establish that we can orbit the weight, and we can certify the accuracy of the
insertion, the payload will deorbit in a few weeks. We don’t wish to add
more junk up there.”
“Good for you. All the stuff up there, it’s becoming a concern for our
manned missions.” The NASA man paused, then decided to ask a sensitive
question. “What’s your max payload?”
“Five metric tons, ultimately.”
He whistled. “You think you can get that much performance off this
bird?” Ten thousand pounds was the magic number. If you could put that
much into low-earth-orbit, you could then orbit geosynchronous communi-
cations satellites. Ten thousand pounds would allow for the satellite itself
and the additional rocket motor required to attain the higher altitude. “Your
trans-stage must be pretty hot.”
The reply was, at first, a smile. “That is a trade secret.”
“Well, I guess we’ll see in about ninety seconds.” The American turned
in his chair to watch the digital telemetry. Was it possible they knew some-
thing he and his people didn’t? He didn’t think so, but just to make sure,
NASA had an observation camera watching the H-i i. The Japanese didn’t
know that, of course. NASA had tracking facilities all over the world to
monitor U.S. space activity, and since they often had nothing to do, they kept
track of all manner of things. The ones on Johnston Island and Kwajalein
Atoll had originally been set up for SDI testing, and the tracking of Soviet
missile launches.
The tracking camera on Johnston Island was called Amber Ball, and its crew
of six picked up the H-n, having been cued on the launch by a Defense
Support Program satellite, which had also been designed and orbited to give
notice of Soviet launches. Something from another age, they all told them-
selves.
“Sure looks like a -19,” the senior technician observed to general agree-
ment.
“So does the trajectory,” another said after a check of range and flight
path.
“Second stage cutoff and separation, trans-stage and payload are loose
now … getting a small adjustment burn-whoa!”
The screen went white.
“Signal lost, telemetry signal lost!” a voice called in launch control.
The senior Japanese engineer growled something that sounded like a
curse to the NASA representative, whose eyes tracked down to the graphic-
display screen. Signal lost just a few seconds after the trans-stage ignition.
That could mean only one thing.
“That’s happened to us more than once,” the American said sympatheti-
cally. The problem was that rocket fuels, especially the liquid fuels always
used for the final stage of a space launch, were essentially high explosives.
What could go wrong? NASA and the U.S. military had spent over forty
years discovering every possible mishap.
The weapons engineer didn’t lose his temper as the flight-control officer
had, and the American sitting close to him put it down to professionalism,
which it was. And the American didn’t know that he was a weapons engi-
neer, anyway. In fact, to this point everything had gone exactly according to
plan. The trans-stage fuel containers had been loaded with high explosives
and had detonated immediately after the separation of the payload package.
The payload was a conical object, one hundred eighty centimeters wide at
the base and two hundred six in length. It was made of uranium-238, which
would have been surprising and unsettling to the NASA representative. A
dense and very hard metal, it also had excellent refractory qualities, meaning
lhat it resisted heat quite well. The same material was used in the payloads of
many American space vehicles, but none of them was owned by the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration. Rather, objects of very similar
shapes and sizes sat atop the few remaining nuclear-tipped strategic weap-
ons which the United States was dismantling in accordance with a treaty
with Russia. More than thirty years earlier, an engineer at AVCO had
pointed out that since U23g was both an excellent material for withstanding
the heat of a ballistic reentry and made up the third stage of a thermonuclear
device, why not make the body of the RV part of the bomb? That sort of
thing had always appealed to an engineer, and the idea had been tested, certi-
fied, and since the 19605 become a standard part of the U.S. strategic arse-
nal.
The payload so recently part of the H-11 booster was an exact engineering
mockup of a nuclear warhead, and while Amber Ball and other tracking de-
vices were watching the remains of the trans-stage, this cone of uranium fell
back to earth. It was not a matter of interest to American cameras, since it
was, after all, just an orbit-test payload that had failed to achieve the velocity
necessary to circle the earth.
Nor did the Americans know that MV Takuyo, sitting halfway between
Easter Island and the coast of Peru, was not doing the fishery-research work
it was supposed to be doing. Two kilometers to the east of Takuyo was a
rubber raft, on which sat a GPS locator and a radio. The ship was not
equipped with a radar capable of tracking an inbound ballistic target, but the
descending RV gave its own announcement in the pre-dawn darkness; glow-
ing white-hot from its reentry friction, it came down like a meteor, trailing a
path of fire right on time and startling the extra lookouts on the flying bridge,
who’d been told what to expect but were impressed nonetheless. Heads
turned rapidly to follow it down, and the splash was a mere two hundred
meters from the raft. Calculations would later determine that the impact
point had been exactly two hundred sixty meters from the programmed im-
pact point. It wasn’t perfect, and, to the disappointment of some, was fully
an order of magnitude worse than that of the Americans’ newest missiles,
but for the purposes of the test, it was quite sufficient. And better yet, the test
had been carried out in front of the whole world and still not been seen.
Moments later, the warhead released an inflated balloon to keep it close to
the surface. A boat launched from Takuyo was already on the way to snag
the line so that the RV could be recovered and its instrumented data
analyzed.
“It’s going to be very hard, isn’t it?” Barbara Linders asked.
“Yes, it will.” Murray wouldn’t lie to her. Over the past two weeks
they’d become very close indeed, closer, in fact, than Ms. Linders was with
her therapist. In that time, they had discussed every aspect of the assault
more than ten limes, with tape recordings made of every word, printed tran-
scripts made of the recordings, and every fact cross-checked, even to the
extent that photographs of the former senator’s office had been checked lor
the color of the furniture and carpeting. Everything had checked out. Oh,
there had been a few discrepancies, but only a few, and all of them minor.
The substance of the case was unaffected. But all of that would not change
the fact that, yes, it would be very hard.
Murray ran the case, acting as the personal representative of Director Bill
Shaw. Under Murray were twenty-eight agents, two of them headquarters-
division inspectors, and almost all the rest experienced men in their forties,
chosen for their expertise (there were also a half dozen young agents to do
legwork errands). The next step would be to meet with a United States Attor-
ney. They’d already chosen the one they wanted, Anne Cooper, twenty-nine,
a J.D. from the University of Indiana, who specialized in sexual-assault
cases. An elegant woman, tall, black, and ferociously feminist, she had suffi-
cient fervor for such cases that the name of the defendant wouldn’t matter to
her more than the time of day. That was the easy part.
Then came the hard part. The “defendant” in question was the Vice Pres-
ident of the United States, and the Constitution said that he could not be
treated like a normal citizen. In his case, the “grand jury” would be the
United States House of Representatives’ Committee on the Judiciary. Anne
Cooper would work technically in cooperation with the chairman and staff-
ers of the committee, though as a practical matter she’d actually run the case
herself, with the committee people “helping” by grandstanding and leaking
things to the press.
The firestorm would start, Murray explained slowly and quietly, when the
chairman of the committee was informed of what was coming. Then the ac-
cusations would become public; the political dimension made it unavoida-
ble. Vice President Edward J. Realty would indignantly deny all
accusations, and his defense team would launch its own investigation of Bar-
bara Linders. They would discover the things that Murray had already heard
from her own lips, many of them damaging, and the public would not be
told, at first, that rape victims, especially those who did not report their
crimes, suffered crushing loss of self-esteem, often manifested by abnormal