The black and white photograph he studied was of desert terrain surrounding what appeared to be a launch platform, constructed at the center of an excavation that looked a lot like an old strip mine. The launch pad was outlined and ringed by dirt roads that circled the crater then arrowed away. The resolution was amazing. He could see a few buildings and the shadows they cast on the ground, what looked like earth-burden bunkers, other structures he could not identify, and still more dirt tracks angling across the desert. “This,” Weiss said, reaching across the table to point out a blotch of light surrounding some metal object, “looks to us to be a ground test of a rocket engine. We think it’s part of the R-7 booster.”
Donaldson nodded. “That’s a good shot there. We got more than we thought we would. See, they’re screwing with the engines, trying to figure out how to arrange them so they don’t either fry their components or shake them apart.”
Hardin had read of the Baikonur space complex in the classified message traffic, but had not heard of the R-7. He looked the question at Donaldson. He knew what Donaldson and others like him did at Redstone Arsenal; Weiss was a virtual unknown and on matters of rocket technology he respected Donaldson’s opinion over Weiss’s. “R-7’s a new heavy-lift booster they’re working on. We’ve only gotten sporadic reports of this in so far, but it looks to be at least 10 years ahead of anything we’re working on. When they start screwing with the engines like this it means they’re pretty close to launching the bird. Or in the lingua franca of Washington, a ground test like this indicates an advanced stage of development.”
“Which we told Ike in a briefing yesterday, practically verbatim,” Weiss added.
“So what?” Hardin wanted to know.
“Okay.” Donaldson fixed his gaze on Hardin. “A couple years ago, Von Braun proposed we launch a satellite into orbit. Ike approved, and the Stewart committee voted on the Vanguard program.”
Hardin nodded. “I’m up on that part.”
“Well…what’s actually happened is that we have two programs, not one. Vanguard’s a Navy project, the Army one is called Jupiter and has continued in spite of the Stewart committee’s official recommendations to terminate it. Vanguard, though, is not in good shape. There won’t even be a test launch until this winter at the earliest. Von Braun’s more behind the Jupiter program, and Jupiter’s in a little better shape than Vanguard, but we keep having to deconflict it with Vanguard since that’s the ‘official’ program. We can’t do anything with the Jupiter rocket that’s going to steal the show from Vanguard. Goddam politics.”
“Sounds like the Army/Navy game’s going into overtime,” Bob Davis grinned.
Donaldson shook his pencil at him. “Now you’re airing out our dirty laundry! I lost fifty bucks on that game! Anyhow, neither program is in very good shape and the Russians look to be a lot farther along on R-7 than anyone gave them credit for. They don’t have to play a bunch of political grab-ass with their programs.”
“Our imint folks, and Sal’s, compared some notes with MI-6 and came up with the conclusion that this R-7 booster of Ivan’s could probably launch your grandmother’s Buick into orbit.” Weiss tapped his fingers on the table and didn’t look very happy.
“Or one of their hydrogen bombs,” Davis interjected obviously.
Hardin understood the reference to Britain’s ultra-secret intelligence organization. He had the feeling he’d just been read into some very advanced intelligence programs. Ordinarily the Brits didn’t even acknowledge MI-6 existed and probably wouldn’t take kindly to the organization being discussed so freely ‘across the pond.’ He wondered again who this ‘Weiss’ really was. The Deputy Director for Operations? It seemed possible. That would make him…who, Cabell? He wasn’t sure. But why would Cabell be working under a different name? No, that was stupid.
“Or those,” the Colonel agreed. “Right now they’ve got ‘em but they don’t have anything that will carry them very far. About all they can do is push them up the hill and roll them down into Iran.” This brought some chuckles.
