He was able to make out a few more of the details about the adoptive parents, but he was going to need English-speaking help and an atlas to get any further. He went through the seven next-best prospects, and added their facts to his own list. The next step would be to ask the English-speaking junior lector to help him write to the Russian Orthodox Church in America, enclosing the list, and request that they contact the churches nearest to the boys’ possible locations. There was at least a chance the local churches would know if anyone in the area had adopted a Russian-speaking German orphan. This was an opportunity to bring long-lost children into the fold, after all. To give each a link to their Russian heritage and faith. To make right the wrongs of war.
To find his brother.
4
Simferopol, Soviet Ukraine, 1973
It was not a beautiful machine.
A squatty silver bathtub, riding heavily on eight spoked wheels. Two scientific instruments mounted on the front like a cross between a ray gun and a Christmas ornament. Stereo video cameras gave it lobster eyes.
Even its name was more functional than poetic—Lunokhod. Moon Rover. Typical Ivan engineering, where practicality ruled design. Not much good for pretty, but pretty much good for strong.
Lunokhod had just landed on the Moon.
Thinking through the sequence of how to take the machine down the ramp and onto the Moon’s surface, Gabdulkhai Latypov—Gabdul to his friends—rubbed the sweat off his palms onto his pants legs. He repositioned the procedures book on the console and cracked his thick knuckles. He double-checked that all status lights were green, then reached out and carefully grabbed the controller. Leaning forward, he rested both forearms on the console for stability, stared at the monitor and began.
He tipped the controller forward slightly, pushed the command button and let go. The controller sent an electrical pulse through the console to the giant satellite dish outside the building that pointed straight at the Moon. The signal traversed the 240,000 miles of empty space in 1.25 seconds and hit Lunokhod’s small, pointy antenna. It sent the pulse to the rover’s processor, which deciphered it and briefly powered all eight wheels.
Lunokhod jerked forward slightly, and stopped. A perfectly trained dog, far from home but still responding to its master.
The rover’s twin cameras took an image of the barren landscape and sent it back across the quarter million miles to Gabdul’s huge satellite dish in Simferopol, where it appeared on his fuzzy black-and-white TV monitor.
Ten seconds after he’d released the hand controller, Gabdul saw that Lunokhod had moved.
“ Zhivoy!” he shouted, in triumph. It’s alive! He could hear the stifled murmurs of relief and excitement from the ops crew standing behind him.
Gabdul carefully pushed the controller forward again, a longer command this time, following the practiced protocol to get the machine down onto the Moon. To get to work.
Gabdul had grown up near Simferopol, on the Crimean Peninsula. His family’s Tatar heritage was obvious in his thick dark hair, his wide cheekbones and the glottal sounds of his multisyllabic name. As a teenager he’d stood outside in the Crimean dusk, watching in wonder as Sputnik had raced across the sky, visible proof of Soviet technical prowess and dominance. And when Gagarin orbited Earth four years later, Gabdul decided he was going to be a cosmonaut. Just like a million other Soviet young men.
As soon as he graduated high school, he joined the Soviet Air Forces, which would send him to technical college to study aviation engineering, and after that, he hoped, to flying school. But his origins were a constant impediment. Gabdul had thought that Stalin’s deportation of 200,000 Crimean Tatars to Uzbekistan after the Great Patriotic War was old history, but the bigotry in the military still ran deep—ever deeper, he found, the closer he got to Moscow. Being an ethnic minority from the edge of the Soviet Union made him second class in a classless society.
Despite his graduating in first place, other students with last names like Ivanov and Popov got all the opportunities. Repeatedly denied pilot training, at 25 he found himself a lieutenant in the Soviet Air Forces, working as a junior technical engineer at a space communications ground station near Shchelkovo, on the distant outskirts of Moscow.
Then one day his captain spoke to him during a smoke break out in the hall.
“Gabdulkhai Gimad’ovich,” he’d begun formally, as the two of them stood side by side, staring out the double-paned window at the blowing snow whipping around the hulking silhouettes of the satellite dishes. “There’s a new program starting, and they need smart young electronics engineers. Hush-hush for now, but apparently it will involve a lot of extra training and travel. Are you interested?”