Bridge of Spies (20 page)

“It was a beautiful, clear day,” Nikolai says. “I got up as usual at seven o’clock and went outside. The sky was clear, no clouds at all. I was preparing to report for duty when the siren sounded.”

Nikolai Batukhtin still lives a short drive from the missile base where he was stationed in the spring of 1960. From the nearest highway and even the approach road the base is obscured by dense woods; nothing in it rises above treetop height.

The winter of 1960 had been brutal, “the worst cold ever.” As a lieutenant Batukhtin had been assigned a
domik
—a wood cabin with a stove—but the enlisted men had been in tents since February. On this clear day the snow had finally melted. There was warmth in the sun and a slack day in prospect for everyone, since it was May 1, May Day, the Day of Spring and Labor and of jubilant comradeship for socialists everywhere. It would be written later that a young Boris Yeltsin was among the marchers under the party banner in nearby Sverdlovsk.

The brand-new rockets were at ease, nearly horizontal on their launchers. There were six in all, one per launcher, positioned in a neat hexagon and connected to one another by tracks cut through the trees that made a Star of David pattern when seen from above. Each stood in a clearing of its own that opened onto a larger central clearing with a control cabin on wheels in the middle. The cabin and the launchers were the color of the forest, dark green and still shiny from the factories
where they had been rushed into production on the personal orders of the general secretary. The rockets were gray. Batukhtin was not an excitable soul, but the Dvina—for that was its code name—made him proud. They said that in tests at Sary Shagan it had exceeded expectations, and the expectation was for a missile that could hit an intruder traveling at one thousand miles an hour at eighty thousand feet. Its sharklike fins and long, slim body had a deadly beauty. Comrade Designer Pavel Grushin had surpassed himself.

Fresh from the factory, none of the rockets in Batukhtin’s battery had been fired yet, even in training, and even though there was nothing more patriotic than the defense of the motherland, they were not likely to be fired on May Day.

“The siren sounded soon after eight o’clock,” he remembers. “It seemed like a normal training alarm, but that made no difference. The same actions were required of us. We had six minutes to run to our stations and check our equipment. That was the time limit set by our government. They believed that any more than six minutes would allow the intruder to escape.

“We checked our equipment, then we waited. Nothing happened. We sat there in the cabin and no one said anything. There was no message from our commander, so we sat there in complete silence for nearly an hour. Then Chelyabinsk gave us the coordinates and we switched on our target acquisition radar. At nine o’clock our commander announced there was an enemy aircraft in the sky.”

*  *  *

Thirteen miles up is a hard place to imagine. If you could drive there, it would be the end point of a straight thirteen-mile drive away from planet Earth. Thirteen miles is five Matterhorns, or forty-four Sears Towers, and there is almost nothing when you get there; so little atmosphere to absorb and deflect the sun’s rays that they will feel hot through a pressure suit even though the outside temperature may be as low as –160 degrees Celsius; so little pressure that the human body requires as much protection as in a perfect vacuum. The view is a different matter. The very few people who have seen it say that looking upward they saw a ring of the purest blue deepening nearly to black, while the view down is both humbling and mysterious. It is vast—four hundred miles
in every direction—but at the same time reveals the planet in its true, curved, intimate state.

From thirteen miles up even giant cumulonimbus are a whole Everest below and look like cotton candy. The only big clouds this high up are H-bomb clouds. This is above the weather, above the jet stream, above almost all wind noise, since wind is air. It is still a quick free fall back to Earth—about six minutes, since the first forty thousand feet will be very quick indeed—and still a long way below outer space. But thirteen miles up is implacably hostile to life all the same. It is 29,000 feet above the point where human bodily fluids start boiling of their own accord.

