Back to the Moon (33 page)

“It isn't folly. We're going to get Dr. Perlman his helium-3. It's important to the future of the world. I thought Virgil explained all that to you.”

“Oh, he did. It's a good story too. But what I'd like to hear, Mr. Jack Medaris,” she said seriously, “is the rest of the story. Want to tell it to me?”

He answered sourly. “You've been told all you need to hear.”

“I don't think so.” She sent the bag of coffee floating across to him, watched as he caught it with one hand. “You need to tell me. Maybe it would help you if you got it off your conscience. You've fooled all of these people for all these months. Now you've by God hijacked a space shuttle, done it so it might even be legal. Now you're on your way to the moon, might even be able to land on it, although I can't imagine how your plan's going to work. Still, it's something to be proud of, Jack. But not if you do it as a lie. I've gotten to know you over the last few days. You're not such a bad guy. You're just driven by something you keep inside. Tell me. I want to hear it.”

Jack gazed at the beautiful and irritating woman. His face betrayed his need to tell, to hear it told, especially to her, and he knew she could see it. He flew away from her, up through the hatch to the cockpit where he might be alone with his computers and his sensors, free of this woman and her questions. He felt relief when she didn't follow him. Then he felt lonely because she didn't.

ON THE ROAD TO BAIKONOUR

Allah Akba Airport, Alma-Ata, the Sovereign State Republic of Kazakhstan

Olivia Grant gripped the armrests of her seat as the TU-144 transport dropped sickeningly out of the turbulent sky and slammed into the rough, cracked runway of Alma-Ata, the capital city of Kazakhstan. She had landed in Moscow and into trouble, since she didn't have the necessary visa for entrance to either Russia or Kazakhstan. After a lot of arm waving and the arrival of a contingent of grim-faced men from the Russian Space Agency, it was decided Grant, as a NASA astronaut, fell under the general visa issued for the corps when they'd flown to the
Mir.
After that Grant had been stuffed into an airplane for a six-hour flight in a seat with a backrest that wouldn't stay up and in a cabin so filled with acrid cigarette smoke that the far bulkhead had been nearly invisible. As soon as the aircraft quit taxiing, Grant pushed down the aisle through the crowd of heavyset women in kerchiefs and men in dark, smelly woolen suits and stumbled gratefully into the cool, crisp air of a high desert. She had a splitting headache.

At Kazakh customs what appeared to be a Russian officer needing a shave held up a sign with her name misspelled on it. OLAF GRAANT. She went to him and identified herself. His eyes widened and he threw down the sign and grabbed her in a drunken bear-hug, then spirited her to a dirty black car. The driver, a man with a soft army cap pulled low over his eyes, was smoking. She rolled down the window, gasping for breath. The boozy officer climbed in beside her, said something, and the car was off. Grant was pummeled by the officer, slapping her on the shoulder.

“As-tro-naut!” the officer shouted, a big grin on his round face. He touched her hair. “Lady!”

Grant recoiled. The car sped past truck after truck loaded with what appeared to be cabbages. She pointed ahead. “Baikonour?”

“
Da, da.
Baikonour!”

The old Soviet Union had built its major launch center at Baikonour for a simple reason: it was far enough south that spent stages of the rockets launched from there fell on Siberia rather than China. After the breakup of the Soviet Union it was left stranded in the independent state of Kazakhstan, a country that, in 1991, declared the cosmodrome to be Kazakh property. Since then the Russian Space Agency had been charged a high tariff for every launch.

“How long?” Grant asked, pointing at her watch.

The officer grinned and pointed at his own watch. He held up eight fingers. Eight hours. Grant groaned. The officer dug a bottle out from under the front seat—no label but Grant knew a bottle of vodka when she saw one. He poured a plastic cup full and handed it over. Grant took it greedily.

“Cos-mo-naut!” the officer grinned, pounding his chest. “Cos-mo-naut Nazarbeyev!”

