Rocket Man

By Earl Perkins

We set sail on this new sea . . .

On April 9, 1959, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) introduced Americas first astronauts to the pressScott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Virgil Grissom, Walter Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Donald Slayton. The seven men, all military test pilots, were carefully selected from a final group of thirty-two candidates.

But the real truth of NASAs search for Americas best pilots is not found in the thirty-two finalists that eventually produced Project Mercurys heroic list of space pioneers. The Original Seven Mercury astronauts chosen to lead Americas charge into a new frontier were certainly worthy. They were Americas best and brightest.

But perhaps the very best never got the chance and served his country in obscurity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 6, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543453799

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Copyright © 2017 by Earl Perkins.

Library of Congress Control Number:      2017914743

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5434-5377-5

      Softcover         978-1-5434-5378-2

      eBook         978-1-5434-5379-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Under no circumstances may any part of this book be photocopied for resale.

Cover Photography credit: NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration)

Orion 4 Mission Patch is created by Earl Perkins Copyright © 2017 by Earl Perkins All rights reserved.

Smiling Faces, by The Undisputed Truth Songwriters: Barrett Strong / Norman Whitfield / Norman J. Whitfield

Smiling Faces Sometimes lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC[Insert additional credits here, if applicable, such as permission to reprint copyrighted material.]

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 10/05/2017

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Table of Contents

Dedicated

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Prologue The Cold War and High-Stakes Espionage …

Chapter 1 January, 1959 …

Chapter 2 Medicine Park … January, 2001

Chapter 3 Houston … We have a problem!

Chapter 4 Waltz across Texas …

Chapter 5 Smiling Faces …

Chapter 6 Number One on the Runway …

Chapter 7 Eastbound and Down …

Chapter 8 Washington, D.C… .

Chapter 9 The White House and The Oval Office

Chapter 10 It’s an Honor, Mr. President …

Chapter 11 Can Someone bring me up to speed …

Chapter 12 A Renewed Purpose …

Chapter 13 Back to Houston …

Chapter 14 Cruising Down Interstate One …

Chapter 15 Launch Fever …

Chapter 16 A Search for Truth …

Chapter 17 Honoring a Fallen Hero …

Chapter 18 Commencing the Countdown to Launch Orion 4 …

Chapter 19 T-Minus One Minute and Counting …

Chapter 20 History Awaits You …

Chapter 21 Crossing the Great Divide …

Chapter 22 For All Mankind …

Chapter 23 The Story That Must Be Told …

Chapter 24 The Call of Freedom …

Epilogue Loose Ends … and the Wonder of it All …

Image%20Logo%20patch.jpg

Ad astra et ultra …

To the Stars and Beyond …

Dedicated

to:

All those who have paid for the

cost of freedom through their loyalty,

devotion, and vigilant watch

over America’s liberty …

The cost of freedom is high, but Americans have always paid it … Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of Liberty.

President John F. Kennedy

January 20, 1961

Inaugural Address

From the Author …

A particularly grateful thank you to all the men and women who have served our country over the years to provide the freedom that we all enjoy today … I know there are thousands who have served in heroic anonymity without receiving their just recognition …

Foreword

Rocket Man, author Earl Perkins’ debut novel, takes the reader on a swift journey that is far more than just well-paced, page-turning excitement. This modern work of fiction serves as a wakeup call to what lurks just beneath the surface of some of today’s most disturbing breaking news: The Cold War never ended.

Timely indeed, given that three decades after the Soviet Union first frayed at the edges, then came completely unhinged from itself, America endures a new onslaught of Russian style deceit and aggression, both visible and covert.

Rocket Man serves to remind us that now more than ever that the stakes involved in our superpower conflict could not be higher. And astute fans of the Space Race will not dispute the truly scary plausibility of the terrifying plot in this tale of international spies and intrigue.

So, reader, turn off the television. Don your best protective emotional gear. Then strap in for hard acceleration and a dozen G-forces to keep pace with astronaut Pete Allen as he defends not just a nation’s ideals but the annihilation of the Free World.

Thank you, Mr. Perkins. Rocket Man is a great escape and I can’t wait to read your next story.

Lantz Vickers

Chicago, 2017

Preface

As a young boy of eight and s half years old in May of 1961, I remember watching Alan Shepard as he crawled into his Freedom 7 spacecraft to take America’s first ride into space and usher us into a new era called The Space Race …

The only problem was, as a kid who loved sports, I had no idea who we were racing, or what we were racing for …

All I knew was that the Russians were always the bad guys when ever I watched them on Championship Wrestling … But after my Dad explained exactly why the Russians were the bad guys, and the reasons why we were racing them, I got it!

