The Glass Lady (7 page)

“Assuming,” Secretary Vazzo sighed, “that you can work with Moscow's new Chief of Staff, Marshall Akhromeyev. Don't underestimate this new man.” The diplomat's face showed the strain.

“We're working on that, Joe,” the Admiral said with fatigue in his voice. “Our people agree with Colonel Cerven's proposal. Colonel Stermer, how soon can your people switch Parker and Enright to the LACE operation, install the mylar blankets in the shuttle's payload bay, and have Endeavor launch-ready from the Cape?”

“Just say the word, Admiral. We can pull Endeavor's chocks in thirty days.” The Colonel from Canaveral was ecstatic.

“How about ninety-six hours . . . Four days.”

The silence was intense.

“Admiral, we would barely have time for external tank chilldown and for installing Endeavor's pyrotechnics. Twenty days at the very best. And that's leaving a mess of screws untightened.”

“Four days, Dale.”

“Admiral. Forgive me. But it cannot be done.” The man from Florida looked stricken.

“Dale, four days. That's the word from upstairs. The final word.”

The Marine stenographer opened his eyes to join the little company looking at the harried officer from Cape Canaveral.

“Admiral: Four days. December 18th . . . Do you know what ‘Palapa' means in Indonesia? It means ‘Fruit of our Effort.' ”

“Think we're going to get fired, Skipper?” Jacob Enright asked with a weak grin.

The two fliers slouched in their flightsuits soaked with sweat. They sat alone in the Johnson Center's conference room, the same sterile room where they had been humiliated the previous night.

“Wouldn't mind, Jack. This crap of flying the simulator at dawn or at midnight so the other crews can fly it in daylight is getting to me.” Colonel Parker looked over his coffee mug to the cold darkness beyond the window. “Midnight again, Jack. Going to forget how to fly in daylight.” When angry, the Colonel's voice lost its down-home drawl.

“I know. At least, Will, we didn't bend our metal today . . . All damn morning shooting launch aborts, and half the night doing workarounds in the cockpit on electrical glitches . . . Was it this afternoon we tipped a few at your place, or was it last week?” Enright sighed, slouched deeper into his chair, and with closed eyes he sipped his cold coffee.

The conference-room door opened and the tall, bearded flight director entered, followed by his wake of pipe smoke. His face was grim as Parker and Enright looked up with bleary and dark eyes. The fliers waited for the rest of the director's entourage for another simulator, postmortem at midnight.

The Flight Director turned his face to the door, which he pulled closed behind him. The two seated airmen looked quickly at each other as their sleepy minds registered that the Flight Director was alone.

“Git them resumes ready, Number One,” Colonel Parker whispered to Enright as the youthful engineer in a cloud of pipe smoke sat down opposite the exhausted pilots.

Parker and Enright sat up as the Director intently studied the ashen-faced astronauts. The pilots looked back at the Director's face, an anguished face, thought Parker.

“Jack. Will,” the Director said, laying his pipe upon the bare table.

“Hutch,” greeted the Colonel with what was left of his strained good cheer.

The airmen waited impatiently while the Director studied his own hands upon the table.

“The next mission is yours.”

That was it. The Flight Director's facial muscles did not move.

“Oh,” offered William Parker from his dry throat. He whispered, but his brain did handstands.

The Flight Director's words rattled around behind Enright's heavy eyes. The full thought did not root in Enright's mind before the Director continued his monologue.

“Does the LACE mean anything to either of you?”

“Don't know, Hutch,” Jack Enright smiled. “I've never been married.”

“Hot damn, Skipper!” Jacob Enright sang beneath the blinding arc lights of the midnight parking lot. He fairly danced in the cold, black drizzle between his sensuous driving machine and the Colonel's battered truck.

“Four days?” the Colonel asked blankly with his wornout face pressed against the rain-streaked side window of his pickup. With his large hand cupped to the sides of his wet face to shield his eyes from the glare of the flood-lights, he surveyed the puddle of water growing on the front seat of his flatbed relic.

“Come on, Will,” Enright pleaded, unable to restrain his pleasure. “The LPS can get her off in four days. We've run fully automatic countdowns since Eight.”

