Fulcrum

by Alexander Mikhaylovich Zuyev

  The weather was good throughout the flight. And once more I marveled at the comfort and stability of the aircraft. After crossing the Caspian, we flew almost due east, leaving the snow-crusted mountainous frontier with Iran well off our right wingtips. Ahead the even higher white ramparts of the Hindu Kush rose above the dark browns and charcoal gray of the flat Kara Kum, the “Black Sand” desert. Mary was an oasis town sprawled among vegetable plots on the banks of the Karakumsky Canal, a geometrically straight irrigation and barge channel that provided one of the few landmarks in the featureless desert.

  The Mary base complex spread across a wide area north of the dusty, mud-brick civilian town. Mary Two, the smaller of the two airfields, was a regular VVS Su-17 base and transport stop-over for flights to and from Afghanistan, which lay over the steep ridges of the Paropamisus Range on the southern horizon. That unit had dropped bombs on the very first day of the Afghan war seven years before and was still flying combat missions.

  Mary One was a much more elaborate base, with extensive maintenance facilities and ordnance depots to service the VVS regiment permanently stationed there, which flew a variety of aircraft to simulate NATO formations.

  It was nice to fly into such a big, well-equipped base surrounded by hundreds of square miles of empty desert, completely free of ground obstacles or air navigation hazards. But when I flared for landing on the broad concrete runway, I was surprised to see crusty snow beside the taxi ramp. Then, pulling onto the apron with my canopy open, I saw that the snow was actually crystallized salt, caked on the sooty gray sand.

  The weather at Mary was typical of the high Central Asian desert in early spring, sunny hot at midday, and chilly dry at night with a vast unbroken dome of stars. Outside the barbed-wire perimeter fence, Turkmen tribal people, the men in turbans, the women veiled, herded shaggy two-humped camels, donkeys laden with bright carpetbags, and endless herds of sheep and goats. But the base itself was definitely part of the twentieth century.

  The Mary center regiment operated an unusual variety of aircraft types. They flew modified MiG-21s and MiG-23s that registered the same type of radar profile as American F-15s and NATO fighters. Heavy turboprop An-12 transports and Mi-8 helicopters were used as electronic countermeasure (ECM) platforms to jam the radar of “friendly” aircraft like our MiG-29s. Other Tupolev and Ilyushin multi-engine aircraft had been rigged to duplicate the function and electronic signature of American AWACS and British Nimrod airborne radar planes. During our two weeks at Mary, we would eventually fly large engagement exercises involving the entire regiment against an equal unit of “NATO” planes.

  Our first afternoon at the center we met with the base test officers and the high-ranking evaluation staff from Moscow. The mood of the meeting was formal and professional, with none of the typical sardonic Air Force humor exchanged among the pilots from the two groups.

  In all the tests we would have to demonstrate the ability to fly the MiG-29 to the limits of its performance envelope. This meant low and slow, low and supersonic, and all the way up to stratospheric high-Mach flight. The air-combat tests would all be closing engagements, ranging from two opponents to a huge two-regiment melee spread across a hundred horizontal miles and thousands of feet of altitude. The rules of engagement for these dogfights gave our opposition MiG-23s the close to performance as American F-15s, supported by AWACS. These MiG-23s would be escorted by pairs of MiG-21s and Su-17s carrying active ECM jammers.

  A separate malchi-malchi “hush-hush” technical delegation from Moscow would test my first squadron on a tactical nuclear bombing mission. We would drop the standard six-foot-long dummy nuclear bomb that we trained with on the Special Weapons poligon in Georgia. This particular test could come at any time and would involve close scrutiny of our ability to correctly and rapidly enter the secret unlocking codes into our aircraft weapons systems in the precise sequence needed to arm and drop a nuclear bomb.

  The next day the test commanders presented their first surprise. Cool high pressure with minimal turbulence was the forecast in the morning. So, instead of the scheduled dogfight exercise, we were given our maximum airspeed test. Although everyone tried to take this assignment in stride, we were excited by the prospect.

  Speed, of course, is what fighters are built for. But most people did not understand the full ramifications of a maximum airspeed test in a modern high-performance fighter. High Mach numbers were not always the equivalent of high airspeed.

