The Fall (3 page)

But the cyber-sword cuts both ways,
she thought with a slight grin. The same VIP accounts that allowed the Los Alamos scientists to connect their tablets into the OSS network had allowed Angela to load up a nice little virus into their portable devices, creating back doors that should give her access to their networks.

You get to see mine but I also get to see yours.

As soon as this jump was over, she would find out who they were and why they wanted to modify Jack's descent profile during the reentry phase from Alpha-G to Alpha-B.

She had gone over the data and it didn't make any sense. Alpha-B would increase the angle of descent by two degrees, keeping Jack supersonic for fifteen more seconds than planned, which could potentially set him off course by as much as three miles from his designated touchdown site northeast of Orlando. The Alpha adjustments, from A to K, were created to compensate for the winds aloft during reentry and keep the jumper on a mission-specified vertical track. Part of Project Phoenix's deliverables was touchdown accuracy to within ten feet of the intended target.

In the end, NASA had caved and agreed to program Hastings's Alpha-B descent profile. But just before the launch, Angela had used her secret back door into the OSS descent control algorithms to reprogram it back to Alpha-G while still keeping all systems reporting that they were set for Alpha-B.

It's
my
husband you're fucking with, General, not one of your eunuchs,
she thought, glad that she had listened to the hacker in her and programmed multiple back doors into every system in the OSS network.

“Jump plus ten. Pod burn complete.”

“Roger.”

Pete looked over to Angela and gave her a reassuring thumbs-up. His soft features contrasted sharply with a pair of blue eyes gleaming with bold intelligence under a full head of dark hair.

He turned back toward his monitor. Pete's dark skin had the handsome damage of countless weekends sailing or skydiving with Jack. Those two went back to high school in New Jersey. Although Pete was captain of the chess team while Jack led the football team, they developed a deep friendship. Then Pete got an academic scholarship to Stanford's prestigious School of Engineering while Jack played football for Rutgers before joining the Navy, where he eventually screened for BUD/S, Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL Training at Coronado. That led him straight to SEAL Team 3, followed by five years of missions in the Middle East's hottest spots and another two years with SEAL Team 4 in South America. When a mission in Colombia went south due to faulty combat gear, Jack signed up to test prototype military equipment for the Pentagon, feeling that he could best serve his country by working out the kinks in high-tech weaponry and gadgets before they became plans of record for America's fighting forces. Pete, on the other hand, accepted a contract with the Pentagon to develop America's next generation of weaponry, which led him to NASA and Project Phoenix, where he wasted no time in recruiting Jack.

Angela watched the ends of her lips curve up on her reflection on the flat-screen monitor, remembering the first time she laid eyes on the clean-cut Jack Taylor, rapidly deciding he was definitely not her type. Angela had grown up among the tough biker crowd that hung around her father's motorcycle shop in Cocoa Beach. The former SEAL, albeit ruggedly handsome and quite free-spirited, didn't trigger any feelings in her. And besides, she was too damn busy developing the OSS to give Jack's advances any serious thought. But somewhere along the way, he had turned her around, and before she knew it they were married.

Angela forced those thoughts aside while focusing on the data displayed on her monitor, confirming proper functionality of all systems. Everything was as it should be, including her secretly reprogrammed descent profile.

She pinched the bridge of her nose, seeking comfort by remembering Jack's final words just before he'd left the suit-up room. Beaming with confidence, he'd looked her in the eye and gave her the same damn line he'd always given her before going on a mission:
Relax, honey. I'll be right back.

She took a deep breath, glancing around the room, trying very hard to keep it together while her husband dropped out of the sky like a fucking meteor.

Come home to me, Jack. Please come home.

*   *   *

Jack plummeted to Earth, at least according to the altimeter reading next to the mission timer. One mile down and sixty-one to go, but all he felt was a serene sense of floating in space as outside temperatures read 100 degrees Kelvin or about minus-280 degrees Fahrenheit.

