Velocity (22 page)

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.

The fourth defective RORSAT was launched in late 1987. After it exhausted its power supply the satellite’s primary propulsion system failed to push it into storage orbit. The backup did fire, but lifted it into an incorrect orbit 80 kilometres below its intended altitude. Over the following decades the satellite’s orbit steadily decayed. It was due to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere sometime in early 2017.

Henri stares at the RORSAT as they glide towards it. He has painstakingly tracked it for the last three years. It is 11 metres long, a metre and half wide and could only be Russian. Ungainly, inelegant and fussy, it instantly offends the Frenchman’s refined sense of design. Six long, spindly antennae protrude from a fuselage covered in the dull grey paint Soviets favoured for their military hardware.

Atlantis’s
external control thrusters fire and swing it towards the satellite. Nico gently works the controller, eyes glued to the monitor in front of him. It displays three views of the satellite fed by three cameras inside
Atlantis
’s payload bay. The shuttle edges closer, parallel but slightly below the RORSAT, no more than six metres away.

‘How’s that?’ Nico’s question is directed at Martie Burnett.

‘Fine, hold it there.’

The thrusters fire once more and the shuttle holds station. Henri turns to Martie, his gaze steady. ‘You’re up.’

Feet secure in velcro floor straps that stop her floating away, Martie stands at the rear of the flight deck and studies a small video monitor within the instrument panel. It displays the same three images of the Russian satellite that Henri and Nico see.

She raises her eyes from the monitor and looks out the cabin’s rear window at the Canadarm, a remote-controlled robotic manipulator connected to the inside of the shuttle’s payload bay. Designed and built, unsurprisingly, by Canadians, it resembles a human arm, except it’s 15 metres long and 40 centimetres wide. Articulated at its shoulder, elbow and wrist, the giant white appendage ends in a clever mechanical device called the effector.

Martie believes the Canadarm is the most important system on the shuttle. Without it the spacecraft is just an expensive crane without a hook. She can grab anything with the effector. On her two previous trips to orbit she’d snagged a communications satellite, the Hubble, even an errant toolbox. She’d never missed.

She works the hand controller located on the panel before her with smooth, direct movements and watches the Canadarm rise from its resting place. It eases across the shuttle’s open bay doors then reaches into the darkness. She triggers a switch and the image on the monitor flicks to a view from a camera positioned on the effector.

Martie scans the satellite for a point to attach. If she touches it but doesn’t grab hold it could scoot away and they’ll have to chase it. Considering how long it took to find she knows they don’t have the fuel for that. So she can’t miss. She’d promised Henri she could do this and she won’t let him down.

Martie watches the monitor intently as the effector moves, scans the satellite’s cylindrical body. Around its midsection are a series of large bolts, each about eight centimetres high. One of them looks like a promising target to latch onto. She moves the effector towards it.

Henri studies the monitor. He knows how important this moment is. He’s invested millions of his own money, years of his time and co-opted his crew all for this moment, so he needs the next two minutes to go smoothly. He turns, watches Martie as she focuses on the monitor and moves the hand controller. She is the centrepiece around which the mission was built. Hers was the perfect confluence of skill and circumstance. If she had rebuffed him when he first sought to recruit her then they wouldn’t be here and none of this would be possible.

He takes a deep breath, forces himself to relax. He knows she’s done this many times before. She’ll be fine.

‘Shit!’ Martie stares at the monitor and says it again. ‘Shit.’ The effector grabbed the bolt. Then she tightened its hold to pull the satellite towards the payload bay and the bolt snapped off, sending the satellite into a slow spin.

She releases the broken bolt from the effector, sends it flipping away, then searches for another spot to grab on. One that won’t snap.

She doesn’t notice the longest of the satellite’s six antennae until it rotates into view and slams into the Canadarm, sends a shock wave through the shuttle. ‘Damn.’ The antenna lies across the Canadarm as the satellite continues to rotate. The antenna bends. Martie wills it to snap.

It doesn’t. The bent antenna springs back into shape and spins the satellite in the opposite direction, drives it away from the shuttle. Fast.

If she doesn’t grab it now they won’t get it back. By the time Nico can swing the shuttle around it’ll be so far away they won’t have the fuel to retrieve it.

Martie searches the satellite, looks for another spot to grab on. In six seconds it’ll be out of reach.

She jams the hand controller forward. The effector darts towards the satellite, reaches the end of its range, clamps down on one of the antennae as it swings past.

The satellite stops spinning but its momentum swings it underneath the Canadarm. The antenna bends, and bends - and snaps.

‘Christ.’ The satellite tumbles towards
Atlantis.
If it hits it’ll punch a hole in the fuselage and the instant depressurisation will mean a gruesome death for everyone on board.

The satellite’s 10 metres away and moves quickly. Martie flicks the hand controller. The Canadarm flips up, pivots, and the effector releases the broken antenna. The satellite’s five metres away. The Canadarm shoots towards it. Three metres away. The effector clamps onto the satellite’s rear sensor hub. One metre away. The Canadarm draws it to a stop. Ten centimetres from
Atlantis.

