by Chris Jones
“Separation!” Budarin shouted. “We have separation! Everything works!”
The ground was silent to their drama. “Can you hear us?” Budarin asked. “Can you hear us?”
Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit didn’t know it at the time, but these were among the last words they would hear from the ground: “Keep an eye on your internal pressure, guys.”
“Can you hear us?” Budarin asked.
There was no reply.
· · ·
Micki Pettit had arrived in Moscow the day before with her twin boys. Annie Bowersox had also made the trip. Now, lying awake in bed, staring at their Star City cottage ceilings, they tried to sleep, but they were both kept awake by the thrill that morning would bring. They had made plans to wake up early and head to TsUP to watch from their front-row seats the return of their husbands. They couldn’t wait. They felt like those giddy girls in Times Square who had welcomed the sailors home.
Only the slightest ill feeling clung to them. Nikolai Budarin’s wife, Marina, had announced that she would not be there, because for a cosmonaut, it was considered the worst kind of luck for his wife to wait for him with open arms. If she did, it was almost certain that she would never close them around her husband again.
Micki and Annie told themselves it was just more Russian hocus-pocus, more silly superstition. So much had gone wrong already. They were due for a change of luck. Having made it through a heart-stopping beginning and an interminable middle, they were owed an uplifting end. They were owed their champagne moment, a tickertape finish.
In her bags, Micki had even packed a pillbox hat.
· · ·
“Look at that fire,” Bowersox said.
He and Pettit each saw the lost modules roll out past their windows and begin burning up. They were glad for not having been in them. But they didn’t know there was still reason for concern. They didn’t know that were everything in order, they wouldn’t have been able to see what they saw. They didn’t know that one of the small rockets assigned to keep their capsule stable had fired less than a second too late.
And then their own windows filled with plasma and fire.
“There’s so much fire,” Bowersox said, filled with wonder.
“Yes,” Budarin replied, sounding distracted. He knew that some fire was normal, a product of the heat generated by reentry, the capsule trailing it like a meteor’s tail. But even for Budarin, the fire seemed brighter than normal, more intense. It might have been his imagination, but the temperature inside Soyuz also seemed as though it was on the rise. Sweat started to run into his eyes. Blinking it back and turning his head to sneak a peek through one of the windows, he said, almost to himself, “Yes, we are on fire pretty good.”
Bowersox and Pettit both marveled at the glow. But in his concern, Budarin had grown deaf to their awe. He was scanning the instruments and gauges, one by one, trying to find something, anything, that wasn’t right. Suddenly, his eyes grew wide when one of his monitors flashed in front of him, and a telltale light—called, ominously, the BS light—blinked on.
Bowersox saw it, too. Uh-oh, he thought.
Holy fucking shit was more like it.
The computers had announced that whether Expedition Six liked it or not, Soyuz was about to be pushed into a steep, ballistic descent. Instead of the usual semi-gentle fall into gravity’s embrace, they were primed to enter an accelerated, lung-crunching dive into elementary physics. There was no longer time for grace. For whatever reason, the hardware wanted them home, as soon as possible. It was as though the three men had been loaded into that shotgun of theirs and fired straight into the earth.
In English, Bowersox gave Pettit the red alert. “Don, BS is lit up, and we don’t know why,” he said. Resorting to his typical understatement, he added, “It’s probably going to be a fairly aggressive entry.”
Budarin noticed that something was wrong with the capsule’s left side.
“I didn’t touch anything,” Bowersox said.
Pettit, unable to ignore the hint of anxiety that Bowersox had failed to stifle during his self-defense, began to worry out loud. “Why the BS?” he asked in Russian.
Perhaps because of the stress of the moment, Bowersox replied to him in kind. “We don’t know, Don,” he said, before switching over to English. “Tighten up your belts as much as you can.”
The three men began tugging on their restraints, trying to find safe places for all of the loose things that were about to turn into projectiles.
“We’ll make it, guys,” Budarin said.
“Kolai, you’re good,” Bowersox replied.
