by Mike Jenne
Wolcott shrugged. “Mark, we have no control over the Block Two, if that’s the steer you’re lookin’ to rope. Right now, the boys at MIT are totally focused on getting Apollo to the moon, and they don’t have much time left over for us. I can’t push them to deliver.”
“Okay,” said Tew. “Let’s look at the worst case scenario. Realistically, can we even fly without the Block Two?”
“Yes and no,” answered Heydrich. “Ja, I think that we can prepare at least two crews to execute by June, with just the existing hardware. But one of the critical milestones is that we validate a full-up forty-eight-hour simulation by January. That’s one of the items you’ll be briefing at the next In-Progress Review, Mark.”
“Gunter, I am painfully aware of that. How close are we to clocking forty-eight hours?”
“We ain’t, boss.” Wolcott sniffed. “Not by a long shot. None of the crews have crossed the twenty-four-hour line yet, so it ain’t extremely likely that they’ll make forty-eight hours before we brief Hugh Kittredge. But in any event, if anyone can pull it off, I would lay my money on Carson.”
“So, Gunter, what’s your assessment?” asked Tew. “Can we make it by January?”
“At this point, I agree with Virgil that Carson is our strongest contender to make the forty-eight-hour mark by January,” answered Heydrich. “Of course, Carson can’t do it by himself, so all of this is contingent on finding someone to fill that right-hand seat.”
“Could you excuse us a minute, Gunter?” asked Wolcott.
Heydrich nodded, stood up, picked up his notebooks, and headed for the door. “I’ll be outside,” he said over his shoulder.
“Virgil, we need to make this quick,” said Tew, glancing at his Timex watch. “I have a doctor’s appointment in twenty minutes.”
“Ulcers acting up again?” asked Wolcott.
Tew nodded solemnly. “Heart, too. Virgil, this damned Project is killing me. Literally.” He screwed the lid back on the blue bottle. “So what’s on your mind?”
Wolcott leaned back and folded his arms across his chest. “Look, after everything we’ve been through over the years, this is as close as we’ve ever come to puttin’ our guys in orbit. Mark, we are so close. Ain’t you willin’ to stretch the truth just a hair?”
Tew shook his head. “No, Virgil. As much as I want to put someone up there, I am not willing to deceive anyone, including Hugh Kittredge, just to make it happen. Either we make the milestone or we don’t. It’s yes or no, black or white. No wiggle room, friend.”
Flustered, Wolcott put his elbows on the table and rested his chin in his hands. “Mark, pardner, I’m beggin’ you to reconsider. We’ve been killin’ ourselves for the past two years, and it all boils down to whether you’re willing to fudge just one little bullet on a briefing chart. You know full well we won’t launch a crew in June if we’re not ready, but we will be ready by then. Please, Mark, just this once, please be willing to bend a little.”
“No.”
Wolcott looked at the ceiling, slowly shook his head, and groaned. “Okay, buddy, okay. I ain’t wantin’ to play this card, but there’s another option.”
“Virgil, there are no other options. It’s very cut and dry. We either make it to forty-eight hours by January or we don’t. That simple.”
Wolcott stood up and walked to bookshelves lining the wall behind their desks. He opened a black binder and placed it in front of Tew. The page detailed the various milestones that had to be completed at different intervals during the Project. “Right there, pardner,” he exclaimed, holding his finger on a line of text. “Right there it is, in black and white. That’s our savin’ grace.”
Tew cited the line aloud: “Demonstrate the capability to complete an unassisted non-cooperative rendezvous by successfully executing a full-profile mission simulation of forty-eight hours duration.” He sighed and added, “Virgil, we’ve covered this ground a thousand times.”
Grinning, Wolcott said, “Mark, that line says we have to successfully execute a forty-eight-hour full-up simulation, but it doesn’t explicitly specify that we complete it with a flight crew.”
“I’m obviously still missing something here, Virgil. Care to elucidate?”
“Look, Mark, Gunter is confident that Carson can make forty-eight hours. I concur. The trick is wranglin’ someone to stick in the right seat.”
