Love or Liberty, page 35
‘I’ll bet we taste heavenly.’
Jim hurried to gather star charts and Earth maps from a stowage in the sidewall and began to make calculations. Chuck peered out of the porthole and fired the small thrusters to stabilize their movement again. He pressed the comms on his headset and said, ‘Ground, do you copy, over?’ Beep. There was no answer. ‘We took a hit from that Polyot satellite but we’re … okay.’ He glanced at Jim. ‘And, we’re still tied to the Soviet Molniya satellite. We’ve lost the landing procedure so I’m maneuvering to slow us down. When we’re ready, we’ll eject the Command Module straight at it and hopefully, that’ll break the tether apart and kick the thing off into space … which leaves us to get home, over.’ Beep. Chuck paused for a response while he continued to look at Jim. When there was no answer, he pressed the mic again. ‘The main engine’s low so we only have one shot at this. It has to work first time. Do you copy?’ Beep.
Jim pointed to a location on the map. ‘Here. It looks like we’re coming down somewhere around here. We may end up in the Northern Territories, perhaps Canada. Any longer and we’ll drop in on Europe.’
Chuck pressed the mic again. ‘CAPCOM do you copy?’ Beep.
They both heard nothing other than white noise. Chuck continued. ‘It looks like our landing equipment took a hit. We’re in a spin and I’m about to fire the main thruster to see if we can correct course. Come and look for us in the, erh … Pacific?’ He looked at Jim to confirm then glanced down at the map. ‘Or the Rockies, perhaps. And, while you’re out, suggest you try … the Atlantic. You know, it’s probably worth stopping in, erh, Paris, just in case. Actually, why don’t we just call you when we get somewhere. Over.’ Beep. He looked at Jim, ‘We’re on our own, buddy.’
* * *
In the Gemini control room, CAPCOM listened intently into his headset and breathed a sigh of relief. ‘I think they’re back on line,’ he said turning to FLIGHT. He held up a hand for silence in the room and listened carefully. ‘Something’s happened.’ He pressed the mic on his control panel and said, ‘Liberty. Ground here. We hear you. Glad you’re back online. Standby.’
FLIGHT stepped in closer and stared at the large display on the wall. ‘Alert the Navy and Coast Guard and have them send up aerial reconnaissance. It looks like they’re headed for the northeastern Pacific. But they could still land outside of our waters.’
CAPCOM spoke into his mic again. ‘Liberty, we’ve got you. We’re tracking you. We’re sending the rescue teams out, over.’ Beep.
* * *
Chuck glanced at Jim as he held a finger over a control panel button. ‘Okay … ready? On go.’ He paused an instant for a final mental calculation then pushed the button all the way. And, to their relief, the main engines fired and slowed the capsule from the speed of a bullet to a crawl in just a handful of seconds, pressing them both hard into their seats. Pyrotechnics fired and ejected the Command Module, leaving just the conical capsule of Liberty with the men inside. It took another jarring jolt which sent it bouncing off Molniya with a neck snapping tug through the tether.
Jim watched the screen intently as the module spun and floated away into another orbit, like discarded trash, knowing that it would lose energy and fall to Earth then burn up as it entered the atmosphere. Had the tether to Molniya been severed too with that last tug? His relief was short lived as the capsule began to spin again. The navigation gimbal went wild as Earth flailed about outside the window. And now, it was impossible to know exactly where they were headed as the capsule began to fall quietly towards Earth, like a giant pebble.
Jim continued to look out of the porthole window as the capsule began to buffet through the upper atmosphere, a brownish orange glow permeating the sky as vicious white-hot flames coiled up and darted past the window at high speed.
‘Has that thing separated?’ Chuck hollered above the growing din.
Jim craned his neck up to look, but he could barely move against the force which held him glued in his seat. He yelled back, ‘Something’s wrong!’
‘We’re still spinning too much,’ Chuck replied.
The capsule began to shake and rattle violently, as a plume of super-hot plasma roared and curled past the windows like a raging flame. A minute later, everything reddened and Jim’s sight blurred. He blinked and groaned in pain as though a handful of needles were jammed into his eyelids. His left eye began to drip and wanted an itch. Now was not the time to open the visor. A drop fell onto his lip and he tasted blood. He glanced up at a dial on his instruments and saw what seemed improbable. ‘Is that ten-g? My God, Chuck—this thing’s a damn pressure cooker!’
