by Mike Jenne
Their conversation was interrupted by the radio squawking, “Control, this is Taco Two Six. Angels Two Zero. Two minutes from release.”
The sergeant replied, “Taco Two Six, I copy you are at Angels Two Zero and two minutes from release.”
“Lights,” ordered Wolcott quietly.
The sergeant spoke a few words into the radio, and almost immediately the entire area was dark. All the runway markers were doused, as well as all the lights on the compound next to the runways. Several men lit red railroad flares to mark the edges of the dirt assault strip.
“Taco Two Six is one minute out.”
With the lights extinguished, the sergeant’s face was barely visible in the glow of the radio dials. “Taco Two Six, this is Exercise Control. I copy that you are one minute from release point. Break, break, break . . . All stations, all stations, all aircraft in the vicinity of Eglin Air Force Base, be advised that paradrop operations are currently in progress in a five-mile radius of Aux Field Ten, twenty thousand feet AGL to surface. All aircraft are directed to remain clear of this airspace.”
“Control, this is Taco Two Six. Thirty seconds. Request clearance for release.”
Gazing up into the darkness, Ourecky glimpsed the faint red and green anti-collision lights of the C-130. It was about four miles away, flying west to east above the Florida Panhandle.
“Taco Two Six, Control, I copy you are thirty seconds away. Airspace is cleared. You are cleared for release.”
“Control, this is Taco Two Six. Copy cleared for release. Thank you.”
A new voice came over the radio: “Control, this is Chase One. In position.”
“Chase One, I copy that you are in position.” The sergeant turned and translated the chatter for Ourecky. “Taco Two Six is the C-130 making the drop. Angels Two Zero means that he’s at twenty thousand feet. Chase One is an OV-10 Bronco trailing Taco Two Six. He’ll observe the drop. Call sign for the paraglider test vehicle is Ultra Zero One. Here at Eglin, the Ultra call sign designates an unpowered aircraft.”
The C-130 pilot spoke. “Control, this is Taco Two Six. Count down to release. Five, four, three, two, one, Mark. One package away. Stand by, stand by, stand by.”
“Control is standing by for confirmation of release,” stated the sergeant, keying the radio handset.
“Control, this is Taco Two Six. My loadmaster reports that the package is clear.”
“Control, this is Chase One. Package in view. Drogue is deploying . . . drogue is deployed. Paraglider is deploying. I see longitudinal struts inflating and cross strut inflating.” After a few tense moments elapsed, Chase One reported, “Paraglider appears fully deployed.”
Except for a slight buzz of static, the radio was silent for a few minutes. A terse voice finally broke the silence; Ourecky recognized the speaker as Agnew. “Control, this is Ultra Zero One. Receiving TACAN on Channel Six. Command pilot reports that paraglider deployed correctly and is fully controllable with nominal steering response.”
“Ultra Zero One, Control, copy TACAN on Channel Six and paraglider deployed normally.”
Several minutes passed as the men gazed out into the night sky. Ourecky saw the running lights of the twin-engine Bronco spotter plane, but had yet to spot the paraglider. Straining to find the unpowered craft, he cupped his hands around his eyes to shield out the red glare from the railroad flares.
“Don’t look directly at the chase plane right now, pardner,” advised Wolcott. “Scan more to the right. They’re flyin’ a right-handed pattern to our north. Carson will fly parallel to us west to east, then swing around to land east to west.” Wolcott unzipped a fabric case and pulled out a PVS-2 “starlight scope.” The starlight scope—which amplified ambient light from the stars and moon—was brand new technology and was only now being delivered to combat troops in Southeast Asia. He flipped a switch on the device; it hummed audibly as he held it up to his eye.
Ourecky looked to the north and finally distinguished a dark shape as it passed over and blotted out bright stars. Against the stark black sky, the paraglider and Gemini mock-up weren’t discernible shapes, but just a vague blob sailing through the night.
“Control, this is Ultra Zero One, turning right to base.” Ourecky recognized Carson’s voice.
“Ultra Zero One, I copy that you are turning right to base leg,” replied the sergeant.
