Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [135]
“Consider it done,” Werner Weiss said to Colonel Slater’s request.
Up in the air, Slater quickly took the Oxcart to seventy thousand feet. Slater had forgotten how light the Oxcart was. It had an airframe like a butterfly, which allowed pilots to get it up so high. Flying at Mach 2.5 made things hot inside the cockpit. It was like an oven set on warm. If Slater were to take off his glove and touch the window, he’d get a second-degree burn. He moved up to Mach 3 cruising speed at ninety thousand feet, traveling the seven hundred miles to Billings, Montana, in about twenty-three minutes.
The fallacy was that at this height and speed, a pilot could look out the window and take in the view. You couldn’t. Even when you reached cruising height, you had to keep your eyes on every gauge, oscillator, and scope in front of you. There were too many things to pay attention to. Too many things that could go wrong.
Colonel Slater headed toward the Canadian border, where he took a left turn and flew along the U.S. perimeter until he reached Washington State. There, he took another left turn and flew down over Oregon and into California. Finally, he took the aircraft down to twenty-five thousand feet and prepared for a scheduled refuel. Minutes later, Slater met up with the KC-135 that had been dispatched from the Air Force’s 903rd Air Refueling Squadron out of Beale Air Force Base in Yuba County, California.
The process of taking on fuel was one of the more dangerous things an Oxcart pilot could do. In order to connect its fuel line to the tanker, the aircraft had to slow down to between 350 and 450 mph, so slow it could barely keep its grip on the sky. The issue of speed was equally taxing on the flying fuel tank. The KC-135 tanker had to travel at its top speed just to keep up with the slowed-down triple-sonic airplane. This was always a slightly nerve-racking process, complicated for Colonel Slater by the fact that a call came in over the emergency radio at exactly that time. Whatever was going on back at Area 51 that merited this emergency call was most likely not a welcome event.
Slater answered. It was Colonel Paul Bacalis, the man who’d taken over Ledford’s job as director of the Office of Special Activities for the CIA. Bacalis told Slater that an urgent call had come in for him from the Pentagon and he should get back to Area 51 immediately.
“I’m refueling,” Colonel Slater said.
“Finish and dump it,” Bacalis said.
“Can’t it wait?” Colonel Slater asked.
“No,” Bacalis said. “Where are you?”
“I’m over California,” Colonel Slater said.
“Head out to sea, dump the fuel, and come home” was Colonel Bacalis’s command.
Slater let loose forty thousand pounds of fuel and watched it evaporate into the atmosphere. It was critical that he save ten thousand gallons of fuel to get home, not much more and definitely not less. Too little fuel and you wound up like Walt Ray. Too much fuel meant the aircraft could blow out its brakes on landing and overshoot the runway. Now, Slater needed to make a quick U-turn to head home. When traveling three times the speed of sound, the Oxcart needed 186 miles of space just to make the hook. This meant Slater’s U-turn took him from off the coast of Big Sur to high above Santa Barbara on a tight curve.
When Slater got back to base, Werner Weiss and Colonel Bacalis were waiting in his office. Both men wore grins. Colonel Bacalis dialed the Pentagon and handed Slater