R. J. Pineiro
Siege of Lightning
BOOKS BY R.J. PINEIRO
Siege of Lightning
Ultimatum
Retribution
Exposure
Breakthrough
01-01-00
Y2K
Shutdown
Conspiracy.com
Firewall
Cyberterror
Havoc
SpyWare
The Eagle and the Cross
The Fall
Without Mercy *
Without Fear *
Ashes of Victory **
Avenue of Regrets
Chilling Effect
* With Col. David Hunt
** With Joe Weber
First Fire The Consultants ***
*** With Robert H. Wilson
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Dedication
Siege of Lightning is dedicated to two very special people in my life:
My beautiful wife, Lory, a friend for all seasons.
My son, Cameron. Thanks for letting me rediscover the world through your eyes.
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.
“The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor that last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God.’”
PROLOGUE
Bathed in the soft ruddy glow of an autumn sunset, the Russian cargo spacecraft Progress VI trembled as the engines of its four strap-on boosters and central core ignited with the thundering roar of thousands of gallons of highly pressurized kerosene reacting with liquid oxygen, unleashing a combined thrust of 400,000 pounds against the flame-deflector pit.
Engulfed in a pillar of blaze and smoke, the rocket hesitated for a few seconds as the monumental upward drive fought the gravitational force pulling down on its 300,000-pound mass, until slowly the unmanned ferry gained the momentum necessary to achieve lift-off. The four “tulip” stabilizer arms, cradling the three-stage rocket over the concrete stand, fell back to their retracted position through the action of counterweights as the deafening RD-107 engines thrust the craft clear of the launchpad.
On-board computers issued hundreds of commands per second to the attitude-control boosters to keep the ferry from drifting off course as the launch vehicle broke through the sound barrier in forty-five seconds.
Leaving a long billowing trail of smoke, the boosters fired for another eighty seconds before separating from the central core, which continued to fire as the second stage for an additional two hundred seconds.
Forty seconds into second-stage firing, the abort rockets on the shroud tower ignited and the protective third-stage shroud separated into two halves along its longitudinal axis, exposing the spacecraft inside.
At an altitude of ninety miles, the second stage separated, and the RD-461 third-stage booster kicked into life with a final thrust of sixty thousand pounds for 240 seconds, injecting Progress VI into an east-to-west elliptical orbit 150 miles in perigee and 310 in apogee. The flight plan called for the spacecraft to remain in the orbit for seven hours and fifteen minutes, after which Progress VI’s main engine would start the first of three orbital burns to approach Space Station Mir.