Blue Gemini

by Mike Jenne

  Agnew blinked. Slowly gathering his composure, he lifted himself off the floor and stood straight. “Sorry, sir,” he mumbled. “It’s just . . .”

  Wolcott interrupted him. “You have fourteen minutes left. You’ve wasted three already. Do what you need to do, and then scramble your ass back in there.” Feeling sorry for him, Wolcott watched Agnew slink away. The man was clearly spent, both physically and emotionally. It would be a miracle if he endured the next six hours. But Wolcott also wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if he later learned that Agnew had taken a sudden crash-dive into the mental ward of the base hospital.

  Wolcott bounded up the steps to the simulator, and knelt by one of the open hatches. A fetid stench emanated from the crew compartment, an aroma like two men being packed into a broom closet with a space heater and then left for several days to ripen. He watched as a technician sponged small splotches of blood from Agnew’s seat; the blots matched the pressure points where the pilot’s shoulders and hips habitually rubbed against the hard seat back. Wolcott felt a faint tap on his shoulder; it was Ourecky.

  “Sir, may I?” asked Ourecky. He looked as eager as a puppy.

  “You want to squeeze in there?” replied Wolcott. “Well, Ourecky, you’re nothin’ if not brave. Just be careful climbing in, and don’t dare bump any of their switch settings.”

  Ourecky started to slide into the left-hand seat that Carson had just vacated.

  “I wouldn’t advise that,” stated the technician, shaking his head. “If you value your life, you don’t ever want to be caught sitting in Major Carson’s throne. Here, let me help you slide in on this side.”

  Assisted by the technician, Ourecky wriggled into the right-hand seat. “That’s the computer interface?” he asked, pointing at the gray instrument panel.

  The technician leaned into the mock-up. “That’s right.”

  Enthralled, Ourecky continued to identify features in the cabin. “And that’s the Encoder Controller? Circuit breakers? Water management? Rate gyros?” Nodding, the technician affirmed the Captain’s observations.

  Wolcott watched Ourecky chat excitedly with the simulator tech, comparing notes on how information was entered into the computer. On his back inside the capsule, Ourecky acted like a starving kid in a candy store. It was clearly obvious that he was familiar with the various controls and displays. Wolcott thought that was very significant, since the young captain had no previous formal training on the Gemini. The technician knew the instruments and cabin inside and out, probably better than the pilots, yet Ourecky was giving him a run for his money.

  Heydrich walked up the steps and stood beside Wolcott. “So I guess we’re done talking about the Block Two? Are we still stuck with the current computer?”

  “’Fraid so, pard,” replied Wolcott. “Sorry, Gunter. I’ll stay on it, and circle back up with you after I talk to the eggheads at Cambridge.”

  Heydrich knelt down and eavesdropped on Ourecky chatting with his technician. He turned to Wolcott and quietly commented, “Man, someone’s been hitting the books.”

  “And then some, pardner,” said Wolcott, grinning broadly as he fanned himself with the brim of his Stetson. “I just hope we can peel him out of there before it’s time for you to restart.”

  12

  THE ELUSIVE EJECTION POD

  Auxiliary Field Ten, Eglin Air Force Base

  4:20 a.m., Friday, July 5, 1968

  They ran ten miles every Friday. It wasn’t a mind-numbing, foot-dragging jog in mass formation, but a timed individual event. Henson thrived at competition, and enjoyed the opportunity to run all out from start to finish. They were being judged according to some standard, but the instructors rarely lent the slightest clue as to what was satisfactory and what was not. In any event, he figured that his safest option was to finish ahead of everyone else; if they passed, there should be little doubt that he was also achieving the mysterious goal.

  Most of the candidates sprinted off like crazed demons when the PT instructor blew the whistle to start the clock. Invariably, they ended up in a massive clot, elbowing for position, but gradually lost steam in the first mile. In short order, they were strung out along the route, wheezing for breath, running at a much-reduced speed. Henson maintained a steady pace throughout, and breezed past most of his cohorts even before they finished the second mile. Two wiry PJs paced him over halfway, but in time even they sputtered out. By the end of the sixth mile, they had fallen several hundred yards behind him.

