Out of Orbit (38 page)

·   ·   ·

“What’s our altitude?” Budarin asked again and again.

“We can’t see you,” the pilot said each time. “We’ll let you know when we see you, but we can’t see you right now.”

That’s impossible, Budarin thought. The planes should have easily spotted them by now. The ground was rushing up to meet them. In the past, there were always rescue teams waiting, ready to catch him. Where were they now?

Bowersox, still serving as go-between, began preparing Pettit for impact, in English. “A few seconds before landing, Don, you’ll see the landing light go on. That means, you know, get yourself in position. You know that.”

Just then, the capsule’s vents opened up to equalize the pressure
between outside and in. Vapor filled the air like so much cigarette smoke, and condensation dripped from the gauges and instruments. Their ears popped. They were seconds away from their final moment of truth.

“We need to get ourselves ready,” Budarin said. “Hold on to your seats.” Then, turning his attention back to the missing search planes, he asked them again to check their altitude.

“I hear you, but I still can’t see you,” the pilot answered. “We think you’ve missed the target by forty kilometers. We’ll be there soon, but right now, we still can’t see you.”

“Everything is different for us,” Budarin said, shrugging toward his American friends. Because the search pilot seemed sure of Expedition Six’s location, no one on board thought to mention the ballistic descent.

“I can hear you, but I still can’t see you,” the pilot repeated.

“Okay,” Budarin replied. “We are in a good mood, we’re fine. We’re getting ready to land.”

He asked Bowersox to try to wipe off a gauge that had fogged over. It calculated the pressure of the outside air, and it had been counting up while they had dropped out of the sky. Once they were on the ground, it would read 731. Until then, it would help them take a stab at their altitude (although why there was no altimeter inside
Soyuz
was anyone’s guess). The closer they came to 731, the closer they were to home.

“It’s at 525 now,” Bowersox said, knowing that it wouldn’t be long now. “Don, are you comfortable in your seat?” he asked in English.

“Da,” Pettit said. “Da.”

“The pressure is at 660,” Bowersox said. He could feel even that small difference in his legs and gut, the weight of it pressing him down into his seat. So, too, could Pettit and Budarin—a gentle reminder of those harrowing moments when each of them had felt the weight of the world on his chest.

“Well, it’s nothing compared to 8.0,” Budarin said.

“I only remember seeing 6.0,” Bowersox said. “I think I lost track after that.”

“Yes, I think so,” Budarin said. “After six months 8.0? That’s pretty good.”

“It was good,” Bowersox said distractedly, his mind having already begun tackling another problem. If the search planes couldn’t see them and if their descent had been that much steeper than it was meant to have been, then perhaps they had fallen well short of their target. “Are we still in Kazakhstan?” he asked Budarin, only half joking. “Is this going to get political? Can we get to Ukraine this way?”

“No, no,” Budarin said. “We’re where we’re supposed to be. We are still in Kazakhstan.” He had kept his faith in the search pilot’s announcement. “Either way, we’re landing soon. Get ready.”

Bowersox relayed the message to Pettit. “Get ready for landing anytime, Don.” Bowersox did some quick math. “I think we’re still around 10,000 feet, but—”

“Roger that,” Pettit said.

The search plane pilot, still unable to catch sight of the capsule, tried to narrow his sights. It was now his turn to ask, “Can you give us your approximate altitude?”

“Our pressure is 650 now,” Budarin said. “What’s that give us? About 1,000 meters?”

There was no reply from the pilot. They had lost their radio connection yet again
—Soyuz
having dropped below the horizon—and now, there would be no getting it back. For the rest of their ride, at least, and perhaps for much longer, the three men of Expedition Six would have only one another for company, as though they had been launched back into space, not returned to earth.

Budarin asked Bowersox and Pettit if they could see anything out of their windows. They lifted their heads and had a look, but they couldn’t see much. There were just flashes of sky and white cloud. Had they been flying their machine, they would have been flying blind.

“Pressure is 680 …” Bowersox said.

He continued to watch the gauge.

“… 700 …” he said.

The reading continued to climb.

