by Dale Brown
They had a short high subsonic cruise out over the Pacific coast to the refueling area, and then a rendezvous with an Air Battle Force KC-77 tanker. The secret of the Black Stallion spaceplane program was the inflight refueling, where they took on a full load of jet fuel and oxidizer right before blasting into orbit—instead of launching from zero altitude in the thickest part of the atmosphere, they would begin the cruise into space from twenty-five thousand feet and three hundred knots, in far less dense air.
Refueling always seemed to take forever in every aircraft Whack had ever flown in, especially the big intercontinental-range jet transports, but the Black Stallion took even longer because they actually required three consecutive refuelings: the first to top off the jet fuel tanks, since they didn’t take off with a full load and needed a refueling right away; the second to top off the large borohydrogen tetroxide oxidizer—BOHM, nicknamed “boom”—tanks; and a third to top off the jet fuel tanks once more right before the boost into space. Filling the JP-7 jet fuel tanks went fairly quickly each time, but filling the large BOHM tanks took well over an hour because the boron and enhanced hydrogen peroxide mixture was thick and soupy. It was easy to feel the XR-A9 get heavier and noticeably more sluggish as the tanks were being filled, and every now and then the pilot needed to stroke the afterburners on the big LPDRS engines to keep up with the tanker.
Macomber spent the time checking intel updates downloaded to his on-board computers on their target area and studying the maps and information, but he was starting to get frustrated because precious little new data seemed to be coming in, and boredom was setting in. That was dangerous. Although they didn’t have to prebreathe oxygen before this flight, as they would if they were going to wear a space suit, they couldn’t take their helmets off during refueling operations; and unlike Wohl, who could take a combat catnap anywhere and anytime, like right now, Macomber couldn’t sleep before a mission. So he reached into his personal kit bag attached to the bulkhead and…
…to Turlock’s stunned amazement, pulled out a ball of red yarn and two knitting needles, which already had a section of knitted material strung on them! He found it amazingly easy to manipulate the needles with the Tin Man armored gloves, and before long he was picking up speed and almost at his normal work pace.
“Crew, this is S-Two,” Turlock said on intercom, “you guys are not going to believe this.”
“What is it?” the spacecraft commander, U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Lisette “Frenchy” Moulain asked, the concern thick in her voice. There was normally very little conversation during aerial refueling—anything said on the open ship-wide intercom was usually an emergency. “Do we need a disconnect…?”
“No, no, SC, not an emergency,” Charlie said. She leaned forward in her seat to get a better look. Macomber was seated ahead of her and on the opposite side of the passenger module, and she strained in her straps to see all the way into his lap. “But it is definitely a shocker. The major appears to be…knitting.”
“Say again?” Jim Terranova asked. The Black Stallion spaceplane burbled momentarily as if the spacecraft commander was momentarily so stunned that she almost flew out of the refueling envelope. “Did you say ‘knitting’? Knitting…as in, a ball of yarn, knitting needles…knitting?”
“Affirmative,” Charlie said. Chris Wohl, who was seated beside Macomber, woke up and looked over at Macomber for a few seconds, the surprise evident even through his helmet and Tin Man body armor, before he dropped back off to catnap again. “He’s got the needles, the red ball of yarn, the ‘knit one purl two’ thing going, the whole show. Martha friggin’ Stewart right over here.”
“Are you shitting me?” Terranova exclaimed. “Our resident bad-ass snake-eating commando is knitting?”
“He looks sooo cute, too,” Charlie said. Her voice changed to that of a young child’s: “I can’t tell if he’s making a cute widdle doily, or maybe it’s a warm and cozy sweater for his widdle French poodle, or maybe it’s a—”
In a blur of motion that Turlock never really saw, Macomber withdrew another knitting needle from his kit bag, twisted to his left, and threw it at Turlock. The needle whistled just to the right of her helmet and buried itself three inches deep into her seat’s headrest.
“Why, you motherfucker…!” Turlock exclaimed, pulling the needle out. Macomber waved at her with his armored fingers, grinning beneath his bug-eyed helmet, then turned and went back to his knitting.
“What in hell is going on back there?” Moulain asked angrily.
“Just thought since the captain was talking baby talk that maybe she wanted to try knitting too,” Whack said. “You want the other one, Turlock?”
“Take off that helmet and I’ll give it back to you—right between your eyes!”
“You jerks knock it off—maintain radio discipline,” Moulain ordered. “The most critical part of aerial refueling and you bozos are farting around like little snot-nosed kids. Macomber, are you really knitting?”
“What if I am? It relaxes me.”
“You didn’t get clearance from me to bring knitting stuff on board. Put that shit away.”
“Come back here and make me, Frenchy.” There was silence. Macomber glanced over at Wohl—the only one on the spacecraft who probably could make him, if he wanted to—but he looked like he was still asleep. Whack was sure he wasn’t, but he made no move to intervene.
“You and I are going to have a little talk when we get home, Macomber,” Moulain said ominously, “and I’ll explain to you in terms I hope you can understand the authority and responsibilities of the spacecraft commander—even if it takes a swift kick in your ass to make it clear.”
“Looking forward to it, Frenchy.”
