Riding the Red Horse (28 page)

When Werner Von Braun was dying of cancer, he asked me to be his spokesman, to appear on occasion when he was too ill to speak. I did this. What was most interesting to me was a repetitive sentence that he said to me over and over again during the approximately four years that I had the opportunity to work for him.

He said the strategy that was being used to educate the public and decision makers was to use scare tactics. That was how we identify an enemy. The strategy that Werner Von Braun taught me was that first the Russians are going to be considered the enemy.

In fact, in 1974, they were the enemy, the identified enemy. We were told that they had “killer satellites”. We were told that they were coming to get us and control us—that they were the “Commies”.

Then terrorists would be identified, and that was soon to follow. We heard a lot about terrorism.

Then we were going to identify third-world country “crazies”. We now call them Nations of Concern. But he said that would be the third enemy against whom we would build space-based weapons.

The next enemy was asteroids. Now, at this point he kind of chuckled the first time he said it, “Asteroids—against asteroids, we are going to build space-based weapons.”

And the funniest one of all was what he called aliens, extraterrestrials. That would be the final scare. And over and over during the four years that I knew him and was giving speeches for him, he would bring up that last card: “And remember Carol, the last card is the alien card. We are going to have to build space-based weapons against aliens, and all of it is a lie.”

When I went to Russia in the early 70's I found out that they didn't have killer satellites, that it was a lie. In fact, the Russian leaders and people wanted peace. They wanted to cooperate with the United States and the people of the world.

—Affidavit recorded in December of 2000 by Carol Rosin, corporate manager of aerospace company Fairchild Industries from 1974-77, discussing the weaponisation of space according to Werner Von Braun, who after retiring from NASA became a consultant engineer for Fairchild Industries in 1972. Rosin has testified before Congress about space-based weapons on many occasions.

In the morning, Yuri was uncharacteristically chatty and he'd used the gas stove to heat up coffee for breakfast. It had been the only time Yuri had served Alexei anything since their journey had started.

It had encouraged Alexei to begin gently probing. Mostly as a way to pretend he had not noticed that the mysterious backpack had now been opened, and that Yuri was assembling what looked like rather complex electronics. Though the main part of what he expected was a weapon of some sort seemed to be composed of a fluted metal tube a foot in diameter and split vertically into two halves.

“So are you going to tell me what this mission is really about now?” asked Alexei while sipping his coffee. It was strong. It felt strange to be speaking almost normally during the day, though out of habit, even if hidden inside the shell of an old plane, both men spoke in low whispers.

“Sure,” said Yuri. But then he waited a long time before continuing in a manner that seemed to Alexei to avoid the question entirely.

“I was a physics professor, you know?”

Alexei kept quiet. Yuri talking was a bit like having a wild animal walk past you in the forest. You didn't want to do anything to spook it.

“I taught physics,” he said again.

“Which university?” asked Alexei, hoping to keep the conversation going.

“PhysTech.”

Alexei frowned. He didn't know what to say to that. What was a physicist from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology doing wandering through Ukraine with a gun? And while he weighed options to keep Yuri talking, Yuri apparently decided to continue speaking of his own accord.

“My brother…he married a Ukrainian woman. They met online, if you would believe it. I argued with him. With all the trouble in Eastern Ukraine, he could not find a girl in Russia?”

Another melancholic smile and a pause. Alexei was starting to get the impression Yuri would talk even if he were alone now.

“But he fell in love. And he moved there. To Donetsk. To fucking Donetsk.” Yuri's voice went strangely high at the end, and he suddenly looked sharply down, as if trying to fix something troublesome in the basketball-sized, shielded component he was working on between his legs. Or perhaps as if he was trying to avert his eyes from Alexei.

“He married her. Irina was her name. She was very beautiful. Much younger than him. I initially thought she might be after him for money, but only until I met her. It was at their wedding, and though it was the first time I met her, I knew straight away. My brother had been right, and it was me who had been mistaken. He must have found the last angel on Earth.” Something fell from Yuri's face and splashed on the metal component that he busily tightened screws inside of with his multi-tool.

