She snapped forward in her seat, mouthing a prayer to any God that would listen, watching the tiny human shapes on the tower scramble into the rescue baskets as the flames rose behind them in a solid shaft. She couldn’t distinguish one from another, nor even be certain how many of the astronauts were on the platform. From her perspective they were barely larger than insects.
The rainbirds above the pad had activated, flooding it with water. For a long, excruciating moment Annie could see nothing through rising clouds of steam and smoke… nothing except the hideous glare of the fire raging, unquenched, around the shuttle.
And then one of the baskets was released. It arced toward the ground with tremendous speed, moving away from the tower just as a ragged tendril of a flame shot through its metal framework, lashing greedily at the platform. Horrified, Annie could still see members of the team on that platform, their bodies outlined against the flaring edges of the blaze. And then a second basket was released, descending the slide- wire ten or fifteen seconds behind the other — a delay that would have been unacceptable during practice aborts. Annie wondered about it briefly, but pushed her thoughts aside before they had a chance to fully form.
Yet she had seen what she had seen… and would later reflect that the thoughts you tried not to let into your head sometimes turned out to be the ones that took deepest hold, lingering with the tenacity of restless ghosts.
The next few minutes were sheer torment. Along with everyone around her, she had been unable to do anything but wait for the astronauts to resume communications from the bunker. Wait, and stare at the monitor, and try not to surrender to the madness of what she’d been witnessing.
There was silence. And more silence.
Annie gnawed at her bottom lip.
Finally she heard an excited voice in her headset.
“Launch Control, this is Everett. Second basket’s down and I think we’re all—”
He abruptly broke contact.
Annie sat without moving, her heart slamming in her chest. She didn’t know what was going on, didn’t even know what she was feeling. The relief she’d experienced upon hearing Lee’s voice had gotten all tangled up with profound despair. Why had he ceased to respond?
Control was hailing him now. “Lee? Lee, we’re reading you, what is it?”
Another unbearable measure of silence. Then Everett again, his tone distraught, almost frantic: “Oh, God, God… where’s Jim? Where’s Jim? Where’s…?”
Annie would remember little about the moments that followed besides a sense of foundering helplessness, of the world closing in around her, seeming to suck her into an airless, shrinking hole.
And there was one other thing that would stand out in her memory.
At some point, she had glanced over at Roger Gordian. His face pale, his posture somehow crumpled, he appeared to have been violently thrown back into his seat. And the empty, blown-away look in his eyes after hearing Lee’s anguished question—
It was a look that told Annie he knew its answer as well as she did, knew it as well as anyone else in the room.
Colonel Jim Rowland…
Jim…
Jim was gone.
TWO
They had left Portland international jetport in a rented Chevy that had seen better days, taking the Maine Turnpike north for over a hundred miles to the Gardiner terminus, where it merged with the interstate leading by turns northwest and northeast past Bangor to the Canadian border. Now the traffic, sparse since the Bath-Brunswick exits, had entirely dissipated, leaving theirs the only car on a road flanked by a profusion of evergreens and a variety of hardwoods denuded by the long, sedentary New England winter.
The toll stop was unmanned, with no barricade or surveillance cameras, and an exact-change basket that took the requested fifty cents or whatever the driver’s conscience decided was adequate.
Pete Nimec fished two coins out of his pocket and tossed them in.
“Quarters?” Megan Breen said from the passenger seat. They were the first words she’d spoken in almost an hour. “Never knew you were such a choirboy.”
He regarded her through his dark sunglasses, his foot resting lightly on the brake.
“You should’ve looked closer,” he said. “They were Canadian coins some toll clerk stuck me with on my last trip to this state. Been waiting to return the favor ever since.”
“How long ago was that?”
“A year,” he said. “Or so.”
Nimec drove on through. About fifteen miles beyond the toll he turned right at the Augusta exit, stopped for gas, then continued past some worn-looking strip malls and a couple of traffic circles onto Route 3, a hilly stretch of two-lane blacktop rolling eastward toward the coast.
Beside him, Megan looked out her window and fell back into preoccupied silence. The sky was a drab gray sheet of clouds, the wind becoming increasingly aggressive as they neared the coast. It sheered off the sides of the car, skirling into the interior through invisible spaces between its doors and frame, blowing across the dashboard in chill currents that slowly brought the heater into submission. In between long unvaried stretches of woods there were filling stations and junk dealers, and more filling stations and more junk dealers, few with any customers, the scenery rambling on with a kind of lowering, stagnant monotony that seemed endless. Meg could have easily believed the haphazard piles of reclaimed sinks and bicycles and Formica tabletops and dishes and garden rakes and knickknacks being hawked out of shacks or trailers along the road had been accumulating for decades and never went anywhere at all.
Shivering, she sank her chin deeper into her collar. She was wearing a black leather jacket, blue jeans, and black ankle boots. Her thick auburn hair was pulled back in a ponytail under a duckbilled Army field cap.
Nimec thought she looked uncharacteristically tired around the eyes.
“Wonder who’d buy those old throwaways,” she said. “I don’t know,” he said. “You’ve got to keep in mind that everything in this part of the country has an afterlife, including inanimate objects.”
“Sounds unholy.”
He shrugged. “Some might call it Yankee frugality.”
She gave him a wan smile, leaned forward, and turned on the radio, but the Boston all-news station she’d been able to pick up earlier in the ride had grown unintelligibly faint. After almost a minute of listening to static drift, she pushed the “Off” button and sat back.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Probably better for you.”
She glanced over at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“We saw the newspaper headlines at the airport, heard the updates on the radio driving out of Portland,” Nimec said. “I’m no less anxious to hear about the Orion investigation than you or anyone else. But it gets to where you know there won’t be any developments for a while and are just letting the media beat you over the head with information that’s already been reported a thousand times over.”
“I’m not prone to self-abuse, Pete.”
“That wasn’t my meaning. But I can’t help thinking it might’ve been better for you to postpone this trip—”
“We had an agreement. You show me yours, I show you mine.”
“Nice way of putting it,” he said. “Still, you’ve had a rough couple of days.”
Megan shook her head.
“Rough is what happened to those shuttle astronauts. To Jim Rowland and his family. I just want to know the reason it happened,” she said. “I never understood, at least not fully, not viscerally, why it almost always becomes important for the loved ones of plane crash victims to learn the minute details of what went wrong with the aircraft… whether it was engine failure, structural problems, pilot error, whatever. I thought sometimes that knowing wouldn’t change anything for them, wouldn’t bring anyone back. That it might be better if they were encouraged to try moving on and letting the investigators do their work.” She shook her head again. “What bothers me now is that I could’ve been so damned thick.”