Tom Clancy, Martin Greenberg, Jerome Preisler
Shadow Watch
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Jerome Preisler for his creative ideas and his invaluable contributions to the preparation of the manuscript. I would also like to acknowledge the assistance of Marc Cerasini, Larry Segriff, Denise Little, John Helfers, Robert Youdelman, Esq., Tom Mallon, Esq.; the wonderful people at Penguin Putnam, including Phyllis Grann, David Shanks, and Tom Colgan; and Doug Littlejohns, Kevin Perry, the rest of the
ONE
Later, when it became both her job and obsession to determine what happened at the pad, she would remember how everything had gone just right until it all went terribly wrong, turning excitement and anticipation into horror, and forever changing the course of her life. Astronaut, media celebrity, role model, mother — the world’s easy reference tags for her would remain the same. But she knew herself well. There was the Annie Caulfield who had existed before the disaster, and the Annie Caulfield who eventually arose from its ashes. They were two very different women.
The morning had promised ideal conditions for the launch: calm winds, moderate temperatures, a clear blue spread of sky running off toward the eastern rim of Merritt Island, where the sun was shining brightly over Pad 39A at the ocean’s edge. Annie would never forget that gorgeous sky, never forget looking out a window in the Launch Control Center and thinking it was like something from a Florida postcard or tourist brochure, the sort of roof NASA mission planners frequently wished for and rarely got.
Indeed, the preparations for Orion’s launch had gone without a hitch from the beginning. There had been no false starts, none of the frustrating last-minute technical snags that often caused countdowns to slip, and sometimes even forced missions to be scrubbed entirely.
Everything, everything, had seemed just right.
At T minus two hours, thirty minutes, Annie had joined members of the Mission Management Team and other NASA officials in accompanying the flight crew — her crew, as she’d called it, as she referred to all of the teams under her supervision — to the transport vehicle that would ferry them to the pad. While this was typically staged as a photo op by NASA’s Public Affairs people, she was still a little surprised by the number of newsies waiting outside headquarters, their microphones covered with those furry wind baffles that looked like oversized caterpillars. There had even been a host from one of the network morning shows, Gary Somebody-or-other, who’d dragged her before the cameras for a comment.
In hindsight, Annie supposed she should have been prepared for the attention. NASA was intent on working the media, and she was aware that her strongly requested presence at the Center on the launch date, and to some extent even her appointment as Chief of Astronauts — a position very much at the upper level of the agency’s organizational hierarchy — were calculated to draw a larger-than-normal press contingent. But she accepted her value as a PR tool, and sincerely believed the mission warranted its hype.
Long delayed due to funding problems, and of major importance to the International Space Station, the facility’s first laboratory module was at last being sent into orbit, where it would be connected to the building-block segments already in place just two weeks before another research module was to launch from a Russian cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Far beyond their political merits as concrete examples of East-West cooperation, the two missions were at the very heart of ISS’s future scientific endeavors, opening up a new era in space exploration, and Annie was sure this was why she’d been so focused on their nuts and bolts and uncharacteristically oblivious to the surrounding hoopla. Together, they represented the largest step ever toward realizing a dream that had held her in its grip since childhood, and cost her dearly as an adult. With success for the ISS program within reach, Annie was hoping the pride she felt over her contribution might finally eradicate the guilt and pain that had been its lasting by-product.
But such thoughts had their proper time and place, and Annie’s personal trials had been the furthest thing from her mind as she stood there outside the restricted-access buildings of Launch Complex 39, watching Colonel Jim Rowland lead
They were her training group, her extended family.
Her responsibility.
She would always remember how Jim paused before entering the vehicle, his eyes scanning the crowd, seeking out her face amid the many others turned in his direction. The mission commander, and a fellow graduate of the astronaut class of ’94, Jim was a strapping, vigorous man who seemed to pulsate with confidence and enthusiasm… and, at that particular moment, an impatience that only another astronaut who’d seen the Earth from 250 miles up could fully understand.
“Turnips, first and always,” he said, knowing she’d be unable to hear him in the commotion, moving his lips slowly so she could read them without trouble. Grinning at her, then, he cocked a thumb at one of the breast patches on his carrot-orange launch/reentry suit.
Annie chuckled. Her mind flashed back to Houston, and the old training school motto they’d cooked up together, and the missions on which they’d flown as teammates. Ah, mercy, she thought. Once you’d been in space, it never stopped calling to you. Never.
Jim’s grin widened, his eyes showing wry good humor. Then he tipped her a rakish little salute, turned, and entered the transport, the rest of the crew following him aboard in orderly procession.
Soon afterward, her functions as window dressing concluded, Annie broke free of the gathered reporters, ate a light breakfast in the commissary, and then headed for the mission’s designated firing room, one of four expansive areas in the Center capable of directing a shuttle flight from prelaunch testing to takeoff, at which point operations would be shifted over to Mission Control in the Johnson Space Center, Houston. Filled with aisles of semicircular computer consoles, its enormous windows looking out toward the pad, the room was an impressive sight even while unoccupied. On launch days, when it bustled with ground controllers, technicians, assorted NASA bigwigs, and a smattering of guest VIPs from outside the program, it was something else again. For Annie, the atmosphere never ceased to be electrifying.
As she took her place in the Operations Management Room section of the firing room — which situated both the invitees and high-ranking personnel whose roles were nonessential to the countdown — Annie noticed the man seated to her right flick her an interested glance, instantly categorized it as the sort of I’ve-seen-your-picture-on-a- cereal-box look to which fame had made her accustomed, and then just as suddenly realized she was studying him in an almost identical manner. Not many businessmen were also household names, but only somebody who’d been sleepwalking for the past decade could have failed to recognize the founder and CEO of UpLink International, one of the world’s leading tech firms and, most notably insofar as Annie was concerned, prime contractor of the ISS.
He extended his hand. “Sorry for staring, but it’s a great thrill to meet you, Ms. Caulfield,” he said. “I’m —”
