by Homer Hickam
Penny was certain she was being mocked. Nothing made her angrier. “You son of a bitch, I’m going to kick your ass.”
He frowned at her, as if she was something he needed to fix. “Do you have a vocabulary other than curse words?”
“Do you have a vocabulary other than acronyms?” she replied, squinting.
He ignored her comment. “I’ve got a wounded PLT and—” he peered past Penny “—what appears to be a sick SMET. I need to take care of them first. Then I’ll take care of you.”
Penny took his words as a threat. She held her hands turned flat, moved them in a circle. “Take care of me? You come near me, you son of a bitch, I’ll kill you! I have a black belt in karate.”
“Dr. High Eagle,” Medaris said patiently, “we have a long haul in front of us. To get through it we’re going to need to be friends.”
His comment was so ridiculous that Penny spontaneously burst out laughing, only to quickly strangle it. She hated her laugh. She’d been told by her last boyfriend that her laugh sounded like a braying mule. She’d kicked him out that night, sent him packing without even his toothbrush. “Friends?” she rasped, choking the laugh down her throat. “I don’t need any friends, especially a damn spacejacker!”
He arched an eyebrow. “Your laugh... it sounds a little bit like a—”
“Screw you!” she interrupted, then squinted, jabbed her finger toward the deck. “I want to go down, now!”
“You’re aiming in the wrong direction,” he said, opening the box.
“What?”
He pointed at the deck. “When you point in that direction, you’re not pointing at the earth. We’re in an omicron plus-X center-of-earth attitude. The direction you’re pointing is out along the plane of the solar system. That’s a generalization, of course.”
“Well, let me give you a generalization, shithead,” Penny sneered. “I want the hell off this goddam shuttle.”
He shrugged, took scissors from the box, began to snip away the red-soaked material on Cassidy’s pants.
“All right,” Penny breathed. “Let me make this a very simple question. Are we going to land? And no P-L-T or W-C-S acronyms!”
“PLT and WCS aren’t acronyms,” Medaris replied, folding the hole in the material back with his finger. “They’re initials. PLT means pilot. WCS is the waste control system. SMET’s an acronym. Shuttle main engine technician. You didn’t know that?”
Penny was starting to feel homicidal. The man was a complete nerd. “I know this,” she seethed. “If you don’t answer my question, I’m going to use that goddamn equation of yours, gravitational whatever and twice the goddamn whatsit, and come over there and wring your stinking stupid-ass neck, even if I have to wait until you’re asleep to do it. Are you going to land this thing or not? ”
“Yes,” he said as if it were the most obvious thing. She had a surge of hope until he added his final word. “Eventually.”
“Bastard,” she hissed.
“My mother would hate to hear that opinion of her favorite son,” he said, disarmingly.
Penny refused to be disarmed by a spacejacking geek. “You and your mother can go...” she muttered, trailing off, because she had suddenly become aware of her bladder. It felt as if it had swollen to the size of a basketball and someone was sticking needles in it. A remnant of a class she’d had in Houston came back to her. There was something called space adaptation syndrome. SAS! So that’s what this idiot was talking about! Weightlessness in space caused a shift of blood to the head, disorienting the brain. The stomachs of astronauts often paid a price for that. But blood also poured into the upper torso, causing the body to create urine in copious quantities to get rid of the excess fluid. Penny groaned when another thought struck her. Ollie Grant had insisted she drink a lot of water that morning, saying it would keep her from being dehydrated in space. She realized she’d been had. But it didn’t change the fact she had to pee, seriously, now.
CEDAR KEY (2)
Office of Cecil Velocci, Attorney at Law, Cedar Key, Florida
Two FBI agents arrived three hours after Cecil had made his call to the Department of Transportation. By then Trooper Buck had received a call concerning a fender bender on Gulf Street and left. The agents pounded up the steps and strode purposefully past Cecil’s secretary, who waved her arms at them futilely before they hit the door. “Cecil Velocci?”
“Attorney-at-law. Yes. FBI?”
“You got it,” one of them said, displaying his shield. The other agent did the same. “What is all this? I understand you turned in a report, something having to do with the shuttle?”
