A few gallons of the JP-7 fuel dribbled out of the boom and washed over the backside of the SR-71 in sheets, causing the aircraft's black titanium skin to glisten in the morning sun. There was no danger of a fire, for the subzero temperature at 35,000 feet inhibited that. Besides, the JP-7 had a higher combustion point than regular JP-4 jet fuel. That was because the Blackbird's turbo-ramjet engines required a very special diet.
The boom operator in the underside pod of the KC-10 raised his hand in a wave. "Tallyho, Catman. Good hunting. See you in a little while."
"Roger, Fillup-One. Thanks. Catman out." Griggs watched the big KC-10, a tanker version of the civilian DC-10, lumber off on a bearing of 000, true north, where it would fly in a long rectangle until their scheduled rendezvous later that morning. Griggs then banked his SR-71 to a heading of 169 degrees, while the reconnaissance systems officer (RSO) scanned the astro-tracker and NavChronometer on his control panel in the backseat. The timing and navigation on this mission were going to be very dicey indeed, and they would have to work in tandem to bring it off.
The two men had been shaken out of bed in the middle of the night, by the detachment commander no less, and hustled to the recon briefing room at Mildenhall Royal Air Force Base. They'd crammed five hours of mission planning into one, then hauled ass to link up with the KC-10 over the Barents Sea.
They hadn't been told what the mission was about, but that wasn't unusual. They were only told where and when to fly and what to do. The what and when didn't bother Griggs. It was the where that had shocked him out of his sleepiness in the briefing room.
Their Blackbird was headed deep inside Soviet airspace.
Currently they were 473 miles off the Russian coast, west of Novaya Zemlya, which was the long, desolate island that extended a Soviet finger into the Barents Sea. Griggs and his RSO had often flown up to the edge, and even a little over, the Russian border from Finland, or flown over the coastal submarine base at Polyarny — taking pictures with side-oblique cameras, or collecting imagery in foul weather with the Blackbird's SLAR (side-looking airborne radar). But probing the frontier was one thing. A deep penetration was something else again. Particularly since they had to cross some of the world's heaviest air defenses to complete their mission. Terrific, Griggs thought. "Talk to me, Pretty Boy," he ordered.
The backseat RSO, Capt. Thomas "Pretty Boy" Floyd, scrutinized the astro-tracker navigation system and the NavChronometer while punching data into the flight computer. "Come to one-seven-one and bring it up to six hundred knots. We'll go to initial altitude in about forty seconds."
"Rog," replied Griggs.
Floyd ran through his flight data one more time. He didn't have to be a Rhodes scholar to figure out they were on some kind of ELINT (electronic intelligence) mission to listen in on a Russian spacecraft. Probably some satellite telemetry. What he found puzzling was why they had to listen in over Perm, seven hundred miles inside Soviet territory. Usually the Russians downloaded their telemetry to earth stations via a relay network of communications satellites at unpredictable intervals, just like the Americans. But on this mission the detachment commander had emphasized timing, timing, timing. It simply didn't make any sense. Oh, well, just try to concentrate on the mission, Floyd thought. Forget about the Russkies and their nine thousand surface-to-air missiles, their twenty-two hundred interceptors, and their ten thousand air defense radars. They wouldn't mind a little seven-hundred-mile penetration by the Blackbird, would they? Naw.
"Go to initial altitude on my mark," ordered Floyd.
"Roger," replied Griggs.
"Three… two… one… mark!"
Despite its power, getting an aircraft as large as the SR-71 through the sound barrier was not an easy thing to do, so pilots of the Blackbird used a maneuver to propel the aircraft past supersonic speed while conserving fuel. Griggs pushed the dual throttles all the way in and put the spy plane into a shallow dive. This combination of dive/thrust rapidly pushed the machometer indicator past the speed of sound. Griggs then pulled back on the stick and pointed the nose of the Blackbird almost straight up. This "dipsy-doodle" maneuver produced a slingshot effect that catapulted the spy plane skyward at an incredible rate of climb.
The two men felt the pressure build up in their orange space suits while watching their altimeter needles spin round and round.
"Unidentified aircraft, Sector seventeen-D, approaching the coast on a south-southeast heading… Altitude fifteen thousand meters and climbing… fast… What do you think, Comrade Colonel?" asked the radar controller.
Looking at the map projection from his post in the Crow's Nest, Col. Valery Leonov of the Soviet Air Defense Force said through his telephone, "I do not have to think about it. At that speed and rate of climb it has to be one of their SR-71s. No matter. It will probably turn west and head toward Kola before too long." Leonov guessed the surface-to-air missile batteries at Archangel and Pechora already had it locked in and a target solution computed, but neither battery was about to unload an expensive SA-5 missile at a target that was always out of reach. The paperwork demands of the elephantine Soviet bureaucracy explaining wasted missiles was beyond a Westerner's comprehension.
After a West German teenager landed his Cessna in Red Square several years ago, the Soviet Aerospace Defense Command had gone through a bloodletting unlike anything since Stalin's time. Everyone from generals to lowly captains had been busted and purged from the Air Defense Force. During this turmoil, SAM battery commanders feverishly sought some target, any target, at which they could unleash their missiles. The officers in the Aerospace Warning Centre were told to "damn the paperwork" and shoot something—anything—down. It was during that frenetic period that some zealous SAM crews successfully defended the Motherland from two weather balloons that had drifted over the Kola Peninsula from Norway and wasted dozens of SA-5 missiles shooting at SR-71s probing the northern coastline.
But slowly, things got back to normal. Paperwork demands resurfaced, and commanders became reluctant to face the embarrassment of weather balloon inquiries. Pressure from superiors about wasted missiles grew to the point where no one was going to cut loose with an SA-5 unless it was a sure shot.
Even so, it was absolutely maddening for Colonel Leonov how those Blackbird aircraft could play tag along the Rodina's coast and the Air Defense Force couldn't do a damn thing about it. The best surface-to-air missiles in the Soviet inventory could only reach an altitude of thirty kilometers — roughly 95,000 feet. The damn Blackbird could fly five kilometers above that. The SA-5, with a conventional warhead, would explode harmlessly below it.
The only way they might catch one, assuming they could probe through the SR-71's devious electronic countermeasures, was to put a high-altitude interceptor astride its flight path and fire an air-to-air missile at it. Even then, odds were against a hit. If the missile approached the Blackbird head-on, the mutual closing velocity of over five thousand miles per hour was too fast for the missile's guidance system to react and hit the target. If a tail shot was fired, it would have to be damn close, because the SR-71 could almost outrun a missile in a dead heat. About the only way to nail one was to get lucky with some kind of an underneath/side profile shot from an interceptor. But that wasn't possible unless you knew exactly where the Blackbird was going and could lie in wait for him. Leonov had no idea where this one was going, so his final option was closed.
Absolutely maddening.