The Titicaca Effect

by Richard N. Tooker

  Freeman pulled a folded note out of his jeans pocket and handed it to Segurola. “I think whatever you say should be your own words, but hold onto this just in case you can’t think of anything. Don’t read it unless you’re really stuck.”

  Segurola nodded and stuck the note into a pocket on the sleeve of his spacesuit. “I’ll think of something to say,” he said.

  A horn sounded indicating the beginning of the launch sequence, and four technicians came from the back of the hanger to help the astronauts get into the spacecraft. The crew and technicians climbed over and around the steel framework that held the thruster assemblies, looking for all the world, Freeman thought, like kids on a jungle gym. Within a few minutes, the cargo carrier would begin moving toward the pipe, a trip that would take approximately 20 minutes. By the time the spacecraft and crew were in place, the schedule called for them to be an hour and 12 minutes from launch, plenty of time to double- and triple-check the communications and propulsion systems aboard the lifting body that would bring the astronauts home.

  The flight plan, designed to prove much more than just the ability to launch and return safely to earth, called for Segurola to exit the Titicaca Effect at 22,236 miles, the altitude required to establish a geosynchronous orbit, stay over Bolivia for two hours, then descend into a lower, near-earth 160-mile-high orbit. They would stay there for two full orbits before lining up for the return. NASA, which was consulting on the launch under contract from the Bolivian Space Commission, had wanted the spacecraft to land at Cape Canaveral to take advantage of pre-existing facilities. But for purely symbolic reasons, Freeman had insisted on a flight plan that would return Condor One to Bolivia.

  The runway at the La Paz El Alto airport, more than 13,000 feet long and used daily by mid-size commercial jets, was more than long enough to handle the small spacecraft, even with the additional landing speed required because of the altitude. If Condor One were to land at Cape Canaveral, it would then have to be returned to Bolivia the way it had reached the spaceport to begin with, piggy-backed atop a 747, a much trickier and more dangerous landing than simply landing the spacecraft at El Alto. The only real problem in landing there was the need to avoid the mountain peaks surrounding the airport, which wasn’t a problem except during bad weather. The tallest in the area was, of course, Illimani, at more than 18,000 feet. That monumental peak had claimed nearly 30 lives aboard a United Airlines flight in January, 1985, but that was during a rainstorm.

  Today’s weather at the airport was clear, crisp, and relatively windless for the altiplano. Any competent pilot could handle the landing if he were checked out in the lifting body, and Segurola was one of the best in the world.

  Freeman took his daughter by the hand and walked out of the hanger and into the bright morning sunshine to watch the cargo carrier as it began slowly rolling on its wide-spaced rails toward the bridge trusses suspended over the launch area. President Maldonado followed them, trailed by the ever-present camera crew, and the two men talked about details of the launch, the flight plan, contingencies in case there were technical problems, and plans for the follow-up launches that would begin within ten days if everything went right today. Espaciopuerto De La Titicaca was about to begin regular operations.

  As Condor One began to roll, they walked alongside the cargo carrier, Freeman mentally counting down the time remaining for it to reach its destination. He kept a watchful eye on the surrounding expanse of concrete, looking for any sign of a security breach. It was comforting to see the soldiers that were standing at attention 50 feet back from either side of the tracks, each man no further than 20 feet from the next in line. They had automatic rifles at the ready. Maldonado didn’t seem to be worried about Manco Capac, the Chinese, or all the other assorted crazies that seemed to be everywhere in the world, but Freeman certainly was, and he had insisted on very tight security arrangements. The row of soldiers required more personnel than the international security force had available so it had been supplemented by the Bolivian military, men chosen from the Bolivian equivalent to the U.S. Secret Service, the Palace Guard, already cleared for presidential-level security.

  When they reached the launch area, now essentially a gigantic, dam-dried crater adjacent to the island, they stopped about 30 feet from the edge to watch. “Don’t go any closer to the edge, Janey,” Freeman told his daughter. She nodded and sat down on the pavement to watch, cross-legged.

  The technicians who would double-check the clamps that would secure the cargo carrier to the reinforced concrete bridge trusses suspended over the crater followed the carrier as it moved onto the trusses. Two of them were readying the power umbilical that would supply electricity to Condor One during the pre-launch countdown, to be automatically jettisoned and withdrawn 60 seconds before the Titicaca Effect began erupting. The camera crew, by pre-arrangement, moved to within a few feet of the edge of the crater about 75 feet from the bridge, a vantage point that would give them the best angle and sunlight for recording the preparations. Of course, everyone except the crew aboard the spacecraft would have to fall back to a safer distance before the eruption, but that was still well more than an hour away.

  Condor One moved slowly onto the bridge trusses, rolling to its final stop in the center of the crater where it would rest a little more than 70 feet above what had been the lake bottom. Four other technicians had joined the four making the walk from the hanger and were swarming over the thruster frame, checking the engine fittings again. In a few minutes, the automatic clamps that would secure the cargo carrier to the trusses would deploy, leaving the spacecraft and thruster frame free to fall upward toward space within the antigravity field. Freeman smiled. Everything was going according to plan.

