Red Moon

30 The Fourth Enrollment

On the cold morning of Monday, December 25, 1967, when all of North and South America and much of Europe were celebrating Christmas Day, I trudged across a snowy field at the Chkalov air base toward an actual An-2 biplane, reciting aloud several lines from a poem by Pushkin.

There were thirteen of us in a ragged line, I and my colleagues from the Fourth Enrollment, as our group of student-cosmonauts was known. All of us wore leather jackets, tall boots, and old-fashioned soft aviators’ caps. Oh, yes, on our chests and backs were parachutes. As part of our “operational” education, we were to begin jumping.

The thirteen of us ranged in age from twenty-four (at twenty-five, I was the second-youngest) to thirty-five years old. Our backgrounds were quite different; six of us were pilots (four from fighters, two from transports), three were aircraft navigators, another three were research scientists from the Academy of Air Defense, while I was the lone engineer.

We had been brought together by our orders in early May of that year, those orders having been signed by Marshal Vershinin the day of Komarov’s death, which transferred us to Military Unit 26266, the cosmonaut training center, located at the military village known as Star Town.

We were the fourth such group of students to be assigned to Military Unit 26266, the first having been the famous group of twenty pilots chosen with Yuri Gagarin in March 1960. The Second Enrollment was a group of fifteen pilots and engineers chosen in January 1963, while the Third was a collection of twenty-two younger pilots and engineers recruited in October 1965, who were nearing the end of the last phase of their “student” training and, in fact, were commencing their final examinations this very morning. (Think of them as college seniors, while we thirteen were sophomores.)

There had also been a group of five women, chosen in March 1962, but with the exception of Valentina Tereshkova, who in June 1963 had become the first woman to make a spaceflight, they were not considered full-fledged members of the team.

For the first seven months our training had largely consisted of classroom study, learning the basics of aerospace navigation, astronomy, orbital mechanics, aerospace physiology, in addition to courses in Marxism-Leninism.

My education at Bauman, not to mention my year at the Korolev bureau, helped me tremendously in the classroom, and I ranked consistently at the top of the list, ahead of even our very talented military researchers. I found myself tutoring Sergei Shiborin, a young transport pilot. He, in turn, guided me in the ways of the Air Force of the USSR, though not without a bit of hazing: He convinced me to buy expensive presents for each member of the Fourth Enrollment to celebrate my appointment to active duty, and it wasn’t until months later that he confessed he had made up the “tradition.”

Our other main activity during these first months was mandatory physical training. Six mornings a week we were expected to report to the gym for running and calisthenics, for occasional hockey and — when the weather was warm — basketball games. A special pool was being built, too, since the doctors had decided that high-diving would be good training for weightlessness.

Some mornings I enjoyed it; some mornings I had to drag myself out of bed by any means possible. I was helped in this by the miserable condition of my bed and personal surroundings. Upon being enrolled in the cosmonaut unit, my former colleagues at the Korolev bureau took vengeful and illegal steps to have me evicted from my Kaliningrad flat, claiming falsely that it belonged to employees of that organization. Had I chosen to fight their action, I would have won.

But I had been officially assigned a flat at Star Town, and disliking the early morning commute by bus, which put me back in contact with surly bureau types, I let go of the Kaliningrad place and moved into the “temporary” barracks at Star Town with the rest of the Fourth Enrollment, where we waited for our official housing to be built.

As the only unmarried officer, I was given a flat of my own while the others shared larger, but equally decrepit, quarters, which had been built seven years ago as “temporary” housing for those who carved Star Town and the training center out of the woods here.

It hadn’t been so bad during the summer months, but when autumn came, what had been a pleasantly cool darkness became freezing dampness. I bought a portable heater, which, based on its performance, was as likely to asphyxiate me or burn down the whole building as it was to provide heat.

So I spent as little time in my Star Town flat as possible, rising for breakfast at the canteen, followed by the workouts, then class, lunch, more class. I did my evening studies in our lecture room, or in the library of the Star Town elementary school, newly named for the late Vladimir Komarov.

On this December morning we were to enter the second, operational phase of our training, qualifying as parachutists and aircraft crew members so that we would be something more than useless baggage on future flights of Soyuz, Almaz, Program L, or 7K-VI spacecraft.

I had informal experience with radio protocols, for example, from the bureau, and I believe this put me ahead of my scientific colleagues, who had spent their careers learning how to shoot down American missiles. But my experience was nothing compared to the pilots and navigators in our group, who rode the bus to Chkalov in high spirits, returning to what was, for them, familiar ground, while the scientists and I — wrenched out of our cozy classrooms — sat lost in thought, wondering what had possessed us to volunteer for a job that involved being hurled out of a thirty-year-old airplane at three thousand meters.

I tried to remind myself that part of the cosmonaut’s job was being blasted to an altitude of 250 kilometers atop a missile, surely more dangerous than parachuting. But in my mind I kept picturing the charred wreckage of Soyuz 1.

I paid strict attention during two hours of briefings on parachuting basics: “When the static line yanks your ’chute open, look up and make sure it’s round, and that there are no holes in it. If it’s okay, pull the red cord on your harness. That will disable your emergency ’chute.”

“What happens if the canopy is not round, or if it has holes in it?” one of the scientists asked.

Our instructor, an army major with a reported two thousand such jumps to his credit, smiled and pulled a knife out of his boot sheath. “Cut here and here,” he said, indicating the place above the right and left shoulders where the parachute shrouds would be attached to the harness. “The lines will be taut and the knife will be sharp. You won’t have any trouble.”

“But then I’m falling,” the scientist said, persisting.

“That’s when you pull the blue cord.” This was supposed to activate the emergency parachute. “It will come out in front of you, not off your back, so watch your nose.” He laughed, and was joined by some of our pilot colleagues as well as our team of instructors from the training center.

There was more information, much more, such as how to hook up the static line, which would automatically deploy our primary ’chute; the proper posture for landing; and the need to collapse the ’chute once on the ground, so you didn’t get dragged across the snow.

So far, this was all as expected. Shiborin, a veteran often such jumps, confirmed this. But the special needs of cosmonaut training required that we also demonstrate our ability to observe and cope with a new situation.

Each of us was carrying a small notebook and pencil — both attached to our harnesses by string, so they wouldn’t get lost — with which we were to record our impressions.

And we had each been ordered to memorize a piece of poetry over the weekend, some few stanzas we would recite on our climb to altitude. Hence my Pushkin, competing with more Pushkin and Mandelstam and, strangely, a bit of Pasternak, chosen by my colleagues.

Just as we reached the An-2, which was to carry us to glory, we were told to wait. The An-2’s single propeller, which had roared to life as we approached, strangely sputtered and died.

Shiborin, always fearless in circumstances like this, poked his head in the cockpit and yelled at the pilot, “What the fuck is the problem now?”

I couldn’t hear the pilot’s response, though it took a few moments. Then Shiborin trudged back over to where I was standing. “Come on,” he said. “We’ve got to see this.”

Shiborin was a country boy who had grown up on a collective farm, and in spite of that experience became the most fervent Communist I knew. Compared to him, Leonid Brezhnev was a blood-sucking Wall Street banker and enemy of the people.

Perhaps it was part of his fervent belief that all people were equal that he also delighted in ignoring rank, for seeing the mighty brought low.

It’s the only way I can explain why we left our colleagues and instructors and crossed the taxiway to where a MiG-15 trainer was getting ready to take off. “The weather has fallen below minimums for jets,” Shiborin shouted to me, raising, then dashing, my hopes for a postponement of our jump in the space of a single sentence. “Gagarin wants to take off and they won’t let him.” He nodded at the trainer. “He’s in that plane.”

During the past year, General Kamanin had succeeded in getting the Air Force to create a flight-support unit, the 70th Special Training Squadron, for the cosmonaut training center, a group of pilots and aircraft that were ours to use exclusively. The An-2 was part of the squadron, for example, and so was the Tu-104 transport.

But the heart of the 70th was a collection of MiG-15 two-seat trainers, to be flown by pilot cosmonauts with instructors, or by pilot cosmonauts carrying nonpilots like me. (MiG-15 flights were to become part of our curriculum in the next two months.)

The MiGs became a terrific source of conflict between the cosmonauts of the First and Second Enrollments. Recall that those in the First had been relatively junior pilots when selected, and that between academic studies, training for space missions, and (for the famous ones) endless public appearances for propaganda purposes, they had done almost no flying since becoming cosmonauts.

The pilots selected in 1963, however, were highly experienced Air Force inspectors and squadron commanders. It was they who lobbied Kamanin for creation of the 70th, and once its planes arrived, they happily added to their hours, remaining qualified in all-weather and night flying, zooming around in the sky one or more times a week, while poor souls like Gagarin, Nikolayev, and my friend Saditsky had to fight for one or two cockpit hours every couple of months.

What we saw was Colonel Yuri Gagarin, Hero of the Soviet Union, first man in space, and deputy commander of Military Unit 26266, climbing out of a cockpit and down a ladder, to be replaced by another pilot.

“Who’s getting in the plane?” I asked Shiborin.

“Shatalov, I think.” Shatalov was one of the more senior, aggressive, and capable members of the Second Enrollment. Gagarin never glanced at him, but instead threw his helmet at another man in a flight suit, who dodged the projectile successfully, but could not get out of the way when Gagarin tackled him. It was almost comical, since Gagarin was the smallest of the cosmonauts, and this tall pilot hit the ground like a tree felled by an ax.

Shiborin clapped his hands together, like a child at the circus. “Boy, he’s mad!”

“He should be.”

The scuffle lasted only a moment, ending as the MiG taxied off with Shatalov in Gagarin’s place, as Gagarin helped the other pilot to his feet. With the roar of the MiG’s Tumansky engine diminishing, we could clearly hear Gagarin’s protests: “They promised me I could fly today!”

“I know, Colonel, but the weather’s bad in the zone—”

“Shatalov is flying into it!”

“Shatalov is qualified—”

“How the hell am I going to get qualified if I never get off the ground!”

Red-faced with anger, Gagarin walked right past Shiborin and me as we tried to be invisible.

We succeeded, but only for a moment. “Hey, you two!” It was our parachuting instructor. “Let’s go!”

Seated on hard metal benches, feeling the cold through three layers of clothing, we took off a few moments later. Over the clatter of the old engine, I asked Shiborin, my expert in matters aeronautical, why it was acceptable for us to fly, but not Gagarin. “The MiGs operate in a different zone, where the weather is below minimums,” he said, as if this were not the stupidest question in the world. “We’re not dropping in the same place.”

Thus soothed, I returned to my labored written record of my emotions — scribbled with frozen fingers — as we climbed higher and higher. (I looked at those notes some time later and saw that the only observation was how our exhaled breath created a mini-cloud layer in the center of the cabin.)

A horn began honking and a red light at the rear of the cabin lit up. We were almost there.

Our jump master got up and opened the door, swinging it inside the cabin and locking it open. A freezing hurricane added to the roar of the An-2’s motor. My fellow jumpers began making eager thumbs-up. All I could offer in return was a pathetic smile.

The light changed to yellow. “Left side, stand up, hook up!” the jump master commanded. Shiborin and I were in the middle of that left side. Like robots, we raised our arms, clicking our static lines into place, tugging slightly to take up the slack, as if we had been doing this for years.

“Go!” Just like that, the first jumper went out the door. We all moved up. “Go!” Next jumper. By then I had convinced myself that this was just another step on the road to the Moon—

“Go!” Shiborin vanished through the door. I began to recite my Pushkin poem, hoping I was loud enough for the instructors to hear—

“Go!”

Suddenly, without any deliberate step, I was out, falling into the wind on my back as the static line played out behind me, seeing the An-2 rising away with surprising speed—

Wham! I felt myself yanked forward, as if some giant had grabbed me by the crotch and shoulders and straightened me out.

I was no longer falling, but sinking quickly. (There was a difference in the sensation, believe me.) It took me a few moments to realize that the snowy landing zone was below me, partly hidden by wisps of cloud. That the An-2 was gone from sight and sound. Time to make the routine, or was it perfunctory, check on my canopy. I grabbed the lines extending from my shoulder harness and raised my chin.

Above me there was a nest of strings leading to a white circle. I remembered that I was supposed to disarm my emergency ’chute, and reached for the red lanyard.

Wait. I could see sky through the ’chute! One of the panels was torn.

I took a breath. Looked around me. The ground seemed to be rising slowly, perhaps it was fine—

No! With a missing panel, I would be badly injured. My instructors had been very insistent on this.

Besides, I hadn’t disarmed the backup ’chute. Was I too late? Would both ’chutes tangle like Komarov’s?

I reached to my right boot and hauled out the knife. Trying not to think, I quickly put it up to the left side of my neck and pushed.

The strap snapped and I began to twist from left to right. It was more difficult to cut the right strap with my right hand, but I was certainly not going to risk dropping the knife by shifting it! I brought the knife into the right strap from the outside, toward my neck, sawing once, twice—

Then I was falling again and the ground suddenly seemed very close. I clawed for the ripcord to the emergency chute and yanked it.

