Scorpion 1
A State Of Constant Alert
1
The Kremlin Hospital
I was present at the beginning of the end.
The winter of 1965–66 was my final one as a student at the Bauman Higher Technical School, a huge wreck of a place situated on the west bank of the Moscow River. Founded in 1830 as the Tsar’s Vocational School, Bauman was later honored with the name of an obscure Bolshevik who had never attended it, and could not, in fact, have passed the entrance exams.
The name, like those of so many Soviet institutions, was deliberately misleading, suggesting a small college with a student body specializing in, perhaps, auto mechanics. But Bauman was actually the equivalent of your California Institute of Technology. It was an engineering university with twenty thousand students, the elite of Soviet secondary schools, who were trained for jobs in the missile and aircraft industries, and in the intelligence community.
The basic course lasted six years; over half the students flunked out or transferred to less-demanding schools. If you survived to the fifth year, your main challenge was to convince the placement committee to give you the job you wanted, meaning any job as long as it was in Moscow.
My father, a deputy Air Force commander in the Moscow military district, could have arranged such a job for me with a single phone call. But, with that flair for bullheadedness that I share, he refused. Fortunately, I had good luck in the assignment of a thesis adviser.
Vasily Filin was a senior engineer and deputy director of the Experimental Design Bureau Number 1, the organization that created and built my country’s first intercontinental ballistic missile, that launched Sputnik, that made Gagarin the first human in space. Filin was a tall, nervous, long-faced man, quite old to me at the time: He was fifty-nine. He oversaw my work, and that of half a dozen other fifth-year students, with precision and decency, unlike some I could name. But we had no personal interaction until one day in October 1965, when he suddenly raised his head from the papers on his desk, looked at me as if seeing me for the first time, and said, “Ribko, what are your plans?”
He didn’t need to specify, of course. He meant career plans. “The Rocket Force, I think,” I said without much enthusiasm. I had done my summer military service north of Moscow in godforsaken Orevo, at a camp for future missileers. Unless one of the civilian design bureaus in the giant defense industry requested me, I was going to be commissioned as a senior-engineer lieutenant the coming June. It was one of the many ironies of the Soviet system that only a major effort by my father — a career military officer and Hero of the Soviet Union — could keep me a civilian.
I wasn’t upset at the idea; far from it. I looked forward to fulfilling whatever task the Party chose for me.
“You’ll be wasted in uniform,” Filin said, sniffing with unconcealed derision. He folded his hands on the desk, examining them for defects. “What about my organization?”
“I’d love to work at the bureau, but I heard that your quota was filled.”
I think I embarrassed Filin. “Well, yes,” he said quietly. “There are many important people with nephews this year.”
When the silence grew awkward, I rose to gather up my papers. Filin put his hand flat on them. “How are your secretarial skills?” he asked suddenly.
“Well, I can type,” I said. My late mother, Zhanna, had given me a typewriter for my thirteenth birthday, hoping I might become a poet rather than a soldier.
“Now we’re getting somewhere!” What Filin proposed was that I, a graduate of the Bauman School, should join his organization, the Korolev bureau, as his clerk. “The important thing is to avoid wearing green.”
As I said, I would have been happy to wear a uniform, but other factors made military service less attractive than Filin’s offer. For one, my father had warned me that if I went into the Rocket Force, I was likely to be stationed north of the Arctic Circle. “We’re expanding the missile base up there,” he said, “and they’re hungry for young, unmarried engineers.” Such an assignment would likely last five years, and I found Moscow cold enough already.
More important, I was desperately in love with a fellow student, Marina Torchillova, and dreamed of marrying her. There would be no wedding if I moved to Murmansk.
Proving that, like so many of the fellow students I had criticized all my life, I could also put my selfish needs above those of the Party, I began spending one or two days a week out in the suburb of Kaliningrad, typing letters for Filin, serving as his courier, and sometimes — once he discovered that I was licensed — as his driver.
And continued to pine after Marina, who, strangely, still resisted my charms.
On the leaden, snowy afternoon of Thursday, January 13, 1966, I arrived at the Kremlin Hospital with a stack of documents for Filin to review. I had learned, in three months of part-time work, that he was prone to ill health, especially in times of crisis. And there was often a crisis. The upper levels of the Korolev bureau, which included Filin, were routinely criticized by their masters on the Council of Ministers for continued failures at putting an unmanned probe on the Moon. The more complaints the ministers had, the more Filin’s head ached, and so he was off to the Kremlin Hospital, not far from the Bauman campus.
The location wasn’t remotely convenient for me. I still had to rise before dawn to catch the metro to Yaroslavl Station, then the train out to Kaliningrad, where I would collect Filin’s daily load of documents and be assigned a car, which I would then drive back into Moscow. The trip never took less than three hours.
During my several visits that week, I had decided that the Kremlin Hospital was a pleasant refuge. Aside from the doctors themselves, said to be the best in the country, there were the nurses, who, whatever their medical skills, had obviously been selected for their good looks. No wonder Filin ran here whenever he could.
I found him sitting at the desk in his room, talking to Boris Artemov, one of the other deputy directors at the bureau. Filin was wearing slacks and a white shirt rather than a hospital gown. He accepted his documents and I turned to wait outside. “I should have you take these down the hall when I’m finished,” Filin said. The look on my face must have showed my confusion at this statement.
Artemov, a handsome, bald Ukrainian even older than Filin, cleared his throat and spoke: “The chief is here today.”
“Korolev?” I said.
Filin nodded. Sergei Korolev was the genius who had designed and built our country’s first missile. I had only glimpses of him so far, this small, thickset man with a short neck, always moving somewhere in a hurry, never alone. He was our von Braun, though nobody outside Russia knew: It was forbidden for his name to be published.
“Is he sick?”
Filin waved a hand dismissively. “Some routine procedure. He sprang it on us last week.”
Artemov nodded toward the door. “He was taken into surgery not too long ago.”
“I hope it goes well,” I said, knocking on the wooden table near Filin’s chair.
“I wouldn’t want to be the doctors if anything happened to Korolev. People don’t disappear quite the way they used to, but an exception would be made, believe me.”
Filin and Artemov turned to their papers; dismissed, I went out to the hallway, where I sat down on a bench and took a book out of my coat pocket. I was noting the filthy linoleum floor, the peeling paint on the walls, the dim lighting, when I was startled by the sound, not far off, of a man screaming, then quickly silenced. Before I could truly react, I heard a familiar voice: “Yuri! What are you doing here?”