October 27, 1962 Somewhere over the Mediterranean

THE QUESTION KEPT REPEATING ITSELF in the pilot's mind, like a song that wouldn't go away: "Is this really happening?"

He glanced at the co-pilot. His friend, a dark-eyed, swarthy man, was sitting there in his flight suit, his curly black hair concealed by a leather flying cap. He was reading the gauges, calm as a funeral director. Behind him, the navigator was sucking on a pencil, pausing momentarily in the midst of fuel consumption calculations.

There was a dreamlike quality to it all, heightened by the peculiar lack of conversation. No one had uttered an unnecessary word since the plane had taken off three hours ago from the US Air Force base at Benguerir, Morocco. Armageddon had arrived, but the crew didn't seem interested in discussing it.

The pilot tried to break the silence. "How long to the refueling point?" He was talking to the freckle-faced navigator, a taller, goofier-looking version of Mickey Rooney.

The navigator didn't bother to look up from his pad. "Current airspeed?" He asked.

The pilot glanced at the indicator. "About 550." He had dark blond hair, gray-blue eyes and a profile that wouldn’t have been out of place in an Arrow shirt ad.

The navigator did a few calculations. "Sixty-three minutes," he said.

"How long to fail-safe?"

"Two hours, 15 minutes," the navigator answered immediately, having anticipated the question.

The pilot decided to try the co-pilot. "What do you make of that storm system ahead of us?"

"Pretty messy."

"Yeah."

The pilot knew what was on their minds.The co-pilot's family lived in a row house in Jackson Heights, Queens, less than five miles from ground zero— the pretty little wife and the four-year-old twin boys in the photo taped above the windshield. And the navigator's dad was at the Pentagon. But there were no military targets in Parkersburg, West Virginia, thank God. Lisa and the baby were safe enough. For the moment.

The pilot gazed through the windscreen at the gray skies ahead. He couldn't see much, but he knew they had plenty of company. Everything the Strategic Air Command owned was in the air and flying toward fail-safe: a thousand B-47s like this one, maybe half that many B-52s. Soviet radar screens must be white with blips from American nuclear bombers. And besides the planes, there were a dozen or more ballistic missile submarines. Is this really happening? He asked himself.

Behind the cockpit, occupying the 15-foot bomb-bay, was "the gadget," as they called it. On most runs, the pilot was barely aware of the thing. This time, he could practically feel it poking at him through the back of his seat.

"The gadget" was a single B-43 nuclear device with a yield of two megatons, a torpedo-shaped object a little more than twelve feet long and 18" in diameter. It carried a shrouded steel spike at its tip, for penetrating hardened targets and holding the bomb in place until it exploded.

As the pilot thought about the gadget, a slide show began in his brain. He and the co-pilot stood at the control panel. At the count of three, they turned their keys. Then they switched off the six safety switches in the prescribed order. Finally, they set the pyrotechnic armingdelay timer for thirty seconds.

The pilot blinked his eyes but the images kept coming. The bomb-bay doors swung open, metal screeching against metal. The roar of the wind was deafening. Three thousand feet below them, spread out along the eastern edge of the Black Sea, was Sevastopol, the Crimean seaport city of about a quarter of a million people. He gave the command: "Release." Then the shackles unlocked with three sharp metallic clicks and the thing fell out. He twisted the yoke and pushed the throttles ahead, full. The bomber banked sharply to the left and climbed, engines screaming at maximumthrust. Suddenly, the entire sky turned as bright as the sun.

"Well, here it comes," the co-pilot said. His gravely voice had no inflection at all.

"What?"

"That."

Directly ahead of them was a wall across the sky, a cloud formation as dark and opaque as quarry slate.

The pilot felt the yoke start trembling. For once, he was happy to see bad weather. It was a welcome distraction.He remembered that time in the Piper with his dad when he was fourteen. It had started to rain and he'd panicked. "What do I do?" His father had smiled very slightly. "Turn on the windshield wipers."

Raindrops began splattering against the plane's windshield and the pilot did as his father had taught him. After a few moments, they hit the clouds. It was like flying from day into night, except this was not night. It was a big, bad, cumulo-nimbus formation, the result of a ferocious warm air updraft, which had transported millions of gallons of blue Mediterranean water into the cold October sky.

