North Cape

CHAPTER 4

In 1964, as the A-11 project — later to become the SR-71, fighter Interceptor in an attempt to cover up its reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering role — came to conclusion, it had become extremely clear that the United States was badly in need of a stopgap method of acquiring intelligence information beyond the limited capabilities of the original SAMOS project. SAMOS was a classified Air Force satellite system, launched from 1958 to 1972 from both Cape Kennedy and Vandenberg AFB near Santa Barbara, California. Always shrouded under heavy secrecy, SAMOS — and later the expanded ADVANCED SAMOS — had one and only one objective: to keep an eye on Soviet and Red Chinese territory.

The state of the art in photographic techniques, lenses, and films in the early part of the project’s life was such that only fairly gross data could be obtained. The SAMOS satellites were at first limited to one-hundred-nautical-mile orbits in an equatorial path that covered, at best, only limited portions of USSR territory. But as more powerful launch vehicles became available and as the Vandenberg launch site was completed, the SAMOS satellites were launched with increasing frequency into polar orbits of altitudes from six to ten thousand miles, which provided coverage of Communist territory every two hours. By increasing the number of satellites in orbit and launching them into carefully prepared, overlapping orbits, complete coverage every three minutes was obtained.

Sensor technology increased quickly as industry was funded for billions of dollars. From the first crude infrared and black and white lenses, which were limited to coverage of open, daylight, cloudless territory, faster films, computerized programing, sensitive day-night television cameras, tape storage, and widely dispersed, secretly located mobile and fixed ground stations continually received microsecond-duration transmissions that were impossible to locate and fix, and relayed them to a central, monitoring station deep in the Virginia hills. From there, especially prepared abstracts were transmitted to Washington. But, even with sensors able to photograph a Russian guard sneaking a smoke on duty at the Number 3 gate at Kasputin Yar, or record the identification numbers on the locomotive and each of the freight cars moving along the Trans-Siberian Railroad with supplies for the naval base at Vladivostok, there were often, all too often, sites and areas spotted that needed further investigation, In the 1950s, before the SAMOS satellites were available, this Portion of the job had been performed in large part by a series of aircraft, the three most important of which were the U-2 and the reconnaissance versions of the B-47 and B-66. But in 1960, just prior to the ill-fated Paris Summit Conference, a U-2 had been shot down over the Soviet Union with a new type of missile. Nikita Khrushchev had used the incident to stop reconnaissance flights over Soviet territory. For some years after, the U-2 had continued to be operated over Red Chinese territory by the Nationalist Chinese, in spite of the ever-increasing number of the outmoded aircraft shot down and destroyed. By the late 1960s, both the United States and the USSR realized.that the continual surveillance of each other’s territory by their respective “spy-in-the-sky” satellites was doing a great deal of harm to their defense efforts. Such a great deal of harm that both nations on differing occasions were able to report such incidents as the explosion of a nuclear test rocket and the resulting destruction of a complete test complex — and several key officials — in the Soviet Union, and the similar explosion of the highly secret nuclear rocket-engine project at jackass Flats, Nevada, before the capitols were aware that the disaster had occurred, As sensor technology improved, steps were taken to move highly classified work into underground or camouflaged locations not visible to the spying satellites. It was this problem that brought several key officials, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Chief of Staff, the secretaries of State, and Defense, and the president of a large aircraft corporation together in the President’s office in late 1967. From this meeting had come the decision to build an aircraft that would carry many of the same sensors that were incorporated in the Advanced SAMOS. The aircraft to be designed would have long loiter time — on the matter of days rather than hours — coupled with high speed and an extremely high altitude ceiling, well beyond the range of high-altitude antiaircraft rockets.

For two years the lights had burned twenty-four hours a day on the back lot of the aircraft plant, the same lights that had burned for the U-2 and the A-11. Only the two hundred men virtually hand-building the aircraft ever knew what was being built, and of these, only five knew the reason why. A specially constructed and programed computer was used to design and refine the basic structure of the aircraft taking shape in the “skunk works,” as the back lot was known. Shotgun-carrying security guards were in evidence at all times, hard bitten men from the AP’s. They brooked no attempts to cross the gate and were as likely to level a shotgun at a general as a wandering employee. It was contrary to normal American industrial security procedures, usually unobtrusively present, but it was thought better to be safe than sorry.

