Everyone on the Shining Emerald was bored.

The captain of the small Mexican fishing trawler’s arms ached from holding the same position off the California coast for the last three hours. The crew hadn’t thrown out any nets for days and were stiff from in­action. Even the KGB officer standing alone on the forward deck had grown weary of endlessly searching the sky for a sign of his target.

For the last six months, instead of sailing south out of the Sea of Cortez to the fertile waters of the southern Pacific, every few weeks the Shining Emerald had left its home port of La Paz, rounded the Baja peninsula, and headed north. Always to the same spot fifty nautical miles out to sea, and always with a KGB officer aboard.

The Russian held a pair of binoculars to his eyes, scanning the sky. He completed a wide arc, dropped his head a few degrees, and began again. The work wasn’t hard, but it was tiring, on his eyes and his mind.

He was anxious. Mexico was supposed to have been an easy posting. America was busy obsessing over the Caribbean turning red and for once its politicians and spies weren’t paying attention to her southern neighbour, which meant neither were Russia’s. That was until the Cold War turned into a space race.

Arc after arc he saw nothing but bright blue until, on what felt like the hundredth sweep of the sky, he spotted a distant glint. He gently stroked the large dial on the top of the binoculars and slowly, very slowly, it began to change shape and come into focus. Suddenly there it was: a parachute no more than five metres across. Hanging beneath it was a silver cone-shaped canister with the letters NASA written in dark red letters along its side—the payload capsule of a Corona spy satellite.

‘Hello, Falling Star,’ the KGB officer whispered to himself.

The Shining Emerald’s crew sensed a change in the Russian, from tense frustration to anticipation, and finally began to prepare their nets. Moments later a familiar droning sound started to fill the air. A US Air Force Hercules C-130 transport plane was rapidly approaching from the California coast.

‘Star Catcher.’ Another nickname.

The Hercules wasn’t as large or elegant as its Soviet counterpart, the Tupolev Tu-95 with its swept-back wings and chromed, missile-shaped fuselage, but the Russian had to admit it was an impressive beast.

It had taken the KGB months to find out exactly what Corona was, and where it was operating from, after a Soviet submarine stumbled on a jettisoned test capsule in the Arctic Ocean near Svalbard. Their breakthrough came when an informant at Cooke Air Force Base outside Lompoc, California, reported that one of the Hercules transports stationed there was undergoing a very strange refit.