As the bomber bucked and bounced through the conflicting air currents, the pilot did a 180-degree scan. The storm's mother cell—a black thundercloud maybe eight miles in diameter—had spawned branches and roots across the entire sky. The plane was caged in by thunderheads, cloudbursts and a spectacular display of natural fireworks.

"They said we'd probably run into rain," the co-pilot remarked.

The pilot laughed, startling his co-pilot and surprising himself as well. He glanced at the altimeter. They were holding steady at 20,000 feet, mission spec to the refueling point—but exactly the altitude of greatest turbulence and lightning in most thunderstorms.

No problem, he told himself. The book on thunderstorms was quite specific: if you meet one that's really nasty, go over it. And the B-47 had more than enough power to do that. With its six GE jet engines, each rated at 6,000 pounds of thrust, it had a service ceiling of 40,000 feet, well above the usual cumulo-nimbus formations.

The pilot pulled back on the yoke and nudged the throttle levers. "Cutting back to 525," he told the navigator, who immediately started refiguring the plane's fuel consumption. Ten minutes later, they were at 37,000 feet, but still in the thick of it, fighting through vertical rivers of rail, fusillades of lightning and turbulence violent enough to shake loose a kidney stone.

Calling up the weather lore he'd picked up over the years, the pilot looked for cloud tunnels that might lead through the storm, meanwhile picking his way around the greenish-blue regions that spawned litters of lightning bolts. Mainly, he steered to the right, trying to avoid headwinds—the rule in the Northern Hemisphere.

The pilot glanced out through the pelting rain at the portside wing, swept back at thirty-five degrees as wartime German research had dictated. It was fifty-two feet long and it looked about as sturdy as the yellow stripe on a country road. Every time the bomber hit an air pocket, the wing and the two engine nacelles slung beneath it wildly bounced and dropped, then continued quivering harmonically until the next air pocket.

"Thirty minutes to refueling, one hour forty-two minutes to fail-safe," the navigator announced.

The man’s voice shocked the pilot, who had been tranfixed by the storm and wasn’t thinking about the mission.

"Acknowledged," he said, a bit more curtly than he'd intended.

"Think the KC-135 will make it?" The navigator asked.

"It's coming from Turkey," the co-pilot reminded him.

"Oh yeah."

An enormous bolt of lightning crackled across the sky, missing the plane's nose by no more than fifty feet and illuminating the cockpit like a photographer's flash.

"Do you think we'll make it?" The navigator asked. He tried to sound flip.

"I'm more worried about Russian MIGs than I am about the weather," the co-pilot said. "I'm sure Khrushchev hasn't grounded them just because of a little rain."

A sudden updraft lifted the starboard wing forty feet or so and sent the plane sliding to port, down an invisible mountainside of warm air. The pilot smoothly twisted the yoke in the opposite direction, glad the controls were hydraulically assisted. Muscle power wouldn't have a chance against a storm like this.

"How long do you think they'll keep us waiting at fail-safe before they give us a go or a no-go?" The navigator asked. His anxieties had escaped from the bottle and were now running around loose.

"I guess that depends on JFK," the pilot told him.

"Or Khrushchev," the co-pilot said.

"Or Castro," the pilot added. Then the slide show resumed in his mind. He put on his smoked goggles and looked back toward Sevastapol. The city had been swallowed by a fireball, and an enormous mushroom cloud was billowing into the air. At that moment, the concussion hit, flinging the plane across the sky like a frisbee. "Four Fishbed fighters at nine o'clock!" Someone shouted. Too late to stop the bomb run, he thought, but not too late to stop us. "Deploy chafe!" He yelled.

Without any warning at all, the B-47 hit a powerful downdraft, falling 10,000 feet in about thirty seconds. It was like going over the edge of the first drop on the Coney Island Cyclone, except that this roller coaster had no visible bottom. The navigator threw up all over his flightsuit.

They hit some kind of atmospheric floor at just over 26,000 feet, with a jolt so violent that the pilot at first thought they'd crashed into the sea. For a few moments, the plane floundered, engines roaring, the air sucked out of them. Then she caught her breath and resumed her lurching stagger through the powerful cross-currents.

