by Mike Jenne
“Yup. We overnighted in South Dakota, at Ellsworth. The networks didn’t make the final call until this morning, though, after I stayed up all danged night watchin’ the returns. So Dick Nixon’s in? Shucks, maybe there’s a glimmer of hope for us after all.”
“A Nixon win is definitely excellent news for us,” confirmed Tew, sitting down. “Glad you’re back, Virgil. Have you thawed out yet?”
Wolcott placed his Stetson atop his desk, sat down, and leaned back in his chair. “Barely. Pardner, I’ve been cold, but I ain’t never been that cold.”
“Well, I’m just glad you’re back in one piece. And you managed to qualify the other two crews on the paraglider?”
“Yup. So now we have a grand total of two and a half flight crews.” Wolcott sorted a stack of mail from his overflowing inbox. “If this kid Russo works out, we’ll fold him into the mix and we’ll be back to fielding three full crews. It ain’t optimal, but it’s certainly better than nothing.”
“Virgil, I want to talk to you about Ourecky,” said Tew abruptly.
“Ourecky? Yeah, Mark, we do need to talk about him. If he hadn’t figured out that glitch on the paraglider, we probably would have lost the drop trainer. And that ain’t all. The contractor figured out that the same post-retro sequencing error could have shown up on the flight hardware as well. So, I might have had my doubts about Ourecky after the survival field trip fiasco, but he sure saved our bacon.”
Tew nodded in agreement.
“And pardner, that’s why I want to shift him into Mission Control after January.” Wolcott puffed on his oversized cigar. “I s’pose you’re going to tell me that you’ve come to the same conclusion, right? After all, great minds do think alike, don’t they, pardner?”
Frowning, Tew shook his head. “No, Virgil, that’s not what I have in mind for Ourecky. For the past week, I’ve been making arrangements for him to start work on his doctorate next fall. In the meantime, he’ll go out to El Segundo to work on the MOL.”
“That’s good, pard, but there’s still a mess of work yet to be done here, and I would like to hang onto Ourecky for a tad bit longer—”
Tew interrupted him. “No. Come January, he will have served his purpose here, and we need to fulfill our commitments to him.” Tew closed his eyes and then said, “Virgil, have you ever given much thought to the people we’ve killed and the lives that we’ve destroyed?”
Tapping his cigar on the edge of his ashtray, Wolcott whistled. “Yeah, Mark, betwixt us, we’ve killed a heap of folks, but do you think any of them would have hesitated an instant if they had gotten the whip hand on us? That’s the nature of war, pardner.”
Tew shook his head. “No, Virgil, I’m not talking about the Germans or North Koreans or Chinese or all the innocent people that just happened to be under the bombs we dropped. I mean the guys that we’ve killed or the lives we’ve destroyed because we made bad decisions or we just weren’t paying attention when we should have.”
“Shucks, so now you’ve gone and grown a dadblamed conscience, pardner? Granted, we’ve tromped on some backs along the way, but just how does that pertain to this situation? We ain’t harmed Ourecky, and I’m sure that we’ll take very good care of him when it’s time for him to hit the trail, but in the meantime—”
“As I’ve said, Virgil, we’ve squeezed everything we can squeeze out of that young man, and I’m not going to permit you to wring one drop more. He’s yours between now and the end of January, and then we make good on our promises to him.”
“We didn’t make any promises to him, pardner.”
“You didn’t make him any promises, but I did, and I expect you to honor my wishes.”
“As you wish, pard. As you wish.”
26
INTERLOPER
Parking Lot 20, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio
3:25 p.m., Tuesday, December 10, 1968
Shivering from the cold, Eric Yost crouched in the back of his Chevrolet panel van, balancing on a metal milk crate while peering through a small hole. Recently, he’d configured the van for extended sessions of clandestine surveillance. He had obscured the back windows with black spray paint and scratched out several peepholes, each roughly an inch in diameter, that were virtually impossible to detect from outside the van.
