The Kremlin Strike

Six

At nearly sixty thousand feet above the surface of the ocean, the view through the S-29 Shadow’s forward cockpit canopy was spectacular. Seen from this altitude, the earth’s curvature was obvious. The horizon fell away visibly on either side of the spaceplane’s direction of flight. And while the sky was still a deep, rich blue along the edge of that distant horizon, higher up it thinned to paler and paler shades of the same color before fading away entirely into the infinite blackness of space.

“Coming up on Mach three,” Peter “Constable” Vasey said, speaking through the open visor of his pressure helmet. The Englishman’s gloved left hand held the sidestick controller, while his right rested on the bank of engine throttles set in the center console between the spaceplane’s two forward seats. “Stand by for transition to scramjet mode.”

“Affirmative. Standing by,” Major Nadia Rozek replied from the right-hand mission commander’s seat. “All engine readouts are nominal.” Like the pilot, she wore an orange Advanced Crew Escape Suit, or ACES — a full-pressure suit similar to those once used by space shuttle astronauts and SR-71 Blackbird crews. Even after all these weeks of training, she was still astonished at how casually she now accepted the ease with which this marvelous machine attained these kinds of speeds. Their S-29 was already racing east toward the distant Pacific coast at nearly two thousand miles per hour and still accelerating rapidly.

“Mach three.” Vasey had his light blue eyes fixed on his heads-up display. “Go for scramjet transition.” His gloved right hand slowly advanced the throttles.

The pitch of the roar from their five powerful engines — two under each wing and one atop the aft fuselage — audibly changed.

Nadia saw the curves on her engine displays changing. “Spiking initiated,” she reported. The large cone or “spike” in each engine’s inlet was moving forward — diverting the air entering at supersonic speeds away from their turbine fans and into ducts where it could be compressed, mixed with jet fuel, and then ignited. Freed from the need to rely on any moving parts, their transformed engines could now push them up to around Mach 15, nearly ten thousand miles per hour.

Gently, Vasey pulled back on the stick. The S-29’s nose pitched up at around twelve degrees and they soared skyward. Their angle of ascent grew steeper as their speed climbed. “Mach four. Approaching Mach five.”

Pressed back into her seat, Nadia saw the sky ahead of them grow blacker. They were heading toward space, she thought exultantly — on their way into low Earth orbit for the first time.

Suddenly the S-29 Shadow lurched sharply, falling off to the right. They were thrown hard against their seat harnesses.

In that same moment, one of the readouts on Nadia’s multifunction display flashed red. “Emergency shutdown on number four engine,” she said tersely. Without waiting, she tapped an icon. “Shutting down number one engine to compensate.” At these speeds, there was no way any control surface could possibly cope with the imbalanced thrust generated by having only one working engine under their starboard wing.

“Roger that.” Gritting his teeth, Vasey tweaked his stick just a hair back to the left, struggling to keep their nearly hypersonic spaceplane out of a catastrophic spin. When flying at nearly three thousand knots, overcorrecting was almost as dangerous as undercorrecting. Responding to his slight touch, the S-29 rolled a few degrees back to the left, straightening out.

He risked a sidelong glance at Nadia. “Wake the lazy buggers for me, will you, Major?”

“Going for simultaneous engine restart,” she acknowledged. Quick control inputs reconfigured the two idled engines so that neither could fire up without the other. Satisfied by what she saw, Nadia tapped another icon. Nothing. The system function lights for both engines remained obstinately red. “Gówno,” she muttered in frustration. “Crap. No joy on the restart, Constable.”

“Understood.” Vasey spoke more formally. “Sky Masters Control, this is Shadow Two. Declaring a mission abort. Returning to Battle Mountain.”

“Shadow Two, this is Control. Abort declaration acknowledged,” Nadia heard Brad’s voice say. For this flight, he was acting as CAPCOM, their intermediary with the Sky Masters engineers and other specialists monitoring this spaceplane flight from the ground. She sighed inside. With only three working engines, there was no way they could reach orbit — even after transitioning to full rocket power.

Gradually, Vasey lowered the S-29’s nose, leveling off at a hundred and twenty thousand feet while he eased back on the throttles. The big spaceplane slowly decelerated. After a couple of minutes, he announced, “Dropping below Mach three.”

The low, rumbling roar reaching them from outside the cockpit altered a bit, becoming slightly higher-pitched.

“Engine spikes reversing,” Nadia confirmed. “Turbofans spooling up.”

