by Homer Hickam
“What does it do, Joe?” Wingate asked, assuming the easy informality of the aerospace community.
“It’s designed to carry a number of small satellites aboard a single launcher,” Rodriguez explained. Seeing the quizzical look on the blue-suiters, he explained further. “A lot of small companies or universities can’t afford to pay for their own launcher. The idea is that they can save money by combining their payload with a bunch of others, everybody riding on the same rocket.”
“You’re going to put the water bags aboard this SADD, then?”
“Yes. The water bags will be attached in bundles to each of these clamps. The wires have squibs attached that will automatically deploy the clusters. A timer will blow other squibs within the bundle. The trick to this will be deploying all the water bags in the proper pattern. We think we’ve solved that too. Of course we’d like to run a test —”
“There’s no time for that,” Wingate said, eyeing the SADD appreciatively. “Beautiful design. I hope it works.”
Rodriguez shrugged. “You fly without testing, you never know.”
Wingate didn’t respond to the comment. What was there to say? Rodriguez led the blue-suiters to another table to show them the water bags. “What do you call them besides water bags?” Wingate asked.
Rodriguez grinned. “The boys came up with the Space Punitive Reaction Against Hijacking. Pronounced “spray.”
“Spray, huh?” Wingate laughed. “If you want to be politically correct, better change the P to stand for “Protective.’ The President doesn’t believe in punishing people.”
Rodriguez nodded, remembering President Edwards’s opposition to capital punishment. Wingate studied the bags, each a black polypropylene packet about six inches square. Rodriguez handed one of them to the colonel. “The plan is for the Pegasus to rendezvous with the shuttle and deploy SPRAH in a circular pattern with a slight retrograde motion. Timers will rupture the bags. Should be quite a show when all that water crystallizes.”
Wingate moved the bag back and forth in his hands, the water inside making a sloshing sound. “Can the Peg get close enough to Columbia for the spacejackers to see it coming at them?”
“We think so.”
Wingate grinned. “That ought to scare the shit out of those bastards!”
Rodriguez shrugged. He wasn’t so certain. “We’ll use a minisensor to home in on the shuttle. The boys in the back room just assembled it.”
“And what’s that package called?”
Rodriguez could not help but look embarrassed. “The guys call it the Nakey.”
“Nakey?”
“From the group leader’s comment when he was told to build it in twenty-four hours. Not a chance in hell. N-A-C-I-H. Nakey.”
Wingate put the bag back on the table. “You’ve done a fantastic job, Joe. Box your Peg up as soon as you can. Orbital insertion in twelve hours.”
An Air Force major spoke up. “Joe, are you sure this won’t damage Columbia? Looks like there could be a lot of debris flying around up there.”
Rodriguez frowned at the major. I sure hope not was what he wanted to say. “It’s not supposed to” was the best he could muster.
The Researcher
Shirley Grafton was still officially listed as a researcher on the vice president’s staff, but over the last two years she had become more of a confidante, attuned to her boss’s restless mind. She had come to Washington from her native South Carolina with a degree in journalism from East Carolina State to work as an intern with The Washington Post. There she found herself just one of two dozen young women graduates, all trying desperately to get a byline. By chance she’d heard the veep needed someone who loved to spend time in front of computer, or in a library, and began the long interview process. When Vanderheld met Shirley for the final once-over, their minds had clicked. Both of them knew it. There was nothing romantic, of course—Vanderheld was a widower with a passel of kids, two of whom were older than Shirley—but their brains, both curious for knowledge, seemed to work in tandem from the first day they were together. After a while Shirley felt as if she was an extension of the vice president, his mobile self able to travel to do research while he was stuck in the tedium of the political jungle of Washington. She was always ready and eager for any quest for information he gave her. Vanderheld’s interests were kaleidoscopic—everything from the melting of the glaciers in Antarctica to the poverty in the new dust belt down in Oklahoma. Always, it seemed to Shirley, Vanderheld sought knowledge to better people’s lives. Shirley was proud to tell acquaintances and family that she worked for a man who would go down in history as doing more for the poor and the unrepresented than any politician since Franklin Roosevelt.