Beside him, a second milk crate was jammed with essential supplies: cans of chili and beef stew, batteries, film, bread, peanut butter, two cartons of Lucky Strikes, a flashlight, and a set of Army surplus binoculars. It also contained his collection of espionage novels; an avid fan of the genre, he intently studied the works of Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, and John le Carré.
Covered with clutter—food wrappers, dog-eared Playboy magazines, and empty liquor bottles—a moth-eaten Army blanket spread over the bare metal floor of the van. A rancid stench reminded him that he was long overdue in emptying the dented milk can that he had stolen from a dairy and pressed into service as an improvised urinal.
He took a slug from a half-empty fifth of Old Crow, belched, and then mentally assayed his current circumstances. After six years of marriage, Gretchen had recently returned to her native Germany, with their children in tow, but not before bluntly informing him that she wouldn’t be coming back to the States, and he had nothing to gain by following or otherwise contacting her.
He was finding it progressively more difficult to conceal his drinking. His immediate supervisor, Master Sergeant Kroll, was content to overlook it, but he warned Yost that he couldn’t cover for him indefinitely. If their lieutenant ever found out, Yost could kiss his retirement goodbye. At this point, though, even the prospect of losing his monthly stipend was the least of his worries. Just over a year ago, Yost’s poker habit had escalated to the point where he owed nearly ten thousand dollars in gambling debts.
To make matters worse, he had recently crawled to a loan shark to cover the debt, so now he was over twelve thousand dollars in the hole and in legitimate fear for his life. Fortunately, his current existence—spending his daylight hours in the back of this rusted-out van and his nights piloting his yellow Hyster forklift—kept him on the protective confines of the base for most of the day, where the loan shark’s muscle-bound lackeys were loath to venture.
Concerned about the potential of frostbite, he massaged the tip of his nose. His head ached and his back hurt, and he regretted not buying another fifth of liquor. Dusk roughly coincided with the end of the duty day at Wright-Patt, when it would be safe for him to leave the parking lot and blend into the swell of traffic departing the base. He would cruise home to his ramshackle house, sneak in through the back door, take a shower, change into a clean uniform, grab a quick bite if the amphetamines hadn’t completely erased his hunger, and then head back onto the base in time to report for his shift at the warehouse.
Startled by the sound of two fighters zooming off the adjacent runway, Yost ducked down momentarily, afraid that he had been detected. Assuring himself that he was safe, he sat upright and exhaled. He examined his face in the rear-view mirror. Startled, he didn’t recognize his own reflection; he looked at least a decade older than his thirty-six years. He had lost a considerable amount of weight since he had started gobbling speed, and now his ashen skin was drawn tightly over his cheekbones. His left eye was still purple from last week’s encounter with the loan shark’s enforcers, and his sparse hair was rapidly turning gray.
He turned away from the sad visage in the mirror and gazed through one of the peepholes. A flicker of motion caught his eye; he observed a blue station wagon pull away from a brick building to the west of the parking lot. He had witnessed this event several times, so he knew exactly where the car was bound. Reaching down to pick up his Kodak Instamatic camera, he studied the front of a snow-covered hangar at the opposite side of the parking lot.
Billowing a dense plume of steamy exhaust, the station wagon pulled up to the hangar, where it was met by two security policemen bearing submachine guns. Two men in white coveralls climbed out, went to
the rear of the vehicle, carefully unloaded a blue box resembling a casket, and carried it into the hangar. Yost snapped pictures with his Instamatic as the men unloaded a second box, identical to the first. He scrawled down the time in his pocket notebook.
As he considered the potential contents of the boxes, he turned up the volume of the transistor radio jammed into his shirt pocket and listened to Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Suzie Q” playing through the earphone.
Over the past few weeks, Yost had made quiet inquiries about the site but had yet to locate anyone who had any inkling of what occurred behind the walls of the bland-looking building or within the old hangar. Even though it was clearly apparent that a hundred or more people worked at the offices of the Aerospace Support Project, the official base phonebook listed just one phone number for the entire facility.
