Bridge of Spies (28 page)

Their pilots were summoned. Mentyukov could not be found, so his partner was sent up alone, vectored south toward the closed nuclear
city of Chelyabinsk, and ordered to jettison his drop tanks for extra height. He ran out of fuel so quickly that he had to force land in a field.

The search for Mentyukov had not been abandoned. The legend of Mentyukov, in fact, was only just beginning. By some accounts he had put on his uniform and was heading into town to join the festivities when apprehended at a bus stop. By his own account he stood waiting at a bus stop
after
being found at his hotel; for all the urgency of the moment, a bus was his only way of getting to his plane.

The result was the same: by the time Mentyukov reached the airport, Marshal Savitsky (code name “Dragon”) had run out of patience. Mentyukov was ordered to take off at once. He obeyed, strapping himself in without pressure suit or helmet and taxiing past Ayvazyan and Safronov, who were wolfing down their breakfast while listening in over their headsets.

Mentyukov took off still not knowing what he was supposed to do.

Sverdlovsk’s ranking air force commander, General Yuri Vovk, took the microphone.

There was a problem, though. He had no weapons. He knew that Vovk knew, which could only mean one thing.

Mentyukov lit his afterburner and pointed his plane toward the heavens. “I quickly knew I had no way out,” he said much later. “If I refused that would have been the end—of my career, my reputation, everything. It was better to die well, so I asked them one thing—to look after my pregnant wife and mother.”

The legend says Savitsky personally assured him over the live link from Moscow that his family would be well cared for. Ayvazyan, who
was still listening, says he never heard the line about the pregnant wife and that no fighter pilot busy putting his life on the line would pause to say such a thing. But it is not disputed—because it was seen on so many radar screens—that Mentyukov then climbed through 65,000 feet without a pressure suit, and kept on climbing, and closed on Powers from behind at twice the speed of sound.

Ground control cut in. “Target ahead, twenty kilometers.”

Reliving these few seconds at the age of seventy-seven, Mentyukov had a clear recollection of his altitude—20,090 meters—and his speed: 2,185 kilometers per hour. This meant he was traveling a thousand miles an hour faster than the U-2, shrinking the gap between them by a mile every three seconds.

“Target, fifteen … target, ten … target ahead! Look, look! Can you see him?”

He could not. He was looking for a line in the sky. It would be no more than that, and it would be gone in a flash.

In Moscow, Savitsky could see his plan unraveling. He told Sverdlovsk ground control to order Mentyukov to cut his afterburner. Mentyukov refused: maximum power was the only way he could maintain maximum height. The order was repeated. It was Dragon’s order! Mentyukov cut his afterburner and fell like a stone.

*  *  *

Khrushchev finished his tea and left for the Kremlin. From there, a little later, he would walk out of the Spassky Gate to take his place on the reviewing stand in front of Lenin’s mausoleum. There would be gymnasts, dancers, soldiers, missiles, tanks, veterans of the Great Patriotic War, young pioneers, and banners—endless triumphal banners in the red and gold of the revolution. All the pride of world Communism, real and manufactured, would be concentrated for him, right in front of him, here in Red Square over the next two hours.

His power was unchallenged. Stalin and Stalinism were history. The putschists of 1957 had not dared try again. The skeptics of his new coziness toward America had not yet broken cover. The golf course and the magnificent retreat above Lake Baikal—they would be finished in time for the Eisenhowers’ visit. The new era was not yet at hand, but it was achievable, and it would be Khrushchev’s achievement. Yet his mind was fogged with anger.

On May Day Khrushchev normally drove his own family into town. Today he had left them to make their own way and come with his driver. On May Day Biryuzov would normally be with him on the stand. Today he was in his command center watching helplessly as another spy plane peeled back another layer of the thin wrapping that covered the Soviet Union’s nuclear nakedness. Khrushchev had already lost his temper with Biryuzov on the telephone. Now all either of them could do was wait.