No sooner had she said that than two muffled bangs rattled through the spaceplane’s fuselage. This time, the Shadow rolled sharply left. More red warning lights blossomed across her multifunction display. “Engine failure on numbers two and five,” she snapped, tasting blood from where she’d bitten the inside of her lip. As she strained against her safety harness, her fingers danced across the screen, hurrying to shut off their last operational engine before it could drag them into a dizzying spiral down toward the waters of the Pacific Ocean far, far below.

The comforting roar of their engines died — replaced by the keening noise of thin air rushing past.

With great difficulty, Vasey regained control, bringing the S-29 back onto an easterly heading and slightly nose down. “APU status?” he asked coolly.

“The APU generator is on,” Nadia confirmed. With all five engines dead or shut down, the S-29’s auxiliary power unit was crucial. It was now the only source of the power needed to operate their computers and flight controls.

“Engine status.”

She paged through diagnostic screens, rapidly evaluating the data provided by the spaceplane’s internal and external sensors. “It looks like we lost multiple fan blades in both numbers two and five,” she reported. “But the fan cases themselves held. The damage seems to have been contained inside the engines themselves. I show no fire or fuel-leak warnings.”

Vasey nodded slightly. That was a small blessing. Using technology developed under a NASA grant, the turbofan casings for the S-29’s massive LPDRS engines were manufactured out of triaxial carbon braid. That made the casings both stronger and lighter than if they had been made out of a more conventional metal, like aluminum. “Let’s try for a restart on numbers one and three.”

Nadia tapped in a series of commands. If they could power up the two engines that hadn’t actually failed, one under each wing, they should still be able to limp back to Battle Mountain. But when she hit the restart icon, a new row of red caution and warning lights lit up. “Psiakrew! Hell! Both of them show fuel-pump failures. They will not restart.”

“Well, that tears it,” Vasey muttered. He called the control center again. “Sky Masters Control, this is Shadow Two. We are negative return to Battle Mountain. I say again, we are negative return to Nevada. I’m afraid that we’ve just become a rather oversized and somewhat clumsy glider.”

“Copy that, Two,” Brad radioed. “Standing by for your emergency abort field decision.”

Nadia switched her display to show the onboard computer’s evaluation of their flight status and glide ratio. At their current supersonic speed and high altitude, the S-29’s ratio was abysmal — something on the order of 3:1… so for every thousand feet they descended, they’d cover just three thousand feet on the ground. But that would improve substantially when they got down into thicker air and slowed to subsonic speeds. In theory, they ought to be able to come close to the glide ratios achieved by modern jet airliners that had lost all their engines, somewhere between 15 and 17:1. By trading airspeed and elevation for distance, she estimated their probable maximum glide range at around one hundred and sixty nautical miles.

Given that, one quick glance at a digital navigation map showed their two best options for an emergency, engines-out landing. She flagged both in order of priority and sent them to Vasey’s own display.

The Englishman’s eyes narrowed for a split second in concentration as he ran through his own internal calculations. Then he nodded. “Sky Masters Control, this is Shadow Two. Submit we head for SFO, with OAK as the alternate field.”

Both international airports, San Francisco and Oakland, had long runways that more than met their minimum parameters. Now that the spaceplane couldn’t brake using reversed engine thrust, the flight manuals said they needed at least seventy-five hundred feet of smooth, hard-surfaced runway available for a safe landing.

“Wait one, Shadow Two,” Brad answered.

A minute passed, feeling like an eternity to Nadia.

“Two, this is Sky Masters Control. Regret unable to approve requested abort to SFO or OAK,” she heard Brad say. “ATC says they can’t clear the airspace in time.”

“Bugger,” Vasey said under his breath. With dozens of scheduled passenger and air cargo flights crisscrossing the skies above the Bay Area at any given moment, that wasn’t especially surprising. But it was still very bad news.

“Can you make Travis?” Brad asked, sounding concerned now.

Vasey shot Nadia another glance. Frowning, she shook her head. Based on their projected rate of descent and airspeed, they would slam into the ground about eight miles short of Travis Air Force Base. Unfortunately, no other airport within their glide range had a runway that met the S-29’s specified emergency requirements.

“Unable, insufficient range, Sky Masters Control,” Vasey replied, sounding very cool, almost icily detached, now.

“Copy that, Two,” Brad said. “Suggest you prepare to eject over the ocean. We’ve alerted the coast guard. They have two MH-65 Dolphin search-and-rescue helicopters on alert.”

“Stand by on that, Sky Masters,” Vasey said. He turned his head toward Nadia, with a single eyebrow arched in an eloquent, unspoken question.

Nadia shook her head. The thought of so casually abandoning this expensive and badly needed spaceplane was abhorrent to her. There must be another option, something else they could try. But what?

