Soon after NASA detects huge asteroids hurtling toward California, the President announces a plan to deploy nuclear warheads from the space shuttle to destroy them. As the West Coast evacuates, General Jack Harrison, a man haunted by nightmares from a long ago war, is chosen to implement a controversial and top-secret backup plan should the shuttle mission fail.
Against a clock that seems to be ticking far too fast, Jack, two long-time comrades, and a group of men and women little different from any of us feverishly work to turn a Cold War museum into an operational Nike-Hercules missile battery. Their bold attempt to blend new and old technologies to thwart the unthinkable leaves them questioning whether their mission is as futile as it is daring. The only thing of which they are certain is that if they fail, they die.
This intricately woven story about the meeting of technology and faith challenges beliefs and serves as warning to us all of a natural disaster that is not only possible, but probable—and for which the world is still defenseless.
Epiphany is available in Nook, paperback, or hardcover from Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and other major booksellers
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 28th
BC VAN
8:30 AM PST
Steve and Owen had replaced the malfunctioning data communications board the night before and then spent several hours trying to figure out why the original one had gone bad. Although they found and replaced two burned components, the source of the smoke from the bad circuit board, they had been unsuccessful in getting the malfunction to repeat. The IFC crew ran a number of successful system integration tests in the wee hours of the morning using the replacement circuit board, and Jack approved the first of possibly two missile test flights for the day.
“Gus, Oakland Center confirms the airspace is clear and closed to traffic. They ain’t happy about it, either. They want to hear from us soon as we’re done,” John reported, hanging up the phone in the Corridor.
“Yeah, okay.”
Gus was intent on receiving ready-for-action reports from his crew and making sure this first test flight went off without a hitch. Oakland Center’s being pissed wasn’t on his list of priorities today. It had been more than twenty years since he’d been involved in a Nike-Hercules missile firing; and to say he was “wired” this morning was an understatement.
Owen and Steve appeared in the BC Van doorway.
“Hey, Gus. Okay if we watch the launch from outside?” Owen asked. “We want to get some pictures.”
“Is the data logger ready to go?”
“All set. The CD’s loaded, and all John has to do is click the Record button on the screen.”
“Okay then,” Gus said, “go have some fun.”
“How will we know when it’s about to go up?”
Gus held up a wait-a-second finger while he took the ready for action report from the TTR.
“C’mon, he’s busy,” John told the two engineers, moving them into the Corridor.
“Okay. When everyone reports in as ready, he’ll change the system status to red. When that happens, you’ll hear the siren go off and see the MTR antenna slew around and point at the missile. After that, it’ll be up to your folks in Colorado. When they send us the simulated target, you’ll see the TTR antenna move to the target’s azimuth and elevation and begin tracking. Whenever they send the fire command after that, the missile’ll go. It should happen real soon after the TTR starts tracking, so you better be ready. Got all that?”
Child-like grins plastered on their faces, both men nodded, Owen grabbed his camera and tripod, and the two men briefly became stuck in the Corridor’s doorway trying to get outside at the same time.
Like a coupla kids who just heard the ice cream man, John thought, shaking his head.
Owen and Steve chose a location near the MTR antenna with a good view of the Launching Area, which was on lower ground to the southeast. Steve was viewing what he hoped was Alpha Section through his binoculars when the missile and its launcher became visible, rising on the elevator from Alpha’s underground magazine.
“The missile just came up,” he told Owen, who had just finished setting up his tripod and was adjusting his camera settings. “The launcher’s elevating. You better get a move on!”
Owen finished adjusting his camera’s telephoto lens and centered the viewfinder on the image of the nearly vertical missile. He was disappointed that he hadn’t gotten a shot of the missile coming up on the elevator and raising to its firing position, and he made a mental note to pass the camera off to Kim later in the day. When they did the command calibration tests on the rest of the missiles and lowered them into the magazine, she’d be able to get close-ups of what he’d missed.
The low growl of the BC Van’s siren quickly rose in volume and pitch to a wail and then trailed off and fell silent again. The MTR antenna rapidly rotated in azimuth, moved slightly downward in elevation, and came to an abrupt stop pointing at the missile.
“This is really gonna happen,” Steve murmured.
Owen didn’t respond, keeping his camera trained on the distant missile. Somewhere deep inside, neither of them had expected the project to get this far. But it had, and the weight of their roles in its success or failure finally hit home.
Hearing the whine of heavy gears and motors, Steve lowered his glasses and glanced at the TTR antenna long enough to see it spin around and point to the northwest sky. The simulated target transmitted from Peterson Air Force Base was inbound to the site and the TTR was tracking its signal.
For this test, the intercept would occur some sixty miles northwest of the site over the ocean. The asteroids would not come from this direction, however. They would come from the southeast, headed northwest, and the Nike intercepts would be over land. But, with the evacuations not yet complete, Jack decided that a test flight over land would be too dangerous for both public safety and project security.
