Blue Gemini

by Mike Jenne

  “Scott, this isn’t a simulation. This is real,” said Carson. “We don’t have time to play. We have to punch out.” A veteran of two previous ejections, he wasn’t afraid of bailing out. On the other hand, he wasn’t overly thrilled about ejecting into the frigid cold and the prospects of possibly spending a night out in the frozen wilderness.

  “Drew, we can fix this. Really. I’m sure.”

  “Okay. You have thirty seconds, and then we’re heading out into the cold.” Carson looked at the attitude indicator and added, “We’re just shy of seventy degrees angle of bank right now, and eighty is the limit. If we brush close to eighty, I’m calling it. Right now, make sure your oxygen mask is tight. You don’t want to lose it outside, unless you want frostbite.”

  “Checking mask,” said Ourecky quickly. “Okay, Drew, when I tell you, chop the circuit breakers for the landing sequencer. They’re on your side.”

  “I know where the damned landing sequence breakers are, Scott,” snapped Carson.

  “Okay. I’m resetting pyro control breakers one, two and three. Re-set. Now, on your side, set the landing sequence breakers control one and control two to off.”

  “Resetting landing sequence control one and two to off. What’s next?”

  “On my side, resetting paraglider turn-control motor breakers one and two. Now, re-set the PG Reef tele-light. When I tell you, trip the Landing Attitude.”

  “PG Reef is green. Resetting PG Reef tele-light. PG Reef tele-light is now amber.”

  “PG Reef tele-light is amber,” confirmed Ourecky. “Now, trip the Landing Attitude switch.”

  “Landing Attitude tripped. Scott, ten more seconds and we punch out. Nine, Eight, Seven . . .”

  “Try the hand controller,” said Ourecky confidently.

  Carson wrapped his fingers around the hand controller and tugged it to the left. The paraglider immediately responded, and they gradually recovered from the spin. He breathed a sigh of relief, then completed the controllability checks for the paraglider.

  “The turn-control motors were fine,” observed Ourecky. “The problem was that the sequencer energized a redundant relay that cut off the power to the starboard side motor let-up. We just tricked the sequencer into believing the relay was not activated, and that restored the power to the motor. Not a big problem to fix.”

  “And just when did you know this?” asked Carson, gently manipulating the hand controller to align them on the high approach heading for Eielson.

  “It just came to me. I guess I should have figured it out before, but the thought of ejecting into sub-zero temperatures in the dark probably spurred me to come up with it a little faster.”

  Carson laughed. “You’re really quite some piece of work, Scott. Hey, do me a favor. Grab the controller. I need to adjust this shoulder strap. It’s really killing me.”

  Ourecky took the hand controller in his left hand and said, “I have the controls.”

  “You have the controls,” answered Carson, relinquishing the controller and calmly placing his hands in his lap.

  Watching the compass, Ourecky steadily held the unpowered craft on heading as he patiently waited for Carson to resume control. He glanced down and noticed that Carson’s hands were still in his lap. “I thought you had to fix your shoulder restraint,” he said.

  “Oh, it’s much better now,” answered Carson. He reached out and playfully tapped Ourecky on the left shoulder, then put his hands back in his lap. “You saved the ship, so you land it.”

  “I fly the approach?”

  “Yeah. You earned this one. Home, Jeeves.”

  Officers Club, Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska

  8:30 p.m., Thursday, October 17, 1968

  As he entered the club with Carson, Ourecky spotted the other four Blue Gemini pilots—Parch Jackson, Mike Sigler, Tom “Big Head” Howard, and Pete “Squeaky” Riddle—seated at a table in the corner. Rounding out the table was the MOL project liaison officer, Major Ed Russo. With seven people seated at the bar and the two available tables full, the place was as busy as he had ever seen it. Seeing that there were no empty seats at the table with the pilots, he spotted two vacant chairs by the jukebox; he and Carson carried them to the table and sat down.

  “All hail the conquering heroes,” announced Howard, standing up and raising his Olympia bottle. Of the five pilots, he was the tallest, standing an inch shy of six feet. He had broad shoulders, a lantern jaw, and a head that seemed far too big for his body. Besides his massive cranium, his hands were also outsized, so much so that the suit contractor initially claimed that it would be impractical to make gloves suitably large enough to fit him.

