We stayed silent. The storm buffeted the plane about like a leaf, and we wrapped tightly in our coats against the torment of the cold.
After around twenty more minutes of flying, the plane started its descent. Below us I could see a large clearing among the trees, where the plane eventually landed. When we disembarked, Gemow said, “Leave the coats. You won’t need them.” This baffled us, since the door had opened to a blast of threateningly frigid air, and the world of swirling snow outside was even more formidable. Leaving Levalenkov behind to wait for us, Gemow headed straight out from the plane with us following close behind as the wind ripped through our clothes like gauze. The snow was deep, but the sensation under my feet told me that we were walking along rail tracks. Not far ahead of us was a surface entrance to a tunnel, but from here we could tell it had been sealed up by a concrete wall. We entered the short tunnel portion before the cement wall, which got us out of the wind a bit. Gemow pushed away the snow and heaved aside the large rock he uncovered to reveal a dark hole about one meter in diameter.
Gemow said, “This is a spur tunnel I dug around the cement seal. It’s over ten meters long.” As he spoke he took out three large rechargeable flashlights, passed one to each of us, and, carrying the third, motioned for us to follow him into the hole.
I was right behind him, with Lin Yun taking up the rear, as we practically crawled through the squat tunnel. It was claustrophobic in the cramped space, and my feeling of suffocation grew the farther in I went. Suddenly Gemow stood up, and I followed. In the gleam of the flashlight I saw we were in a broad tunnel that sloped gently downward into the earth, leading to the train tracks I had sensed outside and off into the darkness. I shone the flashlight on the wall, and saw smooth cement studded with metal pegs and bands, evidently once hung with electrical cables. We followed the tunnel downward, and the chill gradually disappeared as the depth increased. Then we caught the odor of damp, and heard dripping water—the temperature was now above the freezing point.
Space suddenly opened up before us. My flashlight beam lost its target, as if the tunnel had come out into the pitch-black night. But looking carefully I could still see the circle illuminated by the flashlight high up on the ceiling, too high and too dim to make anything out. Our footsteps had multiple echoes, so I couldn’t be certain how big the place was.
Gemow stopped and lit a cigarette. Then he began: “More than forty years ago, I was a doctoral student in physics at Moscow State University. I still remember clearly the day that thousands of us watched Yuri Gagarin, just returned from space, cross Red Square in an open-top jeep. He waved flowers, and his chest was covered in medals. Overflowing with passion and harboring a desire to accomplish a grand thing in a brand-new world, I voluntarily requested to join the Siberian branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences that was just then being set up.
“Once I got there, I told my supervisor that I wanted to work on something completely new, something with no foundation whatsoever, regardless of the difficulty. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘You’ll join Project 3141.’ Later I found out that the project code had been chosen based on the value of pi. For days after first meeting the person in charge of the project, the academician Nikolai Niernov, I didn’t know what it was about. Niernov was a very unusual person, fanatical even given the politics of the time, someone who secretly read Trotsky and was enamored with the idea of global revolution. When I asked him about the nature of Project 3141, this is what he said: ‘Comrade Gemow, I know that recent accomplishments in space flight are particularly attractive to you, but what do they matter? From orbit, Gagarin wasn’t able to toss so much as a rock down onto the heads of those capitalists in Washington. But our project is different. If we succeed, it will turn all the conventional weapons of the imperialists into toys, and make their air force flight groups as fragile as butterflies, and make their fleets as flimsy as cardboard boxes floating on the water!’
“And then I came here, with the first group of scientists, and it looked like what you just saw outside. It was snowing that day, and this open area had just been cleared out, and there were still stumps on the ground.
“I won’t go into detail about what happened later. Even if we had time, I don’t think my mind could take it. All you need to know is that right where we’re standing was the world’s largest ball lightning research center. The study of ball lightning took place here for thirty years, employing, at its height, more than five thousand people. The Soviet Union’s greatest physicists and mathematicians were all involved to varying extents.
“To demonstrate just how much was invested into this project, I’ll give you one example. Look at this.”
Gemow shone his flashlight behind us, and just beside the tunnel we had come out of we saw another massive tunnel entrance.
“That tunnel is twenty miles long, but for secrecy, all shipments to the base were unloaded on the other end and then brought here through the tunnel. This led to large quantities of goods unaccountably disappearing over there. To keep this fact from attracting attention and questions from the outside world, they built a small city there. Only—likewise for secrecy—the city was not inhabited. It was just a useless ghost town.
“To hide the radiation produced during artificial lightning research, the entire base was constructed underground. We’re standing in a medium-sized lab. The rest of the base has been sealed up or demolished, and there’s no way to get to it now.
“Large experimental equipment was once installed here, like the world’s largest lightning simulator, a complex field generator, and a large-scale wind tunnel, to model the environment producing ball lightning on the largest possible scale and from every angle. Take a look at this.”
We had arrived at a massive trapezoidal cement platform.
“Can you imagine a platinum electrode several stories high? There used to be one installed on this platform.”
He bent down to pick something up and passed it to me. It was heavy, a metal ball. “It looks like it’s from a ball mill,” I said.
Gemow shook his head. “During testing of the lightning simulator, metal structures at the top of the tunnel were melted by the lightning, and the drips cooled to form these.” I examined the ground with a flashlight and found many of the metal balls. “The lightning produced by the massive simulator in the central lab was an order of magnitude more powerful than natural lightning in the wild, enough for NATO’s nuclear monitoring system to detect the shock wave. NATO believed that it was from an underground nuclear test, and the Soviet government admitted to that, taking a major hit in nuclear disarmament talks. When the lightning tests were in progress, the mountains shook, and the ozone produced by underground lightning vented above ground, giving the air within a hundred-kilometer radius an unusually fresh scent. While the simulations were ongoing, the electric field generator, microwave emitter, and large-scale wind tunnels were run to simulate lightning under every condition, and then the results were input into a huge computer system for analysis. Parameters for some of the tests far exceeded the most extreme natural conditions: super-powerful lightning was triggered in a complicated maze of electric fields, or amid microwaves capable of boiling away a pond in a brief period of time…. Lightning research continued here for three decades.”
I looked up at the trapezoidal platform that had once supported a massive electrode, illuminated by the three beams of our flashlights against the backdrop of the depths of the night, like an Aztec altar in the thick jungle, somehow sacred. We pitiful ball lightning chasers had come here like pilgrims to the highest temple, full of fear and awe. Watching the concrete pyramid, I thought about how many people, over the past thirty-odd years, had been sacrificed here.