The pack on my chest tore open and a mass of white flew out. A second wham! Now I was hanging like a rag doll at the end of a new parachute as trees rose toward me. I saw a field, a road, a grimy truck on the road, and tried to brace myself for impact.

Which I don’t remember. One moment I had reached the treetops, the next I was lying on my back, embedded in the snow, the wind knocked out of me. Thankfully there wasn’t much breeze, or I’d have been dragged through the snow like a sack of cabbages.

Remembering my instructions, I tried to rise and collapse my parachute. Standing was surprisingly difficult. I couldn’t seem to put weight on my left side. So, hobbling on one foot, I began hauling on the lines to my parachute.

I looked around. Not far away in one direction, another student-cosmonaut was coming in for a landing. He, too, had a tough time of it, pitching onto his hands and knees.

“Yuri! Yuri, my God!” I realized someone was calling my name. Shiborin was running toward me, as much as anyone could run in the knee-deep snow.

I had made a complete mess of my first parachute jump. No one was going to trust me with a spacecraft if I couldn’t handle this.

I raised a hand in a weak greeting. “I have to sit down,” I said.

31 The Purge

The whole team was collected and trucked back to Chkalov, a process that took an hour. At the clinic there, a flight surgeon who smelled of booze determined that I had probably broken my leg, a diagnosis I, a medical amateur, had made while sober. Nevertheless, since my leg was now extremely painful, I took the offered shot of vodka. Which did nothing for the pain, but improved my spirits.

“We’ll take you over to Shchelkovo,” the jump master said cheerfully, perhaps in response to the flight surgeon’s condition. There was no real hospital at Star Town, just a clinic, like this one.

All I could do was nod dumbly. I wasn’t the only casualty — Alexei Ledovsky had bloodied his nose and Vladimir Agov had wrenched his shoulder — but I was definitely the worst one.

The others, Shiborin and even Ledovsky and Agov, had chattered happily through the post-jump debrief on the truck, like students who have survived a final examination. I could see them glancing at me with pity, figuring, as I did, that the Fourth Enrollment had just lost its first member.

The thirteen of us got along as well as any group of men who are suddenly thrown together in a competitive environment. Our competition was not as fierce as that of the Gagarin group, where twenty men had been chosen knowing only one of them could be first into space. We competed instead for the attention of our instructors and commanders, and of the senior cosmonauts.

One of those who filled both roles was Colonel Pavel Belyayev, commander of the Voskhod 2 mission in 1965, now serving as chief of staff of the training center. He had been the one to officially greet us back in May with the words (surprisingly encouraging, given the recent death of his friend Vladimir Komarov) that “General Kamanin had hoped to select twenty new students this time. That is the number we can successfully train.

“He still hopes to add fifty new students over the next few years, until we have several squadrons of pilots and crew members for all these programs. There will be room for all of you.”

I had since learned of the amazingly ambitious dreams behind Kamanin’s personnel targets. First of all, we were planning various flights of the “improved” Soyuz-to-Earth orbit (hopefully this coming April), of the L-1 version to lunar orbit (by the end of 1968), and, ultimately, of the L-3 to the surface of the Moon (in 1970).

What was truly startling were figures from the next Five Year Plan for military programs: Starting in 1969, the Ministry of Defense wanted to launch fifteen Almaz space stations, three per year, each station operating for four months and hosting rotating three-man crews every two weeks. The primary mission of Almaz was surveillance of the territory and forces of the Main Enemy, that is, the United States. By late 1967 the USSR had begun to launch its own fleet of spy satellites based on the Vostok design, but these were unreliable and limited in use. It was hoped that trained military officers — such as Senior Engineer Lieutenant Yuri Nikolayevich Ribko — would provide better target selection while also performing communications interception and missile warning.

Another military manned spacecraft was the 7K-VI, a version of Soyuz (7K). (The letters V and I stood for “military research.”) Two cosmonauts would fly this one for shorter missions, though exactly how the 7K-VI would differ from the Almaz was never clear to me. A group of cosmonauts was assigned to this program, including a friend of Shiborin’s who had said it was “never going to fly.” Still, it remained on the schedule.

There was even a small spaceplane called Spiral in development.

Looked at it this way, Military Unit 26266 was indeed woefully undermanned.

Yet, strangely, as I hobbled carefully around Star Town that last week of 1967, forbidden to continue operational training with my classmates, I learned that five students from the Third Enrollment were missing. I noticed this when I reported the following Monday morning for physical training. (The fact that I was hobbled did not excuse me from reporting.)

I edged up to Shiborin, who was working out with weights, and asked if he knew the reason for the absences. “They’ve been dismissed,” he said.

“I can’t believe that many of them failed the exams!” Not after two years of study. Surely the weaker ones would have flunked out before this.

“It wasn’t the examinations. A couple of them weren’t even allowed to take them.” He carefully glanced around, to be sure we were alone. “They’re being sent back to their squadrons. Or given other jobs away from Star Town.”

This was surprising. In those days an assignment to a facility like Star Town was more or less permanent, especially since it carried the valuable passport allowing you to live in the Moscow District. It was simply unheard of for an officer holding such a passport to be deprived of it, to be returned to some remote base on Kamchatka or Turkmenistan. “Girl problems?” We had been warned that chasing women had cost a couple of the early cosmonauts their jobs here.

“Political. For some reason, they went back and reviewed everyone’s personnel files and found a lot of problems.”

This was even more stunning than the idea that the five were being shipped out of Star Town. You couldn’t even apply to become a cosmonaut without being a Party or Komsomol member, and then your life was examined by the credentials committee! “How could there be problems?” I said.

“Turned out one of them had a relative in the West. Another one’s father turned out to have fought on the wrong side down in the Ukraine.”

“I can’t believe State Security missed things like that!”

“I don’t think this was State Security,” Shiborin said. “It might have been military intelligence.”

I felt sick. If State Security reviewed the backgrounds of the Fourth Enrollment, my association with Uncle Vladimir would probably remain secret. But if military intelligence found out, my career was over.

“Why do you suppose they did it now?” I asked. I certainly had no idea.

“There’s some kind of war going on. Your old friend Artemov has been making trouble.” I had heard that much, but could see no connection to the purge of the Third Enrollment.

I realized that I needed to talk to Uncle Vladimir. Before I could do that, I needed more information. To get the information, I needed some reason to see my commander.

Within moments I marched out of the gym and headed for the administration building, asking for Colonel Belyayev. None of the student-cosmonauts was in the habit of simply dropping in on Belyayev, though he encouraged us to visit whenever we had questions or problems. He was, after all, the officer who signed our fitness reports. Knowing that, my pathetic plan was to use my accident as an excuse to volunteer for some other work, preferably the kind of duties I performed for Filin in my student days back at the bureau.

But Colonel Belyayev was not in the office today, not expected. I saw my little scheme vanish like a soap bubble, and turned away, only to hear the assistant say, “Colonel Gagarin is in. Would you like to speak to him?”

Why not? “Yes.”

On that morning Yuri Gagarin was thirty-three years old, though he seemed much older. He had gotten heavy again, understandably, given a crushing schedule that required him to make dozens of public appearances where drinking was mandatory. He had no time for physical exercise. I already knew he was angry about his inability to log any time in the air. And, of course, given what happened to Komarov, there was no chance our ministers would allow him to fly in space again.

“Ribko! I’d forgotten about your injury,” he said when I hobbled into his office. “I was hoping you could drive me into town.”

“If your car has an automatic transmission, I can.”

“You’re sure?”

“There’s no physical problem. I’m supposed to be at a geology class at ten A.M.—”

He picked up the telephone and told Belyayev’s assistant that Ribko was being excused for the day. Then he grabbed a notebook and his overcoat and hat, and held the door for me. “This way.”

Gagarin needed me to drive him because he was frantically trying to finish his degree at Zhukovsky. “I’ve been writing a thesis since September,” he said. “It never seems to get done.”

The subject was winged aerospace vehicles. “Like Spiral,” I offered.

“Yes. Though my conclusions won’t make our Spiral friends very happy.” Gagarin had concluded that the only part of an aerospace plane system that the USSR could claim to have demonstrated was the launch system. “We’ve built several models and mockups, but they’re just that… models. We need special materials for the wings and body, to keep the plane from burning up when it reenters the atmosphere. We also need better computer guidance systems, since a pilot will never be able to fly such a reentry.” He went on for quite a while, obviously rehearsing material from the thesis.

“What it lacks most is a mission,” he said, finally. “I can’t figure out what a spaceplane will do that a satellite or a Soyuz couldn’t do better. The fact that we are devoting millions of rubles to this fantasy is stupid.”

By now we had been driving for half an hour, and had reached the Garden Ring Road. I felt brave enough to ask our first man in space, “Why do they make you go to Zhukovsky, when you’ve got so much other work to do?”

He grinned, and I saw a bit of the young pilot who had become so famous so quickly. “General Kamanin wants the first cosmonauts to be pioneers in the command of new space forces. You can’t be a general without an education, and I shouldn’t even have been made a colonel.” I mentioned my father, who had struggled to get through the Red Banner Academy after years of flying.

“Yes. The system now takes pilots and forces them to be bureaucrats. Kamanin said that his plan was to fly us once or twice, then build a bigger cosmonaut team and a larger training center around us.

“He’s also been trying to get control of launch vehicles moved from the Central Space Office to the Air Force. I think he would also like to put the manufacturers back in their place, too.”

“You mean the Korolev bureau?”

“All of the bureaus. They forget that the military is the customer.”

“Because the military doesn’t want to go to the Moon.”

“Yes. It’s not all their fault. The problems are higher up.” Then, looking back down at his papers, he added, casually, “We wrote a letter to Brezhnev about that.”

“A letter?”

“The cosmonauts, those who have flown. We drafted a letter about the confusion in all our space efforts and sent it to the Central Committee. They have to do something, and soon.”

I was stunned to hear this. Heroes of the Soviet Union did not, as a rule, write critical letters to the leadership. Especially not a group of them! “Has there been any response?”

“Well,” Gagarin said, his eyes narrowing, “we are all being examined by military intelligence. Five men are being kicked out of the detachment. We may have started a war.”

I was glad that we were crawling bumper-to-bumper on Leningrad Road, because the news that it was indeed military intelligence “reviewing” our files nearly caused me to lose control of the vehicle. This was very bad news.

We had reached the entrance to the Zhukovsky Academy. I pulled over and asked Gagarin if he wanted me to wait. “No, I’ll ride back with Titov; he’s meeting me. Please take the car back to the center. Thank you for being my chauffeur, and remember — things are going to change in our program. I promise you.”

With that, the short, increasingly stout first man in space hurried off to school.

I retraced my route, heading back down Leningrad Road toward the Belorussia Station and Uncle Vladimir’s office. This was dangerously close to being absent without leave, but I had been excused from classes for the day, and was simply making one stop on the way back to Star Town. Or so I was prepared to testify.

The guard telephoned to Uncle Vladimir’s office. To my surprise, he was present and available, though I was instructed to meet him in half an hour, at the gate to Dynamo Stadium, several blocks away.

I used the time to buy a roll from a kiosk, and was sitting on the hood of the car eating when I saw him approach, on foot. He was red-faced with exertion. “This is the longest distance I have walked in ten years,” he said by way of greeting.

“I’m sorry.”

“It was my choice. It wouldn’t be good for either of us for you to be seen wandering the halls there.” He seemed to have recovered. “How have you been?” We had not seen each other in months, and had rarely spoken since I had told him that I was going to be enrolled in the military cosmonaut team. “Aside from your poor ankle,” he said, noting my cast. “A savage beating by your military rivals?”

I explained about my parachuting mishap.

“And you really thought going into the service was somehow safer than working at the bureau?” He was teasing me, which was a relief. I had been prepared for anything up to and including physical violence. “What brings you crawling back to me?”

I wasn’t even going to question his statement, especially since it was more or less correct. “There’s a war going on between the clans,” I said, and briefly laid out what Gagarin had told me, without naming Gagarin as my source.

Uncle Vladimir listened carefully as I spoke, nodding now and then; then he grabbed me by the shoulder. “It’s new, and yet not new at all. I had heard grumblings about the space program coming from much higher up.” He made a little circling gesture with a finger, as if indicating an airplane. Perhaps one circling Mount Olympus, observing a war of the gods. “You’re in some danger yourself.”

“That’s what I was afraid of.”

“Don’t despair. I won’t let them drag you off to the basement.”

“But can you stop them from shipping me off to the Arctic Circle?”

“We may have to turn to your father for help, if that becomes the question.”

“When he finds out I’ve been working for you, he may not be so eager to save me.”

Uncle Vladimir laughed. “That’s the spirit! Always think the worst! Then you’re never surprised or disappointed.” He got serious again. “I can talk to your father, if that becomes necessary. I doubt that it will.

“Go back to work. If there are any further developments concerning Gagarin and the cosmonauts in their revolt against the Central Committee, tell me immediately.”

