He poured the liquor into the sink, rinsed the insides of the bottles, then slipped the empties into a plastic bag. After nightfall, the bottles would join their owner in the dark waters of the Persian Gulf.
Maxwell picked up the photo again. Claire was wearing the scarf he had given her. She looked happy, as if she was in love.
Maxwell decided that he would keep the photo. Devo would approve.
In his room, Maxwell put on the new Berlioz CD he bought in Dubai. He placed the photo from Devo’s room on his desk, next to the one of Debbie. He sat at the desk, letting the music wash over him, and he thought about the shambles that had become his life. A numbing sadness settled over him like a shroud.
Everything he loved had turned to dust. He had lost Debbie. His once-brilliant career was probably at a dead end. His father, whom he admired above all men, had walked out of his life after his resignation from NASA. His best friend lay at the bottom of the Persian Gulf.
He had nothing of value left. Nothing that mattered.
Debbie smiled at him from the photograph on the desk, and he felt the hole in his heart opening wider. Maxwell closed his eyes, fighting back the tears.
For the thousandth time he remembered that day on the cape.
It was one of those dazzling Florida afternoons. From the gantry tower Maxwell could see eastward far beyond the beach, all the way to the rim of the Gulf Stream. The air was crisp, the horizon as sharp as a pencil line.
She waved at him as she boarded the orbital vehicle. Like the other six crew members, Debbie was wearing the orange pressure suit with the mission patch and wings on the left breast, the American flag emblazoned on the shoulder.
It was a dress rehearsal for the actual launch in two days. They would take their stations and run through the check lists, do a power-up and test of the command and control consoles, and then simulate a count down to ignition. It was a routine procedure they did before every launch.
Debbie Sutter loved being an astronaut. Though she wasn’t a pilot, she intended to be someday. Eight years of college, med school, then the four years of internship — there’d been no time for flight training. She’d been a cardiologist when she made the cut for astronaut training. She was assigned as a human factors specialist, and for the ten-day mission of the space shuttle Intrepid, her job was to study and quantify the effects of prolonged weightlessness on cognition, memory, and sleep patterns.
They had been in the vehicle for nearly an hour. The boarding hatch of the shuttle was closed and sealed so the vehicle could be pressurized, just as it would be for the real launch.
Maxwell watched from the gantry observation room. On the monitor he could see views of the command cabin, where the shuttle commander and the pilot sat. In the cabin he could see the mission specialist stations. Debbie was in her reclining launch seat, facing a console with instruments and a panel of labeled switches.
All the astronauts were wearing the sealed pressure helmets. Their suits were plugged into the onboard oxygen system, and they communicated via the ship’s closed-circuit interphone.
As the pilot read off the checklist, another astronaut would perform the required action, then acknowledge.
“Crew compartment hatch 212 closed,” called out Jeff Beamish, the pilot.
“Hatch 212 closed,” confirmed Anton Vevrey, a payload specialist.
“ER loop automatic control.”
“ER loop automatic,” replied another astronaut.
“Perform cabin leak check.”
“Cabin leak check in progress.”
They went through the litany of pre-launch items, checking cabin pressurization, communications systems, flight controls, thrust-management parameters.
“Main engine controller bite check.”
“Main engine controller bite check okay.”
“Terminate liquid oxygen replenish.”
Maxwell heard Debbie’s voice give the response. “Liquid oxygen replenish is terminated.”
“Okay. Open the liquid oxygen drain valve.”
“Liquid oxygen drain — Aahhhhh!” Debbie’s voice stopped abruptly.
The hair on Sam Maxwell’s neck stood up. Every face in the observation room whirled to the monitor that watched the aft crew compartment. Thick black smoke was filling the compartment.
“Oh, shit!” Maxwell heard a controller say. “Fire in the crew compartment!”
A shrill, clanging alarm went off. On the wall over the door, a red light started flashing.
New voices came over the channel, all issuing desperate commands. “Depressurize! Close the liquid oxygen valve! Get the goddamn hatch open!”
Maxwell watched helplessly while they rushed to open the hatch. A cloud of bilious smoke gushed from the crew compartment. Paramedics rushed across the cantilevered gantry platform and boarded the vehicle. Within a minute they were dragging out orange-suited astronauts, yanking off helmets, slapping on oxygen masks.
The two pilots, Cutler and Beamish, were wobbly but okay. Nancy Rehman, an astrophysicist, came out on her own power, though she was shaking uncontrollably. The Japanese payload specialist, Nomuru, had breathed in smoke and was coughing badly. So was the Swiss mission specialist, Vevrey, but both revived when they were given oxygen.
The last to come out were the two astronauts in the aft crew compartment, Bud Feldman and Debbie Sutter. The paramedics hauled them out on gurneys.
Both were dead.
Two veteran astronauts who had been there in the gantry held Sam Maxwell’s arms, restraining him. “Go down below, Sam. Don’t stay here.”
Maxwell wouldn’t leave. He stood there transfixed while they removed her helmet.
She had died not from smoke inhalation, but from fire. The flames had entered her suit, torched her face and hair and her lungs. Her final seconds of life had been spent in excruciating pain.
They would have been married a year the next month. After Debbie’s rookie space flight, they were going to take a trip somewhere, maybe to the Bahamas. They would celebrate, rejoice, think about starting the family they planned to have someday. They had already become famous as the shuttle couple, the husband-and-wife astronauts, the high fliers. Newsweek did a piece on them. They appeared on CNN Live, the Good Morning, America show, and Oprah.
They wanted to interview Sam Maxwell again. They wanted him to explain for their viewers the depth of his grief. Give the public a look at his Tom Selleck good looks while he maybe shed a tear or two on camera.
Maxwell refused. He hung up when they called. He ignored them when they approached. When a Houston reporter pursued him across a parking lot, Maxwell seized him by the collar, shoved him over the hood of a Lexus and promised him if he saw him again, he would stuff his Nikon up his ass.
The inquiry into the tragedy went on for a month. In the final analysis, they declared it a freak accident. It had been a one-in-a-million combination of circumstances — a tiny fracture in the liquid oxygen drain valve, a leak in the crew ventilation system, and a simultaneous spark from the faulty console switch activated by Debbie as she complied with the pre-launch checklist. There was nothing inherently wrong with the space shuttle.
An enraged Sam Maxwell refused to accept the findings. The director of NASA ordered him to take a thirty-day leave, clear his head, then report back for duty at the space center in Houston. Instead, Maxwell went home and drafted a letter of resignation.
He opened his eyes and let them focus on the two photographs standing side by side on the desk. Debbie and Claire.