*  *  *

Mentyukov had overshot and was almost out of fuel. As his altimeter unwound he was ordered back to base.

Ayvazyan and Safronov, fed and refueled, took off again and spiraled to gain height over Sverdlovsk, awaiting further orders. But Savitsky was at a loss to know what to do with them. It was the rocketeers’ turn.

Voronov’s men had breakfasted, then waited in silence as mediumrange radar stations to the south tracked Powers heading north. As he sailed over Chelyabinsk, one hundred miles south of Sverdlovsk, Voronov switched on his target-acquisition radar and for the first time saw the intruder as a green dot on his screen.

For a few minutes the dot continued north. Then it turned sharply to the right. There was one kink in Powers’s route, and this was it. Two years earlier the cooling system for a nuclear-waste tank near Kyshtym, north of Chelyabinsk, had exploded, releasing more radiation than Chernobyl and a surge in strontium-90 levels that the CIA had been able to detect as far west as Alaska. Bob Ericson had flown over the site the previous summer. Rightly or wrongly, the Agency wanted another look.

The right turn took Powers over a network of fuel-enrichment and nuclear-waste plants east of Kyshtym and out of range of Voronov’s rockets.
That’s it
, Voronov thought,
he’s escaped
.

*  *  *

Powers knew nothing about the Kyshtym disaster. For half a century the countryside below him would remain one of the most irradiated places on earth, but from thirteen miles up on a fine spring day the scars and smokestacks of the Armageddon industry blended innocently into a two-dimensional spread of forests, lakes, and farmland.
Powers thought it looked a bit like Virginia. He took his pictures and made a ninety-degree left turn that pointed him back toward Sverdlovsk, Scandinavia, and safety.

At this point, he would write in his prison diary, he was “feeling fairly good”:

Voronov’s targeting officer saw the left turn at once. The dot was coming back into range, and the Kosulino battery was going to have the best shot. An order came through from the regimental command post to fire if the guidance system could lock on.

“I followed the dot till it came in range,” Voronov said. “Then I gave the order.
Pusk
.”

Nothing happened. For some reason Eduard Feldblum, the launch-control officer, was hesitating.

“Fire!” Voronov yelled, and Feldblum pressed the button.

It was 8:52 a.m. Moscow time; nearly one in the morning in Washington. Three of Voronov’s six rockets were supposed to spurt fire and streak heavenward, defying gravity and America and the slippery upper atmosphere in a supersonic firework extravaganza for the ages. If they had, Frank Powers would have been done for and every assertion by Eisenhower’s advisers that a high-altitude U-2 shoot-down was not survivable would have proved accurate. But only one rocket ignited. It shot up toward seventy thousand feet on a whoosh of flame, creating its own radar dot and converging at Mach 2 on the dot that was Article 360. For a full minute the men in the cabin watched their screens and everyone else waited—Ayvazyan and Safronov in their spiraling MiGs, Vovk (and now Mentyukov) on the ground, Biryuzov and Savistsky and their underlings in the command center, Khrushchev in the Kremlin, Beerli—not that he was worried yet—in Oslo.

The Dvina had two boosters. The second would give out at twelve and a half miles, after which everything depended on ballistics and luck. In principle the missile’s fins would still have some purchase up there on the final, quiet yards of its trajectory. In principle the warhead
would detonate automatically when it came within two hundred feet of its target. But above twenty kilometers anything could happen. Or, as likely, nothing.

“We watched the two dots,” Voronov says, bringing his two old hands together above the table in his front room near the Black Sea. “And then we saw them hit each other.” In Moscow it was 8:53 a.m.

