He showed his badge to another seated guard, who nodded and pointed with his thumb at the solid-looking door behind him. Kaz gave it a push, and then pushed harder at the unexpected weight. He closed it carefully behind him, trying not to make much noise. He was suddenly inside the hub of manned spaceflight, and the experts were at work.
He’d entered a room of pale-green consoles, each stacked progressively higher, like in a theater. The workstations all faced the three big screens on Kaz’s left, glowing with yellow-orange hieroglyphics of numbers, acronyms and schematics. Behind each console Kaz could see a face, lit up by the displays, hazed by cigarette smoke. Each specialist was wearing a half headset, so they could hear both the radio conversation and the voices around them. Mission emblems of previous spaceflights, all the way back to Gemini 4, hung on the walls.
Kaz stood watching the Flight Control team as they communicated with the Apollo 18 crew, now back at work in Building 5. He spotted a familiar face, a fellow test pilot who raised a hand to wave Kaz over. He threaded his way up the tiered levels, trying not to disturb the concentration of the flight controllers.
Kaz ended up behind the CAPCOM console, where he shook hands with Chad Miller, the backup commander of Apollo 18.
“Welcome to Houston,” Chad said softly. “You were over with the crew?”
Kaz nodded. “They’re doing good.”
The two men watched the room work for a minute. A cartoon-like graphic of Pursuit was projected on the big center screen up front. The ship was about to disappear behind the Moon, so Chad asked, “Need a coffee?” Kaz nodded, and the two quietly worked their way out of the room.
Chad Miller, like the rest of the Apollo 18 prime and backup crewmembers, was a military test pilot. Clear blue eyes, sandy-brown hair, square shoulders filling his short-sleeved sky-blue polo shirt, tucked in smoothly at the narrow waist of his compact body. Gray slacks, brown belt, brown loafers. His strong hands and forearms flexed as he poured coffee into two white-enameled mugs. He wore his oversized Air Force–issued watch on his left wrist.
“Cream or sugar?”
“Black, thanks.”
Chad handed him his cup and led him to a small briefing room, where he and Kaz leaned easily on the long table, catching up. They knew each other somewhat from test pilot days, but Chad had worked at Edwards and Kaz at Patuxent River, so they’d never flown together. Chad had a reputation in the small community as a superb pilot, the consummate stick-and-rudder man, with an unforgiving intolerance of incompetence in himself and others. It was a trait shared by many astronauts, and Kaz respected him for it—someone who could get shit done.
At a pause in conversation, Kaz posed the question that everyone asked the backup crew. “Think you’ll fly?”
“Nah, Tom’s just too damned healthy.” Chad laughed. “And it looks like 18 will be the last Apollo. My last chance to walk on the Moon. I’ve wanted to do that ever since I was a kid.”
Kaz nodded. “I know that feeling. But my days of flying any kind of high-performance machine are done—the Navy prefers a pilot with two eyes.”
“Makes sense, I guess. Hopefully NASA will let you fly backseat T-38 while you’re here.”
Kaz agreed, then leaned to glance out the open door, making sure no one was listening in the hallway.
“You coming to the debrief after the sim?”
Chad nodded.
“There’s something we’ve all got to talk about.” Kaz paused. “The Russians have been busy.”
3
East Berlin, 1957
The Russian Orthodox cathedral’s vestry was cold. Father Hieromonk Ilarion shifted his weight and hitched up the shoulders of his robes to cover the back of his neck, grateful for the extra layer of long underwear he’d decided to put on that morning.
Sitting on a high stool, the weak winter light shining through the nearby stained-glass window, Father Ilarion carried on with his scrutiny of the US Army’s partial listing of War Children—German orphans who had been adopted by American soldiers after World War II.
The process of obtaining this mimeographed copy of the list had frustrated even the patience of a hieromonk—over a year of navigating foreign military bureaucracy and its confidentiality concerns. Ilarion had written nine separate letters, each carefully translated for him by an English-speaking junior lector at the cathedral, and he had gone twice in person to meet with the ecumenical cleric at US Mission Berlin. A complicating factor was the Americans’ unspoken embarrassment that their conquering soldiers had fathered thousands of illegitimate children in Germany. As US-Soviet tensions in Berlin heightened, it had only gotten harder to maneuver.