32 Katya

When I returned to my lonely room that night, I found I had a visitor — Katya. This was the first time we had seen each other since my accident. “Oh my God, look at you!” she said, referring to my cast. “They’re going to kill you, if you’re not careful.”

“I’m careful,” I said.

She nudged the cast with the toe of her boot. “Not careful enough.” Then she kissed me.

Since our meeting at Baikonur, we had struck up a relationship of sorts. My training left me little time for a social life; the relative inaccessibility of Star Town was also an obstacle. Then you had Katya’s travel schedule, which often took her to the Central Observatory in the Crimea and no doubt to other scattered institutes of the Academy of Sciences.

It was much like my relationship with Marina — long absences punctuated by brief hours of passion. It wasn’t love, of that I was sure. Katya was a decade older than me, with not only a husband but a good number of other lovers before me. And possibly at the same time. I never asked; Katya’s regal bearing, the sweep with which she entered a room, or a conversation, made such questions seem almost blasphemous.

“It’s bad enough they make you live in a closet. Now they’ve crippled you so you can’t leave.”

“I can leave. I was in Moscow today. I even saw Vladimir.” This was what passed for dangerous conversation between us, the fact that I had met her through my uncle. I had never told him that we had met again, much less become lovers, leaving that to Katya, who in any case saw Vladimir more often than I.

“Dear Vladimir,” she said, sighing. I asked her what she was doing at Star Town. “Instruction in lunar geography and photography,” she said.

It was my turn to laugh. “That was the class I missed today!”

“I know. I was handed a very formal excuse by some young officer. Besides, I wasn’t the actual lecturer: I was merely along to control the materials, to make sure they didn’t fall into the wrong hands.”

“Meaning the Air Force of the USSR?”

She smiled. “Exactly.” Then she looked around my quarters. “Do you have anything to eat…?”

“Not even a potato,” I said. “But there is a café at the station.” I meant Tsiolkovsky train station, the stop nearest Star Town.

“You’re spending all your money!” Katya was much like my mother in her frugality.

“I’m only using the money I’m saving on furniture.” This was pathetic, but true. The flat had come with some of the worst furniture I had ever seen in my life, and I had grown up on military bases. It was heavy, blocky, badly varnished, if at all. The couch was covered with some greasy green fabric that had, I think, formerly been used to protect a truck.

Katya reached for her coat. As she did, there was a knock at the door, which I answered. It was Shiborin, looking flushed and excited, as if he had just run to the residence block from the training center. “There’s a lot of excitement,” he said, panting.

Then he saw Katya behind me, and froze. With her experience in the world of Security, she said, quietly, “Would you like me to leave? Or do you want to talk out there.”

Before I could answer, Shiborin said, “Out here. It will only be a minute.”

Door closed, he got excited again. “Did you tell me you worked for Artemov?”

“I was at the bureau when he took it over last year. But I never worked directly for him.”

“Good, then you’re probably safe.”

“Safe from what?”

Shiborin looked down the dark, dingy hallway. “Artemov was taken in for questioning by State Security today.”

“How do you know that?”

“I happened to be in the sauna when Belyayev and Saditsky came in. They had been over at the bureau trying to find out why the civilians have a better L-1 simulator than we do, and suddenly this whole meeting was called off. They saw Artemov and a bunch of other people being loaded into cars, and Saditsky recognized them as State Security.”

I still didn’t believe it. “Even if they got in those cars, it doesn’t mean they were being arrested or questioned—”

“Belyayev asked these guys, the men in the black coats, he called them. And they just flashed passports at him — a Hero of the Soviet Union! — and told him to mind his own business!” Shiborin shook his head. “He was still pretty steamed when he got to the sauna.” He grinned, to make sure I got his joke.

“Who was taken with him?” I was thinking of poor Filin, who would have to be hospitalized for months to recover from something like this.

“A bunch of second-level people — his little group of pets. Oh yeah, that guy you said you knew — the Georgian.” I had pointed out Lev Tselauri to Shiborin and my classmates during one of our pointless, if not openly hostile, meetings with Artemov and his staff. So Lev had been swept up.

He and I had avoided each other since our last meetings at Baikonur, back in April. I had no idea of how he and Marina were doing, whether she had given birth to a boy or a girl. I didn’t even know where they were living.

“Who would be powerful enough to haul Artemov around?” I asked. “Who’s bigger than Ustinov?”

“The Central Committee and the Politburo,” Shiborin said, with satisfaction. “Representing the Party and the people—”

He was in danger of lapsing into boilerplate propaganda, so I interrupted. “I’ll see what I can find out.” I thanked Shiborin, and went inside my flat.

I told Katya about Artemov and State Security. “Good. It’s about time someone disciplined that drunken, incompetent bastard.” This was vintage Katya, never leaving anyone in doubt as to her opinion.

“I’m starving.”

The trains back to Moscow stopped running at ten, so after dinner I packed Katya off. In other circumstances, I would have asked her to spend the night, but knowing how much she hated the flat, feeling somewhat awkward with my cast, and needing badly to speak to my father, I reluctantly let her go.

I wasn’t able to reach him until the next morning. “Yes, I know all about Artemov,” he said. “He’s not being arrested, but questions have been raised about sabotage.” I can’t remember what my father said immediately thereafter, because I didn’t hear him. Maybe it was the word sabotage coming on the heels of mention of Artemov, but it was at that moment that I realized my conversation yesterday with Uncle Vladimir had triggered this. “Yuri?”

My father had noticed my strange silence. “I’m still here.”

“I said, someone probably wants to throw a scare into him. He just arbitrarily canceled one of our programs, you know. Refused to support it.” I had heard rumors that the 7K-VI program was in trouble; this was additional confirmation. “He’s also having big fights on your Moon rocket.”

“Do you think they’ll replace him?”

“Only if he quits.”

“He’ll never do that.”

“Then we have to hope that they’ll throw him in prison.” I laughed, which was apparently the wrong response. “There’s nothing funny about this, Yuri! There is a war going on at the very highest level! Anyone who’s got his head sticking up is going to get it chopped off!”

“What are you trying to tell me, Papa?”

I could picture the exasperation on his face. “Don’t go anywhere you aren’t ordered to go for a while. That way you won’t have to make any explanations.”

“That sounds ominous.”

“It’s meant to. Remember when I warned you about working for Vladimir? This warning is double strength.”

“I understand.” And I said good-bye.

Understanding my father, of course, did not mean obeying him. He still didn’t know — though given his warning, he might have suspected — that I had gone to work for his brother-in-law. So I had no choice but to continue my investigations. Actually, given their moribund state, to renew them, to finally get some answers to all these open questions. Why would Uncle Vladimir want to pressure Artemov? Could he have new evidence about the Korolev murder? And what did Gagarin’s letter have to do with any of this?

My friends of the Fourth Enrollment were scheduled for another day of parachuting, meaning I had a relatively free day. I reported for exercises, then, still hobbling, caught the train headed for Kaliningrad.

33 Lev And Marina

I had no idea of where Lev and Marina lived, though I knew it had to be Kaliningrad. Both would have completed their studies at Bauman in the spring, and Lev’s employment in the bureau would have entitled him to a flat nearby.

It occurred to me that one new flat had become available in the summer of 1967—the one I had formerly occupied. Why shouldn’t Lev inherit my flat? He had already inherited my girlfriend!

So I went first to my former building, which was already beginning to show signs of deterioration: Bricks had fallen off the facing. In fact, there was netting over the entrance to prevent passersby from being clobbered. When I knocked on my former door, I was greeted by a young woman, a recent mother, to judge from the squalling child in the room.

But it was not Marina. I made a hurried apology and got out of there.

I had thought I was terribly clever — much as I had, early in the investigation of the Korolev murder, believed myself to be a master spy. And with as much success. Now I had no backup plan. I could contact someone in the bureau, Filin’s office, perhaps, or even Triyanov, who might tell me where to find Lev. Or I could leave a message for the Omsk Twins, if they were still at Bauman—

Here came Marina, bundled in her fur coat and boots, grocery bags in each hand, walking up to the building. Before I could offer any sort of greeting, she saw me. She stopped, dropped the bags to the sidewalk, and began to weep.

I got her upstairs to her flat, which turned out to be located in the same corner of the building as mine, but one floor higher up. I was busy trying to contain the spilled groceries, since the bags had torn, while trying to comfort Marina, so I didn’t ask about the baby. Or maybe I assumed her mother or Lev’s mother, if Lev had a mother, was upstairs with it.

But the flat was clearly that of a young childless couple. Silent, empty, free of toys or clothing, or that smell of baby food and other essences.

By now Marina had calmed down. Allowing for a momentary redness around her eyes, she looked heartbreakingly wonderful, prettier than I remembered, and I was about to get angry at Lev all over again. “Where is he? Or she?”

“Who?”

“The baby.”

She closed her eyes, and for a moment I thought she would cry. But she just sighed. “There is no baby,” she said. “I miscarried at six months.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“I doubt that anyone was eager to tell you.” We put the groceries away as if we were back in our respective student flats. “I shouldn’t have cried like that.”

“It’s all right.” I desperately wanted to take her in my arms. “How is Lev?”

She turned toward me. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”

“Yes, I came to check on him—”

“To check on him. Oh, Yuri. I don’t believe you.” She walked out of the kitchen.

I followed, catching her hand. “What do you mean?”

“You know he was taken in, right?”

“Yes. And I came to see if you needed help—”

“Just like a Bolshevik—”

“Marina, what the hell are you talking about?”

“Denounce a man, then swoop down on his abandoned wife all full of concern—”

“I didn’t denounce Lev!” No wonder she had burst into tears when she saw me. “I only heard that he was taken in for questioning along with Artemov—”

“And, of course, you had nothing to do with that, either!”

“No!” I was confused and angry. “Marina…”

She was looking into my eyes. “You still don’t know.”

“Obviously not, or I wouldn’t be sitting here like an idiot.”

Then, strangely, she began to laugh. “Yuri, who do you think I work for? Who sent me to Europe? Who is the head of the Sixth Directorate in State Security?” She only waited long enough for me to indicate that I had no idea. “Vladimir Alexandrovich Nefedov. I believe you know the name.”

Uncle Vladimir, head of a directorate in State Security? That was like being a four-star general, perhaps even a marshal of the Soviet Union, a rank greater than my father’s. “I know he has a high position in the organization, but—”

“—But! He’s been surrounding promising technical students at Bauman with his agents for years! The Sixth Directorate handles industrial and economic espionage, and future managers come from our school. He took a very long view of things.”

“It all sounds logical.”

“Even when he targets his own nephew?”

I still had never told Marina about my working relationship with Uncle Vladimir. Now did not seem like the right time. “Why should I be any different from other students?”

My poor attempt at a joke failed. “Yuri, you got into my class because your uncle put you on the list. He encouraged me to get to know you. Just as he encouraged me to marry a man so we could carry out surveillance in England.”

I sat silently, trying to absorb this terrible news. I guess I had suspected that Marina’s first marriage had been arranged — she had said as much in the past. But our relationship?

“Tell me,” I said, trying hard to be very calm, “did you ever love me? Or did my uncle give you orders to dump me and take up with Lev?”

It was her turn to sit silent, to consider her response. “You must believe me, Yuri. No matter what I’ve just told you, I am not a whore for State Security. I did their work because it saved my father’s life, but my heart was always my own. When I went to England, I was too young to realize that I was caught up in the romance and adventure, that my husband was a cruel, ruthless bastard.

“But I did fall in love with you. Or we would never have seen each other outside of class. You must believe me. By telling you these things, I’ve risked my career.”

“What about Lev?”

“You… withdrew from our relationship, Yuri. Think back to the time you started full-time at the bureau. You never had time for me anymore. Lev was there.” She frowned. “Though lately that fucking bureau has robbed me of his attention, too.”

That sounded like the Marina I knew and loved, a mixture of righteous indignation and spoiled girlishness.

“I’m sure he’ll be back soon, safe and sound.” I stood up, clumsily, my foot asleep in its cast. Marina caught me as I wobbled, and we kissed, deeply, warmly, as we used to.

Then I held her in the dark room — neither of us had turned on a light — swaying with her, like lovers on an empty dance floor in some movie about the Great Patriotic War, the pretty girl in her simple skirt and white blouse, the soldier in his uniform.…

“I should go.” I was confused by my own feelings, and, in truth, we had worn ourselves out emotionally.

There were tears in her eyes again. “Yes.”

Soon thereafter I was in an empty train heading out of Podlipki Station, trying to rearrange the puzzle pieces of my existence. Maybe I was still angry about Marina’s betrayal, no matter how justified she might have felt. But I was still not ready to tell her the truth of my situation.

Especially since I was completely confused about that situation. What was Uncle Vladimir up to? He had had me targeted for intelligence work long before he had approached me. Had he merely used the Korolev murder as a pretext to “activate” me?

Or was it something worse than that? Uncle Vladimir had been present in the Kremlin Hospital the day Korolev died. No murderer had yet been arrested.

