by Homer Hickam
“Well, God bless America,” Hawthorne said sarcastically. “This is going to be a bloody mess when it hits the courts.”
Vanderheld turned, his face a mask of concern. “The courts will figure something out, find a compromise, if it ever gets that far. I worry about the children of this country. What will they think when they see on television that their space shuttle has been attacked by another one?”
Hawthorne snorted. “I think the little rug rats will get over it.”
Vanderheld shook his head. “No, Tammy, you’re wrong.” He sighed, put his hand on his ceiling-high bookcase, dragged his fingers across a row of books as if they might impart some wisdom to him when he needed it the most. “It is a traumatic thing we’re doing to them this day, I fear. Perhaps to the nation at large.”
MET 3 DAYS AND COUNTING . . .
RAID OF THE ENDEAVOUR
Endeavour
Endeavour ’s pursuit of Columbia began at MECO, main engine cutoff, and lasted twelve hours. With Ollie Grant at her side, Pilot Tanya Brown made a long OMS burn that took the shuttle up to a 558-mile-high orbit. With one eye on the computer that gave her a constant update of the target, she used two coelliptic burns to shift to Columbia ’s track. “On the money, Tanya,” Grant said, clapping her crewmate on the shoulder. “Now let’s catch those bastards.”
Grant took off her launch helmet, shaking out her short hair. “I’m going to go doff my LES and check the airlock,” Grant called over her shoulder, heading below.
Brown nodded and gripped the control stick. Rendezvous between two shuttles, each going five miles per second, required complete concentration to avoid disaster. The rendezvous was also complicated by the need for Endeavour to approach Columbia without being seen. Brown would have to work to keep the RCS jets aimed away from the target. For that she would use what was called a low-Z axis approach, a maneuver requiring the cant of the aft firing thrusters and the scarf of the forward firing thrusters to produce the needed accelerations. That would minimize plume impingement—meaning no one on board Columbia would see the burst of flames produced by Endeavour ’s thrusters—but it also meant burning a prodigious amount of propellant.
Six hours later Endeavour was starting to edge into range of Columbia. “There she is,” Brown said.
Grant, back in the commander’s seat, saw Columbia with her external tank still attached. It looked like a big orange blimp floating in space. “Give me the stick, Tanya,” she said. For the final maneuver Grant intended to “eyeball” it, using the seat of her pants to put Endeavour into position. She was the best pilot in the astronaut corps. She didn’t need a computer to tell her how to fly Endeavour. With a light touch on the stick she eased the shuttle closer, steadying three hundred yards beneath Columbia.
A glint of sun reflecting off something large behind Columbia attracted Grant’s attention. Puzzled, she investigated with binoculars, recognizing the distinctive conical shape of rocket nozzles. She swept back to Columbia. What the hell? The shuttle mains were gone and there appeared to be something else—another engine?—bolted in the shuttle’s tail. Why would the hijackers tear their shuttle apart? Grant slowly lowered the binoculars. Something didn’t add up. “What do you think?”
“Beats me, Ollie,” Brown answered, using the zoom on a small video camera for a better view. “Unless they need that new engine to go to a higher orbit. Could they be after a comm satellite in geo?”
Brown meant a communications satellite in geosynchronous orbit, 25,000 miles above the earth. Shuttles weren’t able to go that high. Communications satellites were worth a lot of money, but Grant supposed there were better ways to make a buck than stealing a shuttle and rebuilding it in orbit just to steal a satellite. And who would you sell it to, anyway? “The only way to find out,” she said, “is to get Columbia back. Let’s do it.” She unbuckled her straps and climbed out of her seat, heading for the middeck to prepare for her EVA.