Shirley attended the vice president’s FBI briefing on the second day of Columbia ’s hijack. The President would be getting the same briefing, the man said, in Iraq. The latest information was that the attorney general had some Florida lawyer tucked away who claimed to represent the hijackers. The lawyer had said their leader was a man named Jack Medaris. He had also confirmed that Craig “Hopalong” Cassidy had been part of the plot. The third hijacker was a man named Virgil Judd. Not much was known about him. Medaris, however, was well known to the FBI. He had brilliantly headed up the group that fixed the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters after the Challenger disaster. And then he had been involved in a test stand accident that had killed his pregnant wife, an engineer on the team, and put him in the hospital for months. When the government brought charges of dereliction and manslaughter against him, he’d resigned and the charges were dropped. Although apparently he’d had some success with a start-up called MEC in Cedar Key, Florida, he had recently been dealt another blow when a fire had destroyed part of his factory. Arson had been suspected. Although the FBI had not done a psychological profile on Medaris, it was believed that he had snapped, hijacking the shuttle perhaps as an act of revenge against NASA or the government.
The FBI agent said the attorney general had ordered all news of the lawyer and the hijackers to be kept from the press for the time being. Media speculation was rampant, most of it suggesting that homegrown terrorists were responsible. An Internet reporter had come up with the story on the DOT and NASA million-dollar checks but no one could figure that one out. The media was broadcasting the public’s calls for action but it wasn’t clear what could be done.
The vice president thanked the briefing agent, emphasized the report’s confidentiality to his staff, and dismissed them. As the group of technocrats filed out, Vanderheld stopped Shirley. “Wait with me a bit,” he requested, remaining silent until everyone else had gone, the door to his office closing behind them. “Listen, Shirley—do something for me,” he said. “The FBI’s report is pretty shallow. We need more information. Dig into that accident that killed Medaris’s wife.”
Shirley wrote down the note and then just seemed to catch what the vice president was thinking out of the air. “You think this Medaris is dangerous to the country, don’t you, sir?”
Vanderheld slouched in his chair. “Isn’t that clear by his actions?” The old man cocked his head. “We may need to prepare the public for a stronger response.”
“Stronger response, sir?”
Vanderheld held her eyes. “Desperate people do desperate things, Shirley. I don’t know what Medaris has in mind but I guess we’re not going to like it when we find out. We may need to destroy Columbia before this is all done. If we do, we’ll have to justify our actions to the American people. If Medaris is a madman or a terrorist, we need to know that.”
Shirley made the note. “Sir, I’ve looked back at your record and your general opposition to the space program—”
“I’m not opposed to the space program.” The veep smiled, opening his hands in that way he had, as if he were embracing his subject. “I am opposed to government waste. It just happened to fall on my plate to question the huge outlays of cash for dubious programs starting with Apollo and continuing through Aurora.”
&n
bsp; Shirley’s pen was still poised over the pad. She thought it best not to write what the veep had just said, but to carefully probe. A researcher had to know the best approach to her questions, even when interrogating her boss. She needed to know what he really thought. It always helped her research if she did. “Could you tell me why?” she asked.
“It’s all in my Senate speeches,” Vanderheld said, a little irritably. He looked tired, worn-out, she suddenly thought. “Let me just put it in a nutshell for you, Shirley,” he said, sighing. “There are too many starving children who need to be fed, too many endangered species that need protecting, too much hate and mean-spiritness that needs to be stopped, too many wrongs to be righted, for the government’s money to be spent on something that just gives us pretty pictures of planets or makes us feel good about ourselves. The truth is—and I don’t like this any better than anybody else—space is not somewhere we’re ever going to go, nor is it a place where we’re going to get any kind of a dividend, certainly not equal to the investment it takes to do anything up there. It’s just a circus, entertainment for the masses, and that’s not the job of government.”
Shirley was intrigued at how passionate the veep was on the subject. It was one thing to hear a speech read, another to get an extemporaneous response. “Yet there are millions who believe in it,” she said, her statement meant to elicit more information.
