Ian Rankin: Westwind

‘No sugar,’ said Nick Christopher, handing him the beaker.

‘Thanks.’

‘Only another twenty minutes till break.’

‘Thank God.’

‘So what were you saying about Paul?’

‘Oh, just that he’s got some data he wants me to check.’

‘Data?’ Christopher sipped his own coffee. ‘What sort of data?’

‘I don’t know till I’ve looked. Probably nothing important. You know what Paul’s like.’

Christopher smiled. ‘He’s like a kid with a train set.’

‘Exactly,’ said Hepton.

But by the time he wandered across to Paul Vincent’s console, Vincent himself had vanished. Hepton looked at the computer screen. It was blank. He tried coding in, but it remained blank.

‘Temporary fault,’ said Fagin from behind him. ‘Was there something you wanted?’

‘Just checking.’

‘Checking what?’

‘Oh, you know...’

‘Well you won’t get much joy. Part of the disk’s been wiped.’

‘You mean the hard disk?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because of the malfunction?’

‘Or more likely Vincent’s panicking.’ Fagin had it in for Paul Vincent, everybody knew that. It was whispered that Paul reminded him too much of his own son, who had left home at seventeen and never returned.

‘Where is Vincent, by the way?’

Fagin shrugged. ‘I don’t know. The little boys’ room perhaps.’

‘What happened back there?’

Fagin seemed to think about this. ‘I’m just glad we got her back,’ he said at last. ‘We’ll find out eventually.’

‘It wasn’t a test then, to impress our friends?’

‘Friends?’

‘Those two generals.’

‘Not at all. What makes you say that?’

‘Oh, they just seemed to be timing our response, that’s all. And they looked fairly happy with the outcome.’

‘Nobody likes to lose a satellite, Martin.’

‘Of course not, sir. If you’ll excuse me, it’s almost my break. I think I’ll try to find Paul.’

‘Fine.’ Fagin was picking up the internal telephone, pushing buttons. The panic was over; things had to go on.

Three minutes and forty seconds. Usually a malfunction could be located and corrected within sixty seconds. There were backup systems, a computer locked into every function of the satellite, ready to pinpoint the failure and repair it. After sixty seconds, you could assume that the computers had failed to find the fault, and you began to worry. So you went to manual, checking everything yourself. At the two-minute mark, you panicked.

Three minutes and forty seconds. The brass had seemed satisfied. Fagin seemed satisfied. Paul Vincent had reported his findings, but nobody seemed to want to know. What the hell was going on?

Hepton went to the toilets, then checked the canteen, the recreation area and the TV room: nothing. The table tennis players hadn’t seen Paul Vincent, the guys watching a porn film hadn’t seen Paul Vincent, nobody had seen Paul Vincent. He had disappeared. Hepton sat down in the TV room to think. The porn film was in German, not that a degree in languages was necessary to understand the plot. The film was being beamed via satellite, probably from a mainland European station. One bored weekend they’d spent several hours using the base’s sophisticated communications technology to home in on a couple of television satellites. Now they could pick up just about any station they liked and decode any scrambled signal. The picture today wasn’t the sharpest, but the cameraman was in close enough so that this didn’t really matter...

Zephyr . What did Paul Vincent know about Zephyr ?

Hepton caught up with Nick Christopher in the canteen, where he was scooping up chips and beans with a fork and holding open a book with his free hand.

‘What are you reading?’ Hepton asked.

Christopher showed him the cover, ‘Albert Camus, The Fall . I found it in the library.’

‘What’s it like?’

‘I don’t know. Nothing’s happened yet. What’s wrong?’

Hepton realised that he was sitting with head in hands, elbows propped on the table.

‘I can’t find Paul,’ he said.

‘Perhaps he doesn’t want to be found,’ said Christopher, scooping up another mouthful of beans.

‘Maybe you’re right at that,’ said Hepton, stealing a limp lukewarm chip from the plate.

The afternoon drifted back into ordinariness. After the break, it was back to the consoles. The system, though, was failing to yield the source of the malfunction. Fagin walked from monitor to monitor, for all the world like a factory-line foreman. He stopped at Hepton’s desk.

‘It seems Paul Vincent has been taken ill,’ he said, scribbling something on his clipboard.

‘Ill? Can I go see him?’

‘He’s not in the rest room. They’ve had to take him to hospital.’

‘Christ, that was a bit sudden.’

‘The doctor thinks it might be simple exhaustion.’

Exhaustion. Paul was not only the youngest of the crew, he was the fittest too. Twice a day he jogged around the perimeter fence, a haul of two and a half miles. He was the only one of them who used the multigym. He had the stamina of an athlete. Hepton sat at the console, his mind whirling. The nearest hospital was twenty miles away. He had to go there.

Fagin had walked away now and was examining another monitor. Hepton looked across to where Paul Vincent’s monitor sat untended, the chair pushed in beneath the desk with the finality of a coffin lid being nailed down. He shivered. There was something very odd about this whole thing. A curious mind had brought him into the world of astronomy and astronautics, and that same mind was now needling him to look a little further into things. And yes, he would.

He tasted smoke in his nostrils and felt blood gouge its way along the creases in his spacesuit. The vibration in the shuttle intensified still further, becoming more than a roller coaster. A roller coaster had once terrified him as a child, and he had determined never to be afraid of anything again in his whole life, a decision that was ending here and now with the most complete terror he had ever felt.

Through the glass he caught a quick glimpse of the ground crew; already the fire engines were racing forwards, but too late. Sparks flew from the seared undercarriage, and a final all-encompassing ball of flame sent him veering towards pale darkness.

But then suddenly Adams was at his side, his head bloodied, and Adams’ hands slid around his throat, growing tight, and all the time he was shouting:

‘You sonofabitch! You sonofabitch! I won’t forget! Not ever! The burial’s what matters! Coffin’s got to be buried!’

It was all so unnecessary, Dreyfuss thought. We’re dying anyway; why don’t you let me die in peace? The tarmac below was churning like the sea, as unsteady as a fairground ride. Adams’ hands were still there. Blood pounded in Dreyfuss’ ears, tortured metal, the whine of the uncontrollable engines. How could it have happened? Total malfunction. Absolute and total, just as they were starting the descent. How could it have happened? It was typical of his life that he should die with a question unanswered in his mind.

And then, finally, he blacked out.

The emergency team were ready. They’d been ready since the first warning that something was wrong on the space shuttle Argos . Now they started to jet, engulfing white foam over the stricken craft, snuffing out flames until the whole thing looked like a children’s toy in a bubble bath. The crew had come from the ground station to watch. There had been six men on board: five Americans and one Briton. Most of them were praying that the Americans, at least, would still be alive. They didn’t really give much thought to the only Briton, Major Michael Dreyfuss. These days, it was strictly a case of looking after number one.