Masters glanced up at the cylindrical launch-bay airlock, which actually did resemble the chamber of a gun; inside, he could see the nosecap of the Air-Launched Alert Response Missile, which certainly resembled a bullet, as it motored into position. His head was right in the muzzle. “Good analogy, Helen,” he said wryly.
The booster slid into position. “Try the umbilical selftest,” Masters said to the launch-bay technician.
A moment later, Philips gave him his answer: “That’s it, Jon!” he said with a shout. “There’s a break in the umbilical connector — we had proper voltage but no signal. Come out of there and we’ll have it fixed in no time.”
“Forget it. No time. I’ll do it myself.” Before anyone could say anything else, Masters had scrambled inside the launch airlock and began crawling down along the ALARM booster.
“Jon, are you nuts?” the technician said. “Helen, this is Red. Jon just crawled down into the airlock. Put the interlocks back on.”
“No!” Masters radioed from inside the launch airlock. “Continue the countdown.”
“This is Kaddiri. I’m setting the interlocks, operator-initiated countdown hold. Crewman in the launch airlock. Interlocks on.”
Just then the self-test on the booster’s umbilical ended with a satisfactory reading. “Continuity restored… you got it, Jon, you got it,” Philips said. “But we’ve passed the launch window.”
“Start the countdown at T minus sixty,” Masters said. “The booster has the endurance to make the corrections, and we built a little leeway into the launch window. Continue the countdown…”
“I am not going to reactivate the system until you are out of there,” Kaddiri said testily.
“I’m out, I’m out,” Masters said as his sneakers appeared from the muzzle of the airlock. “Let’s do it.” Masters closed the airlock doors the second he was out of the chamber. Philips gave him his portable oxygen bottle, and he was just putting it on and strapping himself into his seat when the airlock was depressurized. Less than sixty seconds later the booster was on its way.
“Good separation, good first-stage ignition,” Helen reported as the forty-three-thousand-pound missile accelerated ahead of the DC-10 and roared skyward. “Clear connectivity in all channels… wings responding, swiveling on schedule… twenty seconds to first-stage burnout…”
Masters waited a few more moments as Kaddiri continued to monitor the launch, then said with a faint smile, “Well, that was close. You know what happened? The plug was off by a fraction of an inch. It was in close enough to report a closed and safe reading, but there wasn’t any data transfer. Worse, that would have only shown up when the booster was in launch position and the interlocks were removed. On the dock, it was hooked into a different data bus and reported okay. No wonder we thought it was TDRS’ fault.” Kaddiri continued to read off the booster’s primary performance more for the benefit of the mission voice recorder than anything else. The recorder served as a backup to the computerized data-retrieval system. She didn’t say a word to Masters. Wouldn’t even look at him.
Masters noticed the silence and fidgeted a bit. Every launch flight lately seemed to bring out the worst in her. Where was her sense of adventure? Forget it, he decided, she didn’t have one. Still, she was part of his team and he wanted to keep things on an even keel.
“Good thing I caught it, huh?” he asked almost sheepishly.
“No,” Kaddiri said evenly, not looking at him. She didn’t want to go into it with him. Not now. They were, after all, being recorded. Still, he had removed all the safety interlocks, leaving them totally unprotected in case there’d been an ignition-circuit malfunction or a guidance-computer malfunction. That booster could have easily gone off in the cabin and killed them all. Worse he’d reconnected a malfunctioning plug on a live booster. Who knows, she wondered, what
Masters knew she was reviewing the past few minutes and said, “Helen… it was on countdown hold.”
“Because
“Well,” Masters said expansively, “it’s dead on course, dead on speed, dead on altitude. It’ll be in orbit in eight minutes and the friggin’ Air Force can get a look at all that shit going on in the Philippines.”
“Whatever you say, Jon…”
“Helen, come on…”
“Drop it.”.
And he did.