Powers felt it as a WHUMP. Not a bang or a crump, but a whump. It was not a word he would have used if he were making it up. He had made his left turn and noted down his speed and altitude and exhaust gas temperature when the sky went orange and the whump hit him in the back. “Good Lord,” he said to himself and maybe to his helmet. “I’ve had it now.” He knew the plane would probably break up, but for a few seconds it stayed in one piece. His right wing had dipped, so he pulled left on the yoke and seemed to be flying level again. Then his nose started dropping, so he pulled back on the yoke, but this time it kept on dropping and the aircraft started to describe a big, slow arc from the horizontal to the vertical, gradually losing all its forward speed and converting some of it to downward speed in the sickening inverse of a zoom climb, leaving Powers looking straight down at Russia and realizing he had probably lost his tail. Those five-eighth-inch bolts were not designed to survive a missile blast any more than he was.

Both wings tore off, and what was left of the U-2 started to spin, first nose down, then nose up, dragged earthward by its two-and-a-half-ton engine. Powers spun inside it, painfully, his body forced up out of his seat against his seatbelt, his helmet smashing against the inside of his canopy. His first thought was that he would have to eject, but the g-forces building in the cockpit made thinking hard and pushing back into his seat even harder. Something else was making movement difficult. His pressure suit had inflated. And something else again was nagging at the back of his mind. He was supposed to throw the self-destruct switches that would destroy the camera in the payload bay below him. So for a few long seconds of his life Frank Powers was wedged up against the canopy of an airplane that had lost its wings and tail, in a suit that was supposed to save his life but felt as if it were squeezing the life out of him, weighing strategies for getting out alive and keeping America’s most precious secret all at the same time.

Arcing over his legs, in front of his nose, was a titanium canopy rail.
The front edge of the removable part of the canopy slotted into it. If he could reach down between his legs and pull the eject cord right now, his rocket-powered seat would bust through the canopy, but nothing would bust through the rail, which looked as if it would cut his legs off somewhere above the knee. That much was knowable in the blur of sky and sensation that threatened to tip Powers into panic as his bullet-shaped black fuselage fell backward through 34,000 feet.

Thirty-four thousand feet was still an Everest and a half, but it was shrinking at ten thousand feet a minute. He had to think, to stop and think. That was more than an idea. It was a highly specific piece of advice from someone who had been through this sort of serious equipment failure and worked the problem and come out dangling from his parachute and not even too shaken up. (Jack Nole? Bob Ericson? Powers would thank whomever it was in his memoirs, though not by name.)

So he used some of the precious time he had earned by falling from such a great height to think, and in doing so he saved himself. He realized he didn’t have to eject. He could climb out. He opened the canopy by hand and was flung sideways into a freezing hundred-mile-an-hour wind rushing up at him from the fields around Kosulino.

Powers’s faceplate frosted up instantaneously. He was still connected to the cockpit by his oxygen tube, and the cockpit was still spinning, so he was spinning with it, on a lanyard. (The physical remnants of this moment are museum exhibits and black-and-white photographs, but they are photographs of the man in borrowed lounge suits and of his airplane in pieces. They scarcely convey the astounding fact that all this actually happened; that for a few seconds in May 1960, as the Western world slept and the Soviet Union tried simultaneously to celebrate the American spring and the triumph of international socialism, a fine young man from a small town in Virginia, with every good intention but no visa, was to be found tumbling toward Sverdlovsk in a fully inflated pressure suit, loosely connected to the dismembered fuselage of a U-2.)

He had not forgotten the destruct switches. By his own account he tried to pull himself back toward the cockpit to activate the seventy-second timer that, the Agency had promised, would give a pilot time to get clear before the two pounds of cyclonite explosive detonated. But the switches were hard to get at and the g-forces were too strong, he
said—and he was there. “And then I thought: I’ve just got to try to save myself now. Kicking and squirming, I must have broken the oxygen hoses, because suddenly I was free, my body just falling, perfectly free.”

For a few more seconds the body of the plane fell next to him. Then, at fifteen thousand feet, his parachute opened automatically. With time to think again, he pulled off his frozen faceplate. He considered using the poison pin on the way down but thought better of it. Why now? Escape was still conceivable, and if he tried it he might need the pin as a weapon.