  The course was a sandy jeep trail that meandered through the pine forests, eventually depositing the runners back at Aux One-Oh. Running alone, Henson enjoyed the sounds of nature awakening: swaying trees rustling in the wind, tree frogs chirping in the swamps, and birds rehearsing the opening notes of their morning songs. He ran fast in the humid gloom, perhaps swifter than he had ever run on any previous Friday. A hard rain had passed through last night, and the damp sand had yet to be disturbed by dozens of churning feet.

  It seemed like he had barely started when he saw the red pinpoint glow of an instructor’s cigarette before him. The sun had not yet come up, and although the instructor saw him lope across the line, he apparently didn’t recognize him. “Name and roster number?” asked the man.

  “Henson. Roster thirty-eight.” Gasping for oxygen, he bent over and grabbed his knees.

  The instructor switched on a penlight, looked at a stopwatch, and then scrawled an entry on the roster. “Sixty-two minutes, ten seconds,” he commented, then whistled quietly. “That’s mighty good, Henson. Keep walking, or you’ll cramp up.”

  “Thanks,” he replied, still catching his breath. He relished this time on Friday morning, when he normally had at least ten minutes to himself before the others began straggling in. The brief solitude was a luxury, much worth the pain.

  Arriving at the barracks, he prepared for the day. The past few weeks had taught him to be painstakingly efficient. Even though this morning’s clock allowed a more leisurely pace, he refused to squander precious seconds. He showered and shaved in under four minutes, and had donned a clean uniform long before his classmates started filtering in. Combing through his short Afro with a metal pick, he paused at the bulletin board to review the training schedule.

  Most of the morning would be consumed by a graded search exercise. By now, the search drills were such a standard part of their grueling routine that they executed them by second nature. For any given mission, a patrol leader was selected from the candidates, and his overall tactics score rested heavily on how well he organized and prosecuted the search. Each man was granted three shots at being a patrol leader, and he was expected to be successful—by the instructors’ obscure criteria—on at least two. At this point, Henson was one for two.

  On his first graded search, the helicopters had spilled them out at dusk, landing in a tiny clearing adjacent to the Yellow River, to hunt for a pilot who had ejected over the swamps. Henson quickly discovered the search area wasn’t a slightly damp chunk of real estate, but a genuine quagmire, heavily inundated by recent monsoonal rains.

  All night, they fumbled through dense mazes of thorny “wait-a-minute” vines, fallen trees, and submerged cypress stumps. After eight hours of thrashing through the foul-smelling mire, they found the pilot on a small hummock, desperately clinging to a cypress knee. It was a night to remember, or perhaps one to swiftly forget. Henson received a passing grade for the search, but just barely so.

  His second graded search was to locate an ejection pod from an F-111 “Aardvark” fighter-bomber. The F-111, an unusual swept-wing aircraft built by General Dynamics, was unique in that the aircrew did not eject as individuals in an emergency, but the entire cockpit—the ejection pod or “crew capsule”—was blasted free of the airframe and descended under its own parachute. Additionally, unlike most two-seaters, the men sat abreast, as if they were riding in an automobile.

  Ironically, most of their searches were for the pods, as if the objects habitually rained out of the s
ky. Compared to some things they hunted for, an ejection pod wasn’t tremendously difficult to find; it was about the size and shape of a compact sports car, and weighed roughly the same, about three thousand pounds.

  They had quickly pinpointed the pod in a pine forest, but the exercise held a vile twist: the pod was unoccupied. According to the scenario, the impatient aircrew had departed on foot, and the exercise wouldn’t conclude until the two men were found. The search continued long into the night, until the instructors finally called it off. Henson flunked the search, but it was doubtful that any of the candidates would have been successful in that particular fiasco.

  In the interim, he had since paid strict attention and was now a master of the art. He was absolutely confident that he would nail his next search, which would give him the two for three he needed to graduate, so he was well on his way to matriculating to an operational squadron.