Cecil showed them the Department of Transportation contract. The agents inspected the document and then one of them left to make a call from the cellular phone in their car. He returned, grim faced. “I’m going to have to ask you to come with us to Tallahassee,” he said. “The boss wants to question you himself.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“Arrest? Technically, no.”
“Then... ?”
“Look, Velocci, don’t ask, okay? Just move your butt.”
Cecil picked up his briefcase and went through the outer office, waving good-bye to his secretary. “Hold down the fort, Mildred,” he told the wide-eyed woman as he and the agents filed by.
“Cecil, what the H is goin’ on?” she demanded.
“Now, don’t you worry, Mildred. I’ll be back in a jiff.” He gave her a big grin. Despite the fact that he was terrified, Cecil was determined to display an airy confidence. He figured he might as well. Columbia was up there. There was no turning back now.
PUCKETT
Puckett Security Services, Lafayette Avenue, Washington, D.C.
Carl Puckett reveled in his plush office with its view of the United States Capitol building. He’d paid his dues, worked hard for the location, the expensive furnishings, the busty blond secretary out front. For years his little company had worked the desert fields as muscle for the oil industry. When heads needed cracking or security was a problem, Carl and his bad boys were called upon to visit the miscreants, to guard the wells, to shepherd the tanker convoys. Over the years Puckett had taught himself Arabic and Farsi, got to know nearly everyone in the desert kingdoms, even the old gnarled sheiks who owned not much more than a couple of camels up a dry wadi. In the bad old days of the first energy crisis of the 1970s, he’d personally taken one of the top oil executives in the world to a tiny country on the Red Sea that was wavering on its support of OPEC. There was mob rule at the airport and in the streets but he’d gotten the executive into the palace, helped him talk turkey to the sheik-in-charge, got him a deal. When the big boys heard about what he’d done, PSS had suddenly become the hot-ticket enforcer in the oil industry. Puckett had not stopped since, always ready for a special assignment wherever it came from, as long as they were able to pay.
Puckett was built like a fireplug, with a face to match—a nose that had been broken more than once, and a brushy mustache that covered a partial harelip. With arms thick and heavy, and legs built like tree trunks, he looked like a tough customer and he was. He’d kicked an American to death once in a bar in Beirut, had barely escaped the police on that one. The man he’d killed, a roughneck oil driller, had stood just over six feet tall. He’d called Puckett “Tiny,” as in “Hey, Tiny, you lookin’ for trouble?” The driller had never called anybody anything after that. Puckett had slowed down some during the last ten years, had let himself get soft, at least in the gut. He let his employees, mostly street trash he’d trained in a paramilitary camp on a farm in Virginia, do his fighting these days.
Puckett had the television on in a corner, not really listening, just background noise. But he raised his head as the first reports of the hijacking of Columbia started to filter through. He put his hands on his big desk, listened intently. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. Puckett prided himself on his clairvoyance. He’d always had a sixth sense about things, who was responsible for what. This one he
knew from the moment he heard the news. “I should have killed the son of a bitch,” he growled. “If they’d paid me enough, I’d of done it.”
This was going to be delicate. It was only a suspicion but he remembered the way Medaris had fought that night, the hate in his eyes when he’d left him standing in his own blood in that parking lot in front of the burning hangar. God, that was a good rumble, and easy money too. Puckett had put a video camera in the air vent of Medaris’s clean room days before, watched everything going on. He knew when everybody had left and Jack was left behind alone. He would have waited for him to leave too, but it looked as if he was staying the night. It had been bad luck when they’d arrived the same time Jack had closed and locked the door. Things had gotten messy real fast after that. Puckett shrugged at the memory. Things tended to get messy often in Puckett’s particular business.
He dialed the pager of the customer who’d paid for the MEC gig. When he got the reply, he used the code that required a physical meeting between him and the Man. He always thought of them as the “Man,” no matter who they were. None of this needed to go over the phone, and they didn’t need to meet in an office that might be under surveillance. They had a place. Puckett required it of each of his customers. He’d meet the “Man” at the designated place, tell him of his suspicions, see what he wanted him to do.
