Space Station Down, page 6
“Yes, sir,” Scott answered, suddenly aware that he’d been tasked to speak for NASA. But he knew that that wouldn’t last long. As soon as Patricia Simone was out of the cabinet meeting he’d get his marching orders from Headquarters. NASA took its chain of command seriously, as did he—especially as a military officer. But be that as it may, he wasn’t about to argue with the President; that would all be sorted out later.
“And one more thing,” the President added. “I want to know the second that communications are reestablished with the station.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. President. I understand completely—” Scott stopped in midsentence.
“Excuse me?” said the President.
The control center’s giant monitor suddenly blinked.
The control room fell dead quiet, as if all one hundred people across its floor had been frozen in a block of ice.
Stunned, Scott spoke slowly. “Mr. President … you’ll get that last order you gave me fulfilled sooner than you’d think.”
Sounds of chairs shifting. “How’s that?”
“The link with the ISS … it’s just been brought up.”
JAPANESE MODULE (JPM)
Kimberly’s hands flew over the keyboard, trying to determine exactly where the two killers were located in the ISS, when the monitor suddenly blinked and the ISS logo came up on her screen.
Her eyes went wide. One of the downlinks to Johnson had just been reestablished! Something was about to be transmitted.
Stunned, Kimberly’s hands flew to her face. She didn’t know what to think. After all her efforts to hack into the four downlink channels, and being thwarted every step of the way, this suddenly came out of left field. Had the link been brought up by Farid?
As if working on their own, her fingers raced across the keyboard once more, trying to send a message down to MCC, the NASA mission control center.
But her efforts were in vain. A visual image of Farid and his cohort Bakhet filled the screen. Once again, Farid’s computer skills had overridden her efforts to send a frantic message down to NASA, to tell them she was still alive and she was going to do everything in her power to defeat these SOBs.
As she desperately tried to circumvent the digital quarantine that Farid had created against her, it dawned on Kimberly that this couldn’t be just the work of one individual. Even Farid, with his profound working knowledge of the ISS, his insider know-how about how all the station’s systems functioned, could never have managed to circumvent her efforts so quickly. This had to be more than one person working against her, and from the professional manner in which all her efforts had been circumvented, she realized that this had to be a highly organized endeavor.
This had been a well-planned attack on the ISS, to take total command and dominate every one of its functions, after first exterminating the station’s crew. That meant they wanted absolute control of the station for some major, preplanned purpose.
As she came to this conclusion, Farid’s voice, with his proper British accent from his Eton and Cambridge days, spoke over NASA’s video and comm link to the world:
“Today marks the beginning of Dabiq, the Final End of the Folly. The glory of Al-Qahhar will dominate, and the world will see His victorious glory.”
Kimberly drew in a breath. She remembered from her father’s Islamic background that Al-Qahhar was the Subduer, the Supreme One and Irresistible—not the Compassionate and All Understanding, the Allah she had been brought up to trust and understand.
This was an incredible sharp turn from everything she’d been taught and led to believe since a little girl. Even worse, this was incredibly more dangerous. What did he mean, the Final End of the Folly? The final? Was he about to announce a harbinger to the Final End?
The view on the laptop’s screen switched from Farid to an aerial view of New York City, taken either by Google Earth or perhaps the space station itself. The picture’s resolution was so fine and detailed that Kimberly could see individual cars on the streets. Farid’s voice came over the speaker.
“In four days the infidel city will cease to exist. The flaunting cesspool of wealth, the so-called International Space Station that keeps the downtrodden subdued, will hurtle from the heavens and crash into New York.” A cartoon image of the ISS’s thousand-mile path across the ground blinked next to the view of New York City; the path ran from Florida to New York.
“As a vengeful meteor from above, their godless monument of steel and technology will obliterate their center of depravity, their so-called financial center of the world, the fount of all evil. The one-million-pound space station will impact New York City with far more energy than the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima.” The computer-generated graphic of the ISS’s impact trajectory enlarged to fill the screen. “And as the ISS breaks up in the atmosphere, it will spew radiation in a path a thousand miles long and hundreds of miles wide, poisoning your country forever with plutonium. Your loathsome city will be destroyed, your contaminated east coast will be uninhabitable, and millions more will die.
“New York City—in four days, meet your death.”
The video feed switched off.
For several shocked moments Kimberly stared at the now-blank laptop screen. She realized that her hands were trembling, shaking. Stop it! she commanded herself, and began to tap at the keyboard once more in an attempt to break into Farid’s brief broadcast, to let NASA know that she was still alive, and to try to somehow stop this unbelievable insanity.
What was Farid thinking? Why would he do this? If his TV feed had been broadcast to the public, not only would the media go nuts, but there might well be rioting, terrified people by the millions trying to get out of the city, away from the coast, with car wrecks and traffic jams up and down the whole Eastern seaboard.
Did Farid really think he could somehow deorbit the ISS and crash it into a specific location, such as New York City? It was crazy to even think he could be that accurate. And spewing a radioactive path of plutonium? What was that about?