CHAPTER 49 - SO LONG
Moments later
A lightly bearded man, topped in a Ushanka and wrapped in warm winter clothing, slipped down an embankment in heavy leather boots on a bitterly cold but crisp and clear sunny day in deep frozen northern Russia. He stopped in the snow-covered field to catch his breath then removed his thick gloves and extracted a set of binoculars from a satchel. He scanned the landscape through the lenses but saw nothing notable except undisturbed picture-perfect postcard beauty. The entire forest lay under a pristine blanket of snow and bright sunlight cast long shadows of the tall thin pines in every direction as far as the eye could see. All sounds were hushed as if the landscape was in a deep hibernation. He pointed the binoculars up and scanned the sky, stopping only to swig water from a small handheld canister.
‘что-нибудь? Anything?’ asked another man in Russian, walking up behind him.
‘ничего. Nothing,’ replied the first. He dropped his binoculars and gulped another mouthful of water then wiped the drips from his chin with a sleeve.
The second man looked up with his own standard issue KGB lenses and traced across the sky, stopping on a blurry sight somewhere in the wide expanse of blue. ‘Wait,’ he said. He rubbed the condensation on his glasses and looked up again. ‘What is that, Leonid? See it?’ he said with wonder.
Leonid looked more intently. ‘Two?’ He refocused the image and saw bright fireballs hurtling across the hazy sky, each trailing a long plume of smoke and flames, perhaps fifty or a hundred miles up. ‘One of them is on fire. Look, it’s burning,’ Leonid exclaimed.
* * *
Inside the falling Gemini capsule, Chuck was still strapped into his seat when he saw something unusual bolt past the porthole window. It happened again. Then again. He leaned forward as far as he could and turned up to look. ‘It’s that darn rope. Maybe it did cost a million dollars—it’s still there God damn it! We’re dragging that Soviet hunk of metal across the sky like a tow car!’
‘It must be hauling us back to a Russian Gulag. They got us.’
As they waited impotently, Liberty and Molniya continued to spin around each other like a centrifuge, twisting, turning and tugging the tether as their speed continued to soar.
‘The heat shields won’t protect us like this. The fire will get in and eat the damn oxygen!’ Chuck yelled.
Just as he spoke, it seemed that the fires of re-entry were already searching for an opening on Liberty as it fell through the sky. The blaze, which had vaporized every last piece of the falling Command Module, was now on the verge of obliterating Liberty with the men inside. It would simply burn up and disappear with neither trace nor witness, as a stark reminder that men were made to keep their feet on the ground. There would be no welcoming open arms in space. There never were and never would be.
The tether between Liberty and Molniya—valiant, reluctant and foolish in its persistence, was now ablaze like the stream from a flame thrower. The camera mounts on top of Liberty melted and blew away into the trailing blaze which continued to try, mercilessly, to break through the weak seal around the hatch. Just a little more. Just another minute. Liberty couldn’t hold. It would explode, then fire would devour the capsule before it disappeared without trace from the CIA, FBI, SAC, NASA, KGB, ABC, XYZ, or any other acronym that cared to set up an investigating committee.
Then BOOM! it went.
* * *
‘Did you see that?’ exclaimed Vasili on the ground, awestruck at the display of fire which scattered across the sky like a giant firework.
‘They exploded? Both of them?’
* * *
CAPCOM, in the Gemini control center, looked over TELEMETRY’s shoulder, as one of the blips on his screen suddenly vanished. ‘It looks like one of them just, well … it’s gone!’ exclaimed TELEMETRY. Everyone stopped.
‘Gone? What do you mean, gone?’ FLIGHT asked. ‘Check the systems.’
‘Which one’s gone?’ hollered one of the controllers across the room.
‘I can’t tell—not yet. They’re still inside the fire. I can’t communicate,’ replied CAPCOM. ‘It looked like they were coming down together, sir.’
‘Where are they now?’ FLIGHT asked.
