"T minus five minutes, and holding."
It wasn't even ten in the morning, but the day was already hot. Kyle Gustafson squirted another dollop of sunscreen into his palm, then rubbed his hands together. Smearing it over his face and neck, he grimaced: he reeked of coconut oil. He made a mental note to avoid all open flames until he showered.
Kyle had a Scottish-American mother and a Swedish-American father, a combination that Dad called industrial-strength WASP. He didn't belong below the forty-fifth parallel, let alone outside beneath Cape Canaveral's summer, subtropical sun—but he never missed an opportunity to witness a launch. His job helped: who better than the presidential science advisor to escort visiting foreign dignitaries to Kennedy Space Center?
"You could wear a hat, my friend."
I look really stupid in hats, Kyle thought. Turning toward his Russian counterpart, he suppressed that answer as impolitic. Instead, he changed the subject. "Sorry for the delay, Sergei. The hold is built into the schedule to allow time for responding to minor glitches."
"T minus five minutes, and holding."
His guest said nothing. Sergei Denisovich Arbatov was tall, wiry, and tanned. He'd been born and raised in the Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula once popularly called the Russian Riviera. That nickname had gone out of vogue when the USSR self-destructed, and an independent Ukraine had made it clear that ethnic Russians were no longer welcome. In 1992, Sergei had moved his family to Moscow, where he'd moved up rapidly in the new, democratic government. It wasn't clear to Kyle how Sergei avoided the Muscovite's traditional pallor—unless it was by finagling trips to Florida.
"T minus five minutes, and counting."
The single-word change in the announcement made Kyle's pulse race. Across the plain from their vantage point at the VIP launch viewing area, Atlantis shimmered through the rising waves of heated air.
The shuttle on Launch Pad 39B stood 184 feet tall, the dartlike body of the orbiter dwarfed by the solid rocket boosters and external fuel tank to which it was attached. All but the tank were white; the expendable metal tank, once also painted white, was now left its natural rust color to reduce takeoff weight by 750 pounds.
"T minus four minutes, thirty seconds, and counting."
Kyle continued his standard briefing. "The gross weight of the shuttle at launch is about 4.5 million pounds, Sergei. Impressive, don't you think?"
"Apollo/Saturn V weighed a half again more." The gray-haired Russian smiled sadly. "We never made it to the moon, and you Americans have forgotten how. I don't know who disappoints me more."
Kyle had been thirteen the night of the first moon landing. Afterward, he'd lain awake all night, scheming how he, too, would sometime, somehow, make a giant leap for mankind. The idealist in him still shared Arbatov's regrets. Many days, only that boy's dream sustained Kyle through Washington's game-playing and inanity. Someday, he told himself, he would make it happen.
Someday seemed never to get closer.
"T minus four minutes, and counting."
Nervously, Kyle ran his fingers through hair once flame-red. Age had banked the fire with ashes, for a net effect beginning to approach salmon. Too late, he remembered the sunscreen that coated his hands. "We'll go back, Sergei," he answered softly, speaking really to himself. "Men will walk again on the moon. Will visit other worlds, too." He shook off the sudden gloom. "First, though, we've got a satellite to launch."
"T minus three minutes, ten seconds, and counting." Loudspeakers all around them blared the announcement.
The Earth's atmosphere is effectively opaque to gamma radiation. In 1991, to begin a whole new era in astronomy, Atlantis had delivered the Gamma Ray Observatory to low Earth orbit. After years of spectacular success, the GRO had had one too many gyroscopes fail. NASA had deorbited it in 2000, in a spectacular but controlled Pacific Ocean crash.
Now another Atlantis crew was ready to deploy GRO's replacement. Major Les Griffiths, the mission commander, had proposed that the mission badges on the crew's flight suits read, "Your full-spectrum delivery service." The suggestion was rejected as too flippant. A mere three missions into the post-Columbia resumption of shuttle flights, American nerves remained raw.
"Da." Arbatov turned to the distant shuttle. He sounded skeptical. "Then let us watch."
The remaining minutes passed with glacial slowness. Finally, a brilliant spark flashed beneath Atlantis. Golden flames lashed at 300,000 gallons of water in the giant heat/sound-suppression trench beside the launch pad, hiding the shuttle in a sudden cloud of steam. Kyle's heart, as always, skipped a beat, anxious for the top of the shuttle to emerge from the fog. A wall of sound more felt than heard washed over them. Faster than he could ever believe possible, no matter how often he saw it, the shuttle shot skyward on a column of fire and smoke. Chase planes in pursuit, it angled eastward and headed out over the ocean. The sound receded to a rumble as he shaded his eyes to watch.
"Kyle!"
The American reluctantly returned his attention to his guest. Arbatov still stared at the disappearing spacecraft, one of the mission-frequency portable radios that Kyle's position had allowed him to commandeer pressed tightly to his ear. Kyle's own radio, turned off, hung from his wrist.
"Nyet, nyet, nyet!" shouted the Russian.
The presidential advisor snapped on his own radio. "Roger that," said the pilot. "Abort order acknowledged." The hypercalm, hypercrisp words made Kyle's blood run cold.
A speck atop a distant flame, the shuttle continued its climb. The far-off flame suddenly dimmed; the three main engines had been extinguished. What the hell was happening? "Shutdown sequence complete. Pressure in the ET"—external tank—"still rising. Jettisoning tank and SRBs." Unseen explosive bolts severed the manned orbiter from the external tank; freed from the massive orbiter, the tank and its still-attached, nonextinguishable, solid-fuel rocket boosters quickly shot clear. The manned orbiter coasted after them, for the moment, on momentum.
Clutching their radios, Kyle and his guest leaned together for reassurance. "Pressure still increasing."
Light glinted mockingly off the sun-tracking Astronaut Memorial, the granite monolith engraved with the names of astronauts killed in the line of duty. It seemed all too likely that the list was about to grow by five more names.
"Pressure nearing critical." He recognized the voice from Mission Control. "Report status."
What pressure? In the ET? Was it about to blow? Two Sea-Air Rescue choppers thundered overhead as he did a quick calculation. The ET must still contain at least 250,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen!
"Beginning OMS burn."
The distant speck regrew a flame—had the orbital-maneuvering-system engines ever been fired before inside the atmosphere?—and began banking toward the coast. Unaided by SRBs, its main engines unusable without the ET, the orbiter seemed to lumber. Seemed mortally wounded. "Suggest my escorts make tracks."
"Pressure at critical. Crit plus ten. Crit plus twenty. Twenty-three. Twenty-four."
An enormous fireball blossomed above the escaping orbiter. From miles away, Kyle saw the craft stagger as the shock wave struck. "Tell Beth that I love her." The distant flame pinwheeled as Atlantis began to tumble. Moments later, the roar and the shock wave of the blast reached the Cape, whipping Kyle and Sergei with a sudden gale of sand and grit. The distant spark extinguished as safety circuits shut down the tumbling craft's rocket engines.
The orbiter began its long plunge to the sea, with both chase planes diving futilely after it.
Like its mythical namesake, the orbiter Atlantis slipped beneath the silent and uncaring waves to meet its fate.