“Guys,” Budarin said, trying to stay focused on the instruments in front of him through a growing shake. “Hold on, guys, hold on.”
· · ·
Sean O’Keefe’s alarm went off. He pulled himself out of bed and tried to shake out the cobwebs. He smoothed down his hair, pulled on a jacket, and headed back to TsUP.
Paul Pastorek joined him again in the gallery, as did Bill Readdy. Micki Pettit and Annie Bowersox had also arrived, looking excited and put together, what with Micki wearing her snappy hat. The two women took their seats near O’Keefe, and he turned to smile at them. Returning the smile, Micki and Annie leaned forward to get a better look down at the floor of technicians below.
Russian ground control was staid and beautiful, all marble columns and heavy drapes. Everything looked calm, as peaceful as a library. And on those big screens at the front of the room, a series of almost cartoonish illustrations was being projected, explaining what was happening to their husbands and when. According to the cartoons, everything was going to plan. Soyuz had dropped into the atmosphere and made a smooth, on-target descent. Now its parachute was about to open, and after the capsule had bounced to a happy stop on a forgiving earth, what looked like Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound were ready to jump out of it. Perhaps they would have a picnic.
· · ·
“Can you hear us?” Budarin repeated again and again. But still there was no response from the ground. Expedition Six were alone.
Budarin’s breathing grew harder. “Tighten up as much as you can,” he said through gritted teeth.
Bowersox licked his lips. Pettit closed his eyes.
Budarin had leveled his sights to a single gauge in front of him, the needle in it bouncing and rising slowly, recording the g-forces that had begun to sit on their chests like barbells.
“We’re at 2.0,” Budarin said, a little nervously, “2.3 … Hold on guys.”
“We’re holding on,” Bowersox said in Russian. And then, in English, he said to Don: “Take a deep breath while you can.”
The capsule had begun to spin. There was noise, snaps and rattles and groans, and vibration, each rising in pitch. Outside, the fire and plasma danced, coating their windows with ash. Alarm bells went off, if only in their minds.
“Don, how are you?” Budarin asked. “Speak so we can hear you.”
“Da,” Don said.
Budarin continued the count. “… 3.0 … 3.5 … 3.9 … Don, speak to me, say something to me.”
“Da,” Don said again, this time croaking it out.
Their spines compressed. Their ears rang. Pettit could feel sweat streaming back from his forehead and soaking his hair, as though he were in a centrifuge. Bowersox fought to keep his tongue from slipping down his throat.
“… 4.0 … 4.35 … 4.44 …4.7 … oh, it’s pressing good.”
Already, nearly a thousand pounds sat on each of their chests, and things were only getting worse. With every second it grew harder and harder for them to breathe, their gasps already short and shallow. It took everything in Budarin for him to continue to talk.
“… 5.0 … 6.0 …”
They approached the g-force limits that the human body, if left in a vulnerable position, can survive for any length of time. After nearly six months in space, weightless and free, for this brave trio it felt like torture, as though some maniac wanted to see how far he coul
d push them before they finally broke in half. Budarin continued to talk, but soon his audience had trouble listening. So much blood had been pushed to the backs of their brains that Bowersox and Pettit felt as though they had been sucker punched. Were they not already flat on their backs, they would have been knocked there.
“… 7.0 … 7.5 … 7.9 … 8.0 …”
Now Expedition Six had reached an almost mythical number. Several racetracks have been redesigned because drivers in their new, faster cars have reached 5.0 in the corners and risked passing out and crashing. At 8.0, Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit were sustaining an occasionally lethal level of crush, one that threatened to pinch their weakened lungs shut tight. They couldn’t have been blamed if they had panicked. This was one more surprise that they could have done without.
Fortunately, inevitably, Soyuz continued its fall through the atmosphere. Warmer, denser air began slowing them down, and right when they needed it to, the weight began to lift.
“… 7.6 … 7.5 … 7.1 … 6.5 … It’s great,” Budarin wheezed, “… 4.3 … 3.5 … 3.11 … 2.8 … 2.2 … 1.7 …”
Bowersox and Pettit blinked back their fogs. Their blood began rising back into their faces, their tongues meeting their unclenching teeth. They took great, gulping breaths, as though a bully had just taken his foot off their necks. Most important, they even found it in them to smile, having passed one more test, but with more to come.