“And we’ve covered that ground, too,” declared Tew. His voice had been calm, but now it was showing the first traces of anger. “We’re out of options, Virgil. There is no one else.”
“That ain’t entirely true, Mark. I think that this engineer Ourecky could stick it out for forty-eight hours. Look, pard, he’s a danged robot. The kid doesn’t sleep. He just works and works and works. So we pair him up with Carson in the Box.”
“Ourecky? Pair Carson with Ourecky? Ourecky’s not a pilot. He’s on loan to us, no less. What the hell would this prove?” Tew demanded, slamming the binder shut.
“Accordin’ to the rules as they are written, it doesn’t matter who we stick in the Box, so long as they make the forty-eight hours. Amigo, as it is, Carson and Ourecky look to be the most promising shot to clear this hurdle before January. If they’re successful, then you can go to your briefing, tell the bosses we can deliver the mail on a forty-eight-hour run, and not have to lie. That will buy us sufficient time to bring the other two crews up to speed, and it also buys us time for the Block Two to be delivered.”
Saying nothing, Tew slowly shook his head. “But what happens to Carson afterwards?”
Wolcott put his hands behind his neck and loudly cracked his knuckles, a habit that Tew found especially annoying. “Look, pard, here’s my game plan. We team Ourecky with Carson. We prove the concepts, refine the procedures, and keep Carson sharp. You’ll have your chart bullet by January. The other crews continue training. At the opportune time, we look at the other right-seaters and snatch the pick of the litter to replace Ourecky. That simple, jefe.”
“How about Ourecky? After what happened with Agnew, we would be asking a lot of him.”
“Ourecky? Pardner, Ourecky considers it a privilege just to sit in the Box. You ain’t goin’ to hear any griping from him. And besides, if we lose him, it ain’t like we’re losin’ one of our pilots.”
“I’m still not convinced, Virgil,” Tew said. “It’s a mighty convoluted scheme.” He started to reach for the blue bottle, looked at his watch, and thought better of it.
“Come on, Mark, give it a chance. There’s nothing to lose and much to be gained. Let’s not let all of our work get flushed down the tube. Give me this. No, give us this. All of us.”
“Okay, okay,” conceded Tew. “I’ll go along with this, provided that you can assure me that we can be ready in June.”
“We’ll be ready, but we’ll have to shift the line-up on the Box to give Carson and Ourecky top priority, at least until January. I’ll need you to yank some strings to arrange for Ourecky to be brought up here full-time. We can’t pull this off if we’re still time-sharin’ him with Eglin.”
“Done,” replied Tew, picking up the phone and dialing a number.
2:30 p.m.
“Busy, Virgil?” asked Jimmy Hara.
“No, come on in, pardner,” drawled Wolcott. He was seated at the conference table, trying to make sense of several stacks of paperwork before him. “What’s on your mind?
“Surveillance report, Virg. General Tew asked me to keep an eye on one of your temporary workers,” said Hara. “Captain Ourecky?”
“Yup. I do recall Mark asking you to do that,” said Wolcott, lighting a cigarette. “Look, Mark is sort of indisposed right now. Why don’t you just give it to me, hoss?”
Hara nodded and sat down across the table from Wolcott. “Virg, I recall you saying that Ourecky never leaves the base. That’s not exactly true. He’s apparently met a girl here. She’s quite a looker, too.” Hara handed Wolcott a surveillance photo taken at the Falcon Club.
“Woo doggy,”
Wolcott said, looking at the photo. “I have to agree with you there, Jimmy. What an armful. She’s a looker, all right. Got a name on her?”
“So far, just a first name: Bea. She’s apparently a stewardess.”
“Hmm,” said Wolcott. “Stewardess? You know, it’s funny. She looks a lot like that girl on TV. You know, that show with the astronaut and the . . .”
“Genie,” interjected Hara. “I thought so, too. She’s just about a dead ringer, except for the hair. Anyway, as you can see, she’s kind of hard to miss. I’ve seen her around town before Ourecky met her. I think every one of your pilots has hit on her. I watched Carson make a pass at her a few weeks ago, and he ended up going down in flames. She’s probably the only woman in Dayton who’s ever been to the Falcon Club who didn’t want to be picked up by a pilot.”