To go there gently in a balloon is one thing, and even this proved so fraught with surprises that it killed a series of brave pioneers who tried it in the first half of the twentieth century. To go there in a pressurized cockpit with 450 knots of forward motion is quite another, since if the cockpit breaks up or the canopy pops open the cockpit-sized gas bubble that it contained will be gone in no time, its molecules violently and instantly pulled away from one another and redistributed around the stratosphere too thinly to measure, while the pilot, if conscious, will experience a loss of heat and pressure more sudden than any earthbound machine can simulate. Moreover, whatever happens next will happen fast. He could go into a spin, or lose his head to hypoxia or a passing aileron, or just lose his head. Or he could get lucky and survive those first few seconds and have a moment to begin to think.

From the moment he approved its construction, President Eisenhower was haunted by the idea of a U-2 going down in Russia. He forecast very specifically that if it happened in the midst of superpower negotiations the plane “could be put on display in Moscow and ruin my effectiveness.” The plane’s champions were adamant that even if it did happen he could deny all knowledge because the pilot would not survive to talk. He would almost certainly die in any midair explosion, they said. If by chance he survived that, he would not be expected to survive the fall. If by some miracle he survived
that
, they intimated, he would, with luck, have the decency to kill himself or go quietly to the execution the enemy would presumably insist on, in the tradition of the American revolutionary hero Nathan Hale, hanged for spying against the British in 1776.

They were wrong on all counts. Not one but two pilots showed it was possible to survive a midair U-2 catastrophe. On a training flight in 1956 Bob Ericson’s oxygen supply ran low because of a leak, leaving him hypoxic and groggy as he sailed over Arizona on his way back to Groom Lake. His judgment impaired, he forgot that the U-2 liked to be flown slightly nose up to control its speed. He put it into a shallow dive, picked up too much speed, and regained full consciousness when the machine spontaneously disintegrated around him at 28,000 feet. He did not need to eject since there was nothing left to eject from, and his parachute opened automatically at 15,000 feet.

On another training flight, this time over Texas, Colonel Jack Nole punched out at 53,000 feet and lived. It was in September 1957, a banner month for U-2s over Russia and a hot one in Texas, though not at 53,000 feet, where during routing flight checks Nole’s flaps either froze or stuck fully extended as if for landing. This put him into a near-vertical dive as if off the first hill of a monstrous roller coaster but with no good end in view. He reported that he had lost his tail and was ordered to abandon ship, which he was already trying to do, though in truth what followed was not the type of punching out that had earned the process grudging affection among fighter jocks. All they had to do was make one big decision and give one big pull on a cinch ring between their legs. Nole had to unscrew his oxygen tube and his radio wire with stiff, fat gloves fully inflated to prevent the skin and blood vessels on the backs of his hands from distending like blown bubble gum. Then he had to shimmy out of his harness with his torso clamped in a pressure-suit bear hug and pop the canopy by hand. It would have been awkward at ground level. At fifty thousand feet and falling it was that old air force pilot’s temptress—the lethal invitation to panic.

Nole declined the invitation. He wrestled free of the plane and for a few seconds fell next to it, faceplate frosting up in the sudden Siberian cold, limbs stiff despite the onrush of thickening air, thinking. He had a choice to make concerning his parachute. Pulling the rip cord would start oxygen flowing to his helmet from an emergency supply in his seat pack. But assuming it deployed correctly, it would also take about one hundred miles per hour off his downward velocity, and he was still so high that he might freeze solid on such a leisurely descent. (Who knew? No one had bailed out from this high before.) The alternative was to keep free-falling, but with nothing to breathe. He pulled the chute.

Nole did not freeze, but he did swing violently and throw up. His escape, like Ericson’s, tended to indicate that death was not in fact a “given” in the event of a U-2 disintegration. More particularly it showed that falling from such a long way up did at least give the self-possessed pilot time for a rational review of his options, and it confirmed that David Clark’s pressure suits did what was claimed of them—at least at fifty thousand feet.

But fifty thousand feet was not seventy thousand feet. Would the suit hold up in a true worst-case scenario? The air force was anxious to know. It did not send a U-2 all the way up to its operational ceiling for the express purpose of falling apart, but it did send up a series of balloons—the magnificent gossamer helium bubbles code-named Excelsior I, II, and III that took Captain Joe Kittinger to the edge of space.

