by Mike Jenne
“Okay, honey, let me sort this out,” said Bea, sitting upright and crossing her arms over her chest. “So far, from what you’ve told me, you won’t be in California any more. You might not get a chance to go to MIT at all. You’ll be traveling almost constantly for the next three months, so we’ll rarely see each other. Do I have a good grasp on everything so far?”
Swallowing, he nodded and sipped from the glass of water.
Frowning, she stood up, walked over to the stereo, and turned it off. Pivoting back toward him, she said, “You know, I’m not a brilliant mathematician like you, dear, but this equation just isn’t balancing for me. As far as I’m concerned, the things that you’ve described are all minuses. What exactly is on the plus side? Am I missing something? Is this something that you volunteered for or was it dumped on you?”
“Bea, it’s really difficult to explain. Just about the only thing I can tell you is that the project I was working on has evolved into something that’s a lot more important. They asked me to come back to finish what I started. Beyond that, there’s not much I can say.”
“So you just want to shove everything behind a curtain marked “classified” and hope that I’ll eventually be the obedient little Air Force wife who doesn’t ask too many questions? You do know me better than that, don’t you?”
“I’ll tell you what I can when I can. But that’s not always going to be much.”
“Are you sure that this is what you want?” she asked. “Aren’t there any other options?”
“It’s the Air Force. It’s not the corporate world. Sometimes I just have to do as I’m told.”
“I guess that I would be more comfortable if I knew that it was what you were told to do, and not something that you volunteered for.”
“I volunteered to join the Air Force, so that’s sort of a moot point. Bea, I’m grungy and I’m dead tired,” he said. “I’ve been on the road for three days. I need to take a shower.”
“We’re not through discussing this,” she snapped.
Frustrated, he went into the bathroom, stripped off his clothes, stepped into the tub, and closed the plastic shower curtain. He took his time, luxuriating in the hot water and the momentary solitude. He meditated on how to make all these gears turn in unison. He wasn’t even married yet, but he was having tremendous doubts whether he could effectively balance being a husband while simultaneously living the strange and secretive existence he had chosen. Life would be a lot simpler if I had elected to stay in California, he thought.
Minutes later, with a white towel wrapped around his waist, he emerged from the bathroom to find her seated on the bed, waiting for him. She had obviously cooled off a little, since she seemed less inclined to argue with him. He turned towards the mirror to brush his hair.
“Well, gee, honey, those are certainly new marks to add to the collection,” she commented, pointing at some odd spots on his back. “Care to explain them, or should I even bother asking?”
Holding his arm over his head, he awkwardly contorted his upper body to examine his reflection. She was right. The intense stress of the centrifuge’s G-forces had ruptured a maze of capillaries in his back. His shoulder blades and back were dappled with miniscule purple splotches, none bigger than the diameter of a pencil eraser.
Gently poking the spots, she asked, “Do they hurt? What on earth makes marks like that?”
“I can’t say.”
“Can’t say or don’t know?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.
“Can’t say.”
“You know, Scott, I suppose I just should be thrilled that you’re not coming home with hickeys on your neck or fingernail scratches up and down your back. But I see these strange scars and marks, and I just can’t comprehend what it is that you’re involved in. I just wish that I understood. I wish that you could make me understand.”
I wish I could make you understand, too, he thought. He turned to her and held her close. “Bea, please trust me. I love you, and we’ll make this work. The next few months will be hard, but we’ll muddle through them together. You just have to trust me to know that this is very important, and not just for me.”
“I love you, too, Scott. I’ll try my best to understand. All I ask is that when you go away, that you always come back to me.”
“I’ll always come back to you,” he vowed, hoping that he could keep that promise.
34
VOMIT COMET
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio
10:10 a.m., Thursday, March 27, 1969
Over the intercom, the pilot announced that they were commencing the first parabola. Seated on the floor, in an orange flight suit and stocking feet, Ourecky leaned back against the padded wall and apprehensively clutched a strap. A veteran of several similar flights, Carson sat on the other side of the fuselage and watched him. Toward the rear of the aircraft, twelve trainees undergoing the weightlessness orientation course paid rapt attention to their three instructors.
