Shadow Watch

Annie can scarcely guess.

No, that isn’t the truth. Not really.

The simple, inescapable truth is that she’s afraid to guess.

His grip tightens.

She wishes she could see his face.

“You were supposed to be responsible. Supposed to look out for us, ” he says.

Annie still doesn’t pull away, absolutely refuses to pull away. Instead she moves closer to him, pressing up against the bed rail, thinking if she could just see his face, if they could just see each other eye-to-eye, he would stop this nonsense about her leaving him—

The thought is abruptly clipped short as her eyes once again fall on his sleeve. The color, yes, the color, how had she failed to identify it right away? She doesn’t know the answer, but realizes now that what he’s wearing isn’t a pajama, its carrot-red color and heavy padded fabric marking it as, of all things, all impossible things under the sun, a NASA flight/reentry suit. At the same instant this occurs to her, the quiet beep of the instruments measuring her husband’s vital functions pitches up to a shrill alarm, an earsplitting sound she recognizes from some other place, some other when.

It is a sound that makes her gasp with horror.

The faceless man in the bed is shouting at her at the top of his voice: “H2 pressure’s dropping! Look for yourself! Check the readings!”

On impulse, Annie shoots her gaze over to the right side of the bed, recognizes the forward consoles of a space shuttle where she had seen hospital instruments only moments before. For some reason this causes her little surprise. She takes in the various panels with a series of hurried glances, her eyes leaping from the master alarm lights to the smoke-detection indicators on the left-hand panel of the commander’s console, and then over to the main engine status displays below the center CRT.

Again, what she sees is not unexpected.

“Stay calm, Annie, we’re on the fast track now! Better reach for that ejection lever or nobody’s making it home!” the man in the bed practically howls, and then wrenches her arm with such violence that she stumbles off balance and crashes forward against the rail. She flies across it, whimpering, throwing out her free hand to check her fall. It lands on the mattress beside him, preventing her from sprawling clear across his chest.

“The world spits us up and out, so where’s our goddamned parachute?”

He keeps holding onto her right arm, keeps shouting at Annie as she braces herself up over him with her left. Though their faces are just inches apart, his features are still too distorted for her to make them out.

Then, suddenly, the sense of disconnection she had experienced in the waiting room recurs for a fleeting moment, only now it is as if she’s been split in two, part of her watching the scene from high above while the other struggles with the man on the bed. And with this feeling comes the whole and certain knowledge that his face would not belong to her husband if she could see it; no, not her husband, but someone else she has loved in a very different way, loved and lost. Annie doesn’t understand how she knows, but she does, she does, and the knowledge terrifies her, seeming to rise on the crest of a building hysteria.

“Where’s our goddamned parachute?” he shouts again, and yanks hard at her wrist, pulling her down onto himself. As she finally tries to break away, Annie catches another glimpse of his clutching fingers… and sees for the first time that they are horribly burned, the fingernails gone, the outer layer of skin sloughing off the knuckles, baring raw, strawberry-red flesh underneath.

She wants to scream, tells herself she must scream, thinking… still without knowing why… that it might somehow bring her ordeal to an end. But it refuses to come, it is trapped in her throat, and all she can do is produce a small cry of anguish that is torn to shreds by her vocal cords even as she wrings it out of them—

Annie awakened with a jolt, her heart knocking in her chest, the trailing edge of a moan on her mouth. She had broken out in a cold sweat, her T-shirt plastered to her body.

She looked around, taking a series of deep breaths, shaking her head as if to cast off the lacy remnants of her dream.

She was home. In Houston, in her living room, on her sofa. From the TV in the kids’ room she could hear the Teletubbies carrying on with manic effervescence. On the carpet at her feet, her newspaper was still folded to the article she’d been reading when she’d fallen into an exhausted sleep. Its headline read: “AFTERMATH OF TRAGEDY.” Above the columns of text was a photo of Orion in its catastrophic final moments.

Annie bent her head and covered her stinging eyes with her palm.

She’d flown back from the Center after having been there since very early that morning and attended meeting after meeting in which the participants — NASA executives, government officials, and representatives of the various shuttle and ISS contractors — had ostensibly been trying to sift through what they knew about the accident and lay out a preliminary framework for an investigation into its causes. Instead, they had spent the majority of the time staring at one another in dazed silence.

Perhaps, Annie thought, it had been a mistake to expect anything more constructive so soon after the explosion. At any rate, she had felt nothing but a sense of leaden futility by the end of the final session, and been grateful for the chance to go home.

Home sweet home, where she could take her mind off what had happened, enjoy some light reading and a refreshing nap before getting started on dinner.

Her hand still clapped over her eyes, she felt a small, bleak smile touch her lips.

An instant later the tears began streaming between her fingers.

The Barrett rifle against his shoulder, his cheek to its stock, Antonio aligned his target in the crosshairs of its high-magnification sight.

Moments after leaving Kuhl’s vehicle, he had scurried up a tree that afforded a direct line of fire with the guard station, and was now half-sitting, half-squatting in the fork of its trunk, his feet braced on two strong branches. The thirty-pound weapon ordinarily required a bipod for support, but here on his treetop perch he’d been able to rest its barrel over his upraised knees.

He inhaled, exhaled, gathering his concentration. A series of dry trigger pulls had helped him find a comfortable body position and make minor adjustments to his aim. He would be shooting across a distance of over nine hundred yards, and could not afford to be even slightly off balance.

There were two guards inside the booth. One stood at a coffeemaker, pouring from its glass pot into a cup. The other sat over some papers at a small metal desk. He would be the second kill. The man on his feet would have greater mobility, and a mobile target always had the best chance of escape, requiring that it be the first to be taken out.

Antonio took another inhalation, held it. The guard at the coffee machine had filled his cup and was putting the pot back on its warming pad. He raised the coffee to his lips, but would never get a chance to drink it. In a practical sense he was already dead. The booth’s bullet-resistant window would be easily penetrated by the tungston-carbide SLAP rounds chambered in Antonio’s weapon, doing the men behind it no good at all.

“Mi mano, su vida,” he whispered, releasing his breath. As always before a kill, he felt very close to God.

He pulled smoothly on the trigger of his weapon, his eye and forefinger welded in seamless action.

His gun bucked. A bullet split the air. The window shattered. The guard spun where he stood and went down, the coffee cup flying from his hand.

Antonio breathed again, took aim again.

Still behind his desk, the second guard barely had the time to turn toward his crumpled partner before another bullet whistled in from the night and caught him in the left temple, tearing through his skull and snapping him up and out of his seat.

The sniper remained in position a short while longer, wanting to be thorough, watchful of any hint of movement in the sentry booth. Nothing stirred in the pale yellow light spilling from its blown-out window. Satisfied he’d gotten two clean kills, he shouldered the rifle, and was about to slip from the tree when a fluttering sound