“Bombs aside, we’re going to look very bad if the Russians put something into orbit before we do. Unfortunately Ike doesn’t exactly share our misgivings about this rocket,” Weiss went on presently, his tone revealing frustration, “which is effectively hamstringing Sal’s operation at Redstone. The DCI and a few others don’t like it much, but the trouble Nasser’s stirring up in Egypt—that’s where the MiG came from, by the way, but that’s another story—has destabilized NATO’s eastern flank enough that we don’t think Ike will authorize an op to try and grab the plans for R-7.”
He’d heard of this, too. Gamal Nasser, the president of Egypt, had apparently nationalized the Suez Canal and blockaded the Tiran straits, and it didn’t look as if Israel would be willing to stand for it much longer. The Suez Canal linked the Red Sea with the Mediterranean, and as such was the most important 100-mile stretch of waterway in the entire region. Egypt now effectively controlled all access between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, and Khrushchev was reported to be furious. The situation was an appalling political mess and threatened to bring Britain and France into the conflict, if one ensued. He imagined the British were more than busy trying to figure out a way to extricate themselves from what was shaping up to be another hideous Mideast morass.
“I thought we were more or less blind in Baikonur,” Bob Davis mused aloud.
Weiss frowned. “We don’t have anyone there, no. The place is too damned isolated. The area bleeds nationalism—hell, after the war Stalin shipped most of the Ukraine to Kazakhstan and I can tell you there still isn’t much love lost between them and the Soviets, but we just don’t have many assets there yet. Until they started up Baikonur we hadn’t seen much of a need, so we’ve dropped trou on that one a little.”
There was silence for a few moments as the small group around the table considered Weiss’s statement. Hardin was growing restless. He was a pilot and his patience for dull discussions of current events was limited. His patience with history was more so. “Look, guys, this might make more sense to me if someone could tell me what I’m doing here. Right now I’m a strap-hanger.”
“Alright,” Weiss said finally. “We want to turn you over to the Brits, Major Hardin. They want someone to fly that MiG-17 of yours into Russia and grab the plans for the R-7.”
Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan
“Privyet, Aleksei Denisovitch.”
The eastern horizon had begun to glow, and the morning sun would soon be peeping around the dark mass of the nitrogen plant, half a kilometer or so to the east. A breeze stirred his shock of dark hair, bringing with it a chill that caused him to shrug his shapeless gray overcoat a little higher on his shoulders. Late August and already the mornings were growing colder.
The new space research facility, ScientificResearchTestRange #5, was called Baikonur when its existence was acknowledged at all, but it was not close to the city that bore the name. That was located some 380 kilometers to the north. The name had been chosen to mislead Imperialist intelligence. The Baikonur research facility was actually located near the Syr DaryaRiver in south Kazakhstan, a few kilometers north of the old town of Tyuratam. A copper mine had been there once, long ago, and a gulag might have been located nearby in the 1920’s or 1930’s, but now nobody much remembered. There was a railroad, the old village, the river, and nothing else. Around the Baikonur facility the featureless gray steppe stretched far away in all directions.
At first, the only sign of human habitation had been an empty stretch of railroad track, a spur from the tiny railway junction village of Tyuratam that straggled ten kilometers or so north to the abandoned copper mine. The spur had probably been laid by zeks from the old gulag to haul ore when the old open-pit mine was still active. After the site of the mine had been selected for the test range, a motovoz had been shunted onto the spur and served to ferry construction materials to the site from the main line. A cement plant had been one of the first structures er
ected by the 217th Construction Brigade, who brought several war-era bulldozers, scrapers and excavators to help with the work. With the steppe’s ready supply of sand cement was produced in quantity and served as the primary building material. Next a few research and production buildings had gone up, the Oxygen/Nitrogen Plant to the east, the MIK-2-1 Assembly Building a few kilometers to the northwest, and construction had begun on the launch gantry. Further to the west was ‘tent city,’ where the engineers and soldiers of the 217th were housed.
The road underfoot, recently completed and paralleling the spur, smelled of dirty concrete and dust and oil. Aleksei’s dark eyes beheld the tall, gaunt form of his friend, shrouded as he in a gray overcoat. Nodding at the other, he stepped off onto the dusty shoulder. “Privyet, Yaroslav Ivanovitch,” he replied. “Sleep well?”
