The huge Russian plane gleamed in the sunlight as it climbed in front of the Hercules. It continued to pull away from the American plane, its huge engines roaring as it accelerated towards the falling capsule. There was no time for the Hercules to overtake it. All the American crew could do was watch as the Tupolev got further and further away from them and closer and closer to the parachute.
The Tupolev had no hook hanging behind it, but it did have a long, thin refuelling probe projecting out from its nose. The Russian pilot lined the probe up with the gap between the parachute and the Corona capsule, and squeezed one more push from the throttle. His aim was true and the probe shot through the parachute lines like they were the eye of a needle.
Everyone in the Hercules sat in stunned silence as they watched the Tupolev descend back into the clouds and vanish with the Corona payload pinned against the underside of its cockpit.
CHAPTER 34
The Hercules returned to Cooke Air Force Base at 9 p.m. Pacific time. It was 11 p.m. by the time the crew was debriefed, which meant it was 2 a.m. Eastern time when the phone in Patrick Dixon’s hallway started to ring.
He’d told Langley that the post-flight report could wait until the morning. He’d stayed late at the office too many nights recently and needed some decent sleep. If he was being called now, something must have gone very wrong.
NASA had offered Dixon one of the apartments in the research centre grounds when he’d moved down from New England, but he’d preferred to keep a little distinction between his work and home life. He’d found an old colonial-era villa in Armstrong Gardens on the far side of Hampton, south of Langley, that looked out over Chesapeake Bay. Its fretwork veranda and bright painted walls stuck out among the more recent red-brick houses that dominated the neighbourhood. They had been built to survive whatever the Atlantic threw at them, but the villa already had. Dixon loved it.
He dragged himself out of bed and along the dark landing. He almost tripped over Loki, his jet-black cat, who had taken to sitting at the top of the stairs at night, but remembered he was there just in time to clumsily hop over him and land heavily on the first step. He reached the bottom of the staircase intact and picked up the phone. He didn’t even have a chance to say hello before the voice on the other end of the line started telling him exactly how badly things had gone with the evening flight. Thirty seconds later he’d hung up and was making his way back up the dark stairs to get dressed.
The security breach Dixon had feared for months had finally happened. And in dramatic fashion. Questions would now be asked, arguments had, pounds of flesh claimed. Worst of all, people would want to know what progress he’d made on coming up with a more secure way to control and retrieve the intelligence Corona gathered, and the answer to that was still vanishingly little.
The only saving grace of the Russians picking this capsule to intercept was that its payload was relatively low-value. All they’d find when they cracked it open would be an experimental pressurisation system containing a few strips of unexposed film. If they’d wanted to score a major intelligence coup, they’d picked the wrong day for it.
Langley was quiet when Dixon arrived at the research centre twenty minutes later. The nightwatchman waved him through the security gates and he drove across the empty car park to his reserved spot outside the building that had been given over to the Corona programme.
The only light in the building came from his office. Someone was waiting for him.
Phinneus Murphy had worked for the CIA for a long time. He looked like it, and he smoked like it. Dixon had never seen him without a cigarette between his fingers and another lined up to take its place. He was slouched in the easy chair that sat in front of Dixon’s desk, lighting up, as Dixon stepped into his office. They’d worked together long enough to dispense with pleasantries, so as soon as Murphy was finished taking his first, long pull on his cigarette, he got down to business.
‘What are we going to tell the president?’ he asked.
Dixon had anticipated Murphy’s question. ‘They didn’t get anything important,’ he answered. ‘Maybe we even let them take it. Something worthless to keep them occupied.’
‘Is that true?’
‘It could be. We got lucky.’ Dixon took a cigarette from Murphy’s case and sat down at his desk. He only smoked when he was stressed.
‘We got lazy,’ Murphy replied, between drags.
The Marlboro Man had sold America on the image of smokers as rugged and masculine. Cigarettes were to be savoured, smoked slowly by powerful people thinking serious thoughts. Murphy didn’t smoke like the Marlboro Man. He smoked like nicotine was his air and oxygen was poison.
‘We’ve known they’ve been on to Corona for months. We should have been expecting this,’ he said.
‘Not my area of expertise, I’m afraid,’ Dixon replied.
‘It doesn’t take an expert to guess that the more times you let someone get on a podium and tell the world how great we are, the more everyone’s going to want our stuff.’
‘We could always just share Corona,’ Dixon said. ‘You know, for the collective good of humanity.’
‘You going commie on me?’ Murphy asked.
Dixon let out a short laugh. Murphy lit his next cigarette.
‘Speaking of which,’ Murphy continued, ‘next on the president’s list is sticking a bunch of satellites over Vietnam. Got it into his head Corona is the key to nipping this Cong problem in the bud.’
‘He knows it can’t see through things, right? Unless we start clearing jungle it won’t be much help.’
‘He’s been told. But the practicalities aren’t his problem, they’re ours.’
‘My hands are full,’ Dixon said.
His recent late nights had involved a succession of increasingly bizarre experiments to try to crack the atmospheric barrier problem. Dixon and his team had come at the problem from every angle they could think of. They’d explored the idea of vast ground-based aerials, or high-altitude radio balloons. They’d considered developing reusable space planes that could take off and land from regular airstrips. They’d even thought about somehow shrinking down the IBM 7090 mainframe computer that was currently being used by the Mercury programme so it could actually be launched into space. Each experiment was approached with fresh optimism, but each one failed. It was tiring.
‘You know, it’s cute how you think you have a choice,’ Murphy said.
Dixon finally finished his cigarette. ‘I thought we were winning, anyway.’
‘Of course we are,’ Murphy answered. ‘America doesn’t lose. But we could be winning faster. Ideally before the next election.’
‘There it is,’ Dixon said.
‘Don’t act so surprised. Everything’s always about votes.’
A dark thought suddenly struck Dixon. ‘He’d use Corona on our own people, wouldn’t he?’
Murphy pulled himself up out of the easy chair. ‘I wouldn’t recommend it, at least not letting the electorate know it was happening. But I can see the logic.’
‘That’s not something I want to help happen,’ Dixon said.
‘It’s been happening for years,’ Murphy replied. ‘Did you know in the thirties the Nazis worked out which US states had the highest numbers of German migrants in them so they could run adverts about the joys of National Socialism in the local papers and swing US public opinion against intervening in Europe? I saw the map they made.’
‘We’re using Nazis as our reference point, now?’
Murphy smiled. ‘I’m just saying this is nothing new. Finding people, working out what they want, and giving it to them. It’s basic advertising.’