“Have you had breakfast?”
“No.” As he said this, he glanced around my hovel. “I was going to stop at the commissary at Chkalov.” He smiled. “It’s the one thing they do right.”
“We have a good one here, too.”
“I need to be at the base by eight.” It was already 7:30.
I offered to walk him to his car and driver, which waited in front of the administration building. The day was miserably cold and drizzly, typical for early spring. The sun appeared for a few seconds, only to be swallowed up in clouds. “I hope you’re not flying today,” my father said.
“Our group is studying a new spacecraft this week.” Endless, tedious lectures on the bureau’s new Zvezda, in fact. Today’s subject was to be power systems.
“Good.”
As we passed House 3, the main residence building, our path intersected with two other officers. “Here comes Gagarin,” I whispered to my father.
“I know.” He seemed indifferent.
Gagarin and the other pilot, a lieutenant colonel named Dobrovolsky, nodded greetings as they headed into the commissary and up the stairs.
“Here is where I leave you,” my father said, and gave me a warm hug and kiss. As he turned away, I saw that there were tears in his eyes. I wanted to stop him, but he hurried away so quickly it was if he were running.
The Star Town commissary had a section that served as a decent restaurant comparable to the Stakhanov in Ostankino Tower, but most of the time we used the cafeteria section, loading trays with food and beginning to eat before we even sat down. We were, after all, busy cosmonauts.
Saditsky came up in line behind me. “Still trying to catch up on parachuting?”
“Yes.”
He nodded his head toward the tables where the senior cosmonauts were gathered, including Gagarin, Dobrovolsky, and Leonov. “Dobrovolsky isn’t going to jump today; he’s taking a driver’s test. So Leonov has room for one more.…”
The idea of jumping under Leonov’s direction was intimidating: Not only was he one of the most talented of the first cosmonauts, he had turned himself into a master parachutist with a hundred or more jumps to his credit. But I needed to reach that qualifying number, and if not now, when? “Go ahead,” Saditsky said.
I marched over there, set down my tray, saluted, and in my best military voice said, “Senior Lieutenant Ribko requests permission to join Colonel Leonov’s squad for the day.”
Leonov looked at Saditsky. “Why are you recruiting stragglers for me?” he said, clearly joking. “We leave in fifteen minutes,” he said to me. It was already eight A.M.
I grabbed my food off my tray and ran back to my flat to pick up my pass for the air base. (They might let Gagarin or Leonov in without one, but not student-cosmonaut Ribko.) Running was still difficult, and it took me longer than I planned.
Then I had to stop at Belyayev’s office to report my change in plans.
It was already after 8:15 when I raced out to the parking lot for the bus. Fortunately, they had waited. “Let’s go,” Gagarin said.
At Chkalov, Gagarin and a couple of pilots went off to the operations building while I followed Leonov and the rest of his lunar team to get suited up. In the locker room we met a couple of engineers from the bureau who had come over from Kaliningrad — Sevastanov and Rukavishnikov. We exchanged cool greetings; neither had been that active in Triyanov’s kindergarten while I was still there, but they obviously knew me as a defector.
By 9:30 A.M., we were on the taxiway. As we passed one of the hangars, I saw my father — alone — standing there with his hands folded behind his back, staring at a pair of MiG-15s. I waved, but there was no chance he could see me. Then we were in the air heading for the drop zone over Kirzhach, sixty kilometers away.
We had moved so quickly that I had no time to be nervous, and by 10:15 was standing in a muddy field near the small airport there, having successfully completed my seventh jump. The lunar group was planning to make at least two today, and I actually looked forward to another.
As our An-2 came in for a landing, Leonov gathered us all together. “I just checked the weather. We’ve got clouds moving in and we’ll be below minimums shortly. So it’s back to the base.” Thus my eagerness was short-lived.
We were lining up to reboard the An-2 when we heard the roar of a jet somewhere above us in the clouds, but very low. “That’s a 15,” one of the pilots said.
“They shouldn’t be that low in these conditions,” Leonov said.
“Maybe they’re on their way back,” the other pilot said.
I heard a strange sound from the sky — a pop, almost like a misfire. This on top of the noise from the jet’s engine. I glanced around to see if anyone else noticed it: unlikely, since they were either already inside the An-2, or wearing hard helmets. (I had a soft leather one.)
Then we all heard a whump! in the distance, an explosion that literally sent a jolt through the ground. That brought Leonov and Bykovsky out of the An-2 in a hurry. “What the hell was that?” Bykovsky said.
Leonov told him to be quiet and listen. There was no more jet noise. “Something crashed,” he said.
“Who was flying today?”
“Gubarev, Nikolayev, and Shatalov,” he said, naming three of the senior pilot cosmonauts. He looked worried. “Let’s get back.”
37
The Columbus Of Space
When we reached Chkalov, we learned that the missing pilot was not Gubarev, Nikolayev, or Shatalov, nor any of the half-dozen other pilots flying for the 70th or the test center, but Gagarin himself. With him in the two-seat Mig-15 trainer was Colonel Seregin.
Leonov ordered his lunar team back to Star Town and Kaliningrad, then took off for the operations building. Since I was not a member of his team, I received no orders, and decided to find my father, if he was still at the base.
The flight line was busier than I’d ever seen it. A MiG-21 came screaming in for a landing, then two Mi-4 helicopters took off. Another MiG-15 trainer landed, and an 11–14 transport took to the air. I learned later that at eleven A.M., with Gagarin and Seregin’s plane missing and now out of fuel, all Chkalov aircraft had been recalled while at the same time, resources were mobilized for a search of the area around Kirzhach.
I wasn’t ready to believe Gagarin and Seregin were dead: If they had had a problem with their aircraft, they could have ejected. And in that snowy, tree-filled wilderness northeast of Moscow, they could easily be lost for hours.
When I reached the administration building, I found only a single frantic junior lieutenant manning the guard desk. “I don’t know General Ribko and now is not a good time to be asking,” he said, as if he had more important things on his mind. Well, the aircraft-operations people did: I’m not sure how this guy was going to be helping to rescue the Columbus of Spaceflight. Maybe the fact that I was still wearing my leather jacket and flight overalls encouraged him to believe I was either junior to him, or possibly even a lowly civilian.
“Stand at attention when you address me, Lieutenant,” I found myself saying. “You will answer me in a civil tone or you will be guarding a radar site in Kamchatka, is that understood?”
The junior lieutenant’s face went red, but he got the message, coming to a full brace, eyes forward. I was slightly amazed at the result. Although I had been on the receiving end of military-style reaming, I had never actually delivered one.
“I am looking for Colonel-General Nikolai Ribko, Hero of the Soviet Union, inspector for the Air Force staff. He’s the only three-star general at this base today.”
Thanks to my threats, the junior lieutenant’s memory had magically improved. “I saw a colonel-general on the flight line half an hour ago. I have not seen him since.”