Or maybe not. I had grown up watching television reports of the endless anti-war demonstrations on the streets and university campuses of America. Clever Soviet intelligence officers might have manipulated images of the demonstrations to persuade American prisoners to remain voluntarily in the Soviet Union, convincing these battered, vulnerable pilots that they would be imprisoned as traitors if they ever returned to their country.
It was not surprising that Soviet interrogators had used whatever methods necessary to extract secret nuclear weapon arming procedures from captured American pilots. Prisoners of war were held in contempt by the Soviet military. During my years at the Armavir Academy and the constant training in the regiments, I was never instructed in the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War. Never; I didn’t even know it existed. No Soviet soldier or officer was ever told that the Imperialist enemy had signed binding international treaties guaranteeing humane treatment of prisoners. I first learned about the Geneva Convention during my debriefings in America. Throughout years of Air Force service, I was constantly taught that my oath of duty to the Motherland bound me from ever surrendering, as long as I was physically capable of fighting. And then, we were told, it was better to use the last bullet or grenade for suicide than to surrender. Many young Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan had chosen death rather breaking this sacred oath.
My strike force took off in two-plane elements beginning at 0921 hours, exactly three minutes after the escorts. This timing was vital. Our AWACS killers were flying at the extreme limit of their combat radius. We could not enter the wide circle of AWACS radar coverage, and betray our presence, until the AWACS was destroyed. So we flew our doglegs to the north and west, as briefed, then my strike force dropped to the deck, and the escorts fanned out above, on either side of our route.
Captain Petrukhin was not hesitant about leading us across the sooty brown desert at .9 Mach, only 250 feet above the sand. This was even more visually spectacular than the supersonic run we had flown two days before. At this altitude the ground below sailed by in a crazy blur. Twice Petrukhin bounced us up to 400 feet to clear massive power lines. Then we were down on the deck again. At transonic speed, well below the radar horizon of the Hawk defense belt ahead, we were invisible, but closing fast on the enemy.
Then my earphones sounded with the unmistakable terse radio calls of the dogfight unfolding between 9,000 and 30,000 feet above us. Our escorts were engaging the enemy combat air patrol. I could hear the calls of “Rubege odin,” quickly followed by “Pusk … Pusk. Launch … Launch.”
Obviously the enemy air cover had been caught off guard, and this probably meant their AWACS had been destroyed by our “back door” attack.
I followed the lead element, half a mile ahead, glancing occasionally in my mirror to make sure my wingman, Andrei, hung behind my right wingtip. My briefing notes told me I was three minutes from the Hawk zone and nine minutes from weapons release. In the next ninety seconds my SRZO threat receiver whined and blinked alarmingly, a real New Year’s tree of colored lights. But the enemy sweeps were ineffective at this altitude and speed. A minute later we were past the Hawks’ effective range.
Now it was time to prepare the weapon. On my weapons-control panel, I flipped the ordnance switch to spetz, and verified it was centered. Then I selected tormos, “drag,” which meant the weapon’s retarding parachute had been armed. In the low-altitude toss-up bombing mode, I would release the weapon in a highspeed loop back over the target. The parachute would slow the bomb until I sped away on afterburner from the immediate lethal blast and radiation kill circle. Next I depressed the lock-on button on the inner throttle knob and a clear white circle appeared on my HUD, perched atop my straight vector line.
Two minutes to release. I carefully verified that my oxygen system was on 100 percent, emergency pressure, and that the outside airflow was completely closed. No one wanted to breathe a mouthful of plutonium dust. Next I dropped the smoked-glass flash filter on my HUD and lowered my dark helmet visor. As I was preparing my cockpit, the other three elements split away, and I eased my aircraft onto a heading of 195 degrees true and climbed to 600 feet.