"Damage report," the pilot promoted the co-pilot. He was surprised at how weak his voice sounded.

"We seem okay structurally," his co-pilot replied. "But we've got electrical problems. The rate gyro's down and the Fowler flap control is in and out."

This was not good news. The B-47 was a durable bird, but it had unacceptable dutch roll characteristics. The rate gyro was designed to keep these at bay with constant rudder movements. The plane was also a little yaw-happy. The Fowler flaps usually took care of that, by augmenting the ailerons.

Now, both systems were out. He'd have to keep a constant eye on the gauges and indicators and make the corrections himself. A few moments ago, the pilot had been at the wheel of a Porsche. Now he was wrestling a Mack truck with two flat tires.

The plane's physical condition wasn't as disturbing as the loss of altitude.. They were back down in the thickest part of the storm, bumping and bouncing like a New York taxi on a street paved with potholes.

The pilot pulled up on the yoke, but the plane ignored his request. It seemed to be in a state of shock. Maybe they all were. Is this really happening?

"What about dropping down below the storm?" The co-pilot asked.

The navigator had pretty much finished wiping himself off. "Maybe that's a good idea," he said. "After all, the tanker will be orbiting at 14,000 feet, you know. In about sixty-five minutes."

The pilot knew the rule: Better over it than under it. But there wasn't any going over this monster.

"Okay," he said, "we'll give it a try." He eased the yoke down and let up a bit on the throttle. This time, the bomber responded willingly, as if someone had said "at ease."

At about 18,000 feet, the Saint Elmo's fire appeared—an eerie phosphorescence that painted the wing tips with soft bluish tongues of light. The three men watched uneasily through the rain-blurred windows. Their minds told them it was completely harmless, but in their guts, they waited for electrocution.

At about 15,000 feet, regiments of mice began tap-dancing on the fuselage.

"What the hell is that?" The navigator asked anxiously.

"It's all right," the pilot replied. "It's hail."

It wasn't all right. The tap-dancing soon turned into jack-hammering and the jack-hammering became cannon fire. The plane had run into a barrage of hailstones the size of baseballs.

The pilot and the co-pilot stared at their respective wings, watching in horror as deep pockmarks appeared like magic on the plane's smooth duralumin skin. Then a particularly large chunk of ice clipped off the outboard aileron on the co-pilot's side. The B-47 yawed sharply to the right.

At almost the same moment, another ice chunk smashed through the side pane of the windscreen, directly behind the pilot. In an instant, storm spray filled the cockpit.

As the pilot fought to control the aircraft, the gauges shorted out or disappeared in the rain. He might as well have been blind. Had he corrected the yaw? Was the plane still on the right heading? Was it flying level? Climbing? Descending?

The pilot knew the greatest danger lay below them. If they were descending, they could crash into the Mediterranean within minutes. He couldn't take that risk. He pulled up on the yoke, hard. Just then, the B-47 hit a 150 knot updraft.

For a few moments, the giant bomber climbed skyward at a 90-degree angle. Then it flipped over on its back and ended up nose down, plummeting toward the sea at nearly 600 miles an hour.

The navigator was screaming incoherently. The co-pilot was unconscious. He'd banged his head on the window frame. The pilot was aware of what had happened, but he didn't know if he could do anything about it.

Still blinded by the downpour, the pilot yanked on the yoke with all his might, feeling the hydraulic assist kick in much more sluggishly than usual. The plane's angle of descent slowly began to diminish.

It was all a matter of time now. They had 16,000 feet or so in which to level out and start back up, 16,000 feet between the plane and the Mediterranean sea. Either they made it or they didn't.

They almost made it. They might have survived, if it hadn't been for the missing aileron. The pilot somehow managed to pull the plane out of its dive just above the water's surface, but the starboard wing caught a white cap.

Engines roaring, the big plane cartwheeled across the rough waters like a spinning stone, bouncing once, twice, three times—shedding parts each time it hit: part of a tail, an engine nacelle, an entire wing.

It landed upside down perhaps a quarter of a mile from the first impact, and slowly began to sink. The pilot was still conscious, his mind still working as sea water poured into the cockpit. Is this really happening? He asked himself for the very last time.

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