She suddenly felt cold. The RTGs. The Russians had just flown them up on the last Progress, compact nuclear power sources. It had been all over the news; everyone knew this was the next phase for the ISS in the human exploration of space. Each multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator carried over ten pounds of Pu-238, or 360 total pounds of highly radioactive plutonium in the three dozen RTGs. Although the radioactivity would spread over a large distance, Pu-238 had a half-life of eighty-eight years and the public might never venture into the contaminated area.…
But the final target was so precise a location, and with the uncertainty of where the ISS might be deorbited, it was insane to even think that Farid could ever come close to hitting the city, or even New York state, for that matter. With the way the atmosphere changed from second to second, it would take incredibly good luck to hit anyplace from Florida to Maine.
But on the other hand, Kimberly realized, if the panic didn’t come from the fear of impact, it would be the fear of being contaminated by a cloud of deadly plutonium falling from the sky. And if his broadcast had been transmitted to the public there could well be rioting and other acts of fear-driven violence, starting in New York and spreading up and down the coast, as well as inland. The average American didn’t have a clue about radiation, how aerodynamics really worked, or even basic orbital mechanics. So although the threat of hitting New York and contaminating the eastern seaboard might be small, it was the panic and rioting that would cause all the damage.
And that nonsense about the station’s one million pounds creating more carnage than an atomic bomb: the ISS’s aluminum modules were thin-skinned. They would mostly burn up in the atmosphere, along with the solar panels and other pieces of equipment. Only about 5 percent of the million pounds would survive the burning reentry, resulting in no more than fifty thousand pounds impacting the ground. And even that wouldn’t be all concentrated at one impact point, but rather would be spread across tens of hundreds of miles, just like the plutonium.
But try selling that to the general public. All they’d know is that the sky is falling, and they’d trample their own grandmothers to get away, anywhere, to be safe.
Kimberly felt her cheeks grow warm as she now realized that Farid’s insane plan had a nugget of reality at its heart, and that she had to reprioritize her whole existence to one all-important goal: stop these SOBs.
JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, ISS CONTROL CENTER, HOUSTON, TEXAS
Déjà vu, all over again.
The mission control center erupted into a madness of yelling as the link from the ISS was cut. Monitors at the MCC started showing projected impact points if the station was to really be deorbited in four days, but the error bars on each of the locations spanned half the continent.
Scott felt his chest constricting as he realized what had just happened. The ISS had been overrun for the sole purpose of crashing the station into a populated area—New York or Los Angeles, it didn’t matter, so long as it caused mass hysteria and the wild violence of millions of people seeking survival; and spewing plutonium as it descended was just icing on the cake. A terrorist threat that dwarfed anything ever attempted before.
His headphones clicked as he now heard frantic babble from the White House: Everyone there was just as rattled as everyone here, Scott realized. The phone connection was no longer muted, but he still couldn’t make out any details of the shouting. And with the noise in the control center ratcheting up as well, Scott couldn’t even think.
He stood up and started clapping his hands again, as loudly as he could.
“Again, stop it! Quiet down!”
This time the control center quieted almost instantly. Most everyone looked angry, their faces red with the frustrating knowledge that there was nothing they could do to help. A few people sobbed. Tears filled some faces.
Scott spoke rapidly, knowing that at any moment he might be called to answer questions from the White House. He was thinking out loud, rehearsing what he’d say if—no, when—the questions from Washington started flooding in.
“You all know your jobs and I don’t have to tell you how to do them. We’re going to need to know the precise altitude of the ISS as a function of time, and couple that with the best information we have on the atmosphere, to keep an updated projection on the point of impact and the ground trajectory as it deorbits.”
He made eye contact as he spoke, and he glanced at the placards above each console as the people turned to hear him.
TOPO, who tracks the ISS orbit
ADCO, ISS attitude
ETHOS, life support
RIO, U.S.-Russian activities
SPARTEN, power and solar panels
CRONUS, space communications and video
GC, ground control
BME, biomedical engineer
OSO, mechanical repair
PAO, public affairs officer
Where was the PAO? It hit him that the new female Voice-of-NASA had been the one who had bolted from the room. But he had more important things to worry about now.
Scott drew in a breath. Then, “In addition, we’ll need every idea you can come up with on how to stop those bozos from carrying this out. I don’t care how crazy an idea you might have, everything’s on the table. The White House will be asking Administrator Simone to give them everything we’ve got, so start inventing, people!”
He stopped abruptly and put a hand to his headphones.
“Scott, Patricia Simone. We saw the feed, but did any of it go out to the public?”
Glancing down at his console, Scott saw that the kill switch to the NASA TV still glowed red.
“No, ma’am. CRONUS is keeping the public feed down. JSC and the White House are the only ones who saw the transmission.”