Through the forward canopy, a brownish haze now marked the far horizon. They were down to around sixty thousand feet and roughly one hundred nautical miles from the Northern California coast. Something about the word nautical tugged at her mind. Realizing what it was, she turned excitedly to Vasey. “You were a Royal Navy pilot, yes?”

He nodded with a slight, wry smile. “For my sins, I was.”

“Then you have landed on aircraft carriers?”

Again, he nodded. “Hundreds of times.” His smile grew wider. “But that’s a nonstarter, Major. Even a madman like me has some limits. I may be a damned fine pilot, but no one on God’s good earth could put an ungainly beast like this one down on a patch of deck only a hundred and fifty meters long!”

Nadia shook her head impatiently, but with a grin of her own. “That is not enough, I agree.” Swiftly, she scrolled through her computer’s maps and satellite photos of different Bay Area regional and municipal airports. Settling on one, she flicked a hand across her display, sending it to Vasey’s MFD. “But this one, you see?”

Intrigued, the Englishman studied her find. Sonoma County’s Charles M. Schulz Airport, about fifty miles north of San Francisco, had a decent six-thousand-foot-long runway, with another six hundred feet or so of hard-packed dirt extending beyond it. Going strictly by the book, that was still too short, but flight safety manuals always built in a margin for pilot error. He whistled softly. “It’s doable, by God.” He flashed her a madcap grin. “So then, by God, we’ll do it!”

While Vasey alerted Brad to their new plan, and secured both his reluctant approval and grudging clearance from the relevant air traffic controllers, Nadia locked the airport’s Runway 32 into the S-29’s flight computer. New steering cues blinked onto Vasey’s HUD.

Following them, he banked the big spaceplane, turning a few degrees more to the east-northeast. They were descending rapidly now, slanting toward the ever-closer coast.

Nadia kept a close watch on their speed. After a few more minutes, she announced, “We are subsonic again, slowing past five hundred knots.” She pulled up another display, this one governing the S-29’s twin fuel tanks. “I suggest we begin dumping fuel to reduce our landing weight.”

“Roger,” Vasey agreed. “Inert and dump our ‘bomb’ first.” Bomb was Sky Masters slang for “borohydrogen metaoxide” or “BOHM.” Essentially refined hydrogen peroxide, BOHM was the liquid oxidizer their engines would have needed for combustion after transitioning to pure rocket mode. While not quite as efficient as supercooled liquid oxygen, it was considerably less costly. BOHM could also be transferred by tanker aircraft — which was not yet possible for cryogenic oxygen.

Nadia typed in new orders, instructing the computers to flush the BOHM tank with helium to render the compound safe before she dumped it into the air high over the ocean. Green lights blinked, indicating the job was done. Quickly, she tapped the fuel-dump icon.

“Bombs away,” she said with a slight, twisted smile.

Vasey blinked. “My God, really? That was terrible, Major. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“Sorry, Constable. But I’ve always wanted to say that,” she admitted.

She waited another sixty seconds to begin dumping their conventional JP-8 jet fuel. No one in their right mind wanted to risk inadvertently mixing BOHM with jet fuel outside a “leopard” engine operating in rocket mode. Ordinarily, it took a pulsed laser igniter to set off the combination… but sometimes any source of friction or even just a vibration at the wrong frequency could trigger a massive explosion.

The S-29 was down to a little over six thousand feet by the time they crossed the coastline — gliding silently above a shore marked by jagged rocks and rolling, whitecapped breakers. Off to their right, Nadia could see a little town her computer identified as Bodega Bay. Ahead lay a jumble of hills and ridges. The slopes swept by winds coming off the Pacific were mostly scrub brush and tall grass. The hills and narrow valleys farther inland were either thickly wooded or a mix of terraced vineyards and fenced cattle-grazing land.

Buffeted by updrafts swirling above those slopes, the spaceplane juddered briefly. Their airspeed dropped further. Control surfaces whirred open, providing a little more lift as they flew lower across Sonoma County.

Beyond the range of coastal hills, housing developments and vineyards sprawled across flatter, more open country. Santa Rosa’s more crowded streets and denser network of buildings lay ahead and to the right. The county’s regional airport was off to the left, about six nautical miles northwest of the city. Live oaks lined both sides of a creek that meandered across the valley floor.

Nadia checked her navigation display. “Two nautical miles out.”

“Copy that,” Vasey said. He turned his attention to the airport tower controller monitoring for their approach. “Santa Rosa Tower, this is Shadow Two, descending through one thousand feet, airspeed one-nine-zero knots, full stop.”

“Shadow Two, Santa Rosa Tower, winds light and from the west, cleared to land Runway Three-Two. Emergency has been declared. Rescue crews standing by,” the controller responded.

