Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [94]
Alekseev told his people to transmit the message to the Kremlin. Then he excused himself and went back to his bed, not at all sure that he wouldn’t be incinerated in it before he woke up.
The U-2 that took off into the Alaskan night was piloted by Captain Charles Maultsby. His mission was both hazardous and routine. He would fly to the North Pole and take samples of atmospheric dust in clouds that had drifted from Soviet nuclear testing sites in the Arctic Circle. He and his colleagues did this on a regular basis. His plane was not equipped with sophisticated navigation devices. In fact, he was using the two most ancient methods known to man: the stars and a compass. Maultsby had a series of star charts tucked next to his seat. By comparing them to what he saw from his cockpit, he could figure out where he was. He had done this efficiently on previous flights, but now, nearing the Pole, these charts stopped making sense. Some kind of false dawn had dimmed the constellations; multicolored steaks of light flickered through the sky, confusing him.
A little later, he found himself adrift in a world of frightful beauty. Sky-filling curtains of light furled and unfurled around him, phasing through iridescent shades of yellow, green, turquoise, indigo. They snaked away, faded, then returned as brilliantly vibrant cliffs dropping into dark nothingness. The thin polar clouds changed color continuously, like theatrical scrims lit by a deranged lighting engineer.
Maultsby had flown into a vast music made visible. He had flown into the northern lights, the aurora borealis, and was lost.
This close to the North Pole, his compass was useless; from here, it told him, all directions were south. He could not radio his base for help; the Russians might detect his signal.
Dazed as he was, Maultsby activated the air-sampling devices, then turned his plane through what he thought was 180 degrees, to return the way he had come. He had to do this in cautious stages over a long circuit. The U-2 was so fragile that any violent maneuver, any sudden variation in speed, would tear it apart. Maultsby had a parachute and a survival kit inside his seat cushion. But this far north, no survival was possible. If he made it down onto the ice cap, the next living thing he would see would be the polar bear that fancied him for breakfast.
“The best advice I can offer,” his commanding officer had said, “is that if you go down, don’t bother to open the chute.”
The U-2 that took off from Florida was piloted by Major Rudolf Anderson. His mission was not routine. He would fly a circuit high above eastern Cuba looking for Soviet air defenses.
After an hour, he could see from his cockpit, in elaborate miniature, the white-rimmed green chain of islands, cays, off the north coast of Cuba passing below him. He activated the camera and eased his course southeasterly.
The USS Oxford was a floating forest of radio masts and radar antennae. It coasted slowly along the edge of Cuban territorial waters, easily visible from the shore. Most of its crew wore headphones and sat listening to and interpreting the little whirrs and pings and buzzes that told them what Cuba’s defense and communications systems were up to.
Anderson’s camera, swinging back and forth below him, had covered the eastern end of Cuba. He turned as sharply west and north as the plane would let him and set course for home.
Two of the technicians on the Oxford sat up straight simultaneously. Each had picked up a repetitive, high-pitched psip-psip-psip. One of them said into the ship’s intercom, “Chief? Chief, we’ve got a Big Cigar.”
Big Cigar was code for Russian radar fixing a surface-to-air missile onto a target. The Oxford’s commander radioed this information to the Pentagon immediately. There was nothing they could do to warn Anderson; like Maultsby, he was instructed to observe strict radio silence until he was back in U.S. airspace.
It was just possible, if you spotted it in time, to dodge a SAM if you were flying a high-powered, highly maneuverable jet. You could throw