  Suddenly, a huge explosion followed by a 150-foot-wide fireball roared from the bottom of the crater directly beneath the cargo carrier. The concussion knocked Freeman and Maldonado off their feet, both men rolling across the tarmac driven by the intense heat from the blast. Freeman struggled to remain conscious as he rolled to a stop, his hands and arms bleeding, his ears ringing, and his face seared from the heat of the explosion. He almost blacked out from the pain, only the sheer force of his will keeping him from slipping into unconsciousness.

  “Janey!” he yelled in panic. He couldn’t see his daughter anywhere. He tried to stand but couldn’t, pain stabbing at his body from all directions.

  “Daddy...” he heard her moan. Her voice sounded ragged and distant, further away from the crater. He dragged himself in the direction her voice had come from, through the smoke and debris that littered the tarmac, continuing to call her name. She didn’t respond.

  He finally found her lying next to Maldonado. She was unconscious and bleeding profusely from a gaping wound on her leg. He stripped off his shirt and used it to tie a tight compress across the wound, which stopped the bleeding, at least externally. He felt her pulse, which seemed to be strong, then checked her over for other injuries. Finding nothing but scrapes and bruises and satisfied that her life wasn’t in danger for the moment, he turned his attention to Maldonado. The president lay motionless and bleeding from the face, ears, and hands. His black suit had been shredded by the rough concrete. His left arm was bent at an impossible angle, obviously broken, and his shoes were gone. Freeman felt for a pulse and found one, but it was weak. At least the president was alive.

  The scene at the crater was bedlam. The force of the explosion had torn three of the technicians working on the thruster frame free from their safety lines, and all three had been blown completely across the crater where their bodies lay in a bleeding heap. They were surely dead. Three more technicians had been stopped from falling by their harnesses, but they hung limply from the concrete trusses, suspended by those harnesses over the crater. Two members of the news crew had also fallen into the crater. One was moving around, the other lay motionless. Even worse, the intense heat of the fireball had ignited two of the ascent thrusters, which were lifting the thruster frame and the spacecraft off the
cargo carrier in slow motion, skewing it sideways. It was obviously about to drop into the crater, and there was nothing anyone could do to control it or stop it from happening.

  Watching the carnage in the control room from the single television camera that had not been destroyed in the blast, Thaddeus Stout shouted into the communication system, “Everyone who can walk, get to the crater now! We need ropes, cables, trucks with winches, anything that can be used to pull people out of the crater down there immediately!” He froze as he watched the thruster frame and Condor One tip over and fall into the crater, spinning crazily from the thruster acceleration as it fell.

  He glanced down at the countdown clock on the console in front of him. It was now 62 minutes until eruption, and he knew that anyone still alive in the crater when it came would surely die. That included the five astronauts, it could include the President of the Republic of Bolivia, and quite possibly his best friend, Tyler Freeman. He ran outside just in time to jump into a Hummer driven by a burly security guard who had grabbed as much rope as he could carry and thrown it into the back of the vehicle. They headed for the crater, tires squealing.

  Alicia Montoya had been conferring with the news pool director in the communications tent when she heard the explosion. The video pool feed from the crater had gone instantly blank, so she ducked out of the tent reaching the open tarmac just in time to see the huge fireball dissipate in the sky over the launch site. She was a half-mile away, but the force of the blast very nearly knocked her down. She recovered her balance and sprinted toward the crater to find Freeman and Janey.

  The spacecraft, thruster frame and pieces of the broken cargo carrier lay in a tangled pile at the bottom of the crater, and every piece of equipment within 100 yards of the blast appeared damaged beyond use or even repair. Freeman had finally managed to get to his feet and send for help to move his daughter and Maldonado, both of whom were still unconscious. A Medivac unit had arrived, and the EMTs were securing them to stretchers to be taken to the infirmary. One of the EMTs held a stethoscope to the president’s chest, announcing that the heartbeat was regular, though not strong.

  Alicia arrived, breathless, and threw her arms around Freeman when she saw that he was alive. She buried her head in his chest, said a quick prayer of thanks, then said, “Tyler, you’re burned and bleeding. You need to go to the infirmary with Janey and the president.”

  “I’ve got to get to the crater,” he responded, looking dazed and in shock.

  She pointed toward the crater. Vehicles and people were converging on the launch site by the dozens, some on foot, others in every conceivable kind of vehicle. “Listen to me, Tyler,” she said firmly. “There are plenty of able-bodied people to help out down there. You’re hurt, and if you go down there now you’ll just be in the way. You’re going to get medical attention, and I’m going with you to make sure you do.”

  She pushed him toward the Medivac van, where one of the EMTs held the door open for them. Janey was regaining consciousness and groaning as the van headed for the infirmary, sirens wailing.