Colonel Parker turned to his young partner in the light rain. He envied his copilot for his passion and his vigor. The Colonel had been that way—20 years earlier when he had posed thin and proud beside a sleek jet amid the rice paddies. He had saved the picture.

“Maybe the Launch Processing System can push us off well enough. But I need a little time to kick the tires before cranking up.”

“We'll make time, Skipper. Unless we have pneumonia. Let's get out of the rain.”

Enright led his captain to his little treasure, a shining chassy tightly wrapped around a monster engine. Enright squeezed in behind the wood steering wheel.

Inside Enright's four-wheeled cockpit, Colonel Parker looked at his knees pulled up to his sweat- and rain-soaked chest. The array of battery and engine dials gave the illusion of a jet cockpit idling on the apron, aching for the purple sky. The low midnight sky leaked softly upon the windows.

“Look at it this way, Will,” Enright counseled as his breath fogged the windshield close to his face. “We've trained for Palapa-Westar Six and for flying the MMU. And we're already working on next year's rendezvous and recovery flight to retrieve a fused-out, recon satellite for the Defense Department. The Manipulator Arm has flown successfully since STS-2. The Plasma Diagnostics Package checked out perfectly on Three in '82. It'll sniff out any radiation or flux leaks from LACE just fine. This thing is exactly what we are trained to do: First-orbit rendezvous with a target, go outside with the MMU, stabilize LACE with the manned maneuvering unit and the flying grapple fixture, attach the pyro package with the RMS, and push 'er off. All in a good day's work, Will.” Enright was still euphoric, itching for his first ride Out There. He looked longingly at the black and rainy sky, his sky at last.

This would be Colonel Parker's fourth flight into the blackness. Another day at the office was all.

“What do you know about LACE, Jack?” Will Parker asked with his face looking over his right shoulder toward his truck. He could hear it rusting in the rain.

“Only what I read in
Aviation Week
.”

“Well, buddy. Whatever is in
Aviation Week
must be the truth.” The Colonel smiled at his truck.

“Then, Skipper, let's do it!” Jacob Enright beamed, filling his youthful face with teeth.

The weary Colonel thought about tomorrow, which was already two hours old. In only six hours, they would again get their feet wet in the Johnson Center's huge, neutral buoyancy pool to simulate working upon their deadly target in watery weightlessness. With his mind full of slow-moving, exhaustion-numbed thoughts, the Colonel faced his excited partner. Jack Enright's boyish grin infected the Colonel's deeply lined, pilot's face.

“You betcha, Number One,” the Colonel smiled as he pried his long body from the cold, damp cockpit.

“Moscow wants its piece of the pie.” Admiral Hauch shrugged wearily. Three nights of midnight meetings were darkly written upon his face. “Joe, would you, please?”

Joseph Vazzo extracted a notebook from his briefcase. Opening the binder inscribed “Confidential Cables,” he addressed the midnight assembly of officers and diplomats.

The ventilators filled the plastic cave with the chill, scentless sigh of filtered air. The man from State adjusted his bifocals.

“Following our Vienna connection, the Soviets informed us through direct communications that they are agreed to maintaining a secrecy lid on LACE, but at a price.”

Even the somnolent Marine stenographer opened his eyes to hear what his fingers were tapping as the diplomat continued.

“The Russians will observe a news quarantine only if they are permitted to have a cosmonaut crew on-station in space for the Intelsat-6 operation. I am advised that a Soyuz, Block-TM spacecraft is already stacked and ready for launch . . .”

“Do the bastards understand the risk to their crew, Mr. Secretary?” demanded a Colonel in shirtsleeves.

“May I suggest, sir, that our colleagues behind the Kremlin wall understand the risks of LACE, and that they did even before your special projects people.” The graying diplomat glared coldly over his glasses toward the officer. “We believe that's also why Moscow is sending their people up in the Soyuz-TM spacecraft. The TM version is new, but the basic Soyuz design is old, reliable—and expendable. They are not risking their new, more efficient, but radically more expensive Buran space shuttle.”

