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.
CHAPTER TWELVE
'Run Like Hell'
The loss of a U-2 over the Soviet Union was only the latest in a string of safety nightmares haunting the Strategic Air Command. Nuclear bombers had gone astray, reconnaissance planes had been shot down, bombs had been dropped accidentally, and early warning systems had given false alerts of a Soviet attack. An accidental nuclear war was not just the stuff of popular fiction. It was within the realm of actual possibility.
SAC already had more planes and missiles and warheads on alert than at any time in its history. One-eighth of its B-52 heavy bomber force ? a total of sixty airplanes ? was in the air at all times, ready to attack targets throughout the Soviet bloc. Another 183 B-47s had been dispersed to thirty-three civilian and military airfields around the United States, ready to take off in fifteen minutes. A total of 136 long-range missiles were on alert. A 'Cuba Fact Sheet' supplied to the president by his military aide reported that General Power had been instructed to mobilize his 'remaining force of 804 airplanes and 44 missiles as of 10 a.m. this morning.' By midday Sunday, SAC would have a 'cocked' ? meaning 'ready to fire' ? nuclear strike force of 162 missiles and 1,200 airplanes carrying 2,858 nuclear warheads.
The more planes and missiles were placed on alert, the more stressed the system became. Even as the Maultsby drama unfolded, senior SAC officers worried about the possibility of an unauthorized launch of the revolutionary new Minuteman missile from underground silos in Montana. Unlike previous liquid-fueled missiles, which required a launch preparation time of at least fifteen minutes, the solid-fueled Minuteman could blast out of its hole in just thirty-two seconds. Deployment of the missile system had been accelerated because of the crisis, but nuclear safety officers were now concerned that too many corners might have been cut.
The decision to activate the first flight of ten Minuteman missiles had been taken soon after Kennedy went on television to announce the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Power wanted every available missile system targeted on the Soviet Union. He called the commander of the 341st Strategic Missile Wing, Colonel Burton C. Andrus, Jr., to find out if the Minuteman could be made ready for firing immediately, circumventing approved safety procedures.
In normal times, firing a Minuteman required four electronic 'votes' from two teams of officers, located in two different launch control centers, twenty miles apart. The problem was that only one control center was complete. Contractors were still pouring concrete at the second center, which would not be operational for several weeks. But the 'last thing' Andrus wanted to tell his short-fused boss was, 'It can't be done.' He knew that Power was 'trying frantically to upstage LeMay's great record as CINCSAC.' He would find a way to 'kluge the system.'
A World War II pilot, Andrus had inherited some of the theatricality of his father, the former commander of the military prison at Nuremberg and jailer of Nazi war criminals like Hermann Goering and Rudolf Hess. Burt