I found another love, and that was the U.S. space program. I became fascinated with all the technical stuff, and the astronauts themselves were absolutely a very distinct group of individuals. Some were much cooler than the others, but the Original 7 Mercury astronauts were a fascinating group.

In high school, I wanted to be a sports writer, but things don’t always work out. So for years, I wanted to write a book but the only problem was I didn’t know what to write about. Later, as a young father, I held both my small daughters Shannon and Amy in my arms as we looked up at the heavens in our back yard and gazed at the moon and stars …

I always wanted to do a romance novel, but I bombed in that attempt. So that left sports, mystery, espionage, and, oh yeah … there was always the space program thing.

I loved Neil Armstrong’s first words from the moon’s surface, but I liked Pete Conrad’s first words even better: That may have been a small one for Neil, but its a long one for me!

I thought Neil Armstrong had people everywhere holding there breath until he finally said, Houston, Tranquility Base here … The Eagle has landed!

But he was much more inspiring as he said, We came in peace for all mankind …

I loved seeing the American flag on the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo spacecrafts, and the big booster rockets as well!

So I thought a space novel that featured a relationship with our hero’s father, a massively heroic pilot in his own right, might be interesting. And in this day of a women being every bit as capable as any man, I had to let her light shine as well.

I had to settle for making our girl so gifted as any man but that the her obvious beauty never got in the way of the two best things about her, her cool and ability in any situation.

I had fun with the stuff I always liked, the countdowns, the critical burns in and out of orbit, that kind of stuff. But I really wanted to just create a mystery-suspense story, with our main guy in love with the woman of his dreams, but on a mission of redemption.

So I’ve tried to wrap all that up in the American flag as much as I possibly could, and maybe spin a story that is both enjoyable and interesting. And maybe a little patriotic. . .

I hope you like it.

Earl Perkins

Newcastle, Oklahoma

Spring-Summer, 2017

Acknowledgements

I am especially grateful to my sweet wife Kathy for her love, patience and objectivity in the production of this story. She is largely responsible for the editing and corrections in grammar, punctuation, the look of the body of work.

Thanks to all the friends along my life-path that helped to shape my love for a good story and the love of telling it …

Thanks to my sixth grade teacher William Oliver Watts for believing in me enough to predict that some day, sooner or later, I would finally begin to write because I had the passion to write … thanks for helping me discover that passion …

Introduction

When I first had the notion to write a novel about a flight to the moon, I knew that most readers would have no interest in just reading about a countdown, or even a really skilled woman as a great pilot. Those concepts were explored a long time ago in other novels. But I wanted to add an element of espionage, to create a life-like scenario that posed a real threat to America and the world at the hands of our old cold-war nemesis, the Soviet Union …

So I wanted to go back into time, when we were at the height of the Cold War with Russia and weave the tale from there, but set the main body of the story in more modern day terms, with all the computer-enhanced concepts being integrated into today’s new hardware designed for a spacecraft of the twenty first century.

The story’s bad guy is obvious from the outset, but there are certain issues in play that prevent them from openly taking action.

The heroine of the story is sassy, independent, and quite skilled as a pilot in her own right. But she loves her man because they are equal in their relationship, while they are both totally comfortable with the traditional masculine-feminine aspects of their relationship.

The plot links two eras in the space age together through the primary protagonist and his father, who the son never really knew until just before he died. Then he learned who his dad really was, and what his life was about, and he became driven to finish something his father started a long time ago … And thereby restore his father’s honor …

It all makes for a slam-bang finish with patriotism and national pride, romance and personal redemption all rolled into one!

I hope you like it …

Earl Perkins

Newcastle, Oklahoma

Spring-Summer 2017

Prologue

The Cold War and High-Stakes Espionage …

In November of 1960, America was looking for new, bold, aggressive leadership to shake off the shackles of World War II only fifteen years earlier. America had established itself as a world leader in science and technology, especially after the United States had ushered in the nuclear age at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945.

During the waning days of World War II, the Soviet Union, in their paranoid way, began to implement their expansion.

Russian fighters, with the help of American air lifts of food and supplies, had withstood the German siege of Leningrad. Germany, and Hitler, were finally defeated with the fall of Berlin in April of 1945.

But the Soviets were already implementing their plan to expand. The evil Soviet leader Josef Stalin, who is rumored to have killed as many as 30 million of his own people, decided that the Russians should begin to expand outside its borders to create a buffer zone to insulate itself from another attack at the hands of Germany in the future. In all, the Soviets would take 47 countries in eastern Europe and the Baltic states in a move to protect the U.S.S.R. from American Imperialism." So much for gratitude.