  Our maximum airspeed test would be flown on full afterburner at an altitude of 3,000 feet above ground level. Here the air was quite dense, so the speed of sound — Mach 1 — was much faster than in the stratosphere. The maximum safe speed for the MiG-29’s airframe at 3,000 feet was 805 knots. None of us had ever flown supersonic so low. Now we were ordered to do so.

  As forecast, the next morning’s weather was cool and windless, with a vast blue dome of desert sky, rimmed with the distant snowcapped mountains. We took off in pairs from the broad runway and flew straight out to the speed test range twenty-five miles north in the empty desert. I was in the first group to fly the seventy-five mile course. The process was relatively simple, but required a sure hand and rock-solid nerves. Even though the MiG-29 was a stable aircraft, a sloppy maneuver at maximum speed could prove dangerous.

  I set up on my compass heading, flying straight and level on full military power at an altitude of 6,000 feet.

  “Three seven four,” ground control ordered. “Proceed.”

  “Ponyal,” I replied. “Roger.”

  I cupped my left hand over the throttles and clicked them forward to afterburner. At this altitude the acceleration was tremendous, pushing me firmly back into the padded ejection seat. Then I eased the stick forward to a ten-degree dive angle and accelerated down to 3,000 feet. Just as I leveled out, my Mach meter twitched through Mach 1 and all my instrument needles jumped with the snap of the supersonic shock wave. My ears popped and the throaty rumble of the engines went suddenly quiet, as if someone had piled feather pillows around my helmet. But I saw the airspeed needle winding steadily up. I remembered to apply strong forward pressure to the stick to parry the supersonic pitch-up “moment.” At this speed the fighter’s lift became so great that I had to push my stick forward to maintain level flight.

  But in straight, level flight with the burners devouring 704 pounds of jet fuel per minute, I had to slide the throttles back to minimum afterburner, not to exceed the maximum airspeed of 805 knots. A powerful moaning, whooshing noise rose around the cockpit, as if I were somehow flying near a waterfall. Then I realized that bizarre sound came from the curved airframe slicing through the dense air like the blade of some fantastic cutting machine.

  Looking straight ahead, the horizon seemed stationary. But when I glanced down on either side of my line of flight, the dark surface of the desert flowed past in a blur. I knew the cone of my sonic boom cascaded down behind me, battering the desert floor. Local tribesmen sometimes left camels out here to graze. I hoped none of the poor creatures were down there today.

  After eight minutes at this incredible speed, I carefully eased off the burners and climbed into a gentle oval to return to base. Before I set up for landing, I rolled and banked the aircraft to make sure none of my flight controls had been damaged by the supersonic run. My aircraft performed perfectly.

  But some of the regiment’s planes did not escape the maximum airspeed test undamaged. They landed with alloy panels ripped away from the air brake section of the lower fuselage between the engines. When I stooped beneath one of the planes to inspect the damage, I was amazed. It looked as if someone had removed the panel with a precision rivet cutter.

  Potentially this aerodynamic damage could have grounded those aircraft for the duration of the regimental test, which would have doomed us to failure. But the Mikoyan OKB rose to the occasion. That night an Il-76 carrying factory technicians and spare parts arrived from Moscow. They worked until dawn with our own engineers, repairing the damage. The
next morning we again had forty-two fighters ready to continue our regimental evaluation.

  And it was a very good thing that we did have a full complement of aircraft. The ministry evaluation team sprang another of their little surprises. Instead of the standard ground-attack mission we had briefed for, the early morning quiet of the parking apron was suddenly shattered by the warbling siren of the nuclear-strike alarm. We would be bombing that day, all right, but with mock RN-40 nuclear bombs, not the 1,100-pound fragmentation bombs our ground crews were preparing to load.

