It turned out that Major Sorven, who headed one of the communications sections and had been Charlie’s first hope, had moved from Vandenberg several months previously. His successor was a Major Myran, but nobody knew where he was. “Can we try a guy called Crowe Thompson, then?” Charlie asked. Thompson was a civilian technician who had worked under Sorven.
The MP operating the phones sounded as if he was beginning to think that perhaps Charlie was a little crazy. “There isn’t anybody in the labs. Didn’t anyone tell you, it’s not exactly a normal working day today?” Keene and Colby exchanged glances. Colonel Lacey, standing with them, turned away for a second to catch the dialogue of one of the controllers behind, who was getting a distress call from something coming in over the Pacific.
Charlie licked his lips. “This is important,” he told the MP.
“Everything’s important.”
“Just hold a second, will you?” Charlie consulted his notes again hurriedly. “How about the launch complexes themselves? There are things going on in there. We can see the lights. Is there anyone answering in OLC-6 East?”
“Yeah, they’re busy over in there, all right.”
“The Boxcar Flight Checkout Area. Try and find an Andy Lintz. Like I said, it’s important. I wasn’t kidding.”
“Gimme a sec. I’ll check around.”
Orbiter Launch Complex-6 East was a refurbished version of the old SLC-6 facility built for the primal NASA shuttle and virtually dismantled following the cutback in operations after the Challenger accident back in the eighties. Now it handled the newer design of one-stage “Boxcar” orbiters that were simpler, easier to assemble, and had the convenience of being prepared and loaded horizontally and under cover, to be elevated vertically only for launch. Charlie had worked for a week with Lintz on a NASA-supplied image-processing computer that had been found faulty after it was delivered to the assembly area for installation.
Across the floor, an officer who had been hunched with two operators in front of one of the consoles straightened up and turned to call to Lacey. “Sir, we’ve got something coming in low and fast from the east, not responding to calls. Strong radar emissions. ATC has no information.”
“The lame duck’s signaling that it’s coming straight in,” the former operator reported from another part of the floor. “They’re on one engine, and it’s intermittent.”
“Clear the main runway,” Lacey ordered. “Dispatch crash tenders and ambulance, and hold further movements till it’s down.” He started to turn back to the officer and the other two operators, but then looked back at the screen in front of Charlie Hu as movement caught his eye. A woman in a green coverall and yellow hard hat had appeared; but she seemed to be distracted and was looking away.
“My name is Hu. Is Andy Lintz there? It’s vitally urgent that I speak to him. . . . Hello? Ma’am? . . . I said, is Andy Lintz there, anywhere?” The woman moved aside without replying, gesturing vaguely to somebody else and keeping her eyes on something distant that seemed to be happening behind the viewer. After a few seconds, a chubby, bespectacled man in a white smock showing grease stains appeared.
“Say, Charlie. . . .” He spoke in a low voice, as if not wanting to be overheard.
Hu tossed a quick, relieved grin back over his shoulder at the others and made a thumb’s-up. “Yeah, right, Andy. How’s it been going? Look, I need some help, and it’s really important. I’m with some people across in the Vandenberg tower right now. We think something serious is scheduled to happen in there fairly soon, and I need access to somebody reliable who can organize security.”
Lintz seemed only to be half hearing, and was watching something beyond the screen in the same inexplicable way that the woman in the yellow hard hat had. The sound of voices shouting indistinctly came through in the background, and then the louder echoing of something being said over a bullhorn.
“Yeah . . . well, it might not be a good time right now, Charlie. It seems we’ve got what you might call a `situation’ developing here. There are guys in combat gear waving guns, and somebody just yanked the Launch Supervisor out of his office. Could be you’re a little late, Charlie.”