The Glass Lady (49 page)

“Okay, Flight.”

The ship was over water again.

“And preliminary tracking and ranging put Entry Interface at 10 hours 17 minutes 04 seconds, MET. We'll refine that for you by IOS in 8 minutes.”

“Roger, Colorado. Twelve minutes to The Wall.”

“Your state vectors look real tight. You're Go for pitch program to entry Alpha angle.”

“ 'Kay.”

Endeavor still flew upside down, tailfirst. On Parker's hand commands to the control stick between his thighs, the RCS thrusters fired to pitch Shuttle's tail up toward the nighttime sky for a half-circle cartwheel. The huge ship's nose passed beneath the tail as she pitched around until her nose pointed toward Okinawa. Rightside up, nose forward, Shuttle's nose was 40 degrees above horizontal for re-entry.

“LOS in 20 seconds, Will.”

“Okay, Flight. We are finally flying right: Heads up and feet down. Alpha 40 degrees up bubble. All set here.”

“Roger, Will. With you in 7 . . .”

“Okay, Jack. Panel Overhead-8, OMS safing: Helium pressure vapor isolation valve, closed. Tank isolation open and cross-feed closed.”

“Done, Skipper.”

“And, computer Major Mode 303 running with attitude Item 24 Roll, and Item 25 Pitch, and Item 26 Yaw.” The AC tapped the EXEC computer key after tapping in each Item number into the computer keyboard. “Digital Autopilot set manual. And, my side, Panel Left-2: Cabin pressure relief, systems A and B to enable. Nose wheel steering to off; entry roll mode to off; speedbrake handle closed full forward. My side and yours, Jack: Air data probe set navigation. Speedbrake set auto. Guidance and Navigation, Panel F-2, Pitch to auto, Roll/Yaw to auto, and body flap to manual.”

After a ten-second nighttime landfall over Madagascar island, Endeavor flew headsup with her nose riding 40 degrees above the horizon. As the mission clocks passed 10 hours 10 minutes out and homeward bound, the orange sun exploded over the eastern horizon a thousand miles away.

“Won't see that for a while, Will.” Enright spoke softly as he reached beneath his seat for the windows' sunshades.

“You will, Jack. You'll be in line for the left seat within eighteen months. You got lots of uptime left in you, buddy.”

“Hope so, Skipper.”

Outside the six forward windows, the low sun was brilliant where it climbed in the southern, mid-summer sky a week before Christmas. As Endeavor descended in the dawn toward the atmosphere seven minutes away, the television screens showed 6056 nautical miles to Runway 23, Okinawa. As the AC called up computer program Major Mode 304 for the first phase of the re-entry, Enright configured the electrical system switches at his right for the final plunge into the morning sky.

Parker was moving the control stick between his thighs for a final check of the ship's aerodynamic control surfaces. With each twitch of the stick, pointers above the forward center television showed the amount of deflection generated in each surface by Endeavor's four Aerosurface Amplifiers. Alexi Karpov looked over Enright's left shoulder at the instrument displays.

“ASA ready and willing, Jack. Back to automatic trim.”

“And fuel cells One, Two, and Three, all set my side, Will.”

“Endeavor, Endeavor: AOS by IOS at 10 hours 16 minutes. With you for three.”

“Morning, Indian Ocean Ship,” Parker drawled. Outside, the sea was now daylight and dazzling.

“Will, Okinawa weather remains clear. Your temperatures and pressures are all Go. We see right OMS inerted. Ready with your inbound pad?”

“Ready to copy, Flight.”

“Okay . . . Entry Interface at 10 hours 17 minutes 01 second at Mach 24 point 6. Thermal control until EI plus 02 minutes 41 seconds; elevons on-line at EI plus 03 minutes. Deactivate RCS roll jets at EI plus 04 minutes 40 seconds at Mach 24, altitude 280,000 feet. First roll reversal at 4 pounds dynamic pressure. You are guidance internal at 263,000 feet. And you come out of S-Band communications blackout at EI plus 18 minutes 47 seconds. Wheels-on at 10 hours 47 minutes 43 seconds. Your ground track is still off a tad but well within the descent envelope.”

“Roger, Colorado. Got it. We're right and tight in the sky and ready for a few steaks and taters—don't forget to set a place for Alexi.”

“Copy, AC. And, Will . . . backroom says you are Go for PTI-7. Repeat: Go for PTI-7. Acknowledge.”

