His captain already knew what Gabdul’s answer would be.
Within weeks, he was called to the OKB-52 Machine Building Plant in Moscow, for an interview and aptitude testing. He took his place in the hallway with several other young engineers waiting for their names to be called, hiding their nervousness behind impassive faces. The interview was straightforward: questions about his career, interests, family. He made sure to mention his pride in his father’s army service and his own lifelong desire to serve the Soviet space program.
The practical testing was harder, and also puzzling. They had him operate a forklift truck, driving it around a prescribed course on the factory floor as they timed him. Then they hitched a trailer to it and had him back that up, around a corner. Gabdul silently thanked his father for having imparted that skill when he was teaching him to drive, back home in Simferopol.
One of the evaluators took over as the driver, and they had Gabdul observe the forklift remotely through a TV monitor and issue instructions to the driver by radio. They repeated the test in dim lighting and then they only let Gabdul see the camera image every five seconds, covering and uncovering the screen with a clipboard. He wasn’t sure what they were evaluating him on, but he tried to imagine himself as the driver and say the things that he would like to hear if he was operating the vehicle.
No one gave him any explanation, just stressed again as he was leaving that he was not to discuss the interview with anyone.
One uneasy week later, his captain came into the control room during his shift.
“Gabdulkhai Gimad’ovich!”
“Da?”
The other engineers looked up as Gabdul got to his feet.
“You are leaving us. The Soviet Air Forces, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that you have communicated with enough satellites. You will report to the Lavochkin NGO in Reutov in two days.” He looked Gabdul in the eye. “They haven’t told me what you will be doing, so it must be highly important. So important, in fact”—he fished around in his pants pocket and pulled out two dark-blue epaulettes with a thin light-blue stripe and three stars—“that you’ve been promoted to senior lieutenant!”
He stepped forward, unbuttoned Gabdul’s faded epaulettes and replaced them with the stiff new ones. He stepped back, and returned Gabdul’s stunned salute.
The captain broke into a broad smile. Looking around at the others, he said, “Rebyata! Sto gram!” This calls for vodka!
But at first Gabdul’s new posting didn’t feel important. When he got to the facility in Reutov, a senior official welcomed him and 18 other trainees by lecturing them on secrecy. Then he led them into a factory clean room, where they all donned caps and lab coats and were sent to stand next to technicians who were assembling a machine that would go to the Moon. The official waved his hand at the hulking silver thing, nearly as tall as he was, and spoke to them of its purpose, its complexity and their role as the handpicked team that would drive it.
Gabdul didn’t know what to think. His dreams of flying in space were crashing down around him, lost forever, but maybe driving this beast on the Moon would be cool.
At the first smoke break, one of the trainees said out loud what several others were clearly thinking. “A toy car driver? That’s not what I signed up for. I thought we were going to be cosmonauts!”
Gabdul sympathized, but also noticed he was the only Tatar in the group, and felt the significance of that.
Soon several quit in disappointment. Others failed out of the surprisingly complex, rigorous training. And Gabdul felt a growing sense of something like pride. Of all 240 million Soviet citizens, only he and this small, elite team would get to do this difficult job. The likelihood of a Soviet cosmonaut ever walking on the Moon was dwindling to near zero with the repeated failures of the heavy-lift N1 rocket. But Lunokhod was real, and soon to launch. Even better, the new lunar simulation field and Mission Control Center were being built in his hometown of Simferopol in the Crimea.
This was a unique challenge, and a chance to make his family proud: a Tatar, in his indigenous Crimean homeland, serving the Soviet Union’s space program.
It might not be his feet that would stand on the Moon, but he, Gabdulkhai Latypov, son of Gimadutin, was about to kick up the lunar dust with wire-spoked wheels.
Gabdul had become a Moon explorer.
5
Washington, DC, 1973
Jim Schlesinger was fit to be tied, as usual.
He stood by the window of his seventh-floor office, staring angrily across the George Washington Parkway towards the Little Falls Dam on the Potomac River. As the brand-new director of the Central Intelligence Agency, he wanted change, and it was happening too slowly.