Red Moon Read online

  RED

  MOON

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  RED MOON

  Copyright © 2001 by St. Croix Productions, Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  A Forge Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  Design by Heidi J. B. Eriksen

  www.tor.com

  Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cassutt, Michael.

  Red moon / Michael Cassutt.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates Book.”

  ISBN: 978-0-312-87440-7

  ISBN: 0-312-87440-5

  1. Space flight—Fiction. 2. Soviet Union—Fiction. 3. Astronauts—Fiction. 4. Space race—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3553.A812 R4 2001

  813’.54—dc21

  00-048449

  First Edition: February 2001

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Russ Jensen

  RED

  MOON

  Autumn, Last Year

  In Russia these days, nothing is easy.

  I’m sure you could make the argument that nothing there has ever been easy, but the old order changeth, and now pensioners find themselves selling apples on the street while mafiyosa cuddle in restaurant doorways with six-foot-tall blondes all the while yelling into cell phones. You can walk into an office and see computers running Windows 3.0, but won’t find a toilet with a seat. Homemade garages sprout like mushrooms at the base of Khrushchev-era worker storage units while cars choke the inadequate streets. A McDonald’s gets built in two days as Red Square is swept by men with straw brooms.

  My contact was an hour late. Had that happened to me at home in California, I’d have been thirty minutes gone. But in Korolev, formerly Kaliningrad, a grim industrial suburb an hour’s drive north of the Kremlin, an hour’s tardiness was expected, forgiven, hardly noticed.

  Besides, the steady deliveries of German beer, ordered from the wary staff of the Rendezvous restaurant by universal semaphore, encouraged me to be charitable.

  Then again, there was nothing else I wanted to be doing. I had come to Moscow to report on the delicate situation between Russia and NASA concerning the International Space Station. This $25-billion project was starting to kick into high gear, except for the fact that a key Russian component called the service module was falling behind schedule, threatening the whole program with delays and higher costs. A U.S. congressman and his staff who had come to Moscow to, as they said, “draw a line in the sand,” had done no such thing. The Russian spacecraft builders had conceded the problem—no money—and blamed the government for failing to deliver the promised cash. I could see that the next week’s activities would consist of various parties commiserating over that unfortunate situation, a bit of hand-wringing here, some posturing there, without changing the basic facts.

  During a break in one of these meetings at the Russian Space Agency, I found myself sitting in a hallway with Dennis Gulyayev, who recognized my name from a book I had written on the Apollo-Soyuz docking some years back. “You know a lot about our space program,” he said, adding, before I could preen, “for a Westerner.”

  “It’s always been a hobby,” I told him. “I grew up watching American astronauts doing spacewalks and going to the Moon. But I always wondered about your side. You guys were first, after all. Sputnik, Gagarin, the spacewalk.”

  Dennis got a faraway look in his eyes. “We could have been first to the Moon, too.”

  I had heard a bit about the abortive Russian man-on-the-Moon program. “Come on, Dennis. You were nowhere close to beating Apollo 11.”

  Now he got amused. “That’s what the histories say.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “The histories are wrong.”

  “Well, I guess I’ll just have to take your word for it.”

  “If you’re interested, I could introduce you to a friend of mine. He knows the real story. He might tell you.”

  I got suspicious. Russians were always trying to sell things to Westerners these days. “For a price?” I said.

  Dennis shrugged. He knew exactly what I meant. “No, he’ll tell you because you wrote that Apollo-Soyuz book. I’ve seen it in his flat. He reads and speaks English.”

  Several people passed us, the congressman among them, along with one of the deputy directors of the Russian Space Agency. We smiled and held our places.

  “He’s getting old. He’d like to tell the story. But nobody in Russia will publish it.”

  “There aren’t many in America who will publish it, either.”

  “I think he would like to tell the story to someone, even if it only gets printed after his death. He’s a friend of my father’s. They worked together.”

  I was bored, I thought it couldn’t hurt. “What’s his name?”

  “Ribko. Yuri Nikolayevich Ribko.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “You wouldn’t have. But he was everywhere—at Korolev’s bureau, at Star Town, at Baikonur. He saw more of the story than most.”

  What the heck: I might get a good anecdote about the pioneering days of the Russian space program that would help my ISS piece. I told Dennis to arrange a meeting at the Rendezvous, a restaurant that happened to be located within walking distance of my hotel in Korolev.

  Not that the hotel was anything special: It was a former center for the reeducation of Party cadres or something like that, much like a school dorm at a hick American junior college. It had been chosen for easy access to the heart of the Russian space program, since the flight control center, the gigantic Energiya Corporation headquarters, and the Central Research Institute of Machine-Building (don’t try to say that too quickly) were all nearby. I could walk to the Rendezvous, saving myself the challenges of getting around Korolev, or Moscow, at night without an escort.

  So I nursed my third beer and watched a young and prosperous-looking Russian couple finish their dinner. The only other customers that night were four Scandinavians—carton manufacturers from Oslo, as I recall.

  Shortly after eight, Ribko entered.

