One minute to midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the brink of nuclear war (48 page)

Maultsby knew what life was like inside a Communist prison. His thoughts went back to a January day ten years earlier when he took off for his seventeenth combat mission over North Korea. He had had a 1,000-pound bomb load beneath each wing of his F-80 Shooting Star, ready to drop on Chinese troop reinforcements at Kunri, an important railroad center. An enemy shell crashed into his fuselage just behind him as he attempted to dive-bomb the railroad line. Diving to earth, out of control, he had just enough time to release the two bombs and yank his ejection seat handle. The pilot chute opened automatically, and he floated down to earth, with jet fighters screaming overhead and bombs exploding around him. He fell into the snow, slipped out of his parachute harness, and tried to run. He did not get very far. He soon found himself looking up into "the muzzles of a dozen rifles, all held by Chinese soldiers."

It was the start of six hundred days as a prisoner of war. The Air Force listed him as "missing in action." He was kept isolated from American and allied prisoners for many weeks. For much of the time, he was held in a stinking cave, dug into the side of a hill, that was not high enough for him to stand upright. Eventually, he was joined by another captured American pilot. Their bedding consisted of filthy straw, which they shared with rodents and insects. It was bitterly cold. Meals consisted of rice and water. "There was pain, intense pain. The months filled more and more with hunger and privation, with cold, and with interrogations that went on endlessly.... [Maultsby] was dragged and shoved and prodded from place to place, rarely knowing where he or his fellow prisoners were." He was finally released in a prisoner exchange at the end of August 1953.

The more Maultsby thought about his prison experiences, the more determined he became "to get as far away as possible" from the radio station playing Russian music. He kept on turning left until the signal was directly behind him and Orion was off his right wingtip. He called out: "MAY DAY! MAY DAY!" over the emergency channel of his radio until he was hoarse.

He was still three hundred miles inside Soviet territory.

12:38 P.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 (2:38 A.M. SUNDAY, SYDNEY)

Admiral Anderson had a long-standing engagement in Norfolk, Virginia, to attend the football game between the Naval Academy and the University of Pittsburgh. It was a matter of pride for the chief of naval operations that he could leave his post in the middle of a crisis, and the ship would still be in good hands. The guardian of the traditions of John Paul Jones had total confidence in the men serving under him, whatever his civilian superiors might think. He would remain true to his personal creed: "Leave details to the staff.... Don't bellyache and don't worry."

He had flown down to southern Virginia earlier in the morning, after making arrangements for a special telephone to be installed in his game box, in case anything truly urgent cropped up. After his argument with McNamara on Tuesday night over arrangements for the blockade, he had not bothered to disguise his frustration with interfering civilians. Rather than setting general guidelines and letting the Navy get on with the job, the White House had insisted on making the final decision about every single ship interception. At least two Soviet ships, the
Bucharest
and the
Vinnitsa,
had sailed right through the quarantine line without being inspected. When he learned of the stand-down order from a McNamara aide, the admiral had uttered a stream of salty oaths.

The football outing meant that Anderson missed the daily crisis meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, coordinating all military actions against Cuba and the Soviet Union. But aides assured him that everything was under control. Early Saturday afternoon, a subordinate called the CNO operations room to check on messages for the boss.

"Tell the admiral to rest easy," Anderson's executive assistant replied confidently. "The boat's on an even keel. He should have a good time, and go to the ballgame."

With "Gorgeous George" cheering them on, Navy trounced Pitt, 32-9.

On the opposite side of the world, in Australia, an American college professor named Irvin Doress was obsessed by thoughts of Armageddon. The thirty-two-year-old sociologist was one of a handful of Americans who had chosen to flee the country rather than wait helplessly for "missiles flying through the crisp night air." He packed his suitcases immediately after Kennedy's speech announcing the blockade, and caught the first Qantas flight out of New York for Sydney. His luggage consisted of "a few of my best books, two manuscripts in various stages of disorganization, a couple of suits, and my trusty typewriter."

He was now sitting in a drab King's Cross hotel room, reviewing his abrupt decision. It was the middle of the night, Sydney time. He thought about the two young children he had left behind in America with an estranged wife, and his students at Union College in upstate NewYork. He had written a hurried note to the head of the sociology department, but had not said any real good-byes. He confided to his diary that he was beginning to feel "shame for having abandoned my loved ones." He asked himself, "Why should I survive and not others, especially younger people."

"There is a time to live and a time to die," he mused. "A post-nuclear world would be an extremely unpleasant place to live--even if the radioactivity didn't kill you."

12:44 P.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 (8:44 A.M. ALASKA)

Located two hundred miles above the Arctic Circle, Pevek was one of the most northerly, most isolated towns in Russia. The local Chukchi culture revolved around the raising of reindeer and the hunting of walrus. The population density was roughly two people per square mile. In winter, temperatures dropped to 50 degrees below zero. To the Soviet state, the region was of interest mainly for its rich deposits of tin and gold, as a winter refuge for the ships that patrolled the Arctic Ocean, and as a remote military outpost. A squadron of MiGs was stationed at an airfield by the edge of the sea to intercept American bombers heading over the North Pole.

When the military radar station spotted the intruder plane heading toward the Chukot Peninsula, the MiGs took off from Pevek Airport. The MiGs shot upward in sudden bursts of speed, but the strange plane remained tantalizingly out of reach. Using their supersonic engines, the Soviet pilots could zoom-climb to 60,000 feet in a couple of minutes, but that still left them 15,000 feet short of their prey. The interceptor jets kept up with the intruder for three hundred miles and then roared off in a westerly direction in search of fuel.

Another group of MiGs took off from the airfield at Anadyr on the Sea of Okhotsk on the other side of the peninsula. They flew north to take over the chase from the Pevek-based interceptors. They almost caught up with Maultsby over the middle of the peninsula and followed him as he turned toward Alaska.