Pretty damn cold,
he thought, reaching almost five hundred miles per hour before the drone deployed. It wasn't really a parachute but more of a small winglike appendage to increase stability for a cleaner entry into the speed of sound.

Jack kept his profile steady now as he approached six hundred miles per hour, the mission timer shifting to red, which indicated he was almost supersonic.

“Seven hundred miles per hour and fifty-eight miles high, Phoenix. Looking good.”

Jack was about to reply but felt a slight buffeting that couldn't be due to air molecules. He was way too far up for any of that.

“KSC, Phoenix, there's a slight—” Jack stopped. The buffeting vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

“Congratulations, Phoenix. You are Mach one point oh and climbing.”

Well, I'll be damned.
He had just punched through the sound barrier with little fanfare.

“Roger that. Phoenix is supersonic,” Jack replied, limbs still stretched, keeping the tension in the stability webbing as he shot past eight hundred miles per hour at mile fifty-six.

The stars slowly dimmed as a violet halo-like glow extended radially around him.

Weird.

But he ignored it as Mach two came and went, as he dropped below the thermosphere and into the ionosphere while the suit kept him completely isolated from the harsh environment.

One minute and fifty-three miles to go,
he thought, enjoying a deep breath of pure cold oxygen while reading the mission timer as his speed continued to climb due to a lack of an atmosphere. And that also meant no sound since there were no air molecules to carry sound waves.

Jack breathed in the refreshing air again, listening to the pumps while watching the rapidly expanding Earth almost as if he were in some sort of silent video game.

Systems remained in the green, the multiple layers of the OSS and its insulating gels holding his body temperature at a nominal 96.7 degrees Fahrenheit as he accelerated beyond the fastest fighter jet. The violet halo intensified, enveloping him in its dazzling glow.

“KSC, Phoenix. You guys see that purple haze around me?”

“Ah, negative, Phoenix. The pod's camera shows you bright and clear. Looking good through Mach three.”

Jack decided to let that go, focusing on his instruments, staring at one of the many retina-controlled icons on his faceplate display and blinking once, releasing the titanium-alloy winglet while getting the OSS ready to fire his boot and glove jets to increase his angle of descent as prescribed by what he hoped would be the Alpha-G profile that Angela had preprogrammed in the suit's directional algorithms, preparing him to reenter the atmosphere and get bombarded by the air molecules that would slow down his descent, in the process creating an air pocket in front of him that would heat the air to incandescence.

But to reenter the atmosphere safely, Jack had to transition from his current skydiver attitude to a near-vertical profile to create the smallest possible cross-section to the incoming compression wave of thermal deceleration. Angela had designed his oversized helmet—which reminded Jack of the elongated head from one of those old
Alien
movies—and extra-wide shoulder pads as the suit's primary ablative shields, designed to take the brunt of the direct reentry heating.

Following engineering principles that dated back to the 1950s showing that the greater the drag, the lower the heat load on the object reentering the atmosphere, Angela had designed the OSS's helmet and shoulder sections to be blunt rather than aerodynamic. In doing so, air molecules wouldn't be able to get out of the way fast enough, acting as an air cushion to push the heated shockwave layer forward and away from him. Since most of the hot gases would no longer be in direct contact with Jack's suit, the heat energy would stay in the shocked gas and simply move around the OSS to later dissipate into the atmosphere above him.

Jack's primary job was to keep all of his mass hidden behind these critical blunt shields made of the same reinforced carbon-carbon material previously used for the nose of the space shuttle and designed for temperatures above 1300 degrees Fahrenheit. The rest of his suit's outer shell, like the chest and waist plates, were fabricated from the coated L-9000 silica ceramics used in the space shuttle's belly, while his limbs were shielded with layers of flexible insulation blankets used by the space shuttle for temperatures below 1200 degrees Fahrenheit.

Jack frowned, unable to avoid thinking about the tragic fate of Space Shuttle
Columbia
burning up during the very unforgiving reentry phase back in 2003 due to damage to its thermal protection system under one wing during the launch phase, exposing its inner skin to the blazing inferno. Hot gases had breached the wing structure through a hole in the TPS, leading to the rapid disintegration of the shuttle.