Puckett put down the phone receiver, laughed, and rubbed his hands. Damn! If he was right, this one could turn into one helluva payday!
POSTINSERTION CHECKLIST (3)
Columbia
To Jack’s relief Cassidy blinked back to consciousness. “It hurts, Jack,” he admitted between gritted teeth.
“Stay still, Hoppy,” Jack said as he snipped a final fragment of blood-soaked material away. He looked at the wound. It was a ragged cut but didn’t appear to be very deep. If Jack could get the bleeding stopped—it appeared already to be slowing—then Cassidy should be fine, a little sore, perhaps, but capable of flying the shuttle.
Jack heard High Eagle grunt, trailing away to a sigh. “Medaris, I need the toilet,” she admitted shamefacedly.
“Better take care of the woman, Jack,” Cassidy said, trying to smile but ending up grimacing, sucking in a breath.
Jack touched his pilot on his shoulder. “Be right back.” He pulled himself over to Virgil, who was stretched out on his back beside the hatch, holding his stomach. He had his eyes tightly closed. “Virgil?”
“I’m sick, sir. Sick to death.” The big man wracked a sob into a plastic vomitus bag. He looked up, his eyes nearly swollen shut. “What happened to Hoppy?”
“An accident with your pistol. Damn, that was a dumb thing to do, bringing a gun on board. Why’d you do it?”
“Don’t know. Thought we might need it. I’m sorry, boss.”
Jack gripped the man’s shoulder. “All right. Hoppy’s going to be fine. Rest. I’ll get back to you later.” Jack tore away a cue card Velcroed to the bulkhead and used it as a guide to deploy the waste-control-system curtain and open the necessary valves. When a shadow fell on him, he saw High Eagle hovering overhead, her eyes filled with anxiety. “Will you hurry up?” she hissed.
As Jack cranked open the final valve, he pointed out the obvious. “You have to get out of your suit,” he said.
“No problem.” She already had most of the zippers undone and quickly peeled the orange outer shell off. She wore a white coolant suit underneath. She flew past Jack, nearly kicking him in the face, and snapped the curtain shut.
“Don’t be too long,” he cautioned. “Virgil needs it next.”
“You and Virgil can go to hell” was her muttered reply.
Jack heard the sound of Velcro patches being urgently ripped away, and then her coolant suit came sailing over the curtain. He looked at the soggy garment in disbelief. She was obviously a woman used to having someone else pick up after her. He grabbed the suit and stuffed it into a plastic bag retrieved from the waste control locker. He heard the WCS curtain being drawn and looked over his shoulder. Penny came out, wearing a pair of panties and a skimpy bra. She caught him staring at her. “What the hell are you looking at?” She crossed her arms over her ample chest. “I thought I’d be with an all-female crew,” she snarled, “instead of freaking spacejackers.” Then, as Jack watched, her face turned a deathly shade of green and she started gulping.
He flew up beside her and handed her a vomitus bag. She buried her face in it. “Do you have anything else to wear?” he asked. The heaters were off-line and the middeck was chilly. She nodded, pointed vaguely toward the lockers. “Get into some clothes.”
“Screw you,” she barked, pulling her face out of the bag. Nevertheless, she drifted to the lockers, began to unlatch one Jack hoped held her personal gear. He headed back to his pilot.
Cassidy grimaced when Jack placed a gauze pad on the wound and applied pressure. “Sorry, Hoppy.”
“Hurts, Jack,” the pilot whispered.
Jack unlatched the medical kit. Inside it were vials of morphine and syringes. He started to prepare a morphine syringe and Cassidy, seeing it, nodded eagerly. “Yeah, I need that.”
“Hold the pad,” Jack said. Cassidy meekly moved both his hands to his thigh while Jack prepared the syringe.
“Jack?” Cassidy coughed. “I was a great pilot. You know that, don’t you?”
“You still are, Hoppy. That’s why I hired you.”
Cassidy grimaced. “Will you tell my son? Tell him I was a great pilot. Don’t let his mother make him hate me.”
“You’ll tell him yourself, you old fart,” Jack said.
“Please, Jack.”
“I’ll tell him.”
“Thanks....” He coughed quietly and then was silent.