Vanderheld waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. “They’ve bought into the science fiction of it. I’ll go along with anything NASA wants to do up there that gives us a return down here. But in all my years in the Senate and the last two years in the Space Council, I’ve seen nothing that warrants spending a dime in space.”
To her discomfiture Shirley found herself disagreeing with her boss, an unusual situation. Still, the veep had given her a quest. She’d do her research for him to the best of her ability, no matter how it might be used. “I’ll start my investigation right away, sir,” she said, and headed for the door.
“Shirley?”
She stopped. “Yes, sir?”
“Bring everything you find to me first. Don’t discuss it with anybody, even in the office.”
“Of course, sir.” Shirley went back to her cubicle, sat down at her computer and stacks of books and memos and articles. Vanderheld had never given her such an admonition before. Surely he knew that she could be trusted. Didn’t he? Her hands, hovering over the computer keyboard, were trembling. She thought she knew what she was looking for. But for the first time since she’d been employed by the veep, she wasn’t exactly sure why.
SAM AND THE ASTRONAUTS
SMC, JSC
Sam brooded over his controllers as they pondered their consoles. They were watching the blinking numbers that defined what was going on aboard Columbia, looking for anything that seemed to be ticking in the wrong direction, varying from nominal. Nominal, Sam thought bitterly. That was one thing this mission could never be.
He had first worked in this same room as a controller for the old Apollo missions and if he wasn’t careful it could flood him with memories. There were a lot of buildings around the center like that, reminders of the time when the country had gone to the moon. Those were exhilarating days and he’d loved working for NASA. But by the time the space shuttles began to fly in 1981, NASA had changed. Sam thought the NASA administrators he had seen come and go had done the best they could, but he also had the nagging feeling that all but one or two of them had betrayed the dream instead of nurturing it. After the demise of Apollo, the wind had just seemed to go out of the dream of space that NASA was supposed to cultivate. Now with the shuttle hijacking, he wondered if the agency would even survive another year.
Sam was watching the shift change when someone tapped him on the shoulder—John Lakey, the chief of the Astronaut Office. He was a nervous character for a flyboy. The way he bobbed his head always reminded Sam of a turkey. Lakey said something and Sam turned to him, incredulous. “Two shuttles in orbit at the same time? I don’t have enough people or instrumentation for that.”
“Orders, Sam.”
Deborah Kimbrough, another astronaut, handed Sam a copy of a letter. “It’s signed by Bonner, authorizing us to prepare for Endeavor’s launch.” She took a step back. “It’s a contingency, Sam. We haven’t gotten the final go.”
Sam read the order, crumpled it, and threw it on the floor. “If you do this, you could put both shuttles in jeopardy.”
Lakey bobbed his head. “That’s one of our own up there, Sam,” he said. “Dr. High Eagle. The Astronaut Office feels we have to think about stepping up to the plate, be ready to take a swing at this thing.”
Sam sneered. “That’s the first time I’ve heard you astronauts claim a payload specialist as your own. Usually you’re busting your ass to keep them and anybody but yourselves off the shuttle.”
Kimbrough put her hands on her hips. “Don’t get in our way, Sam.”
“You’re crazy if you do this,” he said. “You’ll end up killing somebody.”
“As long as it’s one of the hijackers,” Lakey said, “so what?”
“So what? I know that man up there. Jack Medaris was a good man. Maybe, for all I know, he still is—”
“If you don’t want to be Flight on this mission,” Kimbrough said, “you can always quit.”
“That’s right,” Lakey added. “Bonner can and will replace you.” His eyes cut toward Jim Crowder, who’d been watching. Crowder ducked his head, went back to his paperwork.
Sam looked down on his troops. There was some whispering going on between a few of them nearby. They had heard the argument. Morale was already rock bottom at Shuttle Mission Control and this wasn’t going to help it. “Get out of my control room, both of you,” he hissed at the astronauts. “Get out or I’ll throw you out.”
“We’re going, Sam,” Kimbrough said over her shoulder as Lakey meekly followed. “But if the Air Force demo doesn’t work, we’ll be back.”
