Alarms
8 July 1982
Johnson Space Center
Houston, TX
29° 33’ 47” N 95° 05’ 28” W
“Okay, people. We are go for test three. Veridian Flight, be on your toes. We are live and recording,” Charles announced, then nodded to Kathryn at the CAPCOM station.
She turned back to her console and her voice came over the headsets, “Bug, this is Houston. You are go for test three.”
“Roger that, Houston. Bug ME is throttling to ten percent,” came the reply from Fred.
“How’s she handling, Fred?”
The reply took a few seconds to get back to her. Communicating with a ship in lunar orbit was a constant reminder of the limitations of the speed of light.
“Good shape, so far,” was the answer.
Kathryn looked to her right and got a nod from a woman at another console, “We’re getting good telemetry from the engine. So far, so good.”
“Roger that, Houston,” Fred replied four seconds later. “We’ve got a beautiful gray vista out here today. The Moon looks beautiful from fifty miles up.”
“You lucky ducks,” Kathryn said. “The flight director would like to remind you that you do
not have clearance to land. This is not that kind of test.”
“Hey, not our fault they filled the fuel tanks. No promises.
Horizon, take it easy. We’ll see you on the farside.”
“You’d better,” said Hoot.
Bug’s retrofire took her away from
Horizon in a hurry. The Clipper continued on in its polar orbit. Aboard
Bug, Fred and Norman monitored the engine burn as the new lander slowly sank towards the lunar surface.
For the first time since Constellation One, a mission crew was composed entirely of former military pilots. This was a pure test drive, no need for pesky scientists on this trip.
Kathryn was thankful that the smoke-filled days of MOCR were over. She took a beat to listen to the controllers on the loop. For the moment, there was little to do but watch the instruments.
She pulled out her copy of the flight plan, trying to plan ahead for the next hour. She had just found the right page when the sirens went off.
A thunderous blare announced danger in the Mission Operations Control Room.
“Uh…” she said, not quite sure of what was happening. An odd feeling hit the pit of her stomach. She pulled her headset off of one ear. Sure enough, the alarm got louder.
“What the…”
“Everything okay there, Houston?” Norm called from the lander.
“We’re, uh…”
“It’s a fire alarm,” said the new guy over on EECOM.
“It’s here. The fire is here,” said Janet, from the surgeon’s station.
“Charles, we’ve got a fire alarm here,” said John from the trench.
Charles nodded and waved everyone down, “SimSup, can you confirm a fire alarm? Is this part of the program?”
There was a long beat. Nothing was heard from the Simulator office. Ordinarily they would never talk to MOCR during a simulation, but this wasn’t a typical problem to simulate.
“SimSup? SimSup, are you there?” Charles repeated.
“Charles, we need…”
“Continue the burn. We are in the middle of an engine test people. Man your stations. I don’t smell smoke,” Charles said.
“Is this part of the sim?” Kathryn asked.
“It is now. Everyone man your posts. We’re in this. GNC, how are you looking?”
“We’re still in the green, Flight,” came the reply from the second row. Eyes were darting around everywhere.
Kathryn pulled her microphone down and said to Janet, “Is there actually a fire here or are they just having a good time in SimOps?”
All she got back was a shrug.
Behind her, Charles turned to his assistant flight director, “Jim, go find out what the hell is going on.”
Assistant flight directors had one job: to do whatever the flight director said. Jim rose from his chair like it was spring loaded. He made his way out of the back and headed for the simulator room, sniffing for smoke the whole way.
“Houston,
Horizon. Is everything okay? We’re hearing alarms over the headset, but not on the flight deck. Can you confirm?” Hoot said.
“
Horizon, we’ve had a problem here. Stand by,” Kathryn said.
“Do we need to end this sim? Are we aborting?” Hoot said.
“We are not aborting,” said Charles from the director’s chair. “We’ve got two spacecraft up there. Continue the damn burn.”
“He knows this is a sim, right?” Kathryn said to Janet.
“Let’s hope,” she replied.
Between the long military traditions that underlay most NASA procedures, and the general nature of the business that was conducted in this room, there was an unspoken rule that a ship was a ship, simulated or not.
She looked at the big board up front and saw the ground-track monitor for the two ships. The cold gray lunar surface was etched in four different shades, with two dots with a series of trailing dashes marking great circle paths over the Moon.
“At what point do we…” Janet said, and then paused. She rose from her chair slowly. She was sniffing the air. Kathryn joined her in the investigation.
