That’s all I need. He sighed.
“Yes, put him through, please, Jan.” The beige phone on his desk rang, an insistent blinking light indicating which line. He picked up the handset and pushed the button.
“Director Phillips speaking.”
“Sam, we need to talk about a couple things.”
“Good morning, Jim. How can I help you?”
“Help me? It’s not me that needs help. It’s this fiasco brewing in Russia.”
Sam Phillips scanned quickly through his mind. Which fiasco? What mattered to the new CIA Director?
He guessed. “The upcoming Proton launch?”
Schlesinger exhaled loudly through his nose. “You know it. What are your SIGINT boys telling you?”
Phillips shook his head. His agency provided signals intelligence to the Department of Defense, not the CIA. He’d heard that Schlesinger wanted to gather all the country’s intel organizations under the CIA’s control—his control—including the military ones. This was a battle that eventually had to be fought. But for now, he’d offer cautious cooperation; the President had put Schlesinger there by choice. “Nothing significant since the last White House briefing with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” Mostly true.
He could feel Schlesinger’s blood pressure rising over the phone.
“Your job isn’t figuring out what’s significant, Sam, it’s gathering! Tell me the latest.”
Phillips decided to flood the man with information that wasn’t all that sensitive, hoping it would satisfy him.
“You know about the Soviets recently landing their rover at a location on the Moon they didn’t reveal to the scientific community in advance. Well, they are also just finishing final assembly and checkout of their new space station, which they’re publicly calling Salyut 2. As you know, Salyut 1 had to be deorbited when it ran out of fuel eighteen months ago. After the visiting Soyuz crew was killed due to malfunction during re-entry, they grounded their resupply fleet.
“We think Salyut 2 is actually a military spy station called Almaz. Our sources have been monitoring unusual hardware deliveries, and extra levels of security. Our best guess is that they’re building an equivalent to what we intended to do with MOL—essentially a huge, manned camera. Something they can point here and there around the world and see details down to an unprecedented resolution level.”
As he heard Schlesinger take a breath in order to speak, he carried on quickly.
“We won’t know for certain when the launch will be until we see Almaz roll between certain buildings on its railcar at the Baikonur launch site. We have people and assets monitoring that, watching out especially for when they mate it to the Proton rocket itself. Our best guess is that launch will be in early April. So our mid-April target for Apollo 18 is looking good.”
As he hoped, the info dump had been enough to pacify Schlesinger.
“Okay, Sam, the President and I want to know the moment you have visual confirmation.”
Clearly he meant for General Phillips to note his familiarity with the president.
“If the Soviets get this Almaz into orbit in April, how are you going to keep what’s going on at Area 51 a secret?” Schlesinger asked. “They’ll see everything parked on the ramp, and more importantly, the HAVE BLUE testing.”
Time for some shared responsibility, Phillips thought. “I agree, Jim. We’ll need to change ops there. Use camouflage covers, dummy mock-ups, and no flying during Almaz overflights. It will interrupt our activities for about five minutes a few times per day.”
Schlesinger didn’t pick up the cue. There was no such thing as “we” or “our” in his mind. “You’ve got another option too, Sam.”
Phillips heard the click of the pipe stem in Schlesinger’s teeth.
“Stop them being able to look at the United States, or any of our interests, from orbit.”
After he hung up, Phillips stood and thought for a full minute. Then he picked the phone back up to call Kaz Zemeckis.
6
Mission Control, Houston
Gene Kranz, buzz-cut, gruff and competent, looked around the con-ference room at the team gathered there. Young men, mostly, and a handful of women. He was the lead flight director assigned to Apollo 18. With launch only three months away, he’d summed up the day’s work by telling them that he was pleased there had been no major screwups during the six-hour simulation, either by the all-rookie crew or the Mission Control team. Gene had been a flight director since the first Gemini mission, and after six Apollo Moon landings, he treated this one as almost routine, even though he knew that almost anything could go wrong.