PREPPING ENDEAVOUR
LSS, Pad 39-A, KSC
Colonel Olivia Grant pushed her way out of the elevator at the level-three platform on the fixed tower of the pad, a retinue of contractors and Kennedy Space Center managers in her wake. She barged into the center of a group of white-suited pad rats and snatched a logbook from one of them. “Tell me what you’re doing,” she barked.
“Closeouts. External tank subsystems,” one of them answered, gulping. “Everything checked and double-checked.”
Grant waved the logbook at the managers. “This is what I mean, people. Stop checking what’s already been checked.” She put the book down with disdain and kept moving, pointing to other workers. The Cape managers stumbled along behind, trying to keep up. “There’s too many people here. If they aren’t doing anything constructive, get them off this pad!” Grant yelled, loud enough so that everybody on the tower could hear her.
She grabbed a Cape manager by the arm and pulled her alongside Endeavour ’s cockpit. Her grip was powerful. “See there?” Grant pointed. “That’s a flight-ready bird.”
The woman peered closer at the tiles beneath the cockpit. They were cracked, chipped, and glued. “To tell you the truth, Colonel, if I were an inspector, I would have trouble passing these tiles.”
Grant laughed. “You’re a paper-pusher. Tiles get dinged all the time. Just glue ’em in place and we go. People like you think these shuttles are fragile birds. Truth is we don’t know how much abuse they can take. I’d fly one as soon as it landed if I had to. Just prop it up, juice the ET, and go.”
Grant caught other pad rats staring at her. She put her hands on her hips and gave them the evil eye. “I want Endeavour prepped so if we get the word, we can start fueling no later than 0500 hours the day after tomorrow!” she bellowed. They scattered.
The tower lead, a woman in a short white lab coat, spoke up. “We’ll need longer than that, Colonel. This bird’s just starting its prep. We can’t—”
Grant turned on her. “I don’t want to hear
excuses. You’re professionals. Figure out what you need to do and then do it!”
Grant kept moving, kicking butt all over the launch tower and taking names. “Penny High Eagle, I’m comin’ after you, babe,” she muttered as pad rats scattered before her.
THE FLIGHT OF THE PEG
OSC L-1011 Tristar Launch Platform (the Cow), Patrick Air Force Base, Florida
Pilot Jim Durrance wound up the Cow’s engines, powered her off the runway with full flaps, and then steered her into a series of rising spirals while copilot Bill Parise kept his eye on the readouts coming from the Peg. Durrance settled back, happy in his work. The Cow was the best aircraft he’d ever flown and he’d flown a lot of them. The Lockheed L-1011 Tristar airliner had been modified by OSC to launch the Pegasus-E. She was a sweet flier, smooth to the touch, exquisite even in the roughest air. Today the winds were negligible, visibility unlimited.
To synchronize with Columbia’s orbit, Durrance and the Cow had been shifted to Patrick Air Force Base in Florida, just south of Kennedy Space Center. Despite her dance with the Indian DODO, Columbia had kept her essential ground track and orbital inclination. If she didn’t maneuver further, it had been calculated that her orbit would carry her over the point of her ground launch at near five A.M., eastern daylight time. The Cow would fly to 38,000 feet, loiter until Columbia came over the horizon, and then launch her rocket.
“Thirty second countdown,” Durrance announced. “At your go, Cape.”
The Cape range safety officer came back immediately. “You’re go for launch, OSC.”
“Copy that.”
“All nominal,” Parise droned. “Gyro set, power go. Nominal, nominal.”
Durrance had a perfect mental image of the checks the Peg was putting herself through, because OSC required that the pilots know the launch vehicle as well as her designers. Fifty feet long, 4.5 feet in diameter, weighing 48,000 pounds without a payload, the bird was a three-stage solid-propellant rocket that could carry three quarters of a ton into low earth orbit. The orbit reached on this mission would be higher than usual but the payload was lighter, so that posed no problem. Guidance was inertial and internalized. Once dropped from the Cow, the rocket would climb into orbit on its own.