And then there was the Cold War …

In the world of espionage and counter espionage, the stakes were never higher than in the 1950s and 1960s.

The defeat of Germany saw both the United States and Russia scramble to acquire the services of the German scientists who had developed the V-Weapons that had rained terror and destruction down on Great Britain during the war. Ultimately, the United States brought 88 of the top German scientists to the U.S. under protective custody.

The Soviet Union, in stark contrast, determined that they must not let America grab the strategic high ground in the technology race. In response, the Russian military, at gun-point, kidnapped 2,000 other German scientists in an over-night raid by that history calls Operation Osoaviakhim.

In a move that was typical of the deranged Josef Stalin, the Russians simply gleaned the top 400 scientists from that group and summarily executed the rest.

With the successful implementation of the Soviet Alsos (a Russian program in 1946-47 to collect any or all nuclear material and data from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia scientists) and the atomic spies, the Soviet Union conducted its first weapon test of an explosion-type nuclear device, RDS-1, codenamed First Lightning, on August 29, 1949, at Semipalatinsk, Kazakh SSR.

As John Kennedy became President in January 1961, many Americans believed that the United States was losing the Space Race with the Soviet Union after they had successfully launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, in October of 1957.

There was even more concern when on April 12, 1961 27-year old Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space as he orbited the Earth one time in Vostok 1, three weeks before America could launch its first Project Mercury astronaut, Navy Lt. Commander Alan Bartlett Shepard, Jr. on May 5, 1961.

After consulting with NASA through his Vice President Lyndon Johnson to identify such an achievement, Kennedy stood before Congress on May 25, 1961, and proposed that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.

On September 12, 1962, President John F. Kennedy challenged the American people when he spoke at Rice University, setting a bold new agenda for the decade …

"We choose to go to the Moon! … We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win …"

The young American President was absolutely convinced the bold achievement would make the political statement that would establish America as the world leader in the Space Race with the Russians.

Kennedy’s goal gave direction and a specific mission to National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Apollo program. This required the expansion of NASA’s Space Task Group into a Manned Spacecraft Center. Houston, Texas was chosen as the site, and the Humble Oil and Refining Company donated the land in 1961, through Rice University as an intermediary. Kennedy took advantage of the 1962 construction of the facility to deliver a speech on the nation’s space effort.

But as America gained steam in Project Mercury and Project Gemini in 1965, the Russians had already unleashed an insidious plot to infiltrate not only NASA and the American space program, but the U.S. government as well. The Soviets went about their work ever so quietly …

Project Apollo would take America to the moon. Project Mercury would be the first steps toward that goal. But Project Gemini would teach America how to do it.

America won the race to the moon, and on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin guided the the Eagle to a harrowing landing on the plains of the moon’s Sea of Tranquility. Later, as they walked for two and a half hours on the surface of the moon, they unveiled a plaque that Armstrong read to the world:

Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind …

But in the 1960s, Russia hatches an evil plot to put into place a plan that will ultimately lead to the blackmailing of the United States and the world …

With Soviet spies occupying strategic positions within not only NASA but the U.S. Intelligence sector as well, the Russians are able to install a nuclear trigger on a U.S. lunar probe that has been sitting on the moon’s surface for over 35 years waiting for the signal from the Kremlin to signal the destruction on a global scale …

Russian Intelligence has code-named the evil plan Eastern Light …

In the 1960s, U.S, Marine Lt. Col. Adrian Alexander Allen, served the U.S. Department of Defense (D.O.D.) in an ultra high-level security project within the Blue Gemini Program. Known to be a joint Air Force-Navy project, Blue Gemini actually was a front for the hidden U.S. Intelligence Program code named Bright Star. As a top-secret watch dog operation out of Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, Bright Star, with Lt. Col. Allen as its main operative, was charged with the task of finding out what the Soviets were up to with Eastern Light.

Lt. Col. Allen attempted to turn in his findings on the Russian Eastern Light scheme to infiltrate NASA and the U.S. Government, but all of Lt. Col. Allen’s records were taken and he was reduced in rank, discharged from the military, and given a less-than-honorable discharge for alleging that there was co-operation between those above him and the Russian intelligence that had even penetrated Bright Star, America’s own counter-intelligence effort to stop Eastern Light.