‘Of all places, sir, somewhere over the Soviet Union.’ He looked up in disbelief at what he’d just said.
‘Both of them? They must have come down together. Do we have a trajectory?’
‘TELEMETRY shows they’ll be down somewhere in the northern Boreals. But that could be anywhere inside several thousand square miles.’
FLIGHT winced and turned sharply to the MEDIC. ‘Does it look like they made it?’ He looked thoroughly afraid to hear the answer.
The man replied. ‘The heart monitors are still showing a strong signal.’ Quickly, to no applause in the room, he added, ‘But that could just be latency.’
‘Trajectory?’ FLIGHT summoned, impatiently.
‘A better guess would be the Arctic. As far east as … the Barents Sea. As far west as the Northwest Territories. Right now, they’re heading somewhere towards the North Pacific, sir.’
‘Okay, alert the Navy to standby. Let’s move it gentlemen. They might end up in a bowl of borscht whatever their condition!’
‘Sir, I’m told Ranger’s already sailing north up the Bering,’ confirmed TELEMETRY.
‘Good,’ replied FIGHT. ‘Keep me posted.’
* * *
An elderly American lady, adorned in an aged floral-patterned dress, sat in a high back armchair in her living room somewhere in the north of America. She wore a scornful face while she watched US Armed Forces Information Film Number 5 on her monochrome television. A smallish place with aging forties floral décor, the room opened up to the little kitchen immediately behind her seat. She glanced up at a large clock on the wall, then at the door, as if she awaited a visitor.
‘In recognizing a Communist, his physical appearance counts for nothing …’ said the narrator on screen.
‘Did you put the cans in the shelter?!’ she yelled across the room to no one. There came no reply, which seemed to infuriate her.
‘… but there are other Communists who don’t show their real faces,’ continued the narrator, as the image shifted to a picket board at a May Day parade. The Communists Enslave, it read. An American daughter was being escorted out of her father’s home at gunpoint by Soviet soldiers.
‘She’s been brainwashed to defect East. Frightening isn’t it?’ said the suited reporter as he walked up to the camera, surrounded by sandbagged checkpoints on a busy American city road.
‘Herbert?’ the woman screamed, now looking thoroughly anguished. ‘Look! It could be the kids next door. Did you see them yesterday? Coming and going at odd hours of the night?’
An old man hobbled into the room and up behind her. He ripped off a greenish-grey US army gas mask from his face. ‘Quit shouting, would ya? You sound like they’re ‘bout to start invading. And they’re just college kids next door and college kids stay up late. Hell, we’ve known them since they were in diapers, dear.’
‘They’ve been acting strange. And for a couple of years now,’ she said, still pained, and with a finger pointed through the wall towards their house. ‘They used to be good kids, they did.’
Herbert sighed as if he’d heard it a hundred times. ‘They’re teenagers now, dear! That’s what happens.’
‘Did you put the cans in the shelter?’ she demanded.
The old man rolled his harried eyes. ‘I just went down there, dear. Everything’s just fine.’ He sighed again and glanced at the television. ‘Can you turn that thing off now? It’s making you all worrisome again. Quit watching now, would you?’
The lady ignored him and turned back to the set. ‘They’ll be dropping those…’
Unable to finish her words, she turned to a deep rumble outside the house. Both of them looked up at the walls in horror as if an earthquake had hit, then startled, the lady noticed something outside the kitchen window. Her eyes nearly popped. ‘Oh my … they’re here!’ she gasped, as a large fireball raced across the sky. In sheer terror, she turned to the old man then got up and prodded him stiffly to get moving. ‘They’re coming. Oh my! What did I tell you? Come on!’
The pair hobbled their way towards their nuclear bunker like old turtles on the run. ‘Quick, Herbert. They’ll be knocking at the door. Quick!’
CHAPTER 50 - HOME
Moments later
The voracious flames of reentry had burnt through the tether which held Liberty and Molniya together, flinging Liberty on a tangent and beating, by a mere few seconds, other fires which had knocked on the hatch as though it was the front door to a hot party.