“Finally, some good news.” Simone sighed. “We’re extending the press blackout, and the President has ordered that no one at NASA have any contact with the news media. I know that Johnson traditionally has the PR lead for the ISS, but I can’t emphasize strongly enough how critical it is for Headquarters to be the focal point for interacting with the public. Brief your PAO, ASAP.”
Scott glanced at the empty PAO console; the young Public Affairs Officer was still not at her post. Why had she left the MCC? He looked over his shoulder to the glassed observation balcony, searching out the senior PAO who had been escorting a gaggle of VIPs.
The VIPs were gone. Frowning, he saw the young PAO who had deserted her post directing emergency responders at the back of the balcony. It looked as though they were carting someone away. What the hell was going on? He turned his attention back to the Administrator. “Copy—I’ll let him know.”
“The media is already speculating about the murders,” Simone continued, “and they’re playing what little footage they have over and over again on TV all across the world: talk shows, Internet—it’s saturating the news. They’re reporting that everyone on the ISS must be dead, so let Headquarters handle this.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Thanks to your quick thinking the public probably isn’t aware yet of the incredible disaster that could happen if the station is deorbited—”
“Excuse me, Madame Administrator. Surely you’re letting the President and his cabinet know how remote the danger to New York actually is. We’ll be lucky if we can project what hemisphere the ISS will hit, much less a specific city—until it’s much too late to do anything.”
“I understand. I’ve explained exactly that to him, and he appreciates the point. But it’s not the impact he’s worried about. It’s the radiation, and the panic and rioting before the station hits. Especially if it gets out that we don’t really have a clue this far in advance about where it could impact—or even what the radioactive debris path will look like. It could affect anyone on Earth.”
“Copy,” Scott said.
She quickly changed the subject. “Now what about our station partners? What kind of feedback are you hearing from other countries?”
Scott felt his face redden. This was going to be tough, especially with what he’d done to Roscosmos, the Russian Federal Space Agency. They’re probably screaming bloody murder at NASA HQ and want his head on a plate. “I made the unilateral decision to cut out all the partners when I killed the feed to NASA TV.”
“You mean Canada, ESA, and Japan?”
“Everyone, ma’am.”
Simone hesitated. “Including Roscosmos?”
“Yes, ma’am. Even the Russians.”
He heard her muffle the phone link with a hand over the speaker, but she quickly came back. “Okay. So we really are the only ones who heard the terrorists’ transmission. The President will let us know when we can reengage with our station partners, so for now direct all inquiries and interactions no matter where they originate back to Headquarters. Understand?”
“Roger that.” Scott felt somewhat relieved: Now smoothing over international relations was Simone’s problem, not his. But as a retired three-star Air Force general who was currently NASA Administrator, she’d been doing that all her career.
“So what else do I need to know?”
“I’ve tasked everyone here in the center to do everything they can to update the projected impact point, from engaging the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for real-time continuous feed of atmospheric density to working with the Air Force Space Command—who’ve already volunteered access to their classified orbital databases, as well as their Space Fence sensors. Their onsite liaison has been extremely helpful in getting us access.”
“Good,” said Patricia. “I’ll speak to the Director of the National Reconnaissance Office and have them work with Johnson as well. They should be able to refocus their assets on helping us.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She hesitated. “There’s something else. I can’t be getting down into the weeds over here. I’ve got to work with the White House at a strategic level to coordinate NASA’s interactions with the media and our international partners, as well as running the agency. Scott, you were just up on the ISS, and you’ve done a great job during this crisis. I want you out here as my liaison with the National Security Council, be my conduit to understand what they’re planning and what they should be doing. Get to Washington, stat, as fast as you can and head on over to the NSC—I’ll have Headquarters pave the way.”
“Copy,” Scott said. “I’ve got a go-bag here at the office, so I’ll file a flight plan and take one of the T-38s VFR direct to Andrews. I should be there in a few hours.”
The Administrator switched off. Because Simone was a military officer during her own astronaut days, Scott assumed that now that she’d given the order there would be no question in her mind that it would be followed to the last detail. Luckily his small overnight “go-bag” was nearby, a habit he’d picked up while pulling alert during his F-22 days.
Next shift’s CAPCOM had just entered the MCC and was making a beeline to relieve him. George Abbey, Director of Johnson Space Center, Chief Astronaut Fred Tarantino, the head of the astronaut office, as well as four other astronauts, the head of the flight director’s office, and a half dozen staffers followed as well. Scott would brief them all and then be on his way to Washington.
Scott took off his headphones, pushed up from his seat, and moved out to do just that.
FLASHBACK: “NEVER GIVE UP…”
Newly promoted Major Scott Robinson was leading a flight of four F-22s over the ocean, escorting a Navy P-3 intelligence-gathering plane near the man-made islands that the Chinese had built in the South China Sea.
On the last few such intel flights, Chinese fighters had “accidentally” buzzed the unarmed Navy plane, flying close enough to raise the pucker factor even in the highly experienced commanders of the P-3s. Scott’s orders were to protect the four-engined “snooper” and avoid any problems.