Two G’s of gravitational pull cemented Ourecky to the floor as the KC-135A zoomed to altitude. The parabolic profile they were to fly resembled a series of waves; they would be weightless as the plane descended from the peak of one wave to the trough of the next.
As the plane reached the apex of the wave, the floor gradually dropped away, and he found himself hovering, sitting cross-legged in the air, like a Hindu swami who could levitate at will. Suddenly, he remembered his teenaged aspirations of becoming an astronaut, and what it was that had compelled him so strongly to fly into space.
Like an epiphany, he realized that it wasn’t the fantastic pictures of rocket ships in a glossy magazine or gazing through his telescope in hopes of glimpsing the rings of Saturn. What had motivated him so intensely was something that dwelled deep in his unconscious. It manifested itself in remarkably vivid dreams that had started when he was not quite six years old.
As a youngster, Ourecky dreamed that he could fly. In these recurring dreams, his flight was not an unusual event, but a sensation that felt as natural as walking. He could depart the ground whenever and wherever he saw fit, with no effort whatsoever, and effortlessly soar from place to place. He would zoom over the streets of Wilber, swooping just above the rooftops, and cut cross-country over the wheat fields and cornfields, moving unfettered by the constraints of Nebraska roads that ran at uniformly painful right angles.
As he flew, he believed if he were able to grab something—a leaf or a twig or even a feather plucked from a bird on the wing—and grasp it tightly in his hand, it would be there when he awoke, and his ability to take flight would pass from his dreams into the light of day.
That was a dream, but this was reality. Stretching out his hands and legs, he relaxed his body and floated about three feet from the padded floor. He swiveled his head and looked toward the rear of the plane. Some of the passengers were readily adapting to weightlessness while some appeared slightly distraught as they vainly struggled to swim through the air in the middle of the cabin.
Two men were so woefully disoriented that they snatched out the airsick bags tucked in the chest pockets of their flight suits, lending credence to the KC-135A’s label as the “Vomit Comet.” He looked across the cabin at Carson, who stood against the wall, wedging himself in place with his outstretched arms and legs. Carson was grinning from ear to ear, and Ourecky could only imagine that he was doing the same.
The respite from gravity lasted only twenty-five seconds, and then he settled back to the floor as the plane entered the trough of the wave. As the KC-135A rocketed upwards, Carson slid over and sat next to him. “Why did you stay jammed up against the wall?” asked Ourecky, tugging up a loose sock. “I can’t believe you didn’t just let go and fly. This is so amazing.”
“Oh, man, I was having a great time just watching you,” answered Carson. “I wouldn’t have missed that for the world. Ready for some more?”
“You bet. I could stay on here forever.”
“I hope you still feel that way in an
hour or so,” Carson said, laughing.
6:15 p.m.
Waiting for Bea to come home from the airport, Ourecky dozed on the couch. After his long day on the Vomit Comet, he was revisited by his childhood dreams of flight. He awoke to find Bea standing over him. He sat up and wiped a string of drool from his chin.
Unbuttoning her coat, she looked at him and laughed quietly. “So, Captain Ourecky, what sort of new scars or marks do you have this week? Rabies? Radiation burns? Broken bones? Malaria? Scarlet fever? Hives?”
Quickly reacquainting himself with solid ground and the oppressive conventions of gravity, he replied, “Nope. Nothing unusual this week.” He reached out and hugged her around the waist.
“Not even a paper cut or fever blister? Hanging cuticle? Athlete’s feet? Halitosis? Should we notify the White House? Call the Pentagon?” She took off her coat and draped it over the coffee table.
