by T I WADE
AMERICA ONE
By
T. I. WADE
Ryan Richmond dreamed about going to space since the age of seven. Reading about space advancement, and especially Neil Armstrong on the lunar surface in National Geographic, was the ignition of this dream.
At nineteen, after he sold his first company, he recruited the remnants of the Russian Space Program—three of the best space brains in the world.
In his twenties he founded and sold two more companies and hired most of the best scientists and engineers in the European Space Authority.
During his thirties, after selling his third company, he invested heavily in Internet start-ups like Google, netting billions.
Then, he patiently waited until NASA’s shuttle program came to a sad end and contracted the best brains in the U.S. Space program.
Now Ryan Richmond is in his forties, and still wants to go to space; the only problem is that the newly elected U.S. government doesn’t have a current space program of their own—and wants his!
AMERICA ONE
Copyright © 2012 by T I Wade
All Rights Reserved.
Published in the United States of America
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Editor–Sherry Emanuel, Raleigh, North Carolina
Final Editor–Brad Theado, Stuarts Draft, Virginia
Cover design–Jack Hillman, Hillman Design Group, Sedona, Arizona
eBook edition layout by eBooks by Barb for booknook.biz
Font COM4t Sans Medium by Hideki Katayama
Dedication
AMERICA ONE
is dedicated to Neil Armstrong.
Neil Armstrong
Outside in space there are no boundaries,
but within this rocket several walls surround me.
We are the first to reach the great outer space,
and I guess that means we’ve won this important race.
Of this land we are the kings,
and I feel as if I can spread my wings,
and fly through the dark, cold nothingness of space
until I feel the warmth of the sun caressing my face.
We are explorers sailing across this infinite sea,
in search of adventure and mystery.
In search of information about the unknown,
this trip represents the seeds of history we’ve sown.
As we head farther from warmth travelling to the moon,
I find comfort and safety in this space cocoon.
As I step onto the moon I think in my mind,
that this is one step for man and one giant leap for mankind.
Our exploration eventually comes to a conclusion,
and back home this will probably feel like a dream or elusion.
Back at home to this voyage my name is signed,
this great feat, the result of technology and human power combined!
Tischan Anne Wade, 11th Grade.
North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics.
Note from the Author
This novel is only a story—a story of fiction, which could or might come true sometime in the future.
The people in this story are mostly fictitious, but since the story takes place in our present day, some of the people mentioned are real people.
There were no thoughts to treat these people as good or bad people, just people who are living at the time the story is written.
The author is not an expert in the field of space travel. The author is only a storyteller.
Even though hundreds of hours of Internet research were done to write this story, many might find the scientific description of space travel lacking, simple, or simply not 100 percent accurate. The fuels, gases, metals, and the results of using these components are as accurate as the author could describe them.
Very few of us really understand what it is like to travel or live in space for extended periods. Very few of us ever will in our lifetimes.
Neil Armstrong knew, and understood as much as anybody the hardships of space and that is why this action-adventure, science-fiction story is dedicated to him.
The Author would like to gratefully thank Alexander Wade (13), his son, for his many hours of research into nuclear reactors, space flight and astro-engineering to make this story as close to reality as possible for you the reader.
Alexander—a big THANK-YOU!
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Iraq
Chapter 2
The Private Space Race
Chapter 3
Jonesy, meet VIN
Chapter 4
The start of an adventure
Chapter 5
Do I see a C-5 Galaxy over there?
Chapter 6
Do we have a job?
Chapter 7
Training and Deployment
Chapter 8
Maggie Sinclair
Chapter 9
Richmond Field, Nevada
Chapter 10
Nellis Air Force Base, Las Vegas
Chapter 11
A complete flight crew
Chapter 12
DX2014
Chapter 13
A lot of water goes under the bridge
Chapter 14
Final testing
Chapter 15
The second last Christmas for many
Chapter 16
Nearly The Whole Plan
Chapter 17
The Final Frontier
Chapter 18
A whole month!
Chapter 19
The flight of Sierra Bravo II
Chapter 20
The Russian “Beer Can” goes high!
Chapter 21
22,500 miles in space
Chapter 22
DX2014 – Asteroid Mining
Chapter 23
New Hydrogen Thrusters
Chapter 24
DX2014 – Can we get them back?
Chapter 1
Iraq
Victor Isaac Noble, or Lieutenant VIN as his men called him, was a million miles away from the U.S. space race when the Humvee he was hitching a ride back to Baghdad in blew up around him.
He was returning from a couple of months in the desert, west-north-west of Baghdad, tracking known Iranian insurgents; their mission was to transport IED-making equipment for pro-Iranian explosive experts who would lay waste to U.S. military vehicles on the major highways around the capital city.