“Thanks, Joe. The new crew of Parker and Enright received their initial briefing earlier this evening. Our people here and at NASA's Office of Space Science in Houston are confident that our substitute crew is the likely choice and in need of virtually no retraining. After all,” said the Admiral as he lifted a coffee mug to his round face, “Parker and Enright have trained for months for this precise mission. We're only changing their target and the applications package to be attached to it onorbit . . .”

“Not to mention that your mislaid communications satellites could only have winked at them,” Deputy Under Secretary Vazzo offered dryly. “LACE can crisp them . . . and the Shuttle Endeavor . . . and the Soviets in Soyuz.”

“Joe, Joe,” muttered the tired admiral, pleading from the head of the table.

“Admiral,” interrupted a gray-suited National Security Council representative.

“Pete?”

“NSC remains curious about Endeavor's extraordinary turnaround schedule. How confident are you about going up in three and one-half days?”

“I think the KSC people are better informed than I on that one. Colonel Stermer?”

“Sir: as Commander Rusinko pointed out last night, Endeavor is already rolled out to Pad 39-A at Kennedy. With a fully automated checkout and countdown, the LPS—that's Launch Processing System—can get her off in 80 hours. That's not our critical weakness. Let me be specific.”

As the liaison officer between NASA and Defense shuffled through his stack of papers, a dozen hands raised coffee mugs toward faces sagging with midnight fatigue.

“Systems integration is a serious constraint on our timeline. Endeavor's payload bay is stuffed with the communication satellite payload. We must get the bird out of Shuttle and lay in the Mylar reflector blankets. Also, the Payload Assist Module and an OSS pallet with a plasma diagnostics package must be mated, connected, integrated, and checked out in the payload bay . . .” The speaker paused to catch his breath. “Ordinarily, this complex operation would be executed with Shuttle in the horizontal position in the Orbiter Processing Facility. To go in three days, this operation must be done with the system stacked vertically on the pad. We are pushing the time-line, pushing the structural limitations, and pushing the launch team.”

“Dale, will your people be configured for vehicle closeout in time?”

“In time and on time. Barely.”

“Good. Joe, what about integration with the Russians once Endeavor is airborne?”

“The Soviets will launch a little after midnight our time the morning of the 18th. As I understand it, Shuttle will launch at 10 o'clock that morning Eastern Time. Soyuz should arrive at the target about 90 minutes later, just before Shuttle's rendezvous with LACE. Because the SoyuzTM has rather limited, orbital maneuvering capabilities due to her small fuel reserves, they will need the whole eleven hours to shoot their rendezvous with LACE. Their rendezvous will require just less than eight orbits.”

“What about air-to-air communications with the Russians?”

“General Breyfogle, there probably will not be any Soviet comm with our ground stations. They use very different radio frequencies from our FM channels, as you know. Soyuz and Endeavor may have air-to-air voice contact by UHF radio, normally only used by Shuttle for the last minutes of the approach and landing sequence. Am I correct, Admiral?”

“As always, Joe.”

“What about the risk to Soyuz from LACE? Can Soyuz be damaged by another lucky shot by LACE, Mr. Secretary?”

“We don't know for certain, Major. Our best intelligence suggests that all Soviet offensive missiles and military satellites are ‘hardened,' as we say, against laser attack. We estimate their offensive missiles for the last few years have been hardened against laser radiation along the lines of two-tenths kilojoules per square centimeter. That is a measurement of laser focusing energy. Their warheads are hardened against seven kilojoules per square centimeter. That may insulate Soyuz sufficiently if it is also hardened to the warhead range of protection. As most Soyuz and Salyut space station missions are military in nature, we can only presume that they are hardened. That kind of armor may account for their limited maneuverability. We are not sure.”

“Seems you are not sure about a lot of things, Mr. Secretary.”

“That may be, Commander Rusinko . . . But our people have never shot down a Russian satellite with an offensive weapon which was not supposed to be there in the first place.”

Joseph Vazzo spoke through clenched teeth at the silent Navy officer. The Admiral shuffled his papers and all eyes were on him.

“Gentlemen, it's two o'clock in the morning and we're all a little tired and short on patience . . . One more detail: What about handling the press on this one—a joint space flight out of the blue and a bumped Shuttle crew, all in three days? How are we going to ice the cake? Mr. Young?”