Icebeig replaced the photograph and took another long breath. It was now, he thought. The long journey's end was now. Slowly, now that Mulcahey wasn't looking, he unzipped the thigh pocket on his flight suit and extracted a small, cylindrical object about the size of a 12-gauge shotgun shell. On the side of the cylinder was a pressure-sensitive button that released a stainless steel projectile, propelled by highly compressed carbon dioxide gas. It could be used only once. And that time was now. Iceberg put a sharp edge on his voice and barked, "What was that!?"
Mulcahey and Rodriquez both spun their heads.
"What was what?" Mulcahey asked nervously. He didn't like the pilot's tone.
With a stone face Iceberg said, "I saw the smoke-detector light flash."
Mulcahey's blood went cold. There was nothing more terrifying on a spacecraft than fire. Ever since Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee had died in an Apollo capsule fire while on the pad at the Cape, the very thought of fire while in space evoked a standard reaction of raw panic.
"The annunciator didn't come on!" protested Mulcahey, trying to wish the danger away. "Which one was it?"
"Avionics bay number two," replied Iceberg grimly.
"Oh, shit!" cried the copilot.
The avionics bay was the worst possible place for a fire. Smoke detectors would trigger the automatic halogen fire extinguisher within the bay; but if that didn't work, the only way to gain access to the bay and fight the fire was to remove bulkhead panels in the lower-deck crew compartment. And that took time. Time that could allow the fire to spread.
"Rodriquez!" Iceberg's command was flint. "Get down there and see what you can make of it."
"Right! Let me get my oxygen on and—"
"Forget the oxygen! There may not be time, you fool!"
Standard safety procedures called for the flight crew to put on their portable oxygen packs in the event of a fire, but Rodriquez decided not to argue about procedures just now, or take offense at Kapuscinski's remark. He'd do that later. For now, he followed orders and pushed himself to the hatchway leading down to the crew compartment deck. He struggled to unscrew the hatch wheel, finding it difficult to get a foothold in the weightlessness.
The crew areas of the shuttle were divided into two sections. The flight deck — which included the cockpit and cargo bay workstation — was topside, while the crew compartment — which contained storage, sleeping areas, kitchen, bathroom, and airlock access — was below. After the Challeger disaster, NASA had decreed future orbiters would have a safety ejection mechanism. A slide pole escape system was installed on the older shuttles, but the newer models — like the Intrepid— possessed an upgraded system whereby the flight deck was a self-contained capsule that could be ejected with all hands during launch, up to about 120,000 feet. The hatch sealed off the flight deck from the crew compartment until final orbit was achieved, then it was opened to allow passage between the two chambers.
When the hatch wheel finally yielded, Rodriquez yanked the lid back and shot through the passageway hole headfirst.
"CSOC, this is Intrepid," said Iceberg. "We have a problem."
"We read you, Intrepid. State your problem."
Iceberg had rehearsed well. ' 'We received a momentary flashing light of number two smoke detector in the avionics bay. The annunciator did not, I say again did not, go off. Rodriquez is investigating now."
"Roger, Intrepid.. " There was a pause. "Intrepid, we do not, I say again we do not, copy a smoke detector alarm on the telemetry monitor. We've alerted flight engineering. They'll be on standby in case you need them. We recommend you proceed with a circuit check."
"Roger, Control," replied Iceberg. "We will comply with a circuit test of the smoke detector system. Stand by… "
"Well, I don't see any other lights," said Mulcahey, starting to relax a bit — but pulling out his auxiliary oxygen mask just the same. "I think another detector would've gone off by now if there was a real problem, don't you?'
They were Maj. Frank Mulcahey's last words.
In one swift movement Iceberg shoved the cylinder under his copilot's chin and pressed the button. There was a popping sound as the projectile shot into Mulcahey's brain, causing him to convulse and give a little cry. Almost immediately blood started oozing out of the small hole in his chin and into the weightless chamber.
Rodriquez sailed through the hole, not stopping to secure the hatch lid. He immediately faced a bank of storage lockers — much like the kind one would find in a bus station. They were secured to the bulkhead panel, which provided access to the avionics bay. He reached behind the top locker and popped a safety catch. This allowed one row of the lockers to come free. He ripped it away and pushed it toward the back of the compartment.
The front bulkhead panel was secured by six recessed butterfly screws. The screwheads could be pried out of the recesses with a screwdriver, or a strong fingernail, and unscrewed by hand. Rodriquez pulled a screwdriver out of the on-board tool kit and was starting to engage the first screw when he heard a popping sound from above, followed by a little yelp. He hesitated, and was torn between continuing his task and going back to investigate.
Then he heard the hatch clang shut.
Iceberg slammed down the lid and spun the wheel as tight as he possibly could. Then he unzipped the other thigh pocket on his flight suit and pulled out a simple bicycle-cable lock — the kind with a combination mechanism. He ran it through the hatch wheel and around the restraining post, then locked it. There would be some play in the wheel, but the steel cable would prevent it from beir.g opened.
He then pushed himself back to his cockpit seat, where Mul-cahey's blood was beginning to be a problem. Iceberg fished in his copilot's breast pocket and came up with a handkerchief. Most astronauts carried them, not wanting the mucus from their sinuses to escape into the weightlessness. He capped Mulcahey's chin with the handkerchief, then shoved the corners up between the flight helmet and the dead copilot's temple. He looked at his handiwork for a few moments until satisfied it was a good temporary plug.
Sliding back into his seat, Iceberg started flipping control switches on the orbiter's oxygen/nitrogen life-support system, just as he heard a metallic pounding on the hatch lid.
Rodriquez was no fool. But none of his academic or astronaut experience had prepared him for a situation such as this. Rather than rush for the hatch, his first instinct was to establish communication. He fished out the plug to his intercom headset and shoved it into a nearby port.
"Frank?… Berg? What's happening? Did you shut the hatch because of the fire?… Hey, guys. What gives?"
Nothing.
He unplugged the headset and floated up to the hatch. The wheel would turn a little, but not much. That told him something was very wrong, for there was no locking mechanism on the hatch wheel. He pounded on the lid with his screwdriver and had started to yell when he heard a hissing sound.
When the Grissom-White-Chaffee Apollo capsule went up in flames, it was largely due to its one hundred percent oxygen atmosphere; and in the wake of that disaster some bureaucratic chowderhead got the revelation that pure pressurized oxygen around electrical wiring could be dangerous. So, for safety considerations, the shuttle's life-support system was designed to simulate the earth's atmosphere with a mixture of twenty-one percent oxygen and seventy-nine percent nitrogen. The oxygen was carried aboard the orbiter in cryogenic — that is, liquid-form. A controlled boiling chamber converted the super-cold liquid into vapor, then it was warmed by a heat exchanger before being introduced into the cabin. The nitrogen was carried aboard in pressurized tanks. The two gases were mixed through a regulator/sensor that purged the cabin atmosphere as required, and introduced one gas or the other to keep their prescribed level constant. There was, of course, a manual override switch on the shuttle commander's console that controlled the regulator.