A good place to think.
The sheriff hadn’t found any proof that Chad had sabotaged Tom’s helo, but the other information was troubling. Why had Chad never admitted to anyone that he was born into a Russian family, or that he’d retained enough of the language to stay in touch with this newly uncovered brother of his?
Kaz had learned that sometimes, to solve a problem, you had to take it back to basics and repicture it as if it were an exam question on a page. He tried phrasing it that way to himself.
A lander with two crew, American and Russian, is on the Moon. Above them, a spaceship with an American aboard is orbiting every 2 hours. Earth is a quarter million miles away, turning every 24 hours. Mission Control is in Houston, but has satellite dishes spaced around the globe to talk continuously to the crew. Once in a while, Houston hears the crew click their mic twice. Why?
Kaz blinked several times and turned his head against the hard pillow. He could feel the stiff crispness of the pillowcase, no doubt high-temp-washed and rough-pressed by a seaman somewhere in the industrial bowels of the ship.
Nothing.
He tried another entry point. Why had the Soviets sent a KGB officer? The way the guy was so quiet and calculating and the muscular bulk under the lousy suit were giveaways. Why wouldn’t they send a political, maybe the deputy ambassador, someone who they could publicly identify in the PR pictures so they could wave the Soviet flag in everyone’s face? He recalled Stepanov’s face—this guy wasn’t here for protocol. So what was he here for?
The cosmonaut was supposed to still be on Almaz, dutifully orbiting and photographing secret things around the planet, dropping film to Earth in canisters. No one had planned on her being part of this mission. So Stepanov was part of the reaction on their part, another attempt to turn the situation to their advantage. But what did they have control over, and what leverage could they use?
He stretched out on his back and scrunched the pillow under his neck for support. The berth was just long enough that the top of his head and his feet didn’t touch the bulkheads. He closed his eyes and exhaled to relax.
His eyes snapped open in the darkness. Could that be it?
He tried to remember the exact timing, reviewing when he’d been on shift, mapping it out. He realized that it fit.
Christ!
The Soviets had been talking to the crew.
And the crew had responded.
57
Re-entry
Chad glanced at his small computer screen: 36,165 feet per second. He did the math. Holy crap! I’m flying seven miles every second. Thirty-two times the speed of sound. Take THAT, Chuck Yeager!
He leaned forward in his seat to look across at Michael, strapped in beside him, and the cosmonaut on the far right. “Get ready for the finest seven minutes of your life, kids.”
The three of them had re-donned their spacesuits. NASA had learned that a Soviet crew of three had perished when re-entry vibrations and g-loads caused a cabin leak, and had added the safety measure for Apollo 18.
Pursuit was 75 miles high, just beginning to touch the outer atmosphere. Chad punched in the program code to check landing location, and compared it to the latitude and longitude Houston had given them. Identical. They were headed to an empty spot in the ocean, just a couple miles short of the USS New Orleans.
On the outside of the capsule, bad things were starting to happen. Pursuit was slamming into the rarefied air molecules with so much energy that it was ripping electrons free and tearing at its belly shield, burning off the outer layer. The mix of ionized gases clung to Pursuit’s skin in a sheath of blowtorch flames; an electric plasma field, glowing yellow and orange and red, enveloped the ship in a hypersonic fireball.
“My God, look at that!” Michael was watching the flames lick and dance across the windows, the shadows flickering inside the capsule. “We’re flying through a blast furnace!”
Svetlana let the chatter wash over her, probing how her body felt in anticipation of what was about to happen. She’d studied re-entry in detail at Star City, and had practiced repeatedly in the centrifuge trainer; to pass her cosmonaut flight qualification, she’d had to take over from the ship’s computers and fly the simulated capsule by hand, all the way down to parachute opening. On an early training run she’d misjudged it, dug in too deeply and failed, pulling 14 g—beyond the limits of the simulator, barely survivable in real life. She knew how thin the margins were.
She looked at the horizon line in the overhead windows, judging their entry angle; it made sense to her. They were coming in belly first, slightly tipped up and rolled to the right, the computer ready to play the roll angle to control the g force. She nodded. Just like I’d do it.