Perigee (8 page)

“Number One start valves open,” Tom commanded as they went through the startup checklist.

“Start valves open on One,” Ryan answered. “Boost pumps on.”

“Ignite.”

A low whine swelled up from underneath them as the first engine rumbled awake. Once it was idling steadily, they began the same process for the other two. The plane shuddered with each successive ignition until they were surrounded with a steady, dissonant hum.

Tom made a final check of the engine displays as the tug disconnected with a thud. “All three are sitting pretty at twelve percent. Start up sequence complete.”

“Start valves off,” Ryan said, thumbing a switch above his head. “Igniters...off.”

“All right, then. Tell ground we’re ready to taxi.”

…

Penny watched as one route after another turned yellow on the big map projection, which signaled they were pushing back from their gates and taxiing out for takeoff. Expected departure times flashed above each line. “How’s your team’s telemetry, Charlie?”

“All birds are streaming live, no squawks.”

“And 501?”

Those who didn’t know her well might have been surprised at her concern, but Grant chalked it up to professional caution more than anything else. She maintained a healthy skepticism toward treating any radical flying machine as something routine.

Even the friggin’ Concorde was damned lucky to go thirty years before having a fatal,
she’d said many times in private
. What do you think would’ve happened if they’d ever had a rapid decompression at sixty thousand feet? Be even worse if that ever happened to us—I sure wouldn’t want to try a high-dive from a hundred thousand feet at Mach 5
.

Grant pulled up their status on a monitor. As the plane came to life, so did the streams of information on their screens. “Plane’s off blocks at idle power, cleared to taxi. Relax, Penny. They’re big boys. Let them wring that thing out and stretch its legs.”

“Just make sure your guys have solid data before they blast off,” she said. “When all the stars line up perfectly, you’d better be looking over your shoulder because that’s where the meteor’s usually coming from.”

…

In a remote corner of the building, someone else was monitoring the flight as well. A return signal activated the moment
Austral Clipper
started transmitting information. Its discreet transmission back to the plane initiated other commands that went unnoticed by both the crew and the control center technicians, all of whom were buried in a torrent of information that they expected to see.

…

Leo Taggart’s phone buzzed, calling his attention to an incoming text message:
PACKAGE OPENED. MERRY XMAS.

It certainly will be
, he thought.

11

Castle Rock, Colorado
Two days earlier

Tom awoke with a start and pushed a knit blanket off of his chest.
Where am I?
He sat up and looked around the living room as he rubbed his eyes. A magazine lay on the table behind his head, and another blanket was gathered around his feet.

Oh yeah—home. Must have fallen asleep. I didn’t put a fire on though, did I?

He felt the warmth from the stone fireplace in the center of the room before he saw it, which appeared to have been burning for some time.

She can’t be up already?

He twisted around to lift his watch from the side table and checked it with surprise: it was almost noon. He’d been out for at least eight hours, still in his clothes…
wait a minute! Where are my pants?

Not appreciating the humor of his own fleeting thought, he looked down to find his uniform shirt was also unbuttoned. His trousers were neatly folded over a chair in the corner. Now fully awake, he caught the scent of coffee and bacon wafting in from the kitchen. Elise must have been up early and made him as comfortable as she could manage without waking him.

“You in there, babe?” he called tentatively, still halfway expecting her to be asleep.

She poked her head from around the corner, brown hair hanging loosely around the collar of her bathrobe.

“Yes, silly. Who else would be cooking breakfast at lunchtime? One of your girlfriends?” she teased. Elise Gentry walked up behind him and planted a kiss on his forehead, smoothing his tousled hair. “You’re a mess! But I’m glad you’re home.”

Tom grunted as he sat up to make room for his wife while she plopped down next to him. “You okay, honey?” she asked. “Back bothering you again?”

He reached around to rub the small of his back. “Yeah, that’s what I get for sleeping out here all morning. It’ll be all right in a minute. Have you been up long?”

“A few hours,” she said, kneading his shoulders. “You looked dead tired so I didn’t dare wake you. I figured your trip got disrupted, so I just tried to make you comfortable. You sleep like a cat in front of that fireplace.”

He took a long pull from the coffee she’d brought him. “It was kind of a bad night. We seem to be having a lot of those lately. Weather, broken planes...it always come in big bunches. We didn’t have enough duty time left so scheduling pulled us. Imagine we’ll pick up the back end tomorrow. Good to be home though.”

“That’s too bad for them,” Elise said, leaning over to give her husband a tight hug. “It’s always good to have you home.”

He returned the gesture and kissed his wife. “Wish every day could start like this,” he agreed. “I was planning to stay up and make you breakfast in bed. I wanted to surprise you.” He reached over to brush thinning hair away from her face. “I’m sorry, babe. I hate to have you up fussing after me. You need your rest.”

“I can look after myself, caveman,” she said defensively, and laid her head in his lap. “But I’ll expect that breakfast next time you’re home.”

The great room felt warm and close with the curtains drawn, the only sounds were a sputtering coffee pot and a softly ticking grandfather clock in the entryway. As they sat together like that for several minutes, she drifted back to sleep. Tom gently slid out from under his wife to let her have the sofa and pulled the blanket up around her shoulders. She slept a lot lately.

12

Austral Clipper

They patiently waited their turn for takeoff as flight 1204, the
Gulf Clipper
, roared down the runway, destined for Dubai. The noise reverberated through their windshields. Tom craned his neck to watch it lift off into the night, trailing a radiant yellow exhaust plume which illuminated the barren Colorado plains beneath. “Beautiful,” he said to himself, just as his thoughts were interrupted by voices in his headset.

