A Cold Flight To Nowhereville

by Steve Fletcher

  After a few kilometers she saw several large dilapidated buildings that had once been hangars looming a few hundred meters to her right, across the railroad tracks. The long metal structures were rusted now, the white paint peeling and covered with snow, surrounded by frozen sage and bits of junk. Perhaps in the past cargo aircraft had flown from this field, but now most goods came and went by rail. The trains proved cheaper and more reliable to operate than transport aircraft. The field looked as if it had been abandoned for years. She steered the truck onto the access road and found the pavement in poor shape, requiring her to creep along in order to avoid the cracks and deep potholes she could see as depressions in the snow. Some wag had once written a letter to Pravda congratulating the Party for moving the potholes from the fields back onto the streets where they belonged. She passed some broken-down structures and steered carefully onto the snowy ramp, choosing the nearest open hangar as her hiding place. Backing into the empty bay she killed the engine, hoping the wind and snow would obliterate the tracks she had left. From her vantage point she was protected from the wind and had a good view of the runway and the southern approaches, so she settled down to wait.

  Location Unknown

  He’d been hit but the damage did not appear to be immediately critical. He guessed he’d been hit in the aft fuselage somewhere, but the chase jet had given up the pursuit when he’d flown directly into the storm. He heard chatter on the guard channel but the electricity in the air was causing heavy interference. He knew he’d stirred things up but good. The last pilot seemed to be telling the tower he’d shot Hardin down and if they wanted to believe that, that was fine with him. It would buy him some more time, and he didn’t think the local Tall King radar sites would be able to pick him out of the storm.

  Flying into a storm was a pilot’s worst fear. Conditions inside a storm were unpredictable and deadly, with ice, lightning and winds that could reach hundreds of knots. Already the MiG was being badly buffeted and visibility was as close to zero as made no difference. The immediate danger, if the wings weren’t ripped off outright, was being blown sideways off course. He extended the landing gear to give himself more stability and add drag, which would help counteract huge speed increases by the winds. Now he had no idea where he was. He debated dropping out of the storm but he was currently at fifteen thousand feet, and without knowing the terrain he could find himself flying into the side of a mountain. He fought to keep the MiG’s wings level while he checked his last map.

  If he was anywhere close to where he was supposed to be, he should be in Kazakhstan and over level terrain. But he’d had no time in the last half-hour to work out the geometry from his last estimated position, and it didn’t look like he’d have a chance now. If he flew too far, though, he would be over a range of mountains that the map placed just on the eastern side of the Syr DaryaRiver. Oil pressure was dropping and he knew he would have to lost altitude or risk catastrophic engine failure in a storm, in which case his chances of bailing out successfully were exactly zero. He throttled back and put the wounded MiG into a gentle glide. Lightning flashed nearby and for a moment he was blinded, but as his vision returned he saw that he was passing through eight thousand feet and the clouds were thinning. Snow was pelting the canopy and as the MiG broke through the lowest clouds at five thousand feet he saw a vast expanse of flat, snowy terrain below. Not much else was visible.

  Oil pressure continued to drop and he knew he’d been hit somewhere near the back oil pump, which meant the high-pressure shaft was going to fail and he would lose the jet. He would have to keep it in the air as long as he could and then bail out. He scanned the horizon for any recognizable features and finally spotted a ribbon of gray water, far in the distance. The Syr Darya! But where along the river am I? Am I north or south? He throttled up, pushing the MiG to its limits until the river drew nearer. He banked and came to a heading of 208 on the compass, paralleling the river’s path. Where’s the damn city? If that’s the Syr Darya I can’t be that far away from it!

  His heart raced as he fought to keep the jet in the air. Engine temperature was rising and he began to smell smoke, but far to the north he spotted a dark mass on the snowy plain that might have been a city. But which one? If I’m too far south it could be Turkistan, but I can’t tell which side of the river it’s on! But the cockpit was starting to fill with smoke and he was out of time. He released himself from the seat harness, grabbed his packet of clothing, unzipped his flight suit and jammed it inside. Quickly he refastened the harness. The ejection seat on the MiG-15 had been a crude explosive affair and was notorious for injuring pilots, and Hardin prayed the designers had put a little more thought into the seat on the MiG-17. He released the canopy seal and slid it back with an effort as a tornado of wind lashed the interior of the cockpit. He felt a violent thump as the crippled MiG bucked, and he knew the high-pressure shaft had finally failed.

