by Mike Jenne
There were some within their tight-knit community who claimed that the entire enterprise would eventually be the domain of machines, and even now, civilian technicians were busy installing massive banks of computers and other equipment at the Karamürsel site. The civilians avowed that that giant machines would systematically vacuum up the radio transmissions and that the time-consuming toils of sifting and sorting would be automated. But Rybalka was confident that his expertise could never be replicated by a computer or even a thousand computers working in unison, because there were some aspects of the job that were beyond the capacity of machines.
As he arrived for his tour of duty, he mused that Sundays were typically very quiet, even on the supposedly atheistic side of the Iron Curtain, with scarce traffic to monitor over the airwaves. He grimaced; a quiet day meant that his shift’s Squirrels would be tasked with his least favorite chore: the tedious task of transcribing hours and hours of backlogged tapes. While some genuine intelligence was often gleaned from the glut of recordings, he might also spend hours scribbling down inane drivel. Frowning, he remembered one painful session in which he transcribed an hour-long conversation between a Black Sea Fleet supply officer and his counterpart at a shore depot, in which the afloat officer bitterly complained that his ship’s entire stock of flour was infested with weevils.
Although the Squirrels’ work could often be monotonous, at least their job wasn’t as painful as the “Ditty Boppers” who intercepted Morse code transmissions for the duration of their shifts. Rybalka had known Ditty Boppers who had literally copied code for months on end but had not the slightest clue what any of it meant.
As was his pre-shift ritual, he went to his locker in the break area, stowed the box lunch prepared by the base chow hall, and retrieved his “lucky” coffee mug. He filled the mug with steaming coffee from a huge urn on the counter, stirred in two tablespoons of sugar, and then strolled into the work area. He was immediately taken aback. It was not the somber environment that he expected for a Sunday morning. Far from quiet, the room was abuzz with giddy chatter. It seemed almost festive, like Christmas was arriving a month early.
He walked to his workstation, which was occupied by his counterpart from the previous shift, Senior Airman Paul Smith, a lanky young Squirrel from Kansas. “What’s all the hubbub?” he asked.
Rybalka’s expectations of an uneventful shift were immediately altered by Smith’s one-word reply: “Bluto.”
“Bluto? No kidding?”
“Yeah,” replied Smith. He seemed sullen, as if he had missed the last bus to summer camp. “Bluto’s on the pad, ready to launch.”
“Hold the fort, pal,” said Rybalka. “I’ll be right back.” He returned to his locker in the break area, retrieved a large Thermos bottle, and filled it from the coffee urn. Carrying the Thermos and a quart-sized mason jar, he returned to the work area as he pondered how the day would proceed. “Bluto”—named for Popeye’s hulking nemesis—was the Squirrels’ internal nickname for a massive new booster rocket. The giant rocket was apparently still in its testing phases and very prone to failure.
Given the impending launch, all of Karamürsel’s considerable listening capabilities would be focused at the Soviet Tyuratam missile launch complex, located in the expansive grasslands of the Kazakh Republic. The Tyuratam facility—often incorrectly described as the “Baikonur Cosmodrome”—was the point of origin for virtually all Soviet flights into space.
As he collected his belongings to go off shift, Smith glanced at Rybalka’s Thermos and mason jar. “Ready for the long haul, huh?” he asked, stretching as he stifled a yawn.
“You got that right,” replied Rybalka. “I don’t want to miss anything.” He reached into the bottom drawer of the desk and extracted his personal “dope book.” Accumulated over months of monitoring the Soviets, the spiral-bound tablet contained his copious notes concerning frequencies, channel settings, atmospheric conditions, and personality quirks of various Soviet radio operators he listened to on a regular basis. Armed with the information, he could precisely fine-tune his equipment, dialing in minute adjustments to compensate as the Soviet transmitters gradually—but predictably—“wobbled” a few cycles over the course of the day.
“Hey, Vic,” muttered Smith. “Would you mind if I . . .”
