Am I imagining her long hair?
Jack reached down and felt it, running his fingers through it.
Nope, that’s real.
The hair was real, the chocolate freckle was real, the letter from the Navy was very real, and so was everything else he had seen since waking up alone in that field. His SEAL training, ingrained in his DNA, told him to trust his instincts, his senses, especially that sixth sense that had kept him alive for longer than he probably deserved. That inner voice had gotten him through extremely rough and gory times in the Middle East and South America, especially during his last mission, keeping him frosty, thinking, always one step ahead of that ruthless Colombian posse shouting at him across the jungle how he would be fed his own genitals and eyeballs when captured. But the voice had kept him going, kept him ignoring the threats, kept him anticipating, striking, and evading, even after he’d long run out of ammunition, until he reached his extraction point with nothing but his SOG knife, its partially-serrated steel blade stained with Colombian blood.
Jack felt the handle of the same weapon that had saved his butt in that nightmarish mission, gripping it, curling his hand tight around the deep finger grooves until his knuckles turned white. And that same voice shouted at him now from the deepest corner of his mind, noisier than the loudest gunfire, that this world, as he saw it and felt it, was very, very real.
So the next question that suddenly flashed in his mind was—
“Jack?”
He let go of the handle and turned toward her, not knowing what to say.
“Oh, my God!” she screamed, sitting up, throwing her arms around him, hugging him tight, burying her face in his chest like she used to do long ago. “Oh, Jack! Oh, my God! You’re alive!”
Emotions boiled inside of him as he returned the embrace, kissing the top of her head, smelling her hair, reawakening feelings long dormant in their relationship.
She pulled away, gazing at him with wet hazel eyes, taking him in, lips quivering as she mumbled, “It … it is you.”
Angela clung to him again, and all Jack could do was hug her back, his mind in turmoil.
“I … I always wondered … hoped, even prayed,” she said, face still pressed against his chest, before looking at him again. “But the mission … in Afghanistan … they had eyes on you … Pete was there … but they never recovered your body … I … oh, Jack.”
“Angie, look, I need to tell you—”
“I imagined this,” she said, hugging him hard again. “I dreamed about this moment. Prayed that you managed to survive … somehow.”
Jack pressed his lips together, searching for the right words. Unlike Angela, he’d had some time alone to start processing this, to digest the clues and slowly get past denial and into reluctant acceptance of this unbelievable reality, though he still had no explanation. Angela, on the other hand, had been hit cold and hard across the face by his sudden appearance, coming back from the dead. Yet, he had to tell her that things were not quite as they seemed. And the sooner the better.
Gently, he pushed her away and held her at arms’ length, fighting hard to stay focused as his eyes drifted to that chocolate freckle. She put a hand on his face, fingers running over his lips, his chin.
She was obviously still very much in love with him, while the Angela he had left at the suit-up room had probably been one fight away from filing for a divorce. Still, he needed to come clean with her and perhaps they could figure this out, together.
“Listen, Angie,” he finally said, mustering enough strength, deciding there was no easy way to say this. “I’m not sure what’s going on … and although I can’t explain it, I may not be the same man you married.”
Surprise gave way to confusion as she dropped her eyebrows at him.
Jack continued. “I was in a—”
“Honey,” she interrupted, a hand on his cheek. “I don’t care what happened out there … what those motherfuckers did to you. I just care that you made it back to me.”
“No,” he replied, hands on her shoulders. “It’s not that … look, I need you to listen to what I’m saying. And I need you to trust me. Okay?”
She swallowed, slowly regaining her composure before giving him a slight nod.
“Yesterday morning I left you in the suit-up room at the Cape and climbed aboard a capsule on top of an Atlas Five rocket that injected me into a suborbital flight for the purpose of testing an Orbital Space Suit.” He pointed an index finger at his chest. “A suit that you designed.” Angela stared at his battle dress before narrowing her gaze and running her fingers over its smooth surface.
“Carbon fiber laced with Nomex and Kevlar,” she mumbled.
He smiled. “It’s your design, Angie. This is the combat battle dress. The outer layer that got me through reentry’s over there.” He pointed at the silvery shape in the foyer.
She looked over to it and back to him. “Jack, I stopped working on it after … after you died … five years ago. How is it possible that you—”
He gently pressed a finger over her lips.
“I have no way to explain that,” he said. “All I know is that yesterday morning I climbed into a capsule, got shot sixty miles up into the sky, jumped, and after a very, very weird ride, I ended up pretty much where I think I was supposed to touch down, in a grassy field northeast of Orlando. But there was no one there to greet me, and believe me when I tell you, the whole world was watching this jump. NASA had cameras mounted on the capsule, which followed a parallel reentry to capture me heading down. And after it burned up, high altitude balloons picked me up. The FFA had issued a TFR over the area. The Air Force had helicopters and jets all over the place scaring off seagulls and waiting for a visual on my parachute. Even the Boy Scouts of America were tracking me. And yet, I woke up all alone a couple of hours ago.”
Angela closed her eyes, a finger stabbing the middle of her crinkled forehead. “That’s … the strangest story I’ve ever heard.”