But the now-disgraced Capt. Adrian Allen (he had been reduced in rank) never quits on Bright Star, or its objective, and begins a new program on his own …

In the late 1980s, Lt. Colonel Allen’s son, U.S. Marine Colonel Scott Pete Allen becomes a top fighter pilot and is decorated by the Navy during his service in Operation Desert Storm. Born on February 20, 1964, the second anniversary of Lt. Col. John Glenn’s historic 3-orbit mission as the first American to orbit the Earth. Only in his father’s later years did Pete learn his father was actually an astronaut in the Blue Gemini Program, having flown three D.O.D. flights under the strictest secrecy. But then he learned more from his dad …

As Lt. Colonel Allen opens up in a video-taped message to his son to be seen after his death, he reveals the whole story about a case that he worked on for many years in cloaked secrecy: Operation Bright Star, the American search for a way to stop the Russians and their evil plot …

When Pete Allen, now a Marine pilot-turned-astronaut discovers the true climactic intention of the Russian plot are in place, he has to make sure every moves counts in his own personal moon race to stop the sinister Soviet plot. He must succeed …

It would truly be for all mankind …

Chapter 1

January, 1959 …

As a young boy growing up in the gentle hills of eastern Oklahoma, Adrian Allen was fascinated by the flying machines they called airplanes …

Adrian was only ten years old when he saw an air show outside of Tulsa one Saturday, and he was impressed most by the acrobatic flying and the daredevils that were known as wing walkers. It was 1937 and just where, he wondered, would they be walking in 40-50 years? Only time would tell…

But Adrian Allen promised himself that some day, if he worked at it and learned to be a pilot, that he would go as far as flying could take him, maybe even to the moon …

As a gifted pilot that distinguished himself in his service in the Korean War, Marine Major Adrian Alexander Allen had 17 confirmed kills in the Korean Conflict in 1951-52, flying his F-86 Saber jet against the Soviet MIG-15 in Korea’s MIG Alley over the Yalu River that separated mainland China from the Korean peninsula.

After the Korean War was over, Major Allen continued to advance as a Marine Corps pilot, and his reputation became well-known throughout the Corps and the Navy. The file on Major Allen was that not only was he a truly great pilot, but a tremendous flight systems engineer and analyst as well. The Major had contributed many innovative engineering ideas and concepts to other engineers building the hardware that Major Allen and other pilots were expected to take into combat. It was the 1950s, and the technology was coming fast.

In the late 1950s as he was assigned to an intelligence arm of the Department of the Navy with top-secret clearance, now Lt. Col. Allen began to hear about an American Space Flight program, and was one of about 500 military test pilots that contacted NASA inquiring about consideration for America’s first group of astronauts. NASA searched the files of 110 applicants, and contacted them in January of 1959.

Russia had just launched Sputnik and the Americans responded in typical fashion, ramping up all phases of space exploration, including manned space flight. Lt. Allen liked his chances, and he was ready to meet the challenge. All the flying, all the academics and attention to detail would now pay off. All he needed was a chance to prove himself against the best, and this was it.

That was it. Adrian Allen knew that was his calling. To fly into outer space, explore the stars, maybe even walk on the moon! Now that was something into which a boy from small-town Oklahoma could sink his teeth.

In early 1959, Lt. Col. Allen got all paper work and necessary forms and went to his commanding officer, Marine Colonel Graham J. Nagy to request permission to throw his name into the mix for consideration to be picked as one of the initial group of astronauts that would be among the first men in history to ever explore space.

Col. Graham J. Nagy was a desk jockey on assignment from the Pentagon. He loved neatness, preparation … order … all that kind of bureaucratic crap those D.C. pencil-pushers value. To Adrian Allen, it was just the b.s. you had to clear up so you could go flying …

So, on January 13, 1959, Lt. Col. Allen marched smartly into Col. Graham Nagy’s office and presented his request to accept NASA’s invitation to participate in their search.

Col. Nagy, as usual, was cordial and warm. But his response to Lt. Col. Allen’s request was totally unexpected …

Permission denied. Anything else? Nagy responded with an absolute poker face.

Well, yes, sir, Lt. Col. Allen countered, staying poised. If I may ask, sir, why do you object to my request? This is an exceptional opportunity to represent my country and the Corps, and this is a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ opportunity that may never come again.

"Permission denied, Lt. Col. Allen, the Colonel re-affirmed with a definite emphasis on ‘denied’. Do I need to explain it to you, Lt. Col.?"

Adrian noted the emphasis on each word. The Colonel was letting him know exactly who was the higher ranking officer.

Bureaucrats often felt the need to do that kind of crap, Adrian reminded himself.

Remaining respectful, Lt. Col. Allen responded to the Colonel’s offer to explain.

"Thank you, sir, for the Colonel’s patience," Adrian retorted, mustering all