The Glass Lady (50 page)

“About now, Skipper,” Enright said loudly. Neither he nor Parker wore their helmets, since Enright's face was bandaged and Parker would not be able to hear his copilot if Parker had donned his own helmet. They spoke over the roar of air slamming into the windshields at 22 times the speed of sound.

Just behind the exhausted flier, Soviet cosmonaut, Alexi Karpov, leaned forward from his backseat position on the upper flightdeck to look over Enright's shoulder at the arrays of instrument panel displays.

“Bastard” was all Will Parker said when the ship's nose simply dropped out from under him. He did not shout. The word came softly and heavy with disappointment instead of anger at their sudden peril.

When the bogus PTI-7 maneuver pushed Endeavor's nose downward, the view outside the forward windows changed quickly. After five minutes of black sky illuminated by the red wall of ionized plasma, the windows filled with red gas and blue ocean. The sparkling Indian Ocean off the coast of Thailand shimmered as if viewed through a piece of cranberry stained glass.

“Runaway AP!” Jack Enright called. His pilot reflexes instantly propeled his hands toward his panel of circuit breakers and the buttons which would cut the electrical power to the ship's autopilot now on a rampage of its own.

“Command override!” Parker called. “I got it!”

With a copilot's inbred training, Enright let his left hand drop away from the control stick between his knees. When the pilot in the left seat says “I got it,” the copilot, even if his logbook boasts 10,000 hours of jet time, immediately becomes the student pilot. Enright's right hand continued to grope for the switches to disable the brain-dead automatic pilot.

“DAP inhibit,” Enright stammered. He had pulled the plug on the twin digital autopilot systems. It had taken him no more than three seconds. He could do it in his sleep.

While Enright had put DAP's lights out, Will Parker had wrapped both hands around the control column between his thighs. He did not blink for the ten seconds he wrestled with his doomed ship.

The instant Endeavor dropped her black nose, she poked her face into the molten shock wave. The nose-high angle had kept the firestorm well beneath her wings where thousands of heat-resistant black tiles of pure glass insulated her soft belly.

The cabin claxon droned loudly as the red master alarm light illuminated before each pilot's face. In the center of the instrument panel, the red CABIN DEPRESS light flashed.

Enright, now on his own internal autopilot, instinctively checked the cabin-pressure gauges for confirmation that perhaps a window seal had melted a bare heartbeat before the forward windows blew out to let in hellish death by incineration.

“No sweat, Skipper,” Enright shouted, sweating. “Ride her out!”

When Endeavor's nose went down, the sudden heat pulse over the forward cabin had heated the outside shell of the ship just enough to make it expand. When the cabin skin stretched in the heat, the inside cabin became imperceptibly larger. The cabin environmental-control sensors felt the inside air expand to fill the wider flightdeck and the low-pressure alarm was triggered by the air molecules seperating for an instant to fill the suddenly larger vessel. The ship's mechanical lungs refilled the cabin immediately, and the red light blinked off. Enright then turned off his red master alarm light. He reached in front of his captain's sweating face to press Parker's master alarm light as well.

By the time the alarms silenced, Parker had gently pulled Endeavor's charred nose back up toward the black sky still red in re-entry's glow. His pilot's steady hand had prevented his initial panic from allowing his hands to jerk Endeavor's nose skyward in a back-breaking loop. Parker did not consciously caution himself against such a lethal recovery. As a professional pilot, he understood that half of real flying is trained reflex; the rest is simply magic.

With Endeavor now down to 35 miles above the Pacific, she again flew safely nose-high. The center of the three television screens on the forward panel filled with warning alerts. The attitude-control systems were baffled by the runaway autopilot. The electronic brains which picked their way at light speed through the re-entry computer program looked toward their two human helpers for relief.

“You got it, Number One,” Will Parker said through clenched teeth. His hands slipped forward of the control stick. The three negative “G's” of slowing down made all three airmen lunge forward against their seat belts and shoulder harnesses.

