Free The getaway special by Jerry Oltion Page B

retro rocket. It hadn't jettisoned automatically after firing, and since all her experience had been with the reusable shuttle, she hadn't done it manually, either. Now it was back there on the heat shield, disrupting the air flow and holding them at the wrong attitude. Judy reached forward to the violently pitching control panel and flipped the manual jettison switch, but nothing happened. The electrical connection to the explosive bolts had already burned through. Unfortunately the bolts themselves hadn't gotten hot enough to blow, or their problem would have been solved.
    They only had a few seconds in their headfirst attitude before the capsule would burn up. Judy shoved the controller hard to the side and the capsule pitched over, but with the retro rocket trailing behind, it wouldn't go all the way. She rolled the capsule to the other side, the motion throwing her hard against Allen, who held the getaway special canister tight to his body to keep it from flying loose and bouncing around inside the capsule. Judy had to roll the descent module back and forth twice more before the straps or fuel lines or whatever was holding the engine on gave way and the capsule once again flipped around to ride blunt end first.
    Another piece of flaming debris swept past the window, but this time instead of pitching to the side, the capsule steadied out and fell smoothly through the rest of its descent. The gee force grew stronger as they dropped into thicker air. It didn't feel at all like the gees the shuttle pulled on launch and descent; this felt far more personal, as if the universe had invented a brand new force just to torment Judy and Allen. Judy gritted her teeth and concentrated on not blacking out. Terror helped immeasurably. Her heartbeat stayed up around 200 or so as she waited for the heat shield to burn through, and as she wondered how much damage those few moments of headfirst re-entry had done. The parachute was packed into a compartment in the nose of the capsule, and if that had gotten too hot—if it had melted in there, or if the release mechanism had warped enough to jam—then they were as good as dead.
    She'd know in another couple of minutes, because they were coming out of the fireball now. The bright orange flames quit roaring past the window, giving way to blue sky. They were in the lower atmosphere. Judy rolled the capsule around so she could see the ground, but was startled to find only water below.
    They'd missed . They were supposed to land somewhere in the United States, but somehow they'd missed the entire North American continent. Not only that, but Judy had no idea whether they'd overshot or undershot. She'd seen the ocean dozens of times from this vantage, but there was no way to tell whether this was the Pacific or the Atlantic.
    Then the shoreline swept past and she laughed with relief. It was a lake! Probably Lake Michigan—no, there were snow-covered mountains to the east of it. That had to have been Salt Lake, then, in Utah.
    The mountains rushed past below, giving way to high plains, then desert. Not good. The Air Force had no doubt tracked the fireball on the way down, and even though the descent module was invisible to radar now, they could calculate within a few dozen miles where it was going to land. In a forest or a city, Judy and Allen might have time to escape before anybody could get a helicopter out to capture them, but if they landed in the desert they might as well just switch the emergency beacon back on and wait to be picked up. Especially in this desert; Judy could see snowdrifts in the lee of whatever vegetation was down there. Even the most inept tracker in the world could follow them through snow. The attitude jets wouldn't alter their ground path enough to matter, and the only engine that could—the retro rocket—was a burned-up lump of metal falling on its own trajectory miles away. The only thing Judy could do to change their course would be to deploy the parachute early,