by Ian Sales
She pushes herself from the command module and her umbilical slithers out after her. The KH-4B hangs in the sky some thirty feet away, a pale grey cylinder bright with reflected sunlight. It has ejected one recovery vehicle already and the bright gold mylar dome of the second now caps its length. Cobb takes her hand-held manoeuvring unit, her zip gun, and uses it to propel herself across the gap between the two spacecraft. She rolls over and sees one of her crew is now standing in Apollo II’s hatch, unidentifiable behind a gold visor.
Is that you, B? Cobb asks.
In the hatch? Yes.
Cobb turns back to face her destination and she raises the zip gun and takes aim at it, and she thinks maybe it’s an affront to nature and to God to populate this place with tools which serve a military purpose. The space programme has never been military, for all that it was in a race with the enemy, the USSR; and now finally these ploughshares, these chariots of Apollo, are going to be bent into swords, even as the war below has finally stuttered to a long and drawn-out end.
She’s moving too fast, the zip gun isn’t powerful enough to check her velocity. She puts up her hands, touches the KH-4B and slides down it, and her umbilical brings her to an abrupt halt and she swings about, banging both feet against the side of the satellite. She hangs there beside it and she knows her heart-rate is elevated, she’s feeling warm, the water circulating through her Liquid Cooling Garment isn’t cold enough to wick away the heat, and she feels as bent out of shape as the shadow she casts across the KH-4B’s curved side. She puts her hands to the spacecraft but there’s nothing to hold onto, she bobs at the end of her umbilical and she has no leverage to do anything but hang there. It’s a hard scrabble to explore the length of the spy satellite, to move herself around its circumference, and before long she’s panting and sweating and her arms are aching, and all the time she’s telling mission control what she’s doing.
When she does find the right panel, she takes a screwdriver, specially designed to be used with spacesuit gloves, and tries to unscrew the panel’s fastenings. It’s not working. As soon as she attempts to twist the screwdriver, her legs swing out and she cannot apply any turning force. She considers using the screwdriver as a pick, jamming it through the thin aluminium side of the KH-4B, so it will hold her steady.
Exhausted, she floats away from the spy satellite. Turning gently about, she finds herself gazing out at an ocean of stars. The KH-4B is forgotten, and she’s reminded of the hours she spent in a sensory deprivation tank back when she was paving the way for women to become astronauts, only then she lay in total darkness and absolute silence, she didn’t have this sea of light above her, these endless questions and instructions from mission control and B in her headset. She tells them she needs to rest, and her feet and hands are getting cold, but she’ll be fine in a minute, and she closes her eyes and relaxes, in her mind’s eye she can still see the Milky Way flowing across the sky. She is immersed in Creation, she lets it wash across and over and through her, and she knows this is not something she will ever give up.
Recovered, she fires her zip gun to push her back to the spy satellite. She uses the screwdriver to lever up an edge of a panel, and that becomes a handhold, and a fulcrum, so she can turn the screwdriver. But even that doesn’t help, so she reluctantly admits defeat. She puts her booted feet against the spy satellite’s side and launches herself back toward the Apollo command module. As she floats past the golden cone capping the KH-4B, she spots motion and, as she watches, the recovery vehicle is ejected and falls away. Fortunately, the KH-4B is pointed away from the Apollo II spacecraft and the bucket arcs away and down a good forty feet from the command module.
Steadman twists to watch it go and says, Was that supposed to happen?
I don’t know, says Cobb.
She watches the gold recovery vehicle dwindle and fall to Earth, and she knows it might as well be the Moon that’s falling away from them. Even if the rumours are not true about NASA selecting male astronauts, then the Apollo programme is likely to never get any higher than this, to go any further than this. The fighting is done but the war is not over, it will never really be over, and up here is not God’s own undiscovered country but just the generals’ high ground, it’s just the place that has the greatest view, a God-like view.
And Jerrie Cobb, who wants to be the first human being to walk on the Moon, can feel her dreams receding even as the KH-4B Corona recovery vehicle shrinks to a dot against the azure sky and then vanishes.
