Iceberg was sure Rodriquez had died, but he couldn't shake a desire to be certain. He floated to the hatch, took off his helmet, and held his ear to the lid for some minutes, listening for a sound. There was none. Slowly he dialed in the correct combination to the bicycle lock, then removed the cable from the hatch wheel. He carefully turned the wheel, raised the lid slightly, and peeked through a slit. He needn't have worried. Rodriquez was floating spread-eagled in the far corner, with the unsecured bank of lockers lightly bumping his leg.
Iceberg lifted the hatch and secured it, then pushed himself through. He turned Rodriquez over to see his glaring eyes and blue face. The death mask of the mission specialist showed that his end had been a painful one, but the grisly picture unnerved the shuttle commander not at all. Having released the manual override switch from his cockpit console, Iceberg started re-pressurizing the airlock. When the light turned green he opened the door and shoved the mission specialist's body inside. The airlock allowed passage from the crew compartment to the cargo bay of the orbiter. It was ordinarily used to provide access for extravehicular activity (EVA), but Iceberg was now using it for storage. After stuffing the remains of Rodriquez inside, he quickly traveled back up to the flight deck and unhooked Mulcahey's seat restraints. He pulled the dead copilot below, shoved the body into the airlock chamber alongside Rodriquez, and sealed the door. It was then Iceberg noticed the floating plastic fragments. He whirled around to look at the avionics bay. More fragments. He shot across the deck to inspect the damage. Shards of the shattered circuit board stuck out of the slot marked oms; and for perhaps the first time in his life, Iceberg took in a little gasp.
Kapuscinski's understanding of electronic flight control systems was better than that of most pilot astronauts, but still, he was not an electrical engineer. Engineers, in fact, were often looked upon disparagingly by pilots — and he was a superb flyer. So the shattered circuit board gave him an intuitive feel for what had happened, but he wasn't certain — and he was a man who liked absolute certainties. He dashed up to the cockpit and flipped the orbital maneuvering system switch from safe to arm. The light stayed red, refusing to turn green. He screamed, ' 'No!'' and pounded the armrest of his chair. He tried the backup system and the result was the same.
"No! No! No!" he wailed. Never in his life had Iceberg unleashed such emotion. "No, Mother, please. Tell me this cannot be\"
With the butt of a screwdriver, Rodriquez had crippled the circuits of Intrepid's OMS retro rockets. The spacecraft was, quite simply, unable to return to earth.
Out of control.
That's what Whittenberg thought. The whole damn technology thing had tailspun out of control. For somewhere out there, circling around in space, was $4 billion worth of exotic hardware — possibly blown to pieces by a short circuit in a five-dollar breaker switch.
Prices had definitely gone up. As a young stableboy growing up in Kentucky during World War II, Whittenberg had been exercising one of the stud farm's three-year-olds when a P-51 Mustang screamed over them at treetop level. The horse was so spooked that the animal parted company with the young rider. It was at that point, Whittenberg told friends, that he'd decided to forego a career as a jockey and become a pilot instead. Everyone always laughed at the story, because at six feet five inches and 230 pounds, he was an unlikely candidate to ride at Churchill Downs. But while humorous, the story was true. Being buzzed by a P-51 was a transcending experience for the youthful Whittenberg. Much later, when he was an instructor at the Air Force Academy, he looked up the original 1944 cost of a P-51 aircraft. It turned out to be $47,000. About the price of a good sports car these days.
Whittenberg also remembered his first B-52. The eight-engined behemoth was awesome, and so damn complex! He figured that weapons systems couldn't possibly get more complicated than the cockpit of his first B-52. But they did. First the Hound Dog missile, then laser-guided bombsights, then electronic counter-measures, and electronic counter-countermeasures, then cruise missiles. He'd consumed countless technical manuals during his Strategic Air Command career, and it had reached the point where he simply couldn't keep up. He could only manage people whose job it was to keep up on their respective tiny pieces of the Big Picture. He had inner doubts about his, or anyone's, ability to tie all of the little pieces together. Sometimes, like now, it got to him, and he almost wished that Mustang had taken a different vector on that day so long ago… almost.
Whittenberg had yearned all of his life to be a fighter pilot, and the one perk of his four-star rank that he truly relished was his "stick time" in a Talon T-38 trainer, which allowed him to retain his flight status. But in the early days of his career, because of his black skin and enormous size ("Sorry, Lieutenant, we don't have a shoehorn big enough to slip you into one of these itty bitty Sabre Jets — why don't you step into one of those big ole bombers over yonder… ha, ha"), he was relegated to flying the larger aircraft.
So it was in bombers he'd made his reputation, particularly flying missions out of Guam over North and South Vietnam— as the ribbon on his chest denoting the Distinguished Flying Cross would attest. It had happened on the first mission of the Christmas bombing in 1972. The bombing raids over North Vietnam had been halted during the fall of that year while Kissinger was in Paris putting a "peace agreement" together with Hanoi's Le Due Tho. But the negotiations broke down after Nixon's election, causing the President to embark upon a strategy of bombing the Vietnamese back to the negotiating table. Unfortunately, the bombing halt had given the North Vietnamese plenty of time to repair and replenish their air defense batteries.
On the first mission after the hiatus, Whittenberg's squadron was assigned to strike the port facilities at Haiphong, which possessed one of the heaviest concentrations of antiaircraft weapons in the history of air combat. B-52s were a particularly sweet target for the surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries because of their size and lumbering speed, so on this mission a flock of "Wild Weasels" flew in ahead of the bombers to neutralize as many SAM launchers as possible. The Weasels were specially equipped F-105 Thunderchiefs that would "clothesline," or intentionally 'et a SAM radar lock on to them, then unleash their own tracking missiles to home in on and destroy the SAM radar antenna. This would blind the SAM battery until the antenna could be rebuilt. Unfortunately, a Weasel often had to contend with an incoming SAM missile while lining up its own shot. In essence, the process often became a high-speed game of chicken, and sometimes the Weasel's missile came in second.
On that mission over Haiphong, however, no amount of Weasels could contain the flock of missiles that screamed toward Whittenberg's squadron. The entire rim of the harbor seemed to come alive with SAM launch signatures. Sizing up what seemed like a hopeless situation, Whittenberg released his bomb load prematurely and commanded his squadron to release air-bursts of radar-confusing chaff. He then put his own lead B-52 into a steep diving turn, turning off his black box of electronic countermeasures and turning on his navigational transponder. The resulting multitude of radar images apparently confused the Soviet-built fire-control computers, causing them to lock on to the one clear signal which emerged from the electronic clutter— i.e., Whittenberg's transponder. The remainder of his squadron made it through unscathed that morning, but not Whittenberg. The first incoming SAM clipped his B-52 on the wingtip, causing it to cartwheel at 23,000 feet. Whittenberg and his copilot and tail gunner were the only ones able to eject.