Parker and Enright traded glances.

“Ah, Flight, we're single-aft RCS up here. Not to mention tile damage aft portside. We bent our metal a bit. You sure on the PDPU maneuver?”

“Affirmative, Endeavor. Go for PTI-7.”

“Alright, Colorado.”

“Be LOS momentarily. Next contact at Kadena field by UHF on approach. Chase planes are now airborne for intercept at 40,000 feet when you're Mach zero point 8 at 22 miles range-to-go . . . Will, Jack, Major Karpov: Keep your feet dry, my friends. Configure . . .”

“See ya, Flight.”

Endeavor left her last network station behind over the dozen small islands of the Chagos Archipelago which glistened in the early-morning sunlight 90 miles beneath the descending starship.

“Coming up on one, Skipper . . . mark! One minute to Entry Interface.”

“Yeh . . . About PTI-7, Jack.”

“I know.”

Mother's re-entry plot showed 4,700 nautical miles to Okinawa still invisible 3,800 nautical miles on the far side of the hazy, blue horizon ahead.

Endeavor cruised closer to the upper, feathery wisps of the blue planet's breath. At Entry Interface, the starship would plow into the atmosphere at her velocity 24 times the speed of sound and eight times faster than the muzzle velocity of a .30-06 rifle bullet. One minute after that, Shuttle would cross the Equator for the fourteenth time in ten hours aloft to begin Revolution Eight.

The friction of hitting the wall of air at that speed would heat Endeavor's 34,000 pure glass tiles until they glow cherry red at 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat of re-entry is twice as hot as the melting temperature of Shuttle's aluminum skin behind the one-inch-to five-inch-thick glass tiles.

“Fifty seconds to EI, Skipper. About PTI-7?”

On the computer keyboard above the AC's swollen and throbbing right knee, the EXEC pushbutton blinked, awaiting the touch which would execute the program for the Push-down Pull-up, Programmed Test Input Number Seven.

William McKinley Parker floated against his lap belt. His deeply lined face looked out the window beside his left shoulder. Behind his gray pilot's eyes, he was somewhere better. The exhausted Aircraft Commander was home.

In Houston by the bay, all the clocks on all the walls read 17 minutes past 7 o'clock on a crisp, clear evening. Inside the tall airman's home close to the cold sea, no light shined. The last of evening twilight waned in the western sky beyond the dark windows.

Exquisite paintings and photographs of lighthouses hung in a neat row along the dark walls. Each stone tower beneath its solitary light stood alone upon a rocky shore.

The pilot in command was there. His long, tired body floated against his lap belt. But under his stocking feet he could feel the floor, his floor in his home on his Earth.

Will Parker could see the lighthouses standing mutely to warm the hearts of hard men unseen, who braced their salty bodies upon pitching decks.

“Thirty seconds, Will.” Enright's voice sounded like a question.

The AC blinked at his window filled with black sky, morning sunshine, and glaring sea beyond the tinted sunshades.

Enright was surprised to see Parker's large right hand open above the center console between their seats. The thin pilot with the bandaged, burned face reached over with both of his hands to grasp his captain's hand firmly.

“I am proud to have flown with you today, Jacob. You did good.”

The AC smiled and the deep lines in his face cracked. Jacob Enright blinked behind his gauze eyeholes.

Will Parker pulled his hand from Enright's and he placed his hand above the small keyboard of the computers.

On Mother's green face, digital numerics ticked down through 12 seconds to the searing Entry Interface, the wall.

“We are pilots, Jack.” The Mission Commander spoke quietly but firmly. His fingers were poised above the execute key on the computer keyboard which flashed EXEC, EXEC, EXEC.

“That we are, Will. And the icemen, too.”

The Aircraft Commander nodded as he pressed the pushbutton near his right knee. Mother's green face blinked “PTI-7 PROCEED.”

Parker wrapped his right hand around the control stick between his legs. His left hand held the T-shaped handle of the speedbrake controller on the left side of the cockpit. The speed brakes would open the long flanks of the vertical tail fin to slow the ship by air drag a little further inbound.

Together as one voice, the two airmen called out the countdown flashing on their television monitors. On the far side of the numbers was re-entry's wall of fire. And 4,390 nautical miles and thirty minutes beyond Entry Interface was a tiny green island with a ribbon of concrete pointing into the wind beneath blazing Pacific sunshine.

“Four, Three, Two, One . . . Interface!”

