Soyuz crew. You will also have to coordinate with my people at Baikonur to fit the engine and collar into the cargo shroud."
"Agreed," said Vostov. The Chief Designer scratched the stubble on his flabby chin and paused, then asked rhetorically, "What if the Americans try to launch a vehicle to rescue their shuttle before our preparations are complete?"
There was another pause before the General Secretary asked in a sheepish voice, "We can do something to stop an American rescue, can we not, Popov?"
Popov took a deep breath. He didn't like being party to cheating — whether at cards or an international treaty. The United States and the Soviet Union had signed a treaty outlawing anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons two years previously. But at Voront-sky's direction, Popov had hidden something away. "Yes, General Secretary," he said gravely, "at Plesetsk." Popov referred to the second-largest Russian launch facility at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, which handled military pay loads, and where no treaty inspection teams from the U.N. were allowed to set foot — ever.
"Then I suggest you make contingency preparations at Plesetsk as well — without delay. Is that clear, Comrade General?" queried the KGB chieftain.
Popov sighed. "Quite clear, Comrade Chairman."
The supervisor held the glass doors open, allowing the janitorial crew to enter Firing Room Two of the Kennedy Space Center Launch Control Complex. In the old days of the Apollo program it took some 450 technical personnel in a bunker like this to get a Saturn 5 rocket off the ground. But lift-off preparations were so computer-driven now that only ninety launch technicians were required in Firing Room l\vo — one of four such rooms at the Cape.
The cleaning crew shuffled slowly into the big room, which was filled with consoles and computer terminals. They had lit-tie, if any, inclination to hustle, for theirs was a lousy job that paid the minimum wage.
The janitors ordinarily cleaned up the Space Center office buildings at night, but when there was launch activity a cleaning "detachment" would be farmed out to the firing room bunker to tidy things up. Usually it was only the night before a launch that the bunker was fully jammed. But somehow, this evening, things seemed different.
Rosita Coronado, a small Hispanic woman wearing a blue uniform, moved slowly down the aisle of consoles, wiping the countertops and being careful not to disturb any papers lying about. Then she emptied trashcans into her gurney that held open a big plastic trash bag. No one paid much attention to her as she methodically worked her way down the aisle. Nor had anyone noticed she carefully avoided being assigned vacuum cleaner duty. The reason was that she couldn't hear anything with the machine running.
"Okay, start O-two valve seal test on fuel cell number two, now." The skinny power systems technician killed his microphone, then pulled off the headset and draped it around his neck. He turned toward his neighbor and grumbled, "This is the most screwed-up deal I ever heard of. The whole weekend's shot to hell, we've got to crunch eight days of launch prep into less than three, the payload's being yanked out… and they won't even tell us what this is all about, either. It's shit like this that makes people cut corners, and you know what happens then."
"I know, I know," said his compatriot. "I was here, in this very chair, when Challenger went down. Mark my words, with this kind of launch pressure, one of these days something like that…"
Rosita had to keep moving, causing the voices to drift out of earshot. She progressed slowly down the aisle, until…
"Say, lady?"
She didn't turn, but kept moving.
"Senora?"
Rosita stopped and turned to look at the technician with the set of earphones slung around his neck.
"Si, senor?"
"You forgot my ashtray."
She gave him the dumbest look she could muster. "Senor?"
He held it up, full of empty butts. "The ashtray. You forgot it. Comprende?"
She gave him a look of mock horror. "Oh, si, sehor. So sorry." She took the ashtray from his hand and emptied it into the plastic bag, then meticulously wiped it clean and replaced it by his elbow.
"Gracias," he said.
She nodded and turned back down the aisle, pretending not to hear him mutter "Dumb Mexican'' when her back was turned.
The cleaning crew finished up quicker than usual, responding to the supervisor's entreaty of "Undele! Undele!"
Upon completing her night's labors, Rosita took the bus home to a ramshackle frame house outside of Orlando. She didn't bother to doff her blue uniform, but immediately went to the bedroom closet and extracted a battered Smith-Corona typewriter with a microcassette memory recorder.
Actually, the technician at Firing Room Two had been wrong on both counts. Rosita wasn't dumb, and she wasn't Mexican. Cuba was her homeland. Where many years ago, when she was a little girl, her father and brother had died a slow and horrible death in the cellars of Juan Batista's prisons. She and her mother had fled to the Sierra Maestra mountains, where they took refuge with a ragtag band of rebels under the command of a young renegade physician named Fidel Castro. When Batista fell, it went without saying that she became a Communist to her marrow. To spy for the cause was an honor. Bending over her typewriter, she pecked out her message, in Spanish:
EXTENSIVE ACTIVITY KSC LAUNCH BUNKER.
CONVERSATIONS INDICATE PREVIOUS LAUNCH
SCHEDULE ACCELERATED. PROBABLE LAUNCH
WITHIN 72 HOURS. ONLY ROCKET ON PAD IS
SPACE SHUTTLE CONSTELLATION.
— WATER LILY
She'd chosen the code name Water Lily herself, an ironic tribute to her successful masquerade as a refugee crossing the Water from Cuba to the Florida Keys.
She looked at her watch. Time was short. Quickly she changed out of the blue uniform, rewound the cassette, plucked it out of the typewriter, and placed it into the false bottom of a makeup compact.
She left her house and caught another bus into downtown Orlando, where she transferred to the airport express shuttle. At the Orlando Airport, Rosita went directly to a bench situated near a gift shop and sat down. She took out the compact and checked her face — and her watch. At precisely the right instant, she closed the compact and placed it beside her, just as an aristocratic Mexican woman — looking stylish in her Adolfo outfit-sat down. Rosita left, and the recent arrival picked up the compact to study her own high cheekbones and carefully applied Lancome makeup. After indulging in a moment of self-approval, the Latin beauty dropped the compact into her Hermes purse and rose to catch the airport subway for the Mexicana Airline gate.
Later that same day, Rosita's message would be encrypted and transmitted from the Russian embassy in Mexico City to a waiting satellite dish at 2 Dzerzhinsky Square in Moscow.
THE SECOND DAY[1]
Maj. Felix "Catman" Griggs watched the fuel indicator needle creep to the top of the gauge. When it passed the full mark at 61,000 pounds, he said, "That's it, shut 'er down."
"Roger," replied the KC-10 boom operator as he extracted the aluminum pipe from the Blackbird's fuel inlet vent, just aft of the rear cockpit.