North Cape (4 page)

Teleman made the necessary final corrections and keyed the program into the computer. Seconds later the aircraft broke out of its orbiting mode and headed westward on a course that would

intercept the go° meridian. He would pick up the meridian over Uedineniya Island in the Arctic Sea, less than seventy-five_ miles from the Soviet Mainland of the Taimyr Peninsula. He would then cross the Soviet Union from north to south at 150,000 feet with negative 4 radar disruption to avoid Soviet observation.

For the next hour Teleman sat staring out the observation slit at the frozen wastes of the Arctic slipping past below. He sat and stared and thought about the coming mission. He had no qualms about performing it, had no questions about its importance. But he was puzzled about the motives involved on either side. It was not spelled out in the orders, but years of intensive. training, covering a good bit more than flying this aircraft, had taught him that he must seek the reason behind anything the opposition did. He knew that he could not rely on the busy clerks and service officers in the State Department to read the correct interpretations into the intelligence that he gathered, It was, by its very nature, often nothing more than a broad overview. And then again, sometimes, the most minute details were found that brought the entire picture into focus. The trouble with the State Department. was its size. Its thousands of employees were all too often engaged simply in running a bureau where forty thousand people worked. His own agency had fallen into the same pattern of late.

There were just too many people involved, too many in decision-making positions, too many incapable of making the correct decisions or, for that matter, any decisions at all. Too many that spent all of their time pushing their own ideas, interpretations, and motives no matter how they conflicted with the evidence at hand. Nor were the problems of bureaucracy the problems of the United States alone. The interrupted mission to locate the new Soviet electronics research center after its recent move was a prime example. The present theory popular in his agency was that A. Sovulov Semechastky had been responsible. Semechastky was Second Party Secretary and he had come up the hard way in the new generation of Soviet leaders. He also had a son who was general manager of the Electronics Assembly Plant No. 2 in Magnitogorsk. The cocktail talk around Moscow was that Semechastity had been pressured by his son to shift the location of the research center closer to the assembly plant, ostensibly for reasons of efficiency. Covertly, for reasons of increasing family power. Several million rubles would be spent in making such a

change, but it was reportedly common knowledge that Semechastky, Jr., was about to be named the new director of the research center.

Teleman could confirm the rumor by photographs from 120,000 feet that would identify the make, model, and, if lucky, the license plate number of the automobile in the factory manager's parking space.

Teleman sighed. Such was the stuff of modern spying. License plates from 120,000 feet. He knew that he must look for similar signs along the Kazakh-Sinkiang border. In the meantime, he had nearly six thousand miles to go and it looked like a long day. He keyed the computer and PCMS into action and slept.

In 1964, as the A-11 project—later to become the SR-71, Fighter Interceptor in an attempt to cover up its reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering role—came to conclusion, it had become extremely clear that the United States was badly in need of a stopgap method of acquiring intelligence information beyond the limited capabilities of the original SAMOS project. SAMOS was a classified Air Force satellite system, launched from 1958 to 1972 from both Cape Kennedy and Vandenberg AFB near Santa Barbara, California. Always shrouded under heavy secrecy, SAMOS—and later the expanded ADVANCED SAMOS—had one and only one objective: to keep an eye on Soviet and Red Chinese territory.

The state of the art in photographic techniques, lenses, and films in the early part of the project's life was such that only fairly gross data could be obtained. The SAMOS

satellites were at first limited to one-hundred-nautical-mile orbits in an equatorial path that covered, at best, only limited portions of USSR territory. But as more powerful launch vehicles became available and as the Vandenberg launch site was completed, the SAMOS satellites were launched with increasing frequency into polar orbits of altitudes from six to ten thousand miles, which provided coverage of Communist territory every two hours. By increasing the number of satellites in orbit and launching them into carefully prepared, overlapping orbits, complete coverage every three minutes was obtained.

