Shadow Watch

Based on what I see, it’ll be an easy ‘go’ today,” she said.

And she was correct. Shortly after making her prediction, Annie saw the management team take their launch positions and reached for her phones. On the big wall screen across the room, a closed-circuit video feed showed what was usually referred to as “the stack”—this consisting of the Shuttle’s two solid rocket boosters, its massive 150-foot external fuel tank, and the Orbiter — in its vertical launch attitude. But Annie knew the spacecraft from the inside out, knew it as only someone who had flown aboard it could, and saw other vivid, detailed images in her mind’s eye: Jim and his pilot, Lee Everett, harnessed into their seats on the flight deck, the sun streaming into the nose of the vehicle and reflecting off the lowered faceplates of their helmets. Payload Specialist Gail Scott and Mission Specialist Sharon Ling directly behind them, the remaining three crew members below in the mid-deck. All of them in sitting positions on their backs to reduce the effects of g-forces on launch and ascent. Though she had never experienced space sickness, Annie knew they would have time-release scopolamine patches behind their right ears to alleviate potentially debilitating symptoms caused by acceleration and a microgravity environment.

Yes, in her mind, in her heart, she was right there in the spacecraft with them, right there, experiencing what they went through at every stage.

It was T minus five minutes and counting.

Annie listened to the voices in her phones.

“—Control, Orion here. APUs juicing up,” Jim was saying. “It’s HI green for one and two, starting three, over.”

“Roger, proceed, over,” the controller replied.

“Okay, we’re three for three. Humming away.”

“Roger, Orion. Beautiful.”

Annie felt her eagerness building. What she’d heard indicated that the hydrazine-fed auxiliary power units that would gimbal the space shuttle’s main engines — or SSMEs — during ascent were on and functioning normally.

They were down to the wire.

She continued listening in as the shuttle went to independent power and its external tank pressured up. Beside her, Gordian stared out the heavy windows facing the pad with rapt fascination. Only the controllers were speaking now; this close to liftoff, firing room protocols required absolute silence from everyone but those in the launch communications loop. The rules were strictly observed, although Annie guessed the overwhelming exhilaration of the moment would have rendered her speechless even if they hadn’t been.

At T minus two minutes the controller declared they were okay for launch, and Annie felt the expectant tingling that had started in her fingers rush through her entire body.

She would remember checking the countdown clock on her console at T minus six seconds — when Orion’s three SSMEs were to have ignited exactly a half second apart in a sequence controlled by the shuttle’s onboard computers.

Instead, it was when things went wrong.

Terribly, unforgettably wrong.

From the time Annie picked up the first sign of trouble over her audio link to the disaster’s tragic final moments, everything seemed to worsen with dreadful rapidity, giving rise to a stunned, dreamlike sense of unbelief that, in a way, would almost prove a blessing, numbing her to the full impact of the horror, allowing her to cope with what might otherwise have been overwhelming.

“Control… I’m seeing a red light for SSME Number Three.” The urgent voice belonged to Jim. An instant later Annie heard something else in the background, the piercingly shrill sound of the master alarm. “We’ve got a hot engine… LH2 pressure’s dropping… smoke detectors activated… there’s smoke in the cabin….”

Shock bolted through the control room. Her eyes going to the video monitor, Annie reflexively clenched her hands into fists. As she’d glanced at the screen, an inexplicable streak of brightness had shot from Orion above its main engine nozzles.

The controller was struggling to remain calm. “We’re aborting at once, copy? Evacuate Orbiter.”

“Read you…” Jim coughed. “I — we… hard to see… ”

“Jim, white room’s back in position, get the hell out of there!”

Annie swallowed hard. She had performed the emergency evac drill many times during her flying years, and knew it as well as anyone. The “white room,” a small environmental chamber, was at the end of the crew-access arm, which reached from the service tower to Orion’s entry hatch. Having automatically retracted soon after the ten-minute hold was completed, it now had been moved back into place. According to established abort procedure, the crew was to exit the hatch, then quickly pass through the access arm to a platform on the opposite side of the tower, where five high-tension slide-wires ran down to an underground bunker 1200 feet away. Each wire supported a steel basket that was large enough for two or three astronauts, and would deliver them to a nylon catch net at the opposite end.

But first, Annie knew…

First they needed to reach the baskets.

On the screen, she could see flames discharging from the SSMEs in bright orange-white bursts. Oily black plumes of smoke had enveloped the pad and were churning up around the spacecraft’s aft section and wing panels. The blaze was hot, and it was getting hotter. While Annie believed Orion’s thermal shields might prevent its exterior fuselage from catching fire, the heat and fumes in its interior compartments would be lethal to their occupants. And if the fuel in the ET or solid rocket boosters ignited…

But she refused to let her mind go racing down that path. Her hands still tightly balled at her sides, Annie sat with her attention riveted on the monitor. Communication between Jim and the firing room had broken off, and she could scarcely make sense of the confused, anxious, overlapping chatter of the controllers in her headset.

Come on, she thought. Keeping her gaze on the screen, waiting for the crew to emerge from the spacecraft. Where are you?

Then, suddenly, she thought she saw several figures appear on the railed platform on the west side of the service structure — the side where the escape baskets were located. But the distance of the video cameras from the pad, and the obscuring effect of the smoke, made it hard to be immediately certain.

Annie watched and waited, her eyes still narrowed on the screen, locked undeviatingly on the screen.

She had no sooner grown convinced that she had, in fact, spotted Orion’s crew, or at least some of its crew members, than the first explosion rocked the service structure with a force that was powerful enough to rattle the LCC’s viewing window. Annie seemed to feel rather than hear that sound, feel it as a sickening, awful percussion in her bones, feel it in the deepest part of her soul as a huge blast of fire ripped from the tail of the shuttle, leaping upward, engulfing the lower half of the stack.

She snapped forward in her seat, mouthing a prayer to any God that would listen, watching the tiny human shapes on the tower scramble into the rescue baskets as the flames rose behind them in a solid shaft. She couldn’t distinguish one from another, nor even be certain how many of the astronauts were on the platform. From her perspective they were barely larger than insects.

The rainbirds above the pad had activated, flooding it with water. For a long, excruciating moment Annie could see nothing through rising clouds of steam and smoke… nothing except the hideous glare of the fire raging, unquenched, around the shuttle.

And then one of the baskets was released. It arced toward the ground with tremendous speed, moving away from the tower just as a ragged tendril of a flame shot through its metal framework, lashing greedily at the platform. Horrified, Annie could still see members of the team on that platform, their bodies outlined against the flaring edges of the blaze. And then a second basket was released, descending the slide- wire ten or fifteen seconds behind the other — a delay that would have been unacceptable during practice aborts. Annie wondered about it briefly, but pushed her thoughts aside before they had a chance to fully form.

Yet she had seen what she had seen… and would later reflect that the thoughts you tried not to let into your head sometimes turned out to be the ones that took deepest hold, lingering with the tenacity of restless ghosts.

The next few minutes were sheer torment. Along with everyone around her, she had been unable to do anything but wait for the astronauts to resume communications from the bunker. Wait, and stare at the monitor, and try not to surrender to the madness of what she’d been witnessing.