A signal was sent to the craft for it to begin its descent. After firing its retrorockets, the probe slowly made its way down towards the barren, rocky surface. When it was twenty meters from the surface, its rockets stopped and the landing jets took over, slowing the fall of the large, 5,600-kilogram probe. At two meters from the surface, the jets automatically turned off and the probe deftly landed.
With a loud cheer in the packed, cigarette smoke-filled control center, the mission technicians enthusiastically patted each other on the back and proclaimed that successfully landing the probe on the Moon was a great victory for the Soviet Union.
It was, however, a hollow one.
The race for the Moon had already been won, not by the Soviet Union, but by the United States. With a manned landing only hours earlier, the Space Race, as it was dubbed in the Western press, was all but over. Still, the Soviet Union hoped to gain some glory by having Luna 15 land on the Moon and return with samples of dirt and rocks before the Americans returned home.
After checking that everything from the television camera to the radiation and temperature monitors were still working, the probe deployed its extendable arm and awaited the order to drill into a nearby rock.
A hushed silence gripped the technicians as they watched the grainy, black-and-white images sent back to them by Luna 15’s camera. No one seemed to notice the blue cloud of stale cigarette smoke hanging like a thick London fog in the room.
In the back of the cramped office sat a bitter-looking Communist Party official, wearing an old, rumpled suit and scuffed shoes. Like a hawk, he silently watched everything that happened in the room. He had only one job: to inform his superiors in Moscow the instant they had their soil sample, and that it was safely on its way back to earth. Without taking his eyes off the screens, he reached down, picked up his packet of cheap Turkish cigarettes, tapped out his tenth cigarette this hour, and lit it. Inhaling the harsh tobacco into his lungs, he coughed loudly. A veteran of the Great Patriotic War with Germany, the official lamented his place in life. He had always seen himself rising to be a party official with a new car, a young mistress, and dacha in the Crimea. Instead, he had been relegated to the Soviet Space mission as a mere observer. Still, it could be worse, he thought to himself. I could be on an isolated border post with China.
On the lunar surface, the extendable arm reached out and waited for another signal from Earth to begin. The technicians hurriedly selected a nearby flat piece of rock on the edge of an impact crater as their target. A few minutes later, the probe lowered its arm and began to drill into the rock. It quickly penetrated to a depth of ten centimeters before striking a much harder surface. With time slipping away, the decision was made to bring up the sample they already had via a slender suction tube attached to the side of the drill. After placing the sample into a special airtight container built into the probe’s return vehicle, the countdown began. The total time from the probe’s landing on the Moon’s surface until the time the return vehicle’s return rockets fired was just over two hours.
A wave of relief swept through the room when the return vehicle leapt up into space to begin the return trip to its programmed landing site in Kazakhstan. To date, the Soviet lunar return program had met with failure. After today, the scientists at the Baikonur Cosmodrome could justifiably brag that they had pulled off a miracle of Soviet engineering.
In the back of the room, the party official stood up unnoticed and made his way to a nearby office to place his call. However, within a few hours, the celebration was over. The technicians supervising the probe were ordered by state security agents to turn off all of the instruments on Luna 15 and to go home. Each man was pulled into a side room and bluntly told by State Security agents to never discuss the mission with anyone, not even their families. Any thought of beating the Americans home with a sample from the Moon was to be forgotten.
Later that evening, it was announced to the world on Soviet state-run television that in a sign of friendship with the Americans the Luna 15 space probe had been deliberately crash-landed to avoid hitting the U.S. spacecraft as it orbited the Moon.
In a matter of hours, dozens of state officials and KGB agents descended upon the launch site and confiscated every file they could find relating to the Luna 15 mission. Within days, the true story behind the landing was erased from the history of the Soviet Union. The ‘official’ story was accepted as gospel.
What the world did not know was that inside the return vehicle was something that had the ability to affect the life of every living person on the planet. Years later, someone would want it and would do anything to possess it.
4
Like an enraged swarm of hellish fireflies, a long burst of machine-gun fire cut through the air, barely missing its target, a stolen Hummer speeding down a narrow jungle road.
“That was too damn close for comfort,” muttered Ryan Mitchell to himself as he ejected the empty magazine from his M4 carbine. His left hand was sticky with blood from a cut on his wrist, caused by a grenade fragment that had dug a deep gash through his skin. Dressed in filthy, multi-cam fatigues with a darkened face, Mitchell hurriedly slapped home a full magazine and charged the weapon, loading a fresh round into the chamber.
Sitting in the driver’s seat beside Mitchell was Nate Jackson. A powerfully built African-American, Jackson cursed everything under the sun as he fought to keep the vehicle, a stolen Burmese army Hummer, from sliding off the slick dirt trail that snaked through the tree-covered hills. Combat driving using night-vision goggles was challenging enough without the added misery of a heavy downpour that fell from the dark night sky. The world, a mix of dark- and light-green hues in Jackson’s eyepieces, sped past as he tried to lose their pursuer.
Another burst of automatic gunfire tore past the Hummer. This time the long line of tracers flew right overhead, making both Mitchell and Jackson duck down to avoid the incoming fire.
“Jesus, Ryan, will you do something about that?” yelled Jackson as he swerved from side to side on the path, trying to throw off their attacker’s aim.
Mitchell reached over and grabbed hold of Nate’s weapon of choice, the M203 grenade launcher. After checking that it was loaded, he turned around in his seat and got up on one knee. He was about to bring up the weapon to his to his shoulder, when he suddenly felt the vehicle turn hard to the right. Mitchell had to reach out and grab hold of his seat when Jackson took a sharp corner much too quickly, sending the Hummer sliding through the mud towards the edge of the road. Mitchell’s heart skipped a beat when, through his night-vision gear, he saw a steep fall to the valley floor two hundred meters below come racing towards them.
At the last second, the vehicle’s tires found a dry spot and dug in. Like a charging rhinoceros, the Hummer took off once more down the narrow jungle trail.
“Damn it, Nate, warn me next time,” said Mitchell to his friend. “I could have been thrown over the side of the jeep.”
“Sorry, didn’t see the turn until it was too late,” replied Jackson.
Mitchell brought up his weapon and looked through the M203’s sights. He waited for the vehicle chasing them to take the sharp bend. A second later, the Burmese army Jeep came sliding around the muddy corner. Mitchell held his breath, aimed his weapon’s laser indicator, a bright-red dot, at the center of the Jeep, and pulled back on the trigger. With a loud whoosh, the 40mm high-explosive grenade flew straight at the pursuing vehicle.