America One - The Launch Read online

  America One - The Launch

  Title Page

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  America One – The Launch

  By T I Wade

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2013 T I Wade

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Note from the Author

  This novel is only a story—a story of fiction, which could or might come true sometime in the future.

  The people in this story are mostly fictitious, but since the story takes place in our present day, some of the people mentioned are real people.

  There were no thoughts to treat these people as good or bad people. Just people who are living at the time the story is written.

  The author is not an expert in the field of space travel. The author is only a storyteller.

  Even though hundreds of hours of Internet research were completed to write this story, many might find the scientific description of space travel lacking, simple, or simply not accurate.

  The fuels, gases, metals, and the results of using these components are as accurate as the author could describe them.

  Table of Contents:

  Chapter 1

  Don’t Push Me!

  Chapter 2

  The Repercussions

  Chapter 3

  DX2014-Second Visit

  Chapter 4

  DX2014 has a problem

  Chapter 5

  Return to Ivan

  Chapter 6

  Meanwhile, back on Earth

  Chapter 7

  Back to Earth

  Chapter 8

  Diamonds by the thousands

  Chapter 9

  The Last of the Treasure

  Chapter 10

  Capitol Hill

  Chapter 11

  All quiet on the Western Front

  Chapter 12

  Sierra Bravo III and “60 Minutes”

  Chapter 13

  Double Trouble: In space and from Washington

  Chapter 14

  Ryan’s meets the skeleton of American One

  Chapter 15

  The first tour of America One

  Chapter 16

  NASA has a big problem!

  Chapter 17

  The last Christmas

  Chapter 18

  Air Force One

  Chapter 19

  The interesting end of DX2014

  Chapter 20

  Oh Crap!

  Chapter 21

  Peace in Nevada

  Chapter 22

  Flights resume

  Chapter 23

  America One becomes a real spaceship

  Chapter 24

  A new weapon

  Chapter 25

  The “End Game” of political chess

  Chapter 26

  Cuba is nice at this time of year

  Chapter 1

  Don’t Push Me!

  The airfield was peaceful. The desert was inherently quiet. Few birds twittered or chirped and the silence was almost complete. Then, the door to Hangar Three opened releasing a cacophony of sound as the C-5 Galaxy, loaned to Astermine by the United States Air Force, was about to be towed into the hot morning sun.

  Ryan Richmond stood in the middle of the large simmering apron, a handheld radio in one hand and his cell phone in the other. His incoming shuttle from space was still eight minutes out, and many of his friends—and enemies—were twenty minutes away.

  The white streak of a civilian jet could be seen far to the north, the jet extremely high and too far away to hear.

  He saw his platoon of thirty well-armed security guards approach along the tarred road from the direction of the airfield’s only entrance. Ryan also saw Bob Mathews heading towards him as his handheld radio squawked.

  “Sierra Bravo II to ground, do you read? Over.”

  “Ground control to Sierra Bravo II, we have you in radio contact again, and on radar. Your speed is a little high, your altitude is 140,000 feet, 3,000 feet lower than normal, but within your entry window. You are about to pass over the West Coast and look good. Weather here is 98 degrees, wind calm, zero cloud cover. Over.”

  Ryan was not part of the conversation, and just kept himself informed of his incoming shuttle’s progress. This exact same reentry flight had been successfully completed by his two shuttles over a dozen times, and he felt confident that any problems on reentry had been solved. His craft were now the best in the world.

  “Roger that, ground control,” he heard Jonesy reply. “We are coming in heavy, so will keep the speed high. I will compensate for the low altitude once I get manual control in thirty seconds. Over.”

  “Ground control to Sierra Bravo II, seven minutes to touch down, suggest you decrease your glide slope to straight and level for five seconds. That should give you an extra 5,000 feet and bleed off your speed. Over.”

  “Sierra Bravo II, roger, will do,” replied, Colonel John Jones, Ryan’s Chief Pilot, or more correctly, Chief Astronaut.

  Ryan felt the world around him as he stood in the hot dry heat of Nevada. He was accustomed to this beautiful hot, dry weather. Ryan had been born in Las Vegas to reasonably well-off parents the same day that Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon. His father was a casino manager, his mother, Head of Accounts for one of the larger gambling houses on the strip.

  In those days Vegas wasn’t the mega city it had grown into. Everybody had jobs, everybody lived in suburbia, and not everybody visited or had any interest in what went on around The Strip. The area around Hoover Dam and Lake Mead was a place for weekend retreats where residents went to cool down and play. In contrast, the locals of this modern day went to the large air-conditioned casinos to escape the heat and eat cheap meals in the many buffets on The Strip.

  Unemployment—over ten percent—was at an all-time high in the city. Growth had been stagnant in Clark County, as well as the whole of Nevada, for a decade now. Ryan now used the Las Vegas food supply companies to feed the 400 people living on his airfield.