“Don, get ready for the parachute,” Bowersox said.
“Okay,” Pettit said, weakly.
“It’s easy now,” Budarin said. “Now we’ll have fun again.”
Bowersox, however, wasn’t yet thinking about spreading out a blanket in the sunshine. Instead, he was busy pouring all of his might into willing the parachute to open. By the book, it was part of the Soyuz’s automated operation, and he bristled at the lack of control—not just the pilot in him but the hardened realist in him who had survived one malfunction and didn’t fancy his chances of surviving another.
Just then, the small drogue chute opened, filling with air. But the huge main chute didn’t follow its lead. The pyrotechnic bolts that kept it folded tight still hadn’t fired.
Bowersox shook his head. He wished for a huge red button to appear in front of him that he could press, hard, and more than once, to release the parachute. But there wasn’t one. There was just the cruel wait, while Expedition Six continued their race toward the cold, hard earth. The gauges showed the capsule was traveling more slowly than it had been, but when it comes to falling out of the sky, pace is a relative thing. The three men were still going plenty fast enough to dig their own graves.
In Moscow, where officials anticipated Soyuz TMA-1 to make its gentle touchdown within sixteen minutes—how close to home Columbia had been when it was lost for good—the radios came back to life just in time to broadcast a short, loud blast of static. Then the radios crackled, and then they went dead.
In the silence, a few of the technicians put their faces into their hands. A few of the others looked snow white.
Because sometimes, bad things can happen twice.
The Americans in the gallery weren’t all that alarmed by the stern masks suddenly put on by their Russian colleagues. Nor were they unsettled by the tense quiet or by the occasional arrival of a harried-looking subordinate, whispering into the ears of one superior or another.
The cartoons, after all, were still showing happy scenes of a flawless flight, and that was their singular focus; everything else was a mystery. Locked away in this great room in the dark, and unable to speak Russian or make out the whispers, they had been dunked into a kind of isolation tank. Unlike that morning when he had waited hopelessly for Columbia, Sean O’Keefe couldn’t see a touchdown clock counting past zero, couldn’t worry about the sonic booms that he hadn’t yet heard, and couldn’t read the fear in anxious faces. All he had to go on was what he could see, and just then, just there, he could see only cartoons and a kind of stage play, a crew of silent actors running through their routines. It was as though he was stuck in the back of a darkened theater, watching an opera in a language that he couldn’t quite follow. And so he sat, along with the others, blindly waiting for the aria.
They were oblivious to the possibility that three of the principal parts were being played by fire and smoke and ash.
Finally, O’Keefe, Pastorek, and Readdy—as well as Micki and Annie—saw the screens at the front of the room fill with grainy color footage of a Soyuz capsule thumping into the steppes, kicking up dirt. Its orange-and-white parachute rolled out in front of it in a gentle breeze, flapping like a deflated hot-air balloon, and within minutes, soldiers and technicians huddled in helicopters had spotted it and touched down nearby. The film, in essence, showed a textbook landing and recovery unfolding. In the balcony, there was relief. All that remained was the cracking of the hatch.
But suddenly an open radio transmission that had been playing for the assembled crowd, which now included a number of Russian reporters, crackled with the concerned voices of search pilots who hadn’t yet caught sight of Expedition Six’s parachute. The Americans were confused by the seeming discrepancy between what they were seeing in front of them and what they were hearing through the radio. How could the helicopters be touching down if the pilots weren’t sure where Soyuz had landed? And who was taking these pictures?
And then it dawned on the group of them—not quite all at once, but instantaneously enough for a feeling of dread to spread like a virus through the balcony gang—that the footage that they had been watching was stock. It was one more of those cartoons, just without the choppy animation, real life turned into make-believe.
