“Not by choice. Pieces of the puzzle just keep finding me.”
He sat down, motioning me to do the same. But I remained standing. I told him about the pyros, the missing canopy, the bogus conclusion of the accident board. About the smell on my hands.
“I thought it was Vladimir, though I was never sure, because I couldn’t connect the Gagarin murder to Korolev’s. You were the only person in both places.
“You were also at Baikonur, the bigshot Air Force inspector. You could have sabotaged those rockets and spacecraft, too.”
He stared past me, his eyes clouded. He shook his head, as if trying to deny my charges, but only said, “I tried to protect you.”
“It’s all true.”
“It was necessary.”
For the second time in two days, my heart was pounding and I was short of breath, though the circumstances could not have been more different. I had wandered for hours after my meeting with Davydov, eventually returning to my flat and taking out the PB-8 pistol. I had planned to confront my father with the evidence and, I suppose, arrest him.
But as I worked through the things I had seen — the day at the Kremlin Hospital when Korolev died, the times I had seen my father at Baikonur, the encounter at Chkalov — I felt sure I was misinterpreting everything, that I had become as paranoid and suspicious as the State Security spies I hated.
So I left the pistol in the flat and took the train into town to speak to my father, hoping he could dissuade me and place the blame where it belonged: on Uncle Vladimir, or on someone else entirely.
“That’s what we’ve always said in this country, isn’t it, Papa? No matter what we do… burn the farmers, arrest the dissidents, shoot the Trotskyites, make deals with Nazis… it’s necessary.” This was making me sick to my stomach. “Did you kill Mother, too? Was that necessary?”
He tried to hit me, but I blocked it. He was strong, for his age, but after all my months of exercise, so was I. I shoved him back into his chair and held him there.
“I should report you.”
“To whom? You think you know everything that happened, but you don’t.”
That was certainly true. It wasn’t as though I could turn my father over to the militia; those drunken fools could barely arrest a traffic violator. A three-star general would immediately be turned over to his service, or State Security, where it was very likely that he had allies.
And this was my own father! I wanted him to offer a magic explanation, to clear himself in my eyes.
Nothing was said. For moments the only sound was our breathing. Then the clock struck one A.M. I had to be up in four hours.
“I’m going out of town,” I said, finally. “I’ll be home at the end of the week. Try not to kill anyone else in the meantime.”
I walked out without a backward glance.
49
Vorkuta
I didn’t sleep at all until boarding the An-12 at Chkalov the next morning, when I promptly began to doze, waking as Shiborin shook me two hours later on approach to Vorkuta.
“You didn’t miss a thing,” he said, nodding out at the landscape, a frozen tundra that was almost treeless. What could be seen of it through the low clouds, that is. “It’s been overcast all the way.”
The weather matched my mood — cold, colorless, unforgiving. I badly wanted to punish my father for his lies, for his crimes. Next on that list was the Party itself, which allowed all of it to happen.
I felt I should include myself on the list of criminals. I had spied and lied, too.
But in this grim outpost on the Arctic Circle, there was no opportunity for vengeance. Survival was the issue, and not my survival in a simulated “off course” spacecraft landing; surviving in Vorkuta itself as winter approached.
I had heard whispers all my life that Vorkuta was also the center of our country’s Gulag, the system of prison work camps, where political prisoners and criminals were sentenced to exile, or to hard labor in the mines. Of course, I saw nothing of these, just blocks of drab, sooty apartment flats, occasional public buildings and factories, and unplowed roads leading off toward the horizon. There was no other reason for the town to be here: no missile center or Air Force base, for example. One look at the primitive airport was enough to convince me of that. Only a small, frozen river running through the middle of the town hinted at any possible commerce. I could imagine boats putting in during the summer months to pick up loads of ore, which would travel a few kilometers north to the sea, then west to Murmansk.
It was already getting dark when the ten of us — four cosmonauts, a doctor, and no fewer than five instructors — reached a military barracks on the north side of the city. One of our instructors from the Gagarin Center, Captain Voronin, took us around to a shed and showed us our Soyuz/L-1 descent capsule. Fitted with two seats, an ancient Air Force radio, and a wooden control panel on which some humorous test subject — possibly Saditsky — had inscribed obscene commands (“Begin penis insertion!”), it was no more than a shell. “You’ll each be issued a standard recovery kit,” Voronin assured us. “It will be identical to those included in each flight vehicle.”
“Will we have a gun to shoot wolves?” Shiborin was friends with Leonov, whose Voskhod 2 flight had first alerted us to the need for such weaponry.
Voronin looked uncomfortable. “We don’t have authorization for firearms, yet. We’re too far north for bears here, anyway.”
I didn’t know whether to believe that or not, but I wished I had packed my illicit PB-8 along, if only to see the look on Shiborin’s face when I pulled it out.
“We heat the shell to thirty-five degrees before taking it off the truck,” Voronin informed us, returning to his prepared script. “So it will have the same residual heat as a spacecraft that has just reentered.”
“They’ve thought of everything,” Shiborin said.
Shiborin and I were the first “crew,” wakened at six A.M. in darkness, given a cursory medical examination, then breakfast. “Leonov told me to eat heartily,” Shiborin said. I had noticed he was taking double helpings. I wasn’t so sure: A full belly would mean less reliance on “emergency” rations, but it would also require more sanitary exercises, as our instructors called them. And there was no toilet in the Soyuz/L-1 descent capsule. I ate lightly.
Then, dressed in flight suits over which we were allowed to wear our officer’s coats, we were off to the trucks. It was cold, not bitterly so, but enough so that I had no trouble believing it was a few days before winter, and that I was on the Arctic Circle.
Shiborin teased Voronin: “Do you also warm us up before we get dropped in the snow?”
The goal of the test was for the two of us, commander Shiborin and flight engineer Ribko, to survive for forty-eight hours. We had gone through hours of survival lessons back at the center, of course, and had been given pointers and handbooks by our support team last night.
Their advice was simple: Establish communication, stay in the spacecraft as much as possible, and wait for the “rescue” teams to arrive. (Our instructors would be standing by with their radios a kilometer off. I suspected they would also sneak up and check on us from time to time.)
We arrived a few moments after our Soyuz had “landed.” The problem was, the spacecraft was tipped onto its side. We weren’t going to be lowered through the nose hatch like real cosmonauts, we were going to have to crawl on our hands and knees like dogs slipping under a fence. When Shiborin saw the arrangement, he called Voronin “bastard.”
Voronin, who was no older than us, seemed unhappy. “Most of the spacecraft have tipped over on landing,” he said.