Grant frowned at the bleary-eyed man.
This was a cosmonaut?
She had spent her entire life preparing to be an astronaut. She had two doctorates, one in physics and one in mathematics. She was a graduate of the Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, California, and had more than five thousand hours in forty different high-performance aircraft, not to mention her flights into space aboard the shuttle. And this
thing
in front of her was supposed to be her equal? “God help me.” She groaned.
What had she gotten herself into?
She thought of Carl Puckett, the obvious lies he'd told. What game was the American government playing with her life? Maybe she should stop now, get back to the United States somehow, be done with it. But all her life Grant had met every challenge that came to her. Even though she was caught up in what seemed madness, she had to do her best to see it through.

Ten hours later, after a jolting journey across two mountain ranges on roads that barely deserved the name, plus two flat tires, waiting once for what appeared to be ten thousand sheep to cross the road, and stopping at a baked mud hut for the worst meal in her life—something greasy swimming in something greasier—Grant beheld the Baikonour Cosmodrome, the pride of the dead Soviet Union.

As she walked through the filthy glass doors into the dank hall of the main administrative building, she saw dust balls blowing across the floor, a hot, stale wind whistling through a broken window. Down the hall a knot of men dressed in heavy, ill-fitting suits surged toward her. One of them, a tall, thin man with a cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth, hugged her before she could push him away.

“Come, come,” he shouted at Grant. “I am Dubrinski. We speak English, yes?”

She followed him past a mural of Yuri Gagarin in his spacesuit, looking nobly up at something in the corner with other cosmonauts below him following his gaze. Grant couldn't see what they were supposed to be observing. A Kazakh flag had been nailed over that corner of the mural.

They went into a meeting room furnished with an assortment of wooden chairs and flimsy card tables. “These Kazakh dogs stole all the furniture and just about everything else in the building,” Dubrinski said. When he said
Kazakh,
it sounded as if he were spitting.

A thick coffee was served and the men chattered along to Grant's increasing discomfort and rising anger. Finally, she grabbed Dubrinski by the shoulder. “What the hell are we doing?”

“These are Kazakhs, Colonel,” Dubrinski said mildly. “They have nothing to say, really, but they have insisted that you spend at least one hour with them before we Russians can have you. It is their way of showing that the launch center belongs to them. They were also very interested in seeing the American woman who claims to be an astronaut. It is actually their considered opinion that you are some kind of rock star. In a way, they wanted to see if you were Madonna.”

“This is bullshit,” Grant muttered harshly, and stood up abruptly. The Kazakhs, drinking coffee and smoking, stopped their buzz of conversation and looked at Grant curiously. “I want to see the equipment we'll be using. There's no time to spare!”

“Sit down, Colonel,” Dubrinski said firmly, “or much more time will pass before they allow you out of this room. Sit down and smile and drink coffee with them. It is the quickest way for us to begin our tasks.”

Grant sat down but she wouldn't drink coffee with the swarthy men. The stink of their cigarettes and body odor was making her sick. Glumly, she answered in monosyllables all questions put to her. Dubrinski apparently elaborated on everything in the translation as the Kazakhs all nodded appreciatively as he spoke. Finally, one of the men clapped his hands, they all stood up, and Grant and Dubrinski were released. He led her out of the administrative building to the same dirty black sedan, bored driver, and stinking-drunk cosmonaut. They drove down a pothole-filled road to a huge hangar. Gigantic doors were rolled back and Dubrinski led Grant through, stepping across rusting railroad tracks. Pigeon droppings pelted them from the rafters.

Two huge rockets lay on their sides in the rear of the building, three-stage vehicles, each stage on its own railroad car. Canvas awnings drooped over the stages. “That is the one you will ride, Colonel.” Dubrinski pointed and led the way, carefully skirting several piles of broken lumber and bent aluminum tubing. As Grant neared the giant rocket, she saw the skylight over it had collapsed and what appeared to be electrical cables snarled out of a conduit nearby. Another pile of cables had been thrown in a corner in a tangled wad. Cigarette-smoking workers, dressed in ragged gray coveralls, picked nonchalantly around the rocket.

Grant ducked under one corner of the protective tarpaulin and walked toward the rocket. She stopped at the booster stage and ran her eyes over it, spotting chipped paint and signs of corrosion on the propellant feed tubing. As she watched, a mangy brown dog ambled up next to it and urinated on the railroad wheels of the booster carrier. “My God, is there no quality control here?”

