He set off in that lumbering gait appropriate when wearing a skintight pressure suit, walking a few yards to the black lady, whose extraordinary wingspan of eighty feet always startled him, the more so as the dawn light exaggerated its huge wing-spread. He was helped into the cockpit and, strapping himself in, he began his checklist. He had virtually committed to memory his flight plan, but he reviewed, with exactitude, everything. Among the items to be checked was the destruct mechanism. In order to activate it, you needed first to flip the switch marked ARM. This switch energized the second switch, marked DESTRUCT. Seventy seconds after flipping the Destruct switch, an explosion would take place in the camera section of the aircraft, designed to destroy all the photographic evidence but not to damage the pilot, in the event he had not yet pushed his ejection button. But procedure stipulated that before each flight the pilot should check the timing mechanism, because the seventy seconds were inexact. Accordingly, Blackford triggered it while observing his watch. The timer went off at sixty-five seconds. He had established what he needed to know exactly.
There was no communication with the tower, but Colonel Sharpies, standing to one side with Singer and two mechanics, looked up from his watch and, with his thumb stretched up, motioned to Blackford that he was cleared to go.
Taxiing in the U-2 was awkward, though not nearly so much so as landing. In order to save weight, the designer hadn’t equipped the aircraft with the conventional tricycle landing gear. Instead it had four wheels. Two, permanently a part of the plane itself, were arranged bicycle-like along the bottom centerline of the fuselage. The larger of these was situated just forward of the wing’s leading edge, ahead of the engine’s weight. It bore the main load. The second wheel was very small and located well aft, just ahead of the tail structure. At each wing tip, on a rod extending toward the ground, was a small wheel called a “pogo.” The U-2 kept itself level by means of these while taxiing and preparing to take off. Once airborne, both pogo wheels and their rods simply dropped away, while the two permanent wheels pulled up into their internal compartments, streamlining doors closing over them. The permanent wheels took care of landing—until air speed was lost, whereupon the heavier wing, as with a glider, grazed the ground, but with no damage done to the wing. Once down, of course, the U-2 couldn’t get back into the air without fresh pogo wheels.
The aircraft needed a mere one thousand feet of runway. A spectacular feature—Blackford had told Singer to watch for it—was the speed and verticality of its launching trajectory. It would climb at nearly two miles per minute. Instantly on takeoff, it would raise at an angle better than forty-five degrees. “In three minutes,” Blackford said, “you won’t be able to see me—you watch.”
He brought the aircraft into the wind at the runway’s end and looked out one final time at Singer, to whom he raised his hand. He gunned the motor, and twenty-two seconds later he was airborne. He brought the plane around to an azimuth of 320 degrees and headed toward Harbin, in Manchuria. Reaching cruising altitude, he could discern the shape of the entire Korean archipelago. In a matter of minutes, he could see the concrete congestion of Vladivostok.… The sky was cloudless. The sun, now low to his right, would duck behind him when, reaching Harbin, he began to veer westward. And on reaching Manchouli, where his instructions told him to begin filming, he would turn west, and would look away from the sun for the balance of the trip.
No extraordinary winds were predicted, and prevailing winds had been factored into his flight plan.
The U-2 traveled at Mach .7, which is to say seven-tenths the speed of sound, or 537 miles per hour. These were statute miles. The nautical mile being fifteen percent longer, Blackford would travel at 456 knots, reaching Harbin 109 minutes after takeoff, which had been at 0702. At Harbin he would slip into the next time zone west of Tokyo. On reaching Manchouli, at latitude 117 east, he would still be in the—8 zone. That section of the flight was calculated at 59 minutes, so that the two legs combined, at 168 minutes, meant that the sun would be only a little higher off the eastern horizon than it had been at takeoff time.
