Under local orders — neither authorized by Washington, nor prohibited in advance — an American photographic plane ran out over the Sea of Okhotsk, crossed the Siberian coast just south of Bogopol, thus violating Russian territorial sovereignty, and made a single photographic run over the hills where Atomsk was said to exist.
By the time the plane reached the reported location of Atomsk, the Far Eastern air was full of Russian radio calls, all of them in code. American radio experts in Japan went out of their minds plotting the locations of Soviet stations which had never been heard on the air before. Soon the ground stations were followed by aircraft calls. The Soviet pilots spoke to one another sharply, cryptically, under the stress of extreme excitement. The whole of the Red Far Eastern Air Force seemed to have been called out to intercept the American plane.
But the American plane got through — almost.
It was a special model-one of the new experimental reconnaissance planes designed to survive by speed and by speed alone. It put on acceleration which the Russians had never seen before. It rose to a height on which they had not planned. But the Russians caught it, right at the photo finish, in the high cold air above the 38th degree North Latitude which divides American-occupied from Russian-occupied Korea. Down came the plane.
The pilot died either in the air or on impact. But the plane did not burn. That was another one of its novel features. It had been built not to burn. Its purpose was to see, to run, to get the message back.
Communists and Americans reached the wreckage on the ground; the Communists got there first and pulled the cameras out of the plane. Not until the self-propelled howitzers began moving silently for range did the Communist troops go back, back, back, two miles to their side of the border.
The Americans apologized locally to the Soviet military authorities. They said, "The pilot must have lost his bearings." No better pilot ever flew; no better bearings had ever been kept. But, in diplomacy, the word is the thing. The Russian military delegation in Tokyo displayed no ill will. They seemed to regard it as a good joke played by American professional soldiers on Russian professional soldiers, and — besides — they had nothing to worry about. They knew that their people had taken all the cameras out of the wreckage of the plane.
If they had known the truth, they would have been unhappy.
The Russian search had overlooked one camera. Which was not in the least surprising, because talented engineers had built the camera so that it would be overlooked. It was small, but good; it was activated by a special signal in the plane's radio transmitter. When started, it kept on going till its film ran out. Pre-focused, it adjusted for color and brightness automatically. When its job was done, the lens cover snapped back automatically and it looked like a small hydraulic jack on the landing gear.
The Russians didn't get that one.