Eyeball to Eyeball (Final Failure)

by Douglas Niles

  For now, the famed revolutionary seemed content with Tukov’s expression of gratitude. “I want you to think of me as an able assistant, ready to help you in any way I can,” Che concluded, his handsome face creased into a cheery smile. “If you have need of anything, anything at all, please do not hesitate to ask.

  “Thank you, Comrade Che,” Tukov replied, happy to see his visitor heading back to his jeep.

  “Viva la Revolucion!” Guevera declared as his driver fired up the engine.

  “And long live your homeland, and mine,” Tukov replied.

  He said the last words in Russian.

  0950 hours (Sunday morning)

  McCoy Air Force Base

  Central Florida

  The most difficult part of a U2 flight was arguably the landing. Those long wings caught so much air beneath them that at the high-atmospheric pressure near the ground, they almost refused to relinquish their grip upon the sky. So the CIA pilots, and their Air Force colleagues, had come up with a unique tactic to overcome this last bit of resistance. A spotter on the ground would race along the runway behind the plane as it settled for a landing, radioing precise instructions to the pilot related to exactly how much distance remained between the U2’s wheels and the tarmac.

  Since no military ground vehicle was fast enough to perform this task, the various bases hosting U2s had resorted to a rather colorful variety of civilian cars. Heyser had never landed at McCoy, so he was curious as to what sort of vehicle his spotter would employ.

  The major glided toward the runway at less than 100 feet of altitude, aligning his flight path with the long strip of concrete. Tuning his radio to the local frequency, he spoke into his helmet mike. “This is flight 3101, ready for landing. Do you read me?”

  “Copy loud and clear, Major. Do you see me—off to port, gaining speed now?”

  The pilot looked out through the clear canopy as the plane, still slowly descending, gliding on virtually no engine power but still at a ground speed of some 150 miles per hour, crossed over the end of the runway about a dozen feet above the ground. He saw his spotter at once. It would have been hard to miss the fire-engine red Corvette convertible, with the top down, accelerating from the side. One airman, no doubt an experienced sergeant, drove the car, while the landing officer perched on one knee in the passenger seat. His left hand clutched the top of the windshield while the other held a microphone to his mouth.

  “I’ve got a visual,” Heyser reported.

  “Good, Major.” Even through the crackling microphone, the pilot could hear the wind roaring around the speaker’s face. “You’ve got eight feet of clearance under your gear, now seven. Hold her steady.”

  He flew over the car but knew it was racing to catch up as his speed dropped to 140, then 130 and on down, as he fought to bring the airplane down to the ground.

  The fatigue of the long flight made itself known as Heyser kept a firm grip on this stick, trying to will the slender airplane onto the runway. He had to settle gently because, as another weight-saving measure, the U2 was not equipped with standard, very sturdy landing gear. Instead, a pair of lightweight wheels, not unlike those one would see on a bicycle, extended directly below the cockpit, while a smaller pair of similar wheels dropped from the tail. Since the wingtip support struts had been left on the field at Edwards, the wingtips themselves were protected by metal skids that were intended to prevent damage once they sagged to the tarmac. By then, of course, the airplane would be traveling fairly slowly.

  Finally the pilot felt contact with solid ground, and he rolled along, gradually decelerating, for more than a mile. The wings, as expected, slowly settled until both tips touched ground at the same time, a perfectly balanced landing. A screech of noise accompanied by a shower of sparks exploded from each skid, but the additional friction quickly brought the U2 to a rest.

  “Perfect, Sir—very well done!” exclaimed the landing officer as the Corvette rolled past at a gentle fifty miles per hour or so. “Welcome to McCoy, Major, and I will see you at the hangar.”

  “Thanks for the escort,” Heyser replied, watching the flashy red sports car speed away.

  An Air Force maintenance crew came roaring toward him in a “deuce and a half” truck. The vehicle skidded to a stop beside the aircraft, and three enlisted men hopped out. Two lifted the starboard wingtip while the third quickly installed the strut to hold the wing off the ground. Moments later, they repeated the process on the port wing. Thus supported, Heyser goosed his jet engine with a little more power and taxied the U2 toward the line of hangars.

  When he finally scrambled from the cockpit, he was met by the landing officer, a first lieutenant who had jumped out of his Corvette to greet Heyser with a crisp salute. Behind him stood a USAF major and a captain, and a pair of men in civilian clothes. Enlisted men swarmed under the fuselage, hastily opened the camera bay doors, and wasted no time in extracting the canisters of film. The two senior Air Force officers picked up the small cans from the tracking camera and started off at a fast walk, while the pair of civilians wrestled the heavy rolls from the B camera onto a dolly.

  “How was the mission, sir?” asked the landing officer.

  “Easy. A milk run,” Heyser replied honestly. He watched as the film was hurriedly readied for transport. The civilians started rolling the dolly toward a small transport jet at the next hangar.