The incessant spinning began to slow and the capsule regained composure quickly with its heat shields thankfully down. The prize—the oxygen filled Liberty—was now beyond reach of the flames. They raged hot, having jumped at the second prize: the freely spinning Molniya, which had also tried to bolt away into the darkness. But, determined not to permit another escape, Jim could see the flames ambush it, devouring everything until it could take no more. It burst into a ball of fire, the explosion giving Liberty a final jolt, the fireworks perhaps the biggest Jim had ever seen. Molniya’s charred carcass careened helplessly towards Earth as the men inside Liberty began to regain their senses.
Thankfully, their g-reading continued to drop over the next several minutes. Eventually, the drogue deployed and released a giant parachute, which gave them as large a tug as any on the mission so far. The capsule slowed from a plunging freefall to a serene descent in a near-instant.
‘I think my body’s broken,’ Jim said, decompressing and growing a new spine.
‘Yeah. No pussying for spacefarers,’ Chuck replied. ‘I’m going to sell that Florida home.’
Seeing that the inferno was over, Jim glanced at Chuck and clasped his hands with relief. But the jubilation was short-lived. ‘Where are we?’ he asked, unable to see a thing outside.
Chuck glanced out of the porthole and saw nothing but eerie darkness. ‘Doesn’t make sense. Where’s the ground? The clouds? The sky? And the stars? Did we hit water?’
‘I didn’t feel a thing. We can’t be submerged.’
‘We’re on the night side. So, it should be dark, right? We must have missed the target completely.’
Jim pointed to the altitude gauge. ‘Fifteen thousand feet. We’re getting close.’
‘I don’t know about you, but I got a bad feeling about this particular home stretch.’
Liberty’s final descent passed in under a minute. The parachute dropped them onto a dense mountainous forest, startling a small flock of birds resting in the trees. They flailed in terror as the capsule’s heat-shield hit the unyielding tree canopy then tumbled sideways through thick branches, throwing the men hanging by their harnesses in their seats. A moment later, it slipped through and traced a hole downwards to the lowest branch, until it too gave way. The capsule dropped violently and snagged the parachute cables then landed with a thud on its base on thick compacted snow. It began to slip and bump down a precipitous mountain incline like a giant puck in a quickening slide. Pulling free of its cables, it eventually came to rest against an unwelcoming tree, twenty meters along and two meters short of a rocky cliff edge.
Everything stopped and the forest fell silent, as if dumbstruck by the unsolicited visitor. Stillness filled the capsule again for the first time since its fiery launch atop the Titan rocket the previous day. Having traversed the globe several times and survived the inferno on re-entry, here now was the end of the line; the commute home over; the mission complete. All was dark and still inside the spacecraft again.
* * *
‘Okay, it looks like we have a good fix now,’ said TELEMETRY inside the Gemini control center.
‘Where exactly?’ asked FLIGHT.
‘Alaska.’ TELEMETRY looked relieved.
A murmur and a sigh of encouragement spread across the control room and FLIGHT mirrored it with a faint smile. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Get the co-ordinates and alert the search crews. Find it, wherever it landed. CAPCOM, anything?’
The man shook his head. ‘No reply yet. Perhaps they took a hit. The channels are still open.’
‘Keep trying. We need that capsule and our men alive. Everyone got that?’
CAPCOM and the medic walked over to FLIGHT. ‘Any news?’ he asked.
The medic shook his head and said, ‘I’m afraid their sensors stopped transmitting.’
‘Well, that could mean anything,’ interrupted CAPCOM. ‘We’re on it, but can’t tell what happened just yet. It’s like searching for a needle in a haystack, sir.’
TELEMETERY got up and joined the three of them. ‘They broke up on re-entry and it looks like a sizable part landed somewhere in the Soviet Union. A second part dropped somewhere South of Yukon between the Northern Territories and Alaska—we’re pretty sure of that. There’s no beacon yet but the search is on,’ he added, pointing out the location on a map. ‘We’re trying to triangulate Tongass right now. Hopefully they just missed the Pacific. But it’s mountainous out there, cold and pretty inaccessible this time of year.’ He shook his head. ‘At worst, it might take some days.’
‘Okay, we need to move fast. SAC leaders are pressing for answers, good or bad. Our people are out to inform the families. I’m sure you understand that this has to be managed gentlemen.’
