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  As Soviet and Chinese relations worsened following the de-Stalinization campaign of the Khrushchev regime, the intensity and frequency of Sino-Soviet border clashes increased until finally, less than a year ago, both sides, in a carefully secreted meeting, worked out a compromise that was to have settled the entire affair. It seemed that the Chinese had already broken their side of the bargain.

  Teleman's orders directed him to fly to the Sinkiang-Kazakh border where the Red Chinese were reported to have attacked in strength. It appeared to Western observers, from the sketchy reports available, that the Chinese had pulled a surprise attack and caught the Russians fiat-footed. They were steadily being pushed back all along the border and Chinese troops were reported to be firmly established on Soviet territory.

  Both sides were extremely quiet about the fighting, as indeed they always had been. The war was being conducted on a non-nuclear basis at the moment, rather a gentlemen's agreement, although Teleman could not think of two less likely candidates.

  Teleman thoughtfully considered the implications of such au attack as he continued to enjoy a rare moment of relaxation. If the war was being fought without the use of nuclear weapons, the Chinese would be at a distinct advantage. They could mobilize one field army at a strength equal to the entire Soviet forces. The Soviets now must be feeling the same way about the Chinese that the United States had felt about the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong, and, before them, the magnificent French Army about the Viet Mirth.

  The Chinese troops were equipped and trained for this type of "conventional" guerrilla war, a conventional war that involved the proper use and maneuvering of small battle units in guerrilla tradition, small but in vast numbers of independently acting units. Units able to hit and run, always edging and prodding the Soviet forces into territory where the Chinese troops could overwhelm the less mobile Soviet troops by sheer weight of numbers.

  The Soviet generals and political leaders would be in Moscow fingering their arsenal of nuclear missiles and bombs, just as the United States generals had done in Southeast Asia, knowing that they could never use them unless the Chinese did so first, or unless a disastrous defeat endangering the entire nation appeared imminent. They would learn, thought Teleman, just the way the United States had, how best to fight such a war—by practical experience. All the reading and observing could never furnish what one year's defeats and questionable victories would provide.

  The Soviets could ill afford to risk the loss of prestige that would follow if the world knew that the stepson was challenging the stepfather, a very untutored and ill-equipped stepson at that. The State Department and the Pentagon apparently felt that, if the Soviet Union should wind up on the losing side, it would not take long for them to run screaming to the United States for help.

  And why not? he thought sarcastically. Everyone else did as soon as their backs were to the wall. Why should they be different? For the moment the Soviets did not want it known that the much poorer Red Chinese had had the effrontery to attack one of the strongest nations on earth and the leader of World Communism to boot, at least spiritually. Seven to five, he thought, the State Department wants to know how deeply both are involved so that they

  can start cooking up one of their own brews to ease the pressure somewhere else in the world. Perhaps an announcement in the United Nations General Assembly, or better yet a call to two (tongue in cheek) distinguished nations to settle their differences before nuclear bombardments began would steal a march on both as well as promote general world condemnation. The other nations, particularly the non-nuclear nations, had become very leery of the big three of late whenever they had differences to settle in a nondiplomatic manner. After Cuba and the Tel Aviv incident, Teleman did not blame them the least bit.

  Another thought occurred to him. The -Red Chinese, who had taken some pretty embarrassing reverses in Africa and Southeast Asia in the past five years and who were presently, torn apart internally, would not want their preoccupation with the Soviets widely known. Although they could put a much larger army into the field than could the Soviets, a correspondingly greater portion of their total national effort would have to be devoted to supporting that army. And the Chinese Central Government would not logically want to risk their very shaky position in China at the moment. The neo-warlords would certainly be ready and able to take advantage of the situation. If the war got too-far out of hand; the Chinese -could be damn sure that the United States and the Soviet Union would in due course make plenty of trouble for _them elsewhere. The more Teleman thought about it, the more he was ready to lay odds that the Soviets had initiated this particular fight by baiting the Chinese somehow. They must be realizing full well that they could not much longer tolerate the supercilious attitude of the present Peking leadership. That the Russians might have bitten off more than they could chew was also quite possible. Teleman shook his head at the childishness and complexity of international politics and began to set up his flight plan.

  The orders directed him to proceed to the war area—the desolate and rugged hills of the northern Sinkiang plateau and border region—some of the worst territory for fighting a war in the world, territory that made the Dakota badlands look like a children's playground, he thought.

  Teleman made the necessary final corrections and keyed the program into the computer.

  Seconds later the aircraft broke out of its orbiting mode and headed westward on a course that would

  intercept the go° meridian. He would pick up the meridian over Uedineniya Island in the Arctic Sea, less than seventy-five_ miles from the Soviet Mainland of the Taimyr Peninsula. He would then cross the Soviet Union from north to south at 150,000 feet with negative 4 radar disruption to avoid Soviet observation.

  For the next hour Teleman sat staring out the observation slit at the frozen wastes of the Arctic slipping past below. He sat and stared and thought about the coming mission. He had no qualms about performing it, had no questions about its importance. But he was puzzled about the motives involved on either side. It was not spelled out in the orders, but years of intensive. training, covering a good bit more than flying this aircraft, had taught him that he must seek the reason behind anything the opposition did. He knew that he could not rely on the busy clerks and service officers in the State Department to read the correct interpretations into the intelligence that he gathered, It was, by its very nature, often nothing more than a broad overview. And then again, sometimes, the most minute details were found that brought the entire picture into focus. The trouble with the State Department. was its size. Its thousands of employees were all too often engaged simply in running a bureau where forty thousand people worked. His own agency had fallen into the same pattern of late.

  There were just too many people involved, too many in decision-making positions, too many incapable of making the correct decisions or, for that matter, any decisions at all.

  Too many that spent all of their time pushing their own ideas, interpretations, and motives no matter how they conflicted with the evidence at hand. Nor were the problems of bureaucracy the problems of the United States alone. The interrupted mission to locate the new Soviet electronics research center after its recent move was a prime example.

  The present theory popular in his agency was that A. Sovulov Semechastky had been responsible. Semechastky was Second Party Secretary and he had come up the hard way in the new generation of Soviet leaders. He also had a son who was general manager of the Electronics Assembly Plant No. 2 in Magnitogorsk. The cocktail talk around Moscow was that Semechastity had been pressured by his son to shift the location of the research center closer to the assembly plant, ostensibly for reasons of efficiency. Covertly, for reasons of increasing family power. Several million rubles would be spent in making such a

  change, but it was reportedly common knowledge that Semechastky, Jr., was about to be named the new director of the research center.

  Teleman could confirm the rumor by photographs from 120,000 feet that wou
ld identify the make, model, and, if lucky, the license plate number of the automobile in the factory manager's parking space.

  Teleman sighed. Such was the stuff of modern spying. License plates from 120,000 feet.

  He knew that he must look for similar signs along the Kazakh-Sinkiang border. In the meantime, he had nearly six thousand miles to go and it looked like a long day. He keyed the computer and PCMS into action and slept.

  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 19505, 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-z 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-z 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 196os, 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-z and the A-n. 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 accelera
tion 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-5e 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-thousandpound 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 47o 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.