Kyakhta would mark the halfway point in his flight over the frontier of Mongolia. He had a radio signal for Kyakhta, which in any event would be easy to spot, lying as it does south of the midpoint of the enormous Lake of Baikal. To Kyakhta would take 56 minutes, and indeed the local time would be a few minutes before 10 A.M. On that leg he would gain over the sun. From there he would head to Zyranovsk, though he would stay south of it, closer to the Chinese frontier. At Zyranovsk, in the heart of Soviet Kazakhstan, the time would be approximately twenty minutes before ten: yet a little more headway on the sun. From Zyranovsk he would need to change his heading from west to southwest—specifically, to 223 degrees—in order to reach Alma-Ata and effect his rendezvous with the Russians. That flight would take him 52 minutes in addition to the time consumed in his planned series of flameouts. By the time he was on the ground—at approximately ten o’clock local time, Alma-Ata—he would be at 76 degrees 55 minutes east longitude, lying squarely in the middle of—5 time zone. Approximately as far from Greenwich, England, on this side as New York City is on the other, and, Blackford ruminated, only about a hundred miles farther north. What was the weather like in, oh, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in early April? Well, about the same as at Alma-Ata, if you allow for about a thousand feet extra elevation, over in these parts.
Although he could not take sustained time from navigation and the constant checking of the instruments, he thought back in patches on the weekend in Bermuda. The plane—it had proved convenient to fly from New York, as Sally was lecturing at Columbia—had been jammed with Ivy Leaguers. The rugby teams from Yale, Princeton, Harvard, and M.I.T., together with assorted inamorata, were bound for Bermuda for the spring holiday, featuring a rugby tournament, seven days at the Elbow Beach Hotel (for the girls), a thousand hours of exposure to sun and salt, and an appreciable depletion of the island’s reserves of beer, Shetland sweaters, and prophylactics. Blackford felt a generation removed from an expedition in which he had participated as recently as ten years earlier. He had looked up and down the aisle at the girls—chatty, self-confident, cheerful, pleasure-bent, handsome—and at Sally, lovelier at age thirty than anyone else in the aircraft, with that distinctive air of authority, a kind of blonde gentle intelligence, with her sense of participating in two worlds, only one of them available to Blackford.
He thought back, then, to entering their cottage, the porter carrying the two heavy bags. They were registered as Mr. and Mrs. Partridge, “Blackford Partridge” having received a guest card courtesy of his mother Lady Sharkey, in London. It had never before been exactly that open with Sally. They had shared bedrooms together for ten years, but this time, under these auspices, there was a certain disquiet, he remembered, and at first she hadn’t spoken, fussing instead with the unpacking. He left to go to rent motorbikes, and when he returned, his bag had also been unpacked, and she was dressed in tennis shorts, sitting in the little living room, reading.
That night they dined in the candlelit room overlooking the ocean, and lingered over the buffet and the wine. Sally talked, and he replied, and he talked, and she replied, and everything either said led to something else. Blackford was tan from the days in Nevada, Sally red from the day’s bicycling. He stared in utter appreciation of her distinctive beauty, once again remarking that little aloofness that made her so desirable; and she stared at the beautifully shaped man she loved, who was also her closest companion, with whom, for reasons they could never quite articulate, the ultimate consummation of marriage somehow did not materialize. Always there was a reason. The convention was that the burden was his, the professional preoccupations. In the year with the architects, that glibness wouldn’t any longer serve. He wondered whether, tonight, or tomorrow, the subject would arise. He could not bring himself to broach it, not today, three days before his departure for Tokyo. A warm air came on them as they sipped their liqueurs. She wished to go down the long staircase to
the beach below, and he followed her. They doffed their shoes on reaching the beach, and, hand in hand, walked southwest, silent now. Blackford found himself measuring the frequency of the light on Gibbs Hill, which, had it existed with that intensity over the past centuries, might have saved one hundred ships from destruction on the legendary reefs. She had stopped, suddenly, and drawn him to her. His hands began to move, and her body was more than pliant. They moved into the shade of the moon, up against the steep embankment. Blackford closed his eyes. And opened them to check the speed gauge, and make a minor adjustment on the trim tab. The mountains below were sending up thermal currents that reminded him he was flying, essentially, a glider.