Sensor technology increased quickly as industry was funded for billions of dollars. From the first crude infrared and black and white

lenses, which were limited to coverage of open,, daylight, cloudless territory, faster films, computerized programing, sensitive day-night television cameras, tape storage, and widely dispersed, secretly located mobile and fixed ground stations continually received microsecond-duration transmissions that were impossible to locate and fix, and relayed them to a central, monitoring station deep in the Virginia hills. From there, especially prepared abstracts were transmitted to Washington. But, even with sensors able to photograph a Russian guard sneaking a smoke on duty at the Number 3 gate at Kasputin Yar, or record the identification numbers on the locomotive and each of the freight cars moving along the Trans-Siberian Railroad with supplies for the naval base at Vladivostok, there were often, all too often, sites and areas spotted that needed further investigation,

In the 19505, before the SAMOS satellites were available, this Portion of the job had been performed in large part by a series of aircraft, the three most important of which were the U-z and the reconnaissance versions of the B-47 and B-66. But in 1960, just prior to the ill-fated Paris Summit Conference, a U-2 had been shot down over the Soviet Union with a new type of missile. Nikita Khrushchev had used the incident to stop reconnaissance flights over Soviet territory. For some years after, the U-z had continued to be operated over Red Chinese territory by the Nationalist Chinese, in spite of the everincreasing number of the outmoded aircraft shot down and destroyed. By the late 196os, both the United States and the USSR realized .that the continual surveillance of each other's territory by their respective "spy-in-the-sky" satellites was doing a great deal of harm to their defense efforts. Such a great deal of harm that both nations on differing occasions were able to report such incidents as the explosion of a nuclear test rocket and the resulting destruction of a complete test complex—and several key officials—in the Soviet Union, and the similar explosion of the highly secret nuclear rocket-engine project at jackass Flats, Nevada, before the capitols were aware that the disaster had occurred,

As sensor technology improved, steps were taken to move highly classified work into underground or camouflaged locations not visible to the spying satellites. It was this problem that brought several key officials, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Chief of Staff, the secretaries of State, and Defense, and the president of a large aircraft corporation together in the President's office in late 1967. From this meeting had come the decision to build an aircraft that would carry many of the same sensors that were incorporated in the Advanced SAMOS. The aircraft to be designed would have long loiter time—on the matter of days rather than hours—coupled with high speed and an extremely high altitude ceiling, well beyond the range of high-altitude antiaircraft rockets.

For two years the lights had burned twenty-four hours a day on the back lot of the aircraft plant, the same lights that had burned for the U-z and the A-n. Only the two hundred men virtually hand-building the aircraft ever knew what was being built, and of these, only five knew the reason why. A specially constructed and programed computer was used to design and refine the basic structure of the aircraft taking shape in the " skunk works," as the back lot was known. Shotgun-carrying security guards were in evidence at all times, hard bitten men from the AP's. They brooked no attempts to cross the gate and were as likely to level a shotgun at a general as a wandering employee. It was contrary to normal American industrial security procedures, usually unobtrusively present, but it was thought better to be safe than sorry.

On the day the aircraft was rolled out, shrouded in nylon and airlifted to Edwards Air Force Base, there was no celebration, no rejoicing over a job well done, only relief that it was at last out of the plant and gone. A Lockheed C-141 flew the parts of the aircraft to the desert flight-testing base at the foot of the Sierra Nevadas, and it was quickly rolled Into a hangar and disassembled, then trucked deeper into the Mohave to' Gillon Advanced Test Site on the northern rim of the desert. Here, in a specially constructed and closely guarded base annex; the aircraft was reassembled and the testing begun. Teleman's first look at the aircraft came on a day three years after he had signed his contract with the CIA and entered training. Previously, he had served as a reconnaissance pilot with the U. S. Air Force during the Vietnamese war, with some eighty-three missions to his credit before the armistice. He was a bachelor, with no more than the usual family ties and a fierce devotion to his country that had been tested and found fully complete in a North Vietnamese prison camp. His three years of training, covering a range

of subjects from aeronautical engineering to geopolitics, and including education equivalent to a masters degree in the psychology of political power and government structures, had taught him more than he had ever suspected there was to learn. Teleman stood in the hangar that August day, feeling the fierce heat of the Mohave sun burning down on his back. It was nothing compared to the white heat of excitement generated by the sleek black needle of an airplane that reached back into the gloom of the hangar.

