Van found that it refreshed his mind to tinker with lethal hardware. Guns inspired Van, they got him out of his mental box. When Van returned from the firing ranges to bend his full attention onto the KH-13 spy satellite, the satellite problem cracked around the edges. Then the problem started to yield to him.

  Van tossed and turned, in eighteen-hour days, and in the depths of the night. He labored through blind alleys, made wild leaps of insight. He called in a lot of favors. He gave of his very best. He worked quietly, and he worked very quickly. And then, all in a rush, it went.

  The truth was that the satellite’s so-called software problems had nothing to do with the satellite’s software.

  The satellite’s software was incredible. The code was built to mind-boggling, unheard-of security specs. It made AT&T switching station software—the most paranoid commercial code Van had ever worked on—look as loose and scattered as empty Schlitz cans at a beer bust.

  The satellite’s software had been assembled and vetted by three hundred humorless, white-shirt-wearing, avionics-software drones in Clear Lake City, Texas. The KH-13 had three different onboard control computers, each of them independently running 420,000 lines of code. It was belt, plus suspenders, plus a straitjacket.

  Those 420,000 lines had exactly one fully documented, well-understood bug. This was totally unheard-of. The very best commercial software written to that length would have suffered about 5,000 bugs. The KH-13’s software was the dullest, least creative, most focused, most disciplined software that Van had ever seen. It scared him. It was sober, detailed, frighteningly methodical. The code’s design specs alone ran to thirty volumes.

  Every single line of the 420,000 was completely annotated, showing every time it had ever been changed. Why, when, how, and by whom. Every change was rigorously linked to some severe dictation in the design specs. Literally everything that had ever happened to this vast program, down to the tiniest detail, was recorded in a giant master history. And since this code re-used some fully tested code from earlier spy-sats, the reports stretched back some thirty solid years.

  There was something genuinely nightmarish about this KH-13 code. About its complete lack of inspiration, creativity, and cheerful hacker sloppiness. About its gray, sober, steel bank-vault qualities. Van realized with a sinking in his heart that this was the gold standard for the safety and security that he and the CCIAB were trying to impose on the daffy, geeky, loosey-goosey software world. In a cyber-secure utopia, all software would look just like this.

  But the satellite’s coders, for all their horrifying clerkly skills, were only part of the satellite system. The secret aerospace bureaucracy that had built the KH-13 had worked on a strict need-to-know basis. This meant that no human being had ever understood the KH-13 as a whole.

  There were still big black patches in Van’s knowledge, too. Any device of that size and complexity was just too vast for one human brain to hold. But Van had researched the problem with unusual methods. Van knew that he understood things about the KH-13 that were not grasped by anyone else in the world.

  Van went to report his triumphant progress to Jeb. He was eager to explain his ingenious solution to someone who could fully appreciate it. Unfortunately, Jeb was not cleared for learning about the innards of spy satellites—that was one “stovepipe” that was still holding firm. So Jeb simply thanked him, congratulated him on the hard work, and gave him a new assignment.

  Van was now “tasked with creating” a new, bang-up technical presentation for the forthcoming federal computer-security “Cyber-Strategy Summit” in rural Virginia. Jeb was obsessed with this conference, the golden climax of the CCIAB’s policy-making efforts. It was absolutely vital, said Jeb, that “America’s cyber-security community” should come out of this Virginia shindig with “some broad policy guidance and momentum on the ground.”

  This Virginia retreat would be the CCIAB’s last best chance to gather all the major federal players, and get them to line up, see sense, split their differences, dig deep in their pockets, and all sign on together on the same policy page. Then there would be real, true change in the world. Real structure, tasking, and accountability. Finally, American computer security that knew what it was doing. Sensible. Businesslike. Orderly. Realistic.

  Van had to beg permission from Jeb to report his satellite findings to some proper authority. Finding a proper authority took some time, because (as Van now realized) nobody anywhere had ever expected Hickok to find somebody who could actually solve the problem. When a good candidate was finally located inside the intricate spacewar bureaucracy, Hickok insisted on driving Van from Washington straight to Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado.