There was a vague acrid scent. This had gone from funny to not in a very short length of time.
The rest of the room was picking up on the same thing. A survival instinct was hard to overcome.
The backup man on the FIDO station, who was only working on the console because George Green was at home with his newborn daughter, he was the first to choose preservation over valor. He moved for the door too fast and was snagged by his headset. It grabbed him like a fly fisherman catching a bass. The maneuver was enough to draw the notice of the room.
“FIDO, get your ass back in that seat!” Charles’s voice boomed through the room and through the radio link.
The new man froze. This was the worst room in the world to deal with indecision and she had nothing but sympathy for this kid. Given the choice, she’d rather confront a fire than an angry flight director.
The young engineer did the math and made the same choice. He took a deep breath and sat back down. So did Charles.
“Flight, FIDO. Burn parameters are still in the green at one-minute thirty. FIDO is go for throttle up.”
Charles wasn’t out to shame the kid. The moment had passed. “Copy that, FIDO. EECOM, how’s she looking?”
“Running a little hot on the helium sensor, but we’re still…”
He was interrupted by the small boom of the double doors opening at the rear of the room. Jim was back. The alarms were still sounding.
Jim was out of breath. He leaned on a console and took a breath, “It’s the commissary. There was a fire in the kitchen. They’re already working on it. Should be out in a minute or two.”
Charles might have been listening to a TV commercial for all it moved him. “Copy that.”
The building was still technically on fire.
3 August 1982
Skydock Space Station
Orbital Inclination: 29°
Altitude: 250 mi
His hands were cold. There was just no way around it. He’d tried flexing the fingers to get the blood going, but it wasn’t helping much. He fought to keep the feeling in his fingers. If he reported the issue, they’d scrub the EVA and he was determined not to let that happen.
Guy checked his connections one more time. He had a few minutes between each experiment while Norm brought the beams around on the arms. He spared a moment to look down.
This was a hell of a view.
At the moment, he was over the Atlantic, he could see the perfect blue and white of Earth below his feet. That in and of itself gave him a moment’s pause. The sky was below him.
His legs and feet were locked into a frame on the front end of Skydock. The forward airlock was right beside him and he could be back inside in under two minutes if a problem developed. It was a bit disconcerting to be attached to the front of the space station, with no visual reference in front of you. When his outlook was cheery, it felt akin to flying like an angel. When he felt his stomach turn at the sight, he wondered if this was how it felt at the start of a keelhauling.
Inside Skydock, Norm Thagard and the rest of
Constellation’s crew monitored his progress. Well, everyone except John, who was floating on a tether above him, ready to haul him back inside if anything went pear-shaped during these little experiments.
“Guy, how does it feel? Let’s hear a little bit about the experience. They want you to talk about how the process is.”
“Feels fine so far. I’ve got no complaints,” he lied. He could tell them all about the trouble with his hands at the debriefing back in Houston.
“They’d like you to say a little more,” Sally said, prompting him from Houston.
“Sure. The electron beam I’d say has worked the best so far. That was pretty easy to keep the weld going and it looked the most solid to me. I think we’ll be in good shape with that, but we’ll have to see how the tests go back on the ground.”
“So, you liked that more than the furnace box?”
“Yeah, the box didn’t feel right. I couldn’t really see what I was doing. Not sure if you’re gonna like the quality either. What I could see looked a little gnarly.”
“Gnarly?” Ride asked from down below.
“You know, bumpy, gritty, messed up,” he offered.
“You sound like a surfer out of Long Beach,” she said, stifling a laugh.
“Just don’t tell my kids. Don’t want them thinking the old man is actually cool and hip,” he replied.
“Roger that,” she said.
“Okay, Sally, Guy, I’m bringing down the beams for the last electron gun test,” Norm said.
Guion Bluford looked over to his right and saw the beams being brought around on Skydock’s mechanical arms. They slowly maneuvered until the ends of each beam were within reach of his outstretched hands.
“John, let me get the shield again,” Bluford said, craning his neck to look “up” at his EVA partner.
John passed down the clear plastic panel that allowed Bluford to see the welding process, but would avert any flaming debris that wanted to make a hole in his space suit.
The beams were in position by the time that he’d finished arranging the shield. He checked the electron gun for any issues. It had done well on the first test. The power connectors were solid.
“Okay, I’m starting test five, Houston,” Guy said.
