The head swiveled. “Sorry, Colonel. Got lost.”
“Don’t get lost anymore. There’s lots of green, earth side.”
Washington sneered at him, reached for a grab bar, and shoved off ahead of him. McKenna didn’t think the computer specialist liked him. And didn’t care.
He reached the Command Center to find Milt Avery manning the main console. The primary screen held a view of the hanger side of the hub, and a radar repeat was shown on Screen 2. There were six more screens, each showing some section of the space station. Screen 8 was an exterior view, the camera trained on the growing Spoke 9B. Three figures in EVA suits were lining up a curved piece of the spoke.
Avery had been in the astronaut corps before his assignment as deputy commander of the station. He had taken the space shuttles through nine successful missions. A short and quiet man, Avery was not easily perturbed. McKenna thought he would be a good man in a crisis. “Hi, Milt.”
The colonel turned his head to look at him. “Hello, Kevin. Have you been checking on that Teal Ruby?”
“All but in the bay, Milt. And I made a pass through fuel storage. Looks fine.”
“Good,” Avery tapped a line into the computerized log he was working on. “Overton and Pearson said for you to meet them in Sixteen’s dining hall.”
“Damn. I just passed there. Oh, by the way, I chased Washington out of Corridor Two, near Fourteen.”
“One more infraction, and I’m going to ask Jim to boot him out.”
“I could drop him off on my next flight,” McKenna offered. “Say somewhere over Poland.”
“Sounds good to me.”
McKenna went back to Spoke Sixteen, passing through the four safety hatches. He got a bag of coffee and heated a roast beef sandwich from the Back Home machine, then carted them over to the table where Pearson and Overton had strapped themselves down.
There was no one else in the compartment, and McKenna figured the general had shooed them out.
Pearson was studying a mural fixed to one bulkhead. A soft view of Tahiti. There were lots of murals and pictures in the residential spokes.
“I believe that’s about three miles south of Papeete, Amy. We could pop down there for a couple days.”
“You including me?” Overton asked.
“Well, actually, Jim, I wasn’t.”
“He’s not including me, either,” Pearson said. She sat up against the lap belt and crossed her arms on the table. She had to hold the table edge with her fingers to keep her arms down.
McKenna forced his sandwich partway out of the pouch and took a bite of it.
“Amy and I,” Overton said, “had a long talk with Brackman and Thorpe and a couple of experts they found somewhere. The consensus is that the wells, platforms, and ancillary structures are now off-limits. Judging by the infrared and low-light photos of well number eight, the dome is divided internally into three sections, probably living quarters, administrative area, and wellhead section. The dome walls, by the way, are ten feet thick, Styrofoam sandwiched between aluminum sheeting. The well area appears to be completely open under the dome, and the experts say they can interpret the photos to show the wellhead and several turbine generators. Don’t ask me how, Kevin, because the low-light shots were blurry as hell down within the dome. They’re looking at the heat structures. Anyway, on number eight, the wellhead itself is estimated at three hundred and fifteen degrees of temperature. That’s the metal. Temperatures within the well itself are estimated at six hundred and twelve degree Fahrenheit.”
“Don’t touch it, in other words?” McKenna said.
“Not with your hand, not with a Wasp. If the wellhead is damaged, or even if the platform’s anchor lines are severed and the platform drifts, snapping off the well casing, all hell will literally break loose. Superheated water and steam spilling into the Greenland Sea will either kill or drive off the marine life. If all of those wells were to let go, the results could be catastrophic.”
McKenna had already stored a few mental pictures of Amsterdam, Stockholm, and Copenhagen under water.
“Does Brackman still think we need to find the undersea cables? The last reconnaissance run should have killed that idea.”
“Oh, he thinks we can find them, all right. Amy had the idea.”
McKenna looked to her and grinned. “You always do.”
“We’re going to do some electromagnetic mapping,” she said, holding his gaze with her own.
He almost made a snappy comment about her use of “we,” then fortuitously did not. She was, after all, part of the team, and McKenna didn’t want to exclude her.
“Sounds like a damned good idea,” he said.
And got a smile in return for a change.
Eleven
“We set to go, David?”
Thorpe was in his chair overlooking the operations center, and Brackman went in and stood beside him, looking at the big plotting board on the far wall, through the windows of the crow’s nest. Almost all of the targets currently being tracked were displayed in blue and red.
“Getting there, Marv. The First Aero put down at Merlin twenty-five minutes ago. We should get word soon on the equipment.”
Brackman checked the lower right-hand corner of the plotting board. The island of Borneo had three yellow dots on it.
He tracked back across the map and found Murmansk. There was one green dot superimposed on the city.
“What are the Soviets sending?” he asked.
“Sheremetevo’s operations officer is supposed to call me in the next half hour, Marv, but the early word was eight Fulcrums and an AWACS.”
“This is the first time we’ve ever shown the Reds in green, isn’t it?” the commander said.
“Grates a little, doesn’t it?”
Mildenhall Royal Air Force Base on the east side of England had a lavender dot. That would be the Boeing E-3 Sentry. Brackman had decided that he wanted an AWACS of his own aloft to watch over the action. Now that missiles had been exchanged, he was going to maintain much closer scrutiny. Themis could not be relied upon for a constant overhead surveillance because of her orbit, and there was no reason, just yet, to call the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and have a KH-11 moved into an overhead orbit. Besides, that might entail getting the National Security Agency involved and briefed, and the more agencies with an interest, the more difficult it was to reach decisions.
“Where are you spotting the Sentry, David?”
“At forty thousand feet over Greenland’s east coast, if that’s all right with you, Marv. It’ll give us the coverage we want, but keep her out of the fray, if one develops.”
“Overflight permission?”
“We’ve got it.”
“Okay, yeah, that’s good. McKenna give you any idea on the timetable?”
“He said a couple hours or a couple weeks,” Thorpe told him. “It all depends on Benny Shalbot.”
Col. Pyotr Volontov sat in his borrowed, jury-rigged office half a kilometer from the main runway at Murmansk. He thought the chair was a castoff from the Great War. The iron casters squealed, and the left arm was loose.
He rubbed his cheeks with the fingers of his right hand, deciding he should shave before takeoff time. The face mask tended to grate and rub his face raw when he had a stubble of whiskers.
Volontov had just talked on the telephone with Martina, the dark-haired, fair-skinned woman to whom he was betrothed. The engagement seemed to have become more permanent than marriage, now approaching two years of endurance. Neither Martina Davidoff, who was a medical doctor specializing in obstetrics in Moscow, and whose father happened to be an admiral in the Red Banner Northern Fleet, nor Volontov had yet felt inclined to take that last step.