  Hickok’s special courier vehicle had a bulging fiberglass shell, a telescoping mast, and nineteen-inch metal racks full of command-and-control hardware. Hickok’s Humvee could open links to FLTSATCOM, MILSTAR, NAVSTAR, INTELSAT, INMARSAT, EUTELSAT, and the Pentagon’s Global Common Operational Picture. On this cross-country trip, Van’s e-mail arrived for him on Navy-sponsored dot-mil satellite channels designed for aircraft carriers.

  Hickok’s professional life was strangely familiar to Van. It was full of small elite teams. Quick, quiet black-ops soldiers who did peculiar things on very short schedules. They never bragged. The American press never printed a word about them. They were very busy guys. They were very much like top-end computer wizards, except for one thing. They were not pale, pudgy hackers wearing glasses. They were cold-eyed athletes with crazy, kick-the-door-in fitness standards.

  Behind the Humvee’s wheel, Hickok was an iron man. Hickok drove like a low-flying aircraft buzzing the Kuwaiti Highway of Death. Hickok’s reflexes were so much keener than those of normal drivers that he whipped through traffic with race-car twitches of his fingertips. Van learned to watch the windshield as if it were the screen of a video game. It was much easier on his nerves if he pretended that the two of them could just win some extra lives.

  Whenever Hickok needed a break, he retired to the Humvee’s cavernous backseat. There he amused himself, munching take-out double cheeseburgers, sipping strawberry shakes, and leafing through his usual leisure reading, Christian apocalypse fiction. Hickok had no problem reading novels in a moving car, for Hickok was Air Force Special Ops. Hickok never got carsick. He had the stomach for five or six gees.

  Hickok was a big devotee of a best-selling series called “Tribulation Force.” In tomorrow’s post-Armageddon world, the Rapture had carried off all the Believing Christians, leaving all the liberal scoffers, skeptics, and atheists to fight it out with the evil troops of the Antichrist. Hickok liked to read the most ruthless sections of the book aloud, chuckling to himself.

  “Y’know,” Hickok sang out suddenly.

  Van gripped the Humvee’s wheel. Van was dead tired, but it was a lot more relaxing to drive the Humvee than it was to watch Hickok doing it. “What is it, Mike?”

  “We never really talked about that secretary of yours.”

  “What’s Fawn done this time?”

  “Did you ever clear it with her about those surgical gloves?”

  “Mike, I’m just her boss, all right?”

  “What is it with her allergies? The girl is allergic to everything. And what’s with that talcum powder? Is that all in her head?”

  It was pitiful that Hickok asked him for advice about dating geek women. Van already had a geek woman. And unlike Hickok, who was awesomely promiscuous and never thought twice about it, Van badly wanted to keep the geek woman he had. Dottie was the only woman in his life who had ever understood him.

  Now that Van was out of his bunker office and with his nose out of the briefing papers, he could guiltily realize how much hell he had been through and how much harm he had done to himself. Why was he shooting the breeze with some war buddy when he was a married man?

  Van knew that Dottie’s love for him was large, and generous, and without conditions. But oh, how they were hampered by all those other boundaries in their lives. All those far-sighted, professional postponements, those acts of scholarly discipline, those duties and obligations. They were both so well meaning about it, and maybe that was the worst thing. It wasn’t like they really meant to neglect each other. They just arranged their lives so that they always could.

  They talked each other into it somehow, making nice lists in their e-mail, researching the alternatives, checking out a spreadsheet maybe, wisely agreeing on what was surely best for them in the long run.

  But the long run never came around for them. They used their smarts and knowledge to lop off all time for each other. There was something inhuman about being dutiful workaholics, something that wrecked marriages, shattered families, and made a man and woman shrivel up inside. It was going to kill them both someday.

  Without his wife and his child, hinges had popped loose in Van’s soul. He could feel that something quiet but vital to his humanity was slowly going down the shredder.

  Why was it that he could never tell Dottie these things? She never denied him things he needed—when he asked her for them. But when he was worn down like a pencil nub, he couldn’t even find it in himself to ask. They were like a couple who talked in sign language, and now were losing their fingers. It just wouldn’t do. No.

