“I’ll have the coffee waiting.”
Juan replaced the phone into its pouch and sat back against the tree, feeling like he was feeding every mosquito within a fifty-mile radius.
“Hey, Chairman,” Mark called a few minutes later. “Check this out.”
“What have you got,” Juan crawled over to where Mark sat with his legs bent like pretzels.
“You see this here and here?” He pointed to two tiny indentations on the glossy metal surface.
“Yeah.”
“These correspond with two matching holes in the nylon carrying harness. They’re bullet strikes fired up at us from when we took off in the chopper.”
“Those were nine-millimeter from point-blank range,” Juan said. “Barely made a mark. That thing is as tough as NASA boasted.”
“Okay, but look at this.” Mark struggled to turn the seventy-pound cell over so the top was facing up and then pointed at an even deeper pit gouged into the satellite fragment.
Juan gave his weapons expert a questioning look.
“Nothing matches it on the harness. That was put there before we got our hands on it.”
“Something the Argentines did to it?”
Mark shook his head. “We watched them dig it up, and it was out of our sight for only a few minutes before they loaded it into the pickup. I don’t recall hearing a shot. You?”
“No. Could it have happened when the logs slammed into the truck?”
“I don’t think so. I have to do some calculations to be sure, but I don’t think there was enough energy in the collision to cause something like this. And remember, the truck flipped into muddy ground. There wasn’t anything hard enough and small enough to cause such a smooth divot.”
A flash of understanding struck Cabrillo. “It happened when the rocket blew. More than enough energy there, right?”
“That’s the answer,” Mark replied as if he’d known that all along, but there was little triumph in his voice. “The problem is this is the top of the power cell. It would have been protected from the explosion by both the rocket’s vertical speed and the bulk of the cell itself.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m not sure. I’d love to do some tests on this back aboard the Oregon, but we’re turning it over to some CIA flack in Asunción. We’ll never get answers.”
“What’s your gut telling you?”
“The satellite was intentionally shot down by a weapon that only two countries in the world possess. Us—”
“And China,” Juan finished.
NINE
HOUSTON, TEXAS
Tom Parker never knew what he was getting himself into when he joined NASA. In his defense, he’d grown up in rural Vermont, and his parents never had a television because the reception on the side of the mountain where they raised dairy cows was terrible.
He knew something was up on his first day at the Johnson Space Center when his secretary placed a beautiful blown-glass bottle on the credenza behind his desk and said it was for Jeannie. He’d asked her to explain, and when she realized he had no clue as to Jeannie’s identity she’d chuckled and said cryptically that he’d soon find out.
Next came a pair of hand-painted bellows delivered anonymously to his office. Again, Parker didn’t know what this meant and asked for an explanation. By now, several other women in the secretarial pool knew of his ignorance, as did his supervisor, an Air Force Colonel who was a deputy director in the astronaut-training program.
The last piece of the puzzle was an autographed picture of a man in his mid- to late fifties, with receding red hair and bright blue eyes. It took Parker a while to figure out that the signature was that of Hayden Rorke. Internet research was at its infancy then, so he had to rely on a local library. This lead him to eventually discover that Rorke was an actor who played a NASA psychiatrist named Alfred Bellows who was continually vexed by astronaut Anthony Nelson and the genie he’d found on a beach.
Dr. Tom Parker was a NASA psychiatrist, and the I Dream of Jeannie jokes never stopped. After almost ten years with the program, Parker had dozens of glass bottles similar to the one Jeannie called home, as well as autographed pictures of most of the cast and several of Sidney Sheldon’s scripts.
He adjusted the webcam on top of his laptop to accommodate the request of Bill Harris, his current patient.