"General Shenko gave many years' service to his country… I knew jiis family. It is regrettable he should come to such an end as this."
"General Secretary," replied the KGB chieftain, "after the American breakthrough it became critical for us to develop our own reusable shuttle system. It was General Shenko's responsibility to bring such a system to fruition. He failed. One must deal with such failure with ultimate firmness."
Vorontsky sighed and massaged the bridge of his nose. "As always, Comrade Kostiashak, your analysis is most precise— particularly as it concerns the subject of failure." His heavily lidded eyes returned their gaze to the window, and he paused some moments before saying, ever so softly, "I fear I will not be General Secretary much longer, Vitali… So many years I have struggled. To have come so far and to reach such an end as this because of some damned airplane in outer space is more than I can fathom." A moment passed, then he turned and brought his two hammerlike fists crashing down on the desktop. "Two billion rubles!" he cried. "Up in smoke! In an instant! For the second time!" The outburst seemed to vent the remaining energy from his lumbering body, and he collapsed into his huge leather chair.
Kostiashak did not interrupt, but took note that his patron was beginning to show the telltale signs of age.
The General Secretary covered his face with a pair of huge hands. "What good is a damned shuttle if it burns up after three or four flites? It is useless! Utterly useless!" He sighed, and then pointed at the conference room. "They will soon be asking for my head," he murmured apologetically, "and yours along with mine, I'm afraid… My dear friend, I hope I have not shortened so promising a career. You are a grandmaster, are you not? What does one do when one's king is exposed and defenseless?"
Vorontsky raised his watermelon-sized head to face his young protege, who had taken the liberty of lighting up a Pall Mall. But instead of a look of dejection, the diminutive Chairman's Indian-like features seemed vibrant, and the corners of his thin mouth betrayed the flicker of a smile. These signs were not lost on the General Secretary — a consummate politician who had read through many a stone face in his career. "Vitali. What is it? Is there something you have not told me?"
Kostiashak tapped the ask of his cigarette into a porcelain ashtray sitting on the rosewood desk. "Yes, General Secretary. I must confess. There is something I have not… disclosed."
The former hammer thrower felt his pulse quicken. ' 'Then do not keep it from me, Vitali. Tell me what it is."
The KGB chieftain did not answer at once, but took a long pull on his Pall Mall and exhaled slowly, causing the smoke to rise in tiny curls around his dark eyes. In a soft voice that was charged with an undercurrent of excitement, the grandmaster whispered, "You were mistaken, General Secretary. Our king is not defenseless… but to win the game we must risk everything."
THE FIRST DAY
She was beautiful.
Poised above the Pacific surf at Point Arguello, and illuminated by the gantry klieg lights, the American space shuttle Intrepid looked both lovely and powerful as she waited for a spark to ignite her fiery tail. The sleek-winged orbiter was pointed skyward, married to the bright orange external fuel tank and flanked by the pair of giant solid booster rockets. Together the four elements made up the ' 'launch vehicle" of the Intrepid, and her beauty was surpassed only by her complexity. Sitting there, the spacecraft stood eleven stories high, weighed 4.5 million pounds, contained hundreds of moving parts, and carried so much volatile liquid fuel that the gigantic external tank contained internal baffles to prevent the fluids from whirlpooling as they were drained during launch. The orbiter-tank-booster vehicle possessed six major systems — from avionics to propulsion to life support — and hundreds of subsystems, all of which had to work in harmony if the spacecraft was to heave itself aloft.
On this moonlit night, the landscape surrounding Space Launch Complex Six at Vandenberg seemed deserted and eerily still, except for the occasional jackrabbit and a wispy, cloudlike contrail swirling around the top of the bright orange tank. Earlier that morning, 143,000 gallons of liquid oxygen, chilled to minus 147 degrees centigrade, had been loaded into the giant external tank. Once inside, the top layer of the "O-two" oxidizer became warm enough to "boil off" and change into gaseous oxygen. When the expanding super-cold vapor was vented from the tank, it hit the warmer atmosphere and left a telltale contrail whipping in the wind.
A fuzzy voice came through the headphones. "Intrepid, this is Launch Control. Seal your O-two locks."
The shuttle commander's thumb flipped a switch that read 02 valve — et (for "external tank") from the open to the close position. Inside the external tank an aluminum valve rotated and the white contrail immediately disappeared. Pressure was now building up in the liquid oxygen tank like steam in a capped tea kettle. The Intrepid had eight minutes to launch or reopen the valve; otherwise, the tank would rupture and the ensuing explosion would turn the launch complex into a small Mount St. Helens.
"Roger, Control. O-two locks are sealed." It was a cold, hard, and self-confident voice that responded.
"We copy that, Intrepid. We have a visual on the O-two seal."
"Roger," came the icy reply.
Maj. Frank Mulcahey chuckled to himself that the pilot in the adjoining chair enjoyed talking about liquid oxygen because, as a well-worn joke around the complex suggested, the shuttle commander's blood probably ran at about the same temperature.
"Intrepid, seal yourH-two locks," ordered Launch Control.
"Roger, Control." And the liquid hydrogen tank, which held the second component of the shuttle's volatile fuel mixture, was closed off.
Mulcahey, the Intrepid's copilot, was the true picture of his Irish ancestry with his red hair and red mustache, and the tough boxer's build that reflected his feistiness. A native of Boston, he'd spent most of his adult life in fighter aircraft before joining the SPACECOM astronaut corps. He now ran his brown eyes over the multitude of gauges, dials, and liquid crystal displays on the control panel, looking for any aberrant behavior in the launch vehicle's subsystems.
Human eyes and reflexes were woefully inadequate to handle the 34 million pieces of information processed during a shuttle launch; so to fill the void, five on-board computers gobbled through the data, monitoring thousands of functions and even checking on one another. If a dispute arose between the computers concerning a flight procedure, they would vote among themselves to settle the argument. The shuttle was so computer-dependent that firing the engines, lift-off, guidance, and reentry could all be done without the human element. Mulcahey mused to himself that the absence of the human element had extended to the flight commander's chair. Perhaps that's how the commander pictured himself — just another silicon chip or circuit performing a function.
"Move APUs to 'inhibit.' " It was a quiet but firm order.