She used both hands to flip herself over. Floating above the FGB’s outer skin, she started to drift away from the station; the tether securing her to the ISS snaked out as she floated farther and farther away.
Gritting her teeth, Kimberly reached down and grabbed the line with both hands, then started pulling herself hand over hand to the slowly rotating space station. It was revolving so gradually that even through her pain she knew she’d be able to pull herself back to the airlock before the station started ascending—but the effort seemed nearly impossible as the decompression sickness burrowed deeper into her exhausted body.
Little by little she pulled herself toward the Joint Airlock. The station’s low acceleration had moved the ISS so that she had drifted until she was nearly on top of the inflatable Bigelow module. She tried to pull out of the way and avoid hitting the module. Glancing through the Cupola window in Node 3 she saw a faint glow coming from the Bigelow hatch window. Had Farid somehow gotten his hands on a light in the inflatable module? A laptop or something else that he was using to illuminate the supplies stashed in it?
As she laboriously pulled herself along the tether, Kimberly felt an overpowering fear that Farid would somehow get loose, free himself from the Bigelow and escape into the ISS.
A chill of fear swept through her.
With the thrusters now working, he’d be able to rotate the station back again and start it deorbiting once more. At the very least, he’d be able to close the Joint Airlock hatch and prevent her from ever getting back inside.
And if she couldn’t get back inside the station she’d die from her oxygen running out, or from the bends, or—if she survived long enough—from the station’s fiery plunge back to Earth.
Breathing hard against the incredible pain lancing through her, Kimberly opened the equipment pouch belted to her waist. A screwdriver, needle-nose pliers, and a wrench all floated away until she finally found what she needed: Shep’s knife.
Stabilizing herself just outside the Bigelow module, she gripped the ultrasharp knife firmly, pulled back her arm, and stabbed the Kevlar-like fabric of the inflatable as hard as she could.
Again and again she stabbed at the material, working up a sweat until she finally broke through the white, reinforced siding. Small plumes of air spewed from the module, swirling as they vented through the openings. Kimberly kept jabbing, ripping, slashing with Shep’s knife as deeply as she could.
She tore a ten-centimeter rip in the material. It split wider as air whooshed out. Small white ice crystals spewed out from the near-absolute-zero cold, clouding her view, until Kimberly could no longer see any sign of air still escaping the module.
She pulled close and peered into the inflatable module—then just as quickly pushed back.
Farid’s face covered the rip from the inside, his mouth sagging open in a silent scream of death, his eyes frothy red from rapid decompression in the vacuum of space.
Kimberly turned away. Pain still crawling under her skin and inflaming her joints, she pulled to the Joint Airlock. Out of the corner of her eye she spotted Shep’s knife tumbling slowly away from the station. The Navy astronaut’s illegal utility knife had certainly earned its keep and served its purpose. It would probably never be recovered, just floating through the vacuum of space forever.
As she made her painful way back to the hatch, Kimberly knew she’d never have to use it again. But did she have the strength to get back inside the station?
NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY, FORT MEADE, MARYLAND
The nondescript, low-slung warehouse was located just north of Mapes Road and east of MacArthur on Fort George Meade, HQ NSA. The windowless, concrete building was unmarked and could have been a maintenance facility for the U.S.’s premier cryptographic and communications intelligence and security agency. Buildings like this typically contained lawn mowers, fertilizer, grass seed, shovels, cement, lumber, and a wide assortment of spare parts used for the upkeep of a large government site.
Except a detailed, overhead view would reveal hundreds of thick power lines snaking into the facility. Outside, surrounding the structure’s circumference were huge banks of fans and air conditioners, enough to provide cooling for tens of thousands of people—even though the parking lot in front was large enough for only a hundred cars. A dedicated cooling tower was located nearby. And despite being located on a secure U.S. Army base, four razor-wire fences surrounded the mysterious warehouse.
Inside the classified building the air-conditioning worked at maximum capacity, attempting to cool hundreds of supercomputers jammed into the massive facility. Over 40 percent of the world’s entire computational capability existed within its confines, and today NSA’s entire cyber system, enhanced by highly secure off-site cloud computing, was focused on breaking a Chinese encryption code.
State-of-the-art quantum computers simultaneously worked with massively parallel processors, all focused on discovering the one unique key that would unlock classified transmissions intercepted just days before from a deep, underwater cable. The purloined transmissions had been traced as coming from the highest level of the Chinese government, and were being sent to a remote space launch facility located in the South China Sea.
It was a herculean task, and only months before without the help of the still-experimental quantum computing capability, it would have been inconceivable to break such a sophisticated code.
But days into the calculation, the key was discovered.
OVAL OFFICE, THE WHITE HOUSE
The President straightened his tie and took a sip of water as they applied a last dab of makeup to his forehead, masking the sheen of perspiration that betrayed his uncertainty. In front of him, the camera crew’s floor director held up a finger and mouthed the words, “One minute to airtime, sir.”
The President glanced at the digital clock on his desk as it counted down the seconds, thinking that another, more crucial clock was ticking as well. The ISS was still deorbiting and there was incredible pressure for him to execute the Burnt Haunt antisatellite option. Almost his entire cabinet was behind it, and the entire NRC urged him to shoot down the space station and put an end to this crisis.
He knew that if the antisatellite weapon was used, an American astronaut would die along with the terrorists: a female astronaut, who had a Middle Eastern background. And while that might end the immediate crisis, he also knew he’d be accused of not valuing the young woman’s life, because of her heritage. They’d second-guess him, and ask loudly if he would have made the same decision and ordered her death if she’d been Caucasian, not Middle Eastern, like the terrorists.
If he ordered the station shot down, at least the likelihood of any radiation contamination or damage from its reentry would be removed, the panic spreading all over the east coast would be quelled, the rioting stopped.
But he’d kill an innocent American woman.
Should he wait and give the young astronaut a chance, or should he act now and execute Burnt Haunt, perhaps saving hundreds of millions of people from the mayhem of this growing, uncontrolled terror? It’s only one astronaut, one American. That fact weighed heavily on him, the worst part of this dilemma.
“Five seconds, Mr. President.”
He couldn’t wait any longer. I’m destroying a hundred-and-fifty-billion-dollar investment. Did he really need to sacrifice that astronaut?