“You got it,” William Mckinley Parker had said. Something in the command pilot’s voice reached deeply into Enright. He took the stick and did not look to his left at his captain and his friend. Enright simply studied the gauges. Independent of conscious thought, he felt his hands do what they had trained for a lifetime to do. They flew to where every pilot since Orville and Wilbur longed to fly: “I’ll take her home, Will.”
Admiral Michael Hauch sat alone in his Pentagon bunker. Beside a single red telephone, a radio squawkbox hissed at the center of the massive table. The last word from the United States Space Defense Operations Center at Colorado Springs had been a weary flight controller’s status call, “Downlink data dropout.”
The television monitors in the Operations Center’s consoles had been flashing “S-S-S-S-S-S” for 16 minutes to signify that nothing but static was being received from Endeavor through the tracking and relay network during the radio blackout of the fiery re-entry plunge.
The lone commander watched his wall clocks monitoring Mission Elapsed Time. When the MET clock ticked up to the time for the PTI-7 automated death maneuver, Admiral Hauch closed his eyes. In his sudden solitude, he did not wipe away the tear which rolled down his pale and stubbled cheek. He knew that his old friend, Will Parker, had just been incinerated. A lifetime with Will Parker of flying and drinking together, and standing stiffly in dress blues beside open pilots’ graves, had just ended in a Mach 23 fireball of molten metal and melted glass tiles. The big man sagged into his high-backed chair.
On the glass wall of the Crystal Room, the MET clock counted up while next to it the AOS clock counted down to predicted time of acquisition of signal when the re-entry blackout should end 17 minutes after it began. When the second hand wound through 5-4-3-2-1, Admiral Hauch rubbed his sweating forehead with both palms.
“Endeavor, Endeavor,” the squawkbox crackled. “Space Ops by Kadena. Over.” The controller’s voice sounded tired and anxious. He knew that Endeavor was limping home on a ruptured tail section and a prayer. “Endeavor, Endeavor. Over.”
Admiral Hauch sighed deeply, leaned forward, and reached for the button on the top of the little monitor. His moist finger paused for a heartbeat before turning off the telltale receiver. No good news could come from the static in the awful purple sky halfway around the world above the Pacific Ocean.
“With you, Flight,” a strained but youthful voice stammered from 165,000 feet above the sea and 200 miles from the Okinawa coastline.
The thick hand poised above the squawkbox slammed down hard on the mahogany tabletop.
“Good for you!” Michael Hauch bellowed. His blond head rolled back and he pounded the table in bone deep pleasure. “My sweet sonsobitches!” The big man wiped rolling tears from his haggard face.
“Good news, Endeavor!” the faceless voice from Cheyenne Mountain radioed out to sea. “Status, Jack? Over.”
“Okay, Colorado.” Jacob Enright’s voice was a hoarse whisper barely audible above the static. “We’re a bit wobbly but stable. Rates are pegged in the green, all vectors. But we had one hell of a ride when that damn PTI kicked in out here. She did a hammerhead stall or something, pitching down like nothing I ever saw in a nightmare. Will recovered with full manual while I took the whole DAP off line….”
“You say a runaway digital autopilot, Jack?”
“Must have been. Don’t know and don’t care.” Enright’s Mach 8 sigh could be heard above the distracting static. “We’re still holding together, but definitely unstable about the lateral axis with all that trash hanging out the OMS pod damage. Alexi and I are okay, but…” The voice hesitated. Michael Hauch looked hard at the squawkbox. “But Will is out cold. I can’t take my eyes off the FDI to check him out. You got any vitals on him?”
“Okay, Jack. Understand you’re flying the flight director indicator. Are you still full manual control?”
“Affirmative, Flight. What about Will?”
“Sorry, Jack. Nothing by way of medicals on any of you. Sure you’re plugged in?”
“Damn,” the voice from the fringe of space radioed. “Guess not.”
“Is the AC moving at all, Jack?”
Enright turned quickly to look at the slumped Aircraft Commander. Will Parker’s bare head gently bumped sideways into his wide window at his left shoulder. His soaked hair left a round grease mark on the glass. The deceleration forces generated by the ship’s speed reduction in the thicker atmosphere forced all three men to strain forward against their restraint belts. Parker’s hard hands banged against the base of the forward instrument panel above his swollen knee. His eyes were closed. Enright squinted through his sticky gauze mask. His burns hurt furiously.
“Just can’t tell you, Flight. He’s moving around from the G load, but that’s all I can see. I’m going to be hand-flying the ruptured duck down to the deck, I’m afraid… God, I really hurt.”
“We know, Jack. Just hang on for ten minutes, buddy. You’re almost home and the beer at Kadena is cold and waiting.”
“Sure, Flight. Thanks. Just hand me off to Kadena and get us home.” Enright fought back nausea as the sky outside slowly turned from dull red to dark purple. The blue of real air was only minutes away. “Please, Flight.”
Hauch remembered his mission, if only for a moment. He was glad that Endeavor was aimed for Okinawa instead of the more public Edwards base. At least landing at a distant military reservation would ensure security and ample opportunity for the G-3 boys to “sterilize” the press release explaining the damaged shuttle, the Russian’s death, the injuries — or worse — to Will Parker and Jack Enright’s burns.
Admiral Hauch looked wasted. The week of high-level discussions, the mission to LACE, the Russian’s death, and Endeavor’s return from the dead had drained him. He had nothing left inside except fear for his unconscious friend and sheer joy at Endeavor’s return. But the joy was tempered by his knowledge that no shuttle had ever come home without an automatic pilot to steer the huge glider onto final approach. Only on short final do shuttle astronauts take the hand controls for the last five minutes of the descent. And no pilot ever did it solo. Burned, dehydrated, and in pain, Jack Enright would have to do it all.
The Admiral forced his finger to turn off the radio. He had simply borne too much to endure listening to Enright roll Endeavor into a ball on a fly speck island near Japan. Michael Hauch, Naval aviator, had spent ten years at Edwards Air Force Base, California. There, the rock-hard surface of Rogers Dry Lake was pockmarked by permanent smears of oily black where two generations of test pilots had bent their metal in unproven flying machines and rocket planes. The other proud pilots who knew that they were too good to blow up would then attend what they called “the slow walkin’ and sad singin.’ ”
Clicking off the radio, the seaman mumbled, “Keep the shiny side up, Jack.”
Then the tall man laid his large hand upon the red telephone.
Jacob Enright never cried. Not when the medics at Kadena had removed his medicated facial bandages. Not for the two days at the military burn center in San Antonio. There, Air Force physicians had peeled away the burned and blistered skin from his face like layers of an onion to expose the pink and oozing baby skin underneath. And he did not cry when he sat holding Emily Parker’s hand when the President spoke sadly of the high cost of exploring the heavens.