He didn’t wait for confirmation, just set the gun to work and monitored the progress as he fused the beams together. Over the course of a few minutes, Houston and his crewmates left him to his work and he was able to connect the components as they were held steady. The work was exacting, but not difficult.
He was on the final movement when he heard a buzzing through his headset.
“Kill that alarm,” Norm said, in his best commanding tone.
“Problem, Skydock?” Guy asked, curious, but not ready to abort.
“You’re pulling a little more power than we were expecting, Guy. Nothing to worry about. The system is compensating, but it’s not happy about it,” Norm answered.
“Roger that. Almost done,” Guy said.
He finished the last bit and reported as much to Houston and the station. A moment later, the starboard side robotic arm swung the newly welded components away, stored for transport back down to Earth.
“Now comes the fun one,” Sally said.
“Yeah, I’ve been looking forward to this,” Guy said.
The last test was to study the viability of cold welding in a zero gravity vacuum. The principle was simplicity itself. If you brought together two masses composed of the same material in a pure vacuum (low Earth orbit would have to suffice) then, the molecules in mass A would have no particular distinction from those in mass B, and so would quickly form the same level of bonded connection to the new part with little or no outside influence.
The process was discovered (developed seemed like a gross overstatement) over thirty years previously. At first it was thought of as a phenomenon of low-temperature metals in a vacuum, but the nature of the inner workings was quickly sorted out.
“We’ve got a couple of aluminum pieces for you to try now, Guy. Try to line up the clean squares and we’ll see how we do,” Sally said.
Guy took the proffered metals from the grasping claws of the Canadarms and gave each a survey in separate hands. They could have been found in almost any metal shop in America. He found a particularly bright patch on one, and then flipped the other over and found another spot that had clearly been prepared for this type of work.
He brought the pieces together to form a right-angle and held them in place for a beat. He felt a little silly, but he wasn’t quite sure what to do next.
“Sally, how long does it say for me to…” he started, then stopped. In keying his microphone, he had inadvertently let go of one of the pieces, and now he found that, quite absent any real effort on his part, it was now solidly bonded to the other piece.
“Well, how about that?” he amended. Holding the new aluminum angle up so that John and the cameras could see what he had wrought.
8 September 1982
Marshall Space Flight Center
Huntsville, AL
34° 37′ 58″ N 86° 39′ 58″ W
Larry Reid pinched the bridge of his nose. A few hundred yards away, the sirens blared, announcing the commencement of the firing of the engine. The warning wailing did nothing to alleviate his headache.
The tests had not been going well. In retrospect, Tom Kelly and Grumman had had it easy. Their LEMs only had to work once. Reid and his team had triple the challenge.
The “Lunar Shuttle”- they were still working on the name- was required to transport a crew of six astronauts, not two. It was also expected to be able to make three round trips from lunar orbit, to the surface and back again. NASA had graciously allowed for refueling to be completed on the lunar surface (assuming that they could get that to work) which cut down on weight and the size of the fuel tanks. Still, despite a wealth of knowledge accrued by the Apollo missions, Reid and the rest of Hadden’s team were struggling to get the design finalized. It had been four years of wandering in the labyrinth, but they finally smelled the exit.
The superstructure was basically set. The computers nowadays were so much smaller than the jumbled nightmares of wire that Grumman had sent up. There had been advances in materials and thermal shielding and so many other areas, but one thing that was always a real pain in the ass was a reusable rocket motor.
He had traded an air-conditioned office in Santa Clara for a muddy backwoods test stand in Alabama. What was supposed to be a two-week trip was nearing the end of its second month. The guys with wives and kids had settled into a rotation a while back, but he was single and childless. He wouldn’t be seeing California until the job was done.
The first time seeing the engine fire had been exciting and joyful, even when it had shut down after twenty seconds. Seeing it for the eighty-ninth time wasn’t enough incentive to even go outside and look at the thing. He was sure this test would end like all the others had: prematurely.
The roar of hypergolic fuels erupting in a symphony of chemistry did nothing but annoy him as he studied a wiring diagram for one of the fuel pumps. There simply had to be an explanation for the recurring failures and more and more he was convinced the fault was in the electrical systems. Part of why he was convinced was that it was the area he had been assigned to investigate and none of his colleagues had come up with anything in their investigations.
The screams from the engine bell didn’t die down slowly. They came to an abrupt halt. He checked the red clock on the trailer wall that counted the test out. They were eighty-six seconds short.
