by Mike Jenne
“Scott, there’s no sense hitting the road with an empty stomach,” said Mama Ourecky. “Why don’t you sit down for some sausage and scrambled eggs? I can whip them up in a jiffy. I’ll also fix you some sandwiches for lunch. Spam? Peanut butter and jelly?”
“No, Mama. We really have to be going. We’ll take the Plymouth, if that’s all right. Bea can drive it back and stay a few days.”
“Okay,” replied Papa Ourecky. He pulled a ring of keys from a hook beside the kitchen door and tossed them to Ourecky. “You’ll need to fill it up, though. It only has a quarter tank.”
Mama Ourecky stood next to Bea and said, “I’ll fix a basket while Scott packs his things.”
“There’s no time for me to pack,” insisted Ourecky, scooping up Andy and stepping towards the door. “We have to leave now.”
“What’s this all about?” asked Bea, obviously trying to remain at least slightly composed in front of his family.
“Don’t know,” he replied, opening his wallet to check for cash.
“Don’t know or can’t say?” she asked quietly.
He jammed his wallet back in his pocket and curtly answered, “I don’t know, Bea.” He hugged his parents and said, “Bye, Mama. Bye, Papa. I love you. I’ll come back as soon as I can.”
Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska
10:18 a.m.
Although they drove with the windows rolled down, the atmosphere in the Plymouth was chilly enough that they could have been cruising through the frozen wastelands of Antarctica rather than swishing past sunbaked Nebraska cornfields in late summer. They hadn’t exchanged more than a dozen words since leaving his parents’ house. With Andy nestled sleeping in her lap, Bea gritted her teeth and fumed silently as she watched the scenery—a virtually unchanging tableau of pastures, croplands, farm houses, barns and silos—flash by outside.
Although she knew that it was out of his control, she was furious with him for this whirlwind change of plans. Things just never seemed to change. Every time there was a glimmer of normalcy, a faint hope for a stable existence, it was snatched away as quickly as it appeared.
Since she didn’t know how long they would be separated this time, she resolved herself to calm down before they said their goodbyes. Closing her eyes, she realized that what she felt was really more frustration than anger.
She was frustrated with him, but she was also frustrated with the Air Force—particularly Virgil Wolcott and Mark Tew—for not making good on their many promises. And she didn’t look forward to returning to Wilber this afternoon. As much as she adored his parents and enjoyed spending time with them, she knew that they would have more questions than she had answers. For some reason, they believed that he was somehow more forthcoming with her, that she had been endowed with a secret key that unlocked the mystery that was his life and livelihood.
She also felt guilty for leaving her friend Jill behind in Dayton. Jill was sick and definitely not getting any better. Her mother was there, but she was emotionally ill-equipped to care for a daughter who was slowly fading away, much less a granddaughter barely out of diapers.
They pulled in at Offutt, pausing next to a billboard that advertised “Headquarters—Strategic Air Command, Peace is Our Profession.” The security police had obviously been notified to expect them; after a cursory check at the gate, an SP patrol vehicle escorted them to the Flight Operations building, where a vacant parking space awaited the Plymouth’s arrival.
The engine sputtered to a stop. Bea stepped out of the car and glimpsed Drew Carson standing next to a gleaming white T-38 Talon. She had to admit that he struck a dashing figure; in full flight gear, confident and handsome, he looked like a gallant knight preparing to ride into battle on his trusty steed.
“Bea!” exclaimed Carson, strolling towards them and extending his arms. “I sure wasn’t expecting you!”
“Well, Drew, we were on vacation,” she replied, reluctantly accepting his hug. “So I sure wasn’t expecting to drop everything, jump in my in-laws’ station wagon, and then ride for two hours while my husband drove like a banshee to catch a jet plane to who knows where.”
“What’s this about?” asked Ourecky anxiously. “Mark Tew gave us an extra month. Why would they call me back so early?”
“I have no earthly idea,” replied Carson. “Honestly. Virgil just told me to zip you back to Ohio immediately. Did you leave the lights on somewhere? Do you maybe have an overdue library book? Forget to put the cap on your toothpaste?”
Ourecky shook his head.
