2
Even in late springtime Moscow remained brutally cold. Low clouds scudding across the sky cast a monochrome pallor on the equally gray, equally dismal apartment blocks that seemed to march forever across the cityscape. The architectural style, such as it was, had been called “brutalism.” Leftovers from the country’s long, abusive relationship with collective economics, they were nonetheless left standing only because all those people still needed to live somewhere. The fall of communism and the fascist kleptocracy in its wake had not created much incentive to build anything else. Large populations were easier to manage if they were all clustered in one place.
If architecture revealed a culture’s character, then the deeper Owen Harriman wandered into this canyon of dingy concrete the more he longed to flee from it. He wasn’t sure what spooked him more: the vaguely threatening air of an unfamiliar neighborhood in a country they were barely civil with, or the realization that the same authoritarian urges could just as easily be found in his own country. Random scraps of loose garbage tossed about by the wind heightened his anxiety. All that was missing was the sound of a dog howling in the distance.
And at that, a distant canine did indeed begin howling. Owen told himself it was just the wind.
He shook off the chill as a welcome splash of sunlight opened up along the face of the next building. As luck would have it, the block number matched the one on the note tucked in his coat pocket. Owen decided to take that as a sign of encouragement. That, and the place looked a little more tended to than the warren of dull cement he’d just navigated to get here. Maybe that was a way of protecting certain people.
The man’s apartment was just one floor up—he guessed a ground-floor entry was too inviting for burglars—and not that far of a walk. Owen’s facility with Russian was perfunctory, just enough to manage what little reliance NASA still maintained on Roscosmos’s launch systems. He hoped it would be good enough to at least start a conversation on friendly terms.
He knocked on the door, trying to make it sound as non-threatening as possible and realizing how ridiculous the effort was.
There was no answer. He tried again. After a moment, there was a faint shuffling noise as a shadow moved behind the threshold. Owen sucked in his breath with nervous anticipation and mentally ran through his rehearsed greeting as the door creaked open.
A wizened old man, stooped by time, regarded him with skepticism.
“Doctor Rhyzov?”
The little man just stared, dark eyes darting beneath brows unruly as overgrown hedgerows.
“Anatoly Rhyzov?”
Without a word he began to shuffle away and pull the door shut behind him. Owen leaned in and tried one last time, perhaps a little too loudly:
“Arkangel.”
The door stopped moving, then inched back open. The old man still wouldn’t speak.
“Doctor?”
“I am Rhyzov,” he sighed in a voice turned gravelly by the years. “What is it you want, Americanski?”
That was interesting. “How would you know I’m an American?”
“You are rude. Noisy too. Heard you coming upstairs and down hall. No hoodlum makes such racket. That is why they are dangerous, whereas you are simply annoying.”
Owen smiled, he hoped disarmingly enough to keep the conversation moving. “Please accept my apologies if I come across as impolite, Doctor. But if this neighborhood is as dangerous as you say, then may I come in before somebody sneaks out of a dark corner to mug me?”
Rhyzov grunted. “Only because he would then move straight past you through my open door,” he said. “Very well, then. Inside.”
“Thank you,” Owen said as he slipped past. Round one was over, a tie if not an outright win. After months of background research and diplomatic palm-greasing, he was standing in Anatoly Rhyzov’s living room. It was small and tidy, painstakingly cared for and decorated with what had to be several generations’ worth of family heirlooms. In one corner was an open study which was much more cluttered: An old computer sat atop an older desk, surrounded floor to ceiling with shelves stuffed full of engineering texts and loose notebooks. Scattered among the academic detritus were the hallmarks of a life spent in the Russian space program: plaques, paintings, models, even bits of equipment that must have been pulled from old Soyuz capsules. Owen thought they appeared quite heavy to have ever been used on a spacecraft. The rocket equation didn’t discriminate between competing ideologies: Weight was the enemy which stalked every mission, no matter whose flag it flew.
“So,” Rhyzov grunted as he studied Owen. “You come a long way, Mister . . .”
“Harriman. Sorry,” he said, and extended his hand. “Owen Harriman. I’m with NASA.”
If the old man was surprised, he didn’t show it but for the slight lifting of those bushy eyebrows. “What do you do for your space agency, Mr. Harriman?”
“I’m a mission manager in the operations directorate,” he replied, attempting an appeal to the presumed Russian respect for authority. “I’m in charge of something called Project HOPE.”
Rhyzov studied him quizzically.
“Human Outer Planet Exploration,” Owen explained.
“Ah. This I have heard of. Deep-space exploration vehicle, correct?”
“Correct. We’re on track to have the spacecraft Magellan depart for Jupiter in three years.”
Rhyzov nodded. “I hope for your sake it does not become rabbit hole.”
“Excuse me?”