For the ninetieth time, he was grateful this was a government contract.
2 November 1982
Johnson Space Center
Houston, TX
29° 33’ 46” N 95° 05’ 29” W
“Swing it around, Jack,” the foreman said.
Carefully, he moved the lever and watched the basket swing over the foundation. When he felt like he’d moved it far enough, he looked to the foreman who nodded. Only then did he tip the load out and watch the dirt scatter to the ground below.
It was strange to find an astronaut at the controls of a backhoe, working a relatively normal blue-collar job but building new worlds required skills from almost every part of life.
NASA figured it was safer letting an astronaut learn on a backhoe that cost tens of thousands, rather than the prototype rover that had been developed for a few million dollars. If Jack Townsend was going to wreck something, it was better to have it be the foundation of a new employee parking garage, rather than an equipment module at the lunar south pole.
He’d been working with various construction crews for the past few months, here and there between meetings about Clipper’s latest upgrades and the geology field trips. When he joined up, he’d expected astronaut training to be a lot more tedious than it had been. The Air Force had sent him to survival school and he’d spent thousands of hours learning how to fly fighters and then countless more learning about liquid-fueled rocket engines and the principles of orbital mechanics. Now he found himself working on construction equipment in the Texas heat, preparing to build the first outpost for humanity on another world.
He scooped a fresh load of slurry from the pit that he’d been digging since this morning. The hardhat on his head dug in around his temples and he smelled like exhaust and grime.
He couldn’t wait to try out his new skills on the Moon.
15 December 1982
Skydock Space Station
Orbital Inclination: 29°
Altitude: 250 mi
I’ll be home for Christmas
You can count on me…
The dulcet tones of Bing Crosby were no less soothing through a radio headset. With the spacewalk entering its third (and most boring) hour, Mission Control saw no problem with letting the crew take a five-minute breather. Instrumentation would warn of any problems and, even with the thrill of a spacewalk, the whole day had begun to feel anti-climactic.
Kathryn Sullivan thought of home as she looked down on the Earth. Their current orbit wouldn’t pass over Patterson or Houston, but she could go back in her mind just as easily with the red-brown of the Sahara passing by underneath her.
She didn’t look away as they passed over the Indian Ocean. She could spot the lights of ships that were still in darkness.
Where the love light gleams
I’ll be home for Christmas
If only in my dreams.
She took a long breath and let it out. The moment had passed. Back to business.
“How’s it looking, David?” she asked, somewhat absent-mindedly, still vaguely entranced by the beauty underneath her.
“Seventy-five percent. Steady flow,” he replied.
“That tracks with our data here, Kathryn,” said Story, down in Houston.
“Five minutes to go,” David announced.
She pulled her eyes away from Earth to take another look at the linkage from
Patriot to
Zeus II. The ships were in an awkward embrace in their nose-to-nose configuration. The young, grey space liner had generously brought up fuel for the atomic motor along with a couple of smaller solar observation satellites. A scaled-down version of the Skydock’s manipulator arms now angled over
Patriot’s cold grey nose and found the tank just behind Zeus’s control module. The Orbital Refueling Arm, or ORA, would remain attached to Skydock’s trusses after
Patriot and
Zeus departed, ready to supply thirsty ships for the next five years.
The new year would bring new objectives for Zeus II and the agency wanted to test the refueling abilities of Skydock before moving to the heavier freight that she would eventually have to deal with.
So far, so good as the pumps and seals did their job, transferring the gases that drove and cooled the nuclear beast around the Earth-Moon system.
On board Skydock, Bob called down to ask about Friday.
“How’s the forecast for Friday, Story?”
“Skies are looking clear, Skydock. They’re projecting good weather at Edwards too, just in case.”
“Copy that. Did Jon say anything in the debrief from yesterday?” he asked.
“That’s a negative, Skydock. McBride reported no trouble bringing
Constellation in. He did seem very happy to be off of Skylab and away from all the science projects.”
“A test pilot babysitting a pack of scientists,” Crippen said, “I think that was one of Dante’s levels of hell.”
“What do you think the plan is when we get to the Moon, Bob?” Kathryn asked over the comm channel.
“I was kidding. You hear that, NASA brass? Just joking,” Crippen said.
“We’re topped off, here, Houston,” David reported.
“Roger that, David, we show the same,” Story said.
