The triple-perspex canopy capable of withstanding the tremendous air-pressure differences of ultra-high- altitude flight was closed upon them. A hiss indicated the cabin was now fully pressurized. Drawn by a tractor somewhere ahead of the nosewheel, the SR-71 emerged from the hangar into the evening light.
Heard from inside the aircraft, the engines, once started, seemed to make only a low, whistling sound. Outside, the ground crew shuddered even in their earmuffs as the boom echoed through the hangars.
Colonel O’Sullivan secured immediate clearance for takeoff even while he was running through his seemingly innumerable pre-takeoff checks. At the start of the main runway, the Blackbird paused, rocked on its wheels as the colonel lined her up; then Munro heard his voice:
“Whatever God you pray to, start now, and hold tight.”
Something like a runaway train hit Munro squarely across the broad of the back; it was the molded seat in which he was strapped. He could see no buildings to judge his speed, just the pale blue sky above. When the jet reached 150 knots, the nose left the tarmac; half a second later the main wheels parted company, and O’Sullivan lifted the undercarriage into its bay.
Clean of encumbrances, the SR-71 tilted back until its jet efflux pipes were pointing directly down at Maryland, and it climbed. It climbed almost vertically, powering its way to the sky like a rocket, which was almost what it was. Munro was on his back, feet toward the sky, conscious only of the steady pressure of the seat on his spine as the Blackbird streaked toward a sky that was soon turning to dark blue, to violet, and finally to black.
In the front seat, Colonel O’Sullivan was navigating, which is to say, following the instructions flashed before him in digital display by the aircraft’s on-board computer. It was feeding him altitude, speed, rate of climb, course and heading, external and internal temperatures, engine and jet-pipe temperatures, oxygen flow rates, and approach to the speed of sound.
Somewhere below them, Philadelphia and New York went by like toy towns; over northern New York State they went through the sound barrier, still climbing and still accelerating. At eighty thousand feet, five miles higher than the Concorde flew, Colonel O’Sullivan cut out the afterburners and leveled his flight attitude.
Though it was still not quite sundown, the sky was a deep black, for at these altitudes there are so few air molecules from which the sun’s rays can reflect that there is no light. But there are still enough such molecules to cause skin friction on a plane like the Blackbird. Before the state of Maine and the Canadian frontier had passed beneath them, they had adopted a fast-cruise speed of almost three times the speed of sound. Before Munro’s amazed eyes, the black skin of the SR-71, made of pure titanium, began to glow cherry-red in the heat.
Within the cockpit, the aircraft’s own refrigeration system kept its occupants comfortably cool in their g- suits.
“Can I talk?” asked Munro.
“Sure,” said the pilot laconically.
“Where are we now?”
“Over the Gulf of St. Lawrence,” said O’Sullivan, “heading for Newfoundland.”
“How many miles to Moscow?”
“From Andrews, four thousand eight hundred fifty-six miles.”
“How long for the flight?”
“Three hours and fifty minutes.”
Munro calculated. They had taken off at six P.M. Washington time, eleven P.M. European time. That would be one A.M. in Moscow on Sunday, April 3. They would touch down at around five A.M. Moscow time. If Rudin agreed to his plan, and the Blackbird could bring him back to Berlin, they would gain two hours by flying the other way. There was just time to make Berlin by dawn.
They had been flying for just under one hour when Canada’s last landfall at Cape Harrison drifted far beneath them and they were over the cruel North Atlantic, bound for the southern tip of Greenland, Cape Farewell.
“Mr. President Rudin, please hear me out,” said William Matthews. He was speaking earnestly into a small microphone on his desk, the so-called hot line, which in fact is not a telephone at all. From an amplifier to one side of the microphone, the listeners in the Oval Office could hear the mutter of the simultaneous translator speaking in Russian into Rudin’s ear in Moscow.
“Maxim Andreevich, I believe we are both too old in this business, that we have worked too hard and too long to secure peace for our peoples, to be frustrated and cheated at this late stage by a gang of murderers on a tanker in the North Sea.”
There was silence for a few seconds; then the gruff voice of Rudin came on the line, speaking in Russian. By the President’s side a young aide from the State Department rattled off the translation in a low voice.
“Then, William, my friend, you must destroy the tanker, take away the weapon of blackmail, for I can do no other than I have done.”
Bob Benson shot the President a warning look. There was no need to tell Rudin the West already knew the real truth about Ivanenko.
“I know this,” said Matthews into the mike. “But I cannot destroy the tanker, either. To do so would destroy me. There may be another way. I ask you with all my heart to receive this man who is even now airborne from here and heading for Moscow. He has a proposal that may be the way out for us both.”
“Who is this American?” asked Rudin.
“He is not American, he is British,” said President Matthews. “His name is Adam Munro.”
There was silence for several moments. Finally the voice from Russia came back grudgingly.
“Give my staff the details of his flight plan—height, speed, course. I will order that his airplane be allowed through, and will receive him personally when he arrives.
“He wishes you a peaceful night, Mr. President,” said the translator.
“He must be joking,” said William Matthews. “Give his people the Blackbird’s flight path, and tell Blackbird to proceed on course.”
On board the
Despite his threat to choose a different cabin, Drake was confident there would be no night attack from the Marines, and elected to stay where he was.
Thor Larsen faced him grimly across the table in the day cabin. For both men the exhaustion was almost total. Larsen, fighting back the waves of weariness that tried to force him to place his head in his arms and go to sleep, continued his solo game of seeking to keep Svoboda awake, too, pinpricking the Ukrainian to make him reply.
The surest way of provoking Svoboda, he had discovered, the surest way of making him use up his last remaining reserve of nervous energy, was to draw the conversation to the question of Russians.
“I don’t believe in your popular uprising, Mr. Svoboda,” he said. “I don’t believe the Russians will ever rise against their masters in the Kremlin. Bad, inefficient, brutal they may be; but they have only to raise the specter of the foreigner, and they can rely on that limitless Russian patriotism.”
For a moment it seemed the Norwegian might have gone too far. Svoboda’s hand closed over the butt of his gun; his face went white with rage.
“Damn and blast their patriotism!” he shouted, rising to his feet “I am sick and tired of hearing Western writers and liberals go on and on about this so-called marvelous Russian patriotism.
“What kind of patriotism is it that can feed only on the destruction of other people’s love of homeland? What about
“I hate their bloody patriotism. It is mere chauvinism, and always has been, since Peter and Ivan. It can exist only through the conquest and slavery of other, surrounding nations.”
He was standing over Larsen, halfway around the table, waving his gun, panting from the exertion of shouting. He took a grip on himself and returned to his seat. Pointing the gun barrel at Thor Larsen like a forefinger, he told him:
“One day, maybe not too long from now, the Russian empire will begin to crack. One day soon, the Rumanians will exercise