On the day the aircraft was rolled out, shrouded in nylon and airlifted to Edwards Air Force Base, there was no celebration, no rejoicing over a job well done, only relief that it was at last out of the plant and gone. A Lockheed C-141 flew the parts of the aircraft to the desert flight-testing base at the foot of the Sierra Nevadas, and it was quickly rolled Into a hangar and disassembled, then trucked deeper into the Mohave to Gillon Advanced Test Site on the northern rim of the desert. Here, in a specially constructed and closely guarded base annex; the aircraft was reassembled and the testing begun. Teleman’s first look at the aircraft came on a day three years after he had signed his contract with the CIA and entered training. Previously, he had served as a reconnaissance pilot with the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnamese war, with some eighty-three missions to his credit before the armistice. He was a bachelor, with no more than the usual family ties and a fierce devotion to his country that had been tested and found fully complete in a North Vietnamese prison camp. His three years of training, covering a range of subjects from aeronautical engineering to geopolitics, and including education equivalent to a masters degree in the psychology of political power and government structures, had taught him more than he had ever suspected there was to learn. Teleman stood in the hangar that August day, feeling the fierce heat of the Mohave sun burning down on his back. It was nothing compared to the white heat of excitement generated by the sleek black needle of an airplane that reached back into the gloom of the hangar.

He shook his head wonderingly as he walked back along its DC-9 length. The body was 120 feet long, yet nowhere was it more than eight feet in diameter. The fuselage carried the distinctive contours of a supersonic aircraft: a pinched waist, Coke bottle shape halfway along its length. The wing began less than ten feet from the tip of the nose. Starting at a width of half an inch, it grew to two feet at mid-length, where it then flared out into a severely flattened and cambered parallelogram. Twin vertical stabilizers rode the wing, reaching four stories toward the ceiling of the cantilevered hangar. Each was demurely painted with the symbol of the United States, a six-by-nine-foot representation of the American flag. Other than that red, white, and blue flag, the aircraft was a gleaming black, a deadly killer whale of an aircraft for all that she was completely unarmed.

Teleman climbed the ladder affixed to the fragile side, half expecting the fuselage to collapse under his weight. He wriggled down into the cockpit and stretched out in the same acceleration couch he had sat in so many times in the mock-up at Eglin AFB. Every instrument, every control was exactly where it should be. With eyes closed he ran through the complete check-out of the instrument and computer panels. The only difference that he could detect was the complete satisfaction of sitting in the actual aircraft rather than the fiberglass and plywood mock-up.

Teleman was the first to fly the A-17. She was rolled out the next day and he climbed into the cockpit again and wriggled down into the couch, feeling the soft push of the oil-filled cushions against his back as the couch adjusted itself to his body. He made the first flight without the PCMS — the Physiological Control Monitoring System — in operation and the aircraft was all his to control. Teleman taxied to the far end of the runway and set the brakes. Then he ran the engines up slowly to full-military-rated thrust. The two great Pratt & Whitney TRR-58 turbo-ram-rocket engines took two minutes to build thrust to the maximum allowable for takeoff, nearly 53,000 pounds apiece. Teleman lay in the acceleration couch wondering at the tremendous vibration that shook every rivet, every seam in the entire aircraft until his teeth ached. Then he released the brakes. And in spite of its two-hundred-thousand-pound dead weight, the A-17 bounded forward. He was off the runway before he realized it. Automatically his body went through all the motions: gear up and locked, engines throttled back to low cruising speed of 470 knots, ground control tuned to 126.6 Mc, eyes sweeping the instrument panels. All instruments were reading into the green, and for a moment he ignored the check list and concentrated on getting the feel of the aircraft.

While the chase planes took up their stations around him, he tentatively tried the control system and whistled excitedly as the A-17 responded with all the firmness of an F-4

Phantom. Then test control was on the radio demanding to know if he had started through the check list yet. Regretfully he dropped back into the proper pattern while his two chase pilots, one on either side, grinned at each other from their stations well back and below his tail assembly.

For the next year, Teleman got to know the A-17 better than he had ever known any other aircraft. Under the supervision of the design engineers, he took apart and reassembled the aircraft. Then he took the A-17 up for hours on end, always flying the same tight pattern at one hundred thousand feet, well above the allowable levels for commercial planes. Gradually, as he came to know exactly what the airplane would do, flight altitudes and speeds were increased until he was flying routinely at Mach 5 and two hundred thousand feet.

Now he was nearly on his own. He spent so many hours in the aircraft that without the log he would have lost all count. Of the hours spent cramped in the cockpit, sitting in the closely guarded hangar flying computer-devised emergency conditions, he did lose track. At the end of the year he came to feel that the A-17 was an extension of himself. And then the medical people moved in to make it so.