This test was a hard shot—the undesirable over-the-shoulder-shoot—so called because it would bring the missile close past the IFC area on its way to intercept, causing the MTR to rotate rapidly halfway around in azimuth as it tracked the missile from its launch position in the southeast to the intercept in the northwest. This particular flight course also required a special missile maneuver very early in the flight called a skirting turn, the purpose of which was to make the missile skirt the MTR at a great enough distance when the missile flew past such that the MTR’s maximum angular tracking rate would not be exceeded. They were going for broke on this test. If everything went well, there would be no need for a second test flight.
Owen peered through the camera’s viewfinder, his finger poised on the shutter motor switch. He would hold the switch down at the first sign of rocket motor ignition, and he hoped to get several shots of the missile’s lift-off.
“Be ready,” Steve said, staring at the missile through his binoculars. “Should be just about any sec—”
Brilliant white and yellow flame blasted from the missile’s booster nozzles, spreading out and up from the launcher’s blast deflector on the ground below. The lack of immediate missile movement gave Steve the mistaken impression that the missile would rise slowly, like the space shuttle. He blinked and found himself looking at an empty launcher enveloped in swirling smoke. The missile broke the sound barrier before the booster nozzles cleared the top of the launcher, and the booster and missile combination climbed high into the clear blue winter sky.
Owen held down the shutter motor switch at the first sight of flame and got the launch and several additional frames of the empty launcher afterward. He quickly backed away from the camera, followed the missile’s ascent with his eyes, and tried to reorient Steve to the missile’s location.
Almost four seconds had passed since the launch, and the booster had burned out and begun to drop away from the missile. As the booster cluster dropped away, a metal lanyard connected between it and the missile pulled a pin in the missile. This activated circuitry that initiated the missile’s roll program and ignited the missile’s sustainer rocket motor. The roll program caused the missile to rotate about its long axis until what had been the belly of the missile on the launcher faced the direction of the last predicted intercept point prior to launch. This gave the missile an initial direction to fly toward and an up, down, left, and right reference in relation to itself and the Earth. The roaring, crackling sound of the booster cluster ignition at launch finally reached Owen’s and Steve’s ears and they found the time delay of hearing what they had seen four seconds ago disconcerting.
Steve had his glasses on the missile again. Even through binoculars, the missile was only a tiny speeding dart shape at the front of a white contrail.
Owen’s unaided eyes lost the missile after booster separation and he unwittingly followed the flight path of the spent booster, still trailing wisps of smoke, as it nosed over and began an arcing fall into the nearby Pacific. The booster’s splashdown would unerringly occur in a designated Booster Disposal Area in the coastal waters as had been predicted decades earlier when the site was still active.
“Something’s wrong. It’s going in the water!”
“What are you talking about?” Steve said, not taking his eyes from the binoculars.
“The missile! It’s going in the water!”
“You’re nuts! Where?” Steve dropped the glasses to his chest and looked where Owen was pointing.
“That’s the booster, dumb ass. The missile’s up there!” Steve pointed to the contrail streaking northwest over the Pacific.
“Oh.… Yeah.”
It was a common mistake. Probably ninety-five percent of people who had seen a Nike launch for the first time had watched the booster all the way to impact, thinking it was the missile.
By now, the missile was accepting steering commands, but excessive steering could be problematic. The missile’s sustainer motor would burn out after about thirty seconds and then the missile would coast, initially at close to four times the speed of sound, to the intercept point. Large steering commands to try to match a target aircraft’s evasive maneuvers move-for-move would unnecessarily bleed off the missile’s speed and shorten its range. To avoid this, the computer averaged the position, velocity, and acceleration values of the target’s maneuvers and sent limited steering commands to the missile until the last ten seconds of missile flight. At that point, the computer allowed the missile to take full steering commands to ensure an accurate intercept.
Today’s simulated target aircraft, like Sunday’s oncoming asteroids, did not maneuver. It was a fast target, but an easy one to intercept because its course was ballistic and entirely predictable. There would be little missile steering needed.
A flash of light and a small dirty cloud appeared at the front of the speeding missile’s contrail, which abruptly stopped moving.
Owen pointed to the cloud. “Does that look like sixty miles to you?”
“I don’t know. I guess it must be,” Steve answered. “Let’s go see how the test went.”
Owen gathered his camera and tripod, and he and Steve headed toward the Corridor Building. Neither man heard the very faint boom, like a brief clap of distant thunder that sounded just as they reached the building. It was the sound of the missile’s warhead detonation, and it had traveled only thirty miles.
The two men entered the Corridor Building and immediately knew something had gone wrong when they heard Gus’s raised voice.
