Loomis turned around. It was Tony with the goldfish eyes. He'd been on the bus. The Russian put down the clipboard and gave his companion from the catwalk a charming smile. "Oh, not too often, no. We OSHA inspectors are spread rather thin, I'm afraid."
"OSHA? What's this about OSHA?" demanded a baritone voice. Goldfish eyes looked over Loomis's shoulder, and immediately started backpeddling. "Nothing, Mr. Garvey. I just ran into this OSHA inspector up on the gantry and I was just askin' him a question, that's all."
"Nobody told me anything about any OSHA inspector," bellowed the baritone voice.
Loomis turned around again, this time to see a slender man of medium height whose green eyes possessed a singular intensity. The Russian smiled and extended a hand. "Well then, I guess I should introduce myself. I'm Don Loomis, site inspector, Occupational Safety and Health Administration."
A firm hand clasped his, and a giant's voice boomed from the man with the slender build. "I'm Ed Garvey, deputy pad manager here. Nobody told me about your coming out here today."
Loomis feigned surprise. "Indeed? It was my understanding everything had been arranged by Mr. Burke's office." Edmund Burke was director of the entire Kennedy Space Center.' 'I would certainly think someone in your position would have been informed."
Goldfish eyes slunk off. Garvey had a reputation as a badass manager, and the technician avoided him whenever possible. He joined the remaining employees on their exodus to the parking lot, leaving the deputy pad manager and the OSHA inspector to themselves.
Garvey's intense eyes surveyed Loomis's KSC ID with osha embossed on it. He'd never seen one like that before. "I'm sure you're just doing your job, Mr. Loomis, but I don't like anything happening on my pad that I'm not aware of."
TTie last tech filed by the guard.
"I quite understand, Mr. Garvey. Uh, may I call you Ed? Please call me Don. I have some papers in my case here" — Loomis touched his valise—"that I must confess I find rather disturbing." Loomis looked around like a conspirator, then leaned closer and whispered. "I could get in trouble for telling you this before I file my report, Ed, but I think it's only fair for you to know. There have been some serious allegations made concerning safety on this pad. My, yes, serious allegations. Perhaps if you could take a look at these papers — right here and now — we could possibly nip this problem in the bud. I so dislike getting the U.S. Attorney involved in these matters. I've been in this business for more years than I care to count, and believe me, I'll bend over backward to clear something up before turning it over to those damn lawyers."
Garvey gulped. "Well, yeah, I would appreciate it. Although I must say this is all news to me."
Loomis shook his head sadly. "I'm afraid you're not the first one to tell me that, Ed. Oh, the stories I could tell you. It would curl your hair. But never mind about that. Uh, could we possibly go in here" — Loomis jerked his head toward the locker room— "to look over the papers. Besides, I could use the 'facilities'."
Garvey said, "Yeah, me, too," and followed Loomis through the heavy swinging door.
Inside was a room ringed with tall lockers that contained a few scattered benches and a shower/lavatory area. No one else was there.
"This is a terrible time for something like this to happen," lamented Garvey. "We have a critical launch underway. Even so, I just can't believe anybody's raising a ruckus about safety violations. We run a pretty tight ship here, especially where safety's concerned."
"Oh, yes, yes, I'm sure you do," soothed Loomis as he pulled out the Heckler-Koch P7 automatic from his valise.
Garvey blinked. "Hey! What are you doing?" roared the baritone voice.
"Please be quiet, Mr. Garvey, and do exactly as I say."
Garvey blinked again, then snarled. "You aren't any damn OSHA inspector."
Loomis nodded. "I applaud your deductive skills. Now, if you please, step into one of those lockers."
"What?"
"Please do exactly as I say, Mr. Garvey, and you will not be harmed. Otherwise, I shall be forced to shoot you here and now."
What disturbed Garvey the most about this man Loomis was the detached, unemotional way in which he said "shoot you here and now." The deputy pad manager gulped, then backed up and opened a locker door. Slowly he scrunched up and inserted himself into the cramped rectangular space. "What are you going to do now?" he asked defiantly. "Lock me in here?"
"No," replied Loomis, and a thunt! thunt! thunt! poured from the silenced automatic. Loomis slammed the locker door, pinning the corpse inside.
The P7 went back into the valise and the ID tags on the Russian's chest were switched. He walked outside and up to the security window. The guard looked at the forged ID and the man in white coveralls.,
"Leland. Nine fifty-two. Out," said the guard while making a notation on his clipboard.
Leland nodded and smiled, then walked casually toward the employee parking lot.
Driving back over the NASA Causeway West, "Mr. Tompkins" turned postman turned Leland turned Loomis turned Leland took a left turn onto U.S. Highway 1 and headed toward Miami. He wished he could stay and see the result of his many years' labor, but by nightfall he would be on board a thirty-foot cabin cruiser en route to Havana.
"So what do you make of it?" asked the CinC.
Fairchild, Dowd, and Whittenberg were huddled around a television monitor in SPADOC, inspecting the image of the unknown Russian satellite taken by the Hubble telescope.
Sir Isaac scratched his lightbulb-shaped head and examined the telescope picture intently, then he sighed an exasperated sigh. "I'm afraid these pix don't do us much good. It could still be anything."
"Bull?" queried the CinC.
Dowd shook his head in frustration. He said, "I agree, sir," and moved his finger along the torpedo-shaped object. "This could be an aerodynamic launch shroud that simply hasn't been jettisoned yet. Underneath it could be a reconnaissance bird, electronic ferret, you name it. If this picture wasn't so clear I would've even guessed a Soyuz, but as you can see, it doesn't have the escape rockets on the nose."
The Bull was referring to the small pointed mushroom on the nose of all Soyuz spacecraft that held a small cluster of solid-fuel rockets. It acted like an ejector seat in the event of an emergency on the pad, allowing the Soyuz capsule to propel itself clear of the booster. On September 27, 1983, Cosmonauts Vladimir Titov and Gennadi Strekalov were atop an SL-4 liquid booster awaiting lift-off when, at T minus ninety seconds, a fuel valve apparently failed to close at the base of the rocket and a fire started. The flames consumed the booster so quickly that the automatic launch abort circuitry was melted before it could react to the emergency. The controllers in the launch bunker had to trigger the escape rockets, and the Soyuz was blasted to an altitude of 950 meters, where its rapid-deploy parachute opened. The cosmonauts came down four kilometers from the pad. Shaken, but alive.
Whittenberg's clouded mind agreed with the assessment of his other two generals. As frustrating as it was, he recognized there was virtually nothing further he could do about the Intrepid until the Constellation got aloft. His body was screaming for sleep, and Fairchild looked worse than he did. "Sir Isaac," he ordered, "go get some sack time. Bull, you keep somebody riveted on this satellite picture during the Hubble's observation window. I'm going to hit the sack myself for a while. There's nothing we can do at the moment, anyway. Wake me if you need me."
"Yes, General," said Dowd, but Whittenberg's mind had already shut down and the chief of staff's response didn't even register. The CinC had to rely on his body's autopilot to get him back to the couch in his office.