But a dark cloud loomed over Athena’s profitable venture, threatening not only to take away the obscene profits Athena had grown to enjoy, but most importantly, to ruin Vanderhoff’s plans for European domination in space. The new NASA. An improved NASA. A reborn space agency with a real vision: to regain the status it had held in the late sixties and early seventies, to establish itself once more as a space leader. The Challenger setback had only resulted in a new, vigorous agency willing to go the extra mile to achieve the dreams of Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy: to make space travel routine, an everyday occurrence. Vanderhoff knew that was the philosophy behind the American space shuttle program. It was the reason NASA had stepped away from brute-force methods of reaching space and opted for sophistication, for reusable spacecraft capable of taking off like a rocket and landing like an airplane, routinely transporting its passengers and cargo to orbital stations built from materials also ferried into space by the advanced orbiter. That was the shuttle’s mission and, in Vanderhoff’s mind, the future.
But Vanderhoff believed the future in space belonged to Europe, not the United States, and not even the independent republics of the former Soviet Union, which remained united behind Russia’s leadership when it came to space exploration. Athena already had plans for its own shuttle and space station, but needed time to develop the projects. Time that Vanderhoff knew would not be available if NASA remained successful in maintaining its aggressive new schedule of shuttle launches, a large number of which would be used to ferry modules of Space Station Freedom into orbit.
Vanderhoff eyed General Marcel Chardon sitting to his right. Chardon was the second-in-command of all French armed forces and the most powerful military player of Vanderhoff’s coalition.
Like the two high-ranking German Bundeswehr officers sitting next to him, General Chardon had chosen to join Vanderhoff’s conspiracy for tactical reasons. The sixty-two-year-old general was certain that Europe would be threatened by competing U.S. and Russian space stations, which would be used — Cold War or no Cold War — as test bases for Strategic Defense Initiative weaponry.
SDI. Vanderhoff exhaled. He strongly shared Chardon’s belief that Europe had to take immediate steps now to position itself as the leader in space with the end goal of becoming the world superpower. Vanderhoff, like Chardon, cherished the dream of Europe being the strongest power on Earth, and space supremacy was a critical step toward achieving that dream.
Vanderhoff and his allies had the financial means to back all of the research needed to build Athena’s revolutionary Hermes shuttle and the Columbus space station, but time was running out. NASA was coming back too strong. The prototype modules for Freedom were already completed, and with Discovery, Atlantis, Endeavour, and now Lightning, the American space agency had plenty of muscle to ferry all the hardware necessary to permanently establish itself in space before the end of the century.
Athena needed time and Vanderhoff knew how to get it. He had already tested his stealth killer satellite on the Russians, and now it was the Americans’ turn. He began the meeting.
“We have two major issues to discuss. The first is in regards to a CIA operative named Stone. Apparently this agent was responsible for the debacle at the warehouse. He seems to have taken Madame Guilloux under his wing.” Vanderhoff saw Chardon’s face hardening. “I have just received a call from our contact inside the CIA and he has given me information that assures us of Mr. Stone’s termination. Once he is done away with we will find Guilloux’s wife and terminate her as well, just as we killed her recalcitrant husband and the other scientists who opposed us. We can’t afford a leak before Lightning’s launch.”
Chardon shifted his two-hundred-pound body on the chair and exhaled.
“Something bothering you, General?”
“Stone should have been dead by now, monsieur. He never should have left the warehouse alive.”
“Well, just make sure your people are in place at the Botanical Gardens, and that he doesn’t escape this time. Any problems with the local police?”
“No,” replied Chardon. “We own the Prefect of Police.”
“Well, just make sure everyone involved knows that this time there can’t be any mistakes. Understood?”
“Oui.”
Vanderhoff paused to look around the table and saw several heads nodding in assent. He had driven the point home. He leaned back in his swivel chair and forced his expression to relax somewhat.
“Gentlemen, the second issue up for discussion is Athena’s future in space in the post-NASA era. I have met with my scientists down in Kourou and their progress has been outstanding, largely due to the major injection of capital into our research and development division. Here are the fruits of our labor.” Vanderhoff rose and walked to the side of the room, where he pulled off a white cloth covering mock-up models of their space shuttle and space station.
“This is a model of the shuttle Hermes, gentlemen, a space vehicle that takes state-of-the-art technology one step beyond the American space shuttle. Our shuttle will be capable not only of returning from space and landing like an airplane, but also taking off like one.”
Right away, Vanderhoff noticed people murmuring among themselves. He waited for silence and continued.
“Before Guilloux’s elimination, he had devised a revolutionary and clean method of reaching space. You see, gentlemen, three-fourths of the launch weight of the American shuttle is nothing but liquid oxygen — the heavy oxidizer vital to achieve combustion with liquid hydrogen fuel. Most of that oxidizer is consumed during the first three minutes of flight, when the shuttle is still within Earth’s atmosphere. Guilloux came up with an interesting thought. Why carry all that oxygen along when there is plenty of oxygen in the atmosphere? And so Guilloux proposed a rocket engine that would breathe oxygen during the atmospheric portion of the flight, switch to on-board liquid oxygen right before reaching space, and in the process, severely cut back on weight and complexity while increasing cargo area. Simple and elegant.”
“But feasible?” asked Chardon.
“Our scientists are working on that. That’s why we need to slow down NASA. We need time to overcome two major obstacles. One is the development of an air-breathing jet engine capable of attaining speeds in excess of Mach ten to achieve space injection. The second is to develop an active fuselage cooling system. Unlike the tiles of the passive thermal-protection system of the American orbiter, our system will cool the entire fuselage by running liquid hydrogen under the craft’s skin using a technology similar to the one currently used for cooling conventional rocket-engine nozzles. We feel the cooling issue will be straightforward, but the jet engines — that’s going to take time and plenty of money to develop. Once done, however, we will have a true space plane.”
“How much time?” asked Chardon.
Vanderhoff pointed at the engines in the rear of the three-foot-long plastic model of the streamline Hermes. “A conventional jet engine extracts oxygen from the atmosphere, but it is not suitable for speeds above Mach three. We have developed an engine that uses the ramming effect of the plane’s supersonic speed to compress the air in the combustion chamber prior to its mixing with fuel. This is what we call a ramjet engine, and we have determined that ramjet technology will get us up to Mach six. Beyond that, we have designed — on paper — a special type of ramjet engine in which supersonic air flows through the combustion chamber. This technology, gentlemen, is what will get us the speed necessary to break away from Earth’s gravitational force. The heart of Hermes is the supersonic combustion ramjet or scramjet, but to develop it we’ll need time and money. We have the money. With Lightning out of the way we’ll buy the time.” Vanderhoff paused to let the information sink in.