  The other pilots—excluding Russo—stood and lifted their drinks as well. Embarrassed, Ourecky grinned sheepishly, waved, and sat down. Looking around the table, he couldn’t help but notice that the two-man crews instinctively sat together, with the command pilot of each pair seated to the left. Carson sat down to Ourecky’s left, although in the awkward shuffle of arranging the extra chairs at the table, Russo managed to insert himself between the two.

  “Your first Oly’s on me, Ourecky. You too, Drew,” said Riddle, Howard’s right-seater, waving to the bartender. As a crew, they were a study in contrast; at five foot five, Riddle was the smallest of the five pilots. He had dark red hair and soft features, almost effeminate. Despite his small stature, he was renowned for his flying skills; with over five years working at Edwards, he was the most experienced test pilot amongst them.

  “Thanks, Squeak, but just one for me. I need to make a short night of it,” said Carson. “Scott and I are zooming back to Wright-Patt early in the morning, and I’m cutting close to my bottle-to-throttle window as it is.”

  “Did you guys listen to the news today?” asked Sigler. “Nixon said that if he’s elected, he wants to have us out of Vietnam by the end of January.”

  “I sure hope not,” said Carson. “I’m still working angles to latch onto some of that action. Of course, that’s if Virgil will cut me loose for a few weeks to log some trigger time.”

  “Never, ever happen,” said Howard. “We’re stuck here for the duration. You might as well accept that, Drew, and quit pining for dreams that will never be.” Of the five pilots, only Howard had flown in Vietnam, but only for eleven missions in 1966, before he abruptly received orders to attend ARPS at Edwards. The fact that Chuck Yeager—formerly the commandant of ARPS—was Howard’s wing commander at the time probably had much to do with the abrupt transition to California.

  “I flew overseas,” gloated Russo. “One hundred and twelve missions. Two MIG kills.”

  Ignoring Russo, Riddle said “I guess we’re pulling out of Vietnam then, because it’s a sure bet that Nixon’s going to win.”

  “Oh, hush with that malarkey. It’s not a sure thing by any means,” said Howard.

  “Well, Big Head, maybe you don’t think so,” replied Riddle, tearing open a bag of potato chips. “But I sure do. George Wallace can’t win, but he’s grabbing up Democrat votes that will skew the election results in Nixon’s favor. So I declare Nixon the winner by a nose.”

  “And what a nose it is,” noted Carson. “Anybody heard anything new on Apollo Seven? Those guys are upstairs right now.”

  “One of my old squadron buddies works in Houston at Mission Control,” confided Russo. “He said that the Apollo guys are sick as dogs right now, just puking their guts up, and that the NASA brass is on their last nerve with Schirra. Wally is apparently dictating to them which experiments he’s willing to do and which ones he’s going to shitcan. He’s being pretty damned obstinate, and Houston’s fed up with it.”

  “He is the commander,” observed Carson. Stroking his moustache, he turned to smile and wink at a full-figured Inuit girl sitting at the bar.

  “But it’s an orbital mission,” countered Russo. “It’s the first flight with a brand new ship, with a full flight plan and a whole battery of experiments.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” noted Howa
rd. “But he’s still the commander. Schirra’s the guy up there in the cockpit. No one should be second-guessing him. If his guys are under the weather and can’t keep pace with an overly ambitious flight plan, then they should make adjustments, and the commander is always the guy who should call the ball. Not Mission Control.”

  “Well, I disagree,” retorted Russo. “Normally, that might be true. Now, if I was up there . . .”

  Listening to the conversation as he sipped his beer, Ourecky felt a tap on his shoulder. He looked behind him to see one of the pilots from the recon squadron assigned to the base. Five other recon guys occupied a table on the opposite end of the club. Not more than five minutes ago, they had been raucously singing along with a sappy country song on the jukebox. Now they were silent, intently watching their counterpart, apparently in anticipation of a scuffle.

