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.