Read Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 03 Online
Authors: Sky Masters (v1.1)
Yin considered radioing the South
China Sea Fleet Headquarters at
Zhanjiang
directly, but so far Admiral Yin had not
really done anything noteworthy except get one-sixth of his flotilla destroyed
or damaged; he needed to show some initiative, some decisive action, before
informing his headquarters of the disaster and awaiting instructions. The Shui-
hong-5 was a large turboprop flying boat used primarily for antisubmarine warfare
and maritime patrol, but the ten aircraft assigned full-time to his Nansha
Island flotilla were fitted for antiship duties, with French-made Heracles II
sea surveillance and targeting radar, two C-101 supersonic antiship missiles
hung under the wings, and six French-made Murene NTL-90 dual-purpose
lightweight torpedoes, also on wing pylons. The Shuihong-5 was a significant
threat to any ship that did not possess antiaircraft missiles, and to Yin’s
knowledge no Filipino warship carried antiaircraft missiles except perhaps
short-range Stinger shoulder-fired weapons.
It was enough to bomb the hell out
of whatever Philippine forces were out there. Then, when his commander, the
notoriously mercurial High General Chin Po Zihong, called him on the carpet for
the destroyed
Chagda,
he’d have a
large, ample helping of dead Filipinos to serve up. And
that
would certainly make High General Chin happy.
Off the West Coast of the
United States Near Vandenberg, California Wednesday, 21 September 1994, 1131
hours local
It was an absolutely spectacular day
for flying. The skies were clear, with only a few stray wisps of clouds to
break up the blue all around. The winds were relatively calm and
turbulence-free, which was rather unusual at forty thousand feet.
Things were not quite as calm,
however, inside the special, heavily modified Sky Masters, Inc., DC-10 aircraft
orbiting off the
California
coast.
There was only one booster in the
cargo section of the special DC-10 that morning, which presumably would have
made Jon Masters half as anxious as when he was carrying two. Instead, Masters
was agitated and irritable, much to the chagrin of the rest of the crew. The
source of his irritation was Sky Masters’ newest air-launched space booster,
Jackson-1, a dark, sleek, bullet-nosed object whose very looks promised
powerful results. But the booster, named for the seventh President of the
United States
, wasn’t going anywhere. And that was the
problem.
“What’s going on?” Masters demanded
over interphone, drumming his fingers on the launch-control console.
Helen Kaddiri sighed. “We’re still
tracking down the problem, Jon. We’re having trouble on the Ku-band downlink
from Homer-Seven.”
“You’ve got five minutes,” Masters
reminded her. “If we can’t talk to that satellite, we’ll have to abort.”
Kaddiri sighed again. As if she
didn’t know. An assistant handed her yet another self-test readout. She rolled
her eyes and crumbled the paper up in her hands. She took a deep breath and
keyed the interphone mike: “There’s still a fault in the bird, Jon, and it’s
not at our ground station. We’re going to have to abort. There’s no choice. Air
Force is saying the same as well.”
That was not what Masters wanted to
hear. “Homer- Seven was working fine just seventy minutes ago.” Homer- Seven
was one of the constellation of eight TDRS, or Tracking and Data Relay
Satellites, launched in the late 1980s and early 1990s to provide uninterrupted
tracking, data, and communications coverage for the space shuttle and other
military satellites, including spy satellites. They replaced several slow,
outmoded ground communications stations once located in remote areas of the
world such as the Australian outback and the African Congo.
“Now the Air Force wants to abort?
After they’ve been screaming at me to get these fuckers in orbit so they can
eyeball the
Philippines
? That’s typical. Tell ’em to keep their
nose out of my business and find out where the problem is in
their
satellite.”
Even as the words came out of his
mouth, though, Masters knew that wasn’t what the Air Force was going to want to
hear. Besides, the TDRS system had proved generally reliable in the past, and
all of Jon Masters’ NIRTSats relied on TDRS to beam status and tracking
information to his
Blytheville
,
Arkansas
, headquarters as well as to the military
and government agencies using the satellite.