  It was only fifteen months ago that he had completed the twelve hangars around the large light-colored, cement apron, had only one aircraft on it, the C-5 Galaxy which was about to be towed onto the simmering white expanse.

  He remembered his early years in Henderson, the only child in a happy family. Both his father and mother were tall, slim, and wore glasses to read and work. He had also needed glasses from an early age, and was always slim, a few inches taller than his elementary school classmates.

  “I have manual flight,” squawked Jonesy over the radio. “Speed 2,900 knots at 85,000 feet, raising her nose for straight and lev
el flight for five seconds.”

  “Roger that,” he heard his team back in Hangar One respond.

  In elementary school Ryan did well academically, though he was often so bored he stared out the window and dreamed. However, he did not do very well dealing with a few of the kids who often picked on him due to his slim build. On the playground he was a pushover for the bullies, not understanding their desire to rile him.

  He studied the bullies, realizing that each of them needed to prove something, which they accomplished by pushing him or other kids around. They didn’t do well in class, and were often noisy, and in trouble with the teacher. It seemed to him that the purpose of their aggressive behavior was to hide their own lack of confidence. They also ran in packs and needed encouragement and approval from their friends when they messed with him. It seemed that it was the only way they got attention from the other boys, and often, the girls around them.

  At first, Ryan tolerated their messing his hair or pushing him from one boy to another; but after a couple of years of this, he finally began to get angry.

  One day a kid about four inches shorter than he, but twice his weight, with a big round face and ginger hair went too far. The kid grabbed Ryan’s glasses and stood on them, grinding them into the ground. Ryan needed glasses to read; his distance vision within a few feet was good, but he needed glasses for school work.

  The boys around Mark Sposnik, the ginger-haired boy (Ryan never forgot his name), began laughing. This encouraged Mark to look up at the slim boy and, smiling, said, “So Richmond, now you are blind, what are you going to do about that? You wouldn’t even see my fist coming if I wanted to flatten your face.”

  Ryan felt the anger build up inside. He had been wearing a new pair of glasses; his mother paid twenty-five dollars to upgrade them and now she would be mad at him for breaking them. Plus, he felt like he had let her down by not protecting her new investment in him. Ryan thought that he had to respond in some way, and the words Mark Sposnik had just spoken gave him an instantaneous way to avenge his mother.

  “Sierra Bravo II, you are over the Nevada state line at 73,000 feet, your speed is too fast at 1,120 knots. You still have 3,000 extra feet altitude.”

  “Roger that, ground control, I will reduce speed to 900 knots.”

  With his hand clenched into a solid fist, Ryan hit Mark Sposnik straight on his nose. He hit him quite hard, enough to make blood shoot out of the boy’s nostrils. Ryan had not seen so much blood in his life and just stood there as the other boy reached for his bleeding nose, screaming at the top of his lungs.

  He recalled how loud the screaming was and remembered pictures of firing squads and suddenly the hangman’s noose floated in front of his eyes. He thought he had just killed Mark Sposnik! Nobody around him did anything. They were all frozen, shock written all over their faces. The audience just stood there watching the boy bleed. However, he didn’t seem to be falling over, dying; he was just screaming, holding his nose and looking at his own blood on the ground.

  Seconds later a female teacher grabbed him and the bleeding boy by the backs of their shirts and dragged them into the school building, straight to the nurse on duty.

  Ryan watched as the nurse plugged Sposnik’s nostrils to stem the blood and kept him standing upright telling the boy that the bleeding would soon stop, as his face was higher than his pumping heart.

  “Will he live?” Ryan asked the matronly nurse, whose bright silver hair was a stark contrast to the kid’s red blood and bright orange hair. He felt the teacher still standing behind him.

  “Of course he will, stupid! I see this every month. A bully like you might not be the one to be alive, once you see the inside of the principal’s office. I would fear for your life, and not so much this young man’s.”

  “Thirty miles to target, speed 840 knots, height 60,000 feet,” stated ground control.

  This was Ryan’s first trip to the principal’s office. Behind a dark wooden desk sat the principal, a tall man, well over six feet, speaking into the black telephone on the desk. “I understand, Mrs. Richmond, but school policy states that any children who fight must be taken home immediately until the matter is resolved…….Yes, I understand you are at work, but maybe some understanding drilled into him of what he has just done, hurting another boy, might prevent any future need for you to leave work. Thank you Mrs. Richmond.” The principal looked at Ryan, and said nothing more than “Your mother will be here in forty-five minutes. Go sit outside the office and wait for her. What you have done is disgusting.”

  As he left he heard the principal ask the teacher to round up some of the kids who had witnessed the fight and bring them to his office.

