Payne Harrison
Storming Intrepid
For Paula,
who took my hand and walked beside me on the
Long March (es)
Acknowledgments
There were a great many press officers within the armed forces, NASA, and the educational community who were most kind in providing me with data for this book. The existence of these professionals is a reflection that the free flow of information concerning American military and space affairs is a strength, rather than a weakness, of our society.
I would like to extend my appreciation to Neil and Judy Robinson, and to Don Davison and Lee Dean for their help when this manuscript was in its formative stages, and to Mike Reed and Margie Cruse for their efforts in bringing this project to fruition.
Craig Covault and Bruce Nordwall of Aviation Week were very generous with their time in fielding my questions, and I am grateful to them.
To my agent Jan Miller and my editor Jim Wade, I would like to say I was uncommonly fortunate to be in the hands of such superb professionals.
Tom Clancy and Stephen Coonts were very kind to extend their assistance, and it was most welcome.
A special note of thanks goes to Tom McElmurry, former deputy commander of the Air Force test pilot school and NASA veteran who helped manage the Skylab and space shuttle projects. Professor McElmurry was most gracious to provide a review of the manuscript. Any technical errors that remain are mine and mine alone.
Finally, for Mom, Dad, Sis, and Fannie Mae, thanks for your help, all along the way.
The Prelude
In the predawn twilight, the Marshal Nedelin was a ghostly, almost surreal image — as if it were a latter-day Flying Dutchman gliding across the sea.
Although it resembled a warship in many respects, the vessel carried no missiles or guns on its deck. Instead, it bristled with electronic gear of every size and description — dominated in particular by a large radome just forward of amidships. If required, computerized controls could keep the radome's dish antenna stable, even in heavy seas; but that was unimportant at the moment, for the Pacific Ocean was dead calm this November morning.
In spite of its vassal states and all its power and bluster, the Soviet Union possessed few genuine friends in the world— particularly in the region south of the Tropic of Capricorn. And without sympathetic governments, the Kremlin had few safe harbors where it could establish sensitive electronic outposts.
Because of this dearth of friendly real estate, the Nedelin, and a half-dozen ships like her, had been forged in the Black Sea shipyards of Nikolayev and dispatched across the high seas on electronic tracking missions vital to the Motherland. They were eminently capable of monitoring the outreaches of space, while remaining safe from intrusion and totally under control of their Soviet masters.
Below decks on this November morning, the Nedelin's computers rapidly plotted a trajectory. Then, at the proper moment, the radome's dish antenna pivoted and fired its monopulse radar skyward, probing for an ethereal object hurtling somewhere through the ionosphere. Back and forth the beam traveled, until a sailor was rewarded with a luminescent blip on his cathode-ray screen. The young man punched a button, and the ship's UHF radio immediately transmitted a facsimile of the image to a Molniya communications satellite, where a transponder bounced the signal to another antenna half a world away.
"Sixty seconds to reentry fire, Comrade General!" barked the mission commander.
"Very well," came General Shenko's soft reply.
Col. Oleg Malyshev, the mission commander, spun his chair back to the monitor, forcing himself to concentrate on this last, critical leg of the journey. He'd scarcely left his post for the past fifty-two hours, as the small army of paper tea containers surrounding his feet would attest. Yet in spite of his mounting fatigue, the tall, thin officer with blond hair and Slavic features was unwilling to delegate even minor tasks during this crucial phase of the enterprise.
Row upon row of monitors and their attending technicians radiated out from the huge Mercator world map projection on the forewall. Each person stared intently at his individual screen in the spacious Flite Control Centre, and in spite of the air conditioning that labored to keep the equipment cool, all were sweating like pigs — their rivulets of perspiration triggered by stress rather than heat.
Malyshev, who was unusually young to be a full colonel in the Soviet Aerospace Forces, couldn't worry about General
Shenko's nonchalant manner now. Nor could he worry about the other general — this one in a green serge uniform — watching attentively from the glassed-in observation deck. His only thoughts could be of his duty. "Thirty seconds," he said into his headset microphone, and added, "Commence final arming sequence on engines one and two."
Lt. Col. Dmitri Bulgarin popped up the arming circuit's safety cover and flipped the toggle switch from safe to arm, causing the nearby annunciator light to change from red to green.
"Fifteen seconds," crackled in his headset.
Although the entire reentry firing procedure could be done automatically, Bulgarin's stick-and-rudder nature refused to entrust this one vital function to the spacecraft's on-board computers. He was, after all, a pilot.
Bulgarin's copilot gazed through the windshield at the earth's horizon, which appeared above them and inverted. This was because the Suslov (named for the long-dead Politburo ideologue) was traveling upside down and backward — a seemingly unorthodox position for a winged object, but necessary for the retrofire braking action to take effect.
The word Fire! reverberated in his eardrums and Bulgarin mashed the trigger button, causing the Tumansky liquid-fuel engines to thunder to life — but in the vacuum of space the thunder was silent. It was only from the vibration and mounting g-forces that the two cosmonauts knew the ship's engines had responded.
"Spyglass, this is Rabbit's Nest. Target is coming up on your position now. Begin traverse at zero-one-seven degrees on my mark."
"Roger that, Rabbit," replied the chief master sergeant, as his pudgy hand gently rotated the focusing knob on his console.
The specially modified high-altitude Boeing 767 was cruising over the South Pacific preparing to do what it did best — take a very expensive picture. Its call sign, "Spyglass," was appropriate, for the 767 was a flying observatory designed to take pictures of man-made satellites in low earth orbit. Aboard the aircraft was an exotic reflecting telescope that could scan the heavens through a hole in the plane's humpback roof. The scope consisted of a network of ultrathin flexible mirrors arrayed in a honeycomb fashion. These "rubber mirrors" could be bent and focused by computer to compensate for atmospheric distortion and produce images of astonishing clarity — so clear that one could read a license plate from a hundred miles away.
The position of Spyglass over the South Pacific had been determined by four NavStar global positioning satellites. From 22,300 miles above the earth, three of the satellites continually transmitted time and positioning data to the 767, where an onboard computer triangulated the information, then spat out the aircraft's exact coordinates and altitude. A fourth satellite acted as a double check to ensure the 767's internal clock was accurate. It was. So accurate, in fact, that the aircraft was directly beneath the Suslov's orbital path, which had long been tracked, computed, and plotted by the North American Aerospace Defense Command's Spacetrack radar/computer network. Spyglass was now in position to take its picture.