  Stout arrived at the crater’s edge in time to see nearly twenty military personnel descending the crater wall using ropes they had brought with them. Six others were already on the crater bottom, picking their way through the wreckage of the thruster frame and cargo carrier, trying to reach the hatch of the mangled spacecraft, which was, unfortunately, on the underside of the tangled pile of wreckage because the spacecraft had landed upside down. Two of them reached the hatch within minutes by using one of the steel girders from the thruster frame to lever the spacecraft sideways just far enough to clear the door so it could be opened. As more rescue workers arrived with ropes to lash the spacecraft securely in place, one of them opened the door and scrambled inside. “They’re alive!” he shouted, and the word was quickly passed from person to person back up the crater wall to the people looking down, including Thaddeus Stout. They cheered.

  * * *

  The damage had been devastating. A total of seven technicians and two of the journalists had died instantly, and two more succumbed to injuries within 24 hours. Most of the equipment on the site had to be replaced. Even the reinforced concrete trusses were so badly damaged that they would need to be replaced before a launch could be attempted again. Thankfully, all five of the astronauts had managed to survive the fall into the crater with only minor injuries, primarily because of the safety engineering built into the lifting body. It had been designed, after all, to survive the rigors of reentry into the earth’s atmosphere. While those stresses were not nearly as severe as the explosion, the craft’s builders had overcompensated for those foreseen stresses, which had no doubt saved the crew’s lives.

  But Condor One itself was lost. There had been barely enough time to get the crew and the rest of the dead and injured out of the crater before the Titicaca Effect erupted. The dam that held back the waters of the great blue lake held, but virtually everything that had fallen into the crater was thrown into the stratosphere by the Titicaca Effect. Of course, without the thruster assembly to keep it in the center of the antigravity field, the wreckage did not achieve orbit. Like the American Airlines flight that had been destroyed by the first eruption many months earlier, pieces of the wreckage were later found along a 200-mile footprint trailing the antigravity field as the earth rotated eastward. Fortunately, the impact area was largely unpopulated, and there were no further injuries.

  Janey’s wounds turned out to be serious enough to keep her on crutches for nearly a month after she returned home, but would not cause any permanent damage or disfigurement. She was something of a celebrity when she went back to school. All her classmates had been watching the launch attempt when the disaster happened, and she retold her story endlessly.

  An examination of the disaster site, scoured clean of debris by the eruption, turned up tell-tale traces of C4, the explosive of choice for terrorists. As soon as he regained consciousness, Maldonado issued orders for the immediate arrest of Manco Capac, who vehemently denied having any part in conceiving or carrying out the attack. He was jailed nevertheless, and reconstruction of the site began almost immediately. With the threat of further violence apparently removed, Maldonado wanted to rebuild and launch quickly, and Freeman shared his belief that they needed to get into space as rapidly as possible to calm the nerves of the now-jittery Bolivian people. One of the other two available lifting body spacecraft was on its way to the lake within days, and Condor Two was scheduled to be launched within four months.

  * * *

  It would take almost three of those months for the truth to come out. One of Manco Capac’s followers, unbeknownst to the leader of the New Empire of the Incas, had taken it upon himself to sabotage the launch with no sponsorship or help from the organization itself. He had managed to get a job on the site during construction of the dam because he had no prior arrests or record of any kind that would have revealed his intentions. Hiding the explosive in a crevice in the rock bottom of the crater was the first and only terrorist act he had ever undertaken.

  Because he was part of the construction crew assigned to keep the lake bottom free of debris, it had been a relatively easy matter for him to smuggle a thumbnail-sized, radio-controlled detonator into the crater, where he attached it to the hidden cache of C4 the day before the launch. He had triggered it himself while he was standing on the edge of the crater, and it had very nearly cost him his own life. An amateur with explosives, he had no idea how much power he had packed into the crevice. His intention had been to make a statement on behalf of Capac and his followers by disrupting the launch, not to destroy the spacecraft and kill people.

  He was never actually caught by the authorities. A deeply spiritual man, his grief and guilt over what he had done eventually led him to turn himself in and confess his crime.

  Capac, exonerated, was freed.

  Chapter 22: Condor Two

  In the weeks after the aborted attempt to launch Condor One into space, the major focus was on
security. The multinational force was still in place, but now it reported directly to General Suarez, who had been elevated in rank two stars by President Maldonado and given the authority to enforce security protocols in any way he saw fit. The general was a trusted confidant of the president, and proved to be a brilliant tactician as well.

  Suarez started by personally interviewing and reviewing the backgrounds of each member of every security team, without regard to national origin. Virtually every country that was a part of the multinational security force lodged a protest, including the U.S., but Suarez stood his ground and Freeman backed him up. They were told they could cooperate or withdraw, at their option. Grudgingly, they submitted to the scrutiny, which created some uncomfortable political situations when Suarez rejected personnel from both France and Russia.

  The general also required new and much more rigorous background checks of the non-military personnel who worked at the spaceport, primarily Bolivians of Indian descent. He was accused of ethnic profiling, a characterization he took no issue with, saying simply that profiling was necessary if security was to be assured. The approach turned out to be the right one. During the investigations, three more workers were found to have ties to the New Empire of the Incas and two turned out to be Peruvians masquerading as Bolivians. All were summarily dismissed and banned from the site without appeal.