Carson nudged an aviator’s kit bag with his toe. “All your zoom gear’s in there,” he said. “There’s a locker room in Flight Ops where you can suit up. We need to be wheels up as soon as possible. I’ll give these guys the nickel tour while you’re getting dressed.”
“Back in a minute,” replied Ourecky, swinging the canvas bag up on his shoulder. He turned and walked towards the building.
“Sorry about this, Bea. You look beautiful, as always,” said Carson, kneeling to hug Andy.
“Thanks, Drew, but it’s not me. It’s my Martha White biscuit flour,” she replied, glamorously swiveling her head and placing a hand on her hip. “I use it to bring out my eyes.”
“Biscuit flour, huh? Who would have guessed? Well, it certainly works wonders for you.”
“So you have no idea of what’s going on?”
“Honestly, Bea, no. Virgil mentioned that we should expect to be out of pocket for a week, possibly two, but nothing else.”
“So you don’t know what you’ll be doing but you do know how long you’re going to be gone?” asked Bea. “That makes no sense.”
“Like I said, Bea,” replied Carson, shaking his head, “I don’t know. Honest.”
They chatted for a few more minutes, but Bea gleaned nothing that she didn’t already know. As she stood off to the side trying to maintain her composure, Carson walked Andy around the T-38. Carson held him up; as he ran his tiny hand along the gleaming fuselage, it was obvious that the child was fascinated by the plane. Exactly what I don’t need, thought Bea.
A few minutes later, outfitted in his flight gear, Ourecky emerged from the Flight Ops building. A terrible feeling of dread gripped Bea’s stomach, as if she might never see him again.
Suddenly, she realized that this was the first time she had seen her husband wearing any sort of uniform, except for the day that they initially met on the plane in Atlanta. Seeing him and Drew together in flight gear immediately reminded her of her father’s squadron photograph from Korea. The two men could easily have stepped into that black-and-white image to take the place of her father and stepfather.
The scene just unnerved her. Even if he came home safe from this mysterious trip, she knew that if things continued the way they were, it was only a matter of time before he left and never came home. She reconciled herself to the notion that only something traumatic would be sufficient to wrench him from that certain trajectory.
Pulling on his flight gloves, Carson said, “I’m sorry we have to rush, Bea, but we really need to be leaving. I’m sure that we’ll see you back in Ohio.”
“Just a minute,” she said.
Glancing at his watch, he said, “Bea, we’ll miss our takeoff spot if we don’t get rolling …”
“Drew, please give us a minute,” pleaded Bea. “Please.”
“Bea, I’m sorry, but Scott and I really need to go,” he answered, donning his helmet. “Now.”
“Just a minute, Drew,” said Ourecky calmly. “You can pre-flight. I’ll be there in a flash.”
“I’ve already done my pre-flight.”
“You know, it never hurts to double-check things,” answered Ourecky, glancing towards the T-38’s angle-of-attack vane. “Safety first, right?”
“Yeah. Safety first. I’ll take another stroll around just to be sure. That should give you two kids enough time to say your proper goodbyes.”
Ourecky started to embrace Bea, but she lightly pushed him away and said
, “Scott, I need to tell you something, and you need to listen. You keep insisting that you’re just a run-of-the-mill engineer, basically just a nobody, but I know that the Air Force doesn’t send a supersonic jet to shuttle an inconsequential nobody from Nebraska to Ohio.”
“Bea, I’m sure there’s a logical explanation—”
“I don’t doubt that, Scott.” she said, standing with her hands on her hips. “I’m certain there’s a logical explanation for all of this, but right now, I don’t see it. If you went to Vietnam, and were in constant mortal danger, it would be easier for me, because I see that on television every night and it’s something tangible that I could come to grips with.”
With Andy hugging her calves, she continued. “As it is, I have no idea what you’re doing. Some days you drive off to the office like everyone else in the world, and then sometimes you just drop off the face of the earth for days and weeks and months with hardly the slightest warning, and sometimes you come back looking like hell, like you’ve been tortured, and you try your best to be so casual about it, but I just know in my heart that you’ve been in terrible danger, and it just eats me up that you won’t talk about it.”