He gave her a half smile and said, “And that’s not even the strangest part.”
“You mean weirder than showing up here after five years?”
Jack tilted his head. “When I left the launchpad less than twenty-four hours ago, tropical storm Claudette was about to make landfall and rip through central Florida. That’s why NASA pulled in the launch schedule by twenty-four hours. But the skies are clear out there.”
“There are no storms in the forecast, Jack,” she replied, twisting her lips and putting a hand to his forehead.
He gently took her hand in his while looking into her eyes. “I’m not feverish. I’m not sick. I’m not delusional. Yesterday morning you had short auburn hair and slept in an oversized MIT T-shirt. Yesterday morning I got into this suit and jumped from a capsule as high as Alan Shepard’s flight and landed two hours away from here. I’m not making this up.”
She stared at his suit, then back at the foyer, before asking, “All right, Jack. What else is different?”
He tilted his head and said, “You’ve transitioned to the metric system.”
“Yep. Back in the seventies. Ancient history.”
“In my world, Jimmy Carter couldn’t get America to transition. We’re still using miles, gallons, and pounds.”
“What else?” she asked, the look on her face matching his altered state of mind. But in some way he felt a bit relieved to be sharing it with her.
“Well, there’s Cuba,” he said.
She took his hands and placed them on her lap as she sat cross-legged in front of him. “That’s where we went on our honeymoon.”
Damn, she’s gorgeous, Jack thought, having forgotten just how wonderful Angela could make him feel.
She added, “Did we also…”
“Um, no. We went mountain climbing in Yosemite National Park. Cuba fell to Fidel Castro in 1959 and has been a communist state ever since.”
“Really?” she said. “Now that’s screwed up. Castro did win the revolution, but he was ousted from power during t
he Bay of Pigs invasion a couple of years later, and it became a U.S. territory, like Puerto Rico and Guam.”
Jack shook his head. “That mission failed. JFK didn’t provide the invading troops with air support. Poor bastards got stranded on the beach and couldn’t drive inland.”
She made a face. “You’re talking about John F. Kennedy?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Oh, well, here Kennedy did win the election in November of 1960 but was assassinated before he could take office. LBJ became president, and he overwhelmed Castro and his communist regime during that invasion. The place’s been a paradise since, Jack. It’s got some of the world’s most beautiful beaches, great music, shows, gambling, boating, rain forest retreats. You name it, they got it there.”
“Well, in my world, your dad escaped from that hellhole in a rowboat when he was seventeen and made it to Miami, where he built a life for himself,” he said, spending a few minutes telling her about her upbringing, her father’s death, her hacking years as well as those with the FBI before heading to college and eventually NASA, where they’d met.
“Well, everything except for Dad escaping from Cuba matches. He started a motorcycle shop in South Miami and he died from lung cancer. After hacking and the FBI, I also went to FIT and MIT and worked at NASA, where we met and married,” she said, still holding his hands in hers. “I was in the midst of developing the OSS, as well as finalizing the weapons systems when Pete was pressured by General Hastings to perform an actual field test of the combat gear.”
Jack made a face.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing. Just hoping that Hastings didn’t exist here.”
“He does, and he put the screws on Pete to test the gear in a real scenario. Up to that point you had run a bunch of combat drills following HALO jumps at the Cape as well as in the Arizona desert and the jungles of Cuba. But it was time for the real thing, and you … you kept insisting that you needed to run the first field test yourself. So you and Pete headed for Afghanistan. But only Pete came back.”
“What happened?”
She shrugged, glanced over at the mantelpiece, and said, “You know the Pentagon. They gave me the bullshit line that you’d died in a training mission, never mind that you were my husband and were wearing the combat suit that I designed.” She paused, then added, “But Pete told me later. You performed a HALO insertion over the mountains northeast of Kabul to join your old buddies in SEAL Team 3 in an operation underway. Pete was accompanying them as the official NASA observer. Apparently the winds shifted and you ended up on the wrong side of a ridge and came under heavy fire. The battle dress protected you for a while, but the Taliban overran your position before the SEALs could get to you.”
She dropped her gaze while lifting his hands and pressing them against her chest.
“I … damn, I was devastated, Jack. I felt I’d let you down. I should have designed the suit better … stronger.”
“Angie,” he said. “That wasn’t your fault. That’s the nature of military operations.”
She nodded slightly, then said, “Well, in any case, I couldn’t work at NASA anymore. Everything about that project reminded me of you. So I retired and eventually took a teaching job at FIT.”
Jack had no idea what to say. How could this be really happening?
“But you came back,” she said, staring at him just like she used to during the early years of their marriage. “You came back … to me.”
She embraced him again while rubbing her face against his chest. The emotions twisting inside of him nearly made him wince in pain. A part of him wanted to take her right here, on this damn sofa where he had been relegated to spend the last two years sleeping alone. But his inner voice told him that doing so would be cheating on his Angela.
How can I cheat on Angie with Angie?
He just hugged her back, and they remained like that for a few moments, in silence.
“Jack,” she finally said, pushing away, her eyes drying up as the scientist suddenly emerged. “Tell me everything that happened after you jumped.”