Had Uncle Vladimir killed Korolev? If so, what had he hoped to gain? (Ridiculous… he was not even in the same wing of the hospital as Korolev.)

Or, had Uncle Vladimir somehow arranged for Artemov to take over? But why would he be persecuting him now, if, indeed, he was behind that?

Was there some way to link these events? Or was I feverish, emotionally distraught? Could Katya help me?

Too many questions. I had almost none of the information required for intelligent answers, and I needed to be intelligent, because the penalty for mistakes in this particular game was, indeed, death.

34 The American Film Crew

“They only kept him for a few hours, then let him go,” Shiborin said the next morning, as we made our way — he too slowly for comfort, I too fast for my cast — down the icy sidewalk outside our flat.

“Artemov? Everybody?”

“I guess they sweated the junior guys a little more, knowing they would run to Artemov and complain as soon as they got back to the bureau.”

“Who tells you these things?”

He smiled. “Heroes of the Soviet Union.”

We paused as we came to Building Three, the last of the residential buildings to be finished. A truck was parked here and a young woman I didn’t know was holding a baby while trying desperately to keep soldiers from breaking her furniture. “One of the nearly departed,” Shiborin said. “Back to the squadron after being a cosmonaut. Can you imagine how terrible that would be?”

“Moving out with a small child in the middle of winter would be bad enough,” I said, sensitized to domestic challenges by my meeting with Marina. I realized it was good we were heading for the gym, because otherwise I would have telephoned Marina simply to hear her voice, adding more fuel to the fires of confusion.

When we arrived, one of Belyayev’s deputies was waiting with a message for me: “They need you over at the air base this morning,” he said.

“Why?”

“Your English. They have some foreign visitors there today.”

I was stunned. Foreign visitors at Chkalov? “Are they going to Baikonur next?” I said, joking.

Passing by, Shiborin overheard this. “They were here yesterday, while you were gone. It’s a film crew from America making some kind of documentary on the Soviet space program, in case we beat Apollo to the Moon.” He smiled. “Of course, people like you and I are secret, so they hauled out a couple of doctors and called them ‘student-cosmonauts.’ ”

Even if I hadn’t been able to speak some English, I would have wanted to see this, though I wondered who would request my services. Surely there were better English-speakers available to the State Security escorts. “One more thing,” the messenger told me: “Civilian clothing.”

I hurried back to my flat, and got changed just in time to catch the bus.

As I clomped from the administration building toward the flight line, I saw that Chkalov air base was surprisingly active this gray morning. I quickly realized it was an illusion. Yes, there were more cars parked in view, and perhaps two dozen people standing around. But there were no planes or helicopters taking off, only one MiG-17 out on the taxiway, its engines running.

I looked for the cameras, sound and lighting people, and found them at the center of a crowd at the hangar entrance. As I pushed my way through, I heard a familiar voice call my name: “Yuri, over here!”

It was Katya, her face rosy in the cold. She made no move to kiss me, nor I her: This was not only an official event, it was controlled by State Security. There were undoubtedly more agents present than subjects. In fact, since Katya and I were part-time assets, it was possible that the only people not working for State Security were the Americans themselves! “You got my message.”

“You asked for me?”

“I thought you might enjoy this. Besides, you understand a lot of the technical terms.”

“Glad to be useful.”

I had to subtract two from my estimate of State Security agents present in that group, because Gagarin was there, too, along with Colonel Seregin, the commander of the 70th Squadron. Gagarin was wearing a flight helmet and was being filmed getting ready for a training mission. Seregin was filling the role of a briefing officer, complete with clipboard.

They were not on microphone as they walked toward the MiG-17, and a good thing, too, because rather than discussing the particular quirks of the 17, a high-performance jet which, I was quite sure, Gagarin had never flown, Seregin was saying, “How much longer is this shit going to go on?”

“Now you know what my life is like,” Gagarin said. “I should be at the academy this morning instead of freezing my ass off here.”

Naturally, at that moment Katya and what I assumed to be the American producer asked me what they were discussing. So I made up some plausible nonsense about weather, call signs, and traffic patterns.

The technician who had started up the aircraft engines climbed out, and Gagarin went up the ladder to the cockpit, with Seregin close behind. As the camera crew moved down the runway for some establishing shots (that was the term they used), I edged up to Katya. “What are you going to do? Gagarin can’t fly that thing.”

“I know.” She frowned. “They didn’t tell us until we got here. So he’s not going to fly it. He’s just going to… drive it out onto the runway.”

“Taxi it.”

“Yes. And then they can edit in a shot of the same jet taking off with someone else at the controls.”

From what I knew of the accuracy of such documentaries, the footage would show an entirely different aircraft, possibly American, even an old propeller-driven one. But I kept my mouth shut.

Even taxiing an unfamiliar aircraft was a bit of a trick. I could see Seregin going through the procedures step by step with Gagarin. Then, as satisfied as he was going to get, he climbed down and pulled the ladder away himself.

We all backed away to see the first man in space off on his routine training mission. “Here we go,” Katya whispered to me, quoting Gagarin’s first words at the launch of Vostok 1, though not, I believe, deliberately.

It all seemed to go well. Gagarin was a rusty aviator, but he had the basic skills. Slowly, but smoothly, he rolled the MiG down the taxiway, turned around at the far end, then drove back to the hangar. There he halted.

The crew wasn’t satisfied yet. They wanted footage from another angle, something about better lighting allowing them to see into the cockpit itself with a long lens. Katya asked me to explain this to Gagarin, so I hobbled over to the plane, its engines idling.

Gagarin opened the canopy. “What now?”

“They want you to make one more pass, down to the end of the taxiway and turn onto the runway,” I shouted.

“And then we’ll be done?”

No one had said anything, but from the look of frustration on Gagarin’s face, I knew this would be the end of his part in the filming. “Yes!”

He waved acknowledgment, then closed the canopy again. He fired up the engines and rolled past the hangar toward the crew, which by now was at the far end, near the turn onto the runway.

I had just reached Katya, Seregin, and the others when I heard Seregin say, insistently, and to no one in particular, “Slow down!”

As we watched, the MiG reached the end of the taxiway going a lot faster than it had the first time. So fast, in fact, that as Gagarin turned it toward the runway, it began to fishtail.

“Oh, shit,” Seregin said. He began to run.

“What’s going on?” Katya said.

The film crew scattered as the big silver jet slid sideways off the icy concrete into the mountain range of old snow piled where they stood.

The heat from the engines and their exhaust raised an immediate cloud of steam. The engines shut off, whether by Gagarin himself or because they choked on snow being sucked through the inlets. And there, tilted crazily, sat the plane, the right wheel of its landing gear still turning, in front of Colonel Seregin, a dozen State Security agents, and half a dozen Americans, who had gotten the whole pathetic spectacle on film.

Poor Gagarin. He was out of the cockpit by the time I reached him, several minutes after the others. He didn’t need a ladder, of course, since he was able to crawl out onto the mounds of snow into which he had driven the MiG.

In contrast to the day he had had his flight canceled, throwing his helmet, Gagarin was subdued, shaking his head and showing with his hands where and how he had lost control on the turn. Seregin was talking to him. Everyone else was keeping his or her distance.

“The Americans say they’ll give us that footage,” Katya told me.

“Nice of them.” As if there were even a possibility of their escaping from Chkalov with it.

“How were we supposed to know the big hero couldn’t fly?” she snapped.

“Nobody lets him,” I said, though I doubt she heard me.

In truth, it was a minor accident. There would be some damage to the plane, all easily repairable. Gagarin could probably make a case that the runway had not been properly cleared.

As the many State Security watchers conferred with the American film crew, Gagarin and Seregin passed me. “That’s it!” Gagarin said. “I’m tired of being everybody’s tool. I’m calling Kamanin and Kuznetsov and putting an end to all this bullshit.” Off they went, Seregin trying to calm the first man in space even though, I suspect, he agreed with everything Gagarin was saying.

This was exactly the kind of incident that Uncle Vladimir wanted me to tell him about, but I, in my first act of overt rebellion against him, would not.

The problem was, someone else was sure to report it.

35 The Moonstone

Six weeks after my accident, on the morning of Monday, January 29, 1968, I returned to the hospital in Shchelkovo to have my cast removed. It had become such an inconvenience that I would gladly have walked the seven kilometers.

My ankle was a sorry sight, shrunken and pale, but losing the added weight of that industrial-strength plaster made me feel like the lead in the Bolshoi.

Clutching the certificates that authorized my return to active training, including parachuting, I raced for the train back to Star Town. At noon General Kamanin was scheduled to meet with the entire cosmonaut team, something that had never occurred in my nine months at the center.

I had had no further contact with Marina and relatively little with Katya since the awful incident with Gagarin at the air base. I was scrupulously following my father’s advice to keep my head down while the clans waged war above me.

Not that I had any idea of how that war was going. I would have welcomed insights from my father, but he spent most of January in Czechoslovakia. So I was eagerly looking forward to Kamanin’s briefing, hoping it would bring some order to my life.

Eager or not, the train ran late, and I barely reached it in time.

The location was the main classroom in which we student-cosmonauts studied. Ideally suited for a group of thirty, it was stuffed with at least twice that many — fifty cosmonauts and student-cosmonauts, and perhaps ten senior officers, including General Kamanin and his deputies, and General Kuznetsov, head of Military Unit 26266,

Kamanin wasted no time. “Last Monday the United States tested its lunar landing module for the first time.” Apollo 5, as it was called, had been put into space by the Saturn launcher — the Saturn I-B, much smaller than the Saturn V-5. The payload was the buglike Apollo lunar module, both its descent and ascent stages, flying without a crew onboard. “The test was only a partial success. The engines on both stages worked to perfection, but there were numerous computer problems which will probably require another test flight this summer.

“Nevertheless, the Americans are completing their recovery from the Apollo 1 fire.” I realized that the tragedy had occurred almost exactly a year ago. “They have another Saturn 5 test scheduled for April. By late summer they will put astronauts Schirra, Cunningham, and Eisele into space aboard the redesigned Apollo. We expect them to fly a manned Apollo into lunar orbit by the summer of 1969. If all goes well, they will be able to attempt a lunar landing by the end of that year.”

I certainly knew most of this information, since I was able to read the American news magazines that arrived at the Star Town library. To judge from the murmurs around the room, most of my fellow cosmonauts were surprised to hear it laid out so cleanly. Americans on the Moon by the end of 1969!

“That’s if all goes well,” one of the senior cosmonauts said, to nervous laughter.

“Unfortunately, our schedules depend on things not going well for the Americans,” Kamanin said. “As for our program, we will launch the sixth L-1 to the Moon the week of March one, followed by two more unmanned Soyuz the last week of March.” Someone applauded at this. “The State Commission will require two successful L-1 missions before a manned flight around the Moon can be attempted. Assuming a success with Number 6, Number 7 would fly unmanned in May, with a manned attempt possible in July 1968.”

“A year ahead of the Americans,” Colonel Belyayev said with great satisfaction.

“Assuming all goes well for us, and not so well for them.” That came from Gagarin, prompting more laughter. Fortunately, Kamanin was in an indulgent mood.

“The first manned Soyuz flights are scheduled now for June. Obviously Soyuz will have to fly manned before L-1 can be flown with a crew. We have been trying to get the various State Commissions and Minister Afanasyev to understand this.

“With those launch dates in mind, we are resuming active training.” He then began to read off names of crew commanders in the Soyuz group and the L-1 group. Most of them were senior people like Bykovsky and Leonov, who had finally graduated from Zhukovsky, freeing them to be cosmonauts rather than college students. I was pleased to hear my friend Ivan Saditsky named as a Soyuz commander. “Of course, all of these commanders will be joined by engineers from the Korolev bureau.” There was some booing at this.

“We also hope to end the neglect our military programs have suffered. Unfortunately, the 7K-VI program has been canceled.” This was no surprise to anyone. “I and the other members of the Air Force Military-Technical Council have strongly protested this decision, and it’s possible it will be reversed. But for now, those of you involved in the VI program will work on the Almaz station.

“This is an ambitious set of programs. I don’t think a rich country like America could operate four separate manned programs at the same time, and we are trying to… encourage the Ministries of Defense and General Machine-Building to bring us all together under one organization, preferably the Air Force.” For some reason, I found myself glancing at Gagarin, who was sitting to Kamanin’s right, just in time to catch him nodding with satisfaction.

“It won’t be easy. But it’s a fight we must win if we are to beat America to the Moon, and keep the Soviet Union first in the new realm of space.” There was genuine applause at this, and with a self-conscious smile, Kamanin waved and walked out. Belyayev, Gagarin, and Nikolayev followed him, leaving the rest of us to disperse as we wished.

I made my way to Saditsky, who was having his shoulder punched by Leonov, and offered my congratulations. “It sounds better than it is,” Saditsky said, once Leonov walked off. “Your old boss Artemov has decided that Feoktistov should command the next Soyuz flight, and even Triyanov is getting into the act.”