“… 710 … 720 … 730. It’s soon—”

When suddenly, the capsule shuddered, and the men were thrown hard into their seats, their necks snapping back, their ears filling with the sharp clang of metal in distress and their noses with dust.

Bowersox spoke for Pettit, too, when he looked at Budarin with wide eyes and asked: “What the heck was that?”

“That was landing,” Nikolai Budarin said with a sheepish grin.

But it wasn’t over yet. Before he could press the button that would cut loose their giant parachute—a button he would not have wanted to press even half a second too soon—a strong wind filled the canopy, and the scorched capsule began bouncing across the Kazakh flats like a tumbleweed. After a few seconds, Budarin managed to release
Soyuz
from its sail, but not before it had been tipped over onto its side. By the time they had come to a real, permanent state of rest, Ken Bowersox was on the bottom of the pile, Budarin was wedged in the middle, and Don Pettit was perched on top, feeling impossibly heavy, with his arms and legs hanging limp in the air.

“We’re good, we’re good,” Bowersox said, after they had come to a stop and the dust had begun to settle.

“Guys, try not to move your heads,” Budarin warned from previous experience. After spending so long in space—like sailors who have been out to sea one too many times—now they risked land-sickness, risked having their insides squeezed out by gravity’s crush. The taller Pettit, especially, was already feeling a little like Atlas. He didn’t need to be told to stay still. Even blinking felt like too much hard work.

Bowersox, though, couldn’t resist turning his head to look through the window just to his left. It was pressed against the earth, and through it he could see a few leaves of grass pressed flat.

“It’s so good to see the grass!” he said. “It’s so nice to see dirt!”

He laughed out loud, surprising himself at his joy, the mundane having turned for him into sculpture. The good feeling reminded him
of the first time he had survived jumping out of a plane with a parachute strapped to his back. In that moment, after his high-velocity plummet had been slowed by his canopy and finally stopped by a forgiving earth, he had come to understand why skydivers kiss the ground. There was such happiness in having survived the fall.

“Let’s go outside,” Bowersox said, eager to get even closer to that green grass and brown dirt, to feel it under his feet, and to take in deep, cleansing breaths. But Budarin, believing that the recovery team was only moments away and not wanting to look to his comrades at TsUP like a maverick, parried the idea of cracking open the hatch.

Instead, following procedure, he pressed a button that prevented the capsule’s several small radio antennas from deploying; each was locked behind an explosive hatch, and Budarin didn’t want to pepper the search party, which he assumed was nearby, with shrapnel. What he couldn’t have known, however, was that because
Soyuz
had tipped over onto its side, their main antenna had plunged straight into the ground. That misfortune left them more removed from the outside world than they had ever been up there. Even the pilots who had been talking to them minutes before could no longer hope to make contact.

The three men of Expedition Six were ignorant to the long-range panic that filled in the gaps in the static; they had no idea that every tracking device available had lost its hold on them, and that everybody on the other end of seemingly every radar and radio in Russia—pilots, engineers, wives—had lost their hold on them, too.

“Let’s just sit here,” Budarin said. “The helicopters should come soon. Let’s wait until they rescue us.”

To fill the wait—and, more important, because his checklist told him that he should—Bowersox recovered from his early excitement and began looking at the capsule’s lights and gauges and writing down their final readings. He recorded the facts and figures of their incredible flight, but now more true to form, he was careful to keep the emotion of it to himself. Besides, there was no one to share it with. There were no friendly voices coming across their radio. There still hadn’t been a knock on their door.

“Can anybody hear us?” Budarin shouted out into the emptiness. “If anybody’s out there, we’re on the ground. We’re good. We’re waiting for your commands. We’re waiting for rescue.”

He looked up at Pettit and asked him how he was feeling.

“I’m fine,” Pettit said, lying just a little. He was swallowing hard through the world’s worst case of bed spins.

And then they went quiet. It felt as though they had run out of things to talk about, like three men sitting at a bar—checking their watches, counting down to closing time—but with nowhere else better to go.

“Usually, you have to wait about thirty minutes before they come,” Budarin said, trying his best to make the delay seem normal.