“Bea, it’s not that I don’t want to talk about it, it’s that I can’t talk about it. I’m sorry. Now, I have to go.”
“When will you be back?” demanded Bea.
“I told you, Bea. I’ll be back when I get back. I really don’t know.”
She stood with her arms folded across her chest. “Scott, this roller coaster is killing me and killing us, and I need to climb off. I love you, but if you leave now, don’t expect us to be there when you come home.”
“Please don’t say that, Bea.”
“Scott!” yelled Carson, climbing up the ladder to the cockpit. “Now! We have to get moving.”
Ourecky dropped to his knees and hugged Andy. “I’ll see you, little man. I love you.” He stood up, hugged Bea and said, “I love you, too, but I have to go now.”
Aerospace Support Project
2:25 p.m., Monday, August 7, 1972
An official sedan picked up Carson and Ourecky the instant that they descended from their T-38 and whisked them directly to Blue Gemini’s brick headquarters. They weren’t even granted time to shed their sweaty flight suits before being escorted upstairs and directly into the generals’ office.
Tew and Wolcott were there, as was Gunter Heydrich. Strangely, Admiral Tarbox was there as well; Tarbox didn’t look much better than Tew; the elderly admiral looked almost frail.
The atmosphere in the office was somber, almost funereal. The table’s surface was covered with engineering drawings, technical documents, legal pads, slide rules, coffee cups and ashtrays; Ourecky saw that one blueprint-sized chart depicted a cutaway diagram of something that closely resembled the MOL.
“Gents, thanks much for hightailin’ it in here,” declared Wolcott, gesturing for the new arrivals to sit. “Ourecky, we really appreciate you rushin’ back from furlough early. We sure hated to ask you to come back so soon. I hope we didn’t upset your missus too much.”
“A little,” replied Ourecky, taking a chair and thinking back on Bea’s ultimatum at Offutt. “She’s not too keen on things changing so rapidly, but I think she’ll eventually come around.”
“You boys hankerin’ for anything?” asked Wolcott. “Coffee? Water?”
“I’d really appreciate a Coke, Virgil,” replied Carson, sitting down and smoothing his damp hair with his palms. “I’m absolutely parched. It’s been a long hot day.”
“And it’s merely startin’, pard.” Wolcott leaned back in his chair, punched the intercom button on his desk, and said, “Smith, hoof it downstairs, grab a couple of cold Coca-Colas and fetch them up here. Also, call the O Club and rustle up some sandwiches for these boys. I’m sure that they skipped lunch on the way.”
Ourecky’s stomach growled at the mention of food. Not only had he missed lunch, but he had been called away from breakfast as well, and now his metabolism was catching up.
“We’re in sort of a pickle here,” declared Wolcott. “Here’s the lowdown. I know that we ain’t informed you, and I hope you ain’t too offended by our lack of candor, but the Navy has a manned platform upstairs. It’s an ocean surveillance variant of the MOL.”
Wolcott tapped at the diagram spread on the table. “There are two men aboard. The Navy lost communications with them several days ago. If that ain’t bad enough, there was an enormous solar storm on Friday. It was a Class Three event. That’s the gist of it. Admiral Tarbox will fill in the details.”
Ourecky was stunned that the Navy had secretively sent up an MOL, but he was already aware of the massive solar flare. It had been on the news shortly after it occurred, primarily because it had disrupted telephone services and electrical utilities in many areas around the world. He recalled a news interview with a somber NASA spokesman, who claimed they had been very fortunate because the surge had occurred between Apollo missions; otherwise, he implied gravely, it could have been catastrophic if any astronauts had been on the moon at the time.
“To be frank, because they weren’t talking, we initially assumed that the crew was dead,” confessed Tarbox. “But as the situation evolved, we learned the communications outage was due to an equipment failure.”
“Resulting from the solar flare, Admiral?” asked Ourecky, gradually recovering from the shock of the news. A sergeant came in and delivered a pair of Coca-Colas. Carson gulped down almost half of his immediately.
“No, their radios failed prior to that. Since we didn’t have comms, we couldn’t warn them about the solar event. Otherwise we could have brought them out of orbit before they were irradiated. And really, we probably would have never known what happened if your man Russo hadn’t been up there. He really pulled a rabbit out of his hat.”