“Good. Now knock off the horseplay, put away any nonauthorized equipment in the passenger module, and cut the chatter on the intercom, or this flight is terminated. Everyone got it?” There was no response. Macomber shook his head but put away his knitting stuff as directed, smiling at the feeling of Turlock’s angry glare on the back of his helmet. The rest of the refueling was carried out with only normal call-outs and responses.
After refueling was completed, they subsonically cruised northward along the coast for about an hour, flying loose formation with the KC-77—it was now easy for the tanker to keep up with the Black Stallion since the spaceplane was so heavy. They hooked up with the tanker once again to top off the JP-7 tanks, which didn’t take long, and then the tanker headed back to base. “Orbital insertion checklist programmed hold, crew,” Terranova reported. “Report in when your checklist is complete.”
“S-One, wilco,” Macomber growled. Yet another checklist. He called up the electronic checklist on his helmet’s electronic data visor and used the eye-pointing cursor and voice commands to check off each item, which mostly dealt with securing loose items, checklisting the oxygen panel, cabin pressurization, yada yada yada. It was all busywork that a computer could check easily, so why have humans do it themselves? Probably some touchy-feely human engineering thing to make the passengers feel they were something else other than exactly what they were: passengers. Whack waited until Turlock and Wohl completed their checklists, checked his off as complete, then spoke, “MC, S-One, checklist complete.”
“Roger. Checklist complete up here. Stand by for orbital insertion burn, crew.”
It all sounded very routine and quite boring, just like the endless simulator sessions they made him take, so Macomber began thinking about the target area in Soltanabad once again. Updated satellite images confirmed the presence of heavy-vehicle tire tracks again but did not reveal what they were—whoever was down there was very good at keeping the vehicles hidden from satellite view. The Goose drones were not much better than the space-based radar network in detecting very small targets, but maybe they needed to stay away from the highway airstrip and send in the Goose drones first to get a real-time look before…
…and suddenly the LPDRS engines kicked in, not in turbojet mode but now in hybri
d rocket mode, and Macomber was suddenly and violently thrust back into the here and now. No simulator could prepare you for the shove—it felt like hitting a football tackle training sled except it was completely unexpected, the sled was hitting you instead of the other way around, and the force was not only sustained but increasing every second. Soon it felt like the entire offensive line had piled on top of him, being joined shortly by the defensive line as well. Whack knew he could call up data readouts about their altitude, speed, and G-force levels, but it was all he could do just to concentrate on his breath control to fight off the G-force effects and keep from blacking out.
The G-forces seemed to last an hour, although he knew the boost into orbit only took seven or eight minutes. When the pressure finally eased, he felt exhausted, as if he had just finished running the stadium stairs at the Academy before football season, or jogging across the Iraqi desert with a hundred-pound pack.
Obviously his labored breathing was loud enough to be heard on the intercom, because a few moments later Charlie Turlock asked, “Still feel like farting around with your knitting needles, Macomber?”
“Bite me.”
“Get your barf bag ready, Major,” Charlie continued gaily, “because I’m not cleaning up after you if you spew in the module. I’ll bet the macho commando didn’t take his anti-motion-sickness medication.”
“Cut the chatter and run your ‘After Orbital Insertion Burn’ checklists,” Moulain said.
Macomber’s breathing quickly returned to normal—more from embarrassment than by will. Damn, he thought, that hit him too suddenly, and a lot harder than he’d expected. Getting back into a routine would surely take his mind off his queasiness, and the Air Battle Force was nothing if not driven by checklists and routine. He used his eye-pointing system to call up the proper checklist by looking at a tiny icon in the upper left corner of his electronic visor and speaking…
…but instead of issuing a command, all he could manage was a throatful of bile. Scanning the electronic visor with his eyes suddenly gave him the worst case of vertigo he had ever experienced—he felt as if he was being swung upside down by the ankles on a rope, suspended a hundred feet aboveground. He couldn’t stop the spinning sensation; he lost all sense of up and down. His stomach churned as the spinning intensified, a thousand times worse than the worst case of the spins and leans he had ever had on the worst all-night party in his life…
“Better clear the major off-helmet, Frenchy,” Charlie said, “’cause it sounds like he’s ready to blow lunch.”
“Screw you, Turlock,” Macomber meant to say, but all that came out was a gurgle.
“You’re cleared off-helmet, S-One, module pressurization in the green,” Moulain said. “I hope you kept a barf bag handy—vomit in free fall is the most disgusting thing you’ve ever seen in your life, and you might be too sick to do your job.”
“Thanks a bunch,” Macomber said through gritted teeth, trying to hold back the inevitable until he got the damned Tin Man helmet off. Somehow he managed to unfasten his helmet—he had no idea where it floated off to. Unfortunately the first bag he could reach was not a motion sickness bag—it was the personal bag containing his knitting stuff. To his shock and dismay, he quickly found that vomit in free fall didn’t behave as he expected: instead of filling the bottom of his bag in a disgusting but controllable clump, it curled back into a smelly, chunky cloud right back up into his face, eyes, and nose.
