Who was talking? Were they really being serious? How could anybody expect him to do this?
“You’ll need to access the observation module of Gabriel 7 to get to the bomb. There’s a hatch. You saw it on the diagram. You move it to where Ed showed you and then you get back into the Soyuz’s re-entry module. Don’t waste any time. We’ll control everything from here. You’ll feel it disengage…” And then he was inside. They had certainly been right about the amount of space. No adult would have been able to fit into it. He was lying on his back in a metal box that could have been some kind of complicated washing machine or water tank, his feet in the air and his legs so tightly packed in that his knees were touching his chin. There were tiny windows on either side but they were covered with some sort of material and he couldn’t see out of them. There were no controls. Of course not. Arthur the orang-utan wouldn’t have needed controls. Professor Sing was wiring him up. More monitors. Now Alex was the one who was sweating. They had told him he would sweat even more when he was in outer space. Because of fluids moving up, the body’s salt concentration being upset. Alex tried to put it out of his mind. He didn’t even believe he would get there. He didn’t think he would survive the journey.
Tamara Knight leant over him. He was strapped into his seat. His stomach was clenched tight and he had difficulty drawing the air into his lungs. He could move his arms but nothing else. He was already cramped and he hadn’t even started. Her face was very close to his, filling his field of vision.
“Good luck, Alex,” she whispered. Nothing more. She waved a hand with fingers crossed.
“You will hear the countdown,” Professor Sing said. He was somewhere behind her. “You have nothing to worry about, Alex. We will guide you through it all. You’ll hear us over the radio. We’ll look after you.” They sealed the door. Alex felt the air inside the capsule compress. He swallowed, trying to clear his ears.
Apart from the sound of his own breathing, everything was silent.
He was alone.
“T-minus thirty.” A crackle and a hiss of static. The disembodied words had come through the headset.
What did they mean? Thirty minutes until blast-off. In thirty minutes’ time he would be leaving the planet!
Alex tried to make himself more comfortable but he couldn’t move.
“How are you doing, Alex?” It could have been Ed Shulsky talking. Alex didn’t know. The voices echoed inside his head and they all sounded the same.
“T-minus twenty-five… T-minus twenty…”
He could only sit there, doubled up on himself, as the countdown continued. The strange thing was, it felt that time had gone wrong too. A minute seemed like half an hour. Yet half an hour was passing in only minutes. He concentrated on his breathing.
“T-minus fifteen.”
Inside the control room Ed Shulsky was watching Sing and his team of thirty as they went through the final preparations. He walked over to the professor. He was wearing a gun in a holster slung over his shirt.
“I don’t mean to worry you right now, Professor,” he muttered. “But I want you to know that if Alex Rider doesn’t come out of this in one piece, I will personally rip your guts out.”
“Of course!” Sing smiled nervously. “There’s nothing to worry about. He’ll be fine!” Tamara Knight sat motionless in front of the observation window. Smoke was still rising from the rainforest where the Cessna had crashed. There were no birds to be seen. The whole island seemed to be tensing itself for the moment of launch.
“T-minus five.”
What had happened to T-minus ten? Alex was feeling sick. The injection he’d been given hadn’t worked.
He could hear something in the distance. Was it his imagination or was something rumbling far below him?
“T-minus four… three … two … one.”
It began.
At first it was slow. Alex felt a shuddering, vague to start with, but soon it was all-consuming. The entire capsule was shaking. He wasn’t sure if he was moving or not. There was a thud as the clamps holding down the rocket were automatically released. The shuddering got worse. Now the whole capsule was vibrating so crazily that Alex could feel the teeth being shaken in his skull. The noise level had risen too; it was how a roar that pounded at him with invisible fists and, lying on his back with his legs bent in front of him, there was nothing he could do. He was defenceless.
And still it got worse.
He was definitely rising; he could feel the force of the rocket’s thrust. He was being pushed into the seat—
not pushed, crushed! His vision had almost gone. His eyeballs were being mercilessly squeezed. He tried to open his mouth to scream but all his muscles had locked. He felt as if his face was being pulled off.
And then there was a deafening explosion and he was slammed forward in his seat, his neck straining, the belts cutting into his chest. Alex panicked, thinking it had all gone wrong, that part of the rocket had blown up and any moment now he would be either incinerated or sent plummeting back to earth. But then he remembered what he had been told. The first stage of the rocket had burnt out and been ejected. That was what he had heard and felt. God help him, he really was on the way. From nought to seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour in eight minutes.
Everything had been calculated. There should have been an ape inside the orbital module—instead there was a boy. To the computers it made no difference. At exactly the right second, the next stage ignited and once again he was thrown forward, the g-forces pulverizing him. How long had passed since the countdown had ended? Was he in outer space yet? It seemed to him that the shaking was more violent than ever. The whole capsule had become a distorted mass of jagged, flickering lines, like the image on a broken TV screen. He was at max Q, sitting on four hundred and fifty tonnes of explosive, being rocketed through the sky at twenty-five times the speed of sound. The main engine was burning fuel at over one thousand gallons a second. If the Soyuz was going to blow up, it would happen now. He was on fire! Blinding light suddenly crashed into the capsule. A nuclear explosion. No. The fairings on the windows had come free.
They weren’t needed any more. He was looking at the sun, which was streaming in, dazzling him. Was that blue sky or the sea? How much longer could his body stand the battering it was receiving? It occurred to Alex that nothing in the world, no amount of training, could have prepared him for an experience like this.
The rocket stopped. That was what it felt like. The noise fell away and Alex felt a quite different sensation: a sick, light-headed floating that told him he had, in an instant, become weightless. He was about to test it but then the third stage kicked in and once again he was propelled forward on this impossible fairground ride. This time he closed his eyes, unable to take any more, and so didn’t see the moment when he broke through the onion peel of