Suddenly I saw the target, a small shed of rusty metal sheeting with a squat antenna tower, centered in the middle of a six-hundred-foot white circle painted directly on the gravel pavement of the desert. I saw Andrei peel away on his own target off my right wing. Now I concentrated on the HUD as the seconds to pitch-up and weapons release pulsed on the left margin of the screen. When I pulled up hard, my G-meter immediately registered “5” and I was forced deep into my seat. The horizon fell away and I was climbing vertically on afterburner. The seconds to auto release blinked silently to zero, and I felt the weapon lurch as I crested through a loop angle of 120 degrees at 3,600 feet.
Now I had one minute to make my break before that gray monster exploded. Had this been a real nuclear mission, I could have been buffeted by a hellfire flash, a brutal shock wave, and an invisible but powerful electromagnetic pulse. Now, on this realistic training sortie, I prepared my cockpit for the EMP, knowing that all my computerized instruments would be rendered inoperable by the pulse and I would have to navigate back to Mary by analog instruments and magnetic compass alone.
When I touched down and taxied to the apron, I saw a line of smiling faces among our maintenance staff. Preliminary strike results had just come in: All targets destroyed. Only one aircraft lost. The regiment had “killed” the NATO AWACS and shot down nine of their twelve F-16s. This was a spectacular success.
That afternoon Colonel Torbov cautiously suggested that we might actually become the first regiment in the Soviet Air Force to be judged combat operational with the MiG-29.
Like all successful tacticians, my commanders had played our strengths into the enemy’s weakness. And high-level intelligence briefers had stressed that NATO in general, and the American Air Force in particular, underestimated the new tactics of the VVS, which were grounded in our new equipment.
In fact, we had learned, the Americans judged us based on a series of myths. According to American military intelligence, Soviet wingmen were helpless without their leaders; this was false. We were all taught to fly independently and were free to maneuver and select our own targets. The Americans also believed we were totally dependent on our GCI battle-control officers. In fact, we worked with them to build the total threat picture, and were actually more independent of radar control than the Americans, who relied so heavily on their AWACS. The U.S. Air Force also taught its pilots that their Soviet counterparts were simply interceptor pilots trained to fire missiles from poorly maneuvera-ble aircraft. They were confusing the PVO with the VVS.
American myths about rigid Soviet tactics and training procedures were based in part on the poor performance of Soviet clients, especially the Arabs, in air combat against the Israelis.
The Americans somehow believed that we provided the Arabs with our best tactics and training methods when we sold them our airplanes. And, for some strange reason, the Americans also chose to equate Syrian and Egyptian pilots — who usually gained their assignments through family connections — with professional Soviet Air Force pilots who underwent stiff competition to win their place at academies like Armavir.
As the GRU colonel who briefed us on this scornfully indicated, the Americans had somehow put things cherez zhopu, “ass backward.” Training in the Israeli Defense Force was based almost entirely on the Soviet military. In fact, during the Israeli War of Independence in 1948, their ground and air officers had been Red Army veterans of the Great Patriotic War. And today, Israeli pilots were trained exactly as I had been: selected as teenagers right out of school, and flying jets in their second year at an academy.
If anything, the amazing record of success Israeli pilots had achieved over their Arab opponents was an endorsement of Soviet training doctrine, not a condemnation of it. But, as our GRU colonel reminded us, if the Americans chose to believe differently, so much the better.
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On a foggy afternoon two weeks later when flights were grounded at Tskhakaya, Colonel Torbov was summoned to division headquarters. When he returned, he presented the compliments of the division commander and the Air Force chief of the military district. The Moscow evaluators had scored us: 4/5 “Horosho,” Good. This was not a 5/5 “Excellent” rating, but it was quite acceptable compared to the 2/5 the Kubinka and Ros regiments had scored. The 176th Frontal Aviation Regiment had become the first combat-ready MiG-29 unit in the Soviet Air Force, beating out two better-known regiments, including the famous Guards of Kubinka.
Even more exciting, Colonel Torbov continued, was the news that the Ministries of Aviation and Defense had selected our regiment to be the official test evaluation unit for the new fighter’s air-combat tests.