“Don’t let it out, Whack!” he heard Turlock yell from behind him. “We’ll spend the next hour Dustbustering globs of barf out of the module.” That bit of imagery didn’t help to settle his stomach one bit, nor did the awful smell and feel of warm vomit wafting across his face inside the bag.
“Relax, big guy,” he heard a voice say. It was Turlock. She had unstrapped and was holding his shoulders, steadying his convulsions and helping seal the bag around his head. He tried to shrug her hands off, but she resisted. “I said relax, Whack. It happens to everyone, drugs or no drugs.”
“Get away from me, bitch!”
“Shut up and listen to me, asshole,” Charlie insisted. “Ignore the smell. The smell is the trigger. Remove it from your consciousness. Do it, or you’ll be a vegetable for the next three hours minimum. I know you bad-ass commando types know how to control your senses, your breathing, and even your involuntary muscles so you can endure days of discomfort in the field. Hal Briggs fought on for several minutes after being shot up by the Iranians…”
“Screw Briggs, and screw you, too!”
“Pay attention, Macomber. I know you can do this. Now is the time to turn whatever you got on. Concentrate on the smell, isolate it, and eliminate it from your consciousness.”
“You don’t know shit…”
“Just do it, Wayne. You know what I’m telling you. Just shut up and do it, or you’ll be as wasted as if you’ve been on a three-day bender.”
Macomber was still blindingly angry at Turlock for being right there with him at this most vulnerable moment, taking advantage of him, but what she said made sense—she obviously knew something about the agony he was experiencing. The smell, huh? He never thought about smell that much—he was trained to be hypersensitive to sight, sound, and the indefinable sixth sense that always warned of nearby danger. Smell was usually a confusing factor, something to be disregarded. Shut it down, Whack. Shut it off.
Somehow, it worked. He knew that breathing through his mouth cut off the sense of smell, and when he did that a lot of the nausea went away. His stomach was still doing painful knots and waves of roiling convulsions, as bad as if he had been stabbed in the gut, but now the trigger of those awful spasms was gone, and he was back in control. Sickness was not allowable. He had a team counting on him, a mission to perform—his damned weak stomach was not going to be the thing that let his team and his mission down. A few pounds of muscle and nerve endings were not going to control him. The mind is the master, he reminded himself, and he was the master of the mind.
A few moments later, with his stomach empty and the aroma erased from his consciousness, his stomach quickly started to return to normal. “You okay?” Charlie asked, offering him a towelette.
“Yeah.” He accepted the wipe and began to clean up, but stopped and nodded. “Thanks, Turlock.”
“Sorry about the shit I gave you about the knitting.”
“I get it all the time.”
“And you usually bust somebody’s head for ragging on you, except it was me and you weren’t going to bust my head?”
“I would have if I could’ve reached you,” Whack said. Charlie thought he meant it until he smiled and chuckled. “Knitting relaxes me, and it gives me a chance to see who gets in my shit and who leaves me be.”
“Sounds like a screwed-up way to live, boss, if you don’t mind me sayin’,” Charlie said. He shrugged. “If you’re okay, drink some water and stay on pure oxygen for a while. Use the vacuum to clean up any pieces of vomit you see before we re-enter, or we’ll never find them and they’ll become projectiles. If they stick on our gear the bad guys will smell it yards away.”
“You’re right, Tur—Charlie,” Whack said. As she headed back to her seat, he added, “You’re all right, Turlock.”
“Yes, I am, boss,” she replied. She found his helmet lodged somewhere in the cargo section in the back of the passenger module and handed it back to him. “Just don’t you forget it.” She then detached the cleanup vacuum from its recharging station and floated it over to him as well. “Now you really look like Martha Stewart, boss.”
“Don’t push it, Captain,” he growled, but he smiled and took the vacuum.
“Yes, sir.” She smiled, nodded, and returned to her seat.
PRESIDENT’S RETREAT, BOLTINO, RUSSIA
A SHORT TIME LATER
They didn’t always meet like this to make love. Both Russian president Leonid Zevitin and minister of foreign affairs Alexandra Hedrov loved classic black-and-white movies from all over the world, Italian foo
d, and rich red wine, so after a long day of work, especially with a long upcoming trip ready to begin, they often stayed after the rest of the staff had been dismissed and shared some time together. They had become lovers not long after they first met at an international banking conference in Switzerland almost ten years earlier, and even as their responsibilities and public visibility increased they still managed to find the time and opportunity to get together.
If either of them was concerned about the whispered rumors of their affair, they showed no sign of it. Only the tabloids and celebrity blogs spoke of it, and those were all but dismissed by most Russians—certainly no one in the Kremlin would ever wag their tongues about such things and about such powerful people in anything louder than a quiet thought. Hedrov was married and was the mother of two grown children, and they long ago learned that their lives, as well as the life of their wife and mother, belonged to the state now, not to themselves.
The president’s dacha was the closest to security and privacy than anything else they could ever expect in the Russian Federation. Unlike the president’s official residence in the Senate Building at the Kremlin, which was rather unassuming and utilitarian, Zevitin’s dacha outside Moscow was modern and stylish, fit for any international business executive. Like the man itself, the place revolved around work and business, but it was hard to discern that at first glance.
