He couldn't switch off the autopilot. Which meant he couldn't bring the plane down…
So what could he do?
He looked about himself, saw the clouds outside, saw the unconscious body of the pilot named Coleman lying on the floor just outside the cockpit.
And as his eyes fell on the pilot's body, he got an idea.
Schofield came back down to the President, hauling the unconscious Coleman on his shoulder.
He nodded toward the other knocked-out pilot at the President's feet. 'Put on his flight suit,' Schofield said as he dropped Coleman's body to the floor and started undressing it.
Within minutes, Schofield and the President were wearing the two pilots' bright-orange pressure suits — with SIG Sauer pistols concealed in their thigh pockets.
'Where to now?' the President asked.
Schofield gave him a serious look. 'Where no man has gone before.'
The X-38 Space Shuttle was connected to the launch jumbo by a cylindrical umbilical. Half a dozen titanium struts actually mounted the shuttle onto the back of the 747, but it was the umbilical that allowed human access to and from the spacecraft.
Basically, the umbilical looked like a long vertical tube that stretched upward from the back of the jumbo into the underside of the shuttle. Its entrance was at the midpoint of the jumbo, halfway along its lower deck.
Schofield and the President hurried toward it.
On the way, they found gear that had been waiting for the two Echo Unit pilots: two white briefcase-like life support systems — small self-contained air-conditioners just like those carried by the shuttle astronauts — and a pair of spherical gold-tinted space helmets that clicked onto the neck rings of their pressure suits.
The reflective gold tint of the helmets' dome-shaped visors — a feature designed to protect the wearer from the brutal quantities of ultraviolet radiation one experiences at extremely high altitudes — completely hid their faces.
They came to the umbilical's entrance: a tubular vertical tunnel that disappeared into the ceiling. A thin steel ladder rose up through its core.
Now dressed completely in his space suit, his face hidden by his reflective gold visor, Schofield peered up into it.
At the top end of the tube, about thirty yards straight up, he could see the illuminated interior of the X-38 shuttle.
He turned to the President and signaled with his finger: up.
They climbed the ladder slowly, weighed down by their cumbersome space suits and life support briefcases.
After about a minute of climbing, Schofield's helmeted head rose up through a circular hatch in the floor of the shuttle.
Schofield froze.
The rear cargo compartment of the space shuttle looked like the interior of a high-tech bus.
It was only a small space, compact, designed to hold anything from men to weapons to small satellites. It had pristine white walls that were lined with life-support sockets, keypads and tie down equipment studs. At the moment, however, the cabin was in personnel-carrying mode: about a dozen heavy-looking flight seats faced forward, grouped in pairs.
And strapped into those seats, Schofield saw, were the men of Echo Unit and their Chinese conspirators.
There were five of them inside the cargo cabin, and they all wore identical space suits — gold tinted helmets and baggy orange pressure suits with small U.S. flags sewn onto the shoulders.
How ironic, Schofield thought.
They were also strapped tightly into their flight seats, in readiness for the high-G transit into orbit.
Through the cockpit door at the front of the cargo compartment, he saw three more space suited individuals — the shuttle's flight team. Beyond them he could see the clear open sky.
As he stood there, sticking half out of the shuttle's floor hatch, Schofield felt his adrenaline surge.
He knew that their reflective gold helmets prevented him and the President from being recognized. But still he felt self-conscious, certain that he looked like an impostor stepping into the heart of enemy territory.
Near the front end of the compartment, there were several empty seats — waiting, presumably, for the two 747 pilots, and the five Echo commandos who had been cut off down in the hangar.
Slowly, Schofield raised himself up and out of the umbilical tunnel.
No one paid him any special attention.
He searched the cabin for Kevin, and at first, to his horror, didn't see him.
No…
But then he noticed that one of the five space-suited figures seated inside the cabin didn't quite seem to fill out his oversized suit.
In fact, it looked almost comical. The suit's gloved arms hung limply on this figure, its booted leggings dangled clumsily to the floor. It appeared that the wearer of this suit was way too small for it…
It had to be.
Rather than bunching up the space suit to allow Kevin's hands to reach into its gloves, the Echo men had made sure that the little boy was receiving the full benefit of the pressure suit's blood-regulating cuffs, even if that meant he looked like Charlie Chaplin wearing an oversized outfit.
All right, Schofield thought as he stepped out of the umbilical's hatch. How am I going to do this?
Why not just grab Kevin before anyone has a chance to unbuckle themselves, then dive down into the umbilical and get back into the 747 and…
Just then a hand seized Schofield's arm, and a voice exploded in his ear.
'Yo, Coleman.'
It was one of the shuttle's pilots, faceless behind his gold visor. He had stepped back into the personnel cabin and grabbed Schofield's arm. His tinny voice came in over Schofield's helmet intercom.
'Just you two? What happened to the others?'
Schofield just shook his head sadly.
'Aw, well,' the faceless astronaut said. He pointed with two fingers to a pair of flight seats close to the cockpit door. 'Take a seat and strap in.'
Then, with casual efficiency, the astronaut crouched down, helped the President out of the umbilical, and shut the entry hatch behind him!
Then he just strode forward to the cockpit, speaking into his intercom as he did so: 'All personnel, prepare for separation from the launch vehicle in thirty seconds.'
The cockpit door slid firmly shut behind the pilot, sealing it off, and Schofield was left standing in the middle of the cabin, staring at the closed pressure hatch in the floor beneath him.
Holy shit….
They were about to go into orbit.
With the president behind him, Schofield made his way forward, to two empty seats near the cockpit door.
As he did so, he observed how the Echo men had attached themselves to the shuttle's centralized life- support system and strapped themselves into their seats.
He arrived at his seat, and plugged a secondary hose from his life-support briefcase into a socket in the seat's arm. Then he sat down and started securing his seat harness.
The President, watching him, did the same, strapping himself into a seat on the other side of the central aisle.
Once he was safely secured, Schofield turned to look about himself.
Across the aisle from him, in the seat directly behind the President, he saw the lopsided figure of Kevin, looking very awkward in his oversized space suit.
It was then that a strange thing happened.
Kevin waved at him.
Waved at him.
