Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep Above (Apollo Quartet) (7 page)

Forty minutes later, the C-130 rolls down the runway, props buzzsawing, and rises ponderously into the air. The landing-gear folds neatly away, the aircraft banks gently to the right and heads north for Rochester, New York, where the Eastman Kodak film processing centre is ready to recover whatever imagery is possible from the film stacks.

Speed is of the essence as no one is sure what is happening to the film in the surface-pressure cold water in the shipping container. After all, the bucket has been on the bottom for over a month, where the pressure is four tons per square inch. The C-130 gets a priority slot in the Greater Rochester Airport landing pattern, and as soon as it is on the ground, it taxies towards the military terminal in the south quarter of the field. The rear ramp lowers and the refrigerator is pushed out by the cargo master while the two spooks stand by and watch. An unmarked civilian Ford C-600 box truck drives up, followed by a forklift, the refrigerator is loaded into the back of the truck, which leaves the airport, takes Route 47 into Rochester, and then Route 104 into the city centre and the Eastman Kodak film processing plant beside the Genesee River.

Inside the centre, the film stacks are transferred to a refrigerated tank of water prepared weeks before. The remains of the bucket are carefully removed, and the stacks are opened and the film strips examined. Sea water has caused the emulsion gelatin to expand, and this has kept the centre of the rolls of film sealed. Technicians carefully despool the film and those sections of it with recoverable images are dried and then developed. Of the 52,000 feet of film, roughly one tenth has survived and is capable of being processed. The rest is unusable.

The two CIA men oversee the development process, and when the first 8 by 12 photograph slides out of the film processing machine, one of the spooks steps forward and grabs it. He passes it to his colleague, and they both shrug in puzzlement. The photograph appears to show a vast army base outside a city, but neither of them recognise the city or the base. It is certainly not in the US.

The final set of developed photographs and fixed negatives are packed into a secure briefcase. A Ford Galaxie sedan takes the CIA men back to Greater Rochester Airport, where a civilian Bell 205 waits for them on the apron. They clamber into its passenger compartment and buckle themselves onto the bench seat. The pilot turns round and gestures at his headphones. The spooks take the headphones hanging on hooks beside their seats and fit them over their heads.

After one of the spooks has slid the door shut, the helicopter takes to the air and flies south. The CIA headquarters are 293 miles away, a two-hour flight. One of the CIA men clutches the briefcase containing the photographs from the sunken bucket on his lap, the other stares out of the window at the passing countryside. Neither talks, nor pays much attention to the voice of the pilot and various air flight controllers in their headphones.

The heliport at CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia, has the FAA code 84VA, it is one hundred feet by one hundred feet. The Bell 205 settles squarely in its centre and before the rotor has even stopped turning, the CIA men have jumped out and are running bowed toward a black Dodge Polara sedan waiting at the edge of the pad. The car takes them to the entrance to the headquarters, where they are met and escorted to a photographic analysis office. There is a palpable air of urgency—before leaving Rochester, one of the spooks called his supervisor and told him what the photographs showed.

It takes a team of analysts only thirty minutes to identify the city in the photographs as Shenyang in north-east China, 100 miles from the North Korean border. According to present intelligence reports, there is only a typical military presence in the city, but the photographs from the spy satellite say otherwise. Worse, at least half of the military vehicles assembled at the base do not display the red star of China but the white star of the USSR. There are Soviet T-64s and BMP-1s and SA-9 Gaskins on BRDM-2s and FROG rockets on their transporter erector launcher trucks, and Chinese Type-63 and Type-69 tanks and what looks like Chinese-badged Soviet troop carriers and trucks, lots of trucks. At a nearby airfield are Soviet Tu-95s and Tu-22s and Tu-16s and MiG-21s and Su-17s, and Chinese H-6s and J-7s. It is a vast Sino-Soviet task force, and it appears poised to enter North Korea. The area has been at peace for over a decade, but this will clearly not remain true for much longer. An invasion of North Korea is worrying, but a military pact between China and the USSR is greater cause for concern.

News of the intelligence unearthed by the sunken bucket from the spy satellite flies up the chain of command. The director calls the president, the joint chiefs of staff are informed. A meeting is arranged in the Pentagon, and another in the White House.

The peace has always been precarious and it seems it is about to be rudely shattered. This cannot be allowed.

Something must be done.

STRANGE

The giant swept-wing Convair B-60 bombers roll along the taxiway at Eielson AFB outside Fairbanks, Alaska. As each one reaches the end of the runway, they halt and wait for permission to take off. The roar from their eight J57-P-3 turbojets is immense, a tsunami of noise that sweeps across the air force base, shaking doors and rattling windows. As each aircraft is given clearance, it begins to trundle forward, huge and seemingly incapable of flight, gathering speed until the great silver shapes slowly unstick from the earth, rising elegantly and effortlessly into the air. The great bogies of their landing gear lift up and into the wings with a series of thunks and whirrs, and the jet bombers power up into the white polar sky, trailing four lines of brown smoke, gradually fading from sight into the limitless distance.

