Now he is apologising. He shuts his mouth, his anger transferred from Scott to himself.
Okay, says Scott; Alden’s back.
Alden’s voice comes on the VHF: Tig is… 003:05:25.00. Burn time is 03:43. You need a delta-Vt of 3046.8 fps.
Got it, replies Peterson. He has scrawled the numbers on the back of the cue card. Going into LOS now, he tells Falcon Base. See you when I come back round the other side.
There is no way he can check Alden’s figures, he has to trust them. And he does. It is Alden’s numbers which got him into orbit—even if it was not entirely nominal—and he trusts the man to give him the necessary time of ignition and burn time for LEO. A target eight thousand miles across one quarter of a million miles away. A fraction of a degree wrong and he’ll miss it completely…
Soon enough, the ALM swings back around and Peterson can talk once again to Falcon Base. The Mission Timer on the instrument panel is counting up to three hours five minutes and twenty-five seconds.
Master Arm on, he tells Falcon Base. Engine Arm to Ascent.
He watches the timer, his finger poised over the MANUAL ENGINE ON button.
He knows enough about the ALM to know that the APS is not as powerful as a CSM’s Service Propulsion System. Even at one hundred percent—and that is the APS’s only setting—it will need to fire for longer to give him the necessary Δv for TEI. Even though the ALM weighs around a sixth of a CSM.
The Mission Timer flicks to 0030520… 0030521… 0030522..
The moment it displays 0030525, he pushes the manual engine on button. For one heart-stopping second, nothing seems to happen. He turns to look back over his shoulder at the cylindrical bulk of the APS in the centre of the cabin, as if doing so would trigger ignition. But already he can feel a rumble in his boots. He returns his gaze to the window before him and the Moon is drifting away, its surface features shrinking and blurring, the grey beach of its surface losing texture and contour.
And the Mission Timer shows 0030908, so he turns off the APS.
And there: finished. He feels the cessation of thrust. A sudden stillness, an immediate silence, though the roar of the APS had been little more than a faint hum transmitted through the floor of the spacecraft. He turns his attention to the ECS tape-meter for cabin pressure. Has the force of the burn ruptured the delicate cabin walls? Happily, it does not appear to have done so.
Goodbye, he tells Falcon Base. Be well, be patient.
It’s been an honour, sir, says Scott. And he sounds like he really means it.
That whooping klaxon meant the DEW Line was about to be breached: there were Soviet bombers over northern Canada and it was Peterson’s job to get up there—fast—and see that US and Canadian territoriality wasn’t invaded. The YJ93s of his North American F-108D Rapier were spooling up now, kickstarted by the aux power cart, and they lit with a roar as the JP-6 ignited; and their thunder filled the hangar, bouncing off the solid concrete walls and roof like the joyous roar of a perfect storm. The lights and indicators on Peterson’s instrument panel told him all his systems were green, and then his “wizzo”, his weapon systems officer, said, Check, I got it; and that meant the wizzo’s data viewer and radar-TV had been updated with the mission profile by SAGE, NORAD’s vast and powerful computer, from the Sector Direction Center at Syracuse AFB; and the wizzo added, Says here they got Tupolev Tu-22M Backfires and those new Mach 3 bombers, the Sukhoi T-4 Blowtorch. But Peterson was busy confirming the autopilot data fed from SAGE; and then he gave the crew chief a thumbs up, and lowered the canopy. He was sealed in now, snug in his cockpit, the stick between his legs, everything reading green, the thunder of the YJ93s muffled to a distant rumble. The moment the “go” signal came through, he advanced the throttles and released the brakes, and the Rapier began to roll forwards, emerging from the alert barn into flat grey light and a sea of early morning mist hazing the berms of the dispersal area. Minutes later he was lined up at the end of the runway, watching his instruments as he waited for the word, and he twisted his head and saw his wingman lined up alongside him, and he felt a keenness he’d never experienced on training sorties, like he was the edge of a sharp blade and he knew in his heart he’d be doing some cutting of flesh today. He grinned inside his oxygen mask, gave the other pilot a thumbs up, and then readied his hands on stick and throttles. It was up to Peterson to get this bird in the air, then SAGE would take over and fly it to the intercept and, once there, lock onto the targets, arm and release the AIM-47 missiles the F-108D carried—should the situation warrant it. The signal came, Peterson pushed the throttles forward, released the brakes, and the F-108D began to roll forward, the acceleration pushing him back into his ejection seat, the turbojets bellowing like the gods of thunder and lightning, and he called out, Rotate, and gently brought the stick back. The aircraft’s nose lifted, the front wheels were off the ground, he felt the F-108D unstick itself from the earth, then they roared over the base fence and he hauled back on the stick, lit the afterburner, and they rocketed skyward. It seemed like in no time at all they were at their operating altitude and powering north and before long they were past the Mid-Canada Line and fast approaching the DEW Line where it marched across the frozen north of the country, and he saw something up ahead, a smear of contrail miles long across the blue-white arctic sky, and he knew it had to be one of the Soviet bombers, so he asked his wizzo if it was go or no-go. The wizzo told him he had it on his scope, it was one of the T-4s, doing Mach 2, and it was over the line, in Canadian territory, a legitimate target. There was nothing coming through from the Sector Direction Center, but Peterson didn’t care, he was in the zone, he was focused, and the rest of the world had fallen away, left behind in their supersonic dash north—he saw only a world of whiteness, a distant haze of brightness and in it the white-hot dot that was the sun, and his thoughts turned to the craft in which he sat, the weapons it carried, the purpose of those weapons, and his role in the defence of his homeland. So he armed one of his AIM-47 missiles, put his thumb over the “kill” button on the stick and waited for the lock-on tone; and his wizzo protested but he ignored him, and the reticule on the Projected Display flashed, so he pressed with his thumb—gently, as if it were a hunting rifle’s trigger and not simply a button which triggered an electric signal and so fired actuators which pushed hydraulic rams. He heard with satisfaction the grinding of the bay doors opening, the thud of missile release, and then a line of smoke hurtled ahead of the interceptor, writing a death sentence across the heavens. He was on intercept at Mach 3, so given enough time and sky he could have caught the Blowtorch, but the AIM-47 could do it so much faster… And so it did: he saw the impact, the sudden blossoming of flame on the T-4’s flank, the enemy bomber shedding shattered panels which spun mirror-bright in the sun as they fell, the curving smoke trails of debris as the aircraft broke apart; and his wizzo said, Jesus Christ, you sure as shit should’nt’ve done that. He was right, of course, and back at the base the colonel chewed him a new one though they both knew it was a righteous kill, but relations were hair-trigger and neither side wanted to give the other provocation; even so, they could only spin Peterson’s kill as a victory of sorts and he got a Commendation Medal, but he knew his days in TAC were numbered, someone upstairs was going to make damn sure of that. Later, the Soviets shot down a USAFE Convair F-106 Delta Dart out of Lindsey Air Station at Wiesbaden—Peterson himself had flown the Six before his wing was upgraded to the Rapier—and that sparked off a wave of incidents, culminating in an exchange of gunfire at Checkpoint Charlie, during which a US MP shot and killed a Grepo, and so the Soviets walked away from the SALT II talks and overnight Brezhnev’s rhetoric turned hawkish.