“I don’t know what was passing through that head of yours, but you had the biggest smile on your face,” she said, sitting down beside him and mussing his hair. “If I didn’t know you any better, I would have thought you were smoking something. You looked positively euphoric. What in the world were you dreaming about?”
“I dreamed I could fly,” he replied, still smiling. “I always dreamed that when I was a kid.”
“So you fly in your dreams, huh?” said Bea, grinning. She giggled and added, “Meet me in the bedroom, darling, Maybe afterwards you’ll have something else to dream about.”
Trailways Bus Station, Washington, D.C.
9:35 a.m., Saturday, April 12, 1969
As he waited in the pouring rain to board the bus, water dribbled from the prominent nose of Anatoly Nikolayevich Morozov. He did have an umbrella, but it was old and only barely serviceable. Its crook handle was missing and three broken spokes drooped uselessly. There were so many holes in the worn fabric that he might as well have been holding a sieve over his head.
Finally, after enduring the deluge for several minutes, he climbed up the stairs of the bus, awkwardly clutching his sopping pressboard suitcase to his chest. His glasses, beaded with raindrops, were all but useless as he fumbled for his ticket. The driver sighed as he waved him to the rear.
Negotiating the narrow aisle, Morozov found a pair of vacant seats near the back of the crowded bus. He jammed his suitcase into the luggage rack and swung into the window seat. He had purchased a newspaper to occupy his time for at least part of the trip, but now it was a soaked completely through, unfit for anything except perhaps to produce a child’s papier-mâché.
He carefully laid the wet newspaper on his lap, smoothed it flat with his hands, and glanced at the headlines on the soggy front page. In their renewed offensive, Communist forces had shelled forty-five towns and bases in Vietnam. A Mideast peace plan, offered by King Hussein of Jordan, was rejected by Israel, even though the plan recognized the existence of Israel. Another article reported that Egyptian and Israeli forces had exchanged fire over the Suez Canal. China and the Soviet Union were still skirmishing over their shared border.
He gazed down at his shoddy Soviet-made shoes; waterlogged, their flimsy soles of pressed cardboard were literally starting to peel off. Thankfully, he did have an extra pair of footwear—made in America, no less—in his suitcase, along with a simple but serviceable wardrobe purchased yesterday at a Goodwill thrift store in Alexandria, Virginia.
To further pile insult on injury, water dripped from his suitcase overhead, spattering onto his bald crown. He considered shifting to the adjacent aisle seat, but then a pimply-faced American girl occupied it. Lugging an Army duffle bag emblazoned with peace signs and Marxist quotes, she wore filthy blue jeans, a ratty black T-shirt, and metal-framed granny glasses with rose-colored lenses. Obviously still in her mid-teens, she was likely a runaway from a suburban home, probably on her way to a peace rally, love-in or some other drug-fueled gathering of misguided youths.
The girl stuffed her duffle bag underneath the seat, frowned at Morozov, and immediately opened a well-worn copy of Tiger Beat magazine. Minutes later, the bus backed out of the station, wound its way through the crowded streets of the nation’s Capital, and then gradually proceeded towards the northeast through the suburbs of Maryland.
As he rode, Morozov looked out the rain-streaked window and contemplated how he came to be here, seated alongside a gum-smacking teenybopper. Although he passed himself off as an industrial supplies salesman, Morozov was actually a major in the elite GRU—Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye—foreign military intelligence directorate of the Soviet military.
Born in 1939 in a little town just outside Stalingrad, Morozov had been a young child during the terrible years of the German invasion and post-war deprivation. His greatest hero was his father, Nikolae Nikolayevich, a sergeant who had lost his legs in the valiant siege against the German Sixth Army. Existing on a meager pension and the kindness of strangers, reduced to begging after he was unable to return to his pre-War work as a railroad switchman, his father had always insisted that it was important for a man to know his place in the world.