“I have the con, Skip,” Jack Enright said breathlessly. Still in intense facial pain and too tired to die, Enright gripped his hands around the control stick. Endeavor would have to make the program's first completely hand-flown re-entry and landing. Make it or die. Even though the digital autopilot had been strangled to death by Enright, the computerized flight director indicator system still generated flying instructions. The pilot had only to follow its needles: pull up to catch a needle rising; bank left to catch a needle drifting leftward. “Turn to the needle,” Enright's numb brain mumbled into his buzzing and burned ears.

“You got it,” William Mckinley Parker had said. Something in the command pilot's voice reached deeply into Enright. He took the stick and did not look to his left at his captain and his friend. Enright simply studied the gauges. Independent of conscious thought, he felt his hands do what they had trained for a lifetime to do. They flew to where every pilot since Orville and Wilbur longed to fly: “I'll take her home, Will.”

Admiral Michael Hauch sat alone in his Pentagon bunker. Beside a single red telephone, a radio squawkbox hissed at the center of the massive table. The last word from the United States Space Defense Operations Center at Colorado Springs had been a weary flight controller's status call, “Downlink data dropout.”

The television monitors in the Operations Center's consoles had been flashing “S-S-S-S-S-S” for 16 minutes to signify that nothing but static was being received from Endeavor through the tracking and relay network during the radio blackout of the fiery re-entry plunge.

The lone commander watched his wall clocks monitoring Mission Elapsed Time. When the MET clock ticked up to the time for the PTI-7 automated death maneuver, Admiral Hauch closed his eyes. In his sudden solitude, he did not wipe away the tear which rolled down his pale and stubbled cheek. He knew that his old friend, Will Parker, had just been incinerated. A lifetime with Will Parker of flying and drinking together, and standing stiffly in dress blues beside open pilots' graves, had just ended in a Mach 23 fireball of molten metal and melted glass tiles. The big man sagged into his high-backed chair.

On the glass wall of the Crystal Room, the MET clock counted up while next to it the AOS clock counted down to predicted time of acquisition of signal when the re-entry blackout should end 17 minutes after it began. When the second hand wound through 5-4-3-2-1, Admiral Hauch rubbed his sweating forehead with both palms.

“Endeavor, Endeavor,” the squawkbox crackled. “Space Ops by Kadena. Over.” The controller's voice sounded tired and anxious. He knew that Endeavor was limping home on a ruptured tail section and a prayer. “Endeavor, Endeavor. Over.”

Admiral Hauch sighed deeply, leaned forward, and reached for the button on the top of the little monitor. His moist finger paused for a heartbeat before turning off the telltale receiver. No good news could come from the static in the awful purple sky halfway around the world above the Pacific Ocean.

“With you, Flight,” a strained but youthful voice stammered from 165,000 feet above the sea and 200 miles from the Okinawa coastline.

The thick hand poised above the squawkbox slammed down hard on the mahogany tabletop.

“Good for you!” Michael Hauch bellowed. His blond head rolled back and he pounded the table in bone deep pleasure. “My sweet sonsobitches!” The big man wiped rolling tears from his haggard face.

“Good news, Endeavor!” the faceless voice from Cheyenne Mountain radioed out to sea. “Status, Jack? Over.”

“Okay, Colorado.” Jacob Enright's voice was a hoarse whisper barely audible above the static. “We're a bit wobbly but stable. Rates are pegged in the green, all vectors. But we had one hell of a ride when that damn PTI kicked in out here. She did a hammerhead stall or something, pitching down like nothing I ever saw in a nightmare. Will recovered with full manual while I took the whole DAP off line . . . .”

“You say a runaway digital autopilot, Jack?”

“Must have been. Don't know and don't care.” Enright's Mach 8 sigh could be heard above the distracting static. “We're still holding together, but definitely unstable about the lateral axis with all that trash hanging out the OMS pod damage. Alexi and I are okay, but . . .” The voice hesitated. Michael Hauch looked hard at the squawkbox. “But Will is out cold. I can't take my eyes off the FDI to check him out. You got any vitals on him?”

“Okay, Jack. Understand you're flying the flight director indicator. Are you still full manual control?”

“Affirmative, Flight. What about Will?”

“Sorry, Jack. Nothing by way of medicals on any of you. Sure you're plugged in?”

“Damn,” the voice from the fringe of space radioed. “Guess not.”

“Is the AC moving at all, Jack?”