Jim hurried to gather star charts and Earth maps from a stowage in the sidewall and began to make calculations. Chuck peered out of the porthole and fired the small thrusters to stabilize their movement again. He pressed the comms on his headset and said, ‘Ground, do you copy, over?’ Beep. There was no answer. ‘We took a hit from that Polyot satellite but we’re … okay.’ He glanced at Jim. ‘And, we’re still tied to the Soviet Molniya satellite. We’ve lost the landing procedure so I’m maneuvering to slow us down. When we’re ready, we’ll eject the Command Module straight at it and hopefully, that’ll break the tether apart and kick the thing off into space … which leaves us to get home, over.’ Beep. Chuck paused for a response while he continued to look at Jim. When there was no answer, he pressed the mic again. ‘The main engine’s low so we only have one shot at this. It has to work first time. Do you copy?’ Beep.
Jim pointed to a location on the map. ‘Here. It looks like we’re coming down somewhere around here. We may end up in the Northern Territories, perhaps Canada. Any longer and we’ll drop in on Europe.’
Chuck pressed the mic again. ‘CAPCOM do you copy?’ Beep.
They both heard nothing other than white noise. Chuck continued. ‘It looks like our landing equipment took a hit. We’re in a spin and I’m about to fire the main thruster to see if we can correct course. Come and look for us in the, erh … Pacific?’ He looked at Jim to confirm then glanced down at the map. ‘Or the Rockies, perhaps. And, while you’re out, suggest you try … the Atlantic. You know, it’s probably worth stopping in, erh, Paris, just in case. Actually, why don’t we just call you when we get somewhere. Over.’ Beep. He looked at Jim, ‘We’re on our own, buddy.’
* * *
In the Gemini control room, CAPCOM listened intently into his headset and breathed a sigh of relief. ‘I think they’re back on line,’ he said turning to FLIGHT. He held up a hand for silence in the room and listened carefully. ‘Something’s happened.’ He pressed the mic on his control panel and said, ‘Liberty. Ground here. We hear you. Glad you’re back online. Standby.’
FLIGHT stepped in closer and stared at the large display on the wall. ‘Alert the Navy and Coast Guard and have them send up aerial reconnaissance. It looks like they’re headed for the northeastern Pacific. But they could still land outside of our waters.’
CAPCOM spoke into his mic again. ‘Liberty, we’ve got you. We’re tracking you. We’re sending the rescue teams out, over.’ Beep.
* * *
Chuck glanced at Jim as he held a finger over a control panel button. ‘Okay … ready? On go.’ He paused an instant for a final mental calculation then pushed the button all the way. And, to their relief, the main engines fired and slowed the capsule from the speed of a bullet to a crawl in just a handful of seconds, pressing them both hard into their seats. Pyrotechnics fired and ejected the Command Module, leaving just the conical capsule of Liberty with the men inside. It took another jarring jolt which sent it bouncing off Molniya with a neck snapping tug through the tether.
Jim watched the screen intently as the module spun and floated away into another orbit, like discarded trash, knowing that it would lose energy and fall to Earth then burn up as it entered the atmosphere. Had the tether to Molniya been severed too with that last tug? His relief was short lived as the capsule began to spin again. The navigation gimbal went wild as Earth flailed about outside the window. And now, it was impossible to know exactly where they were headed as the capsule began to fall quietly towards Earth, like a giant pebble.
Jim continued to look out of the porthole window as the capsule began to buffet through the upper atmosphere, a brownish orange glow permeating the sky as vicious white-hot flames coiled up and darted past the window at high speed.
‘Has that thing separated?’ Chuck hollered above the growing din.
Jim craned his neck up to look, but he could barely move against the force which held him glued in his seat. He yelled back, ‘Something’s wrong!’
‘We’re still spinning too much,’ Chuck replied.
The capsule began to shake and rattle violently, as a plume of super-hot plasma roared and curled past the windows like a raging flame. A minute later, everything reddened and Jim’s sight blurred. He blinked and groaned in pain as though a handful of needles were jammed into his eyelids. His left eye began to drip and wanted an itch. Now was not the time to open the visor. A drop fell onto his lip and he tasted blood. He glanced up at a dial on his instruments and saw what seemed improbable. ‘Is that ten-g? My God, Chuck—this thing’s a damn pressure cooker!’