  When the “Special Weapons” alarm sounded in a Soviet Frontal Aviation regiment, an intricate and demanding sequence of carefully timed procedures began. As I dashed toward the regimental briefing room, per standard orders, I saw Major Tereshenko, my squadron leader, and Colonel Torbov trotting toward me from the other direction. Their faces bore the mixture of strain and excitement we all felt when rehearsing a nuclear strike. But today their stress was intensified by the unsmiling silent faces of the two Moscow officials trailing them. One of these officers represented the VVS Strategic Forces; the other was a representative of the Central Committee. Such “twins” shared the responsibility for supervising nuclear strikes throughout the Soviet military. Now they would be officially evaluating our use of nuclear weapons with the new aircraft.

  The regiment had a maximum of two hours and ten minutes to launch its strike force. In that time, a number of important events had to occur, all in the proper sequence. First, the regiment’s base defense force — an enlarged combat air patrol, which included most of the 3rd Squadron — had to be launched to protect the airfield from enemy air strikes while the rest of the strike force was briefed and armed. This defensive patrol was launched within twelve minutes, despite the fact that most of the pilots were young lieutenants who had just achieved their Second Class rating.

  As the fighters screamed away, into the pale morning sky, their afterburners cutting orange holes in the winter sunrise, the rest of the regiment’s pilots sat attentively in the briefing room, their mission notebooks open. The target, Colonel Torbov announced, was a series of four secondary NATO fighter-bomber bases located within a dense ring of Hawk air-defense missiles and defended by multiple Stingers. Torbov’s face was set with sober determination, and his voice sounded with harsh precision as he read from the careful mission order he and his operations officers had so meticulously written in anticipation of exactly this nuclear strike sortie.

  Our strike force, he said, would be composed of eight MiG-29s, each carrying an RN-40 boosted fission bomb with a yield of more than thirty kilotons. Each enemy airfield would be struck by a two-plane force. The eight aircraft would breach the enemy SAM ring at transonic speed and low altitude, while the balance of the 1st Squadron and half the 2nd Squadron would engage the “NATO” combat air patrol overhead.

  I swallowed when I saw my name on the strike roster, leading a two-plane formation to hit “Karlsruhe East” F-16 strip, forty miles inside the enemy defense belt. Captain Andrei Shelomtsev, a new First Class pilot, would be flying as my wingman. Our strike force was led by my zveno leader, Captain Vladimir Petrukhin, a bold and skilled pilot.

  While the strike force and the escorts attacked almost due south — after a diversionary feinting loop to the north — the balance of the 2nd Squadron would conduct a maximum-range low-level sweep, far to the southeast, covering the four-hundred-mile dogleg to swing back on the enemy “AWACS,” an An-12 flying at 27,000 feet and escorted by six MiG-23s. This was our trump card. NATO air forces, especially the Americans, were used to the luxury of their so-called “God’s eye” radar coverage from the orbiting AWACS. They were not accustomed to suddenly losing that coverage.

  Deprived of their radar target vectoring the AWACS provided, the enemy combat air patrol would be relatively blind. If they relied on their own active radar, our escorts would be able to locate them on our SRZO radar-warning receivers. For the actual close combat, the escorting MiG-29s would rely on their passive IRST systems, which gave no telltale radar illumination for the enemy to detect.

  This was the bold concept of the mission. Now we broke into squadrons to brief on our particular assignments. While we were engaged with our navigation charts, the regiment’s attached Radio Tecknitsky Brigada, our malchi-malchi nuclear weapons unit, was loading the eight RN-40 bombs to the reinforced inner left weapons pylon of each strike aircraft. These tapered six-foot gray cylinders with their swept, movable tail fins were identical in every way to the real weapon. In fact, on combat proficiency drills such as this, we never knew whether the “dummy” bombs were actually training devices or the real thing. Our exercise clock would be stopped after the arming sequence so that these elaborate training bombs could be demounted and replaced by the cheaper sheet-aluminum replicas for the actual drop at the poligon.

  I immediately followed Captain Petrukhin and the other strike pilots to the parking apron. The RTB mechanics had just finished loading the spetz podviesky, “special loads,” as we informally called the bombs. My weapon was a two-tone, gray and black, aerial bomb, over six feet long. The nose cone was brown plastic, the color of cheap chocolate, a combination radar and barometric fuse sensor. I noted that the preflight pins with their fluttering yellow caution flags were all in place on the pylon attach points and on the bomb’s tail fins.

