The Crossing by Ted Allbeury

Author:Ted Allbeury
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2017-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

21

The plane stood on the tarmac of the parking bay at the airfield in Peshawar, Pakistan, half concealed in its enormous hangar. With its long body, high tail and unusually wide wings its elegance was not obvious because it was painted black. On the drawing board at Lockheed it looked like a smooth, sleek flying fish, but on the ground, in its strange livery, it looked more like a killer shark. It carried no guns, but a mass of infra-red cameras and electronics.

It could photograph a section of the earth’s surface 125 miles wide and 3,000 miles long. And photo-interpreters looking at the huge enlargements of the 40,000 paired frames could read the headlines of a newspaper taken from ten miles above the earth. It was believed to be beyond the reach of even the most sophisticated attack planes available to the Soviet Union. It was one of three identical planes used in Operation Overflight, an operation that had already been working successfully and fruitfully for almost four years.

The only unusual feature of the flight that day—May 1, 1960—was that it was the first flight which would cross the whole of the Soviet Union. Taking off from Peshawar and landing almost 4,000 miles away at Bod in Norway, it would pass over important targets that had never been photographed before.

Rumour had it that the flight was to ensure that when President Eisenhower met President Khrushchev shortly he would be fully up-to-date on Soviet military dispositions.

Inevitably, USAF intelligence officers had considered what routines should apply if a pilot was shot down or force landed in Soviet territory. The plane itself was protected by a timed destruction system. The pilots were offered a cyanide tablet and a silver dollar with a small metal loop so that it could be fastened to a key chain or a chain around the wrist or neck. If the loop was unscrewed it revealed a thin needle whose minute grooves were laced with curare, an instant killer. Taking and using either or both was entirely the pilot’s option. They were merely available. Most pilots carried neither but on that particular morning the young, crew-cut pilot when asked if he wanted the silver dollar had taken it, seeing it as a useful weapon rather than a means of committing suicide.

That morning the pilot stood at the table in the hangar with the intelligence officer as he was handed the various standard items for a flight. Shaving kit, civilian clothes, a packet of filter cigarettes, pictures of his wife, some German marks, Turkish lira, Russian roubles, gold coins, watches and rings for barter, a hundred US dollars, US postage stamps, a Defense Department ID card, a NASA certificate, instrument rating cards, US and International driving licences, a Selective Service card, a social security card, and an American flag poster that said in fourteen different languages “I am an American.”

For the last time they traced his route on the maps. From Peshawar he would cross Afghanistan and the Hindu Kush and enter Soviet airspace near Stalinabad.

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