CHAPTER 49 - SO LONG
Moments later
A lightly bearded man, topped in a Ushanka and wrapped in warm winter clothing, slipped down an embankment in heavy leather boots on a bitterly cold but crisp and clear sunny day in deep frozen northern Russia. He stopped in the snow-covered field to catch his breath then removed his thick gloves and extracted a set of binoculars from a satchel. He scanned the landscape through the lenses but saw nothing notable except undisturbed picture-perfect postcard beauty. The entire forest lay under a pristine blanket of snow and bright sunlight cast long shadows of the tall thin pines in every direction as far as the eye could see. All sounds were hushed as if the landscape was in a deep hibernation. He pointed the binoculars up and scanned the sky, stopping only to swig water from a small handheld canister.
‘что-нибудь? Anything?’ asked another man in Russian, walking up behind him.
‘ничего. Nothing,’ replied the first. He dropped his binoculars and gulped another mouthful of water then wiped the drips from his chin with a sleeve.
The second man looked up with his own standard issue KGB lenses and traced across the sky, stopping on a blurry sight somewhere in the wide expanse of blue. ‘Wait,’ he said. He rubbed the condensation on his glasses and looked up again. ‘What is that, Leonid? See it?’ he said with wonder.
Leonid looked more intently. ‘Two?’ He refocused the image and saw bright fireballs hurtling across the hazy sky, each trailing a long plume of smoke and flames, perhaps fifty or a hundred miles up. ‘One of them is on fire. Look, it’s burning,’ Leonid exclaimed.
* * *
Inside the falling Gemini capsule, Chuck was still strapped into his seat when he saw something unusual bolt past the porthole window. It happened again. Then again. He leaned forward as far as he could and turned up to look. ‘It’s that darn rope. Maybe it did cost a million dollars—it’s still there God damn it! We’re dragging that Soviet hunk of metal across the sky like a tow car!’
‘It must be hauling us back to a Russian Gulag. They got us.’
As they waited impotently, Liberty and Molniya continued to spin around each other like a centrifuge, twisting, turning and tugging the tether as their speed continued to soar.
‘The heat shields won’t protect us like this. The fire will get in and eat the damn oxygen!’ Chuck yelled.
Just as he spoke, it seemed that the fires of re-entry were already searching for an opening on Liberty as it fell through the sky. The blaze, which had vaporized every last piece of the falling Command Module, was now on the verge of obliterating Liberty with the men inside. It would simply burn up and disappear with neither trace nor witness, as a stark reminder that men were made to keep their feet on the ground. There would be no welcoming open arms in space. There never were and never would be.
The tether between Liberty and Molniya—valiant, reluctant and foolish in its persistence, was now ablaze like the stream from a flame thrower. The camera mounts on top of Liberty melted and blew away into the trailing blaze which continued to try, mercilessly, to break through the weak seal around the hatch. Just a little more. Just another minute. Liberty couldn’t hold. It would explode, then fire would devour the capsule before it disappeared without trace from the CIA, FBI, SAC, NASA, KGB, ABC, XYZ, or any other acronym that cared to set up an investigating committee.
Then BOOM! it went.
* * *
‘Did you see that?’ exclaimed Vasili on the ground, awestruck at the display of fire which scattered across the sky like a giant firework.
‘They exploded? Both of them?’
* * *
CAPCOM, in the Gemini control center, looked over TELEMETRY’s shoulder, as one of the blips on his screen suddenly vanished. ‘It looks like one of them just, well … it’s gone!’ exclaimed TELEMETRY. Everyone stopped.
‘Gone? What do you mean, gone?’ FLIGHT asked. ‘Check the systems.’
‘Which one’s gone?’ hollered one of the controllers across the room.
‘I can’t tell—not yet. They’re still inside the fire. I can’t communicate,’ replied CAPCOM. ‘It looked like they were coming down together, sir.’
‘Where are they now?’ FLIGHT asked.
