“But—”
“We can’t keep Kimberly in the dark about this. Chief Astronaut Tarantino will brief the Dragon crew, and she deserves to know as well that she will die if the ISS begins to lose altitude, even if the terrorists are no longer alive. So if Tarantino doesn’t tell her, then you must.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And finally, be sure to tell her about the rescue mission. We need to keep her hopes up, so save that for last. But first, she has to know who she’s dealing with up there.” She hesitated, then narrowed her eyes. “What I’m going to tell you is code word, from the CIA’s most sensitive human intelligence source, and can’t be discussed with anyone but Kimberly.” She quickly filled him in with the latest information she’d just received from the White House Situation Room. “Make sure she understands. Copy?”
Scott felt nauseous. “Copy. I understand perfectly well.”
JAPANESE MODULE (JPM)
Kimberly focused on slowing her breathing. She was safe for the moment, barricaded in the JPM. Farid and Bakhet were unable to reach her. Be calm, she told herself. Concentrate on what you need to do.
Survival was her number one priority, of course. But right alongside it was a powerful urge to defeat the two terrorists, to kill them if she could.
Does that make me as bad as they are? Does that make me a murderer? Maybe, she realized. But they’ve killed six men and want to kill millions more. I’m not a murderer, she told herself. I’m an exterminator, an agent of retaliation, a sword of justice.
Almost, she laughed at herself. Don’t get so pompous, she thought. You just do what you have to do and hope you live through it. If not …
She shoved that thought out of her mind. Stop the bullcrap, she warned herself. Get on with the job.
Pushing to one side of the module, she opened the Velcro seal on one of the blue ESA bags secured there and pulled out a water pouch. She drained it and reached for another, surprised at how thirsty she was, and realized that she was ravenous.
She rummaged deeper into the bag and found one of the meals the guys had squirreled away when they’d temporarily used the JPM for short-term storage while unloading the last Progress resupply vessel. Kimberly remembered she’d been miffed that they’d been so cavalier about where they were dumping the supplies, and she’d fully intended to come back later and straighten things up. But because of the enormous demands on her time, she’d forgotten about her intent to store the supplies in a more proper place.
Good thing, she admitted to herself, as she started wolfing down the food. Got to keep my body fueled and hydrated; otherwise the next time I tangle with those two bastards they might win because I’ve become exhausted.
As she ate she ran over in her mind the options she had on hand to overpower the two. If she could regain administrative control of the ISS’s systems she’d be able to turn off their power. They wouldn’t be able to access the thrusters and would be virtually trapped until the next manned ship could reach the station. Or better yet, maybe she could somehow surprise them. Without power they’d be without any light. She felt sure that even though he’d been aboard the ISS three years ago, Farid wouldn’t be able to find his way around in the dark. He couldn’t stop me from attacking them again.
Could I isolate them from the rest of the station? she wondered. Maybe trap them in one of the modules, much like she’d barricaded herself in the JPM, and seal them off from the rest of the ISS? She wasn’t sure she could pull that off remotely, but if she left the JPM again she might be able to lure them into one of the airlocks, or maybe even the inflatable Bigelow module, and seal off their hatch.
Kimberly knew it would really help if she had the folks on the ground working with her to brainstorm these options. They were the best of the best, but they were certainly no use unless she could communicate with them. Which meant she had to try another mode of communication other than embedding steganographic messages in the experimental data streams.
Still munching on her food, she turned to the laptop and pulled up the ISS orbital nodes. The station was just about to hit a descending orbit, and in fifteen minutes they would be over the coast of California. Time to try the ham radio again. And she wouldn’t be shy about transmitting her situation and asking that somebody patch her through to JSC.
She was about to take a last sip of water when she was struck by a sudden thought.
She froze and nearly choked on her swallow. She felt an icy chill race through her, making her shiver. Did her message on the experimental data link get through, or could the terrorists somehow have intercepted her efforts? Had they gained access to the Japanese link and somehow overridden it? If so, were they watching her now?
She really thought that her message should have gotten through and that the MCC in Huntsville would have either tried the voice link over the Ka-band or activated the video cameras. So why haven’t they? From what she’d seen of Farid’s competence with computers, she wouldn’t put it past him that he’d taken over control of the cameras.
The wide-angle cameras were fixed in their mounting, giving a view of the entire module. Their foldout LED screens showed what the ground should see. Kimberly quickly kicked away from the laptop and pushed off across the compartment, fully intending to blank the lens by attaching pieces of cardboard to them—
Suddenly, an urgent voice came through the tiny speaker next to the Ka-band setup. “Kimberly! This is CAPCOM. We can see you. Can you hear me?”
CAPCOM! Johnson Space Center! I’ve made contact! Kimberly twirled in midair, overjoyed, triumphant.
She recognized the voice: Fred Tarantino, chief of the astronaut office. Where’s Scott? she wondered. He’s supposed to be CAPCOM.
She pulled up and rotated in midair, just missing the video camera and instead careening into the module’s metal frame, hitting her injured hip. Grimacing, she bounced back into the center of the JPM. It felt as if her wound had reopened, but instead of crying out in pain, Kimberly felt elated, exalted, her face warm, her pulse thundering.
We’ve made contact! She wanted to do flying loops through the module. Someone on the ground must have seen her embedded message, and now NASA was using the voice link transmitted over the Japanese Ka-band!
Kimberly felt as if the U.S. Cavalry had just thundered aboard the ISS, bugles sounding the charge. She wasn’t rescued, of course. She wasn’t yet safe. But she was no longer alone.
She grabbed the experimental table to stop her wild gyration and stabilized herself. Now she had the wizards on the ground who would give her the edge she needed to defeat those two SOBs.
And most important, to save the ISS.
* * *
Kimberly quickly brought CAPCOM up to speed, detailing the murders of Al, Robert, and the Russians as unemotionally as she could, in cold clinical terms, even though something inside her wanted to scream for vengeance. She knew that her passions might suddenly well up unless she kept them under strict control; it took every ounce of her astronaut training to remain sternly professional. She was not going to put on a display in front of Tarantino and the rest of NASA—and who knew how many more people throughout the government would eventually watch her report?
But where was Scott? Where was the one person she wanted to speak to, to release her emotions, to ease the ache that gnawed at her innards?