  Cheyenne Mountain was just one stupid mountain in Colorado. But Dottie lived in the Colorado mountains now. He was going to see Dottie and try to set things straight. Van had already sent her e-mail.

  It was a bright, drought-stricken day. The sun gleamed off looming slopes of bare red rock and patches of trapped snow. Cheyenne Mountain loomed so large and bald and frowning that Van had a dizzy spell.

  The legendary Cheyenne space base was something of a disappointment to Van. Cheyenne Mountain commanded America’s ICBMs and it had the capacity to blow up the whole world. It should have been a lot stranger than it looked. Cheyenne was basically a rather typical Air Force base, just stuffed inside a big stone bottle. No grass here, no flagpoles. Bad overhead lighting. Miles of dusty exposed plumbing and ventilation.

  The entire base was supported on giant, white-painted steel springs. If half of Cheyenne Mountain vaporized in a fifty-megaton first strike, the deep bunker would just bounce on its springs a little. The machinery of America’s nuclear vengeance never came unplugged.

  The security people took away Van’s cell phone and his Swiss Army knife. They photocopied his New Jersey driver’s license and demanded his social security number. They let him keep his heavy NSC shoulder bag and his cork-lined instrument case. Without his ever-present pocketknife and pocket phone, Van felt both robbed and naked.

  Hickok had secured an appointment with Major General Edwin A. Wessler. Wessler was a big cheese around the KH-13, but he was not Hickok’s boss. Michael Hickok never showed up on anybody’s organizational charts, so he never had any “boss.” Hickok referred to the various interested parties as his “sponsors.”

  Major General Edwin A. Wessler turned out to be a big, bluff, balding guy with rimless glasses and a Hawaiian tan. General Wessler had just been reassigned to Cheyenne from a missile-tracking base in the mid-Pacific. Wessler was only partially moved into his new office. The place was all beige paint, gunmetal shelving, and scattered blue folders.

  The screen of Wessler’s new Dell showed that he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. Wessler’s topic was “GEODDS, Baker-Nunn, and the ASFPC.”

  “GEODDS,” Van muttered, rubbing his aching forehead.

  “Yes, sir!” boomed General Wessler. “GEODDS can spot an orbiting object the size of a basketball!”

  Van put his heavy bag and case on the floor. His back ached and his wrists were sore. The altitude was killing him. Being at high altitude deep inside a stone cave was somehow much worse.

  Wessler flicked Hickok’s business card with his clean, buffed fingernail. “ ‘Executive Solutions,’ so what kind of outfit is that, Master Sergeant?”

  “That’s a long story, sir. Ever heard of the Carlyle Group?”

  “I don’t need any long stories today,” Wessler told him with a thin smile.

  Major General Wessler had an aeronautics degree, an MBA, and had worked for both NATO and NASA. General Wessler was not just any everyday general. He was a literal rocket scientist. Wessler wore an elastic blue one-piece jumpsuit with starred shoulders and a U.S. SPACE FORCE breast patch. General Wessler looked tanned, fit, and ready to spring right aboard the next Shuttle liftoff. Even though he never did anything spacier than stare deep into a tracking screen.

  Van found it rather weird to meet a no-kidding, real-life general from a “Space Force.” It was weirder yet that America’s Space Force had bases all around the world, with forty thousand service personnel. America’s Space Force was twenty years old. Why had he never seen any Space Force soldiers in any war movies? Or TV programs, either. Not even The X-Files.

  Van coughed on the dry mountain air. Wessler removed loose books from the metal seat of his office chair. “You’d better take a load off your feet, flatlander! I’ll have an orderly bring you a Pepsi!”

  Van hated Pepsis, but he sat down gratefully. He focused his aching eyes on Wessler’s stack of brand-new books. The titles were War at the Top of the World, Tournament of Shadows, and The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power. Their pages were thick with fresh yellow Post-it notes.

  Wessler barked orders into a bright red desk phone.