His companion fell in beside him and they walked a little ways out into the steppe, their feet brushing with a dry crackle through the barely visible scrub. “Like shit. Got drunk but it didn’t help.”
Aleksei grinned. “Perhaps you drink too much.”
Yaroslav scowled. “It’s too early in the morning for humor.”
“It’s too early to be taking walks like the dogs but we do it anyway, don’t we?”
The older man shrugged. “Have to do something to prepare my ass to be sat on all day long.” He paused, fished in the pocket of his overcoat for a cigarette, and after a dint of effort managed to strike a match to it. He offered a second to Aleksei, which the younger man accepted. The taste was foul but the nicotine welcome as he took a long drag, feeling the smoke fill his lungs.
“This is awful,” Aleksei muttered. “What are these things?”
His companion grinned sardonically, teeth shining through a dark haze of unshaven stubble in the half-light of dawn. “Great, aren’t they? Some crap the black-asses produce. Nikolai traded one of the soldiers for a couple packs.”
“I think comrade Nikolai got the worse end of the deal.”
They smoked in companionable silence for a bit while Yaroslav made a production out of kicking at a clump of perekati polya, a scrub-like plant that grew to a meter in diameter or more before breaking off to become a far-ranging tumbleweed. “What a god-forsaken place this is, eh Aleksei? Dust, rocks, black-asses, the army and the apparatchiks.”
Aleksei grinned. “I like it here. I grew up around here, you know? Sort of around here, anyway. I always loved the steppe in the springtime, when the sage blooms. And anyway, what more does one need? What’s got you in such a humor this morning, Yarik? KGB sniffing around Propulsion?” But Yaroslav was like that, up one minute, gloomy the next. There was probably some clinical term for people who behaved in such a manner, but his scientific specialty was not medical.
The other kicked again at the scrub. “Ah, we got an ass-chewing by Tikhonravov yesterday. Some party official was visiting and we told a bunch of lies, then we got our butts chewed.”
“Who was it? I heard someone was visiting but didn’t hear who.”
“Could have been the Minister of Liquor and Cigarettes for all I know. I know nothing from government officials. We were told to keep our mouths shut unless he asked us something directly and then we were to lie like rugs. Then Tikhonravov chewed our butts because the last batch of parts wasn’t correct.”
Aleksei grimaced. “Yes, we got the same treatment.”
“Like it’s our fault,” Yaroslav ranted on, lighting a second cigarette from the butt of the first and flicking it away. It spun end over end in a high arc and vanished into an unprepossessing clump of scrub. “You know we’ve got the thing running on kerosene now? Kerosene. I think we’ve screwed with everything from paint thinner to vodka. German rockets, Czech parts, Asian propellants and Russian liquor. That’s the space program for you.”
Aleksei shrugged, looking over the steppe towards the MIK-2-1 Building. Lights always burned in the huge assembly bay and through the line of windows the main cylindrical body of the R-7, thirty meters long and lying on its side on concrete stocks, could be seen. When the R-7 was ready, a heavy mover would haul it out of the bay and up-end it into vertical launch position. Clustered about the lower half of the white rocket were four conical strap-on boosters, twenty meters in length, each bristling with nozzles for thrust and steering. The rocket had not yet been launched but the theory was that the boosters would ignite first, and if each strap-on booster achieved full thrust then the central stage was ignited. The four strap-on boosters formed the first stage of the R-7 rocket, burning for 120 seconds after full start and producing approximately 405 tons of thrust. The larger core—the second stage—burned for 320 seconds at 497 tons of thrust.