The Convair B-60 has a combat range of 2,920 miles, but it is just over 3,600 miles to the North Korean border with China. The bombers will be met en route by KC-135 Stratotankers out of Clark Air Base in the Philippines for mid-air refueling, both on the flight to China and on the flight home.

Within the 171-foot length of the B-60’s fuselage, the crew of ten keep a weather eye open for attacking aircraft. They are in constant contact with Tin City Air Force Station on Seward Peninsula, the most westerly point of land on the North American continent. But they do not know who they should be looking for, Chinese or Soviet. They know only that the massive concentration of forces just north of the Korea border cannot be permitted. The nine megaton B53 nuclear bomb in the bomb bay of each aircraft will see to that.

The US has not been at war since it pulled out of Korea in 1953, and it is not about to see that conflict re-ignited... even if it means using nuclear bombs to prevent it. But the joint chiefs of staff and the president have determined that nothing less will be effective against such a large enemy force.

The B-60s power through the arctic sky, their contrails invisible in the white haze. At an altitude of 53,000 feet, they are above the cumulonimbus cloudbase, and their cruciform shadows run dream-like across the pillowy landscape below. It is peaceful and serene up here, and though the muffled roar of the turbojets is a constant reminder, each crew-member can forget the purpose of their mission, the destruction they have been ordered to wreak, and instead focus on the greater aim, their pursuit of the greater good.

They are peacemakers—and like all effective peacemakers, they are effective because they carry a big stick...

And they are not afraid to use it.

BOTTOM

The term “bathyscaphe” was coined by Swiss inventor Auguste Piccard in 1946. After achieving the highest altitude ever reached by a human being in 1938, using a stratospheric balloon, Piccard turned his attention to the depths of the sea. The Trieste was the third bathyscaphe designed by Piccard, and was completed at a shipyard in Trieste—hence the name—in 1953. It comprised a large float containing a liquid of lighter density than water, typically gasoline, water ballast tanks and two hoppers of steel shot. Beneath this float hung a steel pressure-sphere seven feet in diameter, in which the crew of two travelled. Piccard lived and worked in Belgium, and was Hergé’s inspiration for the character of Professor Calculus in his Adventures of Tintin books.

After extensive use in the Mediterranean, in 1958 the Trieste was sold to the US Navy. In January 1960, after fitting a new and stronger pressure-sphere, the Trieste descended 35,767 feet to the deepest known part of the Earth’s oceans, Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, a feat not matched until 2012.

After the Challenger Deep dive, the bathyscaphe had its original pressure-sphere put back, was given a new float, and renamed the Trieste II. In June 1963, the bathyscaphe was used to help search for the wreckage of the USS Thresher. The first in a new class of nuclear-powered attack submarines, the USS Thresher had sunk with all hands in 8,400 feet of water off the coast of New England during sea trials. After further modifications, including yet another new float, and a new pressure-sphere rated to 20,000 feet, the Trieste II was used in October 1967 to gather data on the wreck of the USS Scorpion, a nuclear-powered submarine which had sunk in 9,800 feet of water 460 miles south-west of the Azores.

On 1 June 1971, the Trieste II was officially placed in service, having previously been listed as “equipment”. She was classified as Deep Submergence Vessel 1, and made part of an Integral Operating Unit with the USS White Sands, an auxiliary repair dock, and the USS Apache, an ocean-going tug.

It was as part of this IOU that the Trieste II was sent in September 1971 to an area of the Pacific Ocean just north of Hawaii.

During the Cold War, both the USA and the USSR operated a number of spy satellites in orbit. These overflew enemy territory and took photographs of sites of interest to their respective nation’s intelligence services. During the 1960s and early 1970s, neither television nor the radio transmission of imagery was at a sufficiently advanced level for this job. As a result, the satellites carried film cameras, and once the film had been fully exposed it was, in US spy satellites, jettisoned and fell to earth in a specially-designed re-entry vehicle, called a “bucket”. These safeguarded the film during their fall to earth, much like a space capsule. And, also like a space capsule, the bucket would release a parachute in order to slow its descent. However, rather than splash down into the sea, the bucket would be caught in mid-air by an aircraft fitted with a special hook, typically a USAF JC-130 Hercules flown by the 6549
th
Test Group out of Hickam Air Force Base on Hawaii.

On 15 June 1971, the latest in the line of Keyhole spy satellites, the KH-9 HEXAGON, was launched from Vandenberg AFB, California. An improvement on earlier KH satellites, it carried four buckets, and 175,601 feet of nine-inch film. Five days after launch, the satellite ejected its first bucket, containing 40,000 feet of film. Due to a damaged parachute, it was not retrieved in mid-air, but allowed to hit the water and sink. Divers then retrieved it. The second bucket, ejected on 1 July, carried 52,000 feet of film and was successfully captured in mid-air. During the recovery of the third bucket, on 10 July, the parachute snapped off and the bucket hit the sea and sank in almost 20,000 feet of water. The final bucket was successfully retrieved by a JC-130 on 16 July.

The retrieved footage was so superior to that produced by previous spy satellites the CIA decided to try and salvage the sunken third bucket. They approached the US Navy, who proposed using the DSV-1 Trieste II bathyscaphe.