The colonel declared a regimental holiday, and we all unearthed our private caches of good brandy.
Home in Samara on leave in early May, I noticed a small article on the inner “Regional News” page of the local Izvestia. Apparently there had been a fire at a nuclear power station near the town of Chernobyl, sixty miles north of Kiev in the Ukraine. The story was only two paragraphs long and concluded with the reassurance that there was no danger of radiation spreading because “the situation was quickly brought under control.”
Sitting on that park bench near the Volga with the laughter of children ringing in the sunshine, there was certainly no reason why I felt the sudden stab of alarm. Under Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, the Central Committee of the Party and the Politburo had unanimously endorsed complete openness in the news media. Indeed, I had actually read a few unusually frank stories on Aeroflot accidents and industrial explosions over the past year that never would have been printed before glasnost.
Still, there was something in the bland, neutral language of that page-four story about the power plant fire that nagged at me. Perhaps it was the phrase “under control” that triggered my inner alarm system. I suddenly remembered my Afghansti friend Valery’s cynical advice. “Sanya,” he’d repeatedly told me, “never believe the shit in the official press. If you want to know what’s really happening, listen to Radio Liberty.”
Unfortunately I didn’t have my shortwave radio with me on this leave. But friends told me that both the Voice of America and Radio Liberty had been suddenly subjected to incredibly thick jamming, as if Moscow was intent that no details of the accident would reach the Soviet people. I asked my mother if she’d heard of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant.
She nodded, her face set, as always when she spoke of disasters. There had been a notice posted at the Hydroelectric Institute, she said, requesting “volunteers"-concrete construction specialists, carpenters, and structural engineers-to work at Chernobyl. “Do you know the kind of salary they’re offering?”
I shook my head.
“Three hundred and fifty rubles,” she recited, “per day.”
We looked at each other for a moment in silence, both grasping the implications. If the authorities were willing to pay volunteers a month’s salary for every day they worked at that plant, the situation could hardly be “under control.”
“Some people,” my mother said, “have already signed up to go.”
I immediately thought of Jana. A fire in a nuclear power plant might easily spread radiation more than a hundred miles. But if the city of Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, was in danger of radioactive fallout, surely there had to be more in the news than that brief article.
The next day there was in fact more mention of Chernobyl. Now the newspapers and television commentators spoke of the “incredible sacrifices” of heroic fire fighters who had battled a stubborn blaze in the power plant’s reactor number 4.
Whenever the Party ordered the press to speak of “sacrifice,” there had to be some serious problem. I decided to find Jana and convince her to leave the city.
The Kiev airport was chaotic, crowded with hundreds of families sleeping on the floors of the big modern terminal. I noticed that many of the thousands of passengers waiting uncomfortably on this warm spring afternoon were small children, flocked together in groups supervised by tired and frustrated women.
Two miles from the airport the motorway divided, with one road turning right, north toward Chernobyl. Here there was a military roadblock and a small convoy of GAZ field cars with long whipping radio antennas. The soldiers on station between the steel spike pads of the roadblock wore nuclear warfare gauntlets and rubber boot covers. They carefully examined every vehicle arriving from the north, pushing the long snouts of their battlefield Geiger counters under the hoods and chassis. Anyone carrying produce or poultry for sale in the city had their load confiscated.
I had never been to Kiev before and was excited to be driving along the riverbank, then climbing up the long curved motorway toward the high bluff of the Upper Town above the river. Kiev was the first capital of the Russian nation, dating from the Dark Ages of the tenth century. The gilded domes of St. Sophia’s cathedral glittered through the budding beech and maple trees around Bohdan Khmelnytsky Square. But after seeing the city half-deserted, I lost my enthusiasm for tourism.
At the Hotel Ukrainia I tried Jana’s phone number again, but there was no answer at her dormitory. Then I contacted a friend named Ivan who worked at the Antonov plant in the suburbs. He and another friend, Alexi, had been reserve maintenance officers at Tskhakaya and were now engineers working on the huge An-224 Ruslan transport. Ivan invited me for dinner that night.