VIN, a lieutenant with the United States Marine Corps, Force Reconnaissance, or Force Recon for short, was in charge of a five-man team searching a large desolate area of desert around a small Iraqi town called Balad Ruz. The dusty, desert town was northwest of Baghdad with direct road access to the Iranian border.
At twenty-six, he was a young man like all the team members around him, and exactly six feet tall. His parents—his father of English and his mother of Irish descent—hailed from New Jersey, over the river from Manhattan. VIN’s brown hair was from his father’s side of the family. His slightly darker skin tone and bright blue eyes from his mother’s side, as was his Irish build: strong, broad and muscular, as she told him the Irish were.
He and his men were camouf
laged by night atop a dark rocky ridge waiting for any movement from the direction of Iran. The moon hadn’t risen yet, but they could just hear the sound of truck engines faintly echoing down the valley in front of them. It was known that several high-ranking Iraqi officers came from the surrounding area, and there could be ties to them and the Iranians over the border.
The year was 2010. U.S. forces were beginning to leave Iraq and several politicians in Iraq and the neighboring countries wanted to expedite the American’s willingness to leave.
During the several weeks Lieutenant Noble and his men had spent in the area, they had noticed tracks of American-made tires coming across the desolate hilly border westwards under the cover of darkness every eight days; the trucks were loaded with explosives.
Several hundred feet below them on the narrow valley floor, two unmarked, desert-camouflaged five-ton American M939 gun-trucks slowly negotiated their way along the rough and dusty fifteen-mile stretch of dirt road from the border towards Balad Ruz. The truck was preceding without lights, the driver using night goggles.
“We can take them out here?” whispered his second-in-command next to him.
“No, we need to keep them in sight and find out where they are going. If we are lucky we can take them out on the next trip, or on their way home,” Lieutenant Noble replied. “The UAV can do the work for us and track the trucks, but I think it’s possible to get more information from live prisoners at their destination before we take them out.”
Lieutenant Noble continued to watch the slow moving vehicles through his night vision goggles while his second-in-command texted on his communication device, sending the trucks’ coordinates to the ever-present UAV, the unmanned MQ-1 Predator drone several miles to their south and 20,000 feet above them.
For the next hour, the drone, which had computed the information, had moved north to position the trucks on its night-vision video feed, and to monitor where the vehicles were heading.
An hour before dawn, the slow moving trucks entered the small town of Balad Ruz and within minutes had disappeared into one of the larger buildings in the center of town. The UAV’s live feed was being seen by VIN and his men, and his commander back at base, through their communications devices. The building was noted and they headed back five miles towards town.
It was dawn by the time they reached the outskirts of the town. VIN and his desert team were already dressed in attire to make them look like local villagers, and it was easy to walk through the dirty streets of the town. If the townsfolk were up and about, very few would notice or talk to strangers.
When they entered the area four weeks earlier, Force Recon had set them up with three camels to carry their long-range supplies. Unbeknownst to the last camel, it carried enough explosives to blow the group to bits.
The town was quiet as the men walked through the slowly awakening streets. Like a cowboy movie, they were silhouetted by the sun rising over the horizon; they were looking for the building they had seen on their communicator’s live feed. The team had walked through the same town three times in the last couple of weeks and hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary.
Within thirty minutes they found the building, a shabby car repair shop with a door big enough to allow the military trucks through. Lieutenant Noble noticed two men hanging around and talking outside the front of the building’s closed door, and they passed by, hardly looking in that direction.
Lieutenant Noble, with a small video cam hidden in the jewel of his cloth headdress, sent more live feed to the drone as he walked the first camel past the two men. Sergeant Bradley, the team’s second-in-command, took waypoints of the location of the building on his communication devise held underneath his robes as he led the second camel with his other hand.
They stopped for water at the well and an hour later left town at the western edge to go back into the hills. Hopefully the two men they passed had not noticed anything out of place.
“How do you want to take out the building?” texted VIN several hours later, once they had hidden themselves in a cave. It was time for their daily report.
“How far are the closest locals’ houses from the target?” texted back Colonel Mike Jackson from central headquarters in Baghdad. The colonel had seen everything through the “eyes” of the drone, but needed more information before making a decision.
“Just one street, twenty feet wide,” was the reply.
“Too close for comfort. I think it’s better if you guys go in and dismantle the factory after dark. I would prefer a captive from the transport vehicles, but I think that the men inside the building could know as much as the drivers. I suspect they and the drivers are from the other side of the border. You take care of the building tonight and the guy above you can take out the trucks. I will send a team chopper in once the vehicles are dealt with. Get some rest and plan to go in an hour after the trucks leave. The trucks certainly won’t leave before nightfall, and we can take them out at around the same time you go in. Get in close after dark and I’ll call you when they leave.”