He looked over to the foyer. “It was a suborbital jump, from sixty-one miles high. Pete was CapCom. The goal was to test the integrity of the suit during reentry, in particular the ablation layers on the outer shell. Up to that point we had performed several HALO jumps to test most of the suit’s systems, but the highest had been from twenty-seven miles, so not much reentry heating to deal with.”
“Big difference going from twenty-seven miles to sixty-one,” she observed.
“Yep,” he said, getting up and retrieving the packed-up suit, before sitting back next to her while pulling out the upper and lower sections of the outer shell from inside the long helmet. “You designed it to be worn like a backpack after landing.”
“Interesting.” Angela retrieved the upper shell, leaning forward while inspecting the collapsible titanium ring around the neck that served as the base for the helmet. “Keep talking, Jack,” she said. “I’m just looking.”
He sighed. That was one of the things that annoyed him most about his wife. She could hold a perfect conversation while doing something else, and without making eye contact.
Clearing his throat, he continued. “There were a series of descent profile options, which you designed to compensate for the winds aloft. The idea was that a jumper would first check the winds in the projected pipe and select the right profile to reach a specific landing zone with an accuracy of ten feet.”
“I remember that. The Alpha adjustments,” she said, running her hands on the inside of the suit and extracting various modules almost with practiced ease, which she brought up to her eyes while squinting before snapping them back into their respective slots. “It’s all modular, for easy assembly and field maintenance. Interesting.”
“For this jump, you’d selected Alpha-G, though there was some controversy with Hastings about changing the profile to Alpha-B.”
She looked up. “Come again?”
“General Hastings. He showed up at the Cape the night before the jump accompanied by a military detail as well as a couple of his own scientists from Los Alamos and—”
“What do you mean his own scientists?”
“Yeah. Like I said. There was some heated words exchanged, and you actually went ballistic when you caught his two gurus with their little snouts deep in the electronic guts of this suit.”
“Good,” she said. “They had no business being there. But about the Alpha adjustments—I had it programmed for Alpha-G and Hastings wanted Alpha-B?”
“Yep. That was the main issue.”
She looked into the distance and said, “If I remember correctly, and I’m pretty damn sure I do, the adjustments went from A to K, and they just had to do with the angle of insertion when hitting the atmosphere, with Alpha-K offering the most gentle ride and Alpha-A the roughest—but all still well within the design limitations of the suit. I’m sure that for the first suborbital jump, I would have selected something on the more gentle side, and then let the computers determine where you would have landed, and use those calculated coordinates as the landing site. You know, crawl, walk, run. So, what was Hastings’s reasoning for the change?”
“You’re going to have to ask him that. In the end—and I’m not sure how you pulled it off—the system instructed that I used Alpha-G, which I accepted at around mile forty-six.”
“Oh,” she said, the hacker in her grinning. “So, what happened next?”
“I became supersonic pretty quickly, peaking at around Mach three point two, and that’s when things began to heat up—literally.”
“Energy exchange,” she said.
“Right,” Jack said. “There was also this purple glow. I think it began back at around mile fifty-three, right after I went supersonic.”
“A purple glow?”
“Yeah, shaped like a halo all around me. I asked the guys on the ground but no one could see that in the cameras from the descending pod, which was
programmed to adopt a parallel path to my pipe until it burned up.”
“I have no idea what that could have been,” she said, before biting her lower lip, something she always did while thinking or worrying.
Unfortunately, that had a way of triggering something completely different in Jack. Now that action was compounded by that damn chocolate freckle shifting over her lip.
But he quickly pushed those thoughts away as he said, “Neither do I, but the halo never went away. It actually intensified as I dropped, almost washing out the stars. The fall got nasty at around mile forty-two, when the G-forces shot above nine and I couldn’t talk anymore.”
“Could you blink?” she asked, pulling up the helmet now and looking at the miniature projectors of the faceplate display.
He nodded. “I blinked my ass off for the duration of the drop, at least while still communicating with Mission Control.”
Angela pointed at the small rear-facing antenna on the back of the elongated helmet. “You lost comm? What happened to the TDRSS link? I designed it to keep tabs on you all the way down, even through the ionization phase.”
“That’s the problem. TDRSS worked just fine. But things began to get really bizarre at mile thirty, when we switched to feet to report altitude. The violet haze became almost blinding, swallowing even the incandescence of the reentry heat. When I reached one hundred and thirty thousand feet, I jettisoned the second set of ablation shields because they were already down to ten percent. That’s when I entered a tumble.”
“A tumble?”
He nodded.
“But you were still supersonic and heavily depending on that third set of shields to protect you. The OSS would have burned up in an instant,” she said, holding the lower section of the suit. “This is flexible insulation blanket material, Jack, and just a quarter inch of it. Not good for any prolonged exposure to direct reentry heat.”
“I know, I know,” he said. “That’s what’s so strange. The Earth and the stars were swapping places, over and over, while outside temp was well beyond the rating of anything but my last remaining set of ablation shields on my shoulder pads and helmet. But the suit was never breached, and then the most bizarre thing happened when I reached one hundred and twenty thousand feet.”
The Fall Page 10