Kip’s fingers are fanning themselves on the stick controller, his eyes taking in the road, the truck, and the horizon before flitting quickly to the last items on the Before Landing checklist.
Gear down and locked, seats up… I think that’s it.
Something to the right of the roadway a mile or more away ahead catches his attention, another roadway or something like it at perhaps a forty-five-degree angle. But there’s no time to evaluate anything else and he locks his eyes back on the highway, wondering if the oncoming truck drivers have spotted him dropping from the sky straight ahead of them. If so, there’s no indication. The big rigs are getting closer by the second, the plume of black smoke from the lead vehicle streaming from its stacks and its speed constant.
There’s nowhere else to land, but he’s too wide to simply use the right lane and pass them safely, even if he puts her down on the right shoulder. One or more of the eighteen wheelers will end up taking him out, or wreck themselves trying to avoid him.
Airspeed?
He’s holding just over two hundred miles per hour, afraid to pull off any more, but it’s clear that if he doesn’t flatten the glide, he’s going to take out the first truck.
The angled ribbon of concrete or blacktop or something to the right looms in his mind and he focuses on it as an alternative. Whatever it is, even from a mile out he can see it’s overgrown with weeds and cracks that will probably kill him.
The road ahead is impossible, and he makes the choice without another thought. Kip pulls on the stick gingerly, feeling the craft respond as he settles through five hundred feet, calculating how much bank to use and when to angle onto the other roadway. The thing seems to end barely a mile or more in the distance, like it’s merging into the desert, but at least the terrain on the other end is flat.
The overpass is still ahead, about a mile or so distant, the beginning of the strip of angled road he’s aiming at starting on the far side. He’ll have to fly over the overpass before angling onto the road.
The road, he realizes, is an old runway, maybe military, and there are a few buildings along the far end.
He pulls his aim point to the right, just above the overpass, still aligned with the highway he can’t use.
One eighty-five!
He doesn’t dare get slower before being right over the threshold of the old runway. He feels the remaining two hundred feet of altitude more than reads it on the altimeter, his eyes focused now on missing the overpass as he turns toward the end of the old runway. He rolls right slightly, feeling Intrepiddrop more as he stops the turn, coming through fifty feet as the concrete abutment of the overpass flashes beneath him.
And in an instant he’s yanking Intrepidto the right, using the rudder to help skid toward the end of the concrete ribbon, holding his breath as the truck he’d been aiming at disappears behind him. The ship aligns with the runway and he snaps it back to wings level, yanking the nose up to stop the frightening rate of descent, trying to exchange speed for lift as the threshold of the cracked and broken concrete runway moves beneath him.
He feels the airspeed bleed away, unsure how far off the surface he is, amazed when the main wheels squeal onto the surface.
Suddenly it’s like trying to control a kid’s tricycle accelerated to a hundred miles per hour on a bucking surface. He plops the nosewheel on the ground only to find himself rocking wildly left and right and working the control stick as he fights to stop overcontrolling the nosewheel steering while racing over a washboard. He steers back close to where the centerline used to be, the speed now showing less than a hundred miles per hour and slowing, Kip unwilling to pull the nose up as he’s seen the astronauts do for aerobraking.
Seventy.
There’s a partially collapsed hangar to the right ahead and a still intact building of some sort; he sees a weed-infested taxiway leading to a ramp where two Stearman biplanes—crop dusters he hadn’t noticed before—are sitting.
His speed is below forty and he gauges the fairly broad expanse of concrete in front of the building and decides to risk hitting the brakes, pressing on the top of the pedals as he steers right, bringing Intrepidoff the runway and coasting to a halt in front of the old brick structure, kicking up a cloud of dust and dirt in the process.
And the unbelievable fact that he is once again sitting static on the surface of Earth, still alive, begins to sink in like a distant rumor gaining credibility.
Chapter 44
Arleigh is losing it, Richard DeFazio thinks, but who can blame him? The telemetry all the way down has told of an excruciating series of near disasters—the wrong entry point, the wrong attitude, a near fatal problem with the tail boom, and just before the datastream dropped out completely, the unmistakable signature of a complete stall and a spacecraft dropping uncontrollably toward a spot in eastern New Mexico.
And then nothing.
Frantic calls to Albuquerque Air Route Traffic Control Center produce a bit more information, along with confirmation that there was what appeared to be a precipitous drop toward the ground tracked by radar, but then Albuquerque watched what they thought was the same target fly west, toward Roswell, and disappear.
There are phones to both of Arleigh’s ears as he tries to get more information. With the world aware that Intrepidhas somehow boosted out of orbit and is reentering with an untrained Kip Dawson at the controls, the guesswork on where the spacecraft will come down has launched scores of camera crews in airplanes and helicopters, some merely circling their home cities, waiting for word. The moment New Mexico seemed to be the end point, an airborne armada headed in from all points of the compass.
In the meantime, a worldwide television audience too large to measure has been watching long distance images of Intrepiddescending, turning, configuring, reconfiguring… the shots ranging through handoffs from satellite-borne cameras to ground shots with amazing clarity until Intrepiddropped below thirty thousand feet and out of sight of the installation at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque. With Kip’s fate hanging in the balance, billions are holding their collective breaths in the most widely watched global cliffhanger since Apollo 13.
Richard glances at Diana Ross, who has been progressively destroying pencils. He knows better than to ask what she thinks. She thinks what he thinks—that it will be a miracle if Kip survives.
But it’s already a miracle that he figured out how to guide Intrepidthrough reentry.
A secretary has appeared at their side noiselessly with word that a car is waiting to take them to Richard’s jet now fueled and waiting a quarter mile away. Diana almost pushes Richard over in her haste to get out the door, knowing that the flight will take nearly ninety minutes with no certainty how close they can land to the remains, she figures, of Intrepid,Kip Dawson, and Bill Campbell. All Richard knows for certain is the section of New Mexico into which Intrepidhas disappeared, but the exact location of the crash should be known in an hour.
Somehow, Richard has already put a private jet on standby to fly Kip’s family in from the Houston area, just in case—something he has yet to tell the family.
The quiet is overwhelming. Somewhere behind the instrument panel, gyros are still spinning and cooling fans still running, but once he snaps the master switch off, the sound of his own breathing is startlingly loud.
Kip looks around at the plastic bag that contains Bill Campbell’s body.