A few moments later, Carson spoke again. “Control, this is Ultra Zero One, turning right to final. Field in view. Gear down and locked.”
“Control, this is Chase One. I confirm that Ultra Zero One’s gear are down and locked.”
The sergeant responded: “Chase One, good copy. Ultra Zero One, Control, copy gear down and locked. Winds from Two Two Zero at three knots. Surface is packed earth. Ultra Zero One, you are cleared to land on Assault Two Seven.”
“Control, this is Ultra. Copy winds from Two-Twenty at three, cleared to land on Assault Two Seven.”
Finally, Ourecky glimpsed a shadowy object gently gliding toward the assault strip. He heard a gentle popping sound of the fabric wing. He could barely make out the outline of the Gemini mock-up suspended under the paraglider. The dark apparition reminded him of an immense raptor, returning from a nocturnal hunt with a terrified rabbit clutched in its talons.
“Contact light. Flaring paraglider,” reported Carson.
As it drew nearer, the rear of the paraglider drooped sharply downwards as the pilot intentionally stalled it to increase its braking effect. Suddenly, a loud scraping noise confirmed that the object had made contact with the runway.
“Releasing paraglider,” stated Carson. As the jettisoned paraglider fluttered to the ground, the Gemini mock-up continued to slide down the dirt strip, trailing a shower of sparks.
Startled, Ourecky nudged the sergeant and asked, “Did something happen to his wheels?”
“Skids,” replied the sergeant. “He doesn’t have wheels. Just skids.”
Once the mock-up had come to rest, Carson’s voice came over the radio. Laughing, he said, “Ultra Zero One on Assault Two Seven, waiting for taxi instructions.” A few seconds passed, and he added, “Be advised my right-seater got kayoed on the landing.”
“Jack, ask him if Major Agnew is injured,” said Wolcott, switching off the starlight scope and slipping it back into its rubberized case.
“Ultra, is your right-seater injured?” asked the sergeant.
“Control, this is Ultra. Yeah. It looks like he didn’t brace properly and smacked his face on the controls. He’s conscious now but sustained a pretty nasty gash to his forehead. I think he’ll need a few stitches.”
Wolcott whistled lightly and commented, “We’ll forgo the remainder of this evening’s drops, buckaroos. Jack, I’ll ride with Agnew to the dispensary. After you dismantle everything, would you be so kind as to shepherd the lieutenant back to our hangar?” He slapped Ourecky lightly on the back. “Ourecky, I’ll see you up in Ohio next week.
“I’ll see you there, sir.” Shivering slightly in the cool night air, Ourecky looked toward Wolcott; the older man’s silhouette was outlined by the red glow from the sputtering marker flares. In the strange light, he looked almost surreal, like a demonic apparition. Ourecky felt an awkward urge to salute the retired general but let it pass. The two shook hands and parted company.
6
INSOMNIACS
Aerospace Support Project
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio
11:53 p.m., Thursday, April 18, 1968
Air Force Brigadier General Mark Tew sputtered awake from a sound slumber. He rubbed his bleary eyes before consulting his Timex watch: the faint luminous hands reflected that it was seven minutes before midnight. He had been asleep for slightly less than an hour. As had been his routine for the past five years, he would lie down for another nap in five hours and then repeat the cycle throughout the day.
Yawning, he pushed aside a thin blanket, swiveled upright on the canvas Army cot, pulled on his blue cotton bathro
be, slipped his feet into soft suede moccasins, and then padded into the adjoining office that he shared with his deputy, Virgil Wolcott.
Tew opened a Mosler safe behind his desk, removed a highly classified intelligence summary of some recent ominous developments in the Soviet Union, and resumed his nocturnal chores. He sat down, switched on a desk lamp, stretched, closed his eyes, and thought about how he came to be at Wright-Patterson and why he felt so compelled to work at all hours of the day and night.