  As smoke poured into the cockpit to be whipped away by the wind and the MiG nosed over into a final dive, he reached down between his legs and yanked the ejection handle.

  Kyzylorda, Kazakhstan

  Katia woke with a start, jerking her head up from the steering wheel. She was shivering; a glance at her watch showed the time to be half past ten in the morning. She had slept in the cold truck for nearly three hours. Coming to her senses she realized with dismay that she was still alone at the airfield—no aircraft had arrived. Worry rose in her as she wondered what had gone wrong—had the courier run into trouble or gotten lost? Gradually her worry turned to irrational anger. Nothing in the past few days had gone right, and she felt helplessly inadequate to change the situation. How was she to get the film out of the country without a courier? Silently she raged at the dark, cloudy skies. Somehow she would have to find the strength to go on by herself, completely cut-off and without support. She would find a way.

  She wondered what to do. It was too soon to give up on the courier arriving. She sighed and looked around the empty hangar. Some pieces of metal lay scattered here and there, rusting and filthy, and a stray piece of canvas flapped in the wind at the hangar bay. Although she was cold the hangar effectively blocked the wind, so the cold was not unbearable. Still, the deserted field was a lifeless, depressing place and her surroundings weighed on her spirit. She knew she was not feeling like herself. The abrupt departure of her handler had been unexpected and left her emotions somewhat raw. But she was a professional and knew, for the most part, how to control her feelings. She scanned the southern horizon with the binoculars. Their quality and workmanship was excellent, for although there were Russian markings on them she knew the glasses were British. She slowly panned the flat, snowy countryside.

  Nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing but the lonely steppe, the blanket of snow broken here and there by rocks and rough ground, the ubiquitous perekati polya shivering in the winter wind.

  Kyzylorda, Kazakhstan

  Hardin’s vision went black from the force of the explosive charges firing and he heard the sound of a freight train howling around him. When he could see again the seat had detached and was falling away, his parachute had deployed and the stricken MiG was in a steep dive. Oily black smoke poured from the open cockpit until the jet finally plowed into the snowy ground and erupted in a tremendous fireball as the remaining fuel exploded. A few seconds later the balls of Hardin’s feet hit the ground and he twisted and rolled into a snow bank a few hundred yards away from the remains of the MiG.

  For a moment he lay in the snow conducting a mental inventory of himself. Thankfully he seemed to be in one piece, but his back felt as if he’d been trying to dead lift a bulldozer. He clambered out of the snow bank, releasing his harness and flexing his back to ensure there was no permanent damage. He was sore, but that was all. Quickly he gathered up the parachute, straining to pull the harness as wind filled the shroud, and buried it in the snow bank. He pulled off his helmet and concealed that in the snow as well. Unfortunately there was nothing he was going to be able to do about h
iding the burning wreckage of his airplane.

  He stood for a moment, his booted feet sunk into a foot of snow, watching the MiG burn. The jet had plowed into the ground at a steep angle and had thrown parts for hundreds of feet in every direction, scattering the snow as it dug a crater in the frozen sand. He swore at himself furiously. That’s swell, Hardin. That’s just swell! You let ‘em bounce you, like an idiot! They’ll give you a medal for this one! He mooched around the perimeter of the burning wreck for a while, his reasons unknown and his thoughts inchoate. Here was a scorched turbine blade smoking in the snow, there a blackened part of the compressor. He had never lost a plane before; he had planned all along on losing this one, but not quite so soon and not in this manner. It seemed strangely ironic that he should lose a Russian jet on Russian soil, in an operation nobody would ever know of, in an action for which he would receive no award. There would be no kill tally to increase, no lionization from his fellows, no medals, no recognition. Just a wrecked jet burning on the cold, snowy steppe.

