The Tupolev had no hook hanging behind it, but it did have a long, thin refuelling probe projecting out from its nose. The Russian pilot lined the probe up with the gap between the parachute and the Corona capsule, and squeezed one more push from the throttle. His aim was true and the probe shot through the parachute lines like they were the eye of a needle.

Everyone in the Hercules sat in stunned silence as they watched the Tupolev descend back into the clouds and vanish with the Corona payload pinned against the underside of its cockpit.

Chapter 34

Chapter 34

The Hercules returned to Cooke Air Force Base at 9 p.m. Pacific time. It was 11 p.m. by the time the crew was debriefed, which meant it was 2 a.m. Eastern time when the phone in Patrick Dixon’s hallway started to ring.

He’d told Langley that the post-flight report could wait until the morning. He’d stayed late at the office too many nights recently and needed some decent sleep. If he was being called now, something must have gone very wrong.

NASA had offered Dixon one of the apartments in the research centre grounds when he’d moved down from New England, but he’d preferred to keep a little distinction between his work and home life. He’d found an old colonial-era villa in Armstrong Gardens on the far side of Hampton, south of Langley, that looked out over Chesapeake Bay. Its fretwork veranda and bright painted walls stuck out among the more recent red-brick houses that dominated the neighbourhood. They had been built to survive whatever the Atlantic threw at them, but the villa already had. Dixon loved it.

He dragged himself out of bed and along the dark landing. He almost tripped over Loki, his jet-black cat, who had taken to sitting at the top of the stairs at night, but remembered he was there just in time to clumsily hop over him and land heavily on the first step. He reached the bottom of the staircase intact and picked up the phone. He didn’t even have a chance to say hello before the voice on the other end of the line started telling him exactly how badly things had gone with the evening flight. Thirty seconds later he’d hung up and was making his way back up the dark stairs to get dressed.

The security breach Dixon had feared for months had finally happened. And in dramatic fashion. Questions would now be asked, arguments had, pounds of flesh claimed. Worst of all, people would want to know what progress he’d made on coming up with a more secure way to control and retrieve the intelligence Corona gathered, and the answer to that was still vanishingly little.