‘Of all places, sir, somewhere over the Soviet Union.’ He looked up in disbelief at what he’d just said.
‘Both of them? They must have come down together. Do we have a trajectory?’
‘TELEMETRY shows they’ll be down somewhere in the northern Boreals. But that could be anywhere inside several thousand square miles.’
FLIGHT winced and turned sharply to the MEDIC. ‘Does it look like they made it?’ He looked thoroughly afraid to hear the answer.
The man replied. ‘The heart monitors are still showing a strong signal.’ Quickly, to no applause in the room, he added, ‘But that could just be latency.’
‘Trajectory?’ FLIGHT summoned, impatiently.
‘A better guess would be the Arctic. As far east as … the Barents Sea. As far west as the Northwest Territories. Right now, they’re heading somewhere towards the North Pacific, sir.’
‘Okay, alert the Navy to standby. Let’s move it gentlemen. They might end up in a bowl of borscht whatever their condition!’
‘Sir, I’m told Ranger’s already sailing north up the Bering,’ confirmed TELEMETRY.
‘Good,’ replied FIGHT. ‘Keep me posted.’
* * *
An elderly American lady, adorned in an aged floral-patterned dress, sat in a high back armchair in her living room somewhere in the north of America. She wore a scornful face while she watched US Armed Forces Information Film Number 5 on her monochrome television. A smallish place with aging forties floral décor, the room opened up to the little kitchen immediately behind her seat. She glanced up at a large clock on the wall, then at the door, as if she awaited a visitor.
‘In recognizing a Communist, his physical appearance counts for nothing …’ said the narrator on screen.
‘Did you put the cans in the shelter?!’ she yelled across the room to no one. There came no reply, which seemed to infuriate her.
‘… but there are other Communists who don’t show their real faces,’ continued the narrator, as the image shifted to a picket board at a May Day parade. The Communists Enslave, it read. An American daughter was being escorted out of her father’s home at gunpoint by Soviet soldiers.
‘She’s been brainwashed to defect East. Frightening isn’t it?’ said the suited reporter as he walked up to the camera, surrounded by sandbagged checkpoints on a busy American city road.
‘Herbert?’ the woman screamed, now looking thoroughly anguished. ‘Look! It could be the kids next door. Did you see them yesterday? Coming and going at odd hours of the night?’
An old man hobbled into the room and up behind her. He ripped off a greenish-grey US army gas mask from his face. ‘Quit shouting, would ya? You sound like they’re ‘bout to start invading. And they’re just college kids next door and college kids stay up late. Hell, we’ve known them since they were in diapers, dear.’
‘They’ve been acting strange. And for a couple of years now,’ she said, still pained, and with a finger pointed through the wall towards their house. ‘They used to be good kids, they did.’
Herbert sighed as if he’d heard it a hundred times. ‘They’re teenagers now, dear! That’s what happens.’
‘Did you put the cans in the shelter?’ she demanded.
The old man rolled his harried eyes. ‘I just went down there, dear. Everything’s just fine.’ He sighed again and glanced at the television. ‘Can you turn that thing off now? It’s making you all worrisome again. Quit watching now, would you?’
The lady ignored him and turned back to the set. ‘They’ll be dropping those…’
Unable to finish her words, she turned to a deep rumble outside the house. Both of them looked up at the walls in horror as if an earthquake had hit, then startled, the lady noticed something outside the kitchen window. Her eyes nearly popped. ‘Oh my … they’re here!’ she gasped, as a large fireball raced across the sky. In sheer terror, she turned to the old man then got up and prodded him stiffly to get moving. ‘They’re coming. Oh my! What did I tell you? Come on!’
The pair hobbled their way towards their nuclear bunker like old turtles on the run. ‘Quick, Herbert. They’ll be knocking at the door. Quick!’
CHAPTER 50 - HOME
Moments later
The voracious flames of reentry had burnt through the tether which held Liberty and Molniya together, flinging Liberty on a tangent and beating, by a mere few seconds, other fires which had knocked on the hatch as though it was the front door to a hot party.