“I understand you’re under pressure from Washington, but we’re not going to get any answers ’til we stop talking and begin to investigate!” Gus almost shouted into his headset mike.
Gus spotted Owen and Steve, and he rapidly snapped his fingers at them several times to attract their attention.
“Hang on a minute, okay?”
Gus cupped a hand around his mike.
“Did you two see a burst?”
“I guess so,” Owen answered. “There was a flash and then a cloud at the flash, and we didn’t see any more movement after that.”
Gus nodded and spoke into the mike again, more calmly this time. “Okay, I have visual confirmation of a burst. It’s likely the guidance section or the missile battery went tits up, but we won’t know ’til we check everything here.”
The two engineers continued watching as Gus listened to who they assumed was General Harrison in the Launching Area.
“I don’t know. An hour or two, I guess. You’ll know as soon as I do. Oh, and I want to fire the second missile when we get this figured out.”
Gus listened again, and when he responded, Owen and Steve were surprised at the outburst.
“Then why the hell did you even give me a second missile? It’s not as if this never happened before. You’ve seen it as much I have, and that was back when the system was in its prime! C’mon, Jack, I depend—
“Okay, fine.” Gus’s lips were drawn tight, his jaw rigid. “Put Clyde back on the line.”
“I’m here,” Clyde said from the Launching Area a few seconds later. “What’re we doing?”
“Get the second missile up and on. Julie’ll be calling you for a command cal in about ten or fifteen minutes.”
“Roger.”
“And Clyde? Leave her topside when the cal’s done. We might be firing again in a couple, few hours.”
“We’re not getting any missile building done, you know.”
“Yeah, I know. But if we don’t get a good test flight, it won’t matter. I gotta go now. Out.”
Gus flung his headset on the console.
“Now I remember why I retired,” he complained, motioning the two engineers to follow him into the Corridor where the rest of the IFC crew was drinking coffee and talking about what might have gone wrong.
“Listen up,” Gus called out. “Jack needs answers for Washington as soon as we can give them to him. Owen and Steve saw the burst, so that’s information we didn’t have before.
“Steve, Owen, I want you to transmit the data logger file to your people in Colorado for them to review. Then, download it here for me to look at, too. You can help me go through it and make sure I don’t miss anything.
“John, call Oakland Center and tell them we’re keeping the airspace ’til probably mid-afternoon. Then run a Dynamics Course Two and when Julie’s done with the command cal she’s going to run, check out the computer’s burst circuits.”
“Oakland’s gonna have a fit, Gus. Can’t we release the airspace ’til we know if we’re gonna fire again?”
“Screw ’em. The evacuation’s almost over and we’re only impacting them north and west of the airports. They can live with it for a few more hours. If they give you any static, call Jack and let him handle it.”
“But—”
“Today, John.… Please.” Gus was in order-issuing mode and in no mood to argue.
“Julie, run a command cal on the second missile right after the dynamics test. Clyde’ll be ready for you. Then get on the RF Test Set and let’s see how weak the beacon signal can get before the MTR drops it. Have one of the TTR guys work with you.
“Just between us,” Gus said to the group, “I think we’re going to be left with a failure of either the missile’s guidance section or battery, but we have to eliminate everything else on this end before we can say that.
“Can anyone think of any other tests we need to do?”
No one spoke up.
“Then let’s get started.”
Steve and Owen hung back near Gus when the group broke up.
“You have a second?” Steve asked when the others had moved away.
“Sure. What’s up?”
“Well, we were just wondering …” Steve looked to Owen for encouragement, but Owen’s expression was blank. “We were just wondering why you think you already know what went wrong.” Steve turned to Owen again and this time got a nod of agreement.
“History of the system,” Gus answered, offhandedly. “This doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen.”
“And … and what would prevent it from happening, say, right after launch?” Steve pressed.
“Not a thing,” Gus answered as casually as before. “In fact, that’s when it usually does happen. We even have a name for it. We call it a moonball.”
The engineers’ faces drained of color and it took a second before Gus understood the reason for their distress.
“Oh, I get it. You’re afraid we might all go up in a mushroom cloud on Sunday morning.”
“Well, yeah,” Owen finally spoke up. “Aren’t you?”
Gus shook his head, dismissive of the possibility.
“Doesn’t work that way. The warhead isn’t armed ’til later in the flight. And any burst of a nuclear warhead other than an intended one results in what’s called a one-point initiation. Essentially, the weapon’s high explosive components go off in a way that will destroy, but not detonate, the nuclear warhead. If there’s any nuclear yield at all, it won’t exceed the equivalent of four pounds of TNT.”
“You’re not just making that up for our benefit, are you?” Owen asked.
“Gospel, guys.
“Now,” he changed the subject before their doubts resurfaced, “how about getting the data transmitted to Colorado.”
