The X-15 broke out of the spin and leveled oft. The buffeting faded away.
Stone felt a brief burst of elation. He was at 120,000 feet, and Mach 5. Now all I’ve got to do is reenter the goddamn atmosphere.
He pulled up the nose; he muttered a short, obscene prayer as the controls responded to him. He reached the correct twenty-degree nose-up angle of attack, and opened the air brakes, flaps on the plane’s rear vertical stabilizer. A sensation of speed returned as deceleration started to bite, and shoved him forward against his restraint. The leading edges of his wings were glowing a dark, threatening red.
The sky brightened quickly. He could see Edwards, a grid laid out over the desert below, 260 miles from his takeoff point.
At 18,000 feet he pulled in his air brakes and hauled on the aerodynamic controls to initiate a corkscrew dive. The idea was to shed more speed and energy as fast as possible.
At a thousand feet above the dry lake bed he pulled out of his dive and, with the slipstream roaring past his canopy, jettisoned his ventral fin. He extended the landing flaps and pulled up the scorched nose, blistered from the reentry. Chase aircraft settled in alongside him.
The X-15 hit the dirt. The skids at the rear sent a cloud of dust up into the still desert air; Stone was jolted as the crude skids scraped across the lake bed. The nose wheel stayed up for a few seconds, before thumping down to add to the dust clouds.
A mile from touchdown the X-15 came to a halt. The chase planes roared overhead.
As the dust settled over his canopy, Stone switched off his instruments, closed his eyes, and slumped back in his seat.
The ring of his pressure suit dug into the back of his neck.
Stone had proved himself as a pilot today. But a flight like today’s wouldn’t do him a damn bit of good with NASA. I got out of a supersonic spin! I got my hide back down, and if I can figure out how I did it, I’ll be in the manual. But I screwed up. I didn’t finish the science; I didn’t make it through the checklist. And for NASA, that was what it was all about.
A fist banged on his canopy. The ground crews had reached him; through the dusty glass he could see a wide, grinning face. He raised a gloved hand and joined thumb and forefinger in a “perfect” symbol.
All in a day’s work, in the space program.
Monday, April 13, 1970
In 1970, Ralph Gershon was twenty-five years old.
He had grown up on a farm in Iowa, surrounded by near poverty and toil, dreaming of flight. As a kid he’d gone to Mars with Weinbaum and Clarke and Burroughs and Bradbury; later, he’d followed the emerging space program with fascination. He’d gotten himself some flight experience, had crammed his head at school, and — in the face of a lot of prejudice — had finally made it into the academy, and the Air Force.
He’d been following a dream.
But it hadn’t worked out so wonderfully.
As soon as he had climbed away from the base, Gershon was over jungle. It was just a sea of darkness under him, blacker than the sky, rolling to the horizon.
His wingman had pushed in his power and was invisible; he would already be somewhere over the four-thousand-foot mark.
As the Spad climbed, the noise of its turbine rose in pitch, and the prop dragged at smoky air. Gershon could see flashes of light, pinpricks of crimson embedded in the masked ground. The pinpricks were muzzle flashes from the bigger guns down there.
The air was dingy with the smoke: it was about twice as bad as the average Los Angeles smog. The smoke struck Gershon’s imagination. Down there hundreds, thousands of little farmers were patiently tending smoky fires in their own soggy fields, each doing his bit to thwart him, Gershon, and his fellows. If you thought too hard about it, it was awesome; it gave you a sense of the size of this land, of how it was capable of absorbing a hell of a lot of punishment.
So Gershon resolutely tried not to think about it.
Then he leveled off. “Back to cruise power,” he told his wingman.
The Combat Skyspot radar controller came on the line.
He’d been expecting this. He snapped on his flashlight and prepared to mark his map.
Gershon had been briefed for a target inside South Vietnam. But then, in terse sentences, the Skyspot gave him a new target.
Gershon changed his heading; more miles of anonymous, complex jungle rolled beneath his prow.
After the raid was over, ground controllers would destroy all evidence of the diversion, shredding documents and reporting that the attack had taken place, as planned, inside South Vietnam.
And not inside neutral Cambodia.
And, as on previous flights, Gershon was going to have to file a false report.
He glanced into the sky. Somewhere up there, Apollo 13 was heading for the Moon.
Gershon found it hard to reconcile the terrific adventure going on in the sky, three guys hanging their hides out over the edge, with the mindless, lying bullshit of this war.
After an hour the Spad started trembling — pogoing, vibrating longitudinally, so that he was juddered back and forth in his seat. Night flying seemed to magnify everything, every little problem, until you could damn near scare yourself out of the sky. It was hard to know if vibrations like those were a real problem or something that he’d just dismiss during daylight.
He tried to ride it out, and after a while the juddering let up. Production of the Spads — single-seater Douglas A-1 Skyraiders — had been stopped in 1957. Thirteen years ago. They shouldn’t be flying anymore. Operational ships had to be nursed along with components cannibalized from wrecks.
In the dark Gershon had to fly time-and-distance: a kind of dead reckoning, based on nothing but his heading, his airspeed, and the time he flew. It wasn’t exactly accurate. Still, soon Gershon figured he was over the FAG’s reported location. The FAG was his Forward Air Guide, the friendly Cambodian spotter who had been assigned to guide his bombs home.
He twisted the knobs of his VHF radio. “Hello, Topdog, this is Pilgrim. How you hear? Topdog. Pilgrim. How you hear?”
He heard the barking of a thirty-seven-mil airburst, miles away.
Gershon tried to keep his patience. After all, the poor guy was down there in the night, surrounded by mortar-firing hostiles.
There was a crackling of radio static, a distant voice. “Pilgrim. Topdog. You come help Topdog?”
“Yes, Topdog. Pilgrim come help you. You have bad guys?”
“Rager, rager, Pilgrim.” Rager for roger. The FAG was talking the abbreviated lingo the pilots had worked out with the locals they had to deal with. “Have many, many bad guys. They all around. They shoot big gun at me.”
Big gun? Gershon peered down at the dark. Maybe it was so. He couldn’t see any muzzle flashes, so maybe the fight was just a small-arms affair.
Small-arms fire was okay with Gershon. It was even kind of interesting. It sounded like rain on tin, and put little holes in the airplane.
But “big gun” could mean a mortar.
It was hard to be sure. Things would be looking kind of different to Topdog, helpless in his blacked-out hellhole on the inky ground.
“Okay, Topdog, you give us coordinates where you are. We come help you.” Gershon flicked on his flashlight and wrote out the numbers, then checked them against the map.
The coordinates didn’t tie up with where the FAG was supposed to be.
Gershon called his wingman. “Hey. You copy that?”
“Copy.”
“Either he doesn’t know where he is, or he’s a hundred miles from here.”
“Your call, Pilgrim.”
Gershon hesitated, trying to figure what to do. Sometimes this kind of hide-and-seek was normal with an FAG.
Then again, sometimes voices would come floating up out of the dark to the bombers, confidently calling out positions to hit. On checking, the flyers would find the locations to be the designated areas of friendly troops.