“I may be old, but I am not foolish. Neither am I naive. You appear to be earnest young man, Mr. Harriman. Your agency has wasted a great many men like you on grandiose projects that never left drawing board.” The old man leaned in closer. “Tell me, does that frighten you? The prospect of devoting your life to a goal that may disappear from your grasp?”
He was a cantankerous old fart, blunt in a classic Russian way. Owen realized he wasn’t out of the rhetorical woods just yet. “That is a risk in any scientific pursuit, Dr. Rhyzov.”
A grin cracked his weathered face. “That is the difference in our philosophies, Mr. Harriman. Spaceflight is engineering, not ‘rocket science,’” he said, wagging a finger. “You know this. I know this. Yet your superiors pretend it is somehow about science when research is secondary. What does scientific discovery matter if you cannot get to where you’re going in the first place?”
Owen was taken aback. Rhyzov was right, and there was the gulf between their cultures laid bare. It was too easy to fall into the stylistic traps laid by decades of Public Affairs attempts to sell NASA to the taxpayers.
“You are very quiet for one who has traveled so far,” Rhyzov prodded. “Yet you come asking of this Arkangel business.” The grit in his voice made it clear this was a subject he didn’t enjoy.
“I’m not sure it was a question, to be honest. But here we are. So may we speak?”
“We are speaking now.”
Good lord but this guy liked the wordplay. It was time to cut the crap. “Doctor,” Owen began, catching his breath while ceremoniously pulling a manila envelope from his overcoat. “We’ve found it.”
The surprise in Rhyzov’s eyes said it all. His hands shook as he took the proffered envelope. “This is certain?” he stammered. “How did you even know where to look?” Left unsaid: How did you know it even existed?
“We didn’t,” Owen said. “Chance encounter, which we didn’t even see until reprocessing some imagery a few weeks ago. We’d never have found it without the radiation signature. Even after this long, that pusher plate’s pretty hot.”
Rhyzov glared up at him from beneath those unruly eyebrows. “You deduced our drive system?”
Owen laughed. “Are you joking? What else could it be? And I must say, that’s an awful lot of nukes to absorb without having it glow like a neon sign.”
“It was long ago, as you said yourself. As was your probe to Pluto. Yet you wait until now to have brought evidence.”
“We didn’t know there was something worth looking for until your air force blew up that inbound Soyuz a few months ago.”
Rhyzov’s dark eyes shifted. “What Soyuz?”
Owen maintained his best poker face. So the old guy didn’t know? “The transponder squawk we intercepted was consistent with Spacecraft TMK-1, callsign Dnepr, a long-duration variant that conveniently disappeared from your tracking databases after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Appeared out of nowhere, headed for your landing zone in Kazakhstan. It was coming in fast, too.”
“You say it was intercepted? Why?”
“That we don’t know,” Owen said in a little white lie fed to him by the intel briefers. “But between us, it sure looks like they were expecting it. Those ASAT batteries were spun up pretty fast.”
Dread descended on Rhyzov like a cloud. “What was its orbital period?”
“Forty-four years and five months, give or take a few days,” Owen said. “Consistent with a low-energy insertion from Pluto. Wasn’t TMK outfitted with a Block D service module?” It was a long shot, but if the old guy bit . . .
“Da,” Rhyzov said. He still remembered the details. “Needed for
deep-space missions. More delta-v and extended life support.”
So it had been manned; one more data point he’d needed. “Our information suggests it could support three cosmonauts for thirty days,” Owen said, though the idea of three people being stuffed into those tiny capsules for more than thirty hours sounded crazy.
“Da,” he said again, wheels turning behind his eyes.
“They’d have needed at least one correction burn after breaking orbit, once they’d been headed sunward a while.” Thirty days might have been too soon. But if it held enough consumables to keep three men alive for thirty days, then it could keep two for sixty. Or one for ninety.
There’d been at least one live cosmonaut on that old Soyuz, if only to make sure it had remained pointed in the right direction. It might have been his—or their—last action as a living human being. “So our question for you is simple: Why?”
Old eyes flared with long-simmering anger. “You ask me why, when I just now learn at least one of them tried to come back? It would have been suicide, when they could have just come back with my ship.”
And there it was, the source of the old man’s recalcitrance. He’d poured his life into a machine that had been concealed from history along with his professional reputation, all no doubt due to politics. It was old Soviet Russia, after all: Everything was political, a miserable lesson the United States had recently begun to learn.
Owen watched as Rhyzov leafed through the grainy photographs and read the rudimentary information they’d been able to deduce: dimensions, mass, duration . . . the most shocking feature, despite being something they all knew a nuclear-pulse ship could achieve, had been the assumed velocity. The Soviets had managed to build a massive spacecraft capable of achieving a measurable fraction of light speed, enough to fly a grand tour of the solar system in under a year. And nobody had known about it.
