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Eric hadn’t known it, but his last commanding officer had gotten word to an old friend, Hanley, that Stone would make an excellent addition to the Corporation. When Max made the initial approach, Eric agreed to join almost immediately. He recognized in the former Swift Boat commander the same things he had seen in his old teachers. Max had this calm, steady demeanor and endless patience, and he knew how to nurture talent. He was slowly molding Eric into the man he always wanted to be.
This was the other reason Eric couldn’t eat and had slept only fitfully the night before. Success today would mean he had killed a man who had been more of a father to him than the man who had raised him.
“You okay, son?” Jack Taggart asked as they were putting on their flight suits in a locker room behind the hangar office. The space plane’s cabin was pressurized, so the suits were little more than olive drab overalls. “You look a little green around the gills.”
“A lot on my mind, Colonel,” Eric replied.
“Well, I don’t want you to worry none about the flight,” the former Shuttle pilot drawled. “I’ll get us there and back, no problem.”
“I can honestly say that the last thing I’m concerned with is the flight itself.”
A technician stuck his head into the room. “Gentlemen, you’d better shake a leg. Flight director wants Kanga rolling in twenty minutes.”
Taggart snatched up his helmet from his locker and said, “Then let’s go light this candle.”
There were two reclined seats behind the pilot’s position in the sleek space plane, ’Roo. Eric had spent the early morning hours securing his computer and the transmitter into one of them. He eased himself into the second and kept his hands away from his chest, as workers belted him in as secure as a Grand Prix driver. Above him was a pair of windows, through which he could see the underside of the mother ship. There were small windows on either side as well. Taggart was in front of him, talking to flight director Rick Butterfield.
Eric jacked his helmet into a communications port and waited for a pause in Taggart’s conversation to do a radio check on the flight frequency, before switching over to another frequency, though he could still hear the pilot in one ear.
“Elton, this is John, how do you read me? Over.” Hali Kasim had picked the code names from the Elton John song “Rocket Man.”
“John, this is Elton. Reading you five by five. Over.”
“Elton, prepare to receive telemetry on my mark. Three, two, one, mark.” Eric hit a key on his laptop so that Hali could monitor the flight and the Russian satellite in real time aboard the Oregon. He’d even rigged a webcam so his shipmates could see what he was seeing.
“John, signal looks good. Over.”
“Okay, we’re about ten minutes from rollout. I’ll keep you updated. Over.”
“Roger that. Good luck. Over.”
The big hangar doors rattled open, bathing the cavernous space in the ruddy light of a new day. There were enough workers on hand to push Kanga out onto the apron. On the edge of the runway sat a ramshackle mobile home that was the flight director’s control center. Its roof bristled with antennae and a pair of revolving radar dishes.
“How you doing back there?” Taggart called over his shoulder.
Before Eric could reply, the two turbojets mounted on the top of Kanga’s fuselage roared into life. Taggart repeated the question over the radio, because it was too loud to speak comfortably.
“Getting a little excited,” Eric confessed.
“Don’t forget, I’ll flash a red light on your console when we’re ten seconds from the end of the burn. It’ll turn yellow when we’re at five and green when the rocket motor cuts out. At that moment, we’ll be at an altitude of roughly seventy-five miles, but once the motor runs dry we start falling immediately. So do your thing fast.”
“You got it.”
“Here we go,” Taggart announced as Kanga started to taxi.
The gawky mother ship, with its droopy wings, rolled onto the runway and turned sharply to align with the center stripe. It began to accelerate immediately, the engines keening at full power. Designed for the sole purpose of getting ’Roo up to its launch altitude of thirty-eight thousand feet, Kanga wasn’t the most dynamic aircraft in terms of performance. It used up nearly the entire runway before transitioning into the air to start its long, stately ascent. Out the side window, Eric could see its bizarre shadow racing across the scrub desert. It looked like something out of a science-fiction movie.
It took an hour for the plane to spiral up to altitude. Eric spent the time double-checking his equipment. Taggart merely sat quietly in his seat, playing a Game Boy flight simulator.
They were ten minutes early, according to Eric’s timetable, so the plane carved lazy figure eights in the sky. High above them, the Soviet satellite was fast approaching. Unlike the Shuttle or the International Space Station that orb
ited parallel to the equator, the Orbital Ballistic Projectile weapon swept over the globe from pole to pole. In this way, it crisscrossed every square inch of the planet in fourteen days, as the earth revolved beneath it. It was currently over Wyoming, coming on at almost five miles per second. In its present orbital track, it wouldn’t arrive over Eos Island for another week, which was why one of the signals Eric had to send was to fire its maneuvering rockets and change its vector. If everything went as planned, the satellite would be in range to fire one of its rods in less than eight hours.
“Coming up on T minus one minute,” Eric heard Butterfield announce. “All boards are green.”
“Roger that, Ground. Sixty seconds.”
A timer on Eric’s console began to click backward, while the digital speed indicator mounted on the dashboard remained pegged at four hundred miles per hour.