If his outer shell cracked due to the reentry stress, the OSS would be breached, just like
Columbia,
with disastrous results.

“KSC, Phoenix. Jets firing,” he reported, listening to the bursts and confirming readings on his faceplate display as he slowly shifted from a horizontal pose to near vertical, tucking his arms against the built-in recess points on the sides of his suit while closing his legs and engaging the magnetic locking mechanisms to keep his limbs from shifting during reentry.

Jack quickly assumed a bulletlike profile behind his blunt shields, getting a green icon confirming achievement of the Alpha-G angle.

I guess Angie won,
thought Jack. He blinked and accepted the descent profile.

“Phoenix, KSC. Copy that. Mach three point two and holding. Forty-six miles high.”

That's almost 2,500 miles per hour,
he thought, realizing that he had broken every record in the books for the fastest speed without a spacecraft. He could only hope that would be the only thing he broke today, as he plummeted into the stratosphere like a silent meteor.

But the peaceful fall didn't last long the moment air molecules began their attack, slow at first, just a few pings against his armored shields, before rapidly increasing their intensity, pounding him like invisible bullets, like millions of shotgun pellets striking the protective layers on his helmet and shoulder pads. The noise reminded Jack of being trapped inside an RV on a rock-climbing trip in Arizona with Pete eons ago during a massive hail storm. The pounding was deafening.

“Phoenix, KSC, TDRSS in fifteen seconds.”

Jack grimaced, barely hearing his friend. “Copy that!” he shouted through the noise.

Jack stared at an icon in the shape of a satellite on the upper right side of his helmet display and blinked once, engaging the tracking and data relay satellite system. Created during the space shuttle era to solve the dreaded reentry communications blackout caused by ionized air from the compressing atmosphere around the decelerating vehicle, TDRSS allowed the shuttle to maintain communications by relay with a tracking and data relay satellite through a hole in the ionized air at the tail of the craft created by the shuttle's shape. Angela had basically accomplished the same thing at a much smaller scale, incorporating the relevant shuttle contours into the shape of the Orbital Space Suit to punch a similar hole through the ionized envelope and keep tabs of her husband's whereabouts all the way to the ground.

Jack activated the stiffeners around his neck, anchoring the long helmet to the frame of his suit as he felt the G-forces accumulating, as the building pressure on his upper body intensified, as the shockwave compressed the stress-absorbing materials of the suit's titanium and carbon fiber skeleton. But contrary to popular belief, shock-layer heating wasn't caused primarily by direct air friction but by the heating of air molecules within the increasing compression wave.

Jack focused on the graphics of his first ablative shield, which provided protection on two levels. The outer surface began to char, melt, and sublime in the rising heat, while the remaining ablation material underwent pyrolysis, an irreversible thermochemical decomposition at elevated temperatures in the absence of oxygen, expelling the product gases and keeping all layers beneath it quite cool.

Jack watched as the blunt ablation shields worked their chemical magic, lifting the hot gases away from the shield's outer wall, creating a cooler boundary layer as he dove into a wall of fire that always remained a quarter of an inch away from him, before washing away in the slipstream, caressing the sides of his suit's flexible insulation material.

But the thermal shields could do little about the noise, which continued climbing to an ear-piercing crescendo as the atmosphere put up a fight.

Jack tightened his jaw muscles as his near-vertical mass continued to punch through the resisting thin air, turning the sky around him into a blinding, incandescent white stained with that weird violet haze that now started to pulsate in stroboscopic waves.

Jesus Christ,
he thought, as the G-meter read 8.5 and continued to climb.

He increased the pressure of the suit's gel to counter it, to force more blood to his head, to fight the growing light-headedness, receiving visual confirmation through the faceplate display and feeling the squeeze action on his legs.

“Phoenix, KSC. Looking good at forty-three miles high.”