“And yet she goes out with Ourecky?” asked Wolcott, shaking his head. He sure hadn’t foreseen this situation, but he could certainly see potential problems if the relationship got more serious and Ourecky lost focus on his work.
“Sir, I really doubt that she’ll remain interested in him very long. She doesn’t strike me as someone who has an extremely long attention span with men.” Hara slid the envelope of pictures across the table to Wolcott. “Will there be anything else, Virg?” he asked.
“Yeah, Jimmy. Stay on this for a couple more weeks. Develop a more detailed background on this woman and then circle back to me.”
Hara nodded. “Virgil, if you don’t mind me asking, is there any particular reason that you’re focusing on Ourecky? He doesn’t strike me as a key player in the game, but you’re sure asking me to devote a lot of time on him.”
“Hombre, he’s about to become considerably more involved in the very near future. I s’pose you’re right about this woman, that it’s goin’ to be over as quick as it started, but we can’t afford for him to become too distracted. We also don’t want anyone paying too much attention to his comings and goings.”
“So, Virgil, you’re going to put Ourecky back in the Box with Major Carson?”
Wolcott was too surprised to respond. He had just had that conversation with Tew. Finally, he said, “So you know about that?”
Hara nodded. “With Major Carson’s track record, maybe I could give Ourecky some jiujutsu lessons,” he said, smiling. “It might level the playing field a little.”
“No, pard, I think Carson’s going to be on his best behavior from here on out,” said Wolcott. He paused and added, “Jimmy, is there anything you don’t know?”
Hara thought for a moment before replying. “Honestly, Virgil, I guess I don’t know.”
Parking Lot 20, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio
2:30 p.m., Monday, August 19, 1968
As he watched the activities in front of Hangar Three, where he suspected that alien flying saucers were stored and analyzed, Eric Yost sipped from a pint bottle of Old Crow. He had slightly more than an hour before he was due to report for his night shift assignment, so he knew that he had to taper off on the booze lest he be discovered by the snot-nosed lieutenant who lorded over the warehouse.
Yost had monitored Hangar Three for the past several weeks and was certain that something extremely odd was going on within its brick facade. His buddy, Bob Carr, at the hospital, had provided some very interesting details concerning the apparent accident back in July. At Yost’s request, Carr checked the hospital’s records and determined that the incident involved a pilot—Major Tim Agnew—who was admitted briefly to the emergency room before being placed in strict isolation on the psychiatric ward. Carr claimed that Agnew was gone two days later, with no record of transfer or other documentation concerning his disposition. He had not been discharged back to duty, nor had he been transferred to another hospital; he had just vanished. If that wasn’t strange enough, Carr swore that the official admissions register had been altered to eliminate any trace that Agnew was even there in the first place.
Presently, something fairly momentous was obviously happening at Hangar Three. It appeared as if they were making ready for a significant delivery of something. Although the hangar’s doors were opened wide, temporary traffic barriers and guards were carefully positioned to prevent any passersby from inadvertently looking inside. Moreover, curtains of white muslin “target cloth” were strategically placed inside the hangar as well. Yost saw that two massive Hyster H-100 diesel forklifts, each capable of handling up to ten thousand pounds, had been staged in the parking lot near the hangar’s entrance.
Yost couldn’t believe that they would be so audacious as to move another alien spacecraft in broad daylight, but he was curious all the same. He was on the verge of falling asleep when three semi-trailer tractors arrived, each towing a wide-body flatbed trailer loaded with variously shaped crates. As he watched men emerge from the hangar and set immediately to work, he realized that the reception had been carefully orchestrated to ensure minimal exposure of the arriving items. Billowing black smoke, the pair of heavy capacity forklifts roared into operation, quickly shuttling boxes and crates into the hangar.
The first objects unloaded were two enormous circular crates; by Yost’s estimates, they were roughly twenty feet in diameter and five feet tall. He gasped. The size and configuration of the crates lent considerable credence to his theory that Hangar Three was a repository for captured flying saucers. Now he understood how they could be delivered in plain sight without anyone—anyone who didn’t know any better, that is—paying any undue attention.