  According to the schedule, after this morning’s search concluded, they were scheduled to go to the Safety Range for the remainder of the day. Henson always looked forward to their Safety Range sessions, where the candidates were exposed to a multitude of aircraft and other hardware that might conceivably fall out of the sky and necessitate a search.

  While it was logical that most pilots would eject to save their skins in an emergency, the instructors emphasized that it was equally as likely that the candidates might be dispatched to locate a crashed aircraft with the aircrew still aboard. So they learned how to carefully approach each particular type of airframe to extricate its occupants.

  Additionally, they learned how to “safe” different types of ejection seats and ordnance that could still be attached to a downed aircraft, and they were taught to locate and destroy the various pieces of equipment—usually classified communications, electronics and cryptographic gear—that could not be left intact if a disabled aircraft was to be abandoned in the field.

  Some of the Safety Range training was particularly esoteric. Three weeks ago, the candidates had undergone extensive sessions on the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes. Only last week, they had spent three days learning the particulars of the Gemini two-man spacecraft. Henson had asked the instructor why it was necessary to be familiar with a capsule that was already obsolete, since NASA had already completed their Gemini flights and was transitioning to the Apollo program. The instructor explained the Air Force would use the Gemini as a return vehicle for the Manned Orbiting Laboratory even after NASA shifted its sights to the moon.

  Henson thumbed through the rest of the schedule. The last week of Safety Range training was dedicated to “Special Topics,” whatever that was. A holdover from a previous cycle claimed that guest instructors from Project Blue Book lectured them on the proper procedures to handle crashed UFOs during the Special Topics week. Additionally, according to the holdover, two days of the Special Topics training focused on “biological isolation” procedures, which included practical sessions on donning protective gear and decontamination protocols.

  Even as his sweating classmates were still finishing the run, Henson wolfed down a greasy breakfast of bacon and scrambled eggs at the chow hall and then returned to the barracks to ready his gear. Precisely at seven—0700 on a military clock—the class marched out to a grassy field located about four hundred yards west of the Aux One-Oh compound.

  Henson was surprised to see that the Training Flight commander, Captain Lewis, was present this morning. There was also a guest instructor, an Army sergeant from the Ranger School camp located at nearby Aux Field Six. From all appearances, the Ranger wasn’t there to interact with the candidates, but rather to impart the finer points of patrolling and small unit tactics to the Air Force instructors.

  The Air Force cadre seemed to be in awe of the guest and treated him with great deference. Henson had heard his name—Sergeant First Class Nestor Glades—and had overheard one instructor tell another that Glades had just returned from a classified assignment in Vietnam, where he had run high risk recon missions into Laos and Cambodia.

  “Henson, you’re up,” announced an instructor. “Finn, you’re the Assistant Patrol Leader.”

  Knowing that the clock was ticking, Henson immediately went to the instructor to receive the specifics of the search. He was joined by his deputy for the mission, Ulf Finn, a tall, sandy-haired man in his mid-twenties. Lacking even the slightest semblance of body fat, his sinewy body looked like it had been fashioned from intertwined ropes. With sharp Scandinavian features and blond hair shorn in a taut crew cut, he talked with a Midwestern twang. A five-year Security Police veteran, he had done two stints in Vietnam, guarding highly classified communications facilities, but had spent the past two years staring at the vast plains of Kansas as a member of security patrol protecting a Titan II missile silo.

  The instructor handed Henson an index card and noted, “Six Hueys will be here in fifteen minutes. They will be on the ground for two minutes. Any questions?”

  Henson shook his head, grabbed Finn by the shoulder, and jogged back to the waiting candidates. Barely pausing to catch his breath, he tersely addressed them. “Gentlemen, I’m the patrol leader for this morning. Finn is the APL. This is your warning order. We’re tasked with an immediate search mission. Aircraft will be on station in one-five. Six Hueys. Squad leaders, the APL will coordinate the cross-load plan for the aircraft. Finn, chalk me for the first aircraft. Fourth squad, task organize three hasty intercept teams and cross-level their gear to the other squads. Patrol order in five minutes. Time hack is”—everyone present looked at their watches and stood ready to adjust them if necessary—“Zero Seven One Eight. Any questions?”

