As it screamed past the control tower, Colonel Jack Dellingsworth Rader looked down through the finest military binoculars available and saw that the control cockpit was completely empty. He could have sworn, however, that he saw the control yoke move as if under unseen hands.
That, of course, was impossible. But so was everything else about the mysterious Soviet shuttlecraft. After the Gagarin disappeared to the north, the second NASA anticontamination team arrived. They descended upon runway 13-Right like maggots on rotting meat. They swept the runway with Geiger counters, scraped up samples of asphalt, soaked up blood with sterilized sponges, and gathered other bits of physical evidence.
They started from where the shuttle had stood immobile and worked their way down its two-mile takeoff path.
The team leader found the first cube. It was a white square like a child's block. He picked it up in his white-gloved hand and the first thing he noticed was that the cube seemed to be made of material very similar to the rubberized fabric of his anticontamination suit. He placed the cube into a black box and sealed it hermetically.
They found six other cubes scattered along the takeoff path, as if they had been jettisoned from the escaping shuttle.
Four of the cubes were white. The other two were a silvery color. The team leader radioed back a question to the captain in charge of the operation.
"How many men in the first team?" "Four. Why?"
"I'd rather not say. But I think you'd better send a jeep out here to pick me up."
"Why?"
"I think I'm going to faint."
Chapter 4
They came to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, deep in Soviet Central Asia, in the dead of night.
They flew in separately from Moscow because they were too important to risk traveling on a single aircraft. A crash would have obliterated half of the Soviet command structure. The other, truer reason was that they did not trust each other.
The head of the KGB arrived first. He was a general in a green uniform and an abundance of chest medals. Then came his rival, the leader of the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence apparatus. His uniform was gray. They were met at the landing field by the chief scientific adviser to the Soviet space program. Behind them, the moon rose above the skeletal tower from which the Yuri Gagarin had been launched by the hulking Energia booster system only hours before.
The men waited stiff-necked in an operations building for the man who had summoned them to this critical meeting.
The General Secretary of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics arrived in his personal jet just after midnight. He hurried to the operations building.
The others knew that the matter was grave when they saw that he was alone. Whatever this meeting was about, it was so critical the General Secretary dared not bring his advisers.
Guards were stationed about the entrances. The General Secretary personally shut off the lights when he entered.
"To discourage the guards from watching," he said grimly, taking off his astrakhan fur hat and setting it on the table before him. He regarded it intently for several minutes, as if it were a crystal ball. Faint moonlight threw the edges of his bald skull into relief.
The General Secretary had just opened his mouth to speak when a siren wailed in the darkness. Searchlights sprang into life. The crisscrossed under the cold stars, searching, probing for something.
One beam caught a flashing wing. Two searchlights converged on and followed a tiny Anotov-2 biplane as it settled onto the runway, bounced once, and came to an idling stop in front of the General Secretary's guarded plane.
A graceful figure stepped from the plane onto one wing and jumped to the ground.
The guards immediately unlimbered their rifles. Recognizing the pilot's slim-hipped walk, the General Secretary thrust his head out the door and ordered the frantic guards to stand down. He was just in time. They were leveling rifles at the pilot.
He turned to reassure the others.
"It is Anna. I left word where I could be found." The others nodded in the darkness. They all knew Anna Chutesov, special strategic adviser to the General Secretary himself. None of them liked her.
Anna clicked on the light switch when she entered. The four men blinked like startled owls.
"Typical male response," Anna Chutesov told them. "To hide in the darkness in a time of difficulty."
"It is to discourage lip-reading by the guards," the General Secretary said, half-apologetically. "There must be no leaks."
"You are too late. The whole world knows that our shuttle is in American hands. You cannot keep this a secret. Especially this."
"That is not the secret, Ms. Chutesov," said the chief scientific adviser to the Soviet space program, Koldunov. "The loss of the craft is bad, but that is not the worst of it."
"We will talk in the light, where I can see your faces, and you can see mine," said Anna Chutesov. "Lies breed in the dark. If the fear on your faces is true, then there must be no lies between us this night."
"Agreed," said the General Secretary. He did not fear Anna Chutesov, or dislike her as the others did, but he respected this willow-slim blond woman with the chilled steel mind, "Please sit."
Anna Chutesov took the seat that gave her the clearest view of their faces. This was not a time for shirking or flinching. Something terrible had happened, and she had been summoned to help deal with it.
"Now," began the General Secretary. "Our shuttle is in American hands. Now everyone knows this. Koldunov will explain the basic situation."
Koldunov rose to his feet like an instructor before a class, causing the military representatives of the KGB and GRU to sneer. They did not like civilians, especially scientist civilians.
"I will be brief," said Koldunov, and Anna leaned back in her chair because she knew when a man said he would be brief it was a preemptive move to keep the audience from getting restless too soon.
"We lost voice contact with the Yuri Gagarin at twelve hundred hours this afternoon," he went on. "Attempts to make the crew respond continued for several hours, in vain. During that time, there was only one communication from the spacecraft. A single voice, speaking English."
"Which crewman spoke?" asked Anna Chutesov, immediately and instinctively going to the heart of the matter.
"That is the first impossible part. None of them spoke."
"None?"
"There was a crew of three. The voice belonged to none of them."
"How can you be certain?" demanded Anna, her blue eyes like ice.
"Two reasons: voiceprint identification, and the fact that all three crewmen spoke excellent English. The voice from the shuttle spoke turkey English."
"Pidgin English," said Anna, and the General Secretary smiled. Anna was excellent with details. That was her genius.
"Tell her what the voice said," the General Secretary ordered.
"Hello is all right," Koldunov said in English. "It makes no sense. And here is the voiceprint readout." He pulled a long sheet of paper from a brown folder and slid it to the center of the table.
The graph showed four horizontal lines. The top three were like lightning crackling across the page. The bottom one was straight with slight waves just barely visible.
"This is the unfamiliar voice?" asked Anna when the sheet at last came to her.
"Yes," said Koldunov. "Our expert insists no human larynx could cause that kind of readout, but . . ." Koldunov simply shrugged.