Kittinger had much in common with Gary Powers. He wrestled with alligators as a teenager and raced speedboats in Florida as a young man. In the air force he showed the requisite nervelessness when climbing into the flying bricks that passed for fighter planes in the early cold war, but he also showed a very human vulnerability at moments of great stress.

In Excelsior I, in November 1959, he soared to 75,000 feet over New Mexico, then jumped. He blacked out while free-falling in a spin but came to on the ground. The next month he did it again from 74,000 feet and remained conscious all the way down. In August 1960 he set a record that still stands by parachuting from 102,000 feet—twenty miles; four Everests—in so many layers of protective clothing that he looked like a teddy bear. On the way up he nearly lost his cool when the sight of a thick layer of cloud below, separating him from his support team, brought him “face to face with a stark and maddening loneliness.” But he was soon the picture of nonchalance again. He told
Time
magazine that for the first part of his fall he was on his back looking up at a starry sky (it was 7:00 a.m.) with “a sensation of lying still while the balloon raced away from me.” In fact he was accelerating to 614 miles per hour, five times terminal velocity in the lower atmosphere.

On each flight Kittinger’s descent was supposed to be controlled by an ingenious sequence of parachutes: drogue, pilot, main canopy, reserve pilot, reserve main canopy. On the first flight four of the five had become fouled around his neck and body and one another. On the
third the right glove of his pressure suit failed and his hand expanded to twice its normal size. But the key piece of data from all three flights for anyone interested in the likely fate of a pilot forced into an extremely high-altitude bailout was that his main pressure suit, the tensile preserver of his brain and vital organs, worked flawlessly each time. And each time, at Kittinger’s insistence, it was David Clark’s standard issue. Eisenhower’s “given”—the dead, mute U-2 pilot—was being meticulously resurrected by well-intentioned people under his command who reasonably assumed that their main task was to keep pilots alive.

As for the suicide scenario, no one had thought it through. No one had actually talked about suicide with the president either, because so many euphemisms were available—euphemisms echoed by Eisenhower in his memoirs: “I was assured that the young pilots undertaking these missions were doing so with their eyes wide open,” he wrote, “motivated by a high degree of patriotism, a swashbuckling bravado and certain material inducements.”

Patriotism was the key word, of course—priceless, immeasurable, sufficient justification for almost anything. But quite apart from the fact that, as Joe Murphy pointed out, there was “never an instruction” that pilots take their own lives, it was never clear in what circumstances a pilot might choose to do so out of patriotism. He might take the L pill as an alternative to torture, but that was different. Did those who invoked Nathan Hale in fact expect a stricken U-2 pilot to take the pill before hitting the ground? While still in the cockpit, perhaps, but after setting the timer on the two-pound explosive charge behind his seat to ensure that no camera or film fell into enemy hands? Or after ejecting, on that long fall to Earth, when the serenity of the heavens and the crisp, thin air of the upper troposphere would combine to reveal the right choice for the good American, who would then reach with gloved hand into the tight outer pocket of his pressure suit, retrieve the pill, and somehow pop it and breathe his last, undistracted by screaming survival instincts or questions about what might actually happen were he to land alive? Not then? Perhaps not. Certainly, standing orders for American officers during the Second World War and since required them to try to escape if captured. Suicide would preclude that. It would also waste the pilots’ training at the agency farm in Maryland with the simulated Soviet border. Perhaps the pill was to be kept handy against
the dread moment of capture during an escape attempt, when torture and execution were surely to follow in short order. But what if, in fact, he was captured and not tortured, like Hale himself? In that event the pilot might gradually allow himself to hope he might survive. At what point during the emergence of that hope was he expected to put it aside and put his country first? At what point was he finally and irrevocably to reject the possibility that he might be able to withhold from his captors any information that they could use against his country and at the same time stay alive? At what point was he to reject that possibility and kill himself? There was a lot to think about if you were invited to take a mental stroll down the road marked “worst-case scenarios,” but the U-2 pilots never were. Nor did those who gave their orders trouble to take the stroll on their behalf.