  “You’re sitting in a red stripe chair,” growled the recon pilot.

  “Excuse me?” asked Ourecky.

  “I said, you’re sitting in a red stripe chair,” reiterated the recon pilot. He tapped his finger on a two-inch stripe painted in glossy red across the chair’s back. “Those chairs are strictly reserved for recon guys who’ve flown over the line.”

  “Sorry, man,” mumbled Ourecky, beginning to stand up. “My mistake.”

  Howard stood up, gently nudged Ourecky back into the chair, and then turned to confront the belligerent recon pilot. “Well, my friend here hasn’t flown over the line. Since he’s not from around these parts, he obviously doesn’t know anything about your stupid traditions. But let me ask you, chief, since you’re making such an issue of it, have you flown over the line yet?”

  “I haven’t, but that’s not the point . . .”

  Interrupting him, Howard said, “Point? Here’s the point, buddy. The point is that you’re about half a second away from flying over the line yourself. You need to execute a swift about face and move out smartly, just like they taught you at Colorado Springs. And if you or one of your compadres waltzes back over here to dislodge my friend from his chair, red stripe or not, you’re going to be wearing your precious seat for the rest of your days on earth, and it’s going to be very awkward when you go to the latrine to take a crap. Got me? Now, scram.”

  Obviously noticing the other Project pilots glowering at him in a show of unity, the recon pilot abandoned his quest for the chair and slinked back to the far side of the bar.

  Howard extended his hand to Ourecky. “Tom,” he said. “But everyone calls me Big Head.”

  “Scott,” answered Ourecky, smiling to himself. He already knew the first names of the pilots, but also was aware of an unspoken protocol among them, something that transcended the formalities of rank and regulations. An outsider had to earn the privilege to address a member of the inner circle by his first name, and it was a privilege that could only be personally bestowed, much in the same manner that Howard had just granted it to him.

  “Look, Scott, I just wanted you to know that was a righteous save on the paraglider trainer,” said Howard quietly. “As much as I despise flying that damned thing, I would sure hate to think about doing it for real without the opportunity to practice.”

  “Thanks. So you and Major Riddle are supposed to fly it next week?”

  “It’s doubtful,” replied Howard, slowly peeling the label from his beer bottle. “The contractor that built it has a boatload of engineers working on the problem, trying to rig a work-around, but it sounds like we’re looking at a week’s delay at a minimum. I’ll tell you, Scott, it’s damned lucky that you figured it out when you did. That snake could have bit any of us on a live mission, and we would have been immensely screwed.”

  Riddle devoured the last of his chips, crumpled the bag, slurped down the dregs of his beer, belched, and then chimed into the conversation with, “Hey, I was the test lead on that contraption back at Edwards when they were still developing it, even before I got sucked into this project. I’ve logged more time under that batwing that any man alive, and I don’t have the slightest clue about what you did or how you figured it out, but we’re indebted to you. It’s Pete, by the way, but I also answer to Squeaky.”

  “Scott.”

  “So, Scott, how did you break the code?” asked Riddle.

  “Well, Pete, we were trapped in this hard right bank,” described Ourecky, gesturing with his hands like a fighter ace describing a momentous combat engagement. “And I’m flashing back to the simulator, trying to recall what kind of clues I should be seeing or hearing to help me resolve the problem. But I was drawing a blank. I knew that there were two drives for each control line, a take-in drive and a let-out drive.”

  Ourecky continued: “So I assumed the take-in drive had reeled in the control line until it completely stopped, but the let-out drive wasn’t spooling it back out. Of course, the cable could have been snarled or fouled, but when that happens, you should hear a slight grinding noise on that side of the cockpit. So it dawned on me that if the right let-out drive was malfunctioning, I should be hearing something, but I wasn’t hearing anything.”

  “You know,” observed Howard. “I don’t remember that from the Box, either.”

  “It’s a discrepancy in the simulator,” noted Ourecky. “They’ve done a good job with piping in all the simulated sounds from the pyrotechnics and retros and the other noisy stuff, but there’s no noises from the take-in and let-out drives for the paraglider, even though there should be. Since you’re not getting those noises as cues during training, it would be easy to miss in real life, because you’re just not conditioned to hear it. Or hear the lack of it.”

