Fulcrum

by Alexander Mikhaylovich Zuyev

  “There’s no reason to panic, Sasha,” she said, taking my hand in the bright spring sunshine. “The authorities have measured no unusual radiation here in Kiev.”

  “Why did they evacuate all the children, then?”

  Jana looked untroubled. “That’s just a precaution. We have to be sure children do not drink milk from cattle in the danger zone, which profiteers might try to sell.”

  Obviously Jana had fully accepted the official version of events, which, of course, did not mention the early evacuation of the Party families. There were young men sunbathing on the beach. A few were even splashing in the shallows. Like Jana, they did not seem concerned about the water flowing south from the Chernobyl Reservoir.

  I persisted. “Jana, just come with me. I can get you a plane ticket.”

  She smiled, pleased over my concern for her, but shook her head. “No. I called my father, and he called his colleagues here in Kiev. They assured him there was no need for panic, no reason for me to leave.”

  I studied Jana’s young blue eyes. Her trust was complete. Nothing I could say would convince her to leave. Her father had reassured her.

  Looking away at the river below, I tried to understand the mentality of a man like Colonel Baglai. He had certainly been an officer long enough to realize that no military colleague would dispute the official party line and warn him of true danger. And her father, a deputy division commander, also understood the invisible menace of radioactive fallout.

  The night before, I had experienced some of this invisible hazard. I’d woken up before dawn, with a vicelike headache searing my temples and forehead. As I sat on the edge of the bed, I was suddenly seized by a bout of explosive nausea, and vomited all over the floor. (Later, my flight surgeon told me these were the unmistakable symptoms of light radiation poisoning.)

  I said goodbye to Jana the next day at the airport bus terminal. She stood there smiling among the forlorn ranks of schoolchildren carrying their small satchels, as if they really were just going to camp. Jana was the only one smiling.

  It was not until May 14 that Party Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev finally broke his silence and spoke about the Chernobyl accident on national television. I was in Moscow staying with friends, and anxiously watched Gorbachev’s message, hoping for reassurance about the situation in Kiev, or at least some facts about the accident.

  But instead of the “timely and frank information” that Gorbachev had promised two years earlier would be the hallmark of his government’s “trust in the people” and respect for their intelligence, the General Secretary was tight-lipped and defensive, belligerent toward the nations of Western Europe and the United States, which had demanded an explanation for the dangerous radioactive fallout spreading across their territories. It had not been until the French released detailed satellite pictures, showing the roofless Chernobyl reactor number 4 building with the terrible molten glow of its burning core, that Gorbachev reluctantly acknowledged the true scale of the disaster. But he avoided any concrete details, and instead fell back on crude xenophobia to berate the foreigners who had criticized the actions of the Soviet government. Watching Gorbachev’s speech, I realized that glasnost might be just another device that the authorities in Moscow cleverly manipulated to maintain themselves in power. I decided to take my friend Valery’s advice and began listening to Radio Liberty late at night in the kitchen of my tiny apartment in the military housing complex at Tskhakaya.

  My pessimism about the validity of glasnost, however, certainly was not a preoccupation that summer. The regiment’s assignment to conduct the air-combat evaluation of the MiG-29 kept us all much too busy to dwell on politics. Even though we were flying multiple sorties every day, and pushing the aircraft to the limits of its envelope, there were still certain safety standards that none of us dared breach. I knew that a number of MiG-29s had crashed during the OKB and factory-production test phase, but no operational fighter had crashed yet, and Colonel Torbov made it clear that he did not want the first accident in a line regiment to happen at Tskhakaya.

  So we were forbidden from low-altitude maneuvers until the regiment had its own instructors officially qualified to teach us. These two officers were the deputy regimental commander, Lieutenant Colonel Anatoli Antonovich, and the commander of the 2nd Squadron, Lieutenant Colonel Nikolai Semonich, a former PVO Yak-28 pilot who had spent most of his career in the Far East.

  When Semonich came to Tskhakaya the previous autumn, he gave the impression of definitely being a hard-assed fighter pilot. He quickly let it be known that he had been named a squadron commander twelve years before, when he was only a senior lieutenant. Speaking in a rough, deep voice, Semonich also let all the younger pilots know that he had flown thousands of sorties in some of the worst flying conditions possible.