Everyone stares out the windscreen at the satellite, shocked by how close it is, relieved it isn’t closer.

Martie releases a long breath and nods to Henri, who returns that half-smile of his. She looks back at the monitor and gently works the hand controller. The Canadarm draws the satellite away from the shuttle, swings it around and deposits it in the payload bay.

Rhonda fixes her gaze on the Frenchman. ‘So this is about stealing a satellite?’

‘It’s not just any satellite.’

‘What is it then —?’ Then she understands. ‘Kosmos 1900.’

Henri nods, impressed. ‘Exactly.’

Kosmos 1900. Rhonda realises that’s what the Frenchman was talking about earlier. He said ‘Kosmos’, not ‘cosmos’. Obscure information about the satellite floods back to her, details she hasn’t thought about since she was at MIT.

Many satellites use radioactive material to produce their power, primarily non-weapons-grade plutonium-238. The power is generated by the natural decay of the nuclear material. For safety’s sake, the radioactive material is fabricated in a hardened ceramic form that is all but impervious to shock. If the satellite explodes or burns up on re-entry the ceramic breaks into large chunks that can’t spread into the atmosphere.

Not so the Kosmos 1900. That RORSAT satellite is powered by a BES-5 nuclear reactor, one of the few that use such a power plant. The reactor’s core consists of 30 kilograms of highly enriched weapons-grade uranium-235, a fissile material with a half-life of 703800000 years. That raw nuclear material is not fabricated in hardened ceramic form but packed into a comparably fragile metal casing.

Rhonda remembers this because, in 1978, a RORSAT satellite identical to Kosmos 1900 crashed in Canada and spread its uranium cargo across a 600-kilometre path from Great Slave Lake to Baker Lake. Luckily for the Canadians the area was unpopulated. The clean-up took four months yet only one per cent of the nuclear fuel was recovered.

Rhonda knows human exposure to weapons-grade uranium-235 radiation will cause health problems, but it becomes really dangerous when it’s inhaled. One lungful means a litany of ongoing medical issues, cancer and kidney failure being the tip of the iceberg. More concentrated exposure will kill an adult within a week. That’s the reason it’s one of the rarest and most heavily protected materials on the planet. Governments built fortresses to safeguard it on Earth, but not in orbit. In orbit the Russians had discarded a graveyard of satellites brimming with the stuff - at least 1300 kilograms at last count.

‘What do you want that satellite for?’

‘So the nuclear material within it can be dispersed at a designated target.’

His comment is so matter-of-fact that it takes a moment for Rhonda to register its gravity. The Frenchman is planning some kind of attack and that old Russian satellite is his weapon of mass destruction. She shudders to contemplate the damage it could inflict. The RORSAT’s radioactive cargo had the potential to kill thousands of people and make a large area uninhabitable, like Chernobyl or Fukushima Daiichi, for generations to come, with disastrous, long-term health consequences for any survivors.

Involuntarily her jaw clenches. As far as Rhonda is concerned she is responsible.
Atlantis
is
her
ship and all of this happened on
her
watch so it is
her
duty to put it right.

‘So what’s the designated target?’

The Frenchman doesn’t look at her. ‘All will become apparent in the fullness of time.’

**

24

The black Tiger streaks across the orange horizon.

‘Where in hell is it?’ Dirk can’t locate the Loach and it’s pissing him off. After removing its rear hatch from the handgrip on the Tiger’s windscreen, a job that had taken the better part of fifteen minutes, they hadn’t been able to find the yellow chopper again.

Dirk checks the scope in the Tiger’s instrument panel but nothing shows up. ‘How did we miss it?’

In front of him Big Bird tries to remain upbeat: ‘It’s not a surprise. This state is six times bigger than Great Britain —’

‘It’s not a state, it’s the Northern
Territory
.’

‘State, territory. English is my third language, give me a break.’

Dirk knows they should speak German but he doesn’t want to because, apart from Henri’s directive for the multinational crew to use English, he had long ago realised that if he spoke English with a mid-Atlantic accent people were less likely to recognise him than if he spoke German. Of course he doesn’t tell Big Bird this. He’d never told anyone the truth about his past, not even Henri, and he wants to keep it that way. The German feels that in their business, anonymity is essential. The less people know about you and your previous lives, the less that could be used against you down the track.

That’s why he must find Judd Bell. Not only is Dirk sure the astronaut has worked out that the shuttle is going to land out here and will relay that information to the wider world, he’s also sure he will tell that world he is one of the
Atlantis
hijackers when he does. Dirk treasures the life he has built since he cut down the oak and will not give it up without a fight.

Big Bird’s voice rattles in his headset. ‘We’re low on fuel, need to head back.’

Dirk knows he should have dealt with Judd Bell when they first met on the launch pad but he hesitated in the low light, didn’t want to accidentally put a bullet through the Jacolby woman. So the astronaut escaped into the elevator and lived. Then Dirk missed him a further, what, how many times? Christ, it didn’t bear thinking about. The problem is, he wants to eliminate the astronaut personally, without involving the crew, but now he has no choice but to enlist help.