Voyage (6 page)

Three minutes twenty-three seconds
. His yaw deviation was increasing, five or six degrees a second. And his heading had deviated from the B-52’s, maybe as much as fifty degrees. His angle was becoming extreme, and the air started to pluck at his aircraft,
rolling it over to the right. He was in danger of rolling off completely. He might even reenter at the wrong attitude.

And if
that
happened, he’d finish up spread over the welcoming desert in a smoking ellipse one mile wide and ten miles long.

To stop the roll he applied left roll RCS, full left rudder and full left aileron. Everything he had. But the roll seemed to be accelerating. And now the nose was starting to pitch down too.

The starry sky, and the glowing desert below, started to wheel, slowly, around his cockpit, while he continued to work his controls.

At two hundred forty thousand feet above the ground – still supersonic – the X-15 went into a spin, tumbling around two axes at once.

He reported his spin to the ground.

They sounded incredulous. ‘Say again, Phil.’

‘I said, I’m in a goddamn spin.’ He wasn’t surprised at their disbelief; there was no way of monitoring the X-15’s heading from the ground, and they would only see pronounced and slow pitching and rolling motions.

And besides, nothing was known about supersonic spin. Nothing. There had been some wind tunnel tests on X-15 spin modes, which had proved inconclusive.

There was no spin recovery technique in the pilot’s handbook.

Stone tried everything he knew, using his manual RCS and his aerodynamic controls.
Full rudder; full ailerons. What else is there?

The plane began to shudder around him; he was slammed from side to side; it was hard to breathe, to think. It had all fallen apart so quickly.
I lost my tail. I’ve had it
.

Suddenly the MH96 armed the automatic RCS again, and the little rockets started firing in a series of long bursts, opposing the spin. Stone worked with it, reinforcing the RCS with his aerodynamics.

The X-15 broke out of the spin and leveled off. The buffeting faded away.

Stone felt a brief burst of elation. He was at a hundred twenty thousand feet, and Mach five.
Now all I 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, two hundred and sixty miles from his takeoff point.

At eighteen thousand 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
.

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 Rice Burroughs and Bradbury; later, he’d
followed the emergent space program with fascination. He’d got 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 feet mark.

As the Spad climbed, the noise of its piston rose in pitch, and the prop dragged at smoky air. Now 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.

Now 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 now, 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 this 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 any more. 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 hell-hole 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.

Topdog, this is Pilgrim. You hear my airplane?’

‘Pilgrim, Topdog. I hear your airplane. You come north maybe two mile.’

Gershon pushed north.

Gershon looked down. The mountains here were high, and his cruising altitude of ten and a half thousand feet didn’t put him all that far above them.

‘Hey, Topdog. You hear my airplane now?’

‘Rager, rager, Pilgrim. You over my position now.’

There was a valley below him, a black wound in the landscape, coated with the fur of jungle.

‘Topdog. Pilgrim see big valley. Where are you?’

‘Rager, Pilgrim. Bad guy in valley. You put bomb in middle of valley.’

It was a pinpoint target. ‘Look, Topdog, I want to know where
you
are.’ Gershon didn’t want to bomb out the FAG himself.

‘Pilgrim, Topdog on top of mountain. You bomb bad guy.’

‘All right, Topdog, Pilgrim drop bomb in valley.’

Gershon set his wing selector to the left stub, where a five-hundred-pound napalm bomb nestled. He peered down, into oceanic invisibility. He put on a single fuselage light, so the wingman would be able to see where he was going.

He rolled over, relying on his instruments in the darkness, and stabilized into a forty-degree dive.

He descended below the tops of the mountains and closed rapidly.
Through his gunsight he could see glimmers outlining the valley below.

The altimeter unwound, and Gershon’s breath was ragged and hot. He wasn’t worried about anti-aircraft fire; right now he was more concerned about not hitting the ground.

He hit the release button.

Five hundred pounds dropped away from the ship with a jolt. He pulled up, and grunted as three G settled on his chest.

The nape splashed over the landscape. It was like an immense flashbulb, exploding from the valley floor, and it lit up the smoky sky, turning it into a milky dome above him. It was eerie, alien, almost beautiful.

‘Pilgrim! You have number one bomb. Very good. You do same again.’

‘Okay, Topdog, we’ll put it right there.’

Gershon swapped altitudes with his wingman, and let the wingman dive in. The valley wasn’t dark any longer; it was a mass of fires and splotches of twenty-mil hits, which sparkled like little fire jewels. Gershon caught glimpses of his wingman’s Spad, rolling down and leveling off, silhouetted against the blaze below.

‘Very good bomb, Pilgrim.’

‘Okay, Topdog.’

‘Hey, Pilgrim. You got radio?’

Gershon couldn’t figure what the FAG was talking about; the raid was over. ‘Say again, Topdog. Say again.’

‘Topdog listen to radio. Voice of America. You brave boys in trouble.’

‘What?’

‘Apollo. Brave boys. Spaceship in terrible danger, say Voice of America. You understand?’

Jesus
. He felt electrified.
I wonder what the hell has happened, if they can get home …

But what a way to find out, from some poor little guy, lost in a shit-hole in the mountains of Cambodia
.

‘Rager, Topdog. I copy. Thank you.’

‘And to you, Pilgrim, a good night.’

Yeah. A good night faking my records
.

Somewhere in the sky above him – for all the peril those guys were in – Americans were undertaking vast, wonderful adventures. And here he was, flying this bucket of bolts, splashing liquid fire over peasants. Doing something so shitty that even his own Government wouldn’t admit it was happening.

I got to get out of this
. Of course, despite a lot of pressure from the White House, NASA had yet to fly a black man into space. It would be a long haul for Ralph Gershon …

But it couldn’t be worse than this.

Gershon and his wingman climbed back to altitude, and Gershon turned his nose for home.

Earth was a wall of blue light, as bright as a slice of tropical sky; it dazzled her, dilating her eyes, making the sky pitch black when she looked away. The Command Module’s windows were tiny, already scuffed, but even so they let in shafts of startling blue, and the cabin was bright, cheerful, light-filled.