So the problem had to be on the
plane. . .'.
“Get another system check at
Blytheville
and another here,” he ordered. “Right now.
Get on it.”
Kaddiri had quickly grown tired of
being ordered around. “We’ve checked our systems. They’re fine and ready to
receive. The problem’s in the TDRS satellite, not with our gear.”
Masters muttered something under his
breath, threw off his headset, and got up out of his seat. The senior launch-
control technician, Albert “Red” Philips, immediately asked, “Jon, what about
the countdown?”
“Continue the countdown, Red,” Jon
snapped. “No— hold. I’ll be back in one minute.” He then hurried forward to the
flight deck.
Despite the roominess of the launch-control
cabin and booster section in the rear cargo hold of the DC-10, the flight deck
up front was cramped and relatively uncomfortable. Along with the two pilots,
there was the flight engineer’s station behind the copilot, with his complex
system of fuel, electrical, hydraulic, and pneumatic cortrols and monitors; he
also controlled the aircraft’s weight and balance system, which was designed to
compensate for each ALARM booster launch by rapidly distributing fuel and
ballast as the boosters were moved or launched.
Behind the pilot’s station,
back-to-back with the flight engineer, was the alternate launch-control console
and the primary launch-communications center. The system handled the
communications interface between satellites and ground stations and the ALARM
booster until a few seconds before launch, when the booster’s onboard computer
received its last position and velocity update from the launch aircraft and was
sent on its way. The ALARM booster’s onboard flight computers continuously
navigated for itself and provided steering signals to the launch aircraft to
position itself for orbital insertion, but it needed information sent to it
through the launch aircraft’s communication system, and'right now the system
was not picking up data from the tracking satellites. Helen Kaddiri, who was in
charge of the console for this launch, had been trying to restore
communications, but with no luck.
She rolled her eyes in exasperation
as Masters rushed through the pressurized cabin door. “Jon, if you don’t mind,
I can handle this . . .”
Masters immediately checked the
status screen for the launch aircraft’s communication system—everything was
still reporting normal. “I asked you to run a self-test of our system, Helen.”
Kaddiri sighed as Masters peered
over her left shoulder to watch the test process on the screen. . . .
“There!” Masters announced.
“Umbilical fiber optic hardware continuity. Why did you bypass that test?”
“C’mon, Jon, get real,” Kaddiri
protested. “That’s not an electronics check, that’s a visual check—”
“Bullshit,” said Masters, dashing
out of the cockpit and back into the cargo section.
The ALARM booster, its gray bulk
huge and ominous in the bright inspection lights of the cargo section, had been
wheeled out of the airlock and back into the cargo section so technicians could
look it over again.
“Push her back in and check the
umbilical connections,” Masters said. “We might have a bad plug.”
“But we need a safe connectivity
readout before we can push her into position,” Red Philips said. He checked the
status board on the launch-control panel. “I’m still showing no tracking data
from—”
“Bypass the safety locks, Red,”
Masters said. “Get the booster into position to launch.”
“We lose all our safety margins if
we bypass the safety locks, Jon—” But Philips could see that Masters didn’t
care. He punched in instructions in the launch-control console to bypass the
safety interlocks, which usually prevented an armed but malfunctioning booster
to be wheeled into position for release. The interlocks prevented an accident
on board the plane and the inadvertent dropping of a live booster out the
launch bay—now there were no safety backups.
The bypass showed up immediately on
Helen Kaddiri’s alternate launch-control board. “Jon, I’ve got an ‘Unsafe Warning’
light on. Is the booster locked down? I show the interlocks off.”
“I turned them off, Helen,” Jon said
on interphone. He stood with a flashlight at the mouth of the launch-bay
airlock as the huge ALARM booster was motored back into launch position. “We’re
checking the umbilical plug.”