  While we had been in the briefing room, the regimental chief of staff for operations had retrieved our State Secret coded orders from the cryptographic room and removed the matching Secret arming code envelopes from the regimental safe, which had traveled all this way to the Kara Kum Desert under armed guard.

  Our squadron deputy chief of staff followed his superior, carrying a black fiberglass satchel with nuclear weapons instructions, and the special tools needed to complete the arming process. A senior maintenance officer and an officer of the RTB unit stood beside each aircraft, next to the squat electronic arming code apparatus, a rectangular metal box with a ten-digit keypad, connected to the nose of each bomb by a snaking blue cable.

  I received my arming code envelope and opened it immediately, as per standing orders. Now I climbed into the cockpit, but did not connect my ejection harness. Instead, I warmed up my instruments and tuned my radio to the regimental operations frequency. Finally I tore open the red plastic seal of my arming envelope and read the word: Zvezdachot, “Star Counter.” This was the Secret mission designator. In a moment, this word was repeated over the radio net by the regimental ops officer.

  “Ponyal,” I replied. “Four nine seven is standing by to receive.”

  One by one, the other strike pilots checked in. I held my arming code card in my left hand, with my mechanical pencil poised in my right. This was a solemn moment. The State was trusting me with its most delicate secrets.

  “Be prepared to receive,” the regimental headquarters called.

  Thirty seconds later the number sequence began:

  “3 5 7 4 9 6 3 7 5,” I carefully wrote, centering each digit below the similar digits printed on my code card.

  Now I subtracted the line of lower digits I’d just received from the upper numbers, matching each pair in its vertical column. If the results had produced any 9s or 0s, the code transmitted by the regiment would have been false and invalid. I had neither 9s nor 0s. If any top number had been smaller than the number below, I would have followed our cryptographic procedure and added ten to the upper number.

  Down on the apron, the RTB officer showed me his own code card, which he had tallied, using his own separate communications links leading eventually back in an unbroken line to the Central Committee in Moscow. The vital dual, separate-channel code sequence was now complete. My code had been transmitted by the military, his by the civilian leadership. It was time to arm the bomb.

  While the RTB officer watched intently, the maintenance captain entered each of the ten digits on the code apparatus keypad. He punched the wide enter key after each digit. When all ten had been completed, a green light fla
shed and the words “Code Entered Unblocked” appeared in a narrow Plexiglas window. Had he made a mistake, he would have been able to correct the problem once; any further attempt would have rendered the bomb inoperable.

  As I climbed back into the cockpit, I considered the flexibility and flawless security of this system once more. Neither a renegade general nor a deranged politician could commit Soviet forces to a nuclear attack. Yet, the arming sequence was completely practical and worked well, even under realistic field conditions.

  All nuclear-capable fighter regiments practiced loading their bombs at least twice a month. This process was always conducted at night, inside a hangar, in order to avoid American spy satellites. During one such training exercise at Vaziani, I explained to a young weapons officer from the RTB that our superiors had never revealed to the pilots just how powerful the RN-40 actually was. I felt we had a right to know.

  “The yield is slightly over thirty kilotons,” he said casually. The young man wore plain dark coveralls, with no rank on his epaulets or branch insignia on his sleeve. From his tone, he could have been discussing the performance of a truck engine.

  When I commented on the well-conceived arming process, he went on to tell me some fascinating information.

  “Soviet forces adopted this system in the 1970s,” he said, stroking the gray flanks of the practice bomb. “It’s the Americans’ own system, but we’ve added some improvements.”

  He must have noted my confused expression. “The American methods,” he added, “we obtained from several U.S. Air Force ‘guests,’ nuclear-qualified pilots our fraternal Socialist comrades in Vietnam provided us during that Imperialist war.”

  At the time, I had not wanted to consider the methods the GRU had used to extract such information from professional military pilots. This was a cruel side of war that I hated, but I knew the Americans would do the same to me if I were to parachute into the hands of one of their “fraternal” Imperialist allies. All that could be said was that the unfortunate American pilots had probably died painlessly soon after they had revealed this vital information.