Sergei Korolev, The Chief Designer, had completed the first R-series rocket—aptly named Rocket 1—some five years after the end of the Great Patriotic War. Aided by the work of relocated German scientists, the R-1 was virtually an identical copy of a captured German V-2 and formed the blueprint for the entire Soviet rocket program. Although the R-1 project was beset by poor quality of the manufactured components, problems notably absent in the German originals, the Soviet engineers learned a great deal about how to build rockets. The engine in the R-1 produced approximately 25 tons of thrust, but when the R-2 came along the engineers increased that by nearly ten tons. Other modifications and improvements followed rapidly, and the Russian engineers began to depart significantly from the original German designs. Engines were moved around, strap-on boosters were tried, separate stages proposed, guidance systems improved. In the ten years that followed the Great Patriotic War the Russian Space Program advanced twenty-five years.
R-7 would make the world sit up and take notice.
The R-7 propellant team had settled on a combination of liquid oxygen and a special grade of kerosene to fuel the R-7. But Loginov was right: designers at Scientific Research Test Range #5 and the other facility over at Kaliningrad had experimented with an astonishing assortment of chemicals to use as propellants before settling on the current favorite, LOX/Kerosene. “Could have been worse,” Aleksei muttered. “You could have had the Comrade Chief Designer chewing on you!”
“Crap. He hasn’t budged from that house of his in months, I don’t think. Besides, he wants little to do with the propulsion department, and that suits me just fine.”
“Then read Pravda more often,” Aleksei suggested unhelpfully. “That will fix your attitude!”
“How else can I learn what a happy life I lead?” his companion replied, brightening as he responded to the ancient gag. “And how do I know Adam and Eve were Russian?”
“Why else would they think they’re in Paradise when they were homeless, naked, and had just one apple between them?”
They were old jokes, but there was something companionable in their exchange.
They walked on through the steppe, as was their sometime habit, angling northwest towards the MIK-2-1 Assembly building. Farther away and more to the east stood the metal skeleton of the launch gantry, beginning to glow in the pink sunlight, tall and stark against the desolate landscape. Heavy rectangular concrete pylons jutted up from the pit, supporting a heavy concrete slab that would eventually sustain the weight of the R-7 rocket. “Cold today,” Aleksei offered, jamming his hands deeper into the pockets of his overcoat as the wind whipped dust past them. “Winter’s going to come early this year, Yarik.” Winters in Kazakhstan were especially evil. Blizzards could drop several feet of snow and the wind slung ice particles so violently it felt as though you were being peppered with gravel. It was small wonder that they sent exiles here.
“Hmm,” the other grunted, not really listening. “You know, Aleksei, even if the propellant department does its work for a full year without once yanking their wieners, the damn thing still isn’t going to fly. It’s too heavy.”
“The Comrade Chief Designer will figure it out eventually, I suppose. Give me another of those smokes. I live in Guidance and keep my head down, and you’d do well to do likewise.”
Yarosl
av raised an empty hand and twisted it in an odd fashion. Suddenly there was a cigarette in it.
Aleksei grinned. “That’s a good trick! You’ll have to teach me how to do that.”
“Not likely, junior,” Yaroslav replied with an acerbic grin as he passed over the cigarette and offered his friend a match. “That’s a trade secret. So how are things going over in guidance? Got the thing set to come down somewhere in America yet?”
Aleksei shrugged diffidently, cupping his hand around the match and applying the flame to his cigarette. “No, that’s the job of the Ministry of Defense. Our job is to get the thing to go straight up. How hard is it to get a rocket to go straight up, anyway?” he muttered from the corner of his mouth, concentrating on his smoke.
“Ours seem to want to go anywhere but where they’re told,” Yaroslav grinned.
“We noticed. Anyway, it isn’t like the satellite actually does anything. I went and took a look at the thing yesterday. Grisha told me the radio components are crap and the contraption weighs half a ton. Maybe the Comrade Chief Designer thinks it will do something different if we launch it into orbit.” He fell silent for a moment as they strolled through the steppe, enjoying the brisk morning air and the sound of his booted feet scuffing through the scrub. “What the hell, it’s the Americans that know all about guidance anyway.”
A Cold Flight To Nowhereville Page 2