  He was, I judged, in his late fifties. Short, red-faced, with a full head of silver-black hair, he was slim, as Russians go. Blue eyes behind thick glasses. A quick smile that showed some literal steel, but handsome. We shook hands and I thanked him for coming. “Dennis insisted,” he said, shrugging.

  “It seems that Dennis wanted us to meet.”

  I ordered him a beer and asked if he minded my taping.

  “No, I’ve been taped many times before.” He gave that quick smile again. “This, however, will be the first time my permission was asked.”

  To warm up, I asked Ribko what he was doing these days. It was risky, if you don’t like awkward replies: I know of one former space official who survives by making Venetian blinds; another is a dispatcher in a factory. “I’m a consultant, you would say, to the Air Force Academy in Monino. I teach . . . earth studies.” He pointed a finger at the ceiling, then at the table.

  “Space observation?” He nodded. “And you used to work in the Moon program.”

  “Program L-1/L-3, yes.”

  “Which almost beat the U.S. to the Moon.”

  “We could have. We came very close.”

  I sat back, assuming a posture of friendly skepticism. At least that’s what my editor calls it. “You really think so? I
know you were close to a manned lunar orbit. But a landing?”

  Ribko continued to smile, but his eyes narrowed ever so slightly as he leaned toward me. “I know the stories that are being told. They only have part of the truth, because the tellers don’t know, or can’t face it.”

  “But you do. Because you were—”

  “At the heart of it. For three years, I was at the very heart of Program L-1/L-3.”

  “I wonder,” I said at that point, as much for myself as for Ribko, “if anyone cares.”

  He wagged a finger at me. “The world would be different now if we had won. The same things that stopped us are stopping you, on ISS.”

  “Well, then,” I said, substantially more intrigued. “Tell me.”

  Since Yuri Ribko spoke to me in English, I have retained his usage regarding Russian names for people, places, and things. Some, such as Red Square, are given their English equivalents, especially if these have become familiar to Western readers. Others, such as Chkalov air base or the Soyuz spacecraft, are given in transliterated Russian.

  To ease the burden on American readers, however, I have eliminated Russian case endings for these names (Chkalov instead of Chkalovskaya, and have dispensed with the Russian patronymic, the father’s name that is often added to a first name in conversation (Yuri Nikolayevich).

  I was present at the beginning of the end.

  The winter of 1965–66 was my final one as a student at the Bauman Higher Technical School, a huge wreck of a place situated on the west bank of the Moscow River. Founded in 1830 as the Tsar’s Vocational School, Bauman was later honored with the name of an obscure Bolshevik who had never attended it, and could not, in fact, have passed the entrance exams.

  The name, like those of so many Soviet institutions, was deliberately misleading, suggesting a small college with a student body specializing in, perhaps, auto mechanics. But Bauman was actually the equivalent of your California Institute of Technology. It was an engineering university with twenty thousand students, the elite of Soviet secondary schools, who were trained for jobs in the missile and aircraft industries, and in the intelligence community.

  The basic course lasted six years; over half the students flunked out or transferred to less-demanding schools. If you survived to the fifth year, your main challenge was to convince the placement committee to give you the job you wanted, meaning any job as long as it was in Moscow.

  My father, a deputy Air Force commander in the Moscow military district, could have arranged such a job for me with a single phone call. But, with that flair for bullheadedness that I share, he refused. Fortunately, I had good luck in the assignment of a thesis adviser.

  Vasily Filin was a senior engineer and deputy director of the Experimental Design Bureau Number 1, the organization that created and built my country’s first intercontinental ballistic missile, that launched Sputnik, that made Gagarin the first human in space. Filin was a tall, nervous, long-faced man, quite old to me at the time: He was fifty-nine. He oversaw my work, and that of half a dozen other fifth-year students, with precision and decency, unlike some I could name. But we had no personal interaction until one day in October 1965, when he suddenly raised his head from the papers on his desk, looked at me as if seeing me for the first time, and said, “Ribko, what are your plans?”

  He didn’t need to specify, of course. He meant career plans. “The Rocket Force, I think,” I said without much enthusiasm. I had done my summer military service north of Moscow in godforsaken Orevo, at a camp for future missileers. Unless one of the civilian design bureaus in the giant defense industry requested me, I was going to be commissioned as a senior-engineer lieutenant the coming June. It was one of the many ironies of the Soviet system that only a major effort by my father—a career military officer and Hero of the Soviet Union—could keep me a civilian.

  I wasn’t upset at the idea; far from it. I looked forward to fulfilling whatever task the Party chose for me.

  “You’ll be wasted in uniform,” Filin said, sniffing with unconcealed derision. He folded his hands on the desk, examining them for defects. “What about my organization?”

  “I’d love to work at the bureau, but I heard that your quota was filled.”

  I think I embarrassed Filin. “Well, yes,” he said quietly. “There are many important people with nephews this year.”

  When the silence grew awkward, I rose to gather up my papers. Filin put his hand flat on them. “How are your secretarial skills?” he asked suddenly.

