“Systems, what’s your recommendation?” he asks.
“It’s out of limits. No fly.”
Griggs leans farther toward Cully, knowing he’s mere seconds from a decision, outraged that somehow Geoff Shear is about to succeed.
“I vote for go. This is a phantom problem, Cully.”
“Hold the count,” Cully orders.
“No, goddammit!”
Jones is turning now, his eyes flashing anger. “Two words, Griggs. Challenger,and Columbia. We stay conservative. You object?”
Griggs stares into the resolve in Jones’s face and shakes his head.
“No. No objection.”
Cully triggers the interphone channel. “The count is holding at T minus forty-two seconds. We have thirty seconds to decide to scrub or resume the countdown. Systems, where are we?”
Griggs can see the man stand and turn from his console two rows away, his face reflecting genuine fear.
“Pressure is out of limits, temperature approaching out of limits, and I have a report from the gantry shelter of heavy venting. We need to get the crew out, now! This is real!”
“Then we’re scrubbed!” Cully barks.
Launch control explodes into action as the practiced team at the pad begins moving toward an emergency extraction of the two crew members while Cully Jones begins running through the checklist to purge the dangerously overpressurized tank before the contents can explode.
Griggs Hopewell sits quietly, watching and listening and slightly stunned.
My God, this one was real, and I led myself into the assumption that Sheehan did it.
If they had launched with a true overpressure, the remains of the shuttle and the two astronauts would probably be raining back on the launch pad right now.
Chapter 39
Somehow, Geoff Shear is thinking, he’s going to need to do something really special for Dorothy Sheehan. Not that he’s given to overt displays of appreciation beyond NASA award dinners and other official stroking, but in this she’s succeeded against overwhelming odds.
Word that the launch went to a hold and was then scrubbed brings a smile to his face. He assumes the scrub was for being out of the launch window, but there’s the slightly puzzling news of fuel overpressure in one of the shuttle’s tanks—and the call for an emergency evacuation of the crew. But even those developments can’t dilute Geoff’s smug feeling of restored control.
His cell phone is vibrating in his pocket and he whips it out, expecting the female voice he hears to be his wife’s. But this voice is different. Frightened and tense. It takes him a few seconds to realize that he’s talking to Dorothy herself.
“Why are you calling?” he asks, puzzled. She knows better.
“I’m in trouble, sir. I think I’ve been discovered.”
“What did you say? I heard we just scrubbed down there. So, thanks for everything you were doing down there to keep us safe…”
“The fuel overpressure is real. It’s… unexpected.”
“Well, of course.”
Geoff feels his mind racing. How to deal with this? Any call could be monitored and if anyone should know that, it’s Sheehan, which means she’s seriously frightened, and dangerous.
“Where are you calling from?” he asks.
“I’m outside now, in my car, and getting out of here.”
“Why are you calling?”
“I… I guess I just need some coordination since my purpose here is done. All the safety checks and such.”
“Well, Dorothy, your assignment was clear. Double check to make certain we weren’t pushing safety limits. Just come home.”
Now he hears a telling hesitation.
“Well, sir,” she says, her tone hardening. “I got this call and I responded as requested.”
Five seconds of silence pass before she speaks again, her voice this time low and serious and no longer pleading. “You’re going to let me twist in the wind, aren’t you?”
“What does that mean? Dorothy, if you’ve… done something improper, then you need to tell security about it. I have to go. And this call never happened.”
He punches the phone off and erases the number from the display, a small chill climbing his back as he realizes his cellular bill will have also captured the number.
The phone is vibrating again and he sees her number and punches the button to reject the call, erasing the second record of the number before depowering the phone altogether, feeling off-balance. Sheehan was supposed to be rock solid reliable, his own ex-CIA operative with steely nerves and endless resources. How could she crack? And after all, the only thing that’s happened is a launch scrub for an apparently legitimate reason. This is all containable, he tells himself, remembering the moment he decided to trigger the so-called nuclear option. The launch would have had to be scrubbed anyway! But knowing that doesn’t soothe him, and with the sixth-sense survival instincts of a high-level bureaucrat, he can already hear footsteps behind him.
Sergei Mikhailovich Petrov is not surprised to find himself precisely where he expected to be: on orbit, four hundred ninety-eight kilometers above the planet and precisely one hundred fifteen kilometers behind the private American spacecraft.
He glances at his companion, Cosmonaut Mikhail Rychkov who is hunched over his computer display.
“Our closing rate is what?”
Mikhail punches another button and replies without looking over.
“Forty meters per second.”
There will be a turnaround and a braking burst from their main engine necessary in forty-eight minutes, followed by the delicate task of carefully approaching the winged craft from beneath and slightly ahead. In the rushed briefings and preparations of the previous two days, the plan coalesced only as far as parking the Soyuzjust above the private space plane and sending Mikhail out on a dangerous spacewalk with the spare pressure suit they plan to stuff into Intrepid’s airlock.
The right leg pocket of Mikhail’s suit is brimming with black markers able to take the exposure to the vacuum of space. Using a white poster-board and a tethered cloth, he’ll write instructions in English for Kip Dawson to read through the forward windscreen.
At least, that’s the plan. The backup is equally risky, given the size of their space suits and the tiny airlock on Intrepid;Mikhail has substantial doubts whether he can fit inside if he has to go in to prepare Kip for the transfer.
Sergei has the high-powered binoculars out and is searching the void ahead, a smile forming on his face that Mikhail notices.
“You see him?”
“ Da!And he’s still flying backward, facing us, which will make it easier, I think.”
Had a wayward buffalo wandered into and through the control room, the effect would have been much the same. The disbelieving looks on the faces of the control room technicians accompany a stunned paralysis as their collective minds try to grasp the fact that every monitor, including the big-screen display, has suddenly burst back to life with numbers, graphs, and information coming fromIntrepid!
The first technician to get to his feet glances at the door, then back at the screen, wanting to call Arleigh Kerr in from his office but not wanting to look foolish if this is some sort of hallucination.
Or maybe,Chuck Hines, the assistant flight director thinks, we’ve somehow triggered one of the training simulation tapes.