DOWN
By the time they’ve lowered the shipping container into the water and the divers have oh-so-carefully transferred the film stacks into it, by the time they get the shipping container aboard the USS White Sands and into the giant refrigerator purposely built to hold everything at the same temperature as the ocean bottom, no one is all that confident there’s going to be much left that’s salvageable. McIntyre hopes whatever surveillance the spy satellite was doing isn’t too important, or maybe they have some other source of intelligence; because to him those film stacks don’t look like they’re going to be easy to get workable photographs off.
Mooney crosses the deck to McIntyre, who is by the rail enjoying his first cigarette in over twelve hours, and McIntyre’s eyes feel gritty from being awake so long and watery from the brightness and blueness—and yeah, maybe a bit from the smoke too—but he’s not ready to hit his bunk just yet.
I hear you had a bit of trouble down there, Mooney says.
McIntyre nods. He flicks his cigarette stub out into the Atlantic. I guess, he says. We couldn’t get a peep out of dot zero and all those wrecks made it harder than we expected.
There’s no wrecks on the charts, Mooney says.
It’s 20,000 feet deep, points out McIntyre. How would anyone know?
He shrugs. We found the bucket, he adds. Good luck getting anything useful out of it.
The spooks want a debriefing, John.
Yeah, I guess.
McIntyre looks across at the refrigerator, a white box eight feet by eight feet by eight feet with a cooling unit attached. He’s not sure what the spooks want to hear from him, he’s not sure what he wants to say to them. They asked him to fetch the bucket; he fetched the bucket. It’s not like he should have been here anyway. They only flew him in when the original commander of the Trieste II put himself in hospital; and now it’s all over, they’ll fly him back to Washington and the Navy Experimental Diving Unit.
He follows Mooney to the superstructure and they step through a hatch and along a gangway and into the ward room. The two spooks are there, sitting at the table, looking as hot and flustered as they had at the briefing. Stryker and Taylor have gone to their bunks, on McIntyre’s orders—and he wishes he had gone too. There’s no need for this now, it could wait until later.
McIntyre pulls out a chair and sits. You got your film, he tells the spooks, but I don’t know how usable it is.
The CIA guy with the spectacles gives a tight smile. Eastman Kodak, he says, assures us the imagery is recoverable.
We took every precaution, the other spook adds. We’re confident we’ll get to see what we want.
I guess, McIntyre says.
Were there any problems retrieving the bucket? asks one of the spooks.
You mean did everything go to plan, right? McIntyre shrugs. We were lucky not to snag the trail ball on one of the wrecks, he says, and maybe it was a bit harder than anticipated, but no, nothing major went wrong.
I hear you found a lot of shipwrecks.
And airplanes, replies McIntyre.
Anything you saw we should know about? the spook asks.
McIntyre yawns. No, he says, some World War Two airplanes, some freighters about as old, maybe older. Been down there a long time, by the looks of them.
He readies himself to leave, the tiredness has caught up with him and he’s trying to decide if he should ask for coffee or just head straight to his cabin.
Anything happen up here I should know about? he asks.
>
Not much, says the other spook, the one without the glasses. NASA only just went and put a man on the Moon.
CHARM
Once the Trieste II has been emptied of gasoline, floated into the USS White Sands’ aft dock well, and the well drained, the USS Apache takes the USS White Sands under tow. The IOU steams south, leaving its station over the Puerto Rico Trench, and heads for Roosevelt Roads. McIntyre is no longer needed, so a utility boat speeds him ahead and he arrives at the naval station hours before the two ships. By the time they dock, he is somewhere over Cuba in a Navy CT-39E Sabreliner jet, soon to rejoin the Navy Experimental Diving Unit, his short time aboard the Trieste II bathyscaphe behind him and safeguarded by orders to never discuss the mission. The refrigerator containing the shipping container of film stacks is transported in a grey USN Dodge M37 cargo truck from the docks to the air station, where it is loaded into a waiting Navy C-130 Hercules. The two CIA men also climb aboard; no one from the IOU joins them.
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 o
n 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.