The steering cues on Vasey’s HUD slid sharply to the left, indicating this was the point selected for his final turn to line up on the runway. Concentrating fiercely, he tweaked the stick to follow them — rolling toward the northwest and then leveling out.

“One nautical mile out,” Nadia told him.

Vasey nodded. He tapped the landing-gear icon on his own multifunction display. “Descending through five hundred feet. Gear down.”

Hydraulics under their feet whined. The S-29’s center fuselage gear and wing-mounted bogies were coming down. Robbed of its perfect streamlining, the big spaceplane shuddered and rattled.

An indicator on Vasey’s HUD flashed solid green. “Gear down and locked.”

The runway loomed ahead through the S-29’s thick, heat-resistant windscreen, growing larger with every passing second. He peered ahead, blinking away a droplet of sweat. The gloved fingers of his left hand curled around the stick, making tiny movements as he fought to stay on the precisely computed glide path.

Now.

The spaceplane dropped the last few feet and touched down with a sharp jolt — right at the start of the angled yellow chevrons that marked the runway’s overrun area. Braking hard, it rolled fast along the asphalt strip, slashing past the fire trucks and other emergency vehicles parked off to the side.

Looking ahead, Nadia clenched her teeth. Święta Matka Boża, Holy Mother of God, she realized. They weren’t going to stop in time to stay on the runway’s paved surface.

With another sharp jolt, the S-29 skidded off the far end of the runway. It bounced and bucked almost all the way across a furrowed dirt field before shuddering to a halt in a swirling cloud of dust… barely one hundred feet short of slamming nose first into a rusting metal viewing platform.

For a long, unbelieving moment, there was only silence in the cockpit. Finally, both Nadia and Vasey exhaled sharply, amazed to find themselves in one piece. Then, with wildly exuberant grins, they turned and exchanged high fives.

“Well… that was fun,” Nadia said slowly, trying to control the tiny quaver in her voice. “But let’s not do it again.”

“Definitely not,” Vasey agreed. “My mother always claimed I had a cat’s nine lives. If so, that little exploit might easily have used up number seven.”

Suddenly the view outside their cockpit windows went black. “Mission complete,” the Sky Masters computer said smoothly. Lights flickered on, outlining the door on the side of the S-29 flight simulator. “Emergency landing successful.”

When they unstrapped and climbed out of the simulator, Brad McLanahan met them at the foot of the ladder. The tall, blond-haired young man had a grin of his own plastered across his face. “Nice job, guys!”

“We are not in trouble?” Nadia asked, surprised. “Despite choosing such a risky option?”

Surprised, Brad shook his head. “Heck no.” He turned serious. “This was your graduation exercise. Losing all five engines? At hypersonic and supersonic speeds? Man, that’s called a really bad day on the way into space. And yet you still figured out a way to save the spaceplane? Amazing. Believe it or not, you even managed to impress Boomer. Most trainee crews would have taken the easy way out and just ejected.”

“And if we had?” Vasey wanted to know.

“You’d start over again in the simulator tomorrow morning,” Brad told him. He shrugged. “Of course, the same thing would have happened if you crashed on landing. Boomer’s not screwing around here. And I don’t blame him. Tough, realistic training is the only real way to turn out a solid cadre of space-ready crews for these S-planes.”

“So, what comes next?” Nadia asked quietly.

“Both of you already have decent experience handling high-Gs,” Brad said. “So we can skip that part of the program.”

“Which means we move on to zero-gravity?” Vasey guessed. “Riding the Vomit Comet?” Short of actual spaceflight, the best method of re-creating the sensation of weightlessness involved repeated high-angle parabolic maneuvers in an aircraft. During each stomach-churning climb and dive, passengers experienced short periods of zero-G. Airsickness was common, which explained the nickname.

Brad nodded. “And then you head to Houston for EVA training at NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab.”

“It sounds… busy,” Nadia observed.

“Too true,” Brad admitted. Then his smile returned, lighting up his whole face. “But before that, we all get a whole day off for some much-needed R&R.”

“You’re going to show Major Rozek the cultural highlights of Battle Mountain, Nevada?” Vasey guessed, with a dry grin. “But what will you do for the next twenty-three hours and fifty-five minutes?”

Nadia laughed. “Oh, we will think of some way to occupy our time, Constable.” Over Brad’s sudden blush, she offered the Englishman a pitying smile. “We may even spare a moment to wonder what you are doing to entertain yourself.”

“A hit, Major Rozek,” Vasey declared grandly, putting his hand on his heart. “A palpable hit.”