“Impressive work,” Rhyzov finally said, “though your crew complement is too generous by half. The rest of your information is largely correct.”
They’d flown this beast with just three cosmonauts? “You know this business, Doctor. Once you have enough data points, reverse engineering isn’t that hard. We just couldn’t quite believe its origin.”
“Math is math,” the old man shrugged. “Is hard to argue,” though his words hinted at a history of having to do exactly that. Owen saw something change in his eyes, like a barrier had been breached or a vault unlocked. “Please, Mr. Harriman of NASA, we have bantered enough,” Rhyzov said as he shuffled toward the study, waving Owen along. “Come, we have much to discuss.”
As his host poured tea, Owen wandered about Rhyzov’s crowded little office. It spoke of a life filled with family and work. Two families, really, because if a man loved what he did, it didn’t feel so much like work. Owen suspected there had been precious few opportunities like that in the former Workers’ Paradise. Yellowed photographs of children, cousins, and grandparents were interspersed with those of other men and the massive rockets they had constructed together.
His arm rested along Rhyzov’s desk next to an ungainly contraption of lenses and polished aluminum tubes. He guessed it was some type of sextant, perhaps built for an aircraft, more likely from a spacecraft given where it now rested. He wondered if it had in fact been flown in space.
“You like?” Rhyzov asked as he sank into a well-worn chair beside him. “It is from Zond L1.”
“The one you guys flew around the Moon?” Owen admired it with newfound awe—this was actual flown Soviet lunar hardware. “So it wasn’t just an empty capsule?”
“No, not empty,” the little man sighed. “It was fully equipped for human occupants. If they had listened to us, it would have carried a cosmonaut and your Apollo would have been also-ran. Moon race, over. Mother Russia for the win, as you might say.”
Owen laughed. “You were a graduate student on the navigation team then,” he said, letting Rhyzov know they’d done their homework. “Quite an accomplishment, though nothing compared to your nuclear pulse drive.”
“Ah. Now we get down to business, Mr. Harriman. You have dossiers on me as well as Project Arkangel.”
Owen answered with a knowing smile. “Took a while for the spooks at Langley to tease that one out,” Owen said. “Suitably imposing name, too. I’m surprised the party leaders were okay with using Christian imagery for something this grandiose.”
He dismissed it with a wave. “Random codeword. Arkhangelsk is city in Siberia, near Murmansk. We often name projects for cities. But again, you would not be here if there were no questions.”
“Questions are the one thing we aren’t short on.” Owen tapped the file. “This project had a level of secrecy I’ve never seen. If our government knew about it, nobody’s owned up to it.”
That drew a laugh. “Someone knows. Someone always knows. Perhaps right people just wouldn’t pay attention, or someone who should have didn’t and hid his mistake.”
“You’re probably not wrong,” Owen sighed. “There had to be some signal intercepts. Maybe it was lost in the noise at NSA.” His dive into decades-old intelligence uncovered long-forgotten suspicions that the Soviets had been building an orbiting military complex that eventually became Arkangel, believed to be abandoned in the late eighties along with any CIA interest. Owen presumed some bureaucratic dweeb hadn’t figured it out fast enough and hid the evidence just to avoid professional embarrassment.
“Communications and telemetry were tightly controlled,” Rhyzov explained. “Encrypted signals, burst transmissions at random intervals. Ship was too far away for us to control mission anyway.”
The old heads at Star City must’ve loved that, Owen thought. “Still, we should have at least seen the evidence when you lit up that pulse drive.”
“Chemical stage pushed it out of Earth orbit,” Rhyzov explained. “Nuclear stage ignition timed to occur behind Moon’s shadow. Would not have seen.”
“But it burned a lot more than that one time,” Owen said. “Even if our early-warning satellites weren’t looking in the right direction, astronomers would have noticed.”
“Recall that gamma ray bursts were thought to be confined within galactic plane until your Compton satellite demonstrated otherwise,” Rhyzov pointed out. “Late 1991.”
Right about the time when Arkangel went dark. “So those bursts within the plane weren’t natural.” Or as far away as everyone thought.
“Who can know?” Rhyzov smiled, enjoying the game. “We had advantage of launching vehicle before most of your orbiting observatories were operational. Lost in noise, as you said.”
Owen wondered how many astronomers were going to have to reevaluate data from back then. “I keep coming back to one question: Why do something this monumental and then sit on it? Why didn’t they come back? Was there some catastrophic failure?”
“Failure was not in spacecraft.” Rhyzov creaked open a drawer to remove a thick bellows folder. Ruddy brown and worn by age, it was held shut with a simple string clasp. Dust wafted up from its creases as he dropped it onto the floor between them. “Was crew. They malfunctioned. And if your NASA superiors are considering a similar adventure then you must be ready for whatever it may bring. We certainly weren’t.”