“Roger that,” texted VIN, shutting his communicator’s protective lid and working his way back into the coolness of the cave to get some sleep.
By midnight, the team of six had moved closer to the outskirts of the town; they were now dressed in their usual U.S. military desert camouflage with backpacks full of the explosives and ammo the camel had been happy to be relieved of a couple of hours earlier.
The night was dark, and a sliver of a crescent moon gave them just enough light on the rocks and sand to backtrack their way into town without night goggles. The goggles narrowed their surrounding vision too much. The buildings were dark, and there was only the noise of a couple of barking dogs in the distance as they neared. Then they waited for the confirmation that the trucks had left.
Being several feet higher than the nearest buildings half a mile away, they could just hear the trucks grind gears as, they slowly moved down the streets towards the east. The echoes of the moving vehicles could be faintly heard over the chorus of the dozen or more dogs which now heralded their departure. On time, the message arrived from the drone looking down at them.
With the dogs now alert and noisy, they quickly entered town as the trucks left, set up position behind the car repair shop, and crowded into a dark shadow behind a small outer building. The men realized by the smell that it was an outhouse and the area in front of the small building lit up as someone stepped outside from the car repair shop’s back door to use it.
With the door still slightly ajar, the last thing the user of the outhouse saw was a dark shape and the “sput” and flash of a silenced Glock as it blew his head off. In an awkward and embarrassing position, the remains of the dead man slumped over.
Lieutenant Noble waited behind the rear wall of the outhouse for a few minutes to allow the trucks to get away from the town and then over the first brow of the terrain a mile away. Even though it was not the most pleasant of places, the outhouse kept their human smells masked from any dogs around them. Gradually the noise of the animals decreased to just one or two barking in the distance.
After several minutes, a second man exited, maybe to use the outhouse, or find out where his colleague was. This was the man VIN Noble hoped would be easy prey to take with them. As the man opened the door to the dark interior of the smelly wooden room, he felt a severe and sharp pain atop his head; and then nothing more.
“Joey, Pete, you guys get this guy back to the cave. The four of us will take care of the rest,” whispered the lieutenant to two of his men. “If we aren’t back by midday call up transport and get back to base.”
The two men nodded, one lifting the unconscious man up over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift, and they silently headed out of town.
Ten minutes later, and with no more men coming out of the still slightly ajar door, VIN silently went forward. He tried to peer through the small slit, and even opened it a few inches only to see that his view of the interior of the badly-lit bu
ilding was interrupted by a solid four-foot “wall” of old boxes and pieces of wood haphazardly thrown near the rear door. The “wall” was about to fall over, it looked so bad. What he managed to read on the pieces of wood and the odd carton interested him; it was in what looked like Russian.
On the other side of the boxes he could hear several voices talking to each other, and he motioned for the men to ready their pistols with silencers; three of them crept through the door while the fourth man was ordered to stay outside and cover their backs.
Slowly the lieutenant rose to a semi-upright position, but kept his upper body below the line of trash so that he wouldn’t be seen. There was laughter from the other side, and so far he had heard several different voices.
Inch by inch he rose until a slit between two wooden planks gave him a view. He could see more than half a dozen men working at tables with piles of what looked like white plastic explosives and detonators. All of the men wore the local dress, but one man sounded and looked different. He was in the middle, taller than the rest, and was showing one of the locals how to put together a suicide vest: a belt of explosives to be worn under garments. The lieutenant couldn’t see more, but he already realized that with the most recent shipment, if the drone had taken out this building, there were enough explosives to blow up half the town.
He made the easy decision not to harm the surrounding civilians and knelt down to signal the two men on his left. With hand signals he motioned that when he rose to fire, the smallest man in the group, Sergeant Bradley, was to roll out from behind the “wall” into the open room and shoot to kill. Corporal Gibbs, his third-in-command would stand up with VIN and shoot from the left side inwards. He showed them with more signs that a tall man in the middle would be his target and that VIN wanted him alive. VIN would wound the man and then work from him across the right side of the group. They nodded and he counted down with three of his fingers.
VIN and Gibbs stood up, their tall six-foot frames visible a couple of feet above the wall; Sergeant Bradley rolled out on the side.
The taller man in the middle of the group, noticing movement from the back door area, looked up as a silenced bullet sliced through his right arm. For a split second Noble noticed the man’s piercing pale blue eyes as his own eyes moved along the line of men, his silenced Glock searching and hitting new targets next to the man with the blue eyes.