In any event, he strongly suspected that someone out there would be more than willing to shell out good money for the fruits of his sleuthing. And Yost was confident that the money would be more than sufficient to buy his way out of his current jam.
Simulator Facility, Aerospace Support Project
2:50 a.m., Thursday, December 12, 1968
Yawning, Carson rubbed the beard stubble on his chin as he scanned the instrument panel for aberrations. The scan took him almost two seconds longer than normal, since his eyes were bloodshot and sore, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to focus. He looked to his right to check on Ourecky. They were wearing full suits for this scenario run, and Ourecky was experiencing chronic problems with his. “You okay, Scott?” he asked. “How are you coping?”
“My back is killing me, but that’s nothing new,” answered Ourecky groggily, stowing a flashlight. “My right leg is overheating, though. I think there’s a kink in the suit coolant line. I have a cold spot on the back of my upper right thigh, and everything below there is burning up.”
“Ouch.” Carson glanced up at the mission clock. The clock read GET 32:50:54; they were nearly thirty-three hours into a thirty-eight hour mission profile. He checked his watch: it was almost three o’clock in the morning, and they had been lying on their backs in the Box since early Tuesday evening, except for their fifteen-minute breaks at six-hour intervals. “Can you stick it out until the next break, or do I need to request a time-out?”
“I think I can make it. It’s really aggravating, though. You want some coffee?”
“Pass.” Wiping a film of sweat from his brow, Carson sniffed the air. Stale and humid, the cabin smelled of warm electrical wires and several weeks’ accumulation of steeped-in body odor. He watched as Ourecky yanked a plastic bag out of his right thigh pocket. The bag was partially filled with instant coffee. Ourecky stuck an ungloved finger in his mouth to moisten it, dipped the digit into the bag, and then stuck a damp clump of brown granules into his mouth. He chased the dry coffee with a squirt from the water nozzle.
“CAPCOM, this is Scepter One,” said Carson. “I have an admin request.”
“This is CAPCOM, go ahead.” Carson frowned. It was Russo’s voice, so abrasive that it grated like coarse sandpaper in his ears. Russo apparently had just come on shift and would likely cover the Capsule Communicator desk for the remainder of the simulation.
“It’s getting a mite stale in here. Can you push up the air conditioner a notch, please?”
“Will do,” replied Russo. “I’ll expedite. Anything else?”
“Yeah. Be aware that my counterpart has a twisted coolant line in his suit. He plans to tough it out until the next scheduled break, but the techs will need to tend to it then.”
“Good copy,” answered Russo. “I’ll let them know.”
With the comms window completed, Ourecky closed his eyes for a moment, reviewing some of the information sent up from the simulated ARIA tracking aircraft. Carson noticed that he didn’t immediately punch in the read-up data into the onboard computer, as he characteristically did, but instead rummaged in the storage pocket to his right. Ourecky extracted his slide rule and used it to verify the read-up data.
“Uh, Drew, we have a problem here,” stated Ourecky quietly, continuing to deftly manipulate the slide rule. “Would you mind disabling the VOX, just in case?”
Carson toggled the Voice Control switches so that they could have a private conversation that couldn’t be overheard outside the Box. “What’s the problem, Scott?” he asked. He unwrapped his last stick of gum, sniffed it, and then stuck it in his mouth.
“They just read up the solution for the next maneuver. I have a different solution.”
Carson’s throat was parched, but the gum wasn’t helping. As he squirted tepid water into his mouth, he thought about the maneuver; it entailed a relatively long burn of their four 100-pound aft thrusters to alter their orbit. The burn’s attributes—to include its initiation, duration and several variables describing the spacecraft’s orientation—were expressed as a series of numbers that would be manually fed into the onboard computer. The computer would largely control the burn and then provide feedback to indicate if the maneuver was successful or not.
“Drew, did you hear me say that I have a different solution for the burn?” asked Ourecky.
“I did. How much different?”
With no notes, relying entirely on memory, Ourecky articulated the ground’s solution for the maneuver, then his own, and then pointed out the conflicting aspects of the two.