Growing up in rubble-strewn streets, Morozov had not known a day without hunger before he was drafted into the Army in 1957. Assessed with higher than average intelligence, he was selected for officer training and then subsequently chosen for the elite ranks of the GRU. As such, he had travelled far from the banks of the Volga River where he had scampered and scavenged as a child, spending the last five years assigned to the GRU’s resident office within the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC.
His father would be delighted with him, because Morozov certainly knew his place. He was painfully aware that his GRU contemporaries had left him in their wake; he patiently marked time as they moved on to positions of greater responsibility and strategic significance.
Although posted to one of the premier foreign assignments within the GRU, he was still a mediocre third-tier intelligence operative, deemed not yet sufficiently seasoned to handle his own network of sources. Tolerated by his superiors because he was a master of paperwork and administrative minutia, he was only considered adequate to do the menial tasks and scut work necessary to support the operations of the more accomplished spymasters.
After his half-decade in purgatory, Morozov was finally granted an independent assignment. Although it didn’t seem to be a task of vital importance, at least he would be doing something in the field. Currently, there was a worldwide obsession with flying saucers and UFOs; the GRU was keenly curious to discover what the Americans knew about alien spacecraft. There were persistent rumors that the US Air Force actually possessed at least one UFO, which supposedly crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. According to unconfirmed sources, the damaged craft was secretly conveyed to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. Probably not by coincidence, the Air Force was also home to Project Blue Book, whose officers investigated claims of UFOs by pilots and civilians. The GRU wanted to know more about Project Blue Book, so Morozov’s boss—Colonel Federov—was sending him to Ohio to quietly investigate.
Blue Book, he mused. Flying saucers from Mars. Sighing, he looked at the newspaper in his lap and scanned the new items about Vietnam. He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes. Vietnam. That’s where he should be right now, instead of this fool’s errand in Ohio; an advisory tour in Hanoi was a sure ticket to rapid advancement within the GRU. But alas, here he was, on a stinking Trailways bus westbound for Ohio, listening to the incessant gum popping of his adolescent fellow traveler and desperately wishing that he was dry and warm.
35
SERE
Auxiliary Field Ten, Eglin Air Force Base
7:25 a.m., Monday, April 14, 1969
With his flight suit completely soaked with sweat, Carson had forgotten how just brutally hot Eglin could be. The SERE—Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape—classroom was a squat tin-roofed building with two small windows, no air conditioning, and one fan. Situated in a remote corner of the Aux One-Oh compound, it could have
readily been a setting for the highway camp in Cool Hand Luke. He knew that the next two weeks wouldn’t be appreciably different than a chain gang’s; there was little to look forward to but excruciatingly long days and minimal sleep, and then it would get much worse in the third week. He didn’t particularly relish the thought of spending the next three weeks here, especially since he had already suffered through this course before, but his underlying motivation was to be here for Ourecky.
He observed that the place had changed little since last summer. The walls were plastered with brightly painted placards that spelled out the Code of Conduct and parts of the Geneva Convention pertinent to the treatment of prisoners. A map of North Vietnam was pocked with a multitude of red dots—like measles on a child’s face—depicting known POW camp locations.
Ten other men were here for the course. Four were Navy pilots, apparently assigned to the same squadron. They were vague and close-lipped about their mission; when asked, they mumbled something about being involved in reconnaissance, but divulged little else.
The instructor, an athletic captain assigned to the 116th, loudly cleared his throat and spoke. “Welcome to the SERE Contingency Course. This course focuses on survival in extreme circumstances. Here at SERE Contingency, we’re not going to sit around the campfire at night strumming guitars and singing “Kumbaya.” We don’t show you how to snare Bugs Bunny, crochet afghans out of parachute shroud lines, catch fish, build teepees, start fires, or any of that touchy-feely stuff you should have learned at the “greenie” survival courses. You’ll learn evasion tactics to avoid capture, how to survive in captivity, and also what actions to take in the event of a rescue operation, either before or after you’re captured. If you pay attention, you’ll live. If you don’t, your family will likely receive a neatly folded flag to display on the mantle.”