  Henson scanned the crowd, but saw no hands. As the other candidates scattered, he sat down to refine the plan. Using a transparent coordinate scale and grease pencil to plot the pertinent coordinates on his map, he scrutinized the faint brown contour lines to glean a feel for the lay of the land.

  He divided the search into two parts. The first was a straightforward matter of establishing a search grid and banging away on it until they discovered the pod. Henson’s previous failure had taught him to assume, at least initially, that the aircrew would abandon the pod. To address that contingency, he applied his knowledge of what the crew had been trained to do in an “E and E”—Escape and Evasion—situation. Analyzing the terrain, he also had to intuitively factor in human nature. Evading aircrews were trained to avoid “natural lines of drift,” like ridgelines and creek beds that allowed for easier walking, but the further they travelled, the more likely it was that they would become tired and sloppy. Exhausted people also inherently tend to walk downhill, almost like water flowing with gravity, and subsequently find themselves trapped in low areas where moisture and thick vegetation are more prevalent.

  Henson assayed the limited resources available to him—thirty candidates—and applied them to the task at hand. To save time, he had already directed one of the squads to break into three hasty intercept teams. The hasty teams would lighten their loads by handing off their heavy gear to “mules” in the other squads. Less encumbered—carrying just weapons, ammunition, water and basic gear—they could travel fast to strategic points that Henson would designate, ideally to head off the survivors before they managed to venture too far.

  Henson had another weapon in his arsenal. Three weeks ago, the candidates had learned the fundamentals of mantracking. If the aircrew had hastily departed the scene on foot, trackers would look for the subtle clues of their passage—the slightest fragments of footprints, scuff marks on the ground, disturbed earth—and trace them through the woods.

  If the plan worked, they would be done well before lunchtime, and Henson would have the two successful searches that he needed to graduate. If it didn’t, the candidates would likely still be searching into the wee hours of tomorrow morning, and Henson would soon depart for a less challenging assignment in the American Midwest.

  Brushing a tick from his neck, Henson made the final touches to his plan. He looked at his watch: he
had over a minute to spare. “Mission order in one minute!” he announced. He noticed that the tactics instructors, including Lewis and Glades, had taken a seat to listen.

  Looking at his watch, he started the order immediately as the second hand finished its sweep of the minute. “Gentlemen, this is your patrol order. Hold all questions until the end. This order will be in abbreviated format. All SOPs and other standing orders remain in effect. Situation remains the same, as stated in previous orders.”

  Leaning back against their rucksacks, seated on the ground with their weapons across their laps, the men listened intently to Henson. The sun had not climbed very high over the trees, but the temperature was already starting to soar. Cicadas buzzed in a raucous symphony while a woodpecker chiseled intently at a pine’s scaly bark. The bird’s staccato rhythm was drowned out by a pair of F-4 Phantoms roaring overhead, on their way to an early morning of practice bombing runs. The jets disappeared in the distance, and their noise faded with them.

  “Mission. The flight mission is to conduct an immediate search for an F-111 ejection pod . . .”

  “A pod?” barked half the class in unison. “An ejection pod!” howled the other half. It was a running joke with the class, even tolerated by the dour instructors, some of whom actually laughed at the passing moment of levity. In their time at Eglin, the candidates had searched for and located far more ejection pods than the total number of F-111s in the Air Force’s inventory.

  As the candidates settled down, Henson continued. “Mission. The Flight’s mission is to conduct an immediate search for an F-111 ejection pod located in the vicinity of Echo Juliet 336905, in order to rescue or recover the aircrew. Execution. Coordinating instructions. Pick up LZ is here. Primary infil LZ is 344889. Alternate infil LZ is 305924. Third squad, task organize into three hasty intercept teams. Hasty One will cover an intercept point located at 31179202. Hasty Two cover 32479273. Hasty Three 35029277. Center mass for the initial search grid is Echo Juliet 32388855, oriented north, fifty-meter spacing between men.”