  “What gives?” the pilot asked his fellow officer, indicating the men in suits. “Aren’t they taking all the film to Omaha?”

  “Orders,” said the lieutenant. “Part of the deal we made with the CIA. The tracking film goes to our boys at Offut. But the detailed stuff from the B camera, that’s going straight to D.C.”

  2110 hours (Sunday night)

  “The Press Club” Lounge

  Washington, D.C.

  Stella wasn’t sure she should believe her eyes, but she felt pretty certain that she recognized the man in the black suit who had just walked into the bar. She excused herself from the group of reporters she’d been talking to and went over.

  “Bob?” she said. “Bob Morris?”

  He turned, holding the mug of beer the bartender had just drawn for him, and blinked in surprise. “Stella?” he replied in obvious recognition. She couldn’t help noticing that he seemed very happy to see her. “Stella Widener. Wow, it’s been…well, a really long time.”

  “Since our senior year at Alexandria,” she said, remembering back to a high school period that seemed like it belonged to a different woman’s life. “You took me to homecoming that year,” she reminded him.

  “Don’t think I don’t remember,” he said. “We graduated together that spring—class of ’50.”

  “Don’t remind me!” she said with a laugh. “That was twelve years ago!”

  “Sorry,” he replied sheepishly. “It was a long time, but I remember it like yesterday. You were—you’re still—that is, you look amazing. How are you? What are you doing?” A short hesitation, a glance at the bare fingers of her left hand. “Are you married?”

  “That’s a lot of questions, more like me than you, I think. Which I guess answers your middle question first: I’m a reporter. I started with the Boston Globe, now I work for NBC here at the Washington bureau.” She tried to keep the pride out of her voice—in fact, she’d been the first female reporter hired by any of the national networks. “And I’m well, I guess, and no, I’m not married. What about you?”

  “Not married!” he declared hastily. “And I’m working for the Secret Service. I got hired by Treasury out of college, and I’ve been there ever since.”

  Her reporter’s senses tingled. “Are you in the anti-counterfeiting branch?” she asked disingenuously.

  “No.” Now it was his turn to be proud, she saw—and he was less adept at hiding the fact than she hoped that she had been. “I’m with the White House. Presidential Detail.”

  “Wow! Congratulations Bob—that’s wonderful.” She really was impressed. At the same time, she was keenl
y aware of an opportunity to add a source to her notebook, if she went about it carefully.

  “And you—NBC, huh? I knew you’d make good, somehow. That must be fascinating work now. We live in interesting times.” His tone turned wistful. “I never saw you after graduation, you know. What happened to you? I stopped by your house that summer, but your family had moved.”

  “The life of a Navy brat,” she said, truthfully. “Dad got transferred to Pacific Fleet and moved the family to Pearl Harbor. Of course, I didn’t stay there long—I went to Harvard in fall. You were destined for Georgetown, if I recollect, weren’t you?”

  “I’ve never strayed too far from home,” he admitted. “But dang, I’m glad to see you. Listen, can I buy you a drink? Do you have plans for dinner?”

  “Yes, and no,” she said with a genuine laugh. “You always were quite the gentleman,” she added. “That homecoming dance, that was my first kiss.”

  He chuckled, an easy, genial sound. “I think it was for me, too,” he admitted. “So how about we go to this nice steak house I know, just around the corner. I’d love to get caught up with you.”

  “Me, too,” Stella said. “Let’s go.”

  She did remember that kiss, vividly. And she realized that she wouldn’t mind picking up right where the two of them, twelve years earlier, had left off.

  These were interesting times, indeed.

  15 October 1962

  0410 hours (Monday early morning)

  National Photographic Interpretation Center

  Washington, D.C.

  The B camera film had been developed by the Navy’s high-speed lab in Alexandria. Even so, the process took most of the night, so that the transparencies didn’t arrive at NPIC until nearly dawn. The NPIC director, Arthur Lundahl, had been called at home around midnight with an alert to be ready, and he and several of his staff were already in the office, waiting, when the Navy courier with the sealed, heavy envelopes, arrived.

  “Quite the neighborhood,” the petty officer commented, after he’d climbed the stairs to the second-floor office.

  “Makes good cover for a secret installation, doesn’t it?” Lundahl said as he signed receipts for the images. Indeed, the NPIC location looked rather scary from the outside. Located above a rickety, struggling Ford dealership at the corner of Fifth and K Streets in northwest Washington, it meant visitors had to kick aside cans, newspapers, and the occasional sleeping drunk on the sidewalks just to make it to the building. The stairway to the second floor was barely illuminated, and the railing frighteningly wobbly.

  Yet the door at the top was heavy steel, set into a reinforced frame. And inside that door was the most modern photographic analysis facility in the world. The NPIC was truly Art Lundahl’s baby: It had been born at the same time as the U2 aircraft became operational, and the reconnaissance plane and the analysts’ lab made for a perfect match.

