Out of Orbit (37 page)

“… 7.0 … 7.5 … 7.9 … 8.0 …”

Now Expedition Six had reached an almost mythical number. Several racetracks have been redesigned because drivers in their new, faster cars have reached 5.0 in the corners and risked passing out and crashing. At 8.0, Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit were sustaining an occasionally lethal level of crush, one that threatened to pinch their weakened lungs shut tight. They couldn’t have been blamed if they had panicked. This was one more surprise that they could have done without.

Fortunately, inevitably,
Soyuz
continued its fall through the atmosphere. Warmer, denser air began slowing them down, and right when they needed it to, the weight began to lift.

“… 7.6 … 7.5 … 7.1 … 6.5 … It’s great,” Budarin wheezed, “… 4.3 … 3.5 … 3.11 … 2.8 … 2.2 … 1.7 …”

Bowersox and Pettit blinked back their fogs. Their blood began rising back into their faces, their tongues meeting their unclenching teeth. They took great, gulping breaths, as though a bully had just taken his foot off their necks. Most important, they even found it in them to smile, having passed one more test, but with more to come.

“Don, get ready for the parachute,” Bowersox said.

“Okay,” Pettit said, weakly.

“It’s easy now,” Budarin said. “Now we’ll have
fun
again.”

Bowersox, however, wasn’t yet thinking about spreading out a blanket in the sunshine. Instead, he was busy pouring all of his might into willing the parachute to open. By the book, it was part of the
Soyuz
’s automated operation, and he bristled at the lack of control—not just the pilot in him but the hardened realist in him who had survived one malfunction and didn’t fancy his chances of surviving another.

Just then, the small drogue chute opened, filling with air. But the huge main chute didn’t follow its lead. The pyrotechnic bolts that kept it folded tight still hadn’t fired.

Bowersox shook his head. He wished for a huge red button to appear in front of him that he could press, hard, and more than once, to release the parachute. But there wasn’t one. There was just the cruel wait, while Expedition Six continued their race toward the cold, hard earth. The gauges showed the capsule was traveling more slowly than it had been, but when it comes to falling out of the sky, pace is a relative thing. The three men were still going plenty fast enough to dig their own graves.

In Moscow, where officials anticipated
Soyuz TMA-1
to make its gentle touchdown within sixteen minutes—how close to home
Columbia
had been when it was lost for good—the radios came back to life just in time to broadcast a short, loud blast of static. Then the radios crackled, and then they went dead.

In the silence, a few of the technicians put their faces into their hands. A few of the others looked snow white.

Because sometimes, bad things can happen twice.

The Americans in the gallery weren’t all that alarmed by the stern masks suddenly put on by their Russian colleagues. Nor were they unsettled by the tense quiet or by the occasional arrival of a harried-looking subordinate, whispering into the ears of one superior or another.

The cartoons, after all, were still showing happy scenes of a flawless flight, and that was their singular focus; everything else was a mystery. Locked away in this great room in the dark, and unable to speak Russian or make out the whispers, they had been dunked into a kind of isolation tank. Unlike that morning when he had waited hopelessly for
Columbia
, Sean O’Keefe couldn’t see a touchdown clock counting past zero, couldn’t worry about the sonic booms that he hadn’t yet heard, and couldn’t read the fear in anxious faces. All he had to go on was what he could see, and just then, just there, he could see only cartoons and a kind of stage play, a crew of silent actors running through their routines. It was as though he was stuck in the back of a darkened theater, watching an opera in a language that he couldn’t quite follow. And so he sat, along with the others, blindly waiting for the aria.

They were oblivious to the possibility that three of the principal parts were being played by fire and smoke and ash.

Finally, O’Keefe, Pastorek, and Readdy—as well as Micki and Annie—saw the screens at the front of the room fill with grainy color footage of a
Soyuz
capsule thumping into the steppes, kicking up dirt. Its orange-and-white parachute rolled out in front of it in a gentle breeze, flapping like a deflated hot-air balloon, and within minutes, soldiers and technicians huddled in helicopters had spotted it and touched down nearby. The film, in essence, showed a textbook landing and recovery unfolding. In the balcony, there was relief. All that remained was the cracking of the hatch.

