separate engines?”
Jeremy looked to Annie, still hesitant. He was waiting to see how much she wanted to share, and would say nothing more without her okay. Nimec decided he liked him a little better for it.
“The other night I came here after everyone else was gone, just to do some thinking,” Annie offered at length. “I’d had a tough day wrestling with the press and needed to get my head straight….” She trailed off a moment, then shook her head. “But that doesn’t matter. What
“They did evidence analysis on the Unabomber case, the Times Square and World Trade Center bombings in New York, probably hundreds of other investigations,” Nimec said. “UpLink’s had a relationship with them for years, and I’ve worked with them personally. The LLNL’s the best group of crime detection and national security experts in the business.”
She nodded. “They’re sending a team of analysts with an ion-store/time-of-flight mass spectrometry instrument.”
“Which means you’re looking for residual by-products of a blasting material,” he said. “IS/TOF-MS allows the trace-particles analysis to be done right here in this building… avoids deterioration that can take place by transporting the sample to a lab.”
“Yes.”
Nimec mulled that over for a while.
“In acts of sabotage, you have to work quickly and on the sly and that’s how errors are sometimes made,” he said. “If you’re good at destruction, you know that the way to take the possibility of a foul-up into account… to anticipate and keep it from happening… is to be redundant. Get your hands into three engines, though all you need is one to go bad. If I’m reading you right, then whatever made Engine Three — and maybe Engine Two — overheat was supposed to have done the same with Engine One, but didn’t. Or at least not to the extent intended.”
“That’s a reasonable explanation, yes, if we assume a deliberate and successful effort was made to destroy
“More than likely,” Jeremy said. “I’d bet anything on it.”
Nimec looked at him.
“What makes you sound so definite?”
“Remember a second ago, when I was talking snowflakes, and you wanted to talk explosions?”
Nimec had already gotten enough of a feel for Jeremy to realize the question wasn’t rhetorical.
“Uh-huh,” he said.
“Well, it happens we were already on the same page. An offshoot of my work in thermodynamic crystal geometry, which involves various types of controlled explosions, has been an interest in
“Somehow,” Nimec said. “I had an inkling.”
“I know you did.”
Nimec gave him a nod.
“Tell me what you’ve got, Jeremy,” he said. “Why so definite?”
“In simple language,” Jeremy said, “a certain type of chemical reaction equals an explosion equals a pattern. And to me the splay, burn, and scoring patterns in this engine had to have been made by tiny thermal charges — could’ve been something like noncommercial RDX — that were meant to destroy the hydrogen fuel turbo-pumps, but only partially did the job.”
Nimec considered that a second and nodded again.
“Thanks,” he said.
“S’okay.” Jeremy put his hand on the ruined engine, peering at Nimec through the lenses of his wire glasses. “You want to come around this side, I’ll show you what I mean.”
A comradely overture.
“Yeah,” Nimec said. “That’d be good.”
“There’s something I kept to myself at the VAB,” Nimec told Annie half an hour later. “Wasn’t sure how much to say in front of Jeremy.”
They were having coffee in the KSC commissary, his offer of lunch scaled down because of her packed schedule, Jeremy now on his way back to Orlando.
She watched him intensely over her cup.
“Go on,” she said.
“In some instances terrorists will want to leave a footprint of sabotage without taking credit for the act. It’s been an increasing trend over the last decade. Lets them have it both ways — they put the fear into you without bringing heat down on themselves.”
Annie kept her eyes on him.
“You think Main Engine One wasn’t meant to be destroyed? That the attempt was just supposed to look as if it were botched?”
“I think it’s a distinct possibility.”
She was silent awhile. Then a pale little smile touched the comer of her lips. “That must have occurred to Jeremy too. My guess is he wasn’t sure what to say in front of
“Could be.” Nimec noticed himself noticing her smile and redirected his eyes toward the tabletop. What was with him? They were colleagues and these were inappropriate circumstances for such things. Weren’t they? He was looking at her again before he knew it. “He’s certainly smart enough.”
Annie quietly drank some more coffee.
“Two questions,” she said. “Would UpLink find it acceptable if I inform the press that we are now cautiously progressing along a line of inquiry that
“We wouldn’t have a problem with that,” he said.
“Next question,” she said. “If it was sabotage, do you have any idea who may be responsible?”
He thought a moment, then made a decision.
“I think we could very soon,” he said. “Our outfit has a small satellite ground station in Pensacola. I’m getting flown there from Orlando by a corporate jet at four o’clock this afternoon. We’re conducting an operation you may want to observe.”
She chewed her lower lip contemplatively, holding the coffee cup, steam floating up in front of her face.
“I need to get home to the kids.”
“It’s a short trip,” he said. “I’ll arrange for the plane to take you back soon as we’re finished.”
Silence.
Annie took another drink from her cup, then lowered it onto the saucer.
“Count me in,” she said.
NINETEEN
It was 2:00 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, April twenty-third, in San Jose, California.
It was 5:00 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time in Pensacola, Florida.
It was 6:00 P.M. Brazilian Daylight Time in the central Pantanal.
It was 3:00 A.M. the following day, April
The variations in dates and time zones made no difference to UpLink International’s Hawkeye-I and — II
