“No,” Dubnin said. “How deep down is it?”
It was hard to see, with chunks of melting ice obscuring the view through the water. But there was the shiny silvery nose hatch of the Soyuz, bobbing ever so slightly. The heavy lines of the parachute rigging ran down to it. “Two meters,” I said.
“Shit, shit.” Dubnin signaled the transport chopper closer. “We’ve got to get a line on it now. It’s filling with water.”
I saw that he was right. The other two rescuers were rolling up the parachute, and literally trying to hold onto it. Not that they were likely to keep a metal ball weighing a ton from sinking while standing on ice!
As the hook came swinging down, I thought of the dead American astronaut Grissom, whose first spaceflight in Mercury had ended with near disaster in the water. The hatch on his spacecraft had blown open prematurely, filling it with water as Grissom swam for his life. His rescue helicopter had already hooked on, but could not lift the weight of a spacecraft filled with ocean, and had had to release it to the depths. Grissom had almost drowned.
Dubin tried to grab the swinging hook, but missed. I snagged it, only to find there was no tension in the line. With the hook in my hand, I fell right into the hole in the ice.
I don’t know which hurt more, the shock of the icy water, which felt like a million needles on my face and hands, or hitting the Soyuz with my side. Somehow I managed to hold onto the hook, still slack, as I floated there, my coat and boots filling with water, blinking at the horror of my situation. I am a good swimmer; my father even took me snorkeling during our time in the south. Being underwater was nothing to fear… unless you were freezing, and hurt, and wearing several kilograms of heavy winter clothing.
I held onto the ringlike collar of Soyuz, trying not to breathe, then saw what I should do. I jammed the hook of the towline into the joint where the parachute lines attached to the spacecraft. (There was a special hook somewhere on that spacecraft for recovery, but I didn’t have time to look for it.) The line went taut, and I pulled myself up, one arm, then another, to be grabbed by Dubnin, who was screaming. “You fucking idiot!”
It was even colder out of the water, as a very slight wind froze me to my bones. I was gasping. Dubnin hauled me back toward our helicopter, which had lowered itself to within a few centimeters of the ice. He pushed me inside and screamed at a crewman, “Get those clothes off him!”
He must have given orders to the pilot, too, because we lifted off, leaving the rescue team on the ice, and started heading back toward Aralsk.
Looking back, my teeth chattering, my whole body shivering as I painfully peeled off my wet, frozen clothing, I saw Soyuz Number 3, also known as Cosmos 140, being lifted out of the hole, a stream of water pouring from its bottom, as Dubnin and his men stumbled and fell gathering up the parachute rigging while trying not to repeat my icy dive.
The spacecraft was safely returned to Kaliningrad, where it was discovered that a small plug in the base of Soyuz Number 3—a section made deliberately removable to allow maintenance on a thermal gauge in that location — had burned through during reentry, scorching the interior of the spacecraft and allowing it to fill with water and sink following touchdown on the ice.
Analysis of the flight showed that the guidance system was still unreliable, the power margins were slim, and the reentry trajectory was unpredictable. The heat shielding was so faulty that it would have burned, or drowned, a crew.
Confronted with this string of failures, what did the State Commission do?
It authorized the launch of four cosmonauts on Soyuz vehicles 4 and 5 two months hence, in April 1967.
21
General Ribko
After several nights in an astonishingly primitive hospital in Aralsk, I returned to Kaliningrad a quiet hero, as Triyanov described it. “You get credit for saving the spacecraft for analysis,” he said. “But remember that the results of the analysis are embarrassing for many people, so they don’t want to be reminded of your heroism.”
Frankly, I was relieved not to be criticized for my clumsiness. I had not made a heroic leap into the icy deeps — I had stumbled!
There was also a small bonus for my actions — fifty rubles — which when added to my small-but-steady salary made me feel, for the first time in my life, relatively rich. I needed furniture in my apartment, of course, but I could also begin to think about a car of my own. Perhaps in three or four years’ time.
My first night back, my father visited my apartment for the first time. I wasn’t completely surprised: He had called me from Air Force H.Q. a couple of hours before his arrival. Actually, the call itself was the surprise. (I was still getting used to the idea of having a telephone of my own.) I had seen him only briefly in the last six months, perhaps half a dozen times since our bizarre encounter at the Foros resort, and not at all since the new year: He had been on assignment in Europe.
As he stood there in the open door, wearing his full military uniform, including its bright-red Hero of the Soviet Union star, holding a loaf of bread, a package of salt, and a bottle of brandy in one arm, he looked better than he had in years — certainly vastly improved over the tired, aging man with his arm in a cast I had seen in Foros. To add to the strangeness, before he entered he actually saluted me! “It gives me great pleasure to recognize your quick thinking and courage,” he said, like Brezhnev bestowing a medal.
I blushed, and even though I was wearing civilian clothing, snapped my best reserve officer salute in return. “Thank you, Comrade Colonel-General.”
Then he did give me a big bear hug. “You can’t believe how many generals have been talking to me about my son the past few days. The story came right up the chain in the rescue services to Kutasin himself.” My father smiled knowingly. “He was extremely relieved to be able to report to the ministers that the spacecraft had been safely recovered, rather than have to explain why it was lost.”
“I can’t take credit for the recovery,” I said, telling my father about my misadventure with the grappling line, having to be fished out of the icy water by Dubnin and his team.
“It’s the idiot who sets out to be hero who gets himself and everyone around him killed.” He patted his medal. “I won this because I let myself get blinded by the sun and broke off an attack.” He was opening the brandy; I handed him my only two glasses. He poured two fingers in each, no more. “We were dropping on a formation of Nazi tanks at Kursk and I lost my bearings, pulled up. I can still hear Frolov screaming at me, calling me a motherfucker right before his plane exploded.
“I was ashamed of myself, but because I had turned away from the attack, I saw this pair of Messerschmidts coming in behind everyone. So I dived on them and got them with my cannon.” My father had rarely spoken of his activities in the war, though I knew he had flown almost two hundred combat missions in the Ilyushin-2, a dive-bomber. He had certainly never given me any details on this pivotal event in his career. “So my big heroic act came about because I had screwed up. And even though I shot down those two Nazi bastards, if Frolov had lived I might have been court-martialed instead!” This was a sentiment I could easily share. We clinked glasses.
Then I had to explain how I had wound up on the recovery team, a story that was even more inglorious in the telling. He grunted with approval when I mentioned General Kamanin. “I haven’t talked to him in years. He’s one of the chief’s nephews.” The chief in this case being Marshal Vershinin, the commander in chief of the Air Force. “He’s very by-the-book. Not a bad man to work for, though. You could do worse.”