Enright turned quickly to look at the slumped Aircraft Commander. Will Parker's bare head gently bumped sideways into his wide window at his left shoulder. His soaked hair left a round grease mark on the glass. The deceleration forces generated by the ship's speed reduction in the thicker atmosphere forced all three men to strain forward against their restraint belts. Parker's hard hands banged against the base of the forward instrument panel above his swollen knee. His eyes were closed. Enright squinted through his sticky gauze mask. His burns hurt furiously.

“Just can't tell you, Flight. He's moving around from the G load, but that's all I can see. I'm going to be hand-flying the ruptured duck down to the deck, I'm afraid . . . God, I really hurt.”

“We know, Jack. Just hang on for ten minutes, buddy. You're almost home and the beer at Kadena is cold and waiting.”

“Sure, Flight. Thanks. Just hand me off to Kadena and get us home.” Enright fought back nausea as the sky outside slowly turned from dull red to dark purple. The blue of real air was only minutes away. “Please, Flight.”

Hauch remembered his mission, if only for a moment. He was glad that Endeavor was aimed for Okinawa instead of the more public Edwards base. At least landing at a distant military reservation would ensure security and ample opportunity for the G-3 boys to “sterilize” the press release explaining the damaged shuttle, the Russian's death, the injuries—or worse—to Will Parker and Jack Enright's burns.

Admiral Hauch looked wasted. The week of high-level discussions, the mission to LACE, the Russian's death, and Endeavor's return from the dead had drained him. He had nothing left inside except fear for his unconscious friend and sheer joy at Endeavor's return. But the joy was tempered by his knowledge that no shuttle had ever come home without an automatic pilot to steer the huge glider onto final approach. Only on short final do shuttle astronauts take the hand controls for the last five minutes of the descent. And no pilot ever did it solo. Burned, dehydrated, and in pain, Jack Enright would have to do it all.

The Admiral forced his finger to turn off the radio. He had simply borne too much to endure listening to Enright roll Endeavor into a ball on a fly speck island near Japan. Michael Hauch, Naval aviator, had spent ten years at Edwards Air Force Base, California. There, the rock-hard surface of Rogers Dry Lake was pockmarked by permanent smears of oily black where two generations of test pilots had bent their metal in unproven flying machines and rocket planes. The other proud pilots who knew that they were too good to blow up would then attend what they called “the slow walkin' and sad singin.' ”

Clicking off the radio, the seaman mumbled, “Keep the shiny side up, Jack.”

Then the tall man laid his large hand upon the red telephone.

Jacob Enright never cried. Not when the medics at Kadena had removed his medicated facial bandages. Not for the two days at the military burn center in San Antonio. There, Air Force physicians had peeled away the burned and blistered skin from his face like layers of an onion to expose the pink and oozing baby skin underneath. And he did not cry when he sat holding Emily Parker's hand when the President spoke sadly of the high cost of exploring the heavens.

Emily Parker had looked radiant in the Houston sunshine of an unseasonably warm day when the President stood beside William McKinley Parker who heard none of it.

“Mister Enright, why is my daddy in a box,” Emily had pleaded softly into his ear. “When will he get out?”

Emily's red hair glowed and the grown woman's beautiful face was full of the eyes of a terrified little girl. Her child mind made her wet eyes look like a wounded animal's eyes and Jacob Enright could say nothing. He could only look away toward the President who stood surrounded by grim faced NASA technocrats.

The President spoke of the irony that Will Parker should have survived a lifetime as a test pilot, an orbital mission in a tiny, two-man Gemini spacecraft over twenty years ago and one trip to the Moon, only to die coming home from a routine shuttle flight to fetch a damaged communications satellite.

The medics said that Will Parker's brain had quietly ruptured from a stray nitrogen bubble which slammed into a blood vessel during the forces generated by re-entry. The bends had killed him after all. But not before he had saved his battered ship and had handed the bridge over to his devoted and trusted First Officer.

The medics on the ground had swarmed over Endeavor when Enright gently set her down on the little island and had rolled to a stop on the concrete. The men in white worked on Colonel Parker for fifteen minutes while Enright and Karpov watched silently. Everyone knew all along that Will was gone.