“Clipper 501 Heavy, you’re number one for takeoff. Taxi into position and hold.”

Tom guided them onto the runway with a small steering tiller by his knee. The landing gear’s small wheels and long legs made for a bumpy ride along the pavement. It was at least a mercifully short trip. Denver’s vast airport featured six long runways arranged in a pinwheel around three separate concourses, like islands in a sea of concrete. If the winds had favored a different direction, just getting into position would have made for a long scenic tour of the airport and surrounding plains.

They came to a stop along the dashed white centerline as Tom slipped his toes onto the brakes above the rudder pedals. “How’re you doing back there, Mister Kelly?”

Wade gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up from his position behind them. “Ready to blast off.”

“Okay gents, sterile cockpit procedures from here on—no idle conversation until we pass 18,000 feet,” he added for their guest’s benefit. “But that won’t take long.”

“501 heavy, cleared for takeoff, Yellowstone departure. Clock is started at two-zero-four Zulu,” the tower directed as the
Gulf
Clipper
disappeared ahead of them. The flight was now being officially monitored for their record attempt.

Tom repeated their clearance back and simultaneously punched a cabin chime, cueing Marcy that they were about to depart. He smoothly pushed the throttles up to the stops and the Clipper sank forward like a tiger kneeling to pounce, shuddering and howling as it strained against its own power. The instant his toes lifted from the pedals, they were pressed hard into their seats as the plane flung itself down the runway.

Tom’s eyes remained fixed on the runway end as Ryan kept his gaze locked on the instruments, monitoring their acceleration and engine condition. “80 knots…100 knots,” he said above the noise as they hurtled down the runway. “140 knots…V1,” which meant they were committed. They would continue the takeoff no matter what now—the plane was going too fast to stop on what little runway was left ahead. “Rotate.”

Their nose wheel lifted off the runway as Tom eased the control yoke into his lap, and he soon felt the main tires leave the pavement as they began climbing away.

“V2…positive climb rate.”

“Positive rate,” Tom agreed. “Gear up”.

Ryan pulled the gear handle and slammed it firmly up into the detent. “Three green, up and locked.”

“Passing eight thousand feet—flaps up,” Tom said as the ground swiftly receded behind them. Their climb angle was so steep that to the passengers they appeared to be heading straight up. “Looking good,” he observed as much for himself as for their guest. “We set to fill the O2 tanks?”

“Affirmative,” Ryan said. “Intakes and heat exchangers on standby.”

…

Narrow ducts opened along the engine intakes, diverting some of the incoming air to be super-cooled as it passed through heat exchangers on its way to storage tanks inside the wings. Their engines would need the liquid oxygen they were creating to climb above the atmosphere before they flamed out and suffocated in the thinning air.

As they gained speed, conical inlet spikes along the bottom of the plane began inching forward, disrupting the shock waves that threatened to ricochet around inside the engines. They would soon close up entirely, bypassing the hurricane of air around the compressors to feed fresh liquid oxygen straight into the combustion chambers. This was the essence of the combined-cycle engine, which allowed them to function as jets or rockets depending on the need.

They quickly went supersonic, hurtling past Mach one within minutes. Although the plane was shaped to minimize their sonic footprint, the noise couldn’t be completely eliminated. A rapid
boom-boom
echoed dully onto the moonlit plains miles below.

…

Denver

Penny hovered behind the dispatcher consoles, habitually twisting a strand of hair as she watched them gaining speed and altitude. The rest of the fleet was well under their control, which gave her the luxury of shepherding this one flight.

“You’re acting like a mother hen back there.”

She ignored Charlie’s barb. “You slackers need all the help you can get,” she wisecracked, but it sounded testier than she’d intended. “Sorry.”

He waved it off, signaling her it was okay. “You haven’t been in here long enough, that’s all. I’ve heard worse. Said worse, too.”

“I can believe that,” she said, finally taking an empty seat beside him.

“What’s eating you? We wouldn’t have released the flight if it wasn’t safe, and you know Tom wouldn’t have accepted it. This was his idea, remember?”

She brushed her hair back in place with a sigh. “Call me a wuss, but I just don’t like going this far out on the edge of the envelope. Not with pax aboard.”

“I might call you a lot of names, but that isn’t one of them,” he said. “And it’s a mighty big envelope once they get out of the atmosphere. You know that better than I.” Any airplane was limited by its own maximum speed and altitude, which were entirely dependent on its stability in the air. Once a Clipper was in space, those rules no longer applied. The only limit was how fast it could be going when it came back into the atmosphere.

“What’s their status now?”

He highlighted their route and a page full of information appeared. “Looks like they’re sticking to the climb schedule…altitude sixty thousand, Mach two-point-five.” They had leveled off to build speed while drawing in outside air to liquefy for its oxygen. “O2 just topped eighty percent.” By the time their tanks were full the plane would be traveling close to four times the speed of sound.

13

Austral Clipper

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain. We’ve just been cleared to start our boost climb. Please make sure you’re strapped in tight and have no loose items.”

Tom placed the handset back in its cradle and looked to Ryan for confirmation that nothing had changed since their final checks. He gave a thumbs-up sign and ceremoniously moved his hands away from the controls, signaling that the plane was his. “Ready to zorch, skipper. Center just cleared us into the boost corridor.”