  Ryan was enjoying the heat as Bob Mathews walked up to him, saw him deep in thought, and said nothing. The squawking radio would tell him all he needed to know. His security detail was in front of the C-5, which was now out of the hangar. Ryan was facing west, watching for the shuttle’ arrival.

  “Lieutenant, disperse your men, but I want you to remain here with me with one other man. I want every front and side door of every hangar guarded. I don’t want anybody to get inside any of the hangars without my authority.” The lieutenant gave orders, relaying Ryan’s instructions.

  His mother was angry with him, until she realized that his new glasses were missing from his face. He just sat there looking guilty as his mother stormed into the principal’s office demanding to know what had happened to his glasses.

  His mother waited until three witnesses were brought in; she stared scathingly at them, hands on hips, until the principal, not used to irate mothers, found out what had really happened. Sposnik had pulled off Ryan’s glasses and quite simply ground them into the hard dirt of the playground. That was the last time Ryan was ever bullied at school, and Mark Sposnik’s parents did pay for new glasses. From then on his parents allowed him to learn boxing at the local gym, a sport which he excelled in. His ability and long reach forestalled anyone thinking that this tall thin kid was good bully material.

  The feeling of panic, and the utter helplessness of what to do in front of a bully was not one he ever forgot. He had not been afraid; he just didn’t know how to react. Now, today at the airfield, he was not going to be bullied as an adult either. But the memory of that feeling washed over him just before he had walked out onto the hot apron to get some fresh air.

  “Twenty miles to target, 57,000 feet, speed 730 knots.”

  “You are in your window,” he heard his radio man reply to the shuttle from ground control several hundred feet from where he stood.

  The tractor that had just towed out the large C-5 Galaxy continued across the apron with the wheeled, steel-poled tow-unit clanking behind it; it would return the shuttle from the end of the runway to its home in Hangar Six. The medical vehicle, an old Ford cargo van with a red cross painted on each side, and the forty-year old fire engine he had purchased at an auction in Las Vegas, weren’t far behind the tractor.

  “Fifteen miles to target, 48,500 feet, 710 knots. Air brakes out at one notch…..air brakes away,” stated Jonesy, flying the shuttle.

  Apart from the vehicles driving down the side of the runway to the eastern end, there was still no noise. Ryan wondered if he would hear the noise of helicopters, or a fixed wing jet engine first. The shuttle would make no noise on landing. He listened hard, trying to detect any other noises farther away.

  “Five miles to target, 22,000 feet, 495 knots……….three miles to target, target in sight, 16,100 feet, 455 knots.” Ryan now heard a female voice over the radio knowing that Maggie was reading out the information to the pilot. Jonesy was now concentrating, looking for the runway spreading out for 10,000 feet a couple of miles in front of him. Ryan looked far into the western blue sky and saw the silver form of his shuttle coming in steep and fast. He gripped the radio harder than before.

  “One mile to target, 8,000 feet, 330 knots,……….absolute perfect slope 300 yards out, 1,600 feet, 280 knots, flaring out…………..wh
eels down…..the shuttle has landed…..front wheel down,” stated Maggie as Ryan watched the perfect landing 5,000 feet away at the end of the runway.

  The shuttle came in fast. The landing looked much faster than it seemed when he experienced it a few weeks earlier from inside the cockpit. The Silver Bullets had accurate names; they certainly came in fast and steep, the flare-out was quick, and the craft didn’t hang in the air like commercial jets did. He watched the shuttle flare with the usual blue smoke showing as the tires kissed the tarmac. The parachutes blew out of the back, extending only a second after the front wheel spurted out its own cloud of blue smoke.

  Even with the chutes aiding its braking, the long sleek shuttle silently ripped passed him several hundred feet away as it went behind the large hangars on the other side of the apron.

  “Tractor, I want her coupled up fast and returned to the apron ASAP. It is hot on that blacktop and the cabin will heat up quickly.”

  The tractor driver acknowledged the command from Ryan. It would take one of his two assistants a couple seconds to plug in an air conditioner lead from a small unit behind the tractor to a small slot the co-pilot would open in the side of the craft just below her window. This would keep the cockpit at a reasonable temperature, not that it really mattered to the crew aboard. Their suits would repel any heat buildup, as they did the cold of space. At the same time the driver coupled the pole to the shuttle’s front wheel leg while the second assistant untied the flatten parachutes from the rear.

  All this took less than thirty seconds before the shuttle was turned around on the wide runway and towed back to the apron.

  Two minutes later the sound reached Ryan’s ears. It was the sound of a rotor blade in the distance, south of the field, and that gave him hope for who would arrive first. The shuttle reached the cooler white surface as the first helicopter came into view; a couple of other helicopters could be heard behind it, and two F-16s suddenly flew low overhead asking for permission to land.