But suddenly an open radio transmission that had been playing for the assembled crowd, which now included a number of Russian reporters, crackled with the concerned voices of search pilots who hadn’t yet caught sight of Expedition Six’s parachute. The Americans were confused by the seeming discrepancy between what they were seeing in front of them and what they were hearing through the radio. How could the helicopters be touching down if the pilots weren’t sure where
Soyuz
had landed? And who was taking these pictures?

And then it dawned on the group of them—not quite all at once, but instantaneously enough for a feeling of dread to spread like a
virus through the balcony gang—that the footage that they had been watching was stock. It was one more of those cartoons, just without the choppy animation, real life turned into make-believe.

Just then, there was a buzz among the Russians, some of whom had begun to sweat. When they weren’t listening to the radio, they spoke mostly in hushes. They weren’t speaking in hushes anymore. Finally, after ten minutes, Yuri Koptev (trying his best to summon a sense of calm) told O’Keefe that the pilots hadn’t seen the parachute because
Soyuz
had overshot its landing site by a few kilometers. No doubt it would be spotted presently.

After another fifteen minutes had passed, O’Keefe was told that
Soyuz
had fallen short of its target, perhaps by as much as sixty kilometers. For the Americans, the uncertainty was bewildering at first and made them feel sick second.

When everything goes according to plan,
Soyuz
lands in an area precise enough for the rescue teams to watch its parachute open.

This time around, there had been no sighting. There was only an empty sky.

·   ·   ·

After what felt like an eternity, Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit heard what they thought were blessed pops—the sweet sound of the bolts exploding. The noise echoed through
Soyuz
, the capsule shuddering.

“I think the parachute is opening!” Budarin said, following his exclamation with a whoop, like a cowboy at full gallop. “It’s time to hang on again, guys! Hang on!”

·   ·   ·

Finally the Russians told O’Keefe that, all apologies, they would have to excuse themselves for a moment. Koptev hoped to leave a feeling of reassurance in his wake, but he had failed. There had been too much rush in his strides. The Americans, feeling helpless and being watched too closely by the reporters who surrounded them, also decided to withdraw. They set up camp in two otherwise unoccupied rooms, one of which was a small, drab kitchen. With worry filling
in the gaps between the huddled bunches, the two rooms felt like bomb shelters.

Someone put on some coffee. Someone else paced. More ominously, Pastorek pulled up a chair to a table and began taking notes. For O’Keefe, watching his friend’s pen dash across the page was like being a ship’s captain watching a fast-moving blip on his radar screen closing in. Nothing good had ever come out of either. Each was notice of an incoming torpedo.

In his growing upset, O’Keefe was immediately returned to the side of that empty runway in Florida. He flashed back to that morning—to seeing the stricken faces of seven families before they were hustled out of view, to knowing that his prayers for them would go unanswered. He remembered the awful days that had followed, the mourning and debate and recrimination. He remembered the memorial service. He remembered the flowers and cards and teddy bears that had been piled against the front gates in Houston. And now he saw them as though they were right in front of him. He saw every last bit of it, and he saw the beginnings of it happening all over again.

Every now and then, he sent an emissary over to the Russian side for an update. Each time, the emissary came back with a look on his face or a shake of his head that brought tears to Micki Pettit’s eyes. She had decided that she needed to beat a further retreat and ended up hiding out in the relatively quiet kitchen. Even the unflappable Annie Bowersox, who repeated again and again that everything would turn out all right, that everything had always turned out all right, sounded a little less sure of herself with each passing minute. Everybody in each of those two rooms knew that the longer the mystery lasted, the more likely it would end in a cemetery.

O’Keefe waited, the big man shuttling between those two semi-silent, semi-hysterical rooms, until he couldn’t take the pounding in his ears any longer. He needed some time alone. He also needed a cigarette. He slipped through one of the doors and disappeared.

Pastorek looked up from his notes and saw that his boss and best friend was missing. He got up from his seat and left the room, looking down long, empty corridors and poking his head through
open office doors. He spied O’Keefe at the end of a hallway, staring through a pair of corner windows. Smoke curled from his fingertips.

“You okay?” Pastorek asked after he’d made a tiptoe approach. He knew full well the answer.