I was surprised. “I can see either one of them as flight engineers, but commanding? I thought the commander always had to be an Air Force officer.”

“You know that, I know that, the Central Committee knows that… but for some reason, Artemov doesn’t.” He looked at his watch. “Leonov wants me over in Building 44. Come along.”

Building 44 was one of the new structures constantly in the process of rising from the birch forests in which the training center was located. It was the size and shape of a warehouse, and could have passed for one, except for the barbed wire and armed guards around it. And this was inside the perimeter of Star Town and the training center!

Once inside with Saditsky, I saw the reason for the extra security: A mock lunar landscape had been laid out using real soil. The sky was black, thanks to curtains, and in the middle of it all sat a white, lopsided vehicle with four legs… the L-3 lunar lander.

“God, will you look at this thing,” Saditsky said. We stood there at the border of the lunar “surface,” like children at the edge of a sandbox. Leonov and several of the other cosmonauts newly assigned to lunar crews were clustered around the L-3 in their white lab coats. Someone — I couldn’t tell who — was in a pressure suit complete with helmet, trying to demonstrate a tricky egress out of the side hatch of the L-3, backing down the ladder. The whole process was made more realistic — and vastly more complicated — by rigging that connected the suited cosmonaut to an overhead crane, giving the tester a chance to see what it would be like to move in lunar gravity. The cosmonaut’s foot slipped off the ladder with each step, but luckily the tester never fell.

“It’s finally real,” I heard myself saying. That’s certainly what I felt.

“A real monstrosity,” Saditsky said. “There’s one pilot in the L-3, where the Americans will have two. Every move, like opening the hatch and climbing down the ladder, is a one-man job. That’s assuming you survive the landing. They’re saying that once you pitch over out of the descent burn, you’ll have thirty seconds to locate your landing site. That’s not very much time.”

I remembered some of the details from my time at the bureau and my classes: During the firing of the engines, which would lower the L-3 from lunar orbit to within a few hundred meters of the surface, the pilot would be on his back, looking up at the sky; rotating the vehicle so he could face down toward the surface wouldn’t help the problem, since the pilot would be flying over a sunless landscape until the very end. “So you don’t want to fly it?” I said to Saditsky.

“Don’t be an idiot. If engineers are crazy enough to build these things, I’m certainly crazy enough to fly them. I only have to find some way to be first!” He grinned and headed toward his comrades.

I wanted to linger there, to walk on this lunar surface. I could easily imagine myself coming down the ladder from the L-3—not on the first flight, obviously, but at some point, five or even ten years from now.

To do that, of course, I had to remain a cosmonaut. And to remain a cosmonaut, I had to learn some answers. Maybe it was my exposure to Saditsky and his take-the-hill attitude, perhaps it was my newly regained mobility, but at that moment I knew I had to start fighting back, to be something other than a tool.

I was scheduled to attend a Party meeting that afternoon. I had been so faithful in participating in the regular discussions, condemnations, and so on, that I felt sure I could skip this one without jeopardizing my status.

What was I worrying about? If I actually executed the vague plan then taking shape in my brain, my Party attendance record would not be an issue.

As if to prove to myself that I was independent, I stole a small rock from our fake lunar surface.

An hour later I was on the train to Moscow.

I had telephoned Katya’s office before leaving Star Town, to ask if I could visit that evening.

Her flat was on the northwest side just off the Leningrad Highway, roughly between the Institute for Medical-Biological Problems and the Zhukovsky Academy. The Institute for Space Research was located nearby, too, and so was Uncle Vladimir’s branch office of State Security. This neighborhood, in fact, was becoming as familiar to me as the one around the Bauman School.

Katya greeted me at her door with a warm hug and kiss, pressing a glass of red wine into my hand before I could even take off my coat or present her with the oranges I had bought at the Star Town commissary. “Sit while I finish cooking,” she said, going back to her kitchenette and juggling the oranges as she went.

So I sat, sipping the wine, which I didn’t particularly like.

Marina’s confession that she had been steered to me by Uncle Vladimir had made me wonder about Katya: Was she, too, performing some kind of surveillance on me? It seemed unlikely. If Uncle Vladimir had wanted to replace Marina in my life, he surely would not have introduced me to Katya at his cottage. Nor had Katya ever probed for information, quite the contrary: I had learned more from her than she ever learned from me. I really believed that we were two lost souls who happened to find each other at the right moment, both of us knowing that the relationship was short-lived, like a summer flower.

Yet, when she came out of the kitchen, announcing that dinner was ready, she looked lovely and desirable in a way entirely unlike Marina. She was tall and blonde and graceful, lighting a cigarette like a Western film star, arching an eyebrow at my inability to move. “Like what you see?” she said, in English. Then she laughed, and we sat down to dinner.

Eventually I was able to present her with my second gift: “Have you ever seen a stone from the Moon?”

“Only in pictures, and then from very, very far away.”

I took the gray rock out of my pocket. “It’s not authentic, of course, but it’s as close as you’ll get—”

“—Until the Americans land?” she said.

I had always been able to depend on Katya for a conversational challenge. “Kamanin and Gagarin did a big show today. They’re convinced we will beat them. In fact, training for the lunar crews started this very afternoon.”

“What makes them so optimistic?”

“I think it was Artemov’s stumble. It’s as if they’ve been gathering their forces for a big attack, like Zhukov.” By this time we were clearing the table. “Gagarin has been active behind the scenes. He’s a military man supporting the military, so they listen to him. And he’s a national hero, so the politicians and big bosses pay attention to him, too.”

“He’s come a long way for a little man from Gzhatsk.” Katya named the tiny village west of Moscow where Gagarin had grown up.

“He got a lot taller the day they shot him into orbit.”

I had delivered my message, putting Katya to the test. Then I made love to her, like that famous secret agent, James Bond.

36 The Outlying Regions Of Near-Earth Space

On March 2, 1968, the sixth L-1 spacecraft, still unmanned, roared into Earth orbit from Baikonur atop another Universal Rocket. Problems in the L-1 guidance system still hadn’t been completely corrected and we wanted the simplest trajectory possible, so the goal of the mission was not a flight around the Moon, but to a point over 330,000 kilometers out in space. For that reason, the L-1 was announced as the fourth in the series of Zond interplanetary space probes, this one designed to explore “the outlying regions of near-Earth space.”

The big managers of the ministry and State Commission hoped that a safe return and splashdown of Zond 4 would mark another space first, something our country had not accomplished since Luna 9 two years ago.

For two days the mission went beautifully. The troublesome Block D upper stage fired as scheduled early on March 3, sending the spacecraft soaring out into empty space. At the same time, a group of lunar cosmonauts led by Gagarin himself were down at the flight-control center in Yevpatoriya, duplicating the maneuvers in a simulated flight of their own.

Unfortunately, early on March 4, 1968, the same guidance system that had plagued earlier flights, including poor Komarov’s, failed to orient Zond 4 for a correction burn, which had to be canceled. Another attempt a day later also failed, but on March 6, as Zond 4 reached its apogee and began its slow fall back to Earth, the burn put Zond 4 on the desired trajectory for a safe reentry into the atmosphere.

As planned, on March 9, Zond 4 fell closer and closer to earth, diving into the atmosphere to an altitude of less than forty-six kilometers. Had cosmonauts been aboard Zond 4, they would have experienced twenty Gs at this time, dangerously high, but still survivable.

Scorched and slowed by the dive, the spacecraft then regained altitude, climbing back to 145 kilometers to begin its final, slower, more controllable descent.

At that point a series of small mistakes paid big penalties. Our knowledge of the upper atmosphere was incomplete; so was our knowledge of the flying characteristics of an L-1 vehicle in this regime. By the time flight controllers realized that Zond 4 was going to land six thousand kilometers short of its target zone, half a world away from the territory of the USSR, it was too late to make any adjustments. Once Tyulin and Artemov and the other members of the commission learned that Zond 4 was descending by parachute into the Gulf of Guinea off the west coast of Africa, they commanded it to self-destruct so as to prevent agents of the Main Enemy from recovering it. The flight of Zond 4 ended thirteen kilometers above the Atlantic Ocean with an explosion.

Publicly, the world was merely told that contact had been lost with “interplanetary space probe Zond 4.” At the center, where we all took turns dropping into Belyayev’s office for updates, we realized we had taken one baby step closer to a round-the-Moon flight.

The weather in the Moscow area all through February and into March was terrible, not surprising, but it prevented me from catching up to my Fourth Enrollment colleagues on parachute jumps. I needed ten to qualify; by mid March, I still had four to go.

Catching up was all the more difficult, because we student-cosmonauts had largely completed classroom training, where I excelled, and even much of the operational training, where I lagged, and were beginning to take on flight-support roles. For example, during the next pair of Soyuz missions, still scheduled for the middle of April (though lack of docking simulators was slowing the training), three of my engineer colleagues would be assigned to control and tracking stations around the USSR. Two others in the group had been told they were to be sent to the Astrakhan region in September to qualify as test pilots for the Spiral spaceplane program, while another pair were going to work on a successor to the canceled 7K-VI program called Zvezda, this one built by Artemov himself — as if his organization didn’t have enough to do!

The rest, including Shiborin and me, remained unassigned, which made us both extremely nervous. “You have to eat shit to taste the golden apples,” he said, far too often. “Not that being a test pilot is eating shit.”

I succeeded in keeping Marina out of my thoughts, and continued to see Katya. The lack of any overt move against Gagarin or other senior cosmonauts convinced me she had not run to Uncle Vladimir.

My father returned from his inspection tour in Czechoslovakia, and came to see me at Star Town early on the gray morning of Wednesday, March 27, 1968.

“We’re going to be at war this summer,” he announced the moment I made the mistake of asking him how his trip had gone. “That country is going to pieces. The leadership is making the same mistakes the Hungarians made. And the same thing will happen.”

I was fourteen when the “brotherly” tanks of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact had been “invited” into Hungary to “restore order.” The thought that we could be planning the same sort of bloodbath in Czechoslovakia was a depressing reminder of how little things had really changed. Our leaders wore nicer suits now, but deep down they were still Bolshevik thugs.

“How have you been feeling, Papa?” I said, hoping to change the subject from global power politics.

“Never better,” he said, with such strength that I almost believed him. He rotated his arm for me. “No more pain and stiffness here. I could probably pass a physical and go back to the cockpit.”

I smiled. I had not heard him say that in years, not since my mother died. “Do you have business at Monino today?” The Red Banner Air Force Academy at Monino was two train stops further out from Star Town.

“Chkalov,” he said. I gave him a cup of tea, and noticed that in spite of his claims of robust health, his hand shook.

“Straightening out our flight support?” Nobody at Star Town seemed to be happy with Seregin’s 70th Squadron. Pilot cosmonauts complained about the arbitrary scheduling and availability of aircraft while nonpilots like me seemed to be completely frozen out. I had heard that the technical staff of the center was unable to use transport craft when needed.

The problem wasn’t necessarily the fault of Colonel Seregin and his team. The 70th had been created upon orders from Marshal Vershinin with no warning and no study of the impact on operations at Chkalov, which was still home to a busy branch of the military’s flight-test center. It also served as a private airport for Party officials.

My father grunted. “We can’t tell which is more screwed up right now, the squadron or the test center. It’s time both operations got cleaned up.” He didn’t need to add, when we start fighting in Czechoslovakia.

“Have you had breakfast?”

“No.” As he said this, he glanced around my hovel. “I was going to stop at the commissary at Chkalov.” He smiled. “It’s the one thing they do right.”

“We have a good one here, too.”

“I need to be at the base by eight.” It was already 7:30.

I offered to walk him to his car and driver, which waited in front of the administration building. The day was miserably cold and drizzly, typical for early spring. The sun appeared for a few seconds, only to be swallowed up in clouds. “I hope you’re not flying today,” my father said.

“Our group is studying a new spacecraft this week.” Endless, tedious lectures on the bureau’s new Zvezda, in fact. Today’s subject was to be power systems.

“Good.”

As we passed House 3, the main residence building, our path intersected with two other officers. “Here comes Gagarin,” I whispered to my father.

“I know.” He seemed indifferent.

Gagarin and the other pilot, a lieutenant colonel named Dobrovolsky, nodded greetings as they headed into the commissary and up the stairs.

“Here is where I leave you,” my father said, and gave me a warm hug and kiss. As he turned away, I saw that there were tears in his eyes. I wanted to stop him, but he hurried away so quickly it was if he were running.

The Star Town commissary had a section that served as a decent restaurant comparable to the Stakhanov in Ostankino Tower, but most of the time we used the cafeteria section, loading trays with food and beginning to eat before we even sat down. We were, after all, busy cosmonauts.

Saditsky came up in line behind me. “Still trying to catch up on parachuting?”

“Yes.”

He nodded his head toward the tables where the senior cosmonauts were gathered, including Gagarin, Dobrovolsky, and Leonov. “Dobrovolsky isn’t going to jump today; he’s taking a driver’s test. So Leonov has room for one more.…”

The idea of jumping under Leonov’s direction was intimidating: Not only was he one of the most talented of the first cosmonauts, he had turned himself into a master parachutist with a hundred or more jumps to his credit. But I needed to reach that qualifying number, and if not now, when? “Go ahead,” Saditsky said.