“Hang out for a while?”
“Uh, yeah. I’ve never heard an actual launch.”
“Sure,” said Rybalka. “There’s an earphone jack splitter in my locker. You can stay at the desk with me and listen as long as you want, but just stay out of my way. And don’t—don’t—touch the knobs. They’re all mine.”
“Thanks, Vic. I really appreciate it.”
Rybalka smiled to himself. Smith, like most of the neophyte Squirrels, held him in awe; during his first stint at Karamürsel, five years ago, he had witnessed—over the airwaves—cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s historic flight into orbit. He had monitored more Soviet launches, by far, than any other voice interceptor assigned to the station. He particularly relished the drama that surrounded the manned flights, since there were obviously lives at stake, and although he was curious about the looming flight, he knew that it would be years—if ever—before Bluto hoisted a crew to orbit.
During the shift change briefing, he learned that the previous crew had been monitoring the launch preparations for several hours, and Bluto’s lift-off appeared imminent. After the briefing, he poured himself a cup of coffee, settled into his chair, adjusted his headphones, and prepared for the vigil that was sure to ensue. This wasn’t his first rodeo; months of experience had taught him not to be overly anxious. It might be hours or even days before the Soviets launched; quite often, the launch crews proceeded right to the very last tense seconds of the countdown, only to shut down because of some seemingly insignificant technical issue. Sometimes, the problems were swiftly resolved and the countdown resumed within minutes, but often the entire process had to be reset for another attempt.
But all indications were that this was a day when things—at least on the far side of the Black Sea—were going exactly according to plan. Besides Smith, several of the previous shift’s younger Squirrels remained on station, clustered around speakers at a back console. Rybalka chuckled; it looked like the fledgling interceptors were in for a good show.
His brow furrowed as he strained to hear a key frequency. He hushed some of the exuberant kibitzers, consulted his dope book, and then carefully adjusted his equipment. Rybalka was an accomplished radio tuner, absolutely adept at twisting and tweaking the dials until he acquired almost absolute fidelity.
In addition to his technical prowess, Rybalka had the uncanny ability to listen to and comprehend several conversations at the same time, so he was able to simultaneously monitor multiple channels. And unlike most of the other Squirrels, he didn’t struggle with Russian; he’d been fluent in the language long before joining the Air Force, courtesy of immigrant parents and an upbringing in Brighton Beach.
As he patiently listened, he came to realize that there was something very unusual about this launch. In monitoring distant events as they occurred, he didn’t just listen to the substance of the radio conversations, but he also divined content from nuance and emotion. In this instance, the Soviet flight controllers’ voices carried a clearly discernible measure of trepidation, as if they were perched on top of Bluto instead of being entrenched in a concrete bunker a safe distance from the launch pad. Rybalka was perplexed. Was this a manned launch? Were the Soviets actually risking a crew on such a largely unproven rocket? Why else were the controllers so apprehensive?
Rybalka had been on shift for less than an hour when the countdown went into its final moments, and he held his breath as the controllers succinctly reported that the booster engines had ignited correctly and the rocket was underway.
Within minutes, things abruptly went awry. Even as the controllers were speaking, reporting the rocket’s altitude and orientation, he heard a commotion on one of the secondary channels. The
transmissions carried a barely masked undertone of panic. It was obvious that the usually unflappable Soviet controllers were concerned for their own safety. Their normally deadpan voices were agitated. Something was definitely amiss.
He heard the launch director frantically order that the flight be immediately terminated, and then he listened as the flight controllers initiated their procedures to destroy the platform. But then there was a twist that he hadn’t anticipated: A flight controller excitedly declared that the emergency rocket had successfully fired. Rybalka gasped. Emergency rocket? An emergency rocket was a launch escape system, which implied that the launch had to be a manned flight.