  And one stranded pilot staring at it.

  Less stick, more forehead.

  How did you come to grips with the mistakes of a lifetime? They were all here, now, embodied in the burning wreckage of the one thing that might have kept him alive. He hadn’t prepared. He hadn’t planned, not sufficiently, not the way he should have. He’d done just enough to get him into the jet and flying, the way he always had. It was characteristic of him, he now realized. Even in college he hadn’t really applied himself. School came easy, so he hadn’t had to do much. That same trait had come out in his military career—trusting his abilities instead of applying himself. They’d called him ‘Shooter’ because he was an ace. But ‘hip-shooter’ worked just was well, didn’t it? Finally it had bit him in the ass. Finally he realized exactly what his reviewers had been talking about in all those performance evals. The ones he hadn’t paid attention to.

  God, how do you atone for something like that, something endemic to you? How do you deal with it? How do you fix it?

  With shaking hands he lit a cigarette, no longer noticing the acrid taste. “I really screwed up, pop,” he whispered. But only the lonely wind answered. Now it was too late to plan. Now he could only react.

  He sighed in a state of deep funk and scanned his surroundings. He saw miles and miles of nothing, broken only by the occasional snow-covered rise. Sure isn’t much to see around here. A lot of tumbleweeds…weird how American those seem. The wind had died down but the snow was still falling, though fitfully now, and the temperature was bitter cold. Unzipping his flight suit, he pulled out his packet of clothing and opened it.

  The first item he saw was a polished stainless-steel hip flask stamped with a bust of Lenin. He grinned ruefully at the thought that the British agent had made liquor his first selection, and unscrewed the cap. He toasted the wreckage of the MiG ruefully and drank. The liquor burned his throat but the heat was welcome. Next he traded his flight suit for several layers of drab Soviet peasant clothing, all of which looked as if it had been new in the Tsar’s time. Undershirt, long johns, a heavy shirt with a faded brown pattern, gray loose-fitting trousers. Finally there was a worn gray overcoat and sheepskin usanka for his head. Appropriately attired and considerably warmer, he set about cleaning out his flight suit. The Colt .45 and clips went in a pocket of his overcoat, Smith’s stiletto in another. He held the small silver transmitter for a moment, turning it over in his hand before stuffing it down into a pocket. The range of the small device made it next to useless. He had thought to stuff his kneeboard into another pocket of his flight suit before ejecting, for if it had somehow survived the crash intact his marked route of flight would prove singularly incriminating. Trudging over to the burning remainder of his jet, he tossed his flight suit and kneeboard into the nearest blaze, watching for a moment as the flames consumed them. Better quit stalling and move out before the Russian Army shows up, Hardin. But he was curiously unwilling to do so. He felt an odd temptation to hang around the wreck, his last touchstone of familiarity, rather than head out into an alien countryside. But it would not do. Eventually the wreck would be discovered: there were probably already units searching for it, though with any luck the search would be concentrated farther to the south.

  From the air he had seem a road a few miles to the east. The terrain, he decided, had enough dunes and ridges that would permit him to move parallel to the road and watch the traffic without being spotted himself. Eventually it would lead him to whatever city he had seen. With a glance around to get his bearings, he flicked his cigarette away and trudged through the snow, heading northeast towards the road.

  Tashkent, Uzbekistan

  Captain Stepan Dusengaliev of the Tashkent PVO finished relieving himself on the cold rocks and picked his way back up the slope to the flat area at the top of the hill, where the P-14 radar had been installed. It was a huge device, a parabolic skeleton of bare metal ribs thirty meters wide, and the Imperialists had given it the peculiar name ‘Tall King.’ Perhaps it was fitting. The P-14 had an immensely long range and tremendous power, capable of illuminating aircraft at extremely high altitudes, and in the hands of a trained operator perhaps it was worthy of that regal title. The design of the P-14 was a few years old and the radar could not be truck-mounted, as some of the newer radars were said to be, because of its enormous size. It was designed to operate from a fixed installation, sweeping slowly at two to four RPM. And yet such a technological marvel with as much power as the P-14 possessed was still unable to track the oddly behaving aircraft when it had vanished directly into a thunderhead. Captain Dusengaliev was vexed beyond reason.