I marched over there, set down my tray, saluted, and in my best military voice said, “Senior Lieutenant Ribko requests permission to join Colonel Leonov’s squad for the day.”

Leonov looked at Saditsky. “Why are you recruiting stragglers for me?” he said, clearly joking. “We leave in fifteen minutes,” he said to me. It was already eight A.M.

I grabbed my food off my tray and ran back to my flat to pick up my pass for the air base. (They might let Gagarin or Leonov in without one, but not student-cosmonaut Ribko.) Running was still difficult, and it took me longer than I planned.

Then I had to stop at Belyayev’s office to report my change in plans.

It was already after 8:15 when I raced out to the parking lot for the bus. Fortunately, they had waited. “Let’s go,” Gagarin said.

At Chkalov, Gagarin and a couple of pilots went off to the operations building while I followed Leonov and the rest of his lunar team to get suited up. In the locker room we met a couple of engineers from the bureau who had come over from Kaliningrad — Sevastanov and Rukavishnikov. We exchanged cool greetings; neither had been that active in Triyanov’s kindergarten while I was still there, but they obviously knew me as a defector.

By 9:30 A.M., we were on the taxiway. As we passed one of the hangars, I saw my father — alone — standing there with his hands folded behind his back, staring at a pair of MiG-15s. I waved, but there was no chance he could see me. Then we were in the air heading for the drop zone over Kirzhach, sixty kilometers away.

We had moved so quickly that I had no time to be nervous, and by 10:15 was standing in a muddy field near the small airport there, having successfully completed my seventh jump. The lunar group was planning to make at least two today, and I actually looked forward to another.

As our An-2 came in for a landing, Leonov gathered us all together. “I just checked the weather. We’ve got clouds moving in and we’ll be below minimums shortly. So it’s back to the base.” Thus my eagerness was short-lived.

We were lining up to reboard the An-2 when we heard the roar of a jet somewhere above us in the clouds, but very low. “That’s a 15,” one of the pilots said.

“They shouldn’t be that low in these conditions,” Leonov said.

“Maybe they’re on their way back,” the other pilot said.

I heard a strange sound from the sky — a pop, almost like a misfire. This on top of the noise from the jet’s engine. I glanced around to see if anyone else noticed it: unlikely, since they were either already inside the An-2, or wearing hard helmets. (I had a soft leather one.)

Then we all heard a whump! in the distance, an explosion that literally sent a jolt through the ground. That brought Leonov and Bykovsky out of the An-2 in a hurry. “What the hell was that?” Bykovsky said.

Leonov told him to be quiet and listen. There was no more jet noise. “Something crashed,” he said.

“Who was flying today?”

“Gubarev, Nikolayev, and Shatalov,” he said, naming three of the senior pilot cosmonauts. He looked worried. “Let’s get back.”

37 The Columbus Of Space

When we reached Chkalov, we learned that the missing pilot was not Gubarev, Nikolayev, or Shatalov, nor any of the half-dozen other pilots flying for the 70th or the test center, but Gagarin himself. With him in the two-seat Mig-15 trainer was Colonel Seregin.

Leonov ordered his lunar team back to Star Town and Kaliningrad, then took off for the operations building. Since I was not a member of his team, I received no orders, and decided to find my father, if he was still at the base.

The flight line was busier than I’d ever seen it. A MiG-21 came screaming in for a landing, then two Mi-4 helicopters took off. Another MiG-15 trainer landed, and an 11–14 transport took to the air. I learned later that at eleven A.M., with Gagarin and Seregin’s plane missing and now out of fuel, all Chkalov aircraft had been recalled while at the same time, resources were mobilized for a search of the area around Kirzhach.

I wasn’t ready to believe Gagarin and Seregin were dead: If they had had a problem with their aircraft, they could have ejected. And in that snowy, tree-filled wilderness northeast of Moscow, they could easily be lost for hours.

When I reached the administration building, I found only a single frantic junior lieutenant manning the guard desk. “I don’t know General Ribko and now is not a good time to be asking,” he said, as if he had more important things on his mind. Well, the aircraft-operations people did: I’m not sure how this guy was going to be helping to rescue the Columbus of Spaceflight. Maybe the fact that I was still wearing my leather jacket and flight overalls encouraged him to believe I was either junior to him, or possibly even a lowly civilian.

“Stand at attention when you address me, Lieutenant,” I found myself saying. “You will answer me in a civil tone or you will be guarding a radar site in Kamchatka, is that understood?”

The junior lieutenant’s face went red, but he got the message, coming to a full brace, eyes forward. I was slightly amazed at the result. Although I had been on the receiving end of military-style reaming, I had never actually delivered one.

“I am looking for Colonel-General Nikolai Ribko, Hero of the Soviet Union, inspector for the Air Force staff. He’s the only three-star general at this base today.”

Thanks to my threats, the junior lieutenant’s memory had magically improved. “I saw a colonel-general on the flight line half an hour ago. I have not seen him since.”

I could have had him phone his superior officer, whoever that might be, for more information, but I had also seen my father out by the hangars. The operations building was a more likely place to find him. “Thank you, Lieutenant,” I said, offering my best salute, turning on my heel and marching out.

I was reluctant to get too close to the operations building, because everyone there would be busy. But I knew my father; he would probably be right in the middle of things.

As I approached, a familiar face emerged. It wasn’t my father, however, but Shiborin, still in his uniform. “Yuri!”

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“They called over to the center to get extra transport pilots for the search.” He was walking toward the locker room, and I hurried to keep pace. “I’m supposed to take one of the II-14s out. Come along. We could use the extra eyes.”

Not seeing my father, and wanting to be useful, I went along.

As Shiborin suited up, he briefed me on the conditions. Actually, he had me hold the clipboard where he had just written his instructions while he said them aloud, to more firmly embed them in his memory, much as I had helped him study orbital mechanics. “We’re going to have two planes and four helicopters in the air at all times, working our way through search areas that are ten-by-ten kilometers.

“The helicopters will be down low, at a hundred or even fifty meters, while we’ll be at three hundred to six hundred meters.”

We headed for the plane, and I asked what had happened to Gagarin and Seregin. “I guess he showed up hoping to make a solo flight in a 17, and found out the weather was below his minimums. So Seregin offered to fly with him in a 15 trainer. They took off at 10:19 toward Kirzhach, leveled off at four thousand meters. Weather was supposed to be acceptable: a cloud layer at a thousand meters and another one at 4,800. Ten kilometers visibility.

“The flight plan called for simple ground loops, nothing too tricky, in Zones 20 and 21.” These were the two pie-shaped operating areas. The Kirzhach airfield sat on the extreme northern edge of Zone 20. Because of the congestion of air traffic in the Moscow area, most training flights from Chkalov were vectored into those two small, narrow zones extending about seventy kilometers northeast of the base. “The plane only carried enough fuel for about forty-five minutes in the air. The last transmission from Gagarin was at 10:30, when he requested permission to make the turn back toward Chkalov. Heading 75 degrees and in Zone 21.”

I remembered that our parachute jumping team had also been in Kirzhach, at the small airfield there. It was shortly after ten-thirty when we heard a low-flying jet, that strange popping sound, then the explosion of the crash. I told this to Shiborin, who nodded. “Leonov reported that, so our search is going to concentrate on the area south of that airfield.”

Then we climbed into the cockpit of the 11–14, which was being refueled from an earlier mission. A copilot waited. I strapped into a jump seat in the main cabin while Shiborin ran confidently through his preflight checklist. Within ten minutes we had lumbered into the air.

It took us another fifteen minutes to reach our search zone. I had my nose pressed up against a window as we dropped through the clouds and leveled off, it seemed, just above the treetops.

Spring had come a week ago, but there were no signs of it here in the woods northeast of Moscow. Some bare patches of earth, yes, but the open fields were still white with deep snow. Even the branches of the trees were still fluffy from the last snowfall.

“This is going to be tough,” Shiborin said. He had come out of the cockpit to get a better look through the side windows. “Their parachutes are white.”

“Do you think they ejected?”

“They should have. Unless they collided with another plane.” He clapped me on the shoulder and returned to the cockpit.

I kept thinking about that popping sound — could it have been the ejection seats firing away from the stricken aircraft?

We were actually searching for three objects: two men on foot in addition to the wreckage of the plane. Over the course of our two-hour search, however, we saw nothing but forest, fields, country roads, and tiny villages.

By two-thirty we were back at Chkalov for refueling as another II-14 took our place. I went with Shiborin into the operations building to grab a bit of food before resuming, and here I saw General Kamanin in heated conversation with two other generals, one of them my father.

Seeing me, my father broke away. He seemed upset, understandable, given the situation. “I thought you were going to be at Star Town all day.”

I didn’t want to get into a lengthy justification for my presence, so I said, “They called some of us in to help with the search.”

He accepted that, then said, “The search is over. They just found the wreckage of Gagarin’s plane.”

“Where?”

“Three kilometers from some little place called Novoslevo.”

I remembered the name from the charts we had used in the search. It was south and east of Kirzhach, roughly the direction of the crashing jet we had heard. “What about the pilots?”

“Nothing so far.” Kamanin and the other general brushed past us at that moment, headed for the flight line, where a pair of Mi-4 helicopters waited, rotors revving up to speed. We watched them climb aboard, then take off. Then my father said, “Can I give you a ride back to Star Town?”

“I’m still helping with the search,” I said.

He nodded, as if lost in thought, probably, like me, wondering what would happen if it turned out that Gagarin had indeed been killed. “I’m going back to headquarters. They don’t need me here.”

We shook hands and he walked away, never looking back. I ran to catch up with Shiborin inside the control center. He was already peeling off his flight jacket. “They’ve stopped the search. It’s getting dark and they want to see what they find at the crash site.”

I nodded, and followed him to the locker room, where we changed back into our uniforms. Only there did I notice that I had gotten dirt on my hand — dried black grease of some kind, with a peculiar smell. It was probably from the 11–14. I washed it off and thought no more about it.

What General Kamanin found at the crash site, we learned that evening, was a watery hole in the forest where the MiG-15 had plunged almost nose-down, shearing off trees at a 45-degree angle. Wreckage from the explosion had scattered fragments of the plane into the trees and throughout the forest, but the cockpit itself was buried more than five meters deep.

Part of a human jaw was recovered before dark. It held gold and silver crowns and could be identified by one of the Chkalov doctors as belonging to Seregin.

As dark and cold covered the site, there was no sign of Yuri Gagarin, the Columbus of Space.

38 “…While Fulfilling His Duties”

The remains of Yuri Gagarin were discovered shortly after dawn on March 28, when Kamanin and the others returned to the crash site. Even the night before, a fragment of a pilot’s kneeboard had been found. On it, a torn piece of a flight plan marked in red — the same kind of marker Gagarin was seen using the morning of the twenty-seventh. This evidence didn’t prove that Gagarin had not ejected… but a day of searching had not located him.

Even if he’d been injured, the area of Novoselovo was not uninhabited. In fact, the first to arrive at the crash site was a farmer on his tractor. Surely someone would have noticed a parachuting man in the area.

At around eight in the morning (so we heard later that day at Star Town), Kamanin and some other searcher found a piece of a flight jacket hanging from a tree a dozen meters in the air. In the pocket was a receipt for Gagarin’s breakfast at the Star Town commissary.

Kamanin departed immediately, to officially inform the widows Gagarin and Seregin of their loss, while the crash team began the sad business of removing the wreckage from its cold, wet grave.

At Star Town the mood was of complete shock. People stopped and talked, heads shaking. Mothers hushed noisy children. Even Saditsky, never one to show a serious emotion, had red-rimmed eyes when I met him coming back from exercises on Thursday morning. (Only about a dozen cosmonauts showed up, all of them from the Third and Fourth Enrollments.) “This is truly terrible,” he said.

“He must have been a good friend.”

“Yes, but more than that. They talk about how he proved that you could survive a trip into space, and he certainly did that. But he also survived the return — with all the attention, all the booze, the politics. He could have turned into a complete monster, with a big car and a dacha and all the women in the world, but he didn’t. To the very end he was looking out for the rest of us. He was fighting for us.” He put his hands to his eyes for a moment. “And they killed him.”

I could see that Saditsky was upset, not thinking straight. “By pushing him back into the cockpit so soon?”

“No. They took advantage of him. He’d wanted to fly again for years, but the bigshots wouldn’t let him. So when he started fighting them, they had to get rid of him. What better way than a plane crash?”

I remember my father telling me that whenever someone in the military dies under unusual circumstances, it’s always reported as a “plane crash.” Marshal Nedelin, head of the Rocket Force, had been vaporized along with 150 others in an October 1960 explosion at Baikonur. His official obituary said he had died in a “plane crash while fulfilling his duties.”

“I thought the 15 was supposed to be our most reliable aircraft.”