He shook his head wonderingly as he walked back along its DC-9 length. The body was 120 feet long, yet nowhere was it more than eight feet in diameter. The fuselage carried the distinctive contours of a supersonic aircraft: a pinched waist, Coke bottle shape halfway along its length. The wing began less than ten feet from the tip of the nose. Starting at a width of half an inch, it grew to two feet at mid-length, where it then flared out into a severely flattened and cambered parallelogram. Twin vertical stabilizers rode the wing, reaching four stories toward the ceiling of the cantilevered hangar. Each was demurely painted with the symbol of the United States, a six-by-nine-foot representation of the American flag. Other than that red, white, and blue flag, the aircraft was a gleaming black, a deadly killer whale of an aircraft for all that she was completely unarmed.

Teleman climbed the ladder affixed to the fragile side, half expecting the fuselage to collapse under his weight. He wriggled down into the cockpit and stretched out in the same acceleration couch he had sat in so many times in the mock-up at Eglin AFB. Every instrument, every control was exactly where it should be. With eyes closed he ran through the complete check-out of the instrument and computer panels. The only difference that he could detect was the complete satisfaction of sitting in the actual aircraft rather than the fiberglass and plywood mock-up.

Teleman was the first to fly the A-17. She was rolled out the next day and he climbed into the cockpit again and wriggled down into the couch, feeling the soft push of the oilfilled cushions against his back as the couch adjusted itself to his body. He made the first flight without the PCMS—the Physiological Control Monitoring System—in operation and the aircraft was all his to control. Teleman taxied to the far end of the runway and set the brakes. Then he ran the engines up slowly to full-military-rated thrust. The two great Pratt & Whitney TRR-5e turbo-ram-rocket engines took two minutes to build thrust to the maximum allowable for takeoff, nearly 53,000 pounds apiece. Teleman lay in the acceleration couch wondering at the tremendous vibration that shook every rivet, every seam in the entire aircraft until his teeth ached. Then he released the brakes. And in spite of its two-hundred-thousandpound dead weight, the A-17 bounded forward. He was off the runway before he realized it. Automatically his body went through all the motions: gear up and locked, engines throttled back to low cruising speed of 47o knots, ground control tuned to 126.6 Mc, eyes sweeping the instrument panels. All instruments were reading into the green, and for a moment he ignored the check list and concentrated on getting the feel of the aircraft.

While the chase planes took up their stations around him, he tentatively tried the control system and whistled excitedly as the A-17 responded with all the firmness of an F-4

Phantom. Then test control was on the radio demanding to know if he had started through the check list yet. Regretfully he dropped back into the proper pattern while his two chase pilots, one on either side, grinned at each other from their stations well back and below his tail assembly.

For the next year, Teleman got to know the A-17 better than he had ever known any other aircraft. Under the supervision of the design engineers, he took apart and reassembled the aircraft. Then he took the A-17 up for hours on end, always flying the same tight pattern at one hundred thousand feet, well above the allowable levels for commercial planes. Gradually, as he came to know exactly what the airplane would do, flight altitudes and speeds were increased until he was flying routinely at Mach 5 and two hundred thousand feet.

Now he was nearly on his own. He spent so many hours in the aircraft that without the log he would have lost all count. Of the hours spent cramped in the cockpit, sitting in the closely guarded hangar flying computer-devised emergency conditions, he did lose track. At the end of the year he came to feel that the A-17 was an extension of himself. And then the medical people moved in to make it so.

It had been recognized when the A-n cum SR-7i. was completed that man had just about reached his limits in controlling his own aircraft. The A-n was capable of Mach 3 and nearly Mach 4 by