“LOS by Kennedy, Endeavor. With you via Bermuda at 03 plus 17. LOS Bermuda in 5 and a half.”
“Gotcha, BDA,” Parker called as he worked the RMS computer keyboard at waist level to Enright’s left.
Two minutes east of the Virginia coastline, Endeavor was 600 miles out to sea. The blue-green terrain of the American coast was lost at the hazy line of the western horizon. Only the brilliant ocean filled the flightdeck’s thick windows.
“Another voltage spike, Endeavor,” the headphones crackled. “Please give another look outside. See any out-gasing from either the target or Soyuz?”
“Stand by one, Bermuda,” replied an exasperated Enright, who had both ungloved hands full of RMS.
“Let me, Jack,” the AC offered over his voice-activated intercom which the ground could not hear. He pressed his mike button to address the sparkling planet.
“AC here, Colorado. Real sorry, but with the sun west of us and smack in our field of view, I can barely see the target or Soyuz through all the glare. Real sorry, buddy.”
“Thanks, AC. First thing after sunset… in twelve minutes… give another look, please. You’re AOS by Dakar five minutes before sunset and with DKR for two minutes after sunset. Try to get a visual report in darkness by Dakar. You lose DKR at 03 plus thirty-four. You are then out of network contact for ten minutes.”
“Will do, Flight,” the tall flier drawled as he fiddled with the autopilot pushbuttons.
“Good enough, Will.”
Above the bright Atlantic, Soyuz drifted with its round nose only three Shuttle lengths away from Endeavor’s open payload bay. The bay faced LACE and the Soviet ship. With the blinding sun behind Soyuz, the shuttle crew could not see the thin blue-green beam of light which radiated from the belly of Soyuz toward the sea. At the far end of the beam, a Russian tracking ship pitched slowly in light seas. The trawler’s banks of optical antennae sucked in the beam of light from space. Burning through the humid afternoon air, the beam was as secure as a buried telephone cable which could not be tapped. As Soyuz coasted eastward, the optical antennae aboard the trawler tilted toward its target unseen in the purple sky. The laser beam from Soyuz could carry telemetry and voice in either direction over a medium unseen and unheard by Shuttle’s black boxes tuned to radio frequencies.
“Another field spike on the PDP, Endeavor. See anything? Hurry before we lose you here…”
“Say again, Flight. You’re breaking up.” The AC squinted out his overhead window.
The AC’s headphones were silent as Endeavor, LACE and Soyuz, careened over the horizon out of earshot with the Bermuda Island tracking station at 03 hours, 22½ minutes out.
“Peace and quiet at last,” Enright grumbled. The command pilot at his left nodded as he fine-tuned Mother’s autopilot. Endeavor would require only another eight minutes to reach the west coast of Africa.
The rugged old engine of the Jennifer Lee chugged loudly in the little fishing boat which puffed into Chesapeake Bay under gray, winter skies. The cold salt air stung the hard face of the Jennifer Lee’s captain, the fishing boat’s crew of one. And the air was painful against the skin of the fisherman’s only passenger dressed in a business suit.
Ahead loomed the Hampton Roads Bridge linking Hampton, Virginia, off the right side to Norfolk off the left side. The boat made a foaming wake as she plowed northwestward into the mouth of the great bay.
“You picked the perfect spot to go fishing,” the queasy visitor stammered to the middle-aged captain. “Can’t say much for the weather, though.”
“You’re not used to the little boat and the big waves, that’s all,” the man at the tiller said dryly.
“Guess not. Too many years at a desk, I suppose.”
“CIA, Langley?” the burly seaman asked gravely.
“No, Nikolai, Defense Intelligence Agency.”
“Oh. My friends down here call me Nick. Not for much longer, it would seem.” The boatman steered his boat across whitecaps which broke over the low bow of the thirty-foot trawler.
Hampton Roads Bridge cast its faint shadow in the gray weather upon the Jennifer Lee making her tossing way into the bay.
“It is the perfect place to fish, though,” the sailor called over the noise of wind and waves. “Langley is just off to the right and the Norfolk navy yard is just south of the bridge.”
Langley Air Force Base and the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency were on the north side of the towering bridge overhead. Norfolk Naval Air Station was on the south side. The two air bases were hardly 12 miles apart.
The Jennifer Lee was pointed under the bridge toward the James River. Just off the boat’s right side, old Fortress Monroe passed under the northern piles of Hampton Roads Bridge. A young army engineer had built the ancient fort in the 1830’s: Lt. Robert E. Lee, fresh out of West Point. Three decades later during the holocaust of brother killing brother, Lee’s son was a prisoner of war in the Yankee fort.
“Nikolai, I haven’t much time. Our shuttle flight is running into trouble. That’s why I’m here.” The man from Washington looked sicker with each wave.
“Your runaway LACE spacecraft?”
The greening man beside the tall fisherman raised his eyebrows.
“My job is to know about such things, you know,” the captain said with no trace of Russian in his perfect, Tidewater, Virginia, accent.
“Oh. Well, I am told that you can tell us about your Soyuz-TM spacecraft. Our people haven’t monitored a word of communications with it in 13 hours. And the shuttle astronauts have monitored electronic fields in the vicinity of Soyuz. I need to know if those impulses are from Soyuz?”
“Don’t know about that. The disturbances, that is. I do know that Soyuz is a military version of the spacecraft. So she must be using a laser beam of her own to communicate with our ground stations and tracking ships. It’s like your submarine laser.”
“You have done your job well, Nikolai,” the seasick guest said weakly.
“Yes.”
The two men rolled on rough seas for a long silence. They cruised past Willoughby Bay just past the navy yard on the Jennifer Lee’s left.
“I shall miss it here,” the fisherman sighed loudly. “These people are like my own kind: hungry, poor, and hard. Their handshakes have always been good.”
The man from Washington said nothing. His hand covered his mouth on his ashen face.
“Yes, I like it here. How strange, now: my country is losing the Balkans, and I shall lose your beautiful Chesapeake Bay. Oh well, the shellfish are almost all gone now. And what’s left are poison.”
The Jennifer Lee steered toward a row of wharves where dozens of little boats were moored. The air was heavy with the stench of rotted fish in freezing salt air.
“Can you make a living fishing, Nikolai?” the nauseous man inquired between stomach convulsions in the rough sea close to the docks.
“Yes,” the boatman said firmly. “I certainly can’t do my other job after today.”
Just shy of the clapboard dock, the big seaman turned to face his sickly passenger who had been dropped off 15 minutes earlier by a Coast Guard cutter.
“What will you do, Nikolai, when the oyster beds run dry?”
On the dock, two black cars with government plates waited.
“Fish for something else. My people have always been fishermen.”
The Jennifer Lee banged gently into the dock.