When the aerospace craft had cleared the space station by several hundred yards, Munoz said, “Okay, Snake Eyes, flip her ass over.”
McKenna chuckled. “Roger, Tiger. Flipping.”
Using the hand controller, now connected to the thrusters, McKenna gave the MakoShark a nose-down command. Spurts of nitrogen gas spiked the vacuum, and the craft slowly turned over until the tail was pointing in the direction of travel. The cockpit was head-down to the earth.
He pulled back gently on the controller, igniting the thrusters, to stop the roll.
“Lookin’ good, amigo. I’m gonna hook into the brain now.”
McKenna checked the HUD. The readings looked good, though the cockpit temperature was lower than it should be. He nudged the slide switch to raise it. The velocity showed him Mach 26.2. Flat moving out, he thought, though the only sense of movement came from watching the growing gap between the MakoShark and Themis, which was now on the bottom edge of the rearview screen.
The primary screen displayed the randomly appearing numbers that Munoz was programming into the computer. The computer did, in fact, remember typically used coordinates for returns to Peterson, Jack Andrews, or Merlin air bases, updating them automatically for the position of the earth at the time of departure.
“Got any idea at all where you’d like to end up, Snake Eyes?”
“I think it’d be nice if we hit a hundred thousand feet somewhere in the vicinity of the Barents Sea. Maybe even the middle of it.
“You want to make the first run over the ice?”
“To the west, yeah.”
“That’s not what Amy-baby had in mind.”
“Amy-baby’s not flying it.”
“Good goddamned point, jefe. The Barents Sea, it is.”
The screen flickered with more numbers as Munoz plotted the reentry path and entered the variable weight data — pilots, cargo, pylon loads. The computer insisted on knowing, within certain tolerances, the center of gravity and the total weight of the MakoShark before it finalized the numbers. Since none of the variety of components interchanged on a MakoShark had weight aboard the space station, every object placed on board had to be checked against the master weight file on the station’s computer. The mass of a cargo or munitions pod, a camera, a film pack was double-checked against the file, then fed to the MakoShark’s on-board computer.
When his data was entered, Munoz ran the test program, which compared all of the new numbers with what the computer knew was possible. The machine accepted the new information congenially by flashing green letters: “ACCEPTED.”
“Start up procedure.”
“Ready, Tiger.”
They went through the rocket start checklist, up to the point of ignition, then McKenna turned it over to computer control.
In the upper-left corner of his CRT, new blue lettering appeared:
REENTRY PATH ACCEPTED
REENTRY SEQUENCE INITIATED
TIME TO RETRO FIRE: 0.12.43
“Shit,” McKenna said. “Twelve minutes.”
“Hey, compadre, that ain’t bad. We’ve had to wait over an hour before.”
In calculating the duration of retro-rocket bursts, the angle of attack into the atmosphere, and the trajectory to the desired point on earth, the computer also had to determine at what time the reentry program was to begin. The MakoSharks, however, had a distinct advantage over the Space Shuttles, in that they had power available after returning to the atmosphere. It allowed them a great deal more flexibility in reentry scheduling. They had many more windows of opportunity open to them.
McKenna punched the communications button for Themis. “Delta Blue to Alpha. We’ve got retro burn in one-two-point-four-one.”
“Alpha copies,” General Overton said. “Have a nice night, Delta Blue.”
“Colonel Pearson there?”
“I’m here, Delta Blue.”
“Get this, Amy. Twenty-four, twenty-two, twenty-one, seventeen, sixteen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-two, fifteen, twelve, ten, nine, thirteen, six, fourteen, eight, seven, two, five, three, four, eleven, one.”
“Very good, Colonel. You memorized the order.”
“Told you I could do it.”
“Hey, wait a minute,” Pearson said, “That’s backward.”
“Delta Blue out.”
Pearson called several times in the next five minutes, then gave up.
Overton called, too. “Alpha to Delta Blue.”
“Go Alpha.”
“You’ve changed the op?”
“Fuel savings,” McKenna professed.
“Roger, confirm fuel conservation.”
On the intercom, Munoz said, “Snake Eyes, we ain’t savin’ shit.”
“I know, Tiger, but it irritates the IO.”
“That ain’t the way to get into her jumpsuit, gringo.”
“I don’t want to get into her jumpsuit,” McKenna lied. Actually, he had decided to fly the ice first for a particular reason. Despite her stealth characteristics, the MakoShark was vulnerable to the naked eye when seen against a light background, like blue sky or white ice. A storm had passed through the target area around noon, but conditions were now clear, and in the summer, the northern regions did not become fully dark. If, by some chance, a German patrol plane was up by the time Delta Blue made its low-level run, there was a possibility of detection. McKenna wanted the higher-risk portion of the flight out of the way, first.
At thirty seconds to burn, McKenna tightened his straps and double-checked the oxy/nitro fittings. He snuggled his helmet down and rotated his shoulders against the gray-blue environmental suit. The suits they wore were considerably advanced over the EVA suit in which Armstrong sauntered on the moon’s surface. The fabric was a combination of Kevlar, silicon, and plastic, very tear-resistant and very flexible. When inflated, there was less than an inch of space between the fabric and the skin in most places. It depended for some people on the amount of food intake. Frank Dimatta had been refitted for new environmental suits twice, and McKenna had warned him to watch his weight. In the pressurized cockpits, the suits were not inflated, but they would automatically fill if the cockpit seals failed. The helmet-to-suit fitting was comprised of a pair of collars with a series of meshed grooves, allowing almost full freedom in head rotation.
“Four, three, two, one,” Munoz intoned.
The CRT countdown readout went to zero.
McKenna knew the rocket motors were firing from the vibration in the craft’s frame and from the thrust indicators on the HUD. The thrust on each motor climbed rapidly to 100 percent.
Themis slid off the rearview screen as white fire encroached from each side of the screen.
The Mach numbers started to dribble off.
The burn lasted for two-and-a-quarter minutes.
At Mach 20, the computer flipped the MakoShark over once again so they were facing forward, but the angle of attack into the atmosphere would not be nose down. Like the Space Shuttle Orbiters, the MakoSharks pancaked into the heavier soup of the atmosphere. The HUD reported the correct angle of attack, 40 degrees.
The leading edges of the wings, the nose, the pylons when they were mounted, and the nose cones of exterior ordnance or pods were composed of a second skin combining reinforced carbon-carbon, Nomex felt, and a ceramic alloy that resisted temperatures that rose to 2700 degrees Fahrenheit on the leading edges of the wings. Additionally, the nose cone and the wing leading edges contained an arterial network of cooling tubes through which supercooled fluids were pumped. The system had had very few failures, and none of those fatal, and McKenna thought it considerably superior to the Space Shuttled individual tiles.