"It's not an investigation if the brass has a chance to cover this up," explained Remo.
"Nobody's covering up anything. It's all over the-"
"Just open the gate," said Remo, handing the phone to Chiun, who broke it in two and returned the pieces to the airman who was still trying to figure out the physics of Remo's telephone trick.
"Very well, sir," the man said, handing over a pair of clip-on passes. "But you didn't have to break the phone."
"Next time, don't try to cover for your bosses," retorted Remo.
"Nor impede the wrathful agents of the NAACP," added Chiun as the gate rolled aside electronically.
The press, seeing an opening, decided to take a run at the gate, figuring that once they were in, there would be too many of them to throw out.
Remo and Chiun slipped in, and the guard threw the gate into fast reverse. A female reporter got her boobs caught in the closing gate and shrieked a protest that could be heard on the moon-if anyone up there had ears.
This gave the others their opportunity. All the guards converged on the moving wall of press, and no one paid any attention to the pair of NTSB investigators who had been passed through.
REMO AND CHIUN WALKED unnoticed to the accident site. If the BioBubble resembled a glass pancake, this was more like a metallic waffle. Chunks and lumps of unmelted matter protruded from the rehardened crawler that was now spread out like a stepped-on aircraft carrier.
Amazingly they were unchallenged by the emergency crews and frantic blue-coated managers scurrying around. Some wore gas-and-particle-filter masks against the chemical fumes of the destroyed shuttle.
The 165,000-pound space plane was no longer recognizable as the most ambitious feat of engineering ever accomplished by man. Remo recalled that shuttles were so complicated that it was a miracle every time one went up without a hitch. When they landed intact, it was considered another miracle.
Personally, Remo thought, he would rather drive a Yugo against traffic in the Indy 500 than go up in one of those things, but he was risk averse, being only a professional assassin.
"What do you think, Little Father? And don't say dragon."
"I will not say dragon. But I am thinking dragon."
"Don't even think it."
"Too late. I am thinking it."
A beefy-faced manager whose sweat had nothing to do with the humidity of the night noticed them and demanded to know who they were.
Remo did the honors.
The manager read the ID card and exploded, "NTSB? What the hell are you guys doing here?"
"We came for the black box," Remo said in a measured voice.
The manager looked perplexed for all of a minute.
Remo could tell by the dull gleam in his eyes that he was middle management and had no idea if there was a black box, or whether the NTSB could legally lay claim to it if there was.
This conclusion was confirmed by the man's next words.
"I gotta take your request up with my immediate superior."
"You do that," said Remo politely, knowing that his superior would take it to his superior and so on up the line to who knew how many redundant management layers.
By the time a possible no thundered back down the chain of command, Remo figured it would be Christmas again.
Moving among the packed NASA personnel, Remo flashed his NTSB ID card and asked repeatedly, "Anybody see the incident?"
A fresh-faced technician in what Remo at first thought was an Izod smock but quickly realized that impression was merely the result of sneezing without benefit of a handkerchief said, "I did."
"I want to hear all about it," Remo said sharply.
"The transporter was-"
"What transporter?"
The man looked at the gargantuan pile of hardening metal and ceramic, and a dazed expression spread over his face.
"It was incredible. The shuttle transporter is the largest piece of machinery of its type ever built. The shuttle was riding atop her. The most complicated machine ever built riding the biggest one ever constructed. And just like that, it was turned into solder."
"What did it?" asked Remo.
"Lord alone knows. I saw a cone of white light. It bathed the machine, then went away. The heat must have been fierce. Glass melted in the observation room. Glass doesn't melt easily, you know."
"Lately it does," said Remo.
The man went on. "The light evaporated, then came the pressure wave."
"Yeah?"
"It sounded like thunder. But it couldn't have been thunder. What I saw wasn't lightning. Not forked lightning, bolt lightning and certainly not ball lightning. I know lightning. It's one of our biggest concerns when we're taking the spacecraft out of the launch-assembly building."
"Look like a ray to you?" asked Remo.
"If it was a ray, it was the biggest ray ever generated."
"Makes sense. The biggest ray to knock out the two biggest machines ever built, right?"
Chiun nodded as if this made perfect sense to him.
The technician's voice became hollow. "It was also as hot as the surface of the sun. We're finding black droplets we think are the shuttle's heat-resistant tiles. They're supposed to protect the orbiter from reentry heat and are designed to withstand temperatures up to 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit. They came close to being sublimed. That means turned to gas."
"Sounds hot," said Remo.
"We're looking for any carbon-carbon from the nose and leading-edge wing insulation. Carbon-carbon will withstand 1,600 degrees. But so far, there's no trace."
"Sounds superhot," said Remo.
"You know," the technician said, looking up at the red dot that was Mars high in the Florida sky, "I got into the space business because I used to read a lot of science fiction when I was a kid. You grow up, you shake off a lot of wild notions. Space men. UFOs. All that foolishness. But after what I saw tonight, it all came back at me like that past fifteen years never happened. I look up at the stars now and I'm reminded how small we are and how insignificant. Makes a man shiver deep into his soul."