Ian Sales: Then Will the Great Ocean Wash Deep Above

McIntyre pulls out a chair and sits. You got your film, he tells the spooks, but I don’t know how usable it is.

The CIA guy with the spectacles gives a tight smile. Eastman Kodak, he says, assures us the imagery is recoverable.

We took every precaution, the other spook adds. We’re confident we’ll get to see what we want.

I guess, McIntyre says.

Were there any problems retrieving the bucket? asks one of the spooks.

You mean did everything go to plan, right? McIntyre shrugs. We were lucky not to snag the trail ball on one of the wrecks, he says, and maybe it was a bit harder than anticipated, but no, nothing major went wrong.

I hear you found a lot of shipwrecks.

And airplanes, replies McIntyre.

Anything you saw we should know about? the spook asks.

McIntyre yawns. No, he says, some World War Two airplanes, some freighters about as old, maybe older. Been down there a long time, by the looks of them.

He readies himself to leave, the tiredness has caught up with him and he’s trying to decide if he should ask for coffee or just head straight to his cabin.

Anything happen up here I should know about? he asks.

Not much, says the other spook, the one without the glasses. NASA only just went and put a man on the Moon.

Once the Trieste II has been emptied of gasoline, floated into the USS White Sands ’ aft dock well, and the well drained, the USS Apache takes the USS White Sands under tow. The IOU steams south, leaving its station over the Puerto Rico Trench, and heads for Roosevelt Roads. McIntyre is no longer needed, so a utility boat speeds him ahead and he arrives at the naval station hours before the two ships. By the time they dock, he is somewhere over Cuba in a Navy CT-39E Sabreliner jet, soon to rejoin the Navy Experimental Diving Unit, his short time aboard the Trieste II bathyscaphe behind him and safeguarded by orders to never discuss the mission. The refrigerator containing the shipping container of film stacks is transported in a grey USN Dodge M37 cargo truck from the docks to the air station, where it is loaded into a waiting Navy C-130 Hercules. The two CIA men also climb aboard; no one from the IOU joins them.

Forty minutes later, the C-130 rolls down the runway, props buzzsawing, and rises ponderously into the air. The landing-gear folds neatly away, the aircraft banks gently to the right and heads north for Rochester, New York, where the Eastman Kodak film processing centre is ready to recover whatever imagery is possible from the film stacks.

Speed is of the essence as no one is sure what is happening to the film in the surface-pressure cold water in the shipping container. After all, the bucket has been on the bottom for over a month, where the pressure is four tons per square inch. The C-130 gets a priority slot in the Greater Rochester Airport landing pattern, and as soon as it is on the ground, it taxies towards the military terminal in the south quarter of the field. The rear ramp lowers and the refrigerator is pushed out by the cargo master while the two spooks stand by and watch. An unmarked civilian Ford C-600 box truck drives up, followed by a forklift, the refrigerator is loaded into the back of the truck, which leaves the airport, takes Route 47 into Rochester, and then Route 104 into the city centre and the Eastman Kodak film processing plant beside the Genesee River.

Inside the centre, the film stacks are transferred to a refrigerated tank of water prepared weeks before. The remains of the bucket are carefully removed, and the stacks are opened and the film strips examined. Sea water has caused the emulsion gelatin to expand, and this has kept the centre of the rolls of film sealed. Technicians carefully despool the film and those sections of it with recoverable images are dried and then developed. Of the 52,000 feet of film, roughly one tenth has survived and is capable of being processed. The rest is unusable.

The two CIA men oversee the development process, and when the first 8 by 12 photograph slides out of the film processing machine, one of the spooks steps forward and grabs it. He passes it to his colleague, and they both shrug in puzzlement. The photograph appears to show a vast army base outside a city, but neither of them recognise the city or the base. It is certainly not in the US.

The final set of developed photographs and fixed negatives are packed into a secure briefcase. A Ford Galaxie sedan takes the CIA men back to Greater Rochester Airport, where a civilian Bell 205 waits for them on the apron. They clamber into its passenger compartment and buckle themselves onto the bench seat. The pilot turns round and gestures at his headphones. The spooks take the headphones hanging on hooks beside their seats and fit them over their heads.

After one of the spooks has slid the door shut, the helicopter takes to the air and flies south. The CIA headquarters are 293 miles away, a two-hour flight. One of the CIA men clutches the briefcase containing the photographs from the sunken bucket on his lap, the other stares out of the window at the passing countryside. Neither talks, nor pays much attention to the voice of the pilot and various air flight controllers in their headphones.

The heliport at CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia, has the FAA code 84VA, it is one hundred feet by one hundred feet. The Bell 205 settles squarely in its centre and before the rotor has even stopped turning, the CIA men have jumped out and are running bowed toward a black Dodge Polara sedan waiting at the edge of the pad. The car takes them to the entrance to the headquarters, where they are met and escorted to a photographic analysis office. There is a palpable air of urgency—before leaving Rochester, one of the spooks called his supervisor and told him what the photographs showed.

It takes a team of analysts only thirty minutes to identify the city in the photographs as Shenyang in north-east China, 100 miles from the North Korean border. According to present intelligence reports, there is only a typical military presence in the city, but the photographs from the spy satellite say otherwise. Worse, at least half of the military vehicles assembled at the base do not display the red star of China but the white star of the USSR. There are Soviet T-64s and BMP-1s and SA-9 Gaskins on BRDM-2s and FROG rockets on their transporter erector launcher trucks, and Chinese Type-63 and Type-69 tanks and what looks like Chinese-badged Soviet troop carriers and trucks, lots of trucks. At a nearby airfield are Soviet Tu-95s and Tu-22s and Tu-16s and MiG-21s and Su-17s, and Chinese H-6s and J-7s. It is a vast Sino-Soviet task force, and it appears poised to enter North Korea. The area has been at peace for over a decade, but this will clearly not remain true for much longer. An invasion of North Korea is worrying, but a military pact between China and the USSR is greater cause for concern.

News of the intelligence unearthed by the sunken bucket from the spy satellite flies up the chain of command. The director calls the president, the joint chiefs of staff are informed. A meeting is arranged in the Pentagon, and another in the White House.

The peace has always been precarious and it seems it is about to be rudely shattered. This cannot be allowed.

Something must be done.

The giant swept-wing Convair B-60 bombers roll along the taxiway at Eielson AFB outside Fairbanks, Alaska. As each one reaches the end of the runway, they halt and wait for permission to take off. The roar from their eight J57-P-3 turbojets is immense, a tsunami of noise that sweeps across the air force base, shaking doors and rattling windows. As each aircraft is given clearance, it begins to trundle forward, huge and seemingly incapable of flight, gathering speed until the great silver shapes slowly unstick from the earth, rising elegantly and effortlessly into the air. The great bogies of their landing gear lift up and into the wings with a series of thunks and whirrs, and the jet bombers power up into the white polar sky, trailing four lines of brown smoke, gradually fading from sight into the limitless distance.