He attributed his irregular sleeping habits and intense work ethic to his former boss at Air Force Systems Command, General Schriever. Besides his legendary intellect and movie star looks, Schriever was renowned for his uncanny ability to function for days on end without regular sleep. He maintained his inexorable pace by periodically sneaking catnaps. He conditioned his closest subordinates to do likewise, counseling them to always grab a few winks before making any crucial decisions or attending any important meetings. During their stint at AFSC, Tew and Wolcott had relentlessly pushed themselves, striving to keep pace with their exalted boss, snatching rest when they could, like combat infantrymen who learned to doze on the march.
In truth, to imply that they merely worked for General Schriever was not nearly an accurate description of the relationship; they were sworn acolytes of the man. AFSC was the development hub for the nation’s strategic arsenal of ballistic missiles, but Schriever had directed Tew and Wolcott to focus their energies on the military’s role in the rapidly expanding universe of space exploration and exploitation.
In their eyes, if there could be a god of military space programs, like a focused god of Greek mythology, then Schriever was the one who set the stars in the firmament—and then adjusted their brightness and clarity so that they could be seen by lesser men. But all comparisons to ancient deities aside, a more tangible indicator of Schriever’s tremendous reach and power was the fact that he personally controlled almost forty percent of the Air Force’s budget before he retired two years ago.
Though their recent work was largely theoretical, Tew and Wolcott were intimately familiar with the sacrifices of war and the fragility of peace. As B-17 bomber pilots in World War II, they had witnessed close friends blown to pieces right before them. They had seen massive planes instantly transformed into shredded aluminum, flame and smoke. And while they didn’t see it with their own eyes, they were very conscious of the death and devastation wrought by the ordnance they rained on cities below.
After the war, Tew shifted from bombers to fighters. He much preferred the personal one-on-one nature of fighter combat to the cold impersonality of strategic bombing. In 1950, assigned to the Fifth Air Force in Japan, he flew an F-80 Shooting Star against North Korean MIGs after Communist forces crossed the Yalu River. He later transitioned to the F-86 Sabrejet, and by tugging a few strings, he succeeded in bringing his friend Wolcott over as well, and the pair piloted F-86’s for the remainder of the war.
After Korea, in the post-war heyday of aerospace research, Tew’s career followed in Wolcott’s wake. Despite the homespun demeanor reminiscent of his Oklahoma upbringing, Wolcott established a reputation as a practical thinker who could envision new ways to exploit the new technologies arriving at the forefront. What he lacked was the capacity to match fiscal realities and bureaucratic constraints to his ideas. In counterpoint, Tew had mastered the arcane arts of managing budgets, designing organizations, and doing those things necessary to bring Wolcott’s lofty concepts from the drawing table to the skies. They existed as a symbiotic pair, closer to one another than they were to their own wives.
But much to their chagrin, the two had been burdened with a string of troublesome projects. In the late fifties, they had toiled on an effort to build a nuclear-powered bomber, capable of flying from the United States to the Soviet Union and back without refueling. But extensive technical problems—especially the lack of a nuclear reactor light enough to be safely carried aboard an airplane—eventually led to the program’s cancellation in 1961.
After the demise of the original incarnation of Blue Gemini, the pair was transferred to Ohio’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to work on the X-20A Dyna-Soar. Dyna-Soar, short for “Dynamic Soaring,” was envisioned as a winged, reusable space plane that would be launched on a rocket booster, execute missions in space, and then return to earth as an unpowered glider. Had it come to fruition, Dyna-Soar would have performed several potential roles: Hypersonic flight research, inspection of hostile satellites, strategic bombing, space logistics and reconnaissance.
McNamara closed down Dyna-Soar in December of 1963. Afterwards, Tew and Wolcott were assigned to the Manned Orbiting Laboratory project at AFSC. The MOL was one of the Air Force’s premier projects; it was considered of such strategic importance that General Schriever himself was tapped to be director of the project, in addition to his regular duties as the commander of AFSC. Finally, they had hitched their wagon to a rising star, and returned to California from their exile in Ohio.
Even after Schriever retired, the MOL was still gathering momentum and was well on its way to becoming reality. Unlike the other pie-in-the-sky schemes that Tew and Wolcott had labored on, MOL hardware had actually left the ground; launched from Cape Canaveral, a Titan IIIC had carried a mock-up MOL into space in 1966. Thirteen military astronauts—ten Air Force pilots, two Navy aviators and one Marine aviator—were diligently training for MOL missions.