  At the time, I guessed that this bluster was a defense mechanism; Semonich had made the transition from the clumsy old Yak-28 to the MiG-23, then to the MiG-29. He might well have flown thousands of “elevator ride” sorties as a PVO interceptor pilot under tight GCI vector control, but that fact had little to do with his true ability as a fighter pilot.

  The officers were sent to Lipetsk for a one-month low-altitude maneuver course. On their return, they had to fly a series of structured sorties and then would be officially qualified to become our low-level instructors. Antonovich was a natural fighter pilot, a short Byelorussian who really could fly anything with wings. We were all pleased that he would be one of our instructors for dangerous low-altitude air combat. Most of us reserved judgment about Semonich; if he flew as well as he talked, he’d probably be satisfactory.

  Monday, July 14, 1986, was one of those summer days of low overcast and oppressive humidity that often afflicted the coastal region of Georgia. My squadron was scheduled for ground-attack training on the poligon near Kulevi, but we all realized the first sortie would have to be delayed until the overcast lifted. Antonovich and Semonich had the last of their low-altitude acrobatic exercises to complete. And they had to fly them that day because the mandatory forty-five-day limit since their Lipetsk instruction was almost over.

  We all knew that Colonel Torbov wanted them qualified. In the briefing room it was obvious that Lieutenant Colonel Antonovich was resigned to returning to Lipetsk for a refresher course. But Semonich seemed determined to fly his aerobatics, despite the low ceiling.

  By takeoff time, the ragged gray cloud deck was below the minimum 3,000 feet required for their aerobatics exercises. The safety norms were set with a minimum recovery altitude of 600 feet for vertical maneuvers like loops and split-S’s, and the initiation altitude had to be 3,000 feet — clear of any cloud deck.

  Antonovich took off first, flying a MiG-23UB on a weather check, to make sure they had their minimums. Semonich followed at exactly nine o’clock in a MiG-29. The weather report was not good: Antonovich called that he had a ceiling of only 1,800 feet when he flew the length of the aerobatics oval, just north of the base. But when Semonich turned into the oval, he called out that he had exactly 3,000 feet and was about to commence his first maneuver.

  We were all lined up on the parking apron, watching the two planes lace in and out of the gray cloud tendrils. I expected the safety officer in the tower to recall Semonich. Always the tough fighter pilot, he’d made his point. But no recall was sounded. Semonich flew two circles to verify the exact level of the ceiling, then performed his first maneuver, a combat turn. Unfortunately the cloud base was uneven, at some points billowing down to a mere 2,700 feet. The next scheduled maneuver was a wingover, in which Semonich would perform a two-thirds roll to inverted flight, left wing down, then haul back on the stick, still inverted, and whip back into a steep dive — similar to the bottom leg of a loop — and recover to a climb without breaching the 600-foot safety limit.

  The moment he began his wingover, rolling into inverted flight, he sliced into the cloud deck for several seconds.

  Flying inverted in clouds was dangerous. Even the best pilots could experi
ence vertigo. And we watched with mounting alarm as Semonich — still inverted — sank out of the cotton-thick base of the ceiling.

  “Roll over, you fool,” a pilot down the line shouted.

  We all expected Semonich to snap back to level flight and discontinue the aerobatics. But he held his course, in inverted flight, as if he could not decide whether to pull his stick back to begin the maneuver or not.

  Finally his nose dipped and he swung the plane sluggishly down into a vertical dive toward the runway. To execute a proper wingover, you had to handle your throttles precisely, going to military power before entering the base of the pendulum loop and climbing into your recovery. But as we watched in stricken silence, Semonich’s plane fell, still inverted, straight toward the ground across the runway. He slowly pulled up and his nose began to rise in the round-out maneuver. But he simply wasn’t climbing.

  “Climb… now… now,” I shouted. “He’s too low. He’s too damn low.”

  Semonich was through the base of the maneuver, still nose-high for his climb out. But the aircraft continued to sink inexorably, as if being dragged to the ground by invisible wires.