The incessant spinning began to slow and the capsule regained composure quickly with its heat shields thankfully down. The prize—the oxygen filled Liberty—was now beyond reach of the flames. They raged hot, having jumped at the second prize: the freely spinning Molniya, which had also tried to bolt away into the darkness. But, determined not to permit another escape, Jim could see the flames ambush it, devouring everything until it could take no more. It burst into a ball of fire, the explosion giving Liberty a final jolt, the fireworks perhaps the biggest Jim had ever seen. Molniya’s charred carcass careened helplessly towards Earth as the men inside Liberty began to regain their senses.
Thankfully, their g-reading continued to drop over the next several minutes. Eventually, the drogue deployed and released a giant parachute, which gave them as large a tug as any on the mission so far. The capsule slowed from a plunging freefall to a serene descent in a near-instant.
‘I think my body’s broken,’ Jim said, decompressing and growing a new spine.
‘Yeah. No pussying for spacefarers,’ Chuck replied. ‘I’m going to sell that Florida home.’
Seeing that the inferno was over, Jim glanced at Chuck and clasped his hands with relief. But the jubilation was short-lived. ‘Where are we?’ he asked, unable to see a thing outside.
Chuck glanced out of the porthole and saw nothing but eerie darkness. ‘Doesn’t make sense. Where’s the ground? The clouds? The sky? And the stars? Did we hit water?’
‘I didn’t feel a thing. We can’t be submerged.’
‘We’re on the night side. So, it should be dark, right? We must have missed the target completely.’
Jim pointed to the altitude gauge. ‘Fifteen thousand feet. We’re getting close.’
‘I don’t know about you, but I got a bad feeling about this particular home stretch.’
Liberty’s final descent passed in under a minute. The parachute dropped them onto a dense mountainous forest, startling a small flock of birds resting in the trees. They flailed in terror as the capsule’s heat-shield hit the unyielding tree canopy then tumbled sideways through thick branches, throwing the men hanging by their harnesses in their seats. A moment later, it slipped through and traced a hole downwards to the lowest branch, until it too gave way. The capsule dropped violently and snagged the parachute cables then landed with a thud on its base on thick compacted snow. It began to slip and bump down a precipitous mountain incline like a giant puck in a quickening slide. Pulling free of its cables, it eventually came to rest against an unwelcoming tree, twenty meters along and two meters short of a rocky cliff edge.
Everything stopped and the forest fell silent, as if dumbstruck by the unsolicited visitor. Stillness filled the capsule again for the first time since its fiery launch atop the Titan rocket the previous day. Having traversed the globe several times and survived the inferno on re-entry, here now was the end of the line; the commute home over; the mission complete. All was dark and still inside the spacecraft again.
* * *
‘Okay, it looks like we have a good fix now,’ said TELEMETRY inside the Gemini control center.
‘Where exactly?’ asked FLIGHT.
‘Alaska.’ TELEMETRY looked relieved.
A murmur and a sigh of encouragement spread across the control room and FLIGHT mirrored it with a faint smile. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Get the co-ordinates and alert the search crews. Find it, wherever it landed. CAPCOM, anything?’
The man shook his head. ‘No reply yet. Perhaps they took a hit. The channels are still open.’
‘Keep trying. We need that capsule and our men alive. Everyone got that?’
CAPCOM and the medic walked over to FLIGHT. ‘Any news?’ he asked.
The medic shook his head and said, ‘I’m afraid their sensors stopped transmitting.’
‘Well, that could mean anything,’ interrupted CAPCOM. ‘We’re on it, but can’t tell what happened just yet. It’s like searching for a needle in a haystack, sir.’
TELEMETERY got up and joined the three of them. ‘They broke up on re-entry and it looks like a sizable part landed somewhere in the Soviet Union. A second part dropped somewhere South of Yukon between the Northern Territories and Alaska—we’re pretty sure of that. There’s no beacon yet but the search is on,’ he added, pointing out the location on a map. ‘We’re trying to triangulate Tongass right now. Hopefully they just missed the Pacific. But it’s mountainous out there, cold and pretty inaccessible this time of year.’ He shook his head. ‘At worst, it might take some days.’
‘Okay, we need to move fast. SAC leaders are pressing for answers, good or bad. Our people are out to inform the families. I’m sure you understand that this has to be managed gentlemen.’