Dubrinski stepped up beside her. He yelled at the workers, who slouched off after giving him derisive hand signals. The drunken cosmonaut staggered after them, yelling a stream of what sounded like Arabic obscenities. “Do not be deceived, Colonel,” Dubrinski said. “The facilities are old, and our workers have not been paid for many months. But this is a
Proton,
the most reliable space booster the world has ever known. It will take you and your pilot wherever you ask it. Let me show you something.”

Dubrinski led Grant up the length of the booster. He pointed at a cylinder capped with a cone at the end of the rocket. “Your spacecraft. It is all under this shroud. Two stages and a
Soyuz-Y.
”

“Where is the simulator for the
Soyuz
?” Grant asked anxiously. “I'll need some training.”

Dubrinski lit a cigarette. “Our simulator is in Star City, near Moscow,” he said. “You will be trained on-orbit by your pilot.”

Her “host” on the drive from hell to Baikonour was coming back toward them, wiping his forehead on his sleeve. “That moron is going to be my pilot?”

“Him?” Dubrinski cocked an eyebrow, and then laughed. “No, Colonel. He is a Kazakh we flew to the
Mir
space station just to make his government happy. Every time he tried to touch something, we slapped his hands away. I will be your pilot.”

Grant looked at the thin Russian carefully. “Do you have experience?”

“A little,” he said. “Enough, I think. I am a colonel in the cosmonaut corps.”

Grant eyed the man. “How much did NASA pay you to do this?”

Dubrinski shrugged. “Me? Nothing. I am a salary man. The Russian Space Agency? A hundred million dollars, so the rumor goes. Cash. Up front. Some RSA officials are very pleased, I would imagine. Most of the money will go into their pockets.”

Grant looked around at the dingy hangar and the rusty rocket. “Can we get inside the
Soyuz
? I'd like to familiarize myself with the controls.”

“Certainly. We can do that tomorrow when they raise the rocket on its pad and begin the necessary checkouts.”

“What do we have to do to get clearance?”

“Clearance? Nothing. I will just open the hatch and we'll climb inside, fiddle with the controls until you understand everything.”

“There's no procedures involved? It would take a stack of paperwork as high as this hangar for me to do something like that at the Cape.”

Dubrinski laughed heartily. “You Americans make everything too difficult, Colonel. Relax, enjoy the Russian way. Tomorrow I'll train you on the
Soyuz.
Tonight, get drunk with me!”

Grant pulled her coat tight around her neck as a bitter wind whistled through the open hangar. She considered the invitation. She hadn't gotten where she was by being the tentative sort. She could use a little fun. “You're on, Colonel.”

“For tonight?”

“Yes, by damn! And tomorrow you will teach me to fly the
Soyuz.
”

Dubrinski clapped her on her back. “We will rescue the people on board the shuttle as they return from the moon.”

“Sure, Yuri,” Grant said, pleased that he believed the lie about their mission. That would make it easier, at least until they got into space. She'd take it from there. She grinned up into his handsome Cossack face. “You bet your sweet butt.”

MET 6 DAYS AND COUNTING . . .

MONTANA (2)

The Perlman Plant Site

“Listen!” Charlie Bowman said, cupping his ear with his hand and cocking his head toward the ceiling.

Perlman listened but could hear nothing but the faint whir of the air handling units spaced along the massive concrete corridor. He looked up to where Charlie was pointing, at the big circular hatch painted a bright red on the roof of the corridor just outside the old Egg missile launch control room. Charlie had come after him, finding him in his quarters, and brought him out to stand in the concrete causeway that led from the elevator blast doors. Perlman buttoned up his lab coat to ward off the chill of the unheated causeway and listened, but then shook his head. “I'm sorry, Charlie. I can't hear anything.”

Charlie reached up and put his hand on the hatch. He nodded as if it confirmed his suspicions. “Put your hand here, Doc. You can feel it too.”

Perlman didn't share Charlie's concern, whatever it was. They were deep in the silo, behind two huge reinforced concrete blast doors that were locked up tight. But he gave in to Charlie's insistence, and placed his hand on the red hatch, feeling the pebbly roughness of its cast surface. He also felt an intermittent vibration, a distant scratching. He stood on his tiptoes, cocking his ear to the hatch. “Digging?” he guessed.