  “I brought you something good here, sir,” offered Hickok. “It sure wasn’t easy finding it. I had to kiss me a whole lot of frogs. But, sir, I believe this approach might work out!”

  Wessler lowered his brows in a scowl. He had about a mile and a half of shining bald forehead. “Why’d you leave the Air Force, Mr. Hickok?”

  Hickok was startled. “Well, it just seemed like the right time for me to move on, sir.”

  “Don’t hand me that crap! Why’d we lose an airman like you? And now you’re here telling me you think you know how to manage a satellite, Master Sergeant? What on earth is that all about?”

  “Well, sir,” said Hickok, standing straighter, “if you want the truth about why I left the Force, it just got too obvious who was calling the shots there in Kosovo. It was the damn United Nations!”

  Wessler didn’t take that remark at all well. Van was very alarmed. They’d agreed earlier that Hickok would do the talking, because Space Force was a branch of the Air Force, while Hickok was Special Ops, also Air Force. Two wings of the Air Force trying to fly together, how hard could that be?

  “Mr. Hickok may be a civilian now, sir,” Van spoke up. “But I’m NSC.”

  “That’s not what your card says, Dr. Vandeveer! This card says you are DoD!” Wessler read it carefully. “‘Transformational Communications Architecture Office, Department of Defense.’” Wessler’s glasses gleamed fiercely. “That outfit doesn’t even exist! It’s nothing but a press release!”

  “Well, we’re way ahead of the curve,” Van mumbled.

  Van was saved by the arrival of a young airman with a Pepsi. The drink came in a sixteen-ounce plastic Los Angeles Lakers cup.

  “Sir,” Hickok told the general, “that big space re-org at the Pentagon is not the lookout of me and the computer doc here. So there’s no need to bring up the subject of ‘space transformation.’ If you’ll just hear us out a minute . . . We came a long way, and well, we’ve got some good ideas.”

  Wessler hitched up the elastic belt of his blue jumpsuit and sat by his computer. “I’m listening.”

  Hickok shot Van an urgent look. Startled, Van put his Pepsi on the floor.

  “Well,” Van blurted, “uh, sir, when I first saw those SEU reports, I had it figured for thermal failure. Some kind of heat load. But of course, this bird is the most advanced infrared spotter we have. So if there’s anything it would spot, it would certainly be heat.”

  “They tell me you’re a programmer.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Cut to the chase! What’s gone wrong with the bird’s software?”

  “Nothing,” Van said, lunging for his cold-sweating Pepsi. “It’s the hardware. First, I had to correlate those reported anomalies with its orbital position.”

  Wessler stared at him. “You tracked the bird’s zenith angles?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “That is the one thing no one is supposed to know! The orbital periodicity, that is the most jealously guarded secret we have! If the adversary learns that, then he can do denial and deception!”

  “It wasn’t that hard to figure out,” Van said. Other national governments already knew about the KH-13. It was the business of their intelligence services to figure such things out. So Van had used French commercial SPOT satellite photos, easily purchased through the Internet. Using these photos, Van had watched Indian scientists at various Indian nuclear weapons centers busily moving their cars and trucks to baffle the KH-13. The Indians were doing their usual denial and deception efforts against the new American spy satellite, trying to disguise the feverish activity in and out of their nuclear weapons centers. Given the Indians’ keen awareness of the KH-13’s orbit, it was easy for Van to download a PC simulator program from Dottie’s astrophysics lab, and deduce the satellite’s orbit by himself. Dottie was happy to help him find the right program, and she had never suspected a thing.

  “The KH-13 is in a standard American spy-sat LEO/POLAR orbit,” Van said. “Apogee 256, perigee 530 . . .”

  “Never mind that.”

  Van nodded hastily. “So, once I had the orbital periodicity, then I could see these damage episodes are far from random. They only occur when the bird is transiting from the highly charged polar regions into the mid-latitudes.”

  This news put General Wessler right off his feed. Wessler started fiddling nervously with the track-wheel in his mouse. “So, what do you mean to say? That it’s surface-charging? That there’s an arc discharge?”