Like the American Gemini, the Soviets’ first manned spacecraft—the Vostok—was fitted with an ejection seat to save the cosmonaut in the event of a launch accident. Like the Apollo lunar spacecraft, the Soviets’ latest spacecraft—the Soyuz—was outfitted with a launch escape rocket at the very top, which would quickly yank the spacecraft—and crew—away from a malfunctioning booster.
Although they had monitored a multitude of launch accidents in the past, this was the very first one Rybalka had heard involving a manned flight. And it wasn’t resolved quickly; the incident went on for several hours after the ascent was scuttled. Lingering long after his shift was complete, he continued to monitor the frequencies as search and rescue parties were deployed to locate the spacecraft. It was long after midnight when he listened to a relayed transmission that airborne search crews had detected the faint pinging of a locator beacon in the rugged country northwest of Lake Balkhash. Dawn had barely broken over the Black Sea when Rybalka heard the search coordinator gleefully announce that a helicopter crew had discovered the capsule intact. Although the Soviets were the enemy, he breathed a sigh of relief; if the capsule was unharmed, then certainly the crew must also be safe.
3
PROLOGUE THREE: MARCHING ORDERS
The Pentagon
3:25 p.m., Tuesday, January 31, 1967
Air Force Colonels Mark Tew and Virgil Wolcott quickly clambered out of a dark blue official sedan and followed a waiting escort officer into the Pentagon. Last night, both men had been called at their homes in California and directed to report here for a classified briefing. Their instructions were vague, but the matter was clearly urgent.
Tew and Wolcott had worked together, in one capacity or another, for almost three decades. They had both begun their military careers as B-17 bomber pilots in World War II and had gone on to fly fighters during the Korean War. Both were accomplished engineers; after Korea, they had labored on several aerospace research endeavors.
They were currently assigned to AFSC, Air Force Systems Command, in California, where they worked on the Air Force’s Manned Orbiting Laboratory. The Manned Orbiting Laboratory—more commonly known as the MOL—was a military space station that would be inhabited by a two-man crew. It was scheduled to be operational in 1972.
Unfortunately, their time with the MOL project was swiftly drawing to a close, since both men had been selected for promotion to brigadier general and consequently would have to be assigned elsewhere.
Physically, the two couldn’t be more different. Wolcott was balding, tall and rangy; his skin was permanently dry and cracked from his earlier days in windswept Oklahoma. The corners of his blue-green eyes were crinkled with deep crow’s feet, and his teeth were chipped and crooked.
At six feet, Tew was a couple inches shorter than Wolcott, but not nearly as slim; his age and sedentary lifestyle had deposited more than a few adipose pounds around his middle. Golfing was now his sole form of exercise, but his demanding workload left scant time for even that. Both men were fifty-two, but the weather-beaten Wolcott looked younger than Tew.
Tew was developing heavy jowls, and his prominent nose was a garden of red gin blossoms, a testament to his earlier days closing down the bars at officers’ clubs around the world. Incessantly pestered by his wife, Tew had reluctantly taken up a vow of sobriety. Silently, she gloated over winning the battle over the bottle, but it was really Tew’s job at AFSC that turned the tide against an early death from alcohol; the harsh reality was that there was just too much work and not enough time for drinking.
Neither man had any clue why they had been called to the Pentagon on such short notice.
“I’ll tell you, Mark, it’s that damned Apollo fire,” drawled Wolcott. He referred to the tragic incident at Cape Kennedy just last Friday, in which the Apollo One primary crew—astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee—had burned to death when their spacecraft’s cabin was engulfed by a flash fire during a “plugs out” pre-flight test on the launch pad.
“Apollo?” wheezed Tew, struggling to keep pace with their escort officer.
“Yup,” asserted Wolcott. “Everyone’s clamorin’ for an inquiry, and the big hats at NASA are goin’ to have to rustle up some impartial investigators to figure out what went wrong. Since we just got promoted and have to ride off the ranch in California, it makes perfect sense that the Air Force would loan us to NASA for the investigation.”