The interception attempts were being tracked 3,500 miles away in Offutt, Nebraska, in the Operations Center of the Strategic Air Command. By monitoring the Soviet air defense radar net, SAC intelligence officers could follow the MiGs the same way that they followed Maultsby's U-2 once it entered Soviet airspace. They plotted the movements of the MiGs with little check marks on an illuminated screen. As the MiGs turned eastward, SAC asked the Alaska Air Defense Command to scramble a pair of F-102 fighter-interceptors to provide protection for Maultsby.

Earlier in the week, technicians had removed the conventional weapons from the F-102s stationed at Galena Air Force Base in western Alaska, and loaded nuclear missiles onto the interceptors. This was standard procedure when the squadron moved to DEFCON-3. Armed with a nuclear-tipped Falcon air-to-air missile, a lone F-102 could wipe out an entire fleet of incoming Soviet bombers. In theory, nuclear weapons could only be used on the authority of the president. In practice, an F-102 pilot had the physical ability to fire the nuclear warhead by pushing a few buttons on his control panel. Since he was alone in the cockpit, no one could override his decision.

One of the interceptor pilots was Lieutenant Leon Schmutz, a twenty-six-year-old recently out of flight school. As he climbed into the skies above the Bering Strait to search for the missing U-2, he wondered what he would do if he ran into the Soviet MiGs. His only means of defense was a nuclear warhead capable of destroying everything within a half-mile radius of the explosion. To use such a weapon was virtually unthinkable, particularly over American territory. The detonation of even a small warhead could result in all-out nuclear war. But to fail to respond to an attack by a Soviet fighter went against a pilot's basic survival instincts.

1:28 P.M. SATURDAY (9:28 A.M. ALASKA)

Maultsby made a quick mental summary of his situation. The main plus was that he could no longer hear the Russian radio station. The principal minus was that his plane carried sufficient fuel for nine hours and forty minutes of flight. He had been airborne for nine hours and twenty-eight minutes, having taken off at midnight. Twelve minutes of fuel remained.

To have any hope of making it back to Alaska alive, Maultsby knew he would have to make full use of his plane's extraordinary gliding capabilities. With its long, billowing wings and exceptionally light airframe, a U-2 could travel up to two hundred miles without power, buoyed by the wind currents as it slowly descended through the earth's atmosphere. It was a glider as much an airplane.

He needed to save some fuel for an emergency, and also wanted to conserve his battery power. He made a final call in the clear to announce that he was going off the air. "A sense of despair set in" as he reached out to the control panel in front of him and shut down the plane's single Pratt & Whitney J-57 engine. He settled into a gentle glide.

By switching off the engine, Maultsby had also disabled the cockpit pressurization and heating system. The capstans in his flight suit inflated with a
whoosh
from the emergency oxygen supply to compensate for the loss of cabin pressure, preventing his blood from exploding into the thin air. He looked like the Michelin man. A single phrase kept running through his exhausted, sleep-deprived brain as he glided through the stratosphere at a height of seventy thousand feet, unsure of his location and unable to communicate with anybody.

"This is a fine mess you've got yourself into, Charlie."

1:41 P.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 (9:41 A.M. ALASKA)

The latest message from Khrushchev had only confirmed the worst suspicions of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The military brass was convinced that the Soviet leader had no intention of taking his missiles out of Cuba. He was merely playing for time, dragging the United States into an endless round of pointless bargaining. By the time Kennedy realized what was happening, it would be too late. The missiles would be mated with nuclear warheads, pointed at America and ready to fire.

The way the Joint Chiefs saw it, any conciliatory words or gestures from Moscow were merely a feint. A top Marine general warned the chiefs that "Khrushchev, like every doctrinaire Communist before him, is a slavish follower of Sun Tzu." To prove his point, he cited several aphorisms from the venerated Chinese military strategist, drawing parallels between the Middle Empire in 512 B.C. and the Soviet Empire of A.D. 1962:

* Speak in humble terms, continue preparations and attack;

* Pretend inferiority and encourage the enemy's arrogance;

* The crux of military operations lies in the pretense of accommodating to the designs of the enemy.

The chiefs were meeting in the Tank, their Pentagon inner sanctum dominated by a huge map of the world. Seated around the polished wooden table, they debated the latest intelligence from Cuba, including evidence of nuclear-capable FROG missiles and many more Soviet troops than previously suspected. Curtis LeMay dominated the session as usual, even though he spoke in monosyllables and refused to engage in discussion. The Air Force chief wanted his colleagues to recommend execution of a full-scale air strike against thousands of military targets in Cuba, followed by a ground invasion in seven days. At LeMay's insistence, the generals began drafting a document to send to the White House accusing Khrushchev of "diplomatic blackmail."

"Delay in taking further direct military action toward solving the Cuban problem is to the benefit of the Soviet Union," the chiefs warned. "Cuba will be harder to defeat. U.S. casualties will be multiplied. The direct threat of attack on the Continental United States by Cuban-based nuclear missiles and nuclear capable aircraft will be greatly increased."

The chiefs were discussing the timing of the initial attack on Cuba when McNamara walked into the Tank. Having come straight from the ExComm meeting, he was preoccupied by the Jupiter missiles in Turkey, easy targets for the Soviets if the United States attacked Cuba. One way to reduce the temptation to Khrushchev to "knock out" the Jupiters would be to station a Polaris nuclear submarine off the coast of Turkey, and let Moscow know it was there. The invulnerable submarine, with sixteen Polaris ballistic missiles on board, was a much more effective deterrent to a Soviet attack on Turkey than the vulnerable Jupiters. Sending a nuclear submarine to Turkey would also pave the way for the withdrawal of the obsolete Jupiters.