“You can’t do that, Jon,” Helen
warned. “If it’s more than just a plug problem, the booster might proceed to a
final launch countdown before you can open the bay doors or before we can
inhibit the ignition sequence. You’re cleaning a loaded gun with your finger on
the trigger and the hammer pulled back.”
Masters glanced up at the
cylindrical launch-bay airlock, which actually did resemble the chamber of a
gun; inside, he could see the nosecap of the Air-Launched Alert Response
Missile, which certainly resembled a bullet, as it motored into position. His
head was right in the muzzle. “Good analogy, Helen,” he said wryly.
The booster slid into position. “Try
the umbilical selftest,” Masters said to the launch-bay technician.
A moment later, Philips gave him his
answer: “That’s it, Jon!” he said with a shout. “There’s a break in the
umbilical connector—we had proper voltage but no signal. Come out of there and
we’ll have it fixed in no time.”
“Forget it. No time. I’ll do it
myself.” Before anyone could say anything else, Masters had scrambled inside
the launch airlock and began crawling down along the ALARM booster.
“Jon, are you nuts?” the technician
said. “Helen, this is Red. Jon just crawled down into the airlock. Put the
interlocks back on.”
“No!” Masters radioed from inside
the launch airlock. “Continue the countdown.”
“This is Kaddiri. I’m setting the
interlocks, operator-initiated countdown hold. Crewman in the launch airlock.
Interlocks on.”
Just then the self-test on the
booster’s umbilical ended with a satisfactory reading. “Continuity restored ...
you got it, Jon, you got it,” Philips said. “But we’ve passed the launch
window.”
“Start the countdown at T minus
sixty,” Masters said. “The booster has the endurance to make the corrections,
and we built a little leeway into the launch window. Continue the countdown . .
.”
“I am not going to reactivate the
system until you are out of there,” Kaddiri said testily.
“I’m out, I’m out,” Masters said as
his sneakers appeared from the muzzle of the airlock. “Let’s do it.” Masters
closed the airlock doors the second he was out of the chamber. Philips gave him
his portable oxygen bottle, and he was just putting it on and strapping himself
into his seat when the airlock was depressurized. Less than sixty seconds later
the booster was on its way.
“Good separation, good first-stage
ignition,” Helen reported as the forty-three-thousand-pound missile accelerated
ahead of the DC-10 and roared skyward. “Clear connectivity in all channels ...
wings responding, swiveling on schedule . . . twenty seconds to first-stage
burnout...”
Masters waited a few more moments as
Kaddiri continued to monitor the launch, then said with a faint smile, “Well,
that was close. You know what happened? The plug was off by a fraction of an
inch. It was in close enough to report a closed and safe reading, but there
wasn’t any data transfer. Worse, that would have only shown up when the booster
was in launch position and the interlocks were removed. On the dock, it was
hooked into a different data bus and reported okay. No wonder we thought it was
TDRS’ fault.” Kaddiri continued to read off the booster’s primary performance
more for the benefit of the mission voice recorder than anything else. The recorder
served as a backup to the computerized data-retrieval system. She didn’t say a
word to Masters. Wouldn’t even look at him.
Masters noticed the silence and
fidgeted a bit. Every launch flight lately seemed to bring out the worst in
her. Where was her sense of adventure? Forget it, he decided, she didn’t have
one. Still, she was part of his team and he wanted to keep things on an even
keel.
“Good thing I caught it, huh?” he
asked almost sheepishly.
“No,” Kaddiri said evenly, not
looking at him. She didn’t want to go into it with him. Not now. They were,
after all, being recorded. Still, he had removed all the safety interlocks,
leaving them totally unprotected in case there’d been an ignition-circuit
malfunction or a guidance-computer malfunction. That booster could have easily
gone off in the cabin and killed them all. Worse he’d reconnected a
malfunctioning plug on a live booster. Who knows, she wondered, what
that
would have done?