I could have had him phone his superior officer, whoever that might be, for more information, but I had also seen my father out by the hangars. The operations building was a more likely place to find him. “Thank you, Lieutenant,” I said, offering my best salute, turning on my heel and marching out.
I was reluctant to get too close to the operations building, because everyone there would be busy. But I knew my father; he would probably be right in the middle of things.
As I approached, a familiar face emerged. It wasn’t my father, however, but Shiborin, still in his uniform. “Yuri!”
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“They called over to the center to get extra transport pilots for the search.” He was walking toward the locker room, and I hurried to keep pace. “I’m supposed to take one of the II-14s out. Come along. We could use the extra eyes.”
Not seeing my father, and wanting to be useful, I went along.
As Shiborin suited up, he briefed me on the conditions. Actually, he had me hold the clipboard where he had just written his instructions while he said them aloud, to more firmly embed them in his memory, much as I had helped him study orbital mechanics. “We’re going to have two planes and four helicopters in the air at all times, working our way through search areas that are ten-by-ten kilometers.
“The helicopters will be down low, at a hundred or even fifty meters, while we’ll be at three hundred to six hundred meters.”
We headed for the plane, and I asked what had happened to Gagarin and Seregin. “I guess he showed up hoping to make a solo flight in a 17, and found out the weather was below his minimums. So Seregin offered to fly with him in a 15 trainer. They took off at 10:19 toward Kirzhach, leveled off at four thousand meters. Weather was supposed to be acceptable: a cloud layer at a thousand meters and another one at 4,800. Ten kilometers visibility.
“The flight plan called for simple ground loops, nothing too tricky, in Zones 20 and 21.” These were the two pie-shaped operating areas. The Kirzhach airfield sat on the extreme northern edge of Zone 20. Because of the congestion of air traffic in the Moscow area, most training flights from Chkalov were vectored into those two small, narrow zones extending about seventy kilometers northeast of the base. “The plane only carried enough fuel for about forty-five minutes in the air. The last transmission from Gagarin was at 10:30, when he requested permission to make the turn back toward Chkalov. Heading 75 degrees and in Zone 21.”
I remembered that our parachute jumping team had also been in Kirzhach, at the small airfield there. It was shortly after ten-thirty when we heard a low-flying jet, that strange popping sound, then the explosion of the crash. I told this to Shiborin, who nodded. “Leonov reported that, so our search is going to concentrate on the area south of that airfield.”
Then we climbed into the cockpit of the 11–14, which was being refueled from an earlier mission. A copilot waited. I strapped into a jump seat in the main cabin while Shiborin ran confidently through his preflight checklist. Within ten minutes we had lumbered into the air.
It took us another fifteen minutes to reach our search zone. I had my nose pressed up against a window as we dropped through the clouds and leveled off, it seemed, just above the treetops.
Spring had come a week ago, but there were no signs of it here in the woods northeast of Moscow. Some bare patches of earth, yes, but the open fields were still white with deep snow. Even the branches of the trees were still fluffy from the last snowfall.
“This is going to be tough,” Shiborin said. He had come out of the cockpit to get a better look through the side windows. “Their parachutes are white.”
“Do you think they ejected?”
“They should have. Unless they collided with another plane.” He clapped me on the shoulder and returned to the cockpit.
I kept thinking about that popping sound — could it have been the ejection seats firing away from the stricken aircraft?
We were actually searching for three objects: two men on foot in addition to the wreckage of the plane. Over the course of our two-hour search, however, we saw nothing but forest, fields, country roads, and tiny villages.
By two-thirty we were back at Chkalov for refueling as another II-14 took our place. I went with Shiborin into the operations building to grab a bit of food before resuming, and here I saw General Kamanin in heated conversation with two other generals, one of them my father.
Seeing me, my father broke away. He seemed upset, understandable, given the situation. “I thought you were going to be at Star Town all day.”
I didn’t want to get into a lengthy justification for my presence, so I said, “They called some of us in to help with the search.”
He accepted that, then said, “The search is over. They just found the wreckage of Gagarin’s plane.”
“Where?”
“Three kilometers from some little place called Novoslevo.”
I remembered the name from the charts we had used in the search. It was south and east of Kirzhach, roughly the direction of the crashing jet we had heard. “What about the pilots?”
“Nothing so far.” Kamanin and the other general brushed past us at that moment, headed for the flight line, where a pair of Mi-4 helicopters waited, rotors revving up to speed. We watched them climb aboard, then take off. Then my father said, “Can I give you a ride back to Star Town?”
“I’m still helping with the search,” I said.
He nodded, as if lost in thought, probably, like me, wondering what would happen if it turned out that Gagarin had indeed been killed. “I’m going back to headquarters. They don’t need me here.”
We shook hands and he walked away, never looking back. I ran to catch up with Shiborin inside the control center. He was already peeling off his flight jacket. “They’ve stopped the search. It’s getting dark and they want to see what they find at the crash site.”
I nodded, and followed him to the locker room, where we changed back into our uniforms. Only there did I notice that I had gotten dirt on my hand — dried black grease of some kind, with a peculiar smell. It was probably from the 11–14. I washed it off and thought no more about it.
What General Kamanin found at the crash site, we learned that evening, was a watery hole in the forest where the MiG-15 had plunged almost nose-down, shearing off trees at a 45-degree angle. Wreckage from the explosion had scattered fragments of the plane into the trees and throughout the forest, but the cockpit itself was buried more than five meters deep.
Part of a human jaw was recovered before dark. It held gold and silver crowns and could be identified by one of the Chkalov doctors as belonging to Seregin.
As dark and cold covered the site, there was no sign of Yuri Gagarin, the Columbus of Space.
38
“…While Fulfilling His Duties”
The remains of Yuri Gagarin were discovered shortly after dawn on March 28, when Kamanin and the others returned to the crash site. Even the night before, a fragment of a pilot’s kneeboard had been found. On it, a torn piece of a flight plan marked in red — the same kind of marker Gagarin was seen using the morning of the twenty-seventh. This evidence didn’t prove that Gagarin had not ejected… but a day of searching had not located him.
Even if he’d been injured, the area of Novoselovo was not uninhabited. In fact, the first to arrive at the crash site was a farmer on his tractor. Surely someone would have noticed a parachuting man in the area.
At around eight in the morning (so we heard later that day at Star Town), Kamanin and some other searcher found a piece of a flight jacket hanging from a tree a dozen meters in the air. In the pocket was a receipt for Gagarin’s breakfast at the Star Town commissary.