  “Okay,” said Riddle. “Then what?”

  “Well, once I determined that the let-out drive wasn’t running, I decided it must be malfunctioning because it wasn’t drawing power, and then I back-traced the schematics in my head to determine what might have caused the problem. I guessed that the sequencer prematurely chopped the power to the let-out drive, and as it turns out, I was right.”

  “Whew. Very shrewd. I would have never figured out that quirk in a million years,” Riddle said. “I might have given it a few seconds, but I would have punched out long before I started running schematics in my head.”

  “I don’t think so. I think you would have resolved the problem,” said Russo, injecting himself into the conversation. “I think that any of you would have. I know that I surely would have.”

  Riddle laughed. “Russo, that’s mighty high talk from someone who hasn’t even flown the damned thing. All I know is that I have the utmost respect for Drew Carson’s flying abilities, and I’ve never seen him back down from a problem, and even he was primed to punch out of there.”

  “But I was just saying . . .”

  “And I was just saying that you don’t have a damned clue what you’re talking about,” countered Riddle, scowling. He turned toward Ourecky and said, “I don’t know if you’ve caught it, but Carson has gone on and on about you how you saved the ship. That’s quite a feat.”

  “Saving the ship?” asked Ourecky.

  “No. Making a favorable impression on Carson is quite a feat.”

  Remembering the not too distant past, Ourecky kneaded his left shoulder, laughed and said, “Well, Drew’s made quite an impression on me a few times, also.”

  Suddenly, the jukebox’s incessant drone of country music was interrupted by the opening strains of “Bad Moon Rising” by Credence Clearwater Revival. In unison, the recon pilots groaned, and two of them stood up to examine the jukebox. Ourecky couldn’t help but notice Riddle grin and wink at the enlisted bartender, who smiled and winked back.

  “Something going on?” asked Ourecky. “You sure have an evil look on your face, Pete.”

  Tapping his fingers on the table in time with the music, Riddle grinned. “I dropped by this afternoon when the bartender was loading the cooler. I slipped him a sawbuck to look the other way while I made some adjustments to the jukebox. I restacked the records and installed a hidden switch in th
e back so I can turn off all those damned twangy country songs whenever they start to grate on my ears, which usually doesn’t take very long. Now, whenever someone punches in a number for Merle, Buck Owens or Johnny Cash, we’ll be hearing the musical stylings of the Rolling Stones, Three Dog Night, CCR, the Beatles and some others instead. Just my little contribution to the dismal cultural scene up here. I can also switch it back to normal anytime I want.”

  The bartender walked over and announced, “Hey gents, the cook just came in and he’s about to throw your burgers on the grill. How do you want them?”

  “Rare,” replied Jackson. “The redder the better. Want a burger, Drew? Scott? It’s on me.”

  “Medium,” declared Ourecky. “Extra onions cooked on top, if he can.”

  “I’ll pass,” said Carson. “I ate chili con carne in the chow hall earlier. It might be a week before my stomach’s back to normal. Besides, I’m watching my figure.”

  “As are we,” quipped Riddle. “Two for me, both medium rare, smothered in onions, with cheese on top.”

  “Do you have a menu?” asked Russo, looking over his shoulder at the bartender. “Do you have anything else besides hamburgers?

  “Nope. Just burgers,” said Sigler. “Well done for me. Cook it good.”

  “Same for me. Well done,” added Howard. “Charred black.”

  “Hey, stick buddy,” said Carson a few minutes later, standing up as he nudged Ourecky’s shoulder. “Let’s slip into the corner over there where it’s a little quieter. We need to review a few things before we zoom back to Ohio in the morning.”

  “Sure,” replied Ourecky, pushing up out of his chair and following Carson to the corner. “But didn’t we cover the flight plan in detail this afternoon? Haven’t you already filed it?” He paused, smiled, and added, “Oh, you’re tacking on an extra stop, right? Stopping en route to see another one of your hot chicks? Got a dogfight lined up somewhere? Maybe both?”