Columbia
Jack, bone tired, opened the airlock hatch and pulled himself through it into the middeck. Even being weightless couldn’t soothe muscles that felt as if they had been pulled into strings. He and Virgil had spent six hours pulling the remaining two engines out and replacing them with the Big Dog engine. Thank God, he reflected, that Virgil’s SAS symptoms had diminished, at least enough to let him go outside and provide the brains and brawn needed to get the huge engines moved. Essentially, he and Jack had kicked the engines into space, wedging themselves between the aft bulkhead and the unbolted engines and using leg power to send them down their guide rails. There had been nothing elegant about the operation, just unbolting the engines and cutting their power and propellant lines. The original plan had envisioned a more careful approach so that someone might recover the engines, return them to earth to be used again. But the massive power-plants Jack and Virgil had sent tumbling away were just so much scrap metal now. Jack regretted that, but not enough to keep him from doing the damage. Endeavour was probably on her way already. They needed to get going and soon.
He looked up at the flight deck, listening. There was no sound of any movement there, just the faint clicking of solenoid valves as the air delivery system worked to stabilize pressure and keep the oxygen levels adequate. He floated silently onto the flight deck. He was in his underwear but guessed Penny was asleep. She was, strapped into the pilot’s seat. Jack quietly checked her color. It looked good. He couldn’t help but marvel once again at her face, the unblemished skin, high cheekbones, large eyes, and hawklike nose that gave her an exotic elegance. As he looked at her, her eyes blinked open and she stared at him sleepily. “Medaris, what are you looking at?” She yawned, a hand moving up to the back of her neck, underneath her hair.
Penny had been close to decompression sickness after her suit had lost pressure. Two hours of oxygen therapy in the airlock had, Jack hoped, kept her from coming down with a full-blown case. “How do you feel?” he asked.
“Tired,” she replied. She was dressed in shorts and a rugby shirt. She looked down at herself, as if realizing for the first time what she was wearing. “I don’t remember much....” She looked back at Jack, her eyes widening. “My suit. . . my glove...”
“I got to you in time,” he said simply. He probed her for information to see if there had been any onset of the bends. “Do your joints ache? Any tingling in your hands or feet? Any numbness?”
She sat quietly, her eyes closed, as if searching through her body for answers. She looked at her hand. It was red. “My hand feels sunburned and I’m tired,” she said, looking up at him as if for guidance.
Jack nodded. Decompression sickness sometimes caused the fatigue, but if that’s all she had. . . ”You’re going to be all right, High Eagle,” he pronounced with mental fingers crossed. “The sunburn is the capillaries in your skin. They burst when you were exposed to the vacuum. It’ll clear up in a few days.”
She looked again at her rugby shirt. “How did I get into these clothes?” She stared at him. “You didn’t!”
He shrugged. “Virgil helped me. We had to get you out of that suit and into something dry and warm.” To her shocked expression he continued, “You did the same for me once.”
Her face clouded. “Not the same, Medaris.” She shook her head, then looked around. “What’s happening?”
“Virgil and I got the other engines out, put the Big Dog in their place. He’s still out in the cargo bay, tidying up.”
“You left him out there alone?”
“He’ll be all right. He’s a big boy.”
She looked again at her left hand. The red color extended just past her wrist. Jack showed her his right hand and arm. They looked the same. “I got the same treatment. We were lucky we didn’t get a bubble in an artery.”
“I remember now,” she said quietly, staring at the rash. “You saved my life,” she said as if it had just dawned on her.
“I couldn’t let anything happen to my EVA buddy, could I?”
“So now we tes
t and then we land, right?” she asked.
He nodded. “Sure.”
“We need to land, Medaris,” Penny said. “It’s what you promised. They’re not going to give up. They’re going to kill us if they can.”
Jack’s grim eyes belied his smile. “They’ll have to catch us first.”
Cargo Bay, Endeavour
As soon as the airlock was opened into Endeavour ’s cargo bay, Grant pulled herself down the port sill guide wire to the manned maneuvering unit attached there. The MMU looked like a big white metal chair with armrests but no seat. On the arms were joysticks for controlling the built-in jets for maneuvering. Janet Barnes, following Grant, inspected the MMU and then helped to attach it to her commander’s backpack. She made a quick check of connections and then gave Grant a salute. Grant put her gloved hand on Barnes’s helmet. It looked like a blessing. Then, her heart in her throat, she pushed off across the bottomless void toward Columbia. “She’s on her way,” Barnes announced on the encrypted suit channel.
“You go, girl,” Brown said to Grant.