As much as Tew and Wolcott hated leaving the MOL project, Blue Gemini was a task tailor-made for the duo. The very notion of a Soviet Orbital Bombardment System had terrifying implications. Once it was even marginally operational, the Soviets could rain down bombs on the United States without warning. The whole idea scared the crap out of US strategic planners.
As luck would have it, even as Khrushchev uttered his tacit threat in 1961, the Air Force had already been developing a robotic satellite interceptor—SAINT—to counter Soviet reconnaissance and other potential threats from space. Unfortunately, the intercept mission was proving to be far too complex and unwieldy for an unmanned system. A technological nightmare, the incredibly complicated SAINT was like a Rube Goldberg contraption gone awry. By the time it was cancelled in late 1962, SAINT was well on its way to becoming a bigger flop than the Ford Edsel.
Even though SAINT fizzled out, everyone still recognized the need to shoot down hostile satellites. The Army devised an anti-satellite system on Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific, called Project 505, based on their Nike-Zeus surface-to-air missile. In a competing effort, known as Project 437, the Air Force positioned Thor IRBMs on Johnston Island near Hawaii. Both systems would launch nuclear warheads on sub-orbital trajectories to destroy hostile satellites.
The Army’s Project 505 was eventually shelved in favor of Project 437. Project 437 was actually tested with live nuclear warheads launched in 1962 under a program called Starfish Prime. Despite a launch accident that contaminated a large portion of the remote island with radioactive debris, the lessons of Starfish Prime were myriad, but not entirely positive. When one of the tests inadvertently caused a massive electrical blackout in nearby Hawaii, it lent scientists their first glimpse into the crippling effects of the electromagnetic pulse—EMP—that accompanied nuclear explosions.
Another lesson was that while it was entirely feasible to use a nuclear warhead to destroy an enemy satellite, it was by no means a precision option. A nuclear detonation in space carried the risk of destroying everything in its vicinity, including friendly satellites. This was very significant, because outer space was increasingly becoming an extremely crowded place. Besides potentially hostile satellites, there were also legitimate research satellites, weather observation platforms, and communications relays. Additionally, there was an abundance of sheer junk—discarded boosters, miscellaneous debris, and dead satellites—whizzing around overhead. Looking up from earth, even with the most advanced optics and technology, it was virtually impossible to discern what was a valid threat and what was not. But despite its li
mitations, Project 437 was designated as an operational system, with a fixed launching pad and support facilities permanently stationed at Johnston Island.
In the years after Khrushchev’s ominous speech, a general consensus evolved that it was just another saber-rattling bluff, mostly because no one believed that the Soviets possessed the technology to follow through on an OBS. After all, just last year, they had signed the Outer Space Treaty, which unequivocally banned nuclear weapons in space. It made perfect sense for them to sign the Treaty if they didn’t have the technological horsepower to orbit weapons in the first place. Of course, thought Tew, the Soviets’ gesture was rather meaningless, since they hadn’t demonstrated any great propensity to abide by any other treaties that they’d signed.
In recent years, the game had shifted to peaceful competition in space. But although the Soviets fervently asserted that they had no desire to militarize space by stationing nuclear weapons in orbit, intelligence was slowly filtering out that indicated they still intended to do just that.
As Hugh Kittredge had indicated, recent evidence clearly showed that they had been pursuing an OBS the whole time, and up until very recently, they had successfully hidden their efforts from the intelligence services of the Free World. Why were they so intent on orbiting nuclear weapons? It appeared that the Soviet leadership was deathly afraid of the growing strategic arsenal possessed by the United States. They were particularly concerned about our sophisticated ICBM capabilities, especially the submarine-based missiles that they could not effectively monitor or counter. Desperate, the Soviets realized that a space-based system was the only way that they could ever hope to achieve strategic parity, especially if the United States abided by the treaties and they did not. And so, since desperate measures call for equally desperate countermeasures, Blue Gemini was born.