  “Forsazh!” someone shouted nearby. “Afterburner!”

  But we saw no orange burner flame and heard no throaty boom. Instead the aircraft continued sinking, almost gently, like a flat pebble in water. When the MiG-29 hit, there was no loud explosion, only a soft, muffled puff. The red and black fireball was strangely silent. We waited, frozen in place, for Semonich’s ejection seat to blast through that greasy mushroom of smoke. It never came.

  The board of inquiry from Moscow was led by MiG-29 Chief Designer Mikhail Waldenburg and Chief Test Pilot Valery Menitsky. They determined that Lieutenant Colonel Semonich had left his throttles on idle throughout the entire maneuver. They also discovered that he had spent the weekend drinking heavily on fishing trips to the nearby lakes. The blood alcohol level in his body was beyond acceptable limits. Unfortunately our regular doctor, Major Blustein, who never would have allowed Semonich to fly, was not on duty that morning.

  And the accident board discovered something even more disturbing. Many of the “thousands” of training sorties in Semonich’s logbook had been faked. He really had been just a mediocre PVO pilot who had taken the risk to fly aircraft far beyond his ability.

  Instead of celebrating my twenty-fifth birthday that week, we buried Lieutenant Colonel Nikolai Semonich.

  There was no mention of the accident in either the civilian or the military press.

  That autumn I received orders to come to the military test pilot school at Akhtubinsk for my first official interview. If I successfully passed this stage of the process, I would be invited to take the formal written and oral examinations the next summer.

  But even for this preliminary screening, I’d had to assemble eighteen separate documents.

  I took the train from Sochi to Volgagrad and then traveled south along the river by bus. Once we were clear of the city’s industrial suburbs, the countryside became bleak and marshy. This brackish floodplain of the Volga River had never been prosperous, and the number of large, ill-conceived drainage projects had failed. The solid concrete highway stretched on toward the flat horizon, seemingly a road to nowhere.

  Then we passed the guard posts and barbed-wire fences marking the entrance of the Kapustin Yar military space center. This was one of the Soviet Union’s chief missile test ranges. The uniformed KGB guards I glimpsed through the bus window were all heavily armed. Akhtubinsk lay twenty-five miles south of this strange highway through the salt marshes.

  This desolate area, however, was not completely deserted. Twice we passed through villages. The log houses stood at crooked angles among the winter-brown reeds, their thatched roofs sagging like swayback horses. These were some of the poorest towns I had ever seen anywhere in the Soviet Union. A few rusty tractors and a battered farm truck with three flat tires were the only vehicles I saw. The only people in evidence looked old and lost. They wore the faded, threadbare work clothes of hopeless kolkhozniki collective farm workers for whom all promises had been broken. An old woman stood at a well, drawing water with a crudely patched rubber bucket. As the bus rolled by, I stared into her eyes, but saw no flicker of recognition.

  Half an hour later, we rolled into Akhtubinsk, a closed military city of 35,000. After the desolation of the nearby villages, the modern town seemed incongruous. I didn’t have to report to the center until the next morning, so I had the afternoon and evening free. After I checked into the officers’ hotel, I strolled into the city center, looking for a cafe or a restaurant. But block after block, all I found were featureless office buildings and standard seven-story apartment units. Finally I located a produkty State food store. If I couldn’t eat a hot meal, I thought, at least I’d buy some sausage and cheese to take back to my room.

  Inside I found two women clerks in soiled white smocks, chatting quietly at the cashier’s counter. The shelves and refrigerator cases were almost completely empty. The only food I discovered was a heap of one-kilo white bread loaves that were stale and hard, a few sacks of rice, and a forlorn row of pickled green tomatoes in dusty jars with rusty lids. Those were the total “food products” available in the store.

  “Excuse me,” I said, approaching the clerks. “Where can I get something to eat?”

  The heavier of the two women glanced at me, taking in my uniform. “So,” she said rudely, “not from here, I suppose.”

  “No,” I said, “I’m just visiting the center.”

  The second clerk wrinkled her nose. “Don’t they feed you, then?”

  I shook my head.

