Peter Weisemann sat drinking a cup of coffee from a plastic cup. As he sipped the tepid liquid, he winced at the bitter taste of the machine-generated beverage. Since being transported to the United States, following his capture as part of Von Braun’s rocket team, he discovered he did not like American coffee, however; he decided as part of his willingness of now officially being a US Citizen, to endure it. At his small house, in nearby Titusville, he preferred to drink tea. Opposite him in the works canteen, sat an American engineer.
Larry Raft read the newspaper, and cursed out loud after reading about the defeat of his local baseball team. ‘God damn it, not again.’ He glanced over at Weisemann. ‘Sorry, man, but these lousy dudes, haven’t won a game in months. Just keep losing me a lot of dough.’
Weisemann smiled at Raft. He didn’t really understand some of the terms used by the American, but decided to be friendly. ‘Perhaps, they should change their tactics.’
Raft smiled. ‘Yeah, I think you may have something there, pal. These guys couldn’t even hit a beach ball.’
Weisemann laughed. ‘I am sure that their director, is thinking very similar.’
Raft then gave the man a curious stare, as Weisemann’s slightly incorrect use of a word referring to the coach, made him realise that he was talking to a German member of the Cape’s workforce. ‘Yeah right,’ he responded.
Weisemann studied the American for a few seconds, then got up and placed his empty cup in the dustbin. By now, he knew the signs of when he was being silently persecuted, for his original nationality. The animosity was always there, and because of this, his wife had already returned to her homeland, after the treatment that she had experienced in their first adopted home, in Huntsville, Alabama. With false promises from the authorities, of a warm welcome in this ‘Land of the Free, the final straw for her being the discovery of her underwear, maliciously damaged by other users of the local laundromat, following a service wash. Even the attendant had acted dumbfounded when confronted with the incident.
He looked at his watch. It was time to finish his shift for the day and head home. After driving across the causeway, to the coastal town of Titusville, Weisemann, entered his favourite diner. There, he ordered a late lunch of a steak sandwich on rye bread, with a cup of tea, and while waiting for it, went over to a payphone, picked up the receiver of the machine, and dialled. After a few moments, he had got through to the operator. ‘Please can I place an international collect, call to West Germany?’ A few minutes later, the dialling tone indicating a successful connection, was heard in his ear. He listened, as a female voice answered him in German, then made a request to her. ‘Hallo, Herr Fleischer, please.’ Weisemann took a breath. A few seconds later he heard the calm voice of Gunther Fleischer. He smiled. ‘Merlin, it is Albatross. I now have access clearance to the program files.’
In his office, Fleischer smirked. ‘Excellent news, Albatross. I am meeting with some friends from the old days, and we will come up with a plan for you. Please stay in touch my friend.’
Weisemann ended his call, then turning to check if anyone had heard him, noticed a smiling young waitress, holding a tray. ‘Steak Sandwich, and a tea.’ He smiled at her, and followed her back to his table.
On the isolated desert steppes of Kazakhstan, north of the Syr Darya River, lies the small town of Turyatam. In the early 1950s, with links to the town’s small railway station, it was identified to be an ideal location for an experimental rocket and missile facility. Originally designated N-IIIP-5, the complex was responsible for the test firing of the Soviet Union’s first ICBM, the R7 Semyorka. The missile was later adapted for space flight, and following the official launch of the Soviet space programme, the site had been recognised as the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Future achievements at the establishment, included the successful launching of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1. The site was also where Yuri Gagarin took off in Vostok 1, to become the first human being to travel into space.
In 1966, the site was expanded at a cost that is said to be one of the most expensive construction projects ever undertaken behind the Iron Curtain. With new infrastructure, to supplement these spreading tentacles of technology, including housing, schools, as well as a hospital and an improved railway network, the new man-made city, was renamed Leninsk. The name Baikonur, was said to be deliberately false, to thwart the Americans in the accurate pinpointing of the base using their spy satellites, and top-secret U-2 high-altitude reconnaissance overflights of the region. The actual town of Baikonur, was situated hundreds of miles north-east of the true location of the cosmodrome.
Dieter Muller was one of a few remaining German rocket engineers, taken to work on Stalin’s missile programme. In May 1945, originally as part of Von Braun’s entourage of escaping engineers and scientists, on their way to the Americans, he had been lured by the Russians, when they had toured the American lines with their loudhailers, promising better prospects, should any key German technical personnel, choose instead to work in the Soviet Union. Under a cover of darkness, while in the custody of an American patrol, Muller and a few others, had slipped away into the hands of the awaiting Red Army. To his dismay, over the years that followed, those exciting prospects of a ‘better life,’ turned out to be a series of broken promises, as by the mid-1950s, and following successful replication of the missile technology by Russian technicians, most of the captured German staff had been sent back to a future of obscurity in East Germany. Fortunately for Muller, having originally worked on Hitler’s atomic programme, his services were deemed too invaluable to dispense with, so had been retained at Baikonur Cosmodrome, as a vital asset in the quest to have the more powerful weapon of mass destruction. Like many of his scientist and engineer colleagues during the war, Muller had also been a devout member of the Nazi Party. At Baikonur, Muller was now a key technician in the N1 Lunar Rocket project, responsible for the machine’s guidance system. He was to oversee the N1’s trajectory, ensuring the gigantic rocket’s direction, was accurate. One of the privileges for this highly appointed post, meant that he had been well accommodated. He was given a bungalow in Leninsk, and had married a Russian girl, who he had met at a conference in Moscow, two years’ previously. They had recently had a son, which they had named Leo. Muller found his wife Natalia to be a good woman. Loyal to both his work, and the Communist Party; she had thoroughly supported him in his ventures. As well as being a full-time mother of eleven-month-old Leo, she worked as an office clerk, for the local bank. While at work, Leo would be managed at a community nursery, set up for the workers at Baikonur.
Muller knew what he had to do, the N1 mission was in his hands, and another test failure would very much start to put doubts into the minds of the Politburo, as to whether to abandon the project outright. Carrying a clipboard, he walked into the control room. ‘Weather is good today,’ he commented to the other technicians at their desks. He walked over to the wall and looked out through the slit at the launch pad.
Situated a few hundred metres away, poised upright at the gantry, ready for Flight Test number 2, was the immense N1, Moon rocket, with its thirty booster engines. Muller smiled. Having already adjusted the guidance unit, situated in the rocket’s nosecone, he anticipated another failure, as the rocket was set up to lift to a level of two thousand feet, then turn over and crash into the remote wasteland, north of the launch site.