"Allen Steele - Free Beer and the William Casey Society" - читать интересную книгу автора (Steele Allen)

тАЬLet me guess...тАЭ

тАЬRight. Commie plot.тАЭ

****

There was little which could be kept secret for long aboard Olympus
Station. The space station was enormous, but it was only so large; rumors
and hearsay tended to spread quickly among the hundred-plus men and
women living in the big wheel, sometimes but not always missing the
attention of the security team or the station supervisor. In this instance,
word seeped out that something special was being sent up to celebrate the
completion of SPS-1. Yet only a small handful of people knew the details. If
Phil Bigthorn, the U.S. Federal Marshall who headed station security, or
Hank Luton, the station supervisor, had known what was going on, the jig
would have been up; but apparently they didnтАЩt, so the conspiracy continued
to build itself.

Eddie the Gentle Goon managed to make covert contact with one of
the usual sources for goodies at the Cape, a cargo loader who for years
had fattened his bank account by smuggling personal-request items into
the OTVs bound for Skycan. (Cowboy Bob wouldnтАЩt tell me his name,
saying that the same person was still working for Skycan at KSC.) The
cargo loader was willing to take the risk, which was considerable, but he
also put a large fee on the jobтАФfifty grand up front, overhead costs
included. Eddie dickered with him and managed to get the price down to
$30,000 through a combination of sweet talk and menace for which the
Goon was renowned, and authorized a transfer of thirty grand from EddieтАЩs
bank account to the loaderтАЩs. The price was still steep, but the
co-conspirators grudgingly agreed to reimburse the Goon for the expense.

The date for delivery of 444 cases of beer was to be on or before
April 15, the day that final work on SPS-1 was scheduled to be completed.
Dog-Boy and Dog-Girl, who had both worked previously as ground crew at
the Cape, worked out the rough framework of the plan. They figured that,
once the beer was packed into an OTV and the transfer vehicle was loaded
into a shuttleтАЩs cargo bay in the KSC Shuttle Processing Center, it would be
smooth sailing. Under standard procedures, the OTV would not be
reopened for inspection once the shuttle was mated with its flyback booster
and moved to the launch pad. Once the shuttle reached orbit, the flight crew
would routinely deploy the OTV from the cargo bay and fire its engine,
sending it towards Olympus Station as if it were any other resupply mission.

So the hard part was to get all that beer into an OTV, a difficulty
compounded by NASA regulations forbidding all alcoholic beverages at
Kennedy Space Center. There was no way a beer truck could simply drive
past the checkpoints and off-load over four hundred cases of beer at the
SPC. Not without attracting the wrath of KSC s security cops, infamous for
their lack of humor.