“Every aircraft is reliable, until it fails.”

That was the last I saw of Saditsky until nine P.M., when all of the sixty-some cosmonauts were bused to a facility in northeast Moscow, where the remains of Gagarin and Seregin were cremated. The urns containing the ashes were to go on public display at the Central Army House at nine the next morning.

Unlike every other bus ride I’ve taken with my fellow cosmonauts, this one returning us to Star Town was subdued, almost entirely silent. I sat with Shiborin toward the back, where I quite innocently told him what Saditsky had said, that Gagarin had been killed.

To my surprise, Shiborin reacted as if I had just told him he had a nose on his face somewhere below and between his two brown eyes. “No question. He was getting too powerful. Somebody wanted him dead.”

I don’t know which shocked me more — the automatic confirmation of what seemed, to me, a paranoid fantasy, or the fact that I was hearing it from Shiborin, the world’s purest Communist. “Who? Brezhnev? The Hammer? Artemov?”

“None of them. But somebody around them, absolutely. Look at our pathetic history and tell me that it would surprise you.”

Well, I had long ago accepted the idea that a mysterious someone had probably murdered Sergei Korolev. Accepting the idea that Gagarin could have been killed did not require me to reorder my thinking on a major scale.

However, if you believed that both had been murdered, you had to start wondering if the killings were linked. Who would want to cut the heart out of the Soviet space program?

I pondered this over the next two days, as the normal work of Star Town ceased and we gave ourselves over to public mourning. All of the cosmonauts of Military Unit 26266 took turns standing honor guard at the Central Army House, where the line of mourners was so long we were forced to open the viewing early, and keep it open almost to midnight.

I returned home to find an invitation slipped under my door: “The family and friends of Yu. A. Gagarin and V. S. Seregin invite you to honor the memory of Yuri Alexeyevich and Vladimir Sergeyevich on the day of their funeral, March 30, 1968, at 1600 in the Central House of the Soviet Army (Commune Square, Building 2).”

So, on that Saturday afternoon, with the first hints of spring in the air, with all of the cosmonauts, both military and civilian, in attendance, not to mention Brezhnev, Kosygin, Ustinov, Afanasyev, and a multitude of marshals and generals (among them, Colonel-General Nikolai Ribko), the urns carrying the ashes of Yuri Gagarin and Vladimir Seregin were carried from the Central Army House to nearby Commune Square, then down Neglinny Street toward the House of Unions. The streets were lined with mourners, Muscovites of all ages weeping openly.

At the House of Unions the urns were placed on motorized gun carriages as the procession proceeded into Red Square, where the urns were placed in the Kremlin Wall next to Marshal Malinovsky, not far from both Vladimir Komarov and Sergei Korolev. The whole pathetic ceremony was over by three P.M.

At four-thirty, however, we were back at the Central Army House for the memorial speeches. Exhausted, emotionally drained, most of us departed by eight.

I believe some of those speeches are still going on.

As in any military unit, especially one devoted to flight, you mourn the loss of your comrades, you wear the black armband for the appropriate time, then you move on.

That was the air around Star Town as March became April. Of course, all I saw was my own little part of it, that involving the Fourth Enrollment. What was being said by senior cosmonauts such as Leonov and Belyayev, friends of Gagarin, I did not know.

I tried to find some way to link the murder of Korolev with the possible murder of Gagarin, and found nothing. No single person or group that would have benefited from both. I still wasn’t clear who benefited from the death of Korolev, unless it was the Americans. Who, by the way, conducted the second flight of their giant Saturn V-5 rocket on April 4. (I am always able to remember this date, because the great African-American leader Martin Luther King was murdered the same day.)

Unlike the first test, this second Saturn V-5 came close to disaster. During the flight of the first stage, a vicious pogo effect started, in which the spacecraft began to vibrate up and down as many as five or six times a second, with the force of up to ten Gs.

The first stage separated as planned, however, but the more fragile second stage paid the price, losing one of its five engines four minutes into its burn, followed by a second engine moments later. The whole vehicle was in danger of going out of control and having to be destroyed.

The NASA flight controllers showed patience and courage, however, simply waiting to see what might happen. Luckily, the two failed engines were opposite each other, so the overall thrust of that stage remained symmetrical.

Of course, with thrust reduced by forty percent, the three remaining engines were forced to keep burning longer than planned and to a higher altitude. When the second stage shut down and the single third-stage engine took over, the third-stage guidance reacted with alarm to its unusual altitude, so it actually tried to point itself down toward the center of the Earth in order to get back on the proper path!

After a minute or so of that, the third-stage guidance realized it was now too low, so it pitched up, so far that it actually went into orbit backward.

In retrospect, it was almost a comical performance, one that was beyond the capability of any Soviet rocket, which would have destroyed itself with the initial violent pogo effect.

But it showed that America still hadn’t mastered the equipment it needed to land on the Moon. We still had a chance.

Most of these details I learned later, of course. What occupied me most beginning at the end of that first week in April was an order to report to Colonel Belyayev on the morning of Saturday, April 6.

It was a brief meeting — Belyayev still seemed to be exhausted by the events of the past ten days. His health was not good, I had heard. “The State Commission investigating the crash of Gagarin and Seregin has set up four subcommissions. Each subcommission will include representatives from the cosmonaut team. Because of your training as an aircraft engineer, by special request you are to work with the subcommission reconstructing the last hours of Gagarin and Seregin and of their MiG-15.”

I accepted the assignment at once, then found the strength to ask: “Comrade Colonel, you mentioned a special request…?”

“One of the other agencies represented on the subcommission asked for you by name.” He shuffled through the papers on his desk, looking for the order. “A Vladimir Nefedov.”

Uncle Vladimir of State Security. The same Uncle Vladimir who was present at the Kremlin Hospital the day Korolev died, who complained about Gagarin’s ambitions.

Was this the link I was looking for?

39 Subcommision Number 1

I had no time to act on my suspicions, since I went directly from Belyayev’s office to Chkalov, where I joined a team flown by helicopter back to the crash site near Novoselovo. There my valuable aeronautical training was put to use searching for fragments of Gagarin and Seregin’s MiG-15.

My immediate supervisor was an engineer named Davydov from the Ministry of Aviation Production, which oversaw the development and manufacture of aircraft, and was thus responsible for the MiG-15. Davydov was in his thirties, short, dark-haired, thick, and, as I soon learned, strict to the point of idiocy. He had that annoying habit of speaking to you as if reading from a manual: “You are to proceed along the ground only in the direction indicated. At the first sign of an anomaly, you are to stop and signal a supervisor.”

Well and good. Ten of us, “specialists” all, lined up an arm’s length apart in the woods to the north of the crash site itself, which I now saw for the first time: a jagged crater surrounded by stumps of trees destroyed in the explosion. There was also an ominous trail of shattered branches leading back toward Kirzhach. It was here that we searched.

During the initial briefing at Chkalov, and on the flight over, I learned that the demolished mass of the cockpit, including what was left of Gagarin and Seregin, had already been dug out of the crater and hauled off to the base for examination. The larger wing and tail sections had also been removed, but the impact of the crash had been so violent that the MiG had smashed like a jar dropped on cement. There were hundreds — thousands — of metal fragments yet to be recovered, each one a potential witness in the investigation.

So far, the various subcommissions had established that the plane was not damaged prior to the crash (ruling out a collision with another aircraft), that the engine was still operating at the time of impact, and that the pilots did not eject. Maintenance records of this particular MiG-15, officially UTI MiG-15 #612739, call sign “625,” were up to date and in order. There was no obvious cause for the crash.

Further, a bit of a mystery was taking shape. The last transmission from 625 to the control tower at Chkalov was at 10:32 A.M., when Gagarin requested permission to turn to a heading of 75 degrees, which the tower acknowledged. At that time, 625 was thirty kilometers from the runway at Chkalov and heading toward it.

But the crash site was sixty-four kilometers away.

There was no further transmission after 10:32, but the air-traffic radar at Chkalov had 625 on its screen until 10:44.

What happened in those twelve minutes to turn 625 around, send it thirty-some kilometers in the other direction, then knock it out of the sky? It seemed that the answer lay in the damp, matted needles of this forest floor, still dotted with clumps of snow.

I had taken perhaps eight steps when one of the other searchers, to my left, said, “I have something!”

“Nobody move!” Davydov ordered, scuttling down the line behind us and falling to his knees with a camera to record the exact position of the fragment. Only then did he reach down with a pair of tongs and raise it, placing it in a plastic bag.

He stood and made a notation on a chart. “Continue!” he said, and so we did.

During the course of that afternoon, we discovered almost fifty pieces of metal or debris, some as large as a hand. I myself found two items, one a shard of steel later determined to be from the skin of the tail section, and a rusted washer, which might have fallen from a Novoselovo tractor.

I spent the next week tromping through the woods under Davydov’s lash as life at Star Town resumed its former rhythms — if anything, the tempo increased as we looked forward to the launching of another pair of unmanned Soyuz vehicles. During the week another unmanned Luna probe, Number 14, was sent to the Moon. This one was to photograph the lunar surface from orbit, providing information about future landing sites.

Coming in late on the evening of Thursday, April 11, the night before the seventh anniversary of Gagarin’s pioneering flight, I found Shiborin staggering up the sidewalk.

He was more of a drinker than I, but not a steady or committed one. This day he had found himself forced to keep up in a highly emotional contest to prove his love for the late Gagarin on his anniversary. This, at least, was my reconstruction of events, once I had, at Shiborin’s request, steered him into my flat. “Don’t let Anna see me like this.”

For a while it was unlikely anyone would see Shiborin at all, as he collapsed onto my couch and passed out. I busied myself with other matters for the next hour, occasionally checking to be sure he was still all right.

Around midnight he stirred, hauled himself to the bathroom, then back, where I started handing him cups of tea, juice, anything. He was understandably subdued, first telling me the news that our training center was going to be named for Gagarin, as was the Red Banner Air Force Academy down the road in Monino, as well as Gagarin’s birthplace, the village of Gzhatsk. Seregin’s name would henceforth honor his 70th Training Squadron.

I thought that was the end of his report, but then he leaned forward for a moment, finally raising his eyes. “The war’s still going on.”

“What war?”

“Between the Air Force and everyone else. Gagarin was leading the charge, but even in death he’s valuable. Maybe more so: Kamanin apparently went to Ustinov yesterday with a whole bunch of proposals, one of them to take manned vehicles completely away from the Central Space Office.”

“What difference would that make?”

“It would mean that the Hammer and his son-of-a-bitch Artemov worked for us. We wouldn’t have to beg them to live up to their agreements anymore; we could order them to comply, or give the work to Chelomei or somebody else.” I could certainly see the benefits in this, from the Air Force’s point of view. “We know they’re fighting back.” He stood, wobbling, hand flailing as he reached for the door. “Now they’re saying Gagarin was drunk when he took off.”

“Not on the commission, they’re not.” Bits of tissue had been saved for an analysis of blood alcohol, and none had been found in either pilot. Nor had we found any witnesses — other pilots or support personnel — who had seen Gagarin or Seregin downing a shot before climbing in the cockpit.

“Facts have nothing to do with it. It’s only to discredit Gagarin’s judgment so that his proposals can be ignored.”

“What is going to happen, then?” I asked. Maybe it was the fatigue, or a delayed reaction to the events of the past week, the past eighteen months, but I felt myself getting angrier. I was tired of being shuffled around by everyone from Uncle Vladimir to Engineer Davydov. I was going to be twenty-six years old in two days. It was time I began to make my own decisions, take my own actions.

I wasn’t even sure that the positions pushed by Gagarin or Kamanin — or my father, for that matter — were the right ones. But at that moment I wanted to see them win. Perhaps I was just more supportive of people I knew as opposed to those I didn’t. Or more sympathetic to the feelings of those who flew the aircraft and spacecraft than of those who bought and sold them, the ministers, the bureau chiefs, the State Commissioners, and especially the State Security apparatus, which fed on all of us.

“We’ll fight to get control of our fate,” Shiborin said, laboring over the words. “And because we are pilots and not politicians, we’ll lose.” He smiled. “It will be a great tragedy.”

Then he left, walking slowly down the hall.

I spent Friday, April 12, the day before my birthday, working with the subcommission. During the morning hours we worked the crash site, turning up more and more fragments; then, when it began to rain, we returned to Chkalov, where I became a recording secretary for a general meeting of the commission chiefs, learning, for example, that UTI MiG-15 Number 612739 had actually been built in Czechoslovakia in 1956, with a design lifetime of 2,100 flying hours. That on the day of the crash, it had logged 1,113 of those hours, only slightly more than halfway through its operational life. That its jet engine, RD-45-FA Number 84445a, had been manufactured at State Aviation Factory 478 in December 1954, with a design life of one hundred flying hours before maintenance. On March 27, 1968, it had been sixty-seven hours since its last major overhaul. It, too, was well within its useful service life.