  Over the last seven years, Lundahl had installed the most advanced equipment and assembled the most skilled staff available. And they had only gotten better with experience. Teamwork was stressed, and the personnel included both military and civilian. Over time, they had learned to glean incredibly detailed bits of information from the seemingly most innocuous details taken by an aerial photographer.

  The rest of the staff had been notified of a high-priority job, and the men had all assembled by 6 a.m. An analyst from the CIA and another from the Air Force took charge of the pictures that Heyser’s U2 had taken over San Cristobal, and throughout the morning they began to spot crucial details.

  “These are SAM sites, here,” the CIA man, Gene Lydon, pointed out when Lundahl came over to check on their progress. “Looks like they’re fully operational now, but on the last round of pictures, from August, they’d just started construction. Somebody’s been very busy down there. You can see they’ve installed the launchers in the same six-pointed star shape that they use in Mother Russia herself, which usually means they’re protecting something in the middle of that circle.”

  “In the homeland, that’s how they post them around airfields, army bases, and strategic rocket sites,” Lundahl remembered.

  “But here, this—this is the interesting part,” interjected Jim Homes, of Air Force Intelligence. He pointed to a blurry area in the middle of a circle of the SAM launchers. “You see these six trailers, here? They’re pretty damned long. I think we have us some missiles—missiles that are a helluva lot bigger than the SA-2.”

  Within minutes, other analysts were pulling out voluminous books containing data on Soviet missiles, while the first two men carefully took measurements from the photos, using the known scale to determine the exact length of the trailers and their pencil-shaped cargoes. The men at NPIC had distilled a great deal of intelligence about Soviet missiles systems, from sources as varied as public displays such as the May Day parades, where the missiles were shown to the masses—and to visiting dignitaries and intelligence agents—to aerial reconnaissance of Russia. Some of the data almost certainly came from spies, since it contained detailed reports of the equipment needed for each type of missile, as well as the procedures for fueling, aiming, and firing the rockets.

  The technicians used delicate calipers to measure the exact length of the objects in the photos and compared those lengths to the catalogue. By mid afternoon, the conclusion was obvious.

  “We have an installation of SS4 Sandals,” Homes reported grimly. “medium-range ballistic missiles. They can only have come from the USSR.”

  “All right,” Lundahl acknowledged. He’d come to the same conclusion himself but had held his suspicions private in order to avoid influencing his analysts. It was nearly 5 p.m. “Fellows,” he announced. “Call your wives and tell ’em you won’t be home for dinner tonight. I think we have an all-nighter in front of us.”

  At 5:30, Lundahl put a call through to the Deputy Director of Intelligence at CIA, Ray Cline. He summarized his findings in flat, emotionless terms.

  “Okay, we’re going to need to move fast,” Cline replied. “I’m going to call McGeorge Bundy at the White House to give him the heads up and see how he wants to proceed. I think it’s safe to say we won’t be sitting around on this.”

  “I thought not,” Lundahl agreed, knowing that the National Security Advisor would take great interest in, and feel a great deal of alarm about, these pictures.

  “You’re going to need to prep some briefing boards,” the DDI said. “Can you have them over here at 7:30 tomorrow.”

  “I’m working on them right now,” Lundahl replied. “They’ll be ready.”

  “Good,” Cline answered. “Get an hour or two of sleep if you can. I have a feeling you’ll be taking those boards to the White House sometime tomorrow.”

  16 October 1962

  0245 (Tuesday very early morning)

  Sleepee Time Motel

  Fayetteville, North Carolina

  “Did anyone ever tell you, darlin’, that you have really gorgeous tits?” Greg Hartley asked the pretty blond who was perched, somewhat unsteadily, on the side of his bed.

  He meant every word of it, too. Those breasts had been the first things he’d noticed about the young waitress who’d served him a burger and French fries at the diner near Fort Bragg, just about eight hours ago. Her name was Misty something, he’d learned, and she was free after her shift ended at 8. And she was a girl, she let on, who liked to have fun.

  “I may have heard that somewhere before,” she admitted, giving her chest a little shake. Hartley had found it hard not to stare while he was in the restaurant—though he’d given it a game try—but now those breasts were naked, not more than a foot from his nose. It was downright impossible not to look.

  Even through the haze of alcohol and a very long night, he felt a rush of pleasure. The 82nd Airborne Division, where he was a platoon commander, seemed very far away, now that he was nearing the end of a three-day leave. The uniform, with its prized paratroopers badge, meant something to Hartley: it meant an opportunity to meet
girls, impress them, and, as often as not, get them into bed. Of course, his prized blue Thunderbird, parked right outside this room, helped a lot in that department as well.

  All in all, life wasn’t too bad for this Texas boy. He was an oilman’s son, and despite his lazy approach to studies and a C average, his father’s money had gotten him into college. An ROTC course have given him the rank of second lieutenant, and all in all everything seemed to be working out pretty well.

  “Come on,” Misty said, giving him an intimate squeeze as he lay on the bed beside her. “Let’s do it again.”