It is hot, thought Alexei strangely. Maybe he should help Yuri if the old man was already sweating.

“They had a boy in 2015. Ivan. He was beautiful like his mother and happy and funny like his father.” Yuri stopped suddenly and looked up at Alexei. In this moment Alexei realised that it had not been sweat. Yuri was crying. Tears were flowing freely from both eyes, but Yuri seemed completely oblivious of them. Instead, the steel behind his pale eyes seemed impassable.

“I am not just saying this because he was my nephew. You understand?! You understand? He really was beautiful. Special.” The intensity of Yuri's words told Alexei all he had wanted to know about Yuri's past, and now he wished he didn't know it.

“Yes, of course, Yuri Ivanovich,” said Alexei quickly, using the full name as a sign of respect. Of careful attention. He wanted Yuri to know he knew. He understood, and he did. He really did, and he wanted nothing more than for Yuri to stop telling his story. “I understand. I believe you. I believe you.” He really did.

Yuri looked back down at his work, wiped his eyes unselfconsciously with his left hand, and carried on working and talking at the same time.

“When the meteorite hit,” he said the word with a venom that scared Alexei, “I was visiting. I had just left their home to go get some cake. I wanted to spoil little Ivan that evening. He loved cake. Chocolate cake. It was his favourite. I heard it, of course. Everyone heard it first, which is strange isn't it? It doesn't make sense. You should see the flash first, but everyone who was there says the same thing. The noise came first. Then the light. I didn't even fall to the floor.” Yuri was just streaming his words now, not looking up, not pausing. And Alexei wished he didn't have to hear any of them, but he did. He heard every one of them.

“The building in front of me got hit right in the middle of the roof. It looked like some giant animal that had been shot, and a few moments later, the whole thing started to collapse sideways. I just stood there. Thinking of Ivan. Frozen to the spot. My knees felt weak, I don't know if from fear or the ground shaking, but I didn't fall. I turned and ran back to the house, but it was gone. It was just smoke and fire and rubble.” Yuri stopped talking for a while and Alexei opened his eyes —realising only now that they had been closed. A way of trying to shut out Yuri's words. But the silence had made him open them again and now he saw Yuri was sobbing silently, his head down and his body jerking in silence. Tears splashed on the metal cover of the component he was working on.

“I…I never had kids. Divorced three times. Too cantankerous, they said. Too impossible. Too rigid, too focused on my work. But I didn't care. Ivan was my nephew, but he was enough.” Yuri's voice was breaking now, and Alexei, who had come to think of this man as being made of granite felt his own tears begin to flow down his face.

There was a long pause.

Then Yuri tightened on himself and let out a small mewling sound of pain, trying to keep in a hurt that had destroyed him for the last three years.

“I found his arm. I found Ivan's little arm. That's all I could find.” Yuri's sobbing could be heard now. And Alexei could not take it any more. He put down his coffee and went to kneel next to the older man and hugged him.

“I am sorry,
tovarisch
. I am sorry. I am sorry, my friend. I am sorry,” said Alexei, as he squeezed the old man, now seemingly much older than Alexei had ever seen him.

Russia and the U.S. unite: Former enemies sign agreement to work on nuclear weapons to tackle the danger of ASTEROIDS.

—The Daily Mail
, 16 October 2013

The same day he found Ivan's arm, Yuri had buried it in the rubble of where his brother's home had been and then returned to Russia. He spent a year diverting all the funds he could from his department into his pet project. He had equipment machined, and the key component—the power cell he had conceived in secret—built and tested. It was the size of an orange, and he built three. One he took with him, and one he stored in a bank vault along with its construction details, leaving specific instructions with his lawyer concerning who to give access to it. The third he packaged with all the relevant documentation and left with a friend, telling him he'd call at some point in the future, and when he did, to take the whole lot to a guy he used to know in the FSB. Then he headed back to Novorossiya with his equipment. The border was permeable if you paid the soldiers enough, and Yuri had paid them more than enough. He didn't need money anymore. It was summer. He had taken his customary two months leave from the university.