The little boat pitched in rough gray seas. A brilliant sun low in the west made the old boat's white hull glisten in the salt spray which stuck coldly to the faces of the two boatmen. The sailor at the wheel in the open cockpit cuddy was as old and weathered as his boat, the
Rebekah Sara
. On the lobster boat's open stern, hardly thirty feet from the rolling bow, the younger of the two men stood awkwardly braced against the heaving sea.

The captain pointed the boat's bow northward into the mouth of Frenchman's Bay on the far eastern shore of rocky Maine. In the bay of Downeast Maine, the boat stood dead in the water between Mount Desert Island and its Bar Harbor resort to the west and Schoodic Point, just south of Winter Harbor, to the east. To keep from being dragged out to sea by the retreating tide, the boatman at the helm kept his old diesel engine chugging softly against the tide to hold his position just off the lighthouse on Egg Rock Island in the bay. The two cold sailors had waved to the great Blue Nose ferry minutes earlier as the fine old ship plowed the heavy sea on her daily run from Bar Harbor to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.

On the
Rebekah Sara's
stern of peeling green paint, Jacob Enright gulped back nausea as the foaming water challenged his 18 years in his country's Navy. Only Jack Enright knew that he had taken up flying from the decks of aircraft carriers just to get his feet off the pitching ships which made him sick. But today, he would lose his lunch rather than abandon his mission in Frenchman's Bay. He had gone to sea to keep a promise to a friend.

The Shuttle Endeavor was wrapped in a plasma bubble of white-hot gas. The seething heat generated by the 100-ton glider plowing 23 times faster than the speed of sound into the atmosphere had boiled the upper wisps of the blue Earth's air. In the inferno hot enough to melt steel, the ionized vapors engulfed the Shuttle in a blanket of electrically charged fire so tightly that fragile radio waves could neither exit nor enter. The traditional “black out” of re-entry sinks every returning shuttle into 16 minutes of absolute radio silence. Once the ship slides out of orbit and down to 400,000 feet above the ground, the pilots on board could not be more isolated from ground control if they were on the back side of the Moon.

Command Pilot William McKinley Parker sat watching his three CRT television screens on the instrument panel. Jacob Enright at this right side blinked watery eyes at his own consoles. Copilot Enright was still inside his moist mask of drug-soaked gauze which stuck painfully to dime-size blisters raised hours earlier by the laser jolt from LACE. Colonel Parker's face bathed in the cherry light of re-entry's glow was puffy and sweating from the ordeal of decompression sickness which had nearly blown his body apart during his spacewalk. The lethal phase of his case of the bends had subsided, but the pain lingered and clouded his weary brain.

“Down the old kazoo, Skipper,” Enright mumbled as he scanned his instruments reading out Endeavor's rate of descent, cross-range error along the ground-track which had to dog-leg well sideways to hit Okinawa, and angle of bank as the ship's computers automatically rolled the shuttle wingtips up and down to bleed off energy for a precise landing at the emergency shuttle landing strip at Kadena Air Force Base.

“Yeh, Jack,” the Mission Commander croaked. “The PTI ought to kick in at about 350 K.”

“At three hundred fifty thousand, Will. Lookin' for the son of a bitch in twenty seconds.” Enright squinted his bloodshot eyes at the large “eight ball” attitude indicator in front of his face and a bit below shoulder level. The Flight Director, a round black ball with yellow indicator needles, would show the ship's gentle pitch-up when the Programmed Test Input was executed by the humming memory banks in the four primary computers. The fifth computer watched the other four to keep them honest during reentry's blinding firestorm. A steering error of a gnat's eyelash could reduce the already wounded ship to a ball of molten aluminum.

“She's got the wobbles, Jack,” Will Parker stammered. His own eight ball showed a very slight instability in the ship's glide caused by its ruptured tail section.

“Still within the deadband envelope, Will.”

“Seems so, Number One. But if I get a rate C and W, the PTI goes into the dumper.” Colonel Parker watched the bank of Caution and Warning lights for the first flicker of an indication that the ship's parallel attitude-control loops could not handle the PTI maneuver. The forty-degree, nose-high attitude of the ship used the flat side of the massive, black wings to deflect the scalding slipstream away from the damaged tail area. Endeavor literally rode down her own shock wave like a surfer's waxed board skimming over a curl at Malibu. Only the shuttle rode a wave of ionized gas more than 3,000°F hot.