Perigee (10 page)

“Could’ve sworn that was fixed?” Ryan wondered as he cut off the autopilot. He was only half joking.

“Looks like the flight data computer’s bust again. Setting flight idle,” Tom said with frustration as he briskly pulled the throttles back.

Nothing happened.

The pilots exchanged bewildered looks.
What the…
?

His frustration turned to urgency. “Command shutdown,” he said, and slammed the levers back past the idle detents to command a full engine cutoff.

Still nothing.

“Emergency cutoff!”

He never raised his voice, but the dreaded qualifier
emergency
immediately caught their observer’s attention. “What’s going on, fellas?” Wade asked anxiously.

“Later!” Ryan shot back, and pulled a red-bordered emergency checklist from beside his seat. “Emergency cutoff…hoo boy.” He paused to take a second look at the procedure. “Tom, this assumes atmospheric flight,” he said plaintively.

“Figured that when I came up short on a memory aid,” Tom said. “We need to hurry.” If they didn’t shut down soon, they’d overshoot Singapore on re-entry and be forced to turn around and fly back or divert farther downrange.

Ryan began reciting the check items, one by one. “Autothrottles at cutoff?”

“Done.”

“Confirm start valves closed?”

“Closed.”

“Igniters off?”

“All three,” Tom confirmed.

“Propellant valves closed?” Ryan asked as he traced the fuel system schematic etched into the switch panel overhead.

“Closed.”

“O2 isolation valves closed?”

“Iso valves closed.”

That was it. No more check items. They exchanged baffled stares as the engines continued thundering away.

Ryan turned the checklist over in his hands, hoping they’d missed something.
What the hell is going on here?

“I don’t know…we’re off the map now,” Tom said as if reading his mind. “Check the breakers on those isolation valves.”

Ryan twisted to reach the circuit breaker panel behind him. “They’re all closed. Nothing popped.”

“Cycle them anyway.”

He pressed and released each one, with no effect. “Engine fire procedure?” he suggested cautiously.

Tom reached for three red handles centered above the panel, then paused. Pulling them would automatically engage everything they’d just tried and dump fire retardant into the burners. It might force the automatic shutdown sequencers, but once the fire bottles had been discharged the engines would have to go through a major overhaul back on the ground. They would be left flying a hundred-thousand pound, hypersonic glider. “No, not yet,” he decided. “We’ll still need them for approach and landing.”

Ryan checked their trajectory. “Right now, that would appear to be somewhere in Indonesia,” he said glumly. The vector kept extending farther around the globe as they gained altitude and speed, and they were rapidly running out of ideas.

Their attention was diverted by a persistent
ding
, accompanied by a yellow light on the radio panel. Denver was calling.

…

Denver

“Umm…Charlie?” Penny asked calmly. “That’s not a telemetry error, is it?”
Austral Clipper’s
flight path had just shot well past their planned cutoff and it didn’t appear to be slowing down.

“No way—just ran a diagnostic check. Maintenance controller confirms it too. They’re still burning.”

“
What?
”

“You heard me,” he said testily. “They’re still under thrust, but damned if we know why. I just sent them an ACARS message,” he said, referring to their airborne data system, “but they’re not responding. I was about to try Satcom voice.”

“Do it,” she ordered. “Find out what’s going on up there. They’re about to seriously overshoot.”

“Stand by.” He switched over to the air-to-ground satellite radio. “Clipper 501, this is flight control. How copy, over?”

He was met with silence, and unconsciously pressed the earpiece in closer as if that would improve their connection. “501, Denver ops, how copy?” he repeated.

There was a sudden crackle of static. “Denver, 501 copies you five-by-five. Kind of busy up here right now,” a voice hurriedly replied. It sounded like Hunter.

They could sense his tension through the attenuating static. “501, need to confirm you are still under power. We now predict termination at Jakarta.”

“’Termination’ is a really ugly word, Denver.” Definitely Hunter.

“Roger that, 501. Request your status, over.”

A different voice finally replied to their query. “This is Gentry. We have real trouble up here. All three engines are runaways. The autothrottles commanded flight idle but did not execute. No joy on manual or emergency cutoffs. We are considering pulling the fire bottles.”

“We copy your runaway engines,” he repeated for Penny’s benefit as she plugged her headset into an adjacent jack. “No effect from command and emergency shutdown procedures. Any danger of overheat at this time?”

“Negative for now. Engines are hot but holding equilibrium. They just won’t shut down.”

“You get all that, Penny?”

“Yeah, I got it,” she said. “Are they declaring an emergency?” She already suspected the answer.

Grant leaned back into his console. “Are you declaring an emergency at this time?”

The silence seemed interminable, though it only lasted a few seconds.

More silence was followed by another static burst and Tom’s voice once more. “That’s affirmative…we are declaring an emergency at this time. Please advise Center, we have our hands full. Will advise intended destination when able. 501 out.”

By now everyone else in flight control was staring at them and suspecting trouble. Penny grabbed a passing dispatcher by the shoulder. “Call Hammond and get him down here pronto. Tell him Gentry’s flight declared an emergency. He’ll hammer you with questions; just get him down here and I’ll brief him.”

She then spun on the maintenance and systems controllers, who had likewise been listening intently. “You guys have any ideas? Any way we can bypass the propellant feeds to choke off those engines without trashing the whole works?”

“Working on it,” one replied abruptly. The other technician was already on the phone and furiously poring over schematics.

