"I think you suppose right," said Whittenberg. "You find any flaw in his thinking, Chet?"
"Negative, General," replied McCormack.
"I agree with everything Sir Isaac has said," continued Whittenberg, "but the Constellation is the only vehicle we have at this time that can pull something like this off. It's got to be Constellation and it's got to be now. Chet, you and Bull and Sir Isaac start mapping out the flight plan. If Spyglass comes back with pix showing Intrepid is blown to pieces, you can take this matter up with my replacement. Until then, I'll talk with the White House and NASA, and get control over the launch switched to Chet at CSOC. Everyone else get his ass in gear. I want that bird off the pad in seventy-two hours, max."
Control.
That had been the guiding force of his life. Control and purpose. Now, once again, he had to become a creature of absolute discipline and retake control of himself and his situation. No more childish outbursts. No more wailing. Once again, he told himself, be the superb test pilot. Assess the problem and correct it. Be scientific and detached.
First, take stock. Put things in order. There were still droplets of blood floating in the cockpit. Iceberg drifted out of his chair and retrieved a hand-held vacuum cleaner from the crew compartment. He methodically swept the flight deck's air of the red droplets, and then went below ta clear the crew compartment of floating circuit-board fragments. After securing the vacuum cleaner and floating oxygen packs, he carefully inspected the damage to the spacecraft's electronics. Iceberg cursed. That damned Rodriquez. He'd always despised the man's flippant manner.
It appeared the only circuit board damaged was the one marked oms, which carried the primary and backup systems for the maneuvering retro rockets. Carefully, Kapuscinski plucked out the remaining shards and fragments from the circuit casing and put them in a waste container, then gently pushed the circuit drawer back into place. He replaced the bulkhead panel and tightened the butterfly screws, then reattached the storage locker to the panel. Lastly, he put the floating screwdriver back in the tool kit. Satisfied everything was in its proper place, he returned to the left seat of the cockpit.
Methodically, he ran through the instrument checklist and found all major systems were functional, including the reaction control system (RCS), which allowed the orbiter to change position up, down, and sideways, with small pitch and yaw thrus-ters in the nose and tail. That is to say, with the RCS thrusters the Intrepid could change its attitude in orbit, but it couldn't change orbits or execute retrofire. Also, the circuits which allowed the hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide fuel to be transferred from the larger OMS fuel tanks to the smaller RCS fuel tanks that had been taken out by Rodriquez. That meant Iceberg could maneuver the orbiter, but would have to do so sparingly with the existing RCS fuel in the smaller tanks. Life-support systems were in order, and there was enough oxygen and supplies for three men for eleven days — thirty-three days for him alone.
He punched up the orbital path data on the flight computer, which showed the Intrepid was in a circular polar orbit with an altitude of 126 miles. If he was left in this pattern long enough, the orbit would eventually decay and the shuttle would fall into the atmosphere to break apart in an uncontrolled reentry. However, such an orbit decay from this altitude would probably take a couple of months.
For the time being he was alone, with no other vehicle, from either the SDI platform or the ground, that could be of immediate clanger to him. That would change, though. It was his guess that efforts were under way at this very moment to get some kind of vehicle aloft — and fast. He had to find some way of reactivating the OMS retro rockets. He'd crossed the Rubicon, and his only way to survive was to get down from orbit before the Americans found a way up. It had to be done, and he knew he couldn't do it alone. He needed help, and that meant communicating with his new masters.
On the communications panel of the pilot's console, there was a device which had a liquid crystal display with a numeric keypad underneath. It looked very much like a simple ten-key electronic calculator, but in fact it was a radio transmission scrambling device called "Oracle." This device could be wired into virtually any military aircraft or tactical radio and was immensely popular with all three services because of its effectiveness, simplicity, and durability. However, widespread popularity did have its drawbacks.
The spy ring which had so devastated the Navy and compromised its most jealously guarded cryptographic secrets had not ended with the arrest of John Walker, a sleazy submarine warrant officer who sold out his country for some spare pocket change. Operating independent of Walker and unbeknownst to the FBI was another communications warrant officer — this one on a frigate — who had copied an Oracle technical manual and passed it to his Soviet case officer between cruises. About the same time, a file clerk at Pacstar Communications in Los Angeles — the manufacturer of the Oracle system — had photographed circuit diagrams of the system while the design engineers were at lunch and passed it on to her case officer on the West Coast. The KGB's Technical Directorate had pulled the elements together to fashion a working model of the system.
While these intelligence losses were devastating, having an Oracle terminal did not, in and of itself, give the owner access to all scrambled radio traffic. Fortunately, eleven identical digits had to be punched into the microprocessor of the Oracle transceiver for the communications to pass back and forth unscrambled. Without the exact same digits, the Oracle was useless; and with 99,999,999,999 permutations and combinations, the likelihood of anyone tapping into the same eleven random digits during a brief transmission was — to say the least — remote.
Iceberg punched in the eleven digits he had committed to memory. He'd obtained the numbers from the proprietor of a ramshackle rare bookstore in Lompoc, California — the same person who'd given him the little cylinder with which he'd killed Mulcahey. Next, he checked the Global Positioning System on the Intrepid1s NavComputer, which gave him the spacecraft's position, altitude, course, and speed (or vector).
Normally, the orbiter communicated with Mission Control at
CSOC through the tracking and data relay satellites (TDRS), which were two geosynchronous satellites that relayed radio transmissions from the shuttle to the ground. The Russians had their own Kosmos 1700 communications satellites that worked on much the same principle, but it had been decided from the beginning that the Intrepid would not use the Kosmos system, except as a last resort. That was because satellite relay transmissions were much easier to intercept than point-to-point radio signals. Therefore, the Intrepid would aim its directional radio antenna at a ground-based receiving station and communicate only while it was overhead. This cut down the "time window" for communications, but it improved security — at least long enough to get Intrepid on the ground.
The NavComputer told Iceberg the Intrepid was over the Arctic ice cap, and after one more orbit the spacecraft would be crossing Soviet airspace in far eastern Siberia. Iceberg had memorized the positions of the Russian ground-based Orbita tracking stations, and he could see from the navigational plot that he would have a communications time window of about four minutes as he sailed over the small naval station of Valku-mey — a dismal outpost on Chaunskaya Bay that emptied into the East Siberian Sea. There was precious little there, except ice, tundra, a pier — and an earth-station dish pointed expectantly at the sky.