The following day, on the north end, they took, together, a lesson in scuba diving. It was, of course, wretchedly easy for Blackford. So much was, had been, easy for him. He was impatient with the instructor’s repetitions—why did he have to be told more than once that when he felt pressure on his eardrums, he should hold his nostrils together and blow out until the pressure dissipated? Sally had been a little apprehensive. She did not take naturally to the water, and once asked the instructor—a grizzled, wiry man with hair bleached by the sun, whose beefy face and solid paunch suggested a continuing attachment to the liquid way of life—about sharks, and Henry had said that everybody asked about sharks but more people get killed in Bermuda riding bikes than get bitten by sharks in the whole Atlantic. That approach was the wrong one to use on Sally, whose mind was obstinately logical, because of course she replied to Henry that all he had succeeded in coming up with was the reminder that riding motorbikes in Bermuda was dangerous, that she knew this intuitively; what she was interested in was, why wouldn’t sharks attack her? Blackford had managed to change the subject, and an hour or so later they were in thirty feet of water, and he began to feel the exhilaration of the underwater experience, and looked anxiously to see whether Sally shared the experience, but she seemed preoccupied with the gauges, and he could tell from the bubbles coming from her tank that she was breathing less than naturally. But with her light hair trailing in the current, even with the face mask that gave her a proboscis and the tank and harness that made her, viewed from one particular perspective, look like a diesel truck, she was, Blackford thought, somehow distinctive. Like no one else. Would she attract the sharks?… Would he attract the MIGs? Surely no MIG would interfere with Rufus’s carefully plotted Marco Polo? He raised his sextant and looked at the chronometer. The radio triangulation was correct, or nearly so.
The next evening they spent on a rented sloop. The wind was an obliging northerly, so Blackford had undertaken to go out Hamilton Harbor and pursue the tortuous channel, to duck into the harbor at St. George’s, which they reached three hours later as the sun went down. He eased into the shallow water on the left side of the channel and threw out the hook, and the little 36-footer nosed whinnyingly up into the wind as he dropped the mainsail. The air was both cool and balmy, and Sally had set out to light the charcoal fire on the grate suspended over the aft pulpit. He watched her, so competent in so many matters, using two or three books of matches, dousing the charcoal with one of those squirt cans guaranteed to turn a block of ice into a roaring fire. The radio was on and the musical beat seemed to grow more exotic as the sky grew hot with color. Blackford had stood in the cockpit, a rum drink in hand, saying not a word, tapping his foot to the beat of the music. Waiting. It paid off. She had suddenly looked up at him. He remembered that expression: only twice before had she permitted herself the look of a supplicant. He smiled, whisked the roll of paper towels from the dispenser, walked aft and with it picked up two pieces of charcoal. He took them below where he lit the stove, situating the charcoal in a slotted ladle. In four or five minutes the charcoal was red hot, and he brought the ladle carefully back to the cockpit and poured the burning coals into the recalcitrant mound. Ten minutes later the coal fire was burning, and ten minutes after that she put the steaks on, and ten minutes after that, the sun having now left only the embers of twilight, she was in his arms as, episodically, they watched the progress of the steak, their passion burning elsewhere.… He could now see the western end of Lake Baikal.
He would need to come down quickly, but not too quickly. There had been considerable discussion on the point with Rufus and area specialists. To descend very slowly would be to run the risk of the aircraft’s being shot down. A U-2 had been dispatched over Alma-Ata from Peshawar to examine the antiaircraft facilities. At one point Rufus considered a night landing, to lessen the possibility of the plane’s obliteration. “If the plane is shot down,” Rufus had said, in his normal analytical mode, “we run the risk that precisely the evidence we want them to find will be destroyed—if they make a direct hit; or if the plane nose-dives to the ground. You would have bailed out, of course. But if you arrive down with complete documentary evidence of your flight, they’ll wonder why you didn’t destroy it.