It had been recognized when the A-11 cum SR-71 was completed that man had just about reached his limits in controlling his own aircraft. The A-11 was capable of Mach 3 and nearly Mach 4 by the time the Pratt & Whitney J-58 engines had been up-rated to their fullest extent. The A-11 was only marginally effective as an interceptor aircraft. At Mach 3, fifty miles was needed to complete a 180° turn. Almost go percent of the aircraft was composed of fuel tanks and her cruising range was severely limited at speeds above Mach 1.5, allowing little or no loiter time to contact a target. Because of the immense fuel load needed to keep her in the air, her reconnaissance payload, and therefore her cameras and other sensors, were severely limited also. In effect, and compared to the A-17, she was little help to the satellite surveillance system. Some stopgap measure was needed so that aircraft could spend time over enemy territory without being detected and could gather the smallest details necessary until large, manned satellites could be placed in orbit — still four years in the future.

For nearly ten years the X-15 series of rocket craft had been providing behavior and engineering data on hypersonic aircraft. The X-15 was used as the basic design for the A-17. The X-15 was rocket-powered, and this provided the tremendous speeds necessary — but powered flight time was limited to a few minutes duration. The A-17 needed days of flight time.

The turbojet engine is the most efficient of all propulsion systems’ for speeds between Mach .9 and Mach 2.5, where fuel load, speed, range, and weight are the critical factors. Beyond Mach 2.5 and one hundred thousand feet, the ramjet becomes the most efficient Beyond 120,000 feet, where the air is too thin to support even the ramjet, the rocket engine, with its self-contained oxidizer, becomes the most efficient. To avoid Soviet antiaircraft missiles, the A-17 needed an altitude greater than 125,000 feet. Since the late 1950s, a combination of the three types of propulsive systems had been the research goal of aeronautical research laboratories all across the world. The approach finally adapted to the A-17 was the U. S. Air Force concept called the TURBO-RAM-ROCKET. Below eighty thousand feet and Mach 2.5, the twin power plants in the A-17 functioned as turbojets — air sucked in through the inlet and forced into a combustion chamber, where it mixed with fuel, burned fiercely and the hot gas was forced past a turbine and expelled from the nozzle. The turbine was in turn coupled to the compressor behind the air inlet to compress air and force it into the combustion chamber. An improvement was made on the basic system by adding another stage in front of the compressor assembly called a fan. The fan was just that. Huge blades, coupled to and spun by the turbine, pulled in far more air than the combustion process needed. The excess air was ducted out the side of the engine casing to add as much as 30 percent more thrust.

The turbofan, as it was properly called, was capable of pushing the A-17 to speeds above Mach 2.5. Depending upon the altitude and various atmospheric conditions that necessitated the change — somewhere above Mach 2.5 to 3 — the engine switched from the turbojet mode to ramjet. It was in this versatility that the twin engines differed radically from earlier jet aircraft engines. These assemblies are composed of a thick disk of high-strength steel alloy upon which are mounted cambered blades. The blades are twisted to assume an airfoil shape. In the usual turbojet engine, these blades are mounted rigidly. The turbine assembly is constructed the same way and the blades are made of various materials, selected to withstand temperatures in excess of 1600°F as the hot gases exit from the burner chamber. As a rule of thumb, Teleman had been taught, the hotter the temperature of the gases leaving the burner — the Turbine Inlet Temperature (TIT) — the greater the thrust developed by the engine. The A-17’s TIT was in excess of 3200 degrees.

To allow the power plant to enter the ramjet mode, the blades were mounted upon variable stator disks and could be turned edge-on to the airstream. In addition, the air inlet plug, a large rounded cone of metal mounted in front of the air inlet, could be moved forward to increase the air compression.

A ramjet engine works by ramming air into its combustion chamber at high speeds, where it is mixed with fuel and ignited by a glow plug. Because the ramjet must have a certain flow velocity of air before it will begin to operate, it usually must be carried aloft by another engine to the proper speed and altitude. But once in the thin reaches above eighty thousand feet, the two engines, now operating as ramjets, far surpass the potential and efficiency of the turbojet or turbofan.