“Yeah, those are different,” declared Carson. Drowsy, he whistled through dry lips. “Do you think it will really make that much difference which solution we fly? After all, we should still have some wiggle room to make some corrections later on, if need be.”
“I don’t think so,” observed Ourecky. “The tolerances are so tight that we may not be able to recover if we fly the wrong solution. If we choose wrong, we might not make the intercept.”
“Two paths diverged in a wood . . .” mused Carson, mulling the problem in his head. The simulated intercept “target” was actually an abstract series of calculations being run on a mainframe computer.
The ground controllers’ maneuver solution was also generated by a computer. Surely it had to be more accurate than Ourecky’s solution, given that the engineer had slept perhaps forty minutes in the past thirty hours. Beyond being sleep-deprived, Ourecky persisted with his annoying quirk of not writing anything down. As much as Carson had learned to trust him, this call was an easy one to make. “Look, Scott, this sounds like a no-brainer to me. We’ll go with the ground’s solution. Go ahead and punch it in.”
“Drew, I think that would be a huge mistake,” asserted Ourecky. “I’ve reworked this problem four times. I can’t guarantee that my fix is perfect, but I think it’s a lot closer than theirs.”
“But they’re running these equations on a computer outside, Scott,” observed Carson. “You’re working them in your head. That’s a huge difference, in my book.”
“Point taken, Drew,” ceded Ourecky, arching his back to stretch. “But we’re talking about two computers out there on the floor, not one.
“And what difference would that make?”
“Well, the target lives on one of the big mainframes, but their maneuver solution is generated by a computer not much more powerful than the Block One in here. It replicates the hardware they’re going to fly on the ARIA tracking aircraft.”
Ourecky yawned and continued. “That computer’s doing the same thing that we’re doing manually. It’s making calculations based on where it thinks we are and then correlating that fix to where it thinks the target is. Usually, they’re dead-on, but I just think our solution is more accurate this time. I can’t explain why. My guess is that there are still some bugs in their computer program. Drew, computer programs aren’t infallible.”
Carson looked at the clock. Time was running out; he had to make a decision. He remembered the night in Alaska, when Ourecky saved the paraglider trainer—and possibly their lives in the process—and cemented his choice. “Punch in your solution, Scott.”
Minutes later, Russo’s voice rang out over the intercom: “Drew, this is Ed. I want you to switch your comms to Loop Four. I need to have a private conversation with you, and the guidance desk wants to review the maneuver calculations with Ourecky.”
This was odd, thought Carson, yawning widely. What could Russo possibly want to discuss in private? “Switching to Loop Four,” he stated, throwing the switches that would permit him and Ourecky to have independent conversations with the controllers outside on the floor.
“Do you hear me in there, Drew?” asked Russo. “Hey, babe, I hate to step out of role, but we need to keep this train centered on the track.”
“What’s the problem?” asked Carson curtly. He looked to his right; Ourecky was reworking the problem with his slide rule as he reviewed the various steps with the technicians outside.
“Our feedback display from your onboard computer shows that Ourecky didn’t enter the maneuver solution we read up to him. Were you watching him when he keyed it in?”
Carson was becoming increasingly more aggravated. This conversation was detracting from the simulation. According to their current “orbit,” they were several minutes away from the nearest communications window, so they really shouldn’t be talking with anyone, even on an informal basis, and Russo should know that. Worse, this annoying chatter was eating up precious time, since they were less than five minutes away from executing the simulated maneuver burn, which he still had to prepare for. That would be difficult on any day, but at this point he was bone-tired. “Yes, I am very aware of what he entered, Russo. He had a different solution than what you read up. We discussed it in here, and we elected to fly his fix.”
“Look, Drew, I’m just trying to make all of this a little less painful for everyone. I’m urging you to dump Ourecky’s erroneous solution out of the machine and have him input our solution. I’m asking you this as a favor, Drew. Please.”
“And why would I do that, Ed?”