Tew nodded. The temporary assignment did make perfect sense. Moreover, he and Wolcott possessed the appropriate credentials, engineering expertise, and aerospace background. They were ideally suited for the task.
Their escort officer paused at the entrance to a secluded conference room deep within the bowels of the Pentagon. “They’re waiting for you, gentlemen,” he said, opening the door and stepping to the side.
Walking into the room, Tew saw that there were two flag officers present, Lieutenant General Hugh Kittredge of the Air Force and Admiral Leon Tarbox of the Navy. Both were senior representatives to the Military Spaceflight Task Group, a joint services steering committee that recommended spaceflight policies and strategies to key leaders. Ultimately, the primary purpose of the committee was to alleviate bickering among the services by fairly—to the greatest extent possible—parceling out the limited resources available to the Pentagon for manned spaceflight activities.
Short and stocky, Kittredge was fair-haired, with a ruddy complexion that looked as if he had spent a considerable amount of his life outdoors. He walked with a pronounced limp, courtesy of a crash landing in France during the War, followed by two years in a German POW camp. Standing, he greeted Tew and Wolcott and then gestured toward Tarbox, who remained seated at the table.
“Gents, I’m sure that you know Admiral Tarbox,” said Kittredge. “He’ll be sitting in with us today, representing the Navy’s interests.”
“Admiral,” said Tew icily, extending his hand. He had known Tarbox for well over a decade. Like Tew and Wolcott, Tarbox worked on the MOL project in California, but he was primarily concerned with ensuring that the Navy garnered their fair share of the effort.
“Colonels,” replied Tarbox, in an equally distant tone. Broomstick-thin, with white hair and a narrow face permanently dried and puckered by the sun, he looked like a wizened gnome. His shrill voice sounded less like a human’s, and more like the terse screech of an owl swooping to pounce on a baby rabbit. Almost lacking a personality, entirely devoid of humor, Tarbox was so insidiously corrosive that battery acid likely oozed through his veins.
He was decades beyond normal military retirement age. MOL workers had dubbed him The Ancient Mariner; one wag joked that the admiral probably still harbored sour memories of the day when he was ordered to finally furl his sails and surrender to steam power.
Tarbox obsessively insisted that the Navy, not the Air Force, should be leading any military manned spaceflight programs, including the MOL. He asserted that for strategic implications, the heavens were a logical extension of the oceans, so military operations in space should be the dominion of the Navy. There was some validity to his argument. Like the trackless oceans, space was immense and not subject to international boundaries. Moreover, on a very practical note, astronauts would navigate by the stars, using essentially the same techniques and tools employed by mariners for centuries.
I
ronically, Tarbox and his Navy probably would hold sway over military space operations today, save for a series of unfortunate events. In 1955, the armed services presented competing proposals to develop and orbit the world’s first artificial satellite. The Navy’s concept—named Vanguard—was selected over an Army plan that would have used Wernher von Braun’s Redstone rocket as a booster. The Air Force didn’t even have a horse in the race; their plan, which relied on using a modified Atlas ICBM as a launch vehicle, wasn’t granted serious consideration because the Atlas was still in development.
Vanguard would have beaten the Soviet’s Sputnik into orbit, had it not suffered numerous technical problems. With considerable fanfare, the Soviets launched Sputnik in October 1957. In the end, the Army’s Explorer 1 was the first American satellite, launched into orbit atop a Jupiter-C—also designed by von Braun and his largely German team—in January 1958. The Navy’s Vanguard didn’t make it into space for another two months.
Despite the admiral’s outlandish opinions and outspoken behavior, Tew was mindful to tread lightly around Tarbox. It was easy to dismiss the acerbic admiral as an annoying kook, but Tew was well aware that he had the ears of some very powerful people, and his sphere of influence extended far beyond the military. Like Hyman Rickover, the brilliant but abrasive dean of the Navy’s nuclear program, Tarbox wielded vast political power.