It was a wild ride. Above Grant was a vast brown and green continent—Africa. Below her was deep space, the stars shining like white-hot holes punched into a deep black fabric of nothingness. Ahead was the underbelly of Columbia, her glittering heat shield tiles reflecting in the brilliant golden sunlight. The MMU’s jets were enough to get Grant up to a speed of nearly fifty miles an hour, but she didn’t need that much velocity for the short hop across the vacuum to the hijacked shuttle. She throttled back after her initial spurt and soared up and over the shuttle’s port wing. Just as she went over the wing, she saw the boot of Italy and the sparkling Mediterranean passing overhead. Then the field of view narrowed to the bright white cargo bay. Working the joysticks, Grant slowed and settled feetfirst just behind the ATESS tether spool. She grabbed the handrail on its cover and doffed the MMU, tethering it to another handrail. She made a quick inspection of the cargo bay. The ATESS was still buttoned up inside its boxy cover. On the port sill the RMS arm was stowed, clamped down in place. Aft was the extended mission power pallet with its extra fuel cells and instruments covered in white multilayered material. There were, however, some alien packages in the bay. Two big rolls of tentlike material were tied up like sausages in front of the power pallet. And strapped to the aft starboard sill was a short, stout cylindrical device that appeared to be a rocket engine of a type Grant couldn’t identify. She had no time to speculate on its purpose. She had to work fast, before she was spotted. She made her way to the airlock hatch. A glance at the empty flight deck view ports convinced her she hadn’t been seen. She stopped at the hatch and opened the pouch connected to her waist loop. It contained a small tank of compressed chemical agent designed to render the hijackers unconscious. Bonner had flown it down to the Cape, personally handed it to her, showed her how it worked. To neutralize the hijackers, she was to climb inside the airlock, open up all the air valves to get positive pressure, kick open the inner hatch, and pitch the canister inside. She would be protected by her suit from the released gas. Once the pin was pulled, nothing the hijackers could do besides explosive decompression could clear the air. And explosive decompression would kill them unless they were in EMU suits.
Grant eased open Columbia’s exterior airlock hatch. It swung on its hinges, nothing pushing it. That meant there was no pressure in the airlock. That wasn’t right. There should have been a rush of air. Unless someone had used the airlock to go outside and was still outside. . . She pulled the pin on the canister, started to clamber through the hatch. She had to move quickly before—Too late! She felt something hinder her and then she was being jerked backward and twisted around. An ugly face in a bubble helmet appeared. She fought him but he was far too strong for her. He tore the canister out of her hand and flung it away. Grant watched it tumbling, its burnished aluminum surface flashing in the sun as it pitched end over end. She touched helmets so that her voice would carry through the plastic. “This is an order from the President of the United States!” she yelled. “You are to turn this shuttle over to me. Now!” Then, to her horror, she saw a spout of fire overhead and realized she hadn’t been carrying a gas canister at all. She had carried a bomb. An aluminum sliver flew like a jagged dart to imbed itself into the MLI blanket not six inches from her helmet.
The man looked at the shrapnel, pulled it loose. He touched his helmet to hers. “You were going to kill us!”
“I didn’t know,” she gasped.
He looked at the aluminum shard, tossed it away. “It would have killed you too,” he said.
Grant cringed as the sun, reflecting off the Indian Ocean, flashed white hot in her eyes. She turned away in shame and confusion. The man was right. Frank Bonner had tried to kill everyone aboard Columbia. Grant would have died too. He’d sent her on a suicide mission.
Endeavour
Barnes maintained a lonely vigil at the airlock hatch. There had been a brief snatch of comm from Grant, enough to know she was in trouble, and then a gout of fire over Columbia. Brown had gotten on the horn to talk to Houston, to get advice on what to do. John Lakey was the new flight director. Sam Tate was gone, relieved of duty by Bonner. Lakey was still mulling the situation over when Barnes saw the MMU appear over the edge of the cargo bay. It wasn’t Grant. Whoever it was was carrying a ball that Barnes recognized as a PRB, a personal rescue ball.