Because he had been woefully unprepared, he had no substantive evidence of the alien spacecraft he had seen a month ago. This time, he was ready. He picked up a Kodak Instamatic 104 camera—pre-loaded with a film cartridge—from the passenger seat. In the ten minutes it took for the three trailers to be unloaded and their contents moved into the hangar, Yost snapped forty-eight exposures—two entire “126” cartridges—of Kodachrome color film. Even as the hangar doors closed as the tractor-trailers pulled away, Yost quickly loaded a third film cartridge, anticipating that there may be yet another delivery.
Wanting to maintain his edge, Yost popped a Dexedrine tablet into his mouth and washed it down with a swig of bourbon. The prescription amphetamines, regularly issued to pilots in combat conditions, had been thoughtfully provided by his friend Carr. The orange pills enabled Yost to endure a typical day with less than four hours of sleep.
Capturing the UFO delivery on film was a coup, but there was yet another reason for Yost to mark this day in red letters. Obviously sensing that he was worthy of their trust, his friends at the warehouse had invited him to an after-hours poker game in Dayton. Although they played cards virtually every night, at least after the lieutenant took his leave and departed for the Officers Club, the stakes rarely exceeded matchsticks or pocket change. Tonight’s game was the real deal, according to his cohorts, with some fairly significant pots to be won.
Before putting the lid back on the plastic medicine bottle, he quickly inventoried his supply. He had five tablets left, which should be plenty enough to get him through his shift and still have at least a couple held in reserve. Although Yost considered himself to be a proficient card player and skilled gambler, he wanted to ensure that he was wide awake and alert when there was real money on the line.
18
TRUTH BE TOLD
Aerospace Support Project
10:00 a.m., Tuesday, August 20, 1968
Dreading his impending conversation with Carson, Wolcott gulped down his coffee, grabbed his Stetson, and made his way upstairs to the Blue Gemini’s Life Support facility. Manned by three civilian contractors, the facility was the repository for spacesuits, helmets, survival kits and associated equipment. Occupying almost a third of the building’s fourth floor, it consisted of a suit maintenance workshop and a climate-controlled storage chamber.
Each pilot was allocated three identical spacesuits: one for training, one for flight, and one as a back-up. Each custom-made suit cost over a hundred thousand dollars
. Designed for the harshest of environments, the multi-layered garments would protect the wearer in the absolute vacuum of space, where temperatures could easily range from 250 degrees below zero to 250 degrees above, and could change from one extreme to the other in the blink of an eye.
The suits were of a new design, adapted from a model intended for the MOL program. They were far easier to don and doff than the G3C suits worn by the NASA Gemini astronauts, and were durably constructed to be worn on multiple flights. Lacking NASA’s massive budget, the Air Force viewed the ensembles as work clothes, intended to be used over and over, instead of being worn once before being placed on permanent display in an aerospace museum.
Like a gaggle of spinsters at a quilting bee, the technicians doted over the suits, ensuring that every piece was correctly adjusted and in perfect working order. They nagged after the pilots to watch what they ate, since even the slightest weight fluctuation would cause fitting problems. They fussed whenever the pilots returned the cumbersome suits with even the slightest smudge or trace of dirt after wearing them for hours in the Box.
Carson was being fitted for his newly arrived back-up suit. A technician was helping him out of the ensemble as Wolcott arrived. Watching as the lanky pilot wiggled and squirmed to free his shoulders, the scene reminded Wolcott of a butterfly painfully emerging from a snug cocoon.
“New Sunday-go-to-meetin’ duds?” asked Wolcott. “You look mighty dapper, pard. Very spiffy. I hope your tailor can do something with those lapels, though.”
Carson laughed. “Yeah, and they need to let out the inseams a bit, too. It’s a bit snug in the crotch.” With his shoulders free, he slowly pulled the suit down until it was bunched around his waist. He then sat down on a reclining chair to allow the technician to finish tugging the suit off.
“Joel, how are you?” asked Wolcott. “Takin’ good care of my friend Carson here?”
