“Never heard of it,” I said.
“It’s where most of our atomic bombs are exploded.”
“I can’t imagine what they were doing there.”
“Your father was flying aircraft that dropped bombs.”
“You know for sure?”
She sighed. “Vladimir told me once that Zhanna died because of that place. Because of your father’s work. Yes.”
I sat up in bed. “How could my father’s work have killed my mother?”
Katya lay back, running her hands through her blond hair, which had grown tangled and matted by the violence of our lovemaking. The sheet covering her slid down as she did, exposing her breasts. The sight alone was enough to cause my heart to pound. I would have reached for her again, had I been doing anything but hearing my family’s secrets.
“Your mother hadn’t wanted to go to Semipalatinsk. She wanted to stay with you.” Katya brushed the hair back from her face, adjusted her covering sheet. “You must have been adorable at that age.”
“Absolutely,” I said, “and I’ve deteriorated since then. Why did my mother go?” I had always wanted to ask her, but never had.
“Your father insisted. Maybe he didn’t want to be alone out there.” Maybe, I thought, he knew that if Zhanna were exiled with her husband, Vladimir would have to find some way to get them both back to Moscow. “They used to drop atomic bombs from airplanes. I did some studies on the radiation patterns when I was in college. We were horribly careless… marching divisions of soldiers through ground zero a few hours after an explosion.
“There was one test that really went wrong. A-2, September 1956, it was. A bomber was supposed to drop a device in a certain zone, but the pilot misread his chart.”
“Maybe the chart was wrong.” I’d seen enough mistakes like that in the space program.
“Very likely. But the bomb went off too close to one of the viewing sites. Everyone there got a severe dose of radiation. I think there were twenty or so, and most of them were dead within five or six years.”
“Including my mother.”
“Yes.”
I had always sensed that the relationship between my mother and father grew colder during those three years in the desert. When I was younger and we all lived in the Crimea, they had been affectionate with each other, touching, laughing. And with me.
When we were finally reunited in Moscow when I was sixteen, that had all changed. They were cordial with each other, but distant, somehow. At the time I thought it was because we had all grown so much older, and because my father was beginning his travels all over the USSR and Europe, which kept him away from home.
Suppose it was due to this terrible accident? It was as if my mother had died in a car crash where my father was driving… but had lingered like a ghost, haunting him, for years.
It was impossible for me to imagine the horror my mother faced — killed by her husband, seeing herself slowly and steadily withering. Even people sentenced to the Gulag, or the basement of the Lubiyanka, had hope. Not my mother.
“I’m surprised my father ever got promoted after something like that.”
“I think they found someone else to blame. The navigator of the plane, maybe. And, really, Yuri, this is why I was so angry with you on your birthday.”
“Why?”
“Your uncle made sure the reports emphasized Colonel Ribko’s heroism under difficult circumstances, all of that. Vladimir saved your father.”
45
The Second Cosmic Velocity
The Monday after my reunion with Katya, I departed for the Crimea, returning to Star Town after two weeks only to enter a period of intense medical testing in which all members of the Fourth Enrollment were subjected to a series of centrifuge rides. Actually, we had been offered the chance to volunteer. To no one’s surprise, all thirteen of us did so, though I believe one of my colleagues, Captain Sasha Korchugin, an Air Force navigator, surely wished he hadn’t. His heart stopped during one of the tests. Fortunately, he was revived, but he was immediately packed off to the Aviation Hospital to convalesce, and we all knew that our group had suffered its first real casualty.
I didn’t see Katya during that month, though I sent her a letter from Feodosiya, and spoke to her by telephone when I got back to Star Town. Our relationship seemed to have been rebuilt.
I had no contact at all with my father. He might well have been taking care of things, as he had promised. Certainly I saw no signs that I was under surveillance. (That is, no more than any of us were.) I believe he was also distracted from my problems by the “rescue” of Communism in Czechoslovakia by the armies of “brother” nations, which began in mid-August.
The first week of September found Shiborin and me back on the plane to Baikonur. At the Hotel Cosmonaut, we crossed paths with our colleagues in the Soyuz branch of the cosmonaut team, including Beregovoy, Shatalov, and Saditsky. They had just supported the successful unmanned launch of spacecraft Number 9 on August 28 under the cover name of Cosmos 238. Number 9 operated flawlessly for three days, then thumped down safely in the prime landing zone. “A gigantic waste of resources,” Saditsky told me. “They were nervous about the parachute system, fine. But you don’t need to launch the vehicle into space to test that: You can kick it out the door of an airplane.” He shook his head. “And we’re going to waste yet another Soyuz next month because everyone’s afraid.” According to the very conservative plan ordered by Minister Ustinov, even with the success of Cosmos 238, the next phase of the program would allow a single-manned Soyuz to dock with another unmanned one. The ambitious EVA originally planned for Komarov’s flight sixteen months in the past was seen to be too risky.
My attention turned to the L-1 lunar orbit program. A new spacecraft, Number 9 (not to be confused with the newest Soyuz) was in the assembly building being mated to a new Universal Rocket 500. The welds in the upper stages of the rocket had been examined and no leaks were expected. Nevertheless, I wasn’t overly confident. I heard from Lev, who also flew in with the Korolev bureau team, that the investigation of the stage that had failed so disastrously in July had not turned up any flaws in its welds, either.
In spite of my misgivings, early on the morning of September 15, 1968, the latest Universal Rocket 500 rose from the Area 81 pad, lighting up the summer night as it carried the lunar space probe that would be announced to the world as Zond 5. We watched the launch from the range tracking site at Area 97, several kilometers to the south, under a half-Moon, with summer breezes gently stirring the trees.
Over the next few hours, the upper stages, including the bureau’s troubled Block D, performed flawlessly, sending Zond 5 on its climb to that half-Moon.
At midday Shiborin and I boarded an An-24 with Colonel Bykovsky and his lunar cosmonauts, and flew directly off to Yevpatoriya, to take part in the mission from the primary control center. When we arrived, we learned that Zond 5 had suffered its first failure, the all-too-familiar inability of the star-tracking system to orient itself. This time, however, a backup system that sighted on Earth and the Moon managed to keep the spacecraft on course, though it lacked precision and meant that the hoped-for reentry into Earth’s atmosphere would be uncontrolled.
I did note a lack of the usual generals and ministers at Yevaptoriya. Only Artemov and his bureau deputies, including Filin, and the Hammer’s deputy, Tyulin, were there. Not even General Kamanin came. At first I assumed it was for protective reasons: No one wanted to face another inexplicable failure. Then I learned that a very important meeting was being held back at Baikonur to get the Carrier rocket program back on track. The first test launch was rescheduled for November, with a second to follow in February 1969. These dates were important, because we had also learned that the Americans were considering a “surprise” flight around the Moon themselves in January 1969, though they had yet to fly a manned Apollo at all!