“No, I think you’d better come down together, fast, and far enough away from Alma-Ata to lessen the likelihood that any of their SAMs would reach you going down. The granger on the plane should give you pretty good protection against the possibility that long-range radar would guide fighter pilots to you …”
Then he stopped. One of his legendary pauses. Finally: “… though what would be absolutely ideal from our point of view,” Rufus’s face brightened—“would be for a couple of MIGs to guide you down. Take you prisoner from the air. Force you to come down at their airfield.” Rufus had become quite excited by the possibility, which he then honed. “You could come down, climb out of the plane, and set off the destruct unit.”
“That sounds really exciting, Rufus. I climb down off the plane, and seventy seconds later the tail section with the camera blows off killing one general, three colonels, and four Heroes of the Soviet Union, though perhaps the general is merely blinded for life. That’s what I call a really soft landing, all right.”
“You have a point.” Rufus made a note. The following day after telephone discussions with a demolitions expert, Rufus said, as he, Blackford, and Singer were driving to the Aberdeen Proving Grounds:
“They’ve set up a facsimile, rough but reliable, of the structure of the tail end of the plane. We’ve reduced the explosive from the regular three pounds to one pound. Let’s see what happens.”
What happened was a very orderly explosion indeed, rather like a pistol shot through a silencer. The camera within which the explosive was lodged was destroyed, but even the light-skinned carapace of the aircraft was not penetrated. It was that quantity of explosive that Blackford now had on board. In such circumstances there would be no opportunity to destroy the abundant evidence of his log, his charts, the radio signals, all of which would readily betray his itinerary.
“At ten A.M. the Russian MIGs would have good visual contact with you, and wouldn’t panic about having to fly into the sun. They would probably try to talk to you from the tower over the emergency channel. You would at that point merely indicate that you were prepared to follow instructions.”
“And if the MIGs don’t materialize?”
“There’s every reason to suppose they will. Remember, they’re hot and bothered in that whole area, and north of it, about the U-2S, which are driving Khrushchev crazy, and he’s hungry to get his hands on one. The activity out of Peshawar has been intense. If they know that you’re down at an altitude where they can tell you what to do, I don’t think it likely they’d shoot you down.”
Blackford agreed. Still, there was the contingency that no MIGs would show up. In that event, it was decided, Blackford would land the airplane on suitable terrain, destroy the camera, and use his time methodically to destroy his log and charts. But a duplicate set, so to speak a carbon copy, marked “Cmdr. Detachment 10-10, Peshawar” would be lodged in the flap pocket of the cockpit. “These,” Rufus said, “you would simply have forgotten to remove and destroy.”
Blackford and Singer and Rufus spent four sessions on the variables. Blackford appr
oved the plan, but insisted that in the event he came down unescorted, a defect-on-command must be contrived—to account for the failure of the engine to reignite on reaching lower altitudes.
Aberdeen came up with one. When an aircraft suffers a flameout, it noses down for richer air, on contact with which the pilot flips on the Air Ignition switch. That switch, behind the instrument panel, leads to an “AN” (Army-Navy) connecting plug. If that critical connection is incomplete, the firing mechanism becomes inoperative. The engineers at Aberdeen drilled a small hole on the U-2 instrument panel of the plane Blackford would fly, and threaded a fishing line through it and around the connector. Blackford, when resolved finally to descend, would pull both ends of the line, attached to a ballpoint pen for leverage, long enough to effect permanent disconnection—which disconnection would later be assumed, by the autopsists, to have been the result of sloppy maintenance procedures. Having pulled on the double line until the disconnection was effected, Blackford would need, as a housekeeping chore, merely to pull one end of the fishing line, which would snake the whole of it back through the cable into his hands. The little screw hole in the instrument panel, through which the line had been inserted, would be topped by a conventional snap-in plug. If the hole were subsequently explored, its true purpose would not likely be imagined. Blackford would be left with two or three feet of fishing line, which he could quickly wrap around his navigation pencil as though to give him a better finger grip.
Blackford studied the plan and was satisfied that, on the way down, he could simulate repeated failures to refire the engine.
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