“I had no other choice! I didn’t have a fancy Bauman education and a job like this.” He practically threw the papers back at me. “You think you’re getting off the ship just before it sinks, don’t you?”
I was too slow denying it. Triyanov smiled bitterly. “Well, maybe you’ll be right. God knows, we’re in for a rough few months.” He fumed in silence for a moment. “Well, you might as well leave now. Everything here will be frozen while those responsible for Soyuz 1 are identified and punished.” He stood up then, and to my surprise, rather than punching me, held out his hand. “Good luck, Yuri.”
I shook it. Then, surprising me again, Triyanov snapped a salute, which I returned. “Better work on that,” he said.
By noon I had cleaned out my desk, gathered my Baikonur luggage (which had arrived back at Chkalov early that morning), and signed out at the bureau personnel office. I had one more stop to make — Filin.
Nadiya the birdwoman was guarding the gate, as usual. “He’s not here,” she said, not even bothering to look up, or hear what I had to say.
“Do you expect him soon?”
Now she raised her head. “He had to leave for Feodosiya this morning.” Feodosiya was the test site in the Crimea where parachutes were packed. Yes, there would many trips to Feodosiya in the next few weeks for those investigating the Soyuz 1 disaster.
I took out a pencil and paper, and scribbled a note. “Would you give this to him?”
Then I walked out the main gate, away from the job I had dreamed about such a short time ago.
There remained the matter of Uncle Vladimir. When I returned to my flat, I telephoned his office, and was put directly through to him. “I already heard,” he said. There was no reproach in his voice, only a tiredness, which surprised me. After experiencing Triyanov’s rumblings, I expected Uncle Vladimir to explode at me like Vesuvius. But all he said was, “Congratulations.”
“Thank you.”
Then he surprised me again. “Our association will continue. I will be in touch with you shortly concerning your new tasks.”
He hung up then, not waiting for an argument, not that I was in a position to make one. The message was frightening: It was one thing to be a spy inside an organization like the Korolev bureau… it was one of the functions of State Security to report on industrial enterprises.
But the military was different. There, political officers represented the Party, serving as a guard against sabotage or subversion. There weren’t supposed to be informants like me, especially in elite units like the cosmonaut team.
I had been unable to escape detection in the Korolev bureau, and it had effectively ruined my career. What price could I expect to pay if discovered? It would be a lot worse than exile to the spacecraft recovery team, possibly even prison.
So I had not escaped after all. I was merely going to be Uncle Vladimir’s spy inside Star Town.
These were my thoughts as I listened to somber music on the radio, and the announcer describing Komarov’s funeral cortege into Red Square.
I glanced at the new uniform hanging in my open closet, and felt more lonely than I had in years, since the day my mother died.
I took the crumpled letter off my table and dialed Katya’s number.
Interlude
I had to leave Russia after my second series of tapings with Yuri Ribko — to his relief, I suspect. It must have been difficult for him to sit there with me, hour by hour, discussing this very painful period in his country’s life, not to mention his own personal crises.
But he did it, with generally good grace, and I piled up a dozen cassettes filled with his narrative before returning home to Washington, where the travails of our chief executive were drawing journalists like, to borrow a phrase from Yuri Ribko, shit draws flies.
As the presidential scandal played itself out, another crisis erupted in Russia itself, this one over the collapse of the ruble. As my magazine’s Russia “specialist,” and the one least eager to pry “scoops” out of the special prosecutor’s office, I was shipped back to Moscow for a shorter visit.
Even though only a few months had passed since my winter trip, I could see that people were in a more subdued, resigned mood, almost like wartime. Dennis Gulyayev, my contact at the Russian Space Agency, was actually hostile. “Your bankers did this to us,” whatever this was.
So I was on my own reaching Yuri Ribko, calling his flat from the Penta Hotel one night, in between charmingly accented messages from various prostitutes offering to drop by.
At Ribko’s, a woman answered, in English. “Oh, yes, I’m sure he’d like to talk to you.”
Yuri answered, quickly determined where I was, and offered to come down and see me. “You won’t have any luck traveling out here.”
He hung up before I could ask the name of the woman on the phone. Katya?
Yuri was limping as he entered the lobby of the Penta. He looked thinner, paler. “I tripped on the street, like a drunk,” he said, when I expressed concern. “Stone-cold sober, too.”
We found a quiet place in the hotel bar, not an impossible task on this weekday night. “Nineteen sixty-seven was a terrible year for everyone,” Ribko said suddenly. “You lost your Apollo astronauts in January, and then had all these other accidents.” It was true: 1967 was a black year for American astronauts. In addition to Grissom, White, and Chaffee, two other NASA astronauts died in accidents (car and airplane crashes) while one of the Air Force’s Manned Orbiting Laboratory astronauts got killed at Edwards. The X-15 had its first fatal crash in 1967, too.
“We lost Komarov, then had two L-1 missions fail miserably. They never even reached orbit.” I had my notes on these: L-1 Number 4 failed on September 18, 1967, when only five of the six engines in the first stage of its Universal Rocket lit as planned, a failure that allowed the L-1 to make a successful test of the launch escape system.
L-1 Number 5, launched November 21, 1967, got a little higher before the second stage of its Universal Rocket failed. The launch escape system was tested again, landing the reentry module some 285 kilometers downrange.
“There was one triumph,” Ribko said. “We finally got two Soyuz ships docked in orbit, and returned them safely.” He was talking about the Cosmos 186 and 188 missions of late October 1967, which accomplished a tricky automatic docking in space, before separating and reentering separately. “Even then, the damned orientation system on one of the craft failed and it made a ballistic reentry, just like poor Komarov.”
“Did it crash?”
“No. We’d solved the parachute problem by then.” He went on to tell me how the commissions investigating the Komarov disaster had taken two months to come to the official conclusion that the parachutes had been packed improperly. “The real problem, I found out later,” Ribko said, “was that during a thermal test of both spacecraft, some idiot left the covers off the parachute canisters. The heat melted parts of the canisters and prevented the ’chutes from coming out cleanly. Neither ship was safe to fly.
“This means that even if the other problems hadn’t happened, if we had gone ahead and launched Soyuz 2, we would have had four dead cosmonauts, not just one.”
As for the Americans, 1967 was a time for regrouping. Only on November 7 of that year, the very day Ustinov and the Central Committee had once hoped to mark with a manned L-1 flight around the Moon, NASA launched the first of its giant Saturn 5 moon rockets, a spectacular success. “Yes, the Saturn V-5,” Ribko insisted on calling it, noting its genesis in the design of the Nazi V-2 rocket, and its builder, Wernher von Braun.