  “Well, I can type,” I said. My late mother, Zhanna, had given me a typewriter for my thirteenth birthday, hoping I might become a poet rather than a soldier.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere!” What Filin proposed was that I, a graduate of the Bauman School, should join his organization, the Korolev bureau, as his clerk. “The important thing is to avoid wearing green.”

  As I said, I would have been happy to wear a uniform, but other factors made military service less attractive than Filin’s offer. For one, my father had warned me that if I went into the Rocket Force, I was likely to be stationed north of the Arctic Circle. “We’re expanding the missile base up there,” he said, “and they’re hungry for young, unmarried engineers.” Such an assignment would likely last five years, and I found Moscow cold enough already.

  More important, I was desperately in love with a fellow student, Marina Torchillova, and dreamed of marrying her. There would be no wedding if I moved to Murmansk.

  Proving that, like so many of the fellow students I had criticized all my life, I could also put my selfish needs above those of the Party, I began spending one or two days a week out in the suburb of Kaliningrad, typing letters for Filin, serving as his courier, and sometimes—once he discovered that I was licensed—as his driver.

  And continued to pine after Marina, who, strangely, still resisted my charms.

  On the leaden, snowy afternoon of Thursday, January 13, 1966, I arrived at the Kremlin Hospital with a stack of documents for Filin to review. I had learned, in three months of part-time work, that he was prone to ill health, especially in times of crisis. And there was often a crisis. The upper levels of the Korolev bureau, which included Filin, were routinely criticized by their masters on the Council of Ministers for continued failures at putting an unmanned probe on the Moon. The more complaints the ministers had, the more Filin’s head ached, and so he was off to the Kremlin Hospital, not far from the Bauman campus.

  The location wasn’t remotely convenient for me. I still had to rise before dawn to catch the metro to Yaroslavl Station, then the train out to Kaliningrad, where I would collect Filin’s daily load of documents and be assigned a car, which I would then drive back into Moscow. The trip never took less than three hours.

  During my several visits that week, I had decided that the Kremlin Hospital was a pleasant refuge. Aside from the doctors themselves, said to be the best in the country, there were the nurses, who, whatever their medical skills, had obviously been selected for their good looks. No wonder Filin ran here whenever he could.

  I found him sitting at the desk in his room, talking to Boris Artemov, one of the other deputy directors at the bureau. Filin was wearing slacks and a white shirt rather than a hospital gown. He accepted his documents and I turned to wait outside. “I should have you take these down the hall when I’m finished,” Filin said. The look on my face must have showed my confusion at this statement.

  Artemov, a handsome, bald Ukrainian even older than Filin, cleared his throat and spoke: “The chief is here today.”

  “Korolev?” I said.

  Filin nodded. Sergei Korolev was the genius who had designed and built our country’s first missile. I had only glimpses of him so far, this small, thickset man with a short neck, always moving somewhere in a hurry, never alone. He was our von Braun, though nobody outside Russia knew: It was forbidden for his name to be published.

  “Is he sick?”

  Filin waved a hand dismissively. “Some routine procedur
e. He sprang it on us last week.”

  Artemov nodded toward the door. “He was taken into surgery not too long ago.”

  “I hope it goes well,” I said, knocking on the wooden table near Filin’s chair.

  “I wouldn’t want to be the doctors if anything happened to Korolev. People don’t disappear quite the way they used to, but an exception would be made, believe me.”

  Filin and Artemov turned to their papers; dismissed, I went out to the hallway, where I sat down on a bench and took a book out of my coat pocket. I was noting the filthy linoleum floor, the peeling paint on the walls, the dim lighting, when I was startled by the sound, not far off, of a man screaming, then quickly silenced. Before I could truly react, I heard a familiar voice: “Yuri! What are you doing here?”

  I looked up to find my father, Nikolai, approaching. “Papa?”

  He was wearing his green uniform, of course, with the three stars of a colonel-general, and his red Hero of the Soviet Union medal. I had not seen him in two weeks. In fact, in those days I rarely saw him more than once a month. He was often traveling on business for the Air Force’s general staff, where he had worked for the past few years. Even when my mother was alive and we all lived together, he was often absent.

  To my surprise, he hugged and kissed me. This demonstration from the unusually reserved, severe Colonel-General Nikolai Ribko made me stammer as I explained about Filin, not mentioning Korolev. My father nodded. “I hope you’re not here as a patient,” I said to him.

  He smiled as he always did whenever I used phrases that weren’t strictly functional. “I’m in excellent health. I’m visiting Vladimir.”

  Vladimir was my uncle, my mother’s brother, an official of State Security. “Is he all right?” That Uncle Vladimir could be hospitalized without my knowing it was no surprise: I was only in his company two or three times a year, and his activities were completely secret.

  My father tilted his head to one side and shrugged. “He’s heavy, you know.” This was true: Uncle Vladimir was taller than my father and me, a trait that must have served him well as a young Bolshevik thug, but in late middle age he had grown hugely fat.