  He passed the equipment trailer, heading to the van that housed the display. “Yuri!” he shouted. “Talk to me!”

  He burst into the dark, close van, ducking his head to avoid bumping it on the ceiling. The walls were heavy with equipment, the drab green devices blinking and humming. His young operator sat at his duty station, watching the sweep on his display terminal. The crew component of the Tashkent P-14 site was exactly three, himself, Yuri and an ET who usually haunted the equipment trailer, ready to replace the large magnetrons and klystron tubes when they burned out. And they frequently did, for that was the price of the P-14’s power. “Nothing, comrade Dusengaliev! I don’t show him at all, only flight one-three-eight returning to base.”

  Dusengaliev stepped outside the van and lit a cigarette. “That bastard shot down two of our aircraft, Yuri.”

  “Did he?” His young technician sounded frustrated. “I don’t think one-three-eight knew what the hell was going on! What if they fired on each other?”

  “Watch your bearing,” Dusengaliev reprimanded him brusquely. “I’ll make that call, not you.” Unfortunately, Yuri was right. Sorting out what had just happened was going to be a mess of horrendous proportions.

  “I’m sorry, comrade Dusengaliev. Even if he did, it seems to me that he was just defending himself. You ordered one-three-six to fire on him.”

  He blew out a gusty breath, leaning against the doorway of the van as the cold wind sighed over the rocky hilltop. “Yeah, maybe. Maybe he was from that unit at Alma-Ata. But why yank us about it? Why give me that big line of bullshit? And what kind of pilot shoots down two aircraft?”

  “A good one, one who doesn’t want a missile up his ass. Unless zero-four’s first missile hit one-three-six and not him. But one-three-six said he was one of ours. Maybe he had combat time in Korea. What will you put in your report?”

  “Don’t know yet.” Of course the missile would have had the bad luck to actually hit its target. There was a joke widespread among the Air Defense Forces that some wag in the test department had written ‘Dear Comrades, the new air-to-air missiles are excellent! When may we expect an air-to-aircraft model?’

  Dusengaliev stared off at the western horizon, wishing he could see beyond it. There was going to be a hell of a row over this incident. As far as he could tell, at least two missiles had been fired and three je
ts downed, or two downed and one missing…the horror of the situation was belatedly dawning on him. Who had shot down whom and with what? It wasn’t as though the PVO never lost aircraft; on the contrary, aircraft were lost with some regularity. Pilots flew them into mountains or each other, components failed, but loss to friendly fire was unusual. These jets were prized assets of the Party and appallingly expensive. This hadn’t been simply an error or even a casualty of friendly fire—this had been full-blown air combat, and the more he reflected on its outcome the worse his mood became. He exhaled smoke into the wind. “It doesn’t wash, Yuri. I acted appropriately by telling our pilots to fire. He should have followed my instructions.”

  The young enlisted man shrugged, swiveling around in his chair. “Yes, he should have, but not all of them do, and you did order one-three-six to fire on a new MiG.”

  He flipped his cigarette away, angrily lighting a second. It was the age-old struggle for control. He had it, the pilots wanted it. But it was his job to tell them where they could and couldn’t fly. “You think I’m going to get hung for it, don’t you? Little prick. Well that was the same guy who told the Mary tower he was heading for Samarkand. They said he appeared right out of nowhere.”

  Yuri shrugged. “Yes, but to me they sounded drunk. He may have been flying at low altitude, that’s not unusual. Or he was there all along and they just missed him. Or they got his direction of flight wrong.”

  The list of potential screw-ups just went on, too, they were all uncomfortably plausible and implied he had leapt to conclusions. “So they’re idiots for passing him on. I don’t care. He doesn’t have a clearance with us so that means he lands when I say he lands. Especially since I can’t call his unit at Alma-Ata because of the weather.”