A ramjet of this efficiency has a rather narrow operating “envelope.” When the air inlet plug is rammed forward to compress the air while the compressor blades are turned edge-on to — the airstream, a carefully designed tolerance between plug and inlet must be maintained to provide the maximum flow of air to the combustion chamber for the altitude and speed. This tolerance mechanically limits the altitudes and speed beyond which the ramjet may be operated in direct proportion to the growing lack of atmosphere. Beyond 170,000 feet, Teleman could elect, if the extra speed and altitude were needed, to go to the rocket mode.

Now, clamshell doors closed down the area ahead of the combustion chamber — or burner ring in the case of the A-17 engines — and liquid oxygen was fed directly into the burner ring to mix with the fuel — liquid hydrogen — thereby providing a rocket engine that was capable of taking the A-17 to Mach 5.9, only two thousand miles per hour less than would be needed to achieve sub-orbit. Teleman had never had occasion to use the rocket mode except on practice missions. It’ was a last-ditch stand when all else failed: The rocket mode could use six hours worth of carefully metered fuel in two minutes of burning time.

Most experienced military pilots who had received their training during the Vietnamese War were now edging toward the age where their efficiency was slowly being whittled away by the heavy demands placed upon them by their aircraft. Many had gone into the Vietnam War well past the age that a World War II flight surgeon would have considered them capable of controlling even the relatively slower and much less technically complicated fighter aircraft of that period. The younger pilots who had received their baptism of combat flying in the mid-1960s had left the service in droves at the end of the war to answer the lure of high salaries and lifetime sinecure in commercial airlines, which were expanding tremendously in the wake of the giant airliners, supersonic transports, and rapidly growing travel markets.

The human organism is still the most reliable of all mechanisms in spite of the strides that had been made in automation. Rather than load the aircraft down with servomechanisms and complicated gear to perform many of the tasks that the pilot could do, the designers had opted for the human factor.

The A-17 had been on the threshold of man’s ability to control under the difficult and microsecond decision points that had to be reached and gated properly when the aircraft was closing on its target at nearly four thousand miles an hour. The elapsed time from the moment a ground target — often less than a hundred feet across — came into sight until the A-17 had left it behind was often no more than four seconds. During this time, the information displayed on the screens had to be accepted, interpreted, a decision for action made, and the decision implemented; all with enough time remaining to allow the cameras and other recording devices to do their job.

Even in those instances where circumstances dictated that Teleman could loiter the aircraft over the target and select his objectives, someone had to decide what should be recorded, what must be searched for to make the picture complete, and handle the volumes of data that poured in, constantly interpreting, re-deciding and shifting objectives — and often targets. No computer could handle this job. Teleman was trained in the use of certain psychic energizer drugs of the amphetamine and lysergic acid families that could boost his body system output to fantastic heights in relation to normal physiological response. The LSD derivatives extended his powers of concentration and, through their hallucinogenic effect, made him feel that he was actually part of the aircraft. They also increased his comprehension and ability to deal with a multitude of facts in a very short time.

The amphetamines provided the same effect for his bodily responses, increasing his reaction time and slowing his time sense to compensate for the demands of the aircraft’s speed.

Teleman’s physiological and biochemical status was monitored constantly during the mission through a specially tailored system of instruments blended together to form the Physiological Control and Monitoring System. At the start of the mission, an intravenous catheter was inserted into the superior vena cava vein through a plug implanted surgically in his shoulder. A glass electrode was brought into intimate contact with his bloodstream at this nearest acceptable point to the heart. Through the electrode a series of minute pulses, set up by an electrochemical reaction with his blood, informed the computer continually of his body status. The computer was programed to receive inputs directly from various parts of the aircraft’s controlling instrumentation that, coupled with The in vivo status reports, determined the time and dosage of the drugs he received. If the instrumentation, directed by the flight plan or by instructions from Teleman, called for a state of physiologically alert and expanded consciousness, proper drugs were fed into his bloodstream through the catheter and his body responded accordingly. Because of the duration of the flights, often lasting six to seven days, when Teleman was not needed to respond to specific tasks, the computer instructed the PCMS to feed in barbiturate derivatives and he slept. Teleman had once calculated that at least 65 percent of all of his missions were spent sleeping. Although great pains had been taken to develop a high tolerance in Teleman to the drugs he was constantly being infused with, he was thoroughly poisoned by the end of a mission.

In short, Teleman was carefully tailored to the aircraft and its missions. The reach the drugs allowed was marginal, yet enough to provide the control needed to handle his craft as no other airplane had ever been flown. Drugs kept him awake, or put him to sleep, instantly. Others kept him at the peak of alertness for as long as required and his mind focused on his Mission, his instruments, and his aircraft