“X minus ten minutes and counting.” The pad talker sat at the center console. A lean, red-haired man in his twenties, Henry Morse was the team member tasked with maintaining contact between Lucky Linda and men in the blockhouse—the 390 Group, the classified name for this team. Henry switched off the loudspeaker and listened for a moment to his headphones, then turned to the man at the periscope. “Just heard from Jack at the tower. Skid has entered the cockpit.”
“Radio check,” Dr. Robert H. Goddard said, not looking away from the eyepiece.
Harry turned to the mike again. “Lucky Linda, this is Desert Bravo. Radio check, over.”
A few moments passed, then Skid’s voice came over the blockhouse speakers: “Wilco, Desert Bravo. Radio check one, two, three, over.”
“We receive you loud and clear, Lucky Linda. Stand by for checklist.”
Henry glanced at the notebook in front of him, then looked over at a Chinese-American physicist sitting nearby. “Initiate liquid oxygen and nitrogen tank pressurization,” Harry Chung said, carefully watching the gauges on his console.
“Initiate liquid oxygen and nitrogen tank pressurization,” Henry repeated.
Another moment passed. “LOX and nitrogen pressurization, go,” Skid said.
Goddard raised his eyes from the periscope and looked at the master clock on the wall above the consoles. “Clear the pad,” he quietly told Morse.
Once again, Klaxons bellowed near the launchpad, followed by Henry’s voice: “X minus eight minutes and counting. All personnel, vacate the launchpad immediately. Repeat, X minus eight and counting…”
Lucky Linda’s canopy was still open. Within the cramped cockpit, Rudy Sloman lay upon an overstuffed leather acceleration couch, feet above his head. His air hose had been connected to a valve at his feet, and his hands moved across the instrument panel before him, flipping toggle switches in sequence with the checklist printed in a small spiral notebook strapped to his left thigh. Jack Cube and a technician stood on the catwalk; the technician grasped the canopy’s recessed handles and started to slide it shut but stopped as Jackson reached into the cockpit and tapped his friend on the shoulder.
“Good…”
“Don’t say it!” Skid snapped.
Jack Cube stopped himself before he spoke the words Skid considered to be ill omens. “Happy landings,” he said instead.
Skid responded with a wink and a quick thumbs-up. “See you when I get back,” he replied. Like he was just going out for beer and a pack of smokes.
There was nothing left to say or do, so Jackson and the technician slid the canopy into position and locked it down, sealing the pilot within his craft. The technician stooped to pick up his toolbox, then both of them left the catwalk. Once they were off the platform, the technician bent down again and swiftly turned a wheel that withdrew the catwalk from the Lucky Linda. That done, he and Jackson headed for the stairs; the elevator was too slow, and they needed to get off the gantry as fast as possible.
They were the last people to leave the pad. Everyone else was climbing into trucks and jeeps, and a diesel locomotive was already hooked up to the gantry. Jack Cube hopped into the back of a jeep; as it roared off, he looked back to watch the locomotive pull the gantry away from the launchpad. Lucky Linda stood gleaming in the morning sun, the clamps of its launch ring and the electrical umbilical leading from the nose to the adjacent launch tower its sole connections to Earth.
“Good luck, Skid,” Jack Cube whispered beneath his breath.
“X minus three minutes and counting.”
Outside the blockhouse, technicians, infantrymen, and officers watched from behind a sandbag wall. Tripods rose above the barrier, supporting movie and still-image cameras; on a wooden platform, white-coated camera operators worked the enormous television projector whose images were being seen within the blockhouse. Emergency fire and medical personnel waited beside their vehicles, engines warmed up and idling.
At the sandbag barricade, a master sergeant opened a matchbox and pulled out a pair of wax earplugs. A corporal beside him watched as he rolled them between his fingers, carefully shaping the plugs before fitting them into his ears.
“Hey, Sarge,” he said, “is this thing gonna be loud when it goes up?”
“Guess so. The others were.”
The corporal nodded. He’d been transferred here only a couple of weeks ago and hadn’t seen any of the test rockets that were previously launched. “So they made a lot of noise, huh?”
“Yeah, they did.” Sarge first plugged his left ear, then his right. “And then they blew up.”
“Cabin pressure, check,” Henry said.
“Cabin pressure 10 psi, check,” Rudy replied.
The blockhouse door opened, and J. Jackson Jackson came in. Henry looked up as Jack Cube sat down beside him, then covered the microphone with his hand.
“How’s he doing out there?” he quietly asked.
“Great.” Jack reached for a pack of Camels on the table. “How’s it going here?”
“Great.” Henry hesitated, then glanced over his shoulder at Goddard. “Except for Bob,” he quietly added.
Jack Cube turned to look at Robert Goddard. The team leader continued to study the launchpad through the periscope. “Looks fine to me,” he murmured. “What makes you think something’s wrong?”
“He hasn’t said much since he got here.” Henry uncovered the mike again. “Gyro check…”
Jack Cube shook a cigarette from the pack, lit it, and tossed the spent match in the overflowing ashtray. All the other members of the 390 Group were busy at their stations: Taylor Brickell, Harry Chung, Michael Ferris, Hamilton Ballou, Gerry Mander. Only Lloyd Kapman was missing; the team’s other chemical engineer had volunteered to be stationed at McChord Field, to act as a spotter if and when the Office of Strategic Services received word that there had been a launch from somewhere in Germany.
This left just Colonel Bliss and Bob Goddard. Bliss noticed Jackson when the lieutenant looked his way; the colonel gave him a brief nod, then returned his attention to the television screens. Goddard was more tense than he’d ever seen him. The knuckles of his hands were white as they gripped the periscope handles; despite the coolness of the blockhouse, there was a thin sheen of sweat on top of his head.
“Checklist complete,” Henry said. “X minus two minutes, thirty seconds and counting. Lucky Linda, we’re about to poll the launch team. Stand by for final countdown.”
“Roger that, Desert Bravo. Standing by.”
Morse turned to Goddard again. “Bob?”
Stepping away from the periscope, Goddard walked over to where Henry and Jack Cube were sitting. Standing behind Henry, he turned a couple of pages of the loose-leaf binder, then laid a finger at the top of a checklist.
“Range,” he said.
“Range clear,” Gerry Mander responded, his eyes on the radar screen. “Go.”
“Fuel.”
“Tanks pressurized at one hundred percent,” Ham Ballou said. “Go.”
“Main engines.”
“Go!” Michael Ferris snapped.