“We’d like to thank everyone on the Big Gulp team. Smooth and steady flow all the way,” David said.
“Roger that, David,” Story said.
7 March 1983
UBS Evening News
Welcome back folks. Just a few quick stories before we wrap up tonight’s broadcast.
The United States Football League had its first games yesterday. In the opening match the Chicago Blitz beat the Michigan Panthers 29-28 with a 2-point conversion in the game’s final minute. The 2-point conversion being one of the league’s special rules, and not a play that is allowed in NFL football. Later in the day, the Birmingham Stallions lost to the Tampa Bay Bandits in overtime.
Our friends at NASA have provided us with some excellent footage of exciting operations in outer space. First, we take you to the space station Skydock, in low Earth orbit. You can see here the construction of the first of the lunar freighters. These rectangular frames will eventually be outfitted with engines, fuel tanks and landing legs. The whole assembly will then be ready to bring heavy loads to the lunar surface. Construction of this freighter will take place over the next 6 months, with more than a dozen spacewalks by astronauts, supplied by flights of the Cargo Clipper space fleet.
And from the Moon we have these incredible images to show you now. These are pictures from the Galileo Observatory on the far side of the Moon, beamed back from the Olympus station in lunar orbit. Astronauts David Walker and Donald Williams have been on board Olympus for the past week and have been remotely operating the observatory, which allows for much faster response times from the instruments and telescopes on the ground there. Just look at those pictures, wow. We are told this is an image of the Eagle Nebula, which is over seven thousand light years from Earth.
NASA has announced plans to deploy a large telescope in Earth orbit sometime before the end of this decade.
We leave you with these images of the Eagle Nebula, as it appeared over five thousand years before the birth of Christ.
I’m Emmett Seaborne. From all of us at UBS, have a good night, and good news.
4 June 1983
North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD)
Colorado Springs, CO
38° 44′ 33″ N 104° 50′ 54″ W
Even just the thought of being inside a building that needed protection from a nuclear attack was a challenge for his claustrophobia.
Lt. Paul Chase was now entering his third day on the job at Cheyenne Mountain. He’d gone through orientation and met his CO. Now he was finally going in to the main control room and trying to forget about the millions of tons of rock above his head.
“Lieutenant Chase? John Halloway, nice to meet you. Let me help you set up here,” said a friendly staff sergeant who began to escort Paul to his station.
“We’ve got you down here on the Eastern Pacific desk. You’ll be monitoring the two-hundred to three-hundred block. Your monitor is all set up. You know what to do, right?”
Chase nodded as he sat, getting used to the station. The chair was comfortable enough. His voice cracked a bit as he spoke, “Log any new bogeys in orbit, report any changes in vector, route the incoming data from our birds.”
“Don’t forget the most important part…” the sergeant said.
Chase just looked at him.
“Sound the alarm if we have anything incoming,” he said, giving a friendly laugh.
Chase smiled, feeling a little more at ease, “Well, let’s hope there’s no need,” he said, glancing around the room and eyeing the huge monitors up front.
“Roger that, Lieutenant,” Halloway said. He pressed a button on the desk and Chase’s monitor changed to show a series of white dotted lines on a black screen. Overlaid on that were outlines of what he recognized as the Sea of Japan and he could see the dots steadily tracing West, at various angles to the equator.
“Your sector is pretty quiet, at the moment,” Halloway said, “The Cargo Clipper Liberty was in that orbit yesterday, but she landed last night,” he paused to look up at the map of the world screen in the center of the front wall. “Here, let me show you something you don’t get to see too often,” he said.
He pointed at a white dot marked with a serial number that began with “USSR” and ended with a string of six digits.
“This is a Russian MiG-105 that was sent up to track Liberty while she flew her mission. Poor bastard on board has been crammed in that tiny cockpit for three days, just watching the ass-end of a Clipper from a hundred miles out. The Ruskies like to send up their little space fighter when we fly a military mission.”
“He’s still up there?” Chase asked, already understanding the basics of the situation.
“There’s been bad weather over Baikonur for the last day. They aren’t wild about bringing them down away from their cosmodromes. Apparently it raises hell with the Soviet Air Force to have planes coming in from space.”
“Understandable,” Chase replied.
“Anyway, this’ll probably be his last pass over the Pacific. It’s morning there now and they’ve got no reason to leave him up there anymore. Hope the guy can get a hot shower at least. It’s gotta smell bad in that cockpit by now, don’t you think?” Halloway grinned.