I was impressed by the high quality of the seven-story buildings in Ivan’s microrayon near the northern ring highway. But once more it was obvious that something strange had happened. I saw men on the sidewalks between the buildings, but few women and no children. The playground with brightly painted swings and slides stood silent and empty in the warm spring twilight.
Over some good Armenian brandy, Alexi and Ivan told me frankly what they knew of the “accident” at Chernobyl. In the ten days that had passed since the first alarm, my friends had used their contacts within the Kiev scientific community to learn the truth.
“It was a complete fuckup,” Ivan said bitterly, shaking his head. “They were behind schedule running some kind of a test for the ministry in Moscow.”
Alexi continued. “To speed up the results they wanted, the plant engineers actually disconnected the safety systems, then shut down most of the circulation pumps for the reactor coolant water.”
He stared bleakly out at the sunset on the rows of suburban high-rise apartments. “The reactor went wild… uncontrolled reaction. Nothing they could do would stop it.”
“And the fire?” I asked.
“The entire reactor exploded,” Ivan said flatly. “It blew the roof off the building. The fire was the graphite control blocks burning, and hydrogen from the chemical reaction between the fuel rods and the coolant water.”
We refilled our glasses, but this time did not bother with the typical toasts. Good engineers that they were, Ivan and Alexi fully grasped the relentless progression of the Chernobyl catastrophe. Once the tons of uranium fuel were deprived of coolant and exposed to the atmosphere, they explained, the zirconium fuel rods melted, and the fuel pellets themselves formed a molten slag that reacted with steam pockets in the reactor vessel and the burning graphite to churn and bubble for hours. There was little the heroic fire fighters could do to extinguish such a blaze.
“Every second during that period,” Alexi said, “extremely radioactive fragments were being carried upward on the smoke and steam.”
“Picture a volcano, Sasha,” Ivan added. “But instead of lava you have molten uranium, and instead of normal ash you have radioactive cinder.”
“Blyat,” I whispered.
Ivan laughed hollowly and pulled a large bottle of amber liquid from the china cabinet. “I hope you haven’t been drinking tap water. We ran a Geiger counter test. The stuff is definitely hot. So now we drink kagor communion wine. There’s a lot available here in
the Ukraine.”
“It’s supposed to clear your thyroid of radioactivity,” Alexi said. He drank down a glass and poured more.
I then realized that they were both drunk, the kind of intoxication that came from steady drinking over a period of days.
Ivan filled his own glass. “When we die, we will have blessed thyroids.”
I drank a glass of sweet kagor with them in silence, watching the last light drain from the sky above the river, and the streetlamps blink on along the opposite bank.
Finally Ivan spoke in a different tone, cold anger, not fatalism. “You should know about the Party officials from Pripyat and the other towns around the Chernobyl plant,” he said, reciting a story he had obviously told before. “They evacuated their own families immediately, even before dawn on April twenty-seventh.”
“That was a Sunday morning,” Alexi continued. “Kids were out playing in all the villages. The Party got their own people out by plane and helicopter. But they didn’t begin the public evacuation until Tuesday, fifty hours after the explosion.”
Ivan sipped his wine. “And when they did evacuate the people, the buses crossed a bridge through a terrible fallout zone only two miles from the plant, much closer than the route the Party families had taken.”
I was weighing the implications of this when Ivan broke out laughing. “Well, Sanya,” he said, clapping my shoulder, “don’t look so shocked. The Party finally was able to prove that it was the Vanguard of the Proletariat.”
Jana and I finally met the next day. We climbed up to the medieval ramparts of the old city for the view down to the river beaches and of the sports complex on the island opposite the bluff.
I tried my best to convince Jana to leave Kiev, to come with me to Moscow. But she couldn’t understand the extent of the danger here.
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