O’Keefe shook his head and took a drag from his cigarette. “I just can’t believe it,” he said finally, blowing out a thick stream. “It’s like
Columbia
all over again. It’s déjà vu all over again. And the worst part is, we don’t even have our own people in control. I mean, look at this,” he said, waving one of his big hands at the vista through the windows.

Rising in front of them was the rusted hulk of a building that was either unfinished or abandoned (or probably both), all uncapped girders and cracked foundation. Grass grew through the crumbling sidewalk that ran past it. Dark clouds and the forecasted rain had started blowing in. Everything else was already a shade of gray, one long shadow having crossed the city. It was the sort of landscape that looked as though it had never once been touched by rainbows.

It was such a foreboding view—so close to a greasy postapocalyptic movie set or the pages of a dark graphic novel—that Pastorek almost cracked a smile. “It’s an unreal place,” he said. “It’s like being in Wonderland.”

Both men stared through the window for a few more beats before Pastorek turned back toward O’Keefe. “Where’s your thinking at?” he asked.

O’Keefe took another long pull from his cigarette.

“I think we’re in trouble,” he said.

·   ·   ·

The capsule bounced and shook while its massive orange-and-white canopy blacked out the sky above it. Now, Expedition Six’s long fall was finally on the verge of being broken. Despite having enjoyed so long a stint of freedom, the three of them had never been so glad to be tied, once again, to the end of a string.

“It looks like we’re going to live for another day,” Pettit joked in Russian, now that the capsule’s fall was slow and smooth.

“Yes,” Budarin said. “Life is getting better.”

“Everything is
nishtyak,”
Bowersox said loudly, throwing down some Russian slang he’d picked up along the way, something like
cool
.

“That’s right,” Budarin said, smiling. “Congratulations, guys. We got through 8.0. It will be easier now.” And then, in English, he said, “Medical test is done.”

Now, with fifteen minutes remaining until the capsule touched down, Bowersox, like every good test pilot working through the kinks that he’d found in his new machine, wanted to begin the long process of determining what had gone wrong and why. He didn’t feel as though he had made a mistake—as though he had pushed the wrong button or accidentally toggled a no-no switch—but some small part of him wondered whether he might have been responsible for the rough ride. “But how? I guess we’ll find out,” he said, before an unfamiliar voice interrupted his thoughts, squawking across their radio.

“I am the search plane,” the mystery voice announced. “Can you hear me?”

“Search plane, we hear you,” Budarin replied.

Silence.

“Search plane, come in, reply,” Budarin said. “Answer us.”

More silence.

Until, finally: “We’re glad to welcome you. Search teams are in the area. Did you receive a weather report?”

“Yes, we received it,” Budarin said. Unlike in Moscow, it was going to be cool on the steppes but sunny, blue skies dusted with a few white clouds. But more pressing in Budarin’s mind was their altitude, from which they could calculate when they might touch down. Normally the search planes were in sight of
Soyuz
and could pass along an estimate. “Can you tell us our altitude, so we can prepare ourselves for landing?”

“When we see you, we’ll let you know,” the pilot replied. “For now, all we are getting are radio signals.”

“Okay,” Budarin said, although he wondered how the search planes, rocketing over the flats, couldn’t see their smoking capsule
through clear, bright skies, floating under its candy-colored parachute.

He didn’t dwell on the dilemma for very long. Instead, he grabbed Bowersox and Pettit by their knees and shook them. “I congratulate you, guys. We got through it. There is just one more moment to survive.”

Budarin was talking about the landing.

·   ·   ·

The clouds grew darker in Moscow, the rain heavier. Rumors and conflicting reports began filtering through the walls, carried by the vents, back and forth between the Russians and the Americans, the boardroom and the kitchen. There were several NASA representatives in the search helicopters and waiting at the target site—including the normally reliable Bill Gerstenmaier—but the jet engines and rotors washed out phone transmissions, and the few swatches that made it through were ratty and incomplete. Frustrated, some of the Americans at TsUP began calling Mission Control in Houston for news. Perhaps they were hearing things that weren’t making it through the low ceilings in Russia. But they were not. There was nothing to report. No beacon, no voices, no sighting. Expedition Six had vanished.