“Russo?” asked Carson incredulously. “Admiral, did you say Russo is upstairs?”
With his eyes fixed on the table, Tarbox nodded glumly. “He is. He made contact with us yesterday. The MOL’s main radios weren’t working, but he salvaged enough wire to string an auxiliary cable from the MOL to their Gemini-B reentry module. He tied it directly into the circuit breakers and powered up the Gemini-B’s UHF and VHF radios. It took him a few hours to establish the connection, but he persisted, and we’ve been talking to him ever since.”
“Hah,” sniffed Wolcott. “He hot-wired the danged radios. Sounds like a durned Popular Mechanics project. Maybe he accidently learned something while he was here with us.”
“But Russo wasn’t up there by himself,” observed Ourecky. He noticed a chart taped on the wall behind Tew; crudely drawn on white butcher paper, it was labeled ‘Worst Case—Consumables Estimates’ and showed a regression analysis of oxygen and other expendables aboard the MOL. The chart’s projections didn’t paint a reassuring picture. “What happened to your other man, sir?”
“He’s extremely ill,” disclosed Tarbox softly. His bushy left eyebrow twitched erratically. With his coarse voice at the point of breaking, he was clearly rattled by the incident. “Commander Chris Cowin. Russo told us that Cowin was outside on EVA during one of the largest fluxes on August 4, so he caught the full brunt of it. We estimate that he received roughly three hundred rems. We don’t expect him to survive. He’s been unconscious for the past two days, and based on what Russo has described to us, our flight surgeons don’t expect him to last very long, maybe a day or two at most.”
“But even three hundred rems shouldn’t have been a fatal dose,” claimed Ourecky. While he wasn’t an authority on radiation and its physiological effects, he knew that the cumulative amount a person might receive—relative to others exposed in the same incident—was strictly luck of the draw. Simply by virtue of being outside the spacecraft’s protective shielding during the solar flare, Cowin had been dealt the worst possible hand.
Tarbox’s squeaky voice wavered as he replied, “You’re correct. It shouldn’t have been a fatal dose, if he could have rec
eived adequate medical treatment in a timely manner. According to Russo, Cowin had severe diarrhea and was vomiting within an hour of locking back in. He was effectively incapacitated within three hours of exposure.”
“Admiral, Russo should be able to reenter and fly home by himself,” said Carson. “Why didn’t he just stow Cowin in the Gemini-B and bring him straight down?”
“The same reason that he’s still up there by himself,” answered Tarbox. “At some point during this incident, he either broke or badly sprained his wrist. Our flight surgeons are fairly certain that it’s fractured.”
Ourecky was sufficiently familiar with the MOL/Gemini-B configuration to immediately recognize the problem. Theoretically, Russo could probably fly the Gemini-B with one hand, but there was a more pressing problem. The Gemini-B was located at the stern end of the MOL. To board the Gemini-B, he had to transit a narrow access tunnel. To prepare for reentry, he had to close and latch three separate hatches. The first was a hatch at the end of the connecting tunnel. The second portal was a heavy circular hatch literally cut through the Gemini-B’s heat shield, that opened outward from the reentry vehicle. The third was a large pressure bulkhead hatch that opened inward into the Gemini-B’s restricted cabin. Ourecky knew that it was difficult enough for two men to shut and dog down these hatches, but it would be virtually impossible for one man with only one functional hand. Unless his wrist healed quickly, Russo was stuck upstairs.
Confirming Ourecky’s concerns, Tarbox explained the situation with the hatches, and concluded, “Our engineers are trying to improvise a mechanical solution to assist him with the hatches, but Russo also soaked up a substantial dose of radiation. His is obviously not an acute case like Cowin’s, but it’s definitely taking its toll. At this point, he’s very sick, disoriented and just plain weak. Even if we devise a means to ratchet the hatches shut, it’s unlikely that he would make it home by himself. And closing the hatches is just one problem of many.”
“There’s more?” asked Carson. The building shook as a large cargo aircraft—probably one of the new C-5 Galaxy transports—landed on the adjacent runway.
