“Anything else?” he asked.
“As a matter of fact, yes.” Nordstrum checked his watch. “Don’t let another news cycle go by without a statement to the media. There’s still time to put one out before the end of the business day. And before the six-thirty network broadcasts.”
Gordian smiled a little.
“Hell of a mouthful,” he said. “Just like the old days.”
“The sole difference being,” Nordstrum said, “that in the old days I got handsomely compensated.”
Their insertion technique highly modem, their means of delivery an airborne relic, the twelve HAHO jumpers vaulted from a blacked-out DC-3 that had carried Allied troops on missions of liberation during World War II.
This was a very different sort of mission, plotted by men with very different objectives.
The propeller-driven transport had flown from a hidden airstrip in the Pantanal, a sprawling wetlands in central Brazil, to within a dozen miles of their drop zone outside the frontier city of Cuiabá. While a traditional parachute jump might have occurred at an altitude of three thousand feet, they were ten times that distance from the ground when they exited the plane. It was a height at which the atmosphere was too thin to support human life and where, even in the tropics, the extreme cold could damage the flesh and freeze the eyelids shut.
Survival for the high-altitude-high-opening team therefore hinged upon specialized equipment. Oxygen canisters rigged to their jumpsuits made it possible for them to breathe. Protective goggles allowed them to keep their eyes open in the frigid, lashing wind. Pullover face masks and thermal gloves offered insulation against the worst effects of exposure.
Free fall through the moonlit sky was brief. Their airfoil-shaped chutes released moments after they jumped, unfolding front to back, then from the middle out to the stabilizer edges — a sequence that checked their deployment until they were just below the backwash of the props, reducing the opening shock.
Their canopies filled with air, hands on their steering toggles, the jumpers descended at an initial rate of about eighteen feet per second, passing through a high layer of cirrocumulus clouds composed of supercooled water and ice. Fastened to their harness saddles, the bags containing their assault weapons doubled as seats that helped distribute their weight and compensate for drag.
The lead jumper was a man who had gone by many names in the past, and presently chose to be called Manuel. He snatched a glance down at the altimeter atop his reserve chute, checked his GPS chest pack unit for his current position, and then signaled the HAHO team to form up in a crescent around him. He wore a small, glowing blue phosphorous marker on his back, as did three of the other jumpers. Another four had orange markers, the remaining four yellow ones. The colored markers would allow them to maintain close formation as they glided through the inky darkness, and provide easy identification when they broke off into separate groups on the ground.
For now, however, it was vital that they stay together through their long cross-country flight, silently riding the night wind, sweeping down and down toward their target like winged, malicious angels of death.
THREE
FROM AN ASSOCIATED PRESS BULLETIN:
Space Agency and UpLink International Pledge to Keep ISS on Track Despite Shuttle Disaster
Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral-In a joint statement released late this afternoon through NASA press spokesman Craig Yarborough, agency officials and Roger Gordian, whose firm, UpLink International, is chief contractor of the ISS project, have declared their undivided commitment to resuming assembly of the orbital station as soon as possible. “We will reach beyond loss and grief,” Yarborough said in his opening remarks, and then went on to announce the formation of an investigative task force to determine the cause of the blast, which has reawakened grim memories of the 1986 Challenger accident that claimed the lives of seven astronauts and nearly crippled America’s space program.