The Glass Lady (51 page)

“No!” Jack Enright had protested when the Kadena people wanted to carry Will Parker's limp body in long woolies out of the flightdeck first. “No. The skipper leaves last.” Enright was coughing fluid which was slowly filling his lungs now that gravity was working on his burned body after eleven hours of weightlessness. The Air Force people did not argue. They gently eased the bandaged Enright from his sweat soaked seat upstairs and helped him down to the mid-deck and out the hatchway to fresh air. Alexi Karpov followed silently.

Two Air Force sentries held Enright upright, one at each arm, as the medics carried Will Parker down the portable stairs rolled to Endeavor's charred side. In the ship's nose area once glisteningly white glass tiles, the whole cockpit was blackened by the fierce heat of the PTI-7, roller coaster ride. And the OMS pod in the left tail section was rubble.

Jack Enright freed his right hand from the sentry's welcome grip when the body of the command pilot was carried past Enright and Alexi Karpov. In unison, the swooning Enright and the grieving Russian survivor saluted their captain as he passed.

William McKinley Parker had been the last man to leave his ship.

“When will my daddy get out of the box?” the woman asked again.

“I'll tell you later, Emily,” Enright whispered dryly while his President spoke with deep emotion.

The President remembered the seven dead heroes of the destroyed shuttle Challenger. And he movingly spoke of the British poet John Masefield and about tall ships and stars to steer them by.

But Jack Enright did not cry through the eulogy to his friend, nor when the haunting strains of Taps echoed down the Johnson Space Center concrete campus, nor when the T-38 jets screamed overhead and one little plane peeled off from the others to make the Missing Man Formation.

Then the Air Force Band struck up “My Old Kentucky Home” in slow, dirge cadence in honor of the Blue Grass State's dead son. Only then did Lt. Commander Jacob Enright lower his freshly wrapped face and wet his bandages with tears. Between him and Dr. Cleanne Casey, Emily Parker softly whimpered.

“I think you better do it,” the pilot of the
Rebekah Sara
called in his clipped Mainer accent. “Tide going out fast now, Mr. Enright.”

In the three weeks since Will Parker's memorial service in Houston, the bandages had been removed from Enright's face. His new skin looked bright red, raw, and painfully sunburned. His cheeks were covered with a ghastly paste of sunscreen and zinc oxide.

“Thanks, Fenton,” Enright shouted over the sea's noise off Bar Harbor. Enright braced himself on the lobster boat's rolling and open stern.

Before the funeral, Dr. Casey had taken him aside to inform him of Will's strange phone call the night before the launch. She spoke of how he longed to be buried at sea if he were killed in space. At that instant, Enright resolved to honor his captain's last wish at any cost—even his career.

Enright was stunned by the ease with which his request for Parker's body had been granted. First he had called Will's old pal, Admiral Hauch, only three days before the memorial pageant. But the Defense Department had informed Enright that the Admiral was TDY—on temporary deployment outside the country. Where, they refused to say. So Enright went to the NASA brass. The personal assistance people in Houston immediately granted Enright's request on condition that the body be present for the memorial service. Later that day, Will Parker had been reduced to a jug of ashes, tiny bone fragments, and silver dental fillings.

Government men with no humor and narrow neckties had gently suggested that Enright not answer any public questions about the alleged accident. After the Challenger disaster's treatment by the press, Enright did not have to be told twice. Besides, he had seen his Earth from heaven once—and he wanted to see it again.

The world media accepted the press releases and the spokespersons who lamented the unforeseen collision between the Soyuz spacecraft and Endeavor's tail end which had killed Will Parker and one Soviet flyer and had burned Enright. An American delegation of astronauts led by the Secretary of State and the Vice President had attended the Moscow memorial for the Soviet pilot killed in Soyuz. Moscow declined to demand a formal board of inquiry. Glasnost had prevailed serenely.

With one hand on the little boat's rail and his other arm stretched over the side, Enright dumped the can of oily powder into the high gray sea. Two passing whitecaps, and William McKinley Parker was gone.

“Rest well, Skipper,” the thin airman whispered to the cold and receding tide. “Rest well.”

“Are we done?” the Mainer asked anxiously in the rising swells of Downeast Maine. To the east, the gray surf pounded against the granite boulders of Schoodic Point.

“Take us home,” the pilot said above the salty wind.