But Bowersox, his mind having never stopped turning over, was only half listening. Already he had decided that the rescue crews were still hours and maybe even days away. He had done the ballistic math and calculated that he hadn’t been far off when he had joked about landing in Ukraine.

Still, he told himself that, in some ways, lines drawn on maps—and which of them they had fallen within—were irrelevant. No matter whose grass was pressed flat against his window, Bowersox remained strapped inside a small pocket of Mother Russia, an honorary citizen and a guest of a cosmonaut.
Soyuz
was Budarin’s turf, and Bowersox was mindful of the necessary diplomacy for as long as he was in it.

And yet he didn’t especially want to lie twisted and cramped until their rescuers finally showed up.

“You know, it could be that we’re four hundred kilometers away from our target,” he suggested with all of the gentle humility he could muster.

“Yes, the search planes couldn’t see us,” Budarin said, thinking back to their last, confused communications with the outside world. But just as it seemed he was about to reach out for the handle of the hatch, he pulled back his hand. “We don’t want to move around. Let’s just rest.”

They remained suspended in silence, punctuated only by a sporadic
debate between Bowersox and Budarin over whether to switch off some vents that had been running since they had first depressurized the capsule. Bowersox’s manual dictated that they should, but Budarin wanted to keep them on until they headed outside.

“It’s written here—” Bowersox said again and again, pointing to a page in his book.

But Budarin refused to look. It was his turn to be the commander, and, as he had in his decision about the hatch, he wanted it known that his word was final.

Once again, Expedition Six fell into an almost uncomfortable silence. After nearly six months of tranquillity, they had found their first grounds for conflict. It had taken gravity to remind them of their differences.

“The main thing is, we didn’t hit the water,” Budarin said. “At least we hit the ground.”

“Absolutely,” Bowersox said, seizing the opening for dialogue. “And we’re lucky that it’s cool outside. But I would prefer to leave. What if we waited for an hour? Then can we leave?”

Budarin sighed like a parent who was being hounded by a pestering child. “We have to calm down a little bit,” he said. “We need to compose ourselves, and then we’ll see.”

·   ·   ·

Back in the bomb shelters, Sean O’Keefe wondered aloud, and a little angrily, why there wasn’t a fucking satellite phone in the fucking
Soyuz
, so that Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit could call in and announce their fucking location. (Russia’s safety engineers, it turned out, were unhappy with the batteries that powered such phones; they worried that they might leak toxic gases for as long as they were stored in space.)

Paul Pastorek thought about trying to answer the question, but instead he continued taking his notes, having decided that his boss didn’t need to hear that a satellite phone would have been of use only if Expedition Six were alive to use it. His growing pessimism matched the collective mood in those two rooms. Micki Pettit—jet-lagged,
tired from raising two sick children on her own, and stressed out of her scrambled mind—felt as though she might spontaneously combust. It had already been too much for her to take. Now in the waiting, she was pushed closer to the ends of her earth.

·   ·   ·

“How many g’s do you think we pulled there?” Pettit asked in Russian, the first words out of his mouth since he had lied about being fine.

“Nikolai said 8.0,” Bowersox answered in English, almost wistfully. “I hope I didn’t make a mistake,” he said, switching back to Russian.

“It’s fine, guys,” Budarin said. “We’re on the ground. That’s all that matters.”

“I didn’t touch anything,” Bowersox continued, not hearing. “And you didn’t touch anything. It should be automatic. I’m worrying—”

“It’s okay, Ken,” Budarin said again. “Don, how are you?”

“So-so,” Pettit said. “A little—”

“It’s okay,” Budarin said, sounding again like a parent, although this time a gentler one. “You’ll be home soon.”

His own yearning to be there made it harder for Budarin to remain patient. He picked up the radio again. “We’re on the ground, we’re safe, but we don’t know where we are,” he said. “Does anybody hear us?” After listening to a wash of static, he turned to Bowersox and asked if he could see anything new.

“No, just the grass,” Bowersox said, turning his face toward the window. “But it’s so beautiful.”