Further, that the accident rate for the MiG-15 was the lowest in the entire Soviet Air Force, with one accident every 18,440 hours flown. (The Su-11, apparently a death trap of an aircraft, suffered a major accident every 2,100 flying hours!)

It was all facts and figures, the substance of what was, I was sure, going to be thirty thick volumes of data. Yet no one had so far discovered a good reason why two healthy, talented pilots simply dived out of the sky and into the forest.

Katya had made plans to celebrate my birthday on Saturday, and I managed to get out of Star Town early that morning, before any other innovative duty could find me. When we spoke by telephone on Friday, the morning after my emboldening encounter with the drunk Shiborin, I had asked Katya if Uncle Vladimir would be present. “I was only planning a lunch for the two of us,” she said, sounding mystified.

“Just get a message to him that I have information for him. Maybe he can meet us after lunch.”

“I’ll do my best,” she said, mystification turning to irritation. I had felt bad about that, but only briefly. I had enjoyed my time with Katya, but clearly it was coming to an end.

Besides, if I actually managed to carry out the plans taking shape in my head, she would be better off rid of me.

I reached the base of Ostankino Tower before Katya did, and had the pleasure of seeing her strolling toward me from the metro station. For a moment — or several moments — I was about to abort my new mission, to surrender to whatever Katya, Uncle Vladimir, my father, and the heads of Military Unit 26266 planned for me.

It was even worse when we kissed, and she gave me my present, a novel in English called Marooned by an American journalist named Caidin, whose earlier works I had read and admired. “One of our people at the embassy in New York bought several copies for the institute.”

I thanked her, and then we went up the tower to lunch. The service staff did not bow and scrape as they had when Uncle Vladimir and I first dined there, but Katya’s connections through the Space Research Institute hadn’t hurt.

Almost at the stroke of one P.M., as we were having some pastry for dessert, the elevator door opened, ejecting the bulk of Vladimir Nefedov.

He waved off the waiter who flew toward him like a bird of prey, and came directly to our table. He seemed relaxed, even amused, as he kissed Katya and me. “I’ve been wondering when you would chose to reveal this illicit friendship,” he said, lowering himself to a chair that had magically appeared for him.

Katya closed her eyes and glanced out the window. This was awkward for her. “Is it illicit?” I asked.

“Of course not,” Uncle Vladimir said, expansively. “Though you acted as though it was.”

Katya rose. “Excuse me,” she said, and patting Uncle Vladimir on the shoulder, as if to reassure him that she was not upset at his presence, went off to, I assume, the ladies’ room.

Uncle Vladimir watched her go with what could only have been appreciation. Then he turned to me. “I was actually a bit upset when I first learned that you two were seeing each other.”

“Because you and Katya had a relationship?”

This was unusually blunt for me to say to him, perhaps for anyone. I think it shocked him. “A relationship,” he said, as if he had never used the word before. “Katya and I have… many relationships.”

“Yes. That’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about.” I had his full attention by now. “How long have you had me under surveillance?”

“Me personally, or State Security as an institution?”

“Either one.”

He looked down at his chubby hands, anxious, I think, for something to put in them. A pencil, perhaps. “You’ve been under some kind of surveillance all your life, Yuri.”

“Because my father was on the staff?”

“Because your mother, my sister, worked for State Security.” Before I could question this, he continued: “She was not really an active agent past the time you were born — but she reported from time to time on the personal activities of your father and his fellow pilots, and their wives and children. Surely this can’t be a surprise to you.” He actually laughed. “Our whole society would cease to function without such reports. Look at the work you’ve been doing for me!”

“That’s my next question,” I said, still stunned by the revelation about my mother. “I don’t want to be your spy anymore.”

“It’s difficult work. May I ask why not?”

“Because I believe you killed Korolev. Possibly Gagarin, too.”

Katya chose that moment to reappear. A gesture from Uncle Vladimir, one so subtle I’m not sure I saw it, froze her… made her stumble… turned her around and sent her back the way she had come!

Uncle Vladimir spoke calmly. “The price we pay for doing surveillance is that we forget who to trust. Enemies are everywhere. No one is what he seems.” He looked directly into my eyes. “I did not kill either Korolev or Gagarin.”

At that moment I believed him; he had not touched Korolev. “But you know who did.”

Now he sighed and showed frustration. “How can I take you into my confidence, Yuri, when you no longer work for me?”

Laboriously, he rose from the chair. He picked up Katya’s half-empty glass of wine. “Did you have some cake?” He touched his glass to mine, but did not drink. “Happy birthday.”

Then he walked away.

40 The Weather Balloon

The rest of that birthday was even less successful than the lunch. Katya returned, was furious with me, said not a word as we rode down the elevator. As she walked, she kept a proper distance from me, too, like some Victorian maiden out with a questionable suitor.

Finally I said, “Katya—”

She glanced at me, eyes blazing. “You’re being an idiot.”

I stopped, keeping distance between us. I felt ashamed, foolish, but told myself it had to be done. I had to sever my links with Uncle Vladimir, and that included Katya. Yes, as a good Party member would say, for her own good. “I had to tell him.”

“You had to do no such thing! It’s not even a question of being rude to your own uncle, and to me, on your birthday — it’s stupid! He’s a very powerful man, and in case you haven’t noticed, he ranks the Party above family.”

“So he’ll have me killed?”

Katya merely closed her eyes, a sign she was exasperated almost beyond belief. “I know you must have some intelligence, Yuri. You graduated from Bauman. You made it into the cosmonaut team. Maybe it’s because I’m older, but sometimes you make no sense to me. You have no knowledge, no vision, only a response to whatever happened to you last.

“In fact, you have a lot of growing up to do. Maybe you should call me when you’re older. Ten years older.”

She turned and walked away. I chose not to follow her. I’m not sure I could have moved, in any case.

On Sunday, April 14, 1968, Soyuz spacecraft Number 8, configured as the active craft for a planned docking sequence, was launched successfully from Baikonur, and given the name Cosmos 212. The next day, April 15, Soyuz Number 7 reached orbit as Cosmos 213, the new target ship starting out four kilometers ahead of its pursuer, which closed in almost immediately for a successful docking that we were able to watch on television in the Star Town auditorium. (Those members of the Fourth Enrollment not assigned to remote tracking stations, such as Senior Lieutenants Ribko and Shiborin, were excused from other duties for this event, like students on a field trip to a museum.)

Within four hours, Cosmos 212 and 213 separated and went on to test improvements in the guidance systems. Cosmos 212 returned safely to Earth on Wednesday, April 17, making a controlled reentry (using the bell of the Soyuz to create lift and steering) for the first time. The only anomaly was that high winds in the landing zone caught the recovery parachutes after touchdown, dragging Cosmos 212 five kilometers across the steppe, beating the hell out of its skin and heat shield.

Cosmos 213, returning the next day, suffered almost the same fate, performing a controlled reentry only to be dragged across the ground by winds. This time the high winds kicked up a dust storm that kept the spacecraft from being recovered for hours.

Had cosmonauts been aboard, of course, the parachutes could have been manually separated, sparing the spacecraft their bumpy rides.

The twin docking, the second such success in a row, encouraged the Soyuz crews to hope that the next flights would be manned. This in spite of Defense Minister Ustinov’s order that there would be more unmanned tests no matter how well the Cosmos 212–213 mission went. Nobody could tell them for sure, so their feelings about the week’s events were mixed.

And early on the morning of April 23, 1968, the seventh unmanned L-1 was launched for a planned loop around the Moon and return to Earth. Unfortunately, six minutes and twenty seconds into the flight, the second-stage engines of the Universal Rocket 500K abruptly stopped and the launch escape system fired, pulling the L-1 away. It was quickly learned that a component failure had mistakenly ordered the shutdown, causing the loss of the mission.

For every two steps we took forward, there was another giant step back.

In the middle of the next week, the Moscow area suffered one of its spring freezes, and with eighty percent of Gagarin and Seregin’s MiG-15 now recovered, the commission suspended additional searches.

So far, the study of the wreckage had produced no clue to the cause of the crash, except this: There was no Plexiglas from the canopy.

There could have been several mundane explanations for that. If Gagarin or Seregin had taken the first step toward firing their ejection seats just before impact, the canopy would have been fired away first. The problem with that explanation was that no one had yet found the canopy, and it should have been within one or two hundred yards of the crash site.

The other possible reason? The impact of the crash was so violent that it shattered the Plexiglas into shards too small to be found. Several investigators clung to this; others, such as Davydov, with the experience of a dozen such accidents, scoffed at it.

Something, then, had shattered the canopy before the crash. But what?

Perhaps two days after this mystery appeared, so did an explanation. Some other search team — State Security’s, perhaps? — had found wreckage of a weather balloon suspiciously close to the ground track of the Gagarin-Seregin aircraft between Kirzhach and the crash site. The balloon had been shattered by some sort of impact.

Now, the words “weather balloon” suggest something filmy, lighter than air, like a soap bubble, but in fact, the vehicle is a thin metallic ball under pressure, giving it considerable rigidity and resistance. An aircraft hitting such an object could easily be damaged, possibly shattering a canopy and incapacitating the pilots.

Possibly. I found it suspicious that this weather-balloon wreckage magically appeared after the subcommission realized that the MiG-15’s canopy was missing. No agency had yet come forward to claim the weather balloon, either. Was it from the Air Force, who had three airfields in the vicinity, and routinely launched weather balloons? Or from the State Meteorological Service? Did they have a launching site or station nearby? Well, no one seemed quite sure of that, at least not in the last week of April, 1968.

Nevertheless, as I heard in the few meetings I was allowed to attend, the weather balloon was seized upon as the “cause” of the crash that killed Yuri Gagarin and Vladimir Seregin.

The only dissenters to this conclusion were the lower ranks, like me, and even Davydov, who scoffed openly at the idea. “What were these pilots supposedly doing? Flying with their eyes closed? The sky was clear in Zone 20 at the time of the crash. They would have seen that balloon five kilometers away.”

The cosmonaut team also protested, even writing a letter to Ustinov himself complaining about the conclusions of the overall commission. They never received a reply or even an acknowledgment.

So as the spring of 1968 turned into summer, as my father’s world prepared for war, as I saw lines of battle sketched in ink between the Cosmonaut Training Center named for Yuri Gagarin and Artemov’s bureau and its allies, as my personal life shrank to nonexistence, as I weighed the truth of the revelation that my mother had been a spy for State Security, as my country and America kept racing for the Moon, I waited nervously for Uncle Vladimir’s next move.

Interlude

“I always heard the story that Gagarin and Seregin got distracted because they were hunting,” I said to Yuri Ribko. It had been months since our last meetings at my hotel. We were back at the Rendezvous in Korolev early on a cold winter night. I had managed to free myself from coverage of a Presidential impeachment to accompany a group of NASA astronauts doing winter survival training at the Gagarin Center. Some months prior to this, the first two elements of the International Space Station, the Russian Zarya and the American Unity, had been docked together by the crew of STS-88. The astronauts now shivering inside some Soyuz descent module on a field northeast of Moscow hoped to someday live in those modules. Assuming the missing pieces got delivered, which was still an open question, one which, thankfully, Yuri Ribko and I did not have to answer.

“Hunting?” he said.

“The story I heard,” and I had heard it from one of the first cosmonauts, “was that Gagarin or Seregin spotted some elk from the jet as they were on their way back, and decided to strafe the beasts to have some nice fresh meat.”

Ribko laughed. “Well, it’s certainly true that fresh meat was always welcome. We were having it flown in from other parts of Russia, right into Chkalov, in those days. But it’s fiction,” he said. “Their MiG-15 was a trainer: no guns. Even if it had had guns, they wouldn’t have had bullets in them. Good God, there were enough disgruntled pilots taking off from that base that one of them was sure to strafe the commander’s office!”

“Well, it was just a story.”

“Typical. Colorful, with perhaps a tiny sliver of truth.”

“Unlike the stories that your Uncle Vladimir somehow killed Korolev and Gagarin.”

Saying that so bluntly was a risk — Yuri could have exploded at me and walked out, never to be seen again, and my hours of interviewing would have gotten me three-fourths of a book that would never be finished. But I had to let him know that I had doubts. Because others would, too.

I was worried about Yuri, in any case. He looked even thinner than the last time I had seen him. “Slimfast,” he said, joking. “I want to look like an American movie star when I do my book tour.”

(But did Slimfast also make your hair fall out?)

“I realize it all sounds quite fantastic. What’s the term? Science fiction?”

“Fantasy is what they’ll call it. That your Uncle Vladimir Nefedov, whose name appears nowhere in any history of the Soviet space program, somehow murdered Sergei Korolev and Yuri Gagarin, and thus cost Russia a chance to be first to the Moon.”

He put his hand on my wrist; in my experience, when a source does that, he’s preparing to tell me something important. And true. It’s a better indicator than a lie-detector test. “I’m sorry, Misha. Did I give you the impression that the murder mystery ended with Uncle Vladimir?”

“Well, actually, yes.”

He shook his head and smiled. “You owe it to yourself to hear the rest of my story. Then you can decide what you believe.”