‘Hey, if it works.’ Corey extends a hand. ‘Lighter.’
Judd passes over a disposable. He hears the lighter being flicked to life then the roar of a flame. A stream of black smoke billows out as the Australian coughs.
‘Hammer!’
Judd passes it over.
‘Thanks, Mandy.’ Corey proceeds to whack something hard.
‘Did you call me “Mandy”?’
‘It’s your nickname.’
‘Excuse me? Why would you call me “Mandy”?’
“‘I Write The Songs” doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue. You know, Barry Manilow’s song “Mandy” —’
‘Oh, Christ. Don’t call me that. Really.’
‘You don’t get to pick your nickname. I didn’t pick mine.’
Silence.
‘Do you want to know what it is?’
‘Not really —’
‘Blades.’ The Australian says it in a breathy, portentous voice that reverberates in the hatch. ‘I know it’s better than Mandy, but then I don’t dance like Barry Manilow.’
‘I don’t dance like —’ Frustrated, Judd stops and looks up at the darkening sky. ‘How much longer is this going to take?’
‘Settle, Mandy. Precision workmanship takes time.’ The hammering resumes.
Twelve minutes later the day-glo-yellow Loach knifes across the burning horizon.
Judd surveys the orange sky, searches for the black chopper. He sees nothing so he takes in the sunset, remembers the last time he witnessed a view so vivid. He was standing on the Kona Coast, holding hands with Rhonda, eight years ago. He remembers how different, how much better, they’d been away from Houston. Spontaneous. Happy. He can’t remember feeling that way since..
Jesus H! He can feel moisture at the corner of his eye. He pokes his index finger under his Ray-Bans to check. Yep, wet. What the hell’s gotten into him? He’s about to Costner again. He takes a breath and reins in the emotion, stops it before it begins.
The dog barks.
Corey replies: ‘Well, you’ll just have to man up and deal with it, won’t you?’
Judd turns to the Australian. ‘Deal with what?’
‘Your crying. It embarrasses him.’
Judd flushes red. ‘I’m not — there’s no — I just — I got some dust in my eye.’
The Australian nods with an I-don’t-believe-you face and Judd turns away, notices the collection of old cassette tapes strewn across the cabin’s floor. He picks up a couple, studies them. ‘Billy Ocean, Richard Marx, Def Leppard. I love this stuff. This is the music from when I was a kid. I’m surprised we have the same taste.’
‘I use them to scare the cattle when I’m mustering.’
‘Oh. You don’t like any of these?’
‘Billy’s okay. I guess after the Pacific he’d be my favorite ocean. Not that I’ve ever seen the Pacific. I mean I’ve seen pictures, of course, but never, you know, the real thing, in its full watery-ness. I’m not sure that’s a word.’
‘It isn’t.’ Judd places the cassettes in a rusty metal bucket that sits in the passenger’s foot well.
‘Don’t put ‘em in there. That’s my lucky bucket. Just put ‘em on the floor.’
Judd nods and does as he’s told. A moment passes then curiosity gets the better of him. ‘Why is the bucket lucky?’
‘It’s always where I need it. It never leaks. It’s useful for carrying stuff.’
‘Does that make it lucky or just doing the job is was designed for?’
‘Both, I think.’ Corey glances in the side mirror, checks for signs of the black chopper. He doesn’t see anything. ‘So, you’re an astronaut, huh?’
‘Yep.’
‘Cool. Ever fly on the space shuttle?’
‘I piloted it.’ Judd doesn’t include ‘once’. He doesn’t want to be that guy here. In Houston there was no choice, he was a one-hit wonder, but he didn’t have to be here.
‘What was the best bit?’
Judd’s surprised to realise no one’s ever asked him that before. Even so, he knows the answer straight away. ‘The view.’
‘Really? What was so good?’
‘There’s so much of it.’ Judd takes a breath, stares out at the sunset contemplatively. ‘When I was looking at the Earth from up there, well, I’ve never really believed in a god but that was the closest I came.’
‘You’re not gonna cry again, are you?’
‘It was dust!’
Spike barks, lifts a paw, points out the windscreen. On the ground in the far distance a cluster of lights blink and twinkle.
Judd focuses on it. ‘Is that the dish?’
Corey nods. ‘Sure is, Mandy, sure is.
23
‘Where the hell is it?’
Henri stares out the shuttle’s windscreen at the black void of space. It’s not where it should be.
Beside him Nico works the rotational controller, fires the external thrusters, swings Atlantis to the right. ‘It should be right here.’
It should be but it’s not. Henri glances at the screen in front of him and confirms what he already knows: they’re low on fuel. They’re burning through the thrusters’ helium supply at an alarming rate. There’s barely a quarter left in the tank. If they don’t find it soon they’ll have to abandon the search and the mission will have failed because they cannot run out of helium. If they do they won’t be able to position Atlantis for re-entry and the spacecraft will burn up as soon as it hits the Earth’s atmosphere.
Henri studies the MacBook and the tracking program that tells him it should be right here, that Atlantis should be parked on top of it. He looks out the windscreen again, scans the infinite blackness.
‘There.’ He points at a glint of light in the distance.
Nico pushes Atlantis towards it.
The trip towards the glinting object seems to take an age so his thoughts turn, as they so often do, to his wife. He remembers the last time he saw her. That was the night he kept coming back to, the evening they spent in Chicago, seven hours stolen from their hectic schedules. They had ordered room service and watched a movie in bed and made love and fallen asleep in each other’s arms.
The morning, however, had not been so wonderful. Henri remembers her silence as they stepped out of the lobby, her cool peck on his cheek as he opened the taxi door, and the fact she didn’t look back as it pulled away from the curb. What he can’t remember is what their argument had been about. They quarrelled so rarely that he should remember, but he doesn’t. What he does remember is that the last time he saw his wife they had had an argument about something he can’t remember and there is no way he can ever take that back.
‘That’s it.’ Nico’s relieved voice pulls Henri out of the moment. The Frenchman blinks then focuses on the large metal cylinder that floats before them. That cylinder is the reason they are here.
It is a RORSAT, or Radar Ocean Reconnaissance Satellite. Between 1967 and 1988 the USSR launched thirty-three RORSATs to coincide with US and NATO naval manoeuvres. Parked in a 220-kilometre orbit above the Earth, they surveyed the oceans around the clock as the Kremlin’s eye in the sky.
The RORSATs were, in the time-honoured tradition of Soviet-era technology, breathtakingly inefficient. Their power supply lasted barely ninety days. Once depleted, a rocket booster inserted the RORSAT into a storage orbit a further 650 kilometres up. At that altitude they would not re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere for another 600 years. Suffice to say, after reaching storage orbit the RORSATs were promptly forgotten. But not by Henri.
Even by the Soviet’s modest standards the RORSATs had a poor success rate. Of the thirty-three satellites launched, four malfunctioned before they reached storage orbit. Three re-entered the atmosphere, broke up and crashed back to Earth. One lobbed into the Pacific Ocean north of Japan in 1973, another crash-landed in the Canadian Northwest Territories in 1978 and a third plopped into the South Atlantic Ocean in 1983.