He needed logistical help to get into Ukraine though, and he'd got in touch with the resistance movement. They had helped deliver him and Alexei to Pryluky, less than 200 kilometres from his objective. He had explained to them he could install a piece of equipment near the airport that would gather all communications and retransmit them without giving away its location. They had sent Alexei along to help the older man carry the heavy equipment but mostly so that Alexei could learn from him how to infiltrate enemy lines. They thought Yuri was a special forces trained, grizzled old Spetsnaz so did not ask too many questions. Russia provided weaponry and expertise in certain things but never officially, and the Novorossiyans accepted this without fuss.

But Yuri was no Spetsnaz. He had been a keen hunter and hiker until his forties, then had stopped hunting, but still hiked in the mountains whenever he could. He had not wanted Alexei along, but truthfully, he would not have got this far on his own. The young man was useful and kind and carried all their food and equipment without complaint.

The Russian Space Forces, also knowns as VKS, from the Russian
Kosmicheskie Voyska Rossii,
were created on August 10, 1992. Commander-in-Chief of the VKS is Col. Gen. Vladimir Ivanov, who was also CINC of the predecessor organization, Ministry of Defense Space Units (1982-1991), since 1989.

—globalsecurity.org

By nightfall the equipment had been assembled, and Alexei noted it looked like some kind of cannon. The two halves of the fluted metal barrel were now held together by dark rings of solid metal. The basketball-sized control component, which sat at one end of the barrel, had drive motors in it and was the attachment point of a thin but very rigid tripod, which could be locked in place. A touch screen tablet was hard-wired on a swivel to the top of this control component. By simply pointing the tablet's camera at a target so that it was visible on the screen, and then selecting the target by tapping on it with a finger or stylus, the motors would activate and the barrel would point at whatever the operator had tapped on the screen. Another tap on the red button hard-wired on the edge of the tablet would activate the weapon.

But Alexei was not sure what kind of weapon it was. It seemed to have no ammunition. Unless it was already loaded in the control component, but if so, it made no sense. The bore of the cannon was about the size of an orange and no more than one or two such projectiles would fit inside the shielded casing that housed the drive motors of the targeting mechanism.

Throughout the day they had heard numerous planes land and take off, but no one had come near their derelict plane, nor had they seen any people from the various porthole windows. Zhuliany Airport was perhaps not as busy as it had been in the past, but Kiev had been pacified long ago, and the separatists had not managed to make any kind of impact on the regime that had been first installed in Ukraine back in 2014.

When night came, Yuri had gone out alone to scout for a better location. Later, they moved the cannon, which took both of them to move it now that it was assembled, into another plane. It was a much smaller military plane, cramped and rusted, but you could see the airport's main airstrip from it, and Yuri set the cannon up so it pointed at it from one of the larger tears in the fuselage of the old plane that was their new hideout.

“What was the most exciting thing you saw?” I ask.

“I found a list of officers' names,” he claims, “under the heading 'Non-Terrestrial Officers.'”

“Non-Terrestrial Officers?” I say.

“Yeah, I looked it up,” says Gary, “and it's nowhere. It doesn't mean little green men. What I think it means is not Earth-based. I found a list of 'fleet-to-fleet transfers', and a list of ship names. I looked them up. They weren't US navy ships.”

—“Game over”,
The Guardian
, 9 July 2005

“Are you going to blow up a plane, Yuri Ivanovich?” asked Alexei the next morning when he awoke. Yuri had been sitting with his back to him, looking through the scope on his VKS-94 at the planes coming and going.

Yuri turned to look at Alexei and spoke calmly, friendly for the first time that Alexei could recall.