Michael Dobbs - One Minute to Midnight

A faint glow appeared on the horizon off the nose of Maultsby’s plane. His spirits rose for the first time in hours. He now knew for certain he was heading east, back to Alaska. The navigator at Eielson had observed the same golden glow one and a half hours earlier when it was still pitch-dark over Chukotka. Maultsby decided to hold his heading until he descended to twenty thousand feet. If there were not any clouds, he would go down to fifteen thousand and look around. If there were clouds, he would try to maintain his altitude as long as possible. He did not want to crash into a mountain.

At twenty-five thousand feet, his pressure suit started deflating. There were no clouds and no mountains in sight. By now, there was just enough light to permit Maultsby to see the ground. It was covered with snow.

Two F-102s with distinctive red paint on their tails and fuselage appeared on either wingtip. They seemed to be flying at “near stall speed” at a dangerously steep angle. Maultsby had just enough battery power left to contact the fighter jets on the emergency frequency of his radio. An American voice crackled through the ether.

“Welcome home.”

The two F-102 interceptors darted in and out of the clouds, circling the stricken spy plane like buzzing gnats. If they tried to match the slow-gliding speed of the U-2, they would flame out and crash. At least there was no sign of the Soviet MiGs, which had turned back toward Anadyr well before Maultsby reached international waters.

The nearest airfield was a primitive ice strip at a place called Kotzebue Sound, a military radar station just above the Arctic Circle. It was about twenty miles back. The F-102 pilots suggested that Maultsby try to land there.

“I’m going to make a left turn, so you’d better move out,” Maultsby radioed the plane on his left wingtip.

“No sweat, come on.”

As Maultsby banked to the left, the F-102 disappeared under his wing. The pilot radioed back to say that he had gone to look for the little airstrip.

Roger Herman was waiting at the end of the runway at McCoy Air Force Base outside Orlando, Florida, scouring the southern sky for any sight of Rudy Anderson. A mobile officer had a crucial role in assisting the pilot of a U-2 to land his plane. A U-2 was difficult enough to fly; it was even more difficult to land. The pilot had to get its long wings to stop generating lift exactly two feet above the runway. The mobile officer would chase the aircraft down the runway in a control vehicle, calling out its altitude every two feet. If the pilot and the mobile officer were both doing their jobs properly, the plane would belly-flop onto the runway. Otherwise it would continue gliding.

Herman had been waiting for Anderson for over an hour. He was rapidly losing hope. The pilot had failed to send a coded radio message to signal that he had crossed back into American airspace. It was possible that a navigational error had caused him to go astray. But he was only carrying enough fuel for a flight of four hours and thirty-five minutes. He had taken off at 9:09 a.m. The time was about to expire.

Standing at the end of the runway, Herman felt like someone in a World War II movie, counting the minutes to his friend’s return. He waited until he received a call from the commander of the wing, Colonel Des Portes.

“You might as well come back.”

McNamara was increasingly troubled by the lack of information. Dramatic events were unfolding in real time, but he was learning about them many hours later, if at all. His philosophy was the opposite of Admiral Anderson’s. He worried about everything and wanted to know all the details immediately. In his effort to keep informed, he reached deep down into the bureaucracy. He was able to patch himself into the communications system of the Joint Chiefs from his Pentagon suite. He personally got on the phone to low-level officials, including a radar operator in the Florida Keys, to find out what was happening in and around Cuba.

It was unclear to McNamara whether military leaders were deliberately withholding information or whether they themselves did not know what was going on. He and his deputy, Roswell Gilpatric, had noted discrepancies between what they were told by Navy Plot and what they learned from the Defense Intelligence Agency. They were not at all sure that the Navy was “operating on the basis of the very latest information.” It turned out that Air Force commanders had been unaware of Maultsby’s flight to the North Pole until he got into trouble.

The defense secretary learned that another U-2 had taken off on an air-sampling mission to the North Pole on the same route followed by Maultsby. He ordered its immediate recall. He would later halt all U-2 flights outside U.S. territory until the Air Force provided a full report on Maultsby’s overflight.

More startling news greeted McNamara soon after he rejoined the Joint Chiefs in the Tank. At 2:03 p.m., a grim-faced Air Force colonel burst into the room to announce that “a U-2 overflying Cuba is thirty to forty minutes overdue.”

As Maultsby descended below five thousand feet, the F-102 pilots began to get nervous. They could not understand how a plane could fly at that altitude without any power and not flame out. But they had no experience flying a U-2.

Maultsby made an initial pass over Kotzebue airstrip at a height of one thousand feet. It was on a snow-covered peninsula jutting out to sea. A truck marked the beginning of the runway. Beyond the airstrip were a few Eskimo shacks and a military radar installation on a hill. There was barely any crosswind. This was a relief, as even small gusts of wind could blow his flimsy plane off course. As he started a low left turn out to sea, one of the F-102 pilots was convinced he was about to crash.

“Bail out! Bail out!” yelled Lieutenant Dean Rands, the lead F-102 pilot.

But Maultsby refused to panic. He lowered his wing flaps and shut down his idling J-57 engine, as it was giving him too much thrust. Everything looked good, except he was approaching the runway with more airspeed than he wanted. As he passed fifteen feet over the truck, he deployed a parachute out of the back of the plane and kicked the rudder back and forth to slow down. Without a mobile officer racing along the runway behind him, it was difficult to judge his altitude precisely. The U-2 “did not seem to want to stop flying, even without an engine.” It finally did the required belly flop onto the runway, skidded along the ice, and came to rest in the deep snow.

Maultsby sat trancelike in his ejector seat, unable to think or move. He was physically and emotionally drained. After sitting numb for several minutes, he was startled by a knock on the canopy. He looked up to see “a bearded giant” wearing a government-issue parka.

“Welcome to Kotzebue,” said the giant, a huge grin on his face.

“You don’t know how glad I am to be here,” was all Maultsby could manage in return.

He tried to climb out of the cockpit, but his legs were numb. Seeing that he was in difficulty, his new friend “put his hands under my armpits and gently lifted me out of the cockpit and placed me on the snow as if I had been a rag doll.” Radar station personnel and half a dozen Eskimos gathered round to greet the unexpected visitor. The two F-102s bid farewell by buzzing the airfield and rocking their wings.

The bearded giant helped Maultsby off with his helmet. A blast of bitterly cold air hit him in the face, momentarily reviving him and reminding him of the one piece of business he needed to take care of before anything else. He excused himself from the welcoming committee and shuffled laboriously to the other side of the U-2, where he emptied his bursting bladder into a bank of virgin snow.