The PRB was a thirty-inch-diameter sphere made out of spacesuit materials. Every shuttle carried at least three of them. The person in the MMU flew down to Barnes, gave her a salute, and then tossed the ball to her. Then he soared away, crossing the gap between the shuttles. When the ball was unzippered inside the airlock, Grant emerged, stripping the oxygen mask from her face. She ignored all questions and went to the flight deck, got in the commander’s chair, and stayed there, her face an impervious mask. Brown consulted the flight surgeons, who advised a mild dose of Valium. Brown took them to her. Grant furiously flung them in her face.
MONTE SANO
Monte Sano Boulevard, Huntsville, Alabama
Shirley had never been to the Rocket City, but the directions given her at the Huntsville-Decatur International Airport proved easy to follow. She zipped down the eight-laned interstate spur into the city, past the Space and Rocket Center and its famed Space Camp, to the exit ramp onto Governor’s Drive, which led through the medical district and then took a steep turn up a mountain. It was Monte Sano, which meant, in Italian, the “mountain of health.” During the early 1950s the von Braun rocket team, finding it similar to their homeland, had bought property on the mountain and built their homes there. Many of them were still there, including Dr. Ernst Suttner, Katrina Medaris’s uncle.
Shirley turned the rental car onto Monte Sano Boulevard and climbed a narrow, twisting road through a dense forest. To her left sprawled Huntsville, the town von Braun and his team had built. Redstone Arsenal’s vast green acreage could be seen beyond the city and pushing into the sky the massive stands used by Marshall Space Flight Center to test rocket engines. Near the top of the mountain she stopped for a moment and simply admired the view. As she did, the thunder of an engine being test-fired on one of the stands rolled over the valley and into the foothills. Shirley wondered if Jack Medaris’s Kate had died on that stand.
The homes on the mountain, small and solidly middle class, surprised Shirley until she remembered her research. The German team could have made a fortune had they chosen to sell their knowledge to industry but instead had stuck with von Braun to work tirelessly as low-paid civil servants, dedicated to bringing the moon to the nation that had adopted them. And good citizens they had become too. Huntsville had an engineering university, a modern civic center, a new library, an observatory, a top-flight symphony, and a solid high-tech industrial base primarily because of the influence and dedication of the team of German rocket scientists and engineers who had come to live in what had been a tiny cotton-mill town.
Shirley found Suttner’s house, a single-sto
ry brick dwelling, on the bluffs of Panorama Drive. She walked up the driveway and rang the bell. A cheerful woman with a mop of white hair answered. Shirley told the woman who she was. The woman smiled at her. “Ja, ja. I am Elsa Suttner. Ernst is in his study. Come.”
Ernst Suttner was a thin, wiry man with bright blue eyes that sparkled with wit and intelligence. He greeted his guest. “Please, Miss Grafton. Sit down. Elsa will bring us tea and cookies and we will talk. It is a pleasure to meet a member of the vice president’s staff. I was impressed by the speech he gave recently on the danger of global warming. It was excellent, although I do have a problem with the studies he referenced that predict the deterioration of the ozone layer. I’m afraid they rely more on emotion than good science.”
“You have me there, Dr. Suttner,” Shirley apologized. “I’m no scientist. Political science, though. George Washington University, 1995.”
Suttner wagged his finger at her. “Ah, is there any science really more complex than politics?” He laughed heartily. “Your vice president knows that very well. But sit, have some tea. We will talk.”
Shirley sat, accepted the tea and cookies, and then began her questions to the old rocket scientist. He answered all her questions on Medaris and his wife, how Katrina had grown up in the small scientific community, how she and Medaris had met, how she had died. But, frustratingly, Suttner refused to answer any questions about Medaris and what he might be doing aboard Columbia. “You mentioned something about the moon when I first talked to you, Dr. Suttner,” Shirley probed, trying to tease it out of him, whatever it was. “What did you mean by that?”
Suttner sipped his tea, shrugged. “Jack always thought the United States should go back to the moon, consolidate our gains after Apollo. He isn’t alone in that, Miss Grafton. There are many of us in the space community who believe that is the case. The problem is, of course, convincing our politicians! Vice President Vanderheld has been one of our major opponents all along. I should like to talk to him someday, convince him otherwise.”
