John Nance - Orbit

“More or less.”

“Okay. A presidential order is an order, but NASA cannot afford suddenly to throw caution to the wind. I need you to go to Reagan at seven in the morning and get down to the Cape. Should you ever be asked by some damned congressional committee, then these are my formal orders: You’re there to coordinate and ensure safety for the Agency. You were asked to go down there by your supervisor.”

“Understood.”

“But…”

She’s reaching out to him, her index finger actually touching his lips, the level of familiarity and the knowing smile a bit disturbing.

“I think I understand. I know how you think, and how you feel about these private efforts. This launch attempt must not take place if there is too much risk, and I might just discover that there’s far too much risk… the type the boys down South just didn’t see at first.”

He’s nodding, admiringly. “I’m glad you see it that way. As you well know, I can’t trust anyone at the Cape.”

“There’s one thing I want.”

“Go ahead.”

“I’ve enjoyed being your fix-it agent, so to speak, especially after eight years in covert ops for the Company. At least no one’s been shooting at me here. But I’m ready now to come in out of the cold, as the old reference goes. That desk you promised me?”

“You really want to fly a desk?”

“Can we make this my last assignment?”

“Why not. Although I’ll need your help recruiting someone new. The one thing I learned early on in this town, Dorothy—if you don’t have your own eyes and ears, an administrator can never know what’s really happening in the trenches. You’ve done that well.”

“Deal, then? Last assignment?”

“Deal.”

“You want reports back from me?”

“No. We need plausible deniability at all turns. We may have said hello here at this party, but that’s it. In fact, amazingly, there will be no record of your having ever been here tonight.”

“I figured. In that case, I should evaporate,” she says, placing her empty wineglass on a nearby ledge and leaving without another word.

“Here’s our problem, General.”

On one of the huge screens an amazing furball of moving blue dots is gyrating, the dots orbiting the planet they’re almost obscuring. General Risen has seen this many times, the 3-D depiction representing the orbiting garbage dump of space junk whirling around the Earth. But now a single object begins to blink red, and the senior master sergeant controlling the display adds a circle around it and then drops out all but it.

“How long until impact,” Risen asks, “…and are we absolutely sure?”

“Six hours, twenty-four minutes, sir, and the answer is yes, it’ll be a high probability of a conjunction—a direct hit. There’s a kind of football-shaped zone of probable flight path around it, but… it looks potentially fatal to me.”

“How large is the object? Any estimate?”

“General, we’re sure this is one of the shroud halves off a 1986 Soviet Proton rocket. That means more than a hundred pounds.”

He leans forward, scanning the waiting, worried faces of the six men in front of him as they sit in the middle of the main Cheyenne Mountain war room. As commander, he’s rolled his staff car through the vaultlike blast door and climbed into the six-story, spring-mounted building too many times to count, but each time there’s been a crisis or an alert, a special quiet tension fills the place like nowhere else. That biologic electricity now crackles unseen among them as they wait for their commander to assess what their computers discovered less than an hour ago.

The call to his predawn bedroom brought him running.

“Did ASA use Space Command’s clearance procedures for this orbital insertion? In other words, that piece of junk has been up there one helluva long time and we’ve been tracking it. How come they used this precise orbit and we’re only now seeing the conflict?”

“Their orbital flight plan terminated yesterday, sir. They weren’t supposed to be where they are.”

Chris Risen drops his head and grimaces, the know-all senior commander caught in a simple but embarrassing mistake.

“And that dumb question, guys, was just my daily reminder that I’m a carbon-based unit and thus imperfect, stars or not.”

“Easy mistake, sir.”

“We’ve talked to ASA?”

“Yes, General, we’ve already alerted ASA’s Mission Control, but… they have no contact and can’t do anything to alter the spacecraft’s course.”

He nods, aware of the consternation NORAD’s call will have caused in Mojave.

“Sir,” the duty controller, a colonel, adds, “I’m stating the obvious, but the collision won’t be survivable.”

“Understood.”

“And, sir… worse is the fact that we calculate literally thousands of individual debris orbits will result, quite a few of them becoming elliptical and threatening other altitudes. A broken-up shroud would present far less hazard than the rain of fragments from a shattered spacecraft.”

Chris meets the colonel’s eyes for just a moment, getting the message. There are a few top-secret defensive abilities that are known to only a tiny handful of NORAD senior officers, officially denied capabilities that are never to be spoken of in the presence of uncleared individuals. Not even the highly trained control room personnel.

Risen gets to his feet, ever mindful of the delicate balance between approachable leader and the strong, impeccable commander. “All right. Carry on. I’ve got some calls to make.”

He makes his way to one of the glassed-in booths at the rear of the control room and picks up a tie-line maintained twenty-four hours a day by a crack team of specialists, a line that can reach the President almost anywhere at any moment. It is a capability approached with great care and some fear. Lifting the handset bypasses the chain of command, and if the reason isn’t as rock solid as the mountain around them, careers can be ended.

Even that of a four-star general.

A voice most of the nation instantly recognizes comes on the other end. It’s just past 7 A.M. in Washington, and Chris assumes the President is already away from the family quarters, but the sound of rustling bedcovers, a momentary comment from the First Lady, and a deep, sleepy voice betray the assumption.

“Yes?”

“Mr. President, General Risen at NORAD. My apologies, sir, but we have a situation in accordance with your directive yesterday on the private spacecraft.”

“Good morning, Chris. I’m just being lazy getting up. What’s up?”

His explanation is crisp and clear, and there’s a long pause from the other end before the commander in chief sighs.

“What do you recommend? And we are on a secure line, right?”

“Yes, sir. Mr. President, with the considerable damage this will do to orbital safety and the tremendous increase in debris… not to mention the loss of life… I recommend we use Longbow.”

“Really? Won’t our buddies across both ponds see what we’re doing?”

“Sir, we have to assume they will. The Russians, Chinese, French, and perhaps the European Space Agency will probably be watching. The National Reconnaissance Office is the better one to answer that.”

“But you think it’s about time they knew our capabilities anyway, right? I mean, it’s been thirty years and five presidents since we made a show of it.”

“Sir, you’re asking me a policy question I’m not qualified to answer.”

“Yeah, Chris, you’re right. That’s unfair of me. Look, I’m glad you brought this straight to me. I know it’s tough to jump the chain even in your position, but I need that direct contact. I realize this was a judgment call and not out of the Defcon procedures.”