Jack pushed the syringe, saw a spurt of liquid from the needle, and turned back to Cassidy. The pilot’s eyes looked like blue chips of glass. His mouth hung agape and tiny globules, like red beads that had come unstrung from a necklace, trickled from it in a thin line. “Hoppy!” Jack stuck the syringe into the padded cover on the wall and pressed Cassidy back against the airlock. “Virgil, I need your help!”
The curtain to the WCS opened and Virgil, his face shiny with sweat, pulled hand over hand to Jack.
“Hold him still.”
Virgil pinned Cassidy against the bulkhead. Jack unzipped Cassidy’s coveralls, unbuttoned the shirt underneath. He felt down his chest, across his stomach, and then along his right side. He pulled back his hand. It was covered with blood. “Dear God,” Virgil said, seeing the blood.
Jack pulled the pilot’s coveralls back. Then he saw it, a nearly circular puncture wound. Only a small amount of blood oozed from it, a thick scarlet paste. But it was deep. “Dammittohell, Hoppy,” Jack muttered, finding no pulse.
Jack wedged himself between a seat and the wall to gain some stability, got his hands crossed on Cassidy’s chest, pushed, once, twice. Red beads spurted from Cassidy’s mouth with each push. Virgil moaned, put his head to one side, reached with one hand for another vomitus bag stuck in his back pocket. Jack heard High Eagle retching. He kept compressing Cassidy’s chest—ten times—then moved up to give the pilot mouth-to-mouth. He opened the pilot’s mouth, pulled his tongue out. Droplets of Jack’s sweat, sparkling from the sunlight streaming white-hot through the hatch porthole, floated off his forehead in a spray. A big glob of blood stuck in the open aperture of Cassidy’s mouth. If he blew in it, Jack knew he’d force the blood into his pilot’s lungs. He drew back, suddenly overwhelmed. It was a nightmare.
“Boss,” Virgil said, pushing his head in close. Jack could smell the vomit on his engineer’s breath. “Hoppy’s dead. I can feel it. He’s gone. God bless him.”
Jack knew Virgil was right. Another piece of shrapnel, or perhaps the bullet itself, had probably punctured one of the pilot’s lungs. Cassidy had drowned in his own blood. Jack pushed back to consider the situation. They had to land eventually. When they did, Columbia would hit the atmosphere, slashing into the air at five mi
les per second. Without a pilot no one would survive the resulting fireball. There seemed only one chance for survival: Call Houston and beg to be brought in on autopilot.
EXECUTIVE ORDERS
Building 1, Johnson Space Center
Bonner pushed past engineers and technicians as he came out of the elevator. He was trying with little success to will himself calm. A secretary carrying a cup of coffee came out of one of the small assistant director’s offices, saw him, and ducked back inside. She barely registered on his radar screen. His mind had already sorted through the probable passage of events on Launch Complex 39-B, the likely circumstances aboard the shuttle, and several courses of action to control the situation. The hardest part would be to get through the next twenty-four hours, not because of the contingency that now existed in space but because of the response from those who were nominally over him. They’d be panicky, and confused, and angry, probably all at once. Vanderheld. The vice president was Bonner’s real worry. He would probably try to use this situation to further his cutbacks at NASA. In the outer sanctum of his office Lily nervously handed him a fistful of yellow call notes. He rapidly sorted through them, throwing them one by one to the floor. “The vice president,” he breathed. “What did he say?”
“He asked what happened, Frank. I had to tell him as best I knew. It’s all over the television anyway,” she said defensively.
Bonner pursed his lips, nodded. “Call him back.” He opened the big oak door that barricaded his office, then walked to his desk, stared at the opposing wall covered with framed awards, medals, all attesting to his dedication to NASA and JSC. He could see them all being taken down, everything thrown away. There was no doubt that this hijacking, or whatever it was, was going to land on his back. JSC was ultimately responsible for manned spaceflight in the United States. JSC and its director were going to take the blame unless... unless he could come up with a plan, something so grand and glorious everyone would forget the screwup.
The telephone rang. “Yes, sir,” he said, and then lapsed into nervous silence while he listened to the vice president of the United States.