  The first clerk yawned. “Well, this is all we have.”

  “Is it always like this?” I asked, looking at the bare, dusty shelves.

  The fat clerk shrugged. “Sometimes we get shipments, but it all goes fast.”

  Outside it was almost dark, a cold, windy twilight. People were hurrying by, bundled against the chill. I looked back at the two clerks. “Where can I find a restaurant?”

  The thinner clerk laughed so loudly, spittle formed on her lips. “Are you kidding with us?”

  That night I went to sleep hungry.

  The next morning I did manage to find an acceptable breakfast of sweet rolls and tea at the officers’ canteen on the base. This was fortunate because I didn’t want to face my interviews with an empty stomach.

  Colonel Yuri Rizantsev, who chaired the three-officer panel, seemed friendly enough. The officers slowly verified my Armavir Academy records and my training certificates. They noted that I had never had an accident and that my overall record was excellent. The thin engineering major on the right read his questions from a notebook. He seemed interested in the aerodynamic damage my regiment’s planes had suffered at Mary One. But before anyone asked any truly challenging questions, the colonel was on his feet, thanking me for my visit.

  “You will be notified in a few months when to return for your formal examination,” he said, stacking rny papers.

  That was it. I had just become a finalist for the biannual Akhtubinsk selection exams. I knew that over four hundred candidates among the ten thousand fighter pilots in the VVS had applied this year and that there were only forty-eight chairs in the examination room. Now I would sit in one of them.

  “Try not to become complacent, Zuyev,” Colonel Rizantsev warned me. “Work hard, study, and keep up your flying skills. They will definitely be tested next summer.”

  On the bus back to Volgagrad, I sat beside an electronics instructor, a jovial middle-aged lieutenant colonel. He revealed how the staff of the Akhtubinsk center managed to eat. Every day, he said, a Tu-154 jet transport flew a regular shuttle route from the Akhtubinsk Air Base to Pushkino airfield near Moscow, a round trip of over thirteen hundred miles. And every day, officers and their wives were on board, carrying plastic panniers and string bags. They shopped in Moscow and returned each night lugging their salami, sacks of potatoes and macaroni, and their
clinking tins of condensed milk.

  “It’s an unusual system,” the officer admitted. “But so far, we get by.”

  I nodded. If men with families could manage, I decided, I could certainly do so as well. The bus rolled north through the brown salt marsh toward civilization.

  For a while I thought about the kind of country that could build a city like Akhtubinsk but could not put bread or milk on the store shelves. Then I fell asleep.

  CHAPTER 9

  Perestroika

  1987–88

  I was promoted to captain in January 1987, four years and three months after graduating from the Armavir Academy. During the spring of 1987, the regiment was well into the long, complex process of the MiG-29’s combat evaluation. As a lead pilot, I often flew independent two-plane sorties out to the air-combat range over the Black Sea or to the weapons poligons. After each flight, there was always a heavy load of paperwork that most of my friends grumbled about. But I welcomed the demanding and detailed engineering and aerodynamic evaluation reports: Flying these evaluation flights was excellent preparation for my formal examination at the Akhtubinsk test pilot school, scheduled for June. In fact, we had several test pilots and engineers from the Akhtubinsk center at our base who kindly gave me tips on taking the exam.

  Mikhail Gorbachev had been Party Secretary and President for two years. His policy of glasnost was expanding rapidly, and he had just announced another major reform: perestroika, the restructuring” of the entire Soviet economy along modern lines. The reform seemed aimed at hacking down the thick bureaucratic deadwood that was strangling the Soviet economy. In speech after speech, “Mishka” spoke directly to the people, urging them to throw off the shell of mindless habit, to work harder, to streamline, to innovate.

  This was exciting. Gorbachev constantly stressed that we were a great nation of immense potential, graced with almost limitless natural and human resources. He intended to kick a number of well-rounded asses among the lazy and corrupt apparatchiks and the smug nomenklatura, the affluent class of members who held positions of authority all across the Union that were delineated by the Party. The combination of efficient modern Socialism and the inherent energy of the Soviet people, Gorbachev confidently proclaimed, would be invincible.