“Hurry up, gentlemen,” she said forcefully. “This could get real nasty, real quick.”

She made a note of their speed and altitude from the tracking display. Turning back to Grant, she asked about their weight and propellant then grabbed a notepad to work through some quick figures. Her heart sank at the result.

A cold, hollow feeling settled in her stomach.
They’ve got the delta-v. Dear God.

“We don’t have much time here, people.”

17

Austral Clipper

They were now hand-flying the plane as it rocketed past four hundred thousand feet. “We need to get this sucker under control fast,” Tom said. “I’m worried about our final velocity.” The graph of their predicted terminal point was now well past Jakarta and sliding eastward, arcing back up towards the Pacific.

Ryan understood immediately. If that velocity vector closed back over their departure point…“We have enough energy to make Perth, maybe even Brisbane, if we can get her back down in one piece,” he said. “Think you can do it?”

“Not up to me—checking RCS authority now.” Tom gently pushed the yoke forward to fire the reaction-control jets. The nose pitched down slightly, but it used a lot of propellant in the process. They were far less effective when firing at a tangent against the main engines.

Wade piped up behind them. “I can see we’re going way farther than you planned. Why won’t the engines shut down?” he asked suspiciously.

“If we knew why, then we could do something about it,” Tom shot back in exasperation. He caught himself and continued more calmly. “We carried a lot of extra propellant, so they could burn a long time.
Too
long,” he explained. “I need to shallow out our climb angle and get us back into the atmosphere before it runs out, or we end up with too much momentum.”

They were still over Canada but talking about diverting to the other side of the world. “Wouldn’t you want that? I mean, can you even land this thing dead-stick?” Wade asked, afraid the Clipper wouldn’t behave very well with dead engines.

“Not what I meant,” Tom said. “We may not get down at all.”

“What in hell does
that
mean? What are you talking about?”

Tom pointed at the primary flight display. “Look at our horizontal trajectory…you see how the end point keeps creeping back towards Denver? That’s bad.”

Now he was thoroughly confused. “How is that bad?” he asked. “Wouldn’t that put us back where we started? Isn’t that a good thing?”

“No. Look down here at velocity change, delta-v. If we don’t find a way to slow down real soon, we’ll pass 9,000 meters per second. That’s the magic number to connect the circle.”

Wade had been trying to comprehend but everything was happening too fast. He did know enough to understand where this conversation was headed—indeed, where
they
were headed.

The color drained from his face at the sudden realization.

“We’re going into
orbit?
”

18

Denver

Hammond rushed into the operations center and forced himself to project calm, though inside his guts were on fire. Everyone appeared to be tied up on the phones or otherwise engaged, which he expected. A few rifled through system schematics and performance tables. Over at the air traffic desk, a harried-looking woman hovered over a search-and-rescue chart of the North Pacific as she balanced a telephone on her shoulder.

Now
that
ain’t good
, he thought. Looking once more around the room, he finally barked, “Where’s Stratton?” To his surprise, she turned and hopped up from the console directly ahead of him. He immediately recognized the strain reflected in her face.

Penny didn’t waste time, as usual. “Arthur, we have a serious problem with 501. They’re still under full thrust, can’t shut down the mains, and are accelerating at a pretty good clip. They’re trying to flatten trajectory with the RCS thrusters but we can’t see that it’s having much effect…” she paused, distracted by a shout from behind her.

There was a jumble of excited voices, people talking over each other, some arguing. He saw Grant over in the dispatch area: “Okay, calm down everyone. Keep your heads. They have a backup plan and they’re going to execute it. So
watch your telemetry
.
”

He most definitely did not like the sound of this. “What’s happening up there? What kind of overshoot are we looking at?”

“Right now, best case is they set down in Brisbane.”

“
Australia?
How the hell did they get all the way down there?” Hammond exclaimed, not realizing his voice was raised. “How much gas did you guys tanker?”

“About eighty thousand pounds,” she said. “Enough for the next leg.”

He closed his eyes and winced, as if in pain. The spaceplane’s design had been in his head for decades, so he had a pretty good idea of what was coming next. “What kind of velocity are we talking about?” he asked quietly, fearing the answer.

“Enough. I just worked it out on the fly with an educated guess at drag loss and got 8,600 meters per second. Throw in angular momentum from Earth’s rotation…”

“Yeah, I got it,” he sighed. “And the RCS jets couldn’t alter trajectory?”

“Not enough to get them down. That’s hard to duplicate with the flight plan software, but the telemetry confirms my math. They stopped pulsing the jets when prop went below 40 percent.”

“Grant hollered something about a backup plan. What’s that?” he asked, clinging to hope.

“Right now they’re blowing the fire bottles to see if that shuts them down. If it does, they’ll try and dead-stick to Brisbane. Might have to ditch at sea. We’ve alerted their Coast Guard for possible SAR ops.”

A sick feeling swept over him. No airline manager ever wanted to hear “Search-and-Rescue” associated with his fleet. He studiously avoided asking what the likely weather conditions and water temperature would be down there. “What do you think happened up there?” he wondered, “maybe a hard fault somewhere in the plumbing?”

“That’d be my first guess, but we’ll have to let tech ops work on that later. Right now we need to get them down in one piece.”

Of course
, he thought. First things first—stay calm for the troops. “Well Penny, this is why I hired you away from that cushy government job. I presume you have a plan if they can’t?”