The vodka was reserved for when there was something to celebrate, which there hadn’t been for a while.
From the center drawer he retrieved a green baize-covered notebook and set it squarely in front of himself. In his filing cabinet against the wall there were dozens of identical notebooks, KGB-issue, each neatly hand-lettered on the spine with start and end dates. He flipped the current book open to a fresh page, tidily wrote the date in the top right corner, and then flipped back to his previous day’s notes, quickly scanning to refresh his memory on the most current issues. He’d set water to boiling and got himself a cup of tea with two sugars, grabbed two pieces of dried cinnamon raisin toast from the communal tin, balanced them on the saucer and re-sat to begin working through his new stack of mail.
The KGB translation service was slow, but thorough. They provided a running supply of foreign periodicals and trade journals, and Vitaly was on the internal subscription for several. By the time they were delivered to his desk they were normally a few months out of date, but for his strategic purposes that was fine. They also made interesting reading, providing insight into not just what the enemy was doing, but how they explained it to themselves.
He pulled the next mimeographed, stapled bundle from his inbox and saw that it was Stars and Stripes, the long-running American military newspaper. His eyes darted around the paper quickly, hunting for patterns.
The front page was dominated by Vietnam War peace negotiations and US presidential election news. Nothing useful there. Vitaly licked his thumb and forefinger and turned the page, careful not to smudge the cheap ink. A photograph on page two caught his attention. It showed three men in different uniforms standing next to a model of a tall white rocket. The headline read
Military Astronauts—Moonbound!
The United States Air Force and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration today jointly named USAF Lieutenant Colonel Thomas H. Hoffman, USN Lieutenant Michael H. Esdale, and USMC Captain Lucas B. Hemming as the crew for Apollo 18, the last scheduled lunar landing mission.
Hoffman, commander, and Hemming, lunar module pilot, will explore the lunar surface, while Esdale, Command Module pilot, conducts extensive scientific experiments in lunar orbit. Esdale, who has a PhD degree in chemistry, will be the fourth holder of a doctorate to voyage to the Moon. He will also be the first Black astronaut.
Apollo 18 is scheduled for launch in April 1973. Final choice of the landing site has not yet been made. The 12-day mission will continue the emphasis on both lunar surface and lunar orbital science. Lunar surface stay time will be up to 68 hours, and three exploration periods of up to 7 hours each are possible. An Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package will be deployed. Mapping of the Moon and several scientific experiments will be continued from lunar orbit. Esdale will leave the spacecraft to retrieve film from cameras in the service module during the trip back to Earth.
Backup crewmen are USAF Major Chad Y. Miller, USN Lieutenant Robert L. Crippen and USMC Captain Robert F. Overmyer.
Vitaly traced the name as he reread it, his brain spinning. My source is assigned to an Apollo spaceflight! Kalugin had put the pieces in place more than a decade ago, but to see this news in print was somehow shocking. He took a sip of tea to hide his emotions from his three office mates, his brain racing.
Vitaly Sergeievich Kalugin’s source! This was a wild dream he hadn’t allowed himself to count on, even when the MOL program had been announced. The insight that they now could get into the actual hardware and operations of the US space program would be unprecedented. And this assignment also meant that his source would rise faster through the officer ranks in their military—several early astronauts were now generals. He’d also be front-of-line for future US spaceflights, including the reusable Space Shuttle their president had recently announced and the Skylab space station.
For the long game, this was a superb development. He leaned down to pull his desk drawer open and grabbed the bottle of vodka.
9
Ellington Field, Houston
Kaz and Chad stood next to each other at Ellington Field, the US Air Force base five miles north of the Manned Spacecraft Center. Ellington had been a military airfield since 1917 and was one of the reasons MSC was located in Houston.
Both of the men were wearing sunglasses and heavy black ear protectors against the blowing grit and noise. “What a crazy flying machine!” Kaz yelled. Chad nodded and gave him a thumbs-up. It was Chad’s turn to fly the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle next.
It was a Rube Goldberg contraption that someone had once said looked like a flying bedstead. The nickname had stuck. The Bedstead had a jet engine that pointed straight up, and hydrogen peroxide thrusters mounted at all angles on an ungainly aluminum frame. The pilot’s seat was open to the air, stuck incongruously on one end like a crane operator’s shack. The vehicle had been designed and built in a hurry to train Apollo astronauts on how to land on the Moon, and it looked it. Hovering 200 feet in the air, held up by the raw power of the downwards-thrusting turbojet, Tom Hoffman was practicing landings, the peroxide jets puffing bursts of smoke to the sides.