Just then, there was a buzz among the Russians, some of whom had begun to sweat. When they weren’t listening to the radio, they spoke mostly in hushes. They weren’t speaking in hushes anymore. Finally, after ten minutes, Yuri Koptev (trying his best to summon a sense of calm) told O’Keefe that the pilots hadn’t seen the parachute because Soyuz had overshot its landing site by a few kilometers. No doubt it would be spotted presently.
After another fifteen minutes had passed, O’Keefe was told that Soyuz had fallen short of its target, perhaps by as much as sixty kilometers. For the Americans, the uncertainty was bewildering at first and made them feel sick second.
When everything goes according to plan, Soyuz lands in an area precise enough for the rescue teams to watch its parachute open.
This time around, there had been no sighting. There was only an empty sky.
· · ·
After what felt like an eternity, Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit heard what they thought were blessed pops—the sweet sound of the bolts exploding. The noise echoed through Soyuz, the capsule shuddering.
“I think the parachute is opening!” Budarin said, following his exclamation with a whoop, like a cowboy at full gallop. “It’s time to hang on again, guys! Hang on!”
· · ·
Finally the Russians told O’Keefe that, all apologies, they would have to excuse themselves for a moment. Koptev hoped to leave a feeling of reassurance in his wake, but he had failed. There had been too much rush in his strides. The Americans, feeling helpless and being watched too closely by the reporters who surrounded them, also decided to withdraw. They set up camp in two otherwise unoccupied rooms, one of which was a small, drab kitchen. With worry filling in the gaps between the huddled bunches, the two rooms felt like bomb shelters.
Someone put on some coffee. Someone else paced. More ominously, Pastorek pulled up a chair to a table and began taking notes. For O’Keefe, watching his friend’s pen dash across the page was like being a ship’s captain watching a fast-moving blip on his radar screen closing in. Nothing good had ever come out of either. Each was notice of an incoming torpedo.
In his growing upset, O’Keefe was immediately returned to the side of that empty runway in Florida. He flashed back to that morning—to seeing the stricken faces of seven families before they were hustled out of view, to know
ing that his prayers for them would go unanswered. He remembered the awful days that had followed, the mourning and debate and recrimination. He remembered the memorial service. He remembered the flowers and cards and teddy bears that had been piled against the front gates in Houston. And now he saw them as though they were right in front of him. He saw every last bit of it, and he saw the beginnings of it happening all over again.
Every now and then, he sent an emissary over to the Russian side for an update. Each time, the emissary came back with a look on his face or a shake of his head that brought tears to Micki Pettit’s eyes. She had decided that she needed to beat a further retreat and ended up hiding out in the relatively quiet kitchen. Even the unflappable Annie Bowersox, who repeated again and again that everything would turn out all right, that everything had always turned out all right, sounded a little less sure of herself with each passing minute. Everybody in each of those two rooms knew that the longer the mystery lasted, the more likely it would end in a cemetery.
O’Keefe waited, the big man shuttling between those two semi-silent, semi-hysterical rooms, until he couldn’t take the pounding in his ears any longer. He needed some time alone. He also needed a cigarette. He slipped through one of the doors and disappeared.
Pastorek looked up from his notes and saw that his boss and best friend was missing. He got up from his seat and left the room, looking down long, empty corridors and poking his head through open office doors. He spied O’Keefe at the end of a hallway, staring through a pair of corner windows. Smoke curled from his fingertips.
“You okay?” Pastorek asked after he’d made a tiptoe approach. He knew full well the answer.
O’Keefe shook his head and took a drag from his cigarette. “I just can’t believe it,” he said finally, blowing out a thick stream. “It’s like Columbia all over again. It’s déjà vu all over again. And the worst part is, we don’t even have our own people in control. I mean, look at this,” he said, waving one of his big hands at the vista through the windows.
Rising in front of them was the rusted hulk of a building that was either unfinished or abandoned (or probably both), all uncapped girders and cracked foundation. Grass grew through the crumbling sidewalk that ran past it. Dark clouds and the forecasted rain had started blowing in. Everything else was already a shade of gray, one long shadow having crossed the city. It was the sort of landscape that looked as though it had never once been touched by rainbows.