Chase wasn’t comfortable enough to be jocular, but he nodded and smiled as convention demanded.
“You’ll be fine from here. If you need anything, use the black phone at the end of the console.”
“Roger that,” Chase said.
Halloway started to leave and Chase waved a hand for him to pause.
“Staff Sergeant, just out of curiosity, what do I do if I see an incoming Russian missile, or a sub launch or something?”
Halloway stifled a chuckle. He pointed to the phones. Next to the black one was a red one. The red phone was protected by a glass box.
“The red phone is for if you have incoming that’s enemy or unidentified. As soon as you pick it up, you’d better be ready because you’re going to have a pissed off General wondering what the hell is going on and you’d better be able to tell him, and I mean fast.”
“Good to know,” Chase said.
“We had a guy who picked up the red phone by mistake a couple of weeks ago. Thought he was calling downstairs but he was talking to the crow’s nest up top,” Halloway said.
Chase winced, “I’m betting that didn’t end well for him.”
“Nope. Last I heard he was manning a radar tower in Alaska. He got lucky. Could have been Greenland,” Halloway said.
“Don’t touch the red phone. Got it,” Chase said.
“Well, not unless you see a Commie missile coming out of the sky,” Halloway laughed, “Have a good shift, Lieutenant.”
Chase dismissed him and started to monitor his little patch of sky. He watched the Russian spacecraft move from Japan to Hawaii and then it passed off his screen, presumably to be monitored by whoever was tracking movement over the Western Pacific.
There were a few incoming radio transmissions that he sorted. A couple from older, now obsolete spy satellites that were still doing their job, despite the Air Force getting better equipment. He also was able to see Skylab pass through his area of space, which gave him a quiver of excitement.
After a little more than an hour in his new chair, he found himself with a powerful thirst and moved to the end of the row to pour a cup of standard-issue coffee. He was pleased to find that it was as hot, black and strong as could be found at any military facility in NATO. He returned to his station and saw that nothing had changed in the thirty seconds he had gone.
On the edge of his monitor, a new blip came in to view. The readout showed that same number from before, the one that began with USSR. He checked his notes and confirmed that it was the same log entry that the staff sergeant had pointed out. The Russian MiG-105 was still up there.
“Something must have gone wrong at Baikonur,” he said aloud, curious about this unexpected bogey.
He took down the time in his logbook, figuring that whoever was monitoring West Asia had already reported the lingering MiG to the higher-ups.
As he put down his pen, the blip started to flash. The tracking line that marked its progress began to slow in its journey across the ocean. The gigantic computers one floor down took a moment to deduce what was happening. In ten seconds, they had an answer for the young lieutenant.
On the right side of his screen, under the MiG’s identifier, there was a flashing phrase in capital letters, “ENTRY MANEUVER DETECTED.”
He typed in the command to display a new projected path and waited an agonizing thirty-five seconds for the mountain of motherboards to perform its mathematic mysticism.
The screen changed suddenly. There was a clean Mercator projection of the world. At the far right, he saw a circle that represented the MiG. The dotted line was now in front of it, rather than behind, showing its projected course.
The dotted lines swept from the MiG to the edge of the map at the International Date Line. He moved his eyes to the other side of the screen and picked them up again on the left side. The dashes came over the northern coast of California and moved inland. Only two dashes appeared over the continental US before the projection abruptly stopped.
“It’s coming here?” he said, his voice an octave higher than it ought to have been.
He cleared the screen and asked the computer to replot the track, figuring there may have been an error.
A long moment passed before he saw the same map appear on the screen. The dashes pointed very clearly to Colorado.
His blood ran cold and his legs tensed. The Russians were up to something and this couldn’t be good.
He turned to look at the red phone, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
For a moment he wondered if this was a prank, or a training exercise. A drill to mess with the rookie on his first day. But if it was, it was exceptionally convincing.
One of his favorite parts of service was the rigid procedures that were in place for almost any situation. The Air Force had a manual or a set of instructions for everything. There was a procedure for driving a truck and for nuking Russia. And, as he unclenched his muscles, he remembered the procedure for this.
With trembling fingers, he flipped open the clear case and picked up the crimson receiver. He bit his lip before speaking the words that were never supposed to come.
“Crow’s Nest, this is East Pacific. We have incoming. Repeat. We have incoming.”
A moment later he tensed all over again at the sound of the alarms going off in the most secure room in the world.