“Hunting?” he said.
“The story I heard,” and I had heard it from one of the first cosmonauts, “was that Gagarin or Seregin spotted some elk from the jet as they were on their way back, and decided to strafe the beasts to have some nice fresh meat.”
Ribko laughed. “Well, it’s certainly true that fresh meat was always welcome. We were having it flown in from other parts of Russia, right into Chkalov, in those days. But it’s fiction,” he said. “Their MiG-15 was a trainer: no guns. Even if it had had guns, they wouldn’t have had bullets in them. Good God, there were enough disgruntled pilots taking off from that base that one of them was sure to strafe the commander’s office!”
“Well, it was just a story.”
“Typical. Colorful, with perhaps a tiny sliver of truth.”
“Unlike the stories that your Uncle Vladimir somehow killed Korolev and Gagarin.”
Saying that so bluntly was a risk — Yuri could have exploded at me and walked out, never to be seen again, and my hours of interviewing would have gotten me three-fourths of a book that would never be finished. But I had to let him know that I had doubts. Because others would, too.
I was worried about Yuri, in any case. He looked even thinner than the last time I had seen him. “Slimfast,” he said, joking. “I want to look like an American movie star when I do my book tour.”
(But did Slimfast also make your hair fall out?)
“I realize it all sounds quite fantastic. What’s the term? Science fiction?”
“Fantasy is what they’ll call it. That your Uncle Vladimir Nefedov, whose name appears nowhere in any history of the Soviet space program, somehow murdered Sergei Korolev and Yuri Gagarin, and thus cost Russia a chance to be first to the Moon.”
He put his hand on my wrist; in my experience, when a source does that, he’s preparing to tell me something important. And true. It’s a better indicator than a lie-detector test. “I’m sorry, Misha. Did I give you the impression that the murder mystery ended with Uncle Vladimir?”
“Well, actually, yes.”
He shook his head and smiled. “You owe it to yourself to hear the rest of my story. Then you can decide what you believe.”
Scorpion 4
Enemy Agents On Site
41
The Fraternity Of Eagles
On Monday, May 6, 1968, almost a year to the day of my arrival at Star Town, I was called into Colonel Belyayev’s office along with Shiborin after we had showered following exercise.
Belyayev looked tired and unhappy; Shiborin, thanks to his friends in the fraternity of eagles (as the pilots called themselves), had told me earlier that the training center doctors were trying to ground Belyayev. “They say he’s got some problem with his heart, like Slayton, the American astronaut. But who can believe those sons of bitches after what happened in January?”
January, of course, was when the cosmonaut team had suffered a purge in which five students had been dismissed. Every one of the dismissals eventually was laid to “medical disqualification,” thanks to the willingness of the medical staff to cooperate with General Kamanin — who, through no coincidence, supervised the Aviation Hospital in addition to the manned space program — in finding a face-saving way of getting rid of those he wanted to get rid of. It was ludicrous to believe that five healthy young officers, having already passed the rigorous medical exams to get into the cosmonaut team, would in two years’ time become so unfit they had to be dismissed!
“I thought hero-cosmonauts didn’t have to worry about the doctors.”
“As long as Kamanin and Kuznetsov are on their side. But both of them are angry with Belyayev.” Well, he had let discipline slide: A couple of weeks ago a couple of inspectors from Kamanin’s staff had made a surprise visit to the morning exercises, which, luckily enough, both Shiborin and I were attending, and found less than a third of the cosmonauts present. Belyayev was also being blamed because some of the boys got drunk during the trips to Baikonur and Yevpatoriya supporting the last L-1 failure, though I don’t know what Kamanin and the others expected; you ship these guys off to fairly remote locations to do a job, then punish them when they find some way to amuse themselves when the job vanishes. “They’re going to put Nikolayev in Gagarin’s post, and that leaves Belyayev right where he is.”
Gagarin had been the deputy director of the training center when he died, and it was clear Kamanin was grooming him to eventually take over from Kuznetsov. Being director of the center was a very desirable job: interesting work, tremendous power, and the ability — if one chose to exploit it — to live like the ruler of a small country.
“So they won’t let him fly, but they won’t let him move up the chain of command.” A very frustrating situation, even if you weren’t an eagle.
“He’ll probably chew us out just to make himself feel better.”
Nothing like that happened, of course. Belyayev merely acknowledged our salutes, and told us to sit down. “You’ve both performed well in your initial training so far, and with the search-and-rescue teams for the crash.
“We are assigning you both to support the lunar programs L-1 and L-3. These will be part-time positions; you will still continue your student training under my supervision, including the mandatory exercise program.” Belyayev was looking at paperwork on his desk when he added this, missing the smug look Shiborin fired at me. “Your primary job will be to serve as flight-crew representatives to the factories making the rocket and the spacecraft. It’s not flying, but it’s very important work. We need our own eyes and ears in these places.”
Just like that, my cosmonaut career took a major turn. I was going to be spared the tedium of working on the military Soyuz program, or in the Almaz space-station team — both vehicles were years away from test flights and had yet to appear at the center in the form of actual hardware rather than wooden mockups.
The lunar programs were the reason I had wanted to become a cosmonaut. I was still thrilled with the idea of planting my country’s flag on that dark, rocky soil, a crescent earth above me. I knew, of course, that I could never be first: One of our cosmonauts, or some American, would beat me. But to get there at all would be a dream, and to work on the hardware was one giant step toward fulfilling that dream.
My only regret, hearing the news of the assignment (and the further orders that Shiborin and I were to fly to Baikonur tomorrow morning), was that I would have no chance to pursue my private investigation of the deaths of Korolev and Gagarin. Given the resources available to me at that time — which is to say, none — perhaps this was for the best.
Shiborin, ever the eagle, managed to talk his way into the cockpit of the Tu-104 heading east the next morning. I rode on the hard metal benches with a group of engineers from, I soon learned, the Kuznetsov bureau, builders of jet engines who had moved into the rocket field in the past couple of years. Not too happily, to judge from their comments.
As the green of the Moscow District gave way to steppe and desert, I began to think of my mother, now revealed to me as a spy for State Security. Or so Uncle Vladimir had said; again, I had no confirmation. She had been exiled to a wasteland populated only by dangerous weapons and those who worked on them, and never seemed the same. What had happened to her out here?
What would happen to me?
Gagarin’s death did nothing to appease the demons dragging down our space program — demons who worked for Uncle Vladimir, I was now convinced. Ustinov insisted on additional unmanned test flights of the Soyuz; fine, in principle, but there were only two more vehicles that could be ready for launch within the next few months. The canny minds in the Ministry of General Machine-Building had not been able to find enough money to build more Soyuz spacecraft when they were needed. If two more were wasted on yet another set of tests, there would be no manned launch until the fall of the year.