Fulcrum

by Alexander Mikhaylovich Zuyev

  I couldn’t let things end here. “Anatoli Ignatich,” I said. “We’ve known each other long enough to trust each other. You should understand what happened in Moscow.”

  By regulation, Antonovich, who would be the president of the officers’ court, should not have listened to my story in this informal setting with no witnesses present. But he was too good an officer and a friend to send me away.

  I picked up Ivanov’s report again. For the next twenty minutes I refuted his charges point by point. The only area I neglected was the actual circumstances of my “illness” during my final flight on February 13. Being too honest about this would put Antonovich in an awkward position. His face flushed, and he shook his head bitterly when I explained the true facts of the “democratic” process for the election of candidates for the Congress of People’s Deputies. When I detailed the hospital’s cover-up of the AIDS scandal, Antonovich clenched his fists but remained silent.

  “And Ivanov is a wealthy man, Anatoli Ignatich,” I finally added. “I am convinced that he abused his influential position. If my accusations triggered an investigation, he’d be ruined. That is why he has to crush me.”

  Finally Antonovich spoke. “Perhaps. For certain, you were stupid to challenge someone like that.”

  I shook my head sadly. “So we just have to accept the authority of people like that? The corruption has reached the point where the entire government is a criminal gang,” I said bitterly. “They’ll destroy anyone who challenges them. Before they had the gulag. Now…” I fell silent. The terrible events in Tbilisi were still too fresh in our minds to bring to this conversation. “Anatoli Ignatich,” I finally asked, one pilot to another, “don’t you know the history of our country?”

  “I know all this better than you can ever realize,” he replied, his voice weary.

  I had not expected such a frank answer. “Then don’t you realize that all of us wearing this uniform actually do not defend our people? We defend that criminal gang from the people.”

  The silence swelled between us. Defending the people of the Rodina was as much a foundation of faith to Antonovich as belief in the Socialism of Lenin was to my mother.

  Antonovich returned the report to my file and slammed shut the cover. “Sasha, I know you,” he said softly. “One way or another, you’ll find a way to leave the Air Force. But if all the young officers like you are gone, who’s going to make changes here in the military?”

  “I can try my best in civilian life. I can write articles. I can…” I stopped. It was not easy to lie to a friend. I had no intention of trying to reform the Soviet military. I did intend to attack it, to strike a blow of vengeance that would be noted around the world.

  “And I, Sasha,” Antonovich said, “will stay here doing my duty. Conditions will improve. Not for me certainly. Maybe not for my children, either. But their children will have a better life.”

  Antonovich was like many talented young senior Air Force officers. He firmly believed reform was possible.

  “Anatoli Ignatich,” I replied, “my grandparents told my parents the same thing.”

  He looked away, out his office window at the distant line of sleek gray fighters on the parking aprons.

  “Dismissed, Captain,” was all he said.

  With the regiment so busy preparing for the next big combat test at Mary, scheduling my trial was not a high priority.

  Even better, Antonovich assigned me as the regiment’s controller of flight operations, the “boss” who supervised the control tower dispatchers, the duty-alert section, and coordinated our flying schedule with other units and the PVO missile batteries in the region. This assignment included rotating, day-on, day-off, as the regimental duty-alert officer, which meant I had an official reason to be on the flight line, day or night, for the indefinite future.

  * * *

  Now that I had said goodbye to my family and knew I had at least a month to prepare, I set about seriously planning my “operation.” This task would be much more complicated than anything I had ever done. If the plan succeeded, I would live. If it failed, I would die. That was a strong incentive for success.

  As I concentrated on the practical details, the solutions to the problems came slowly, one answer colliding with the next, like the tumblers in a combination lock slowly but inexorably falling into place.

  The first question I had to answer was exactly where I planned to fly the hijacked fighter. But answering that relatively simple question actually led to several more complex problems. I had already decided on Turkey because it was one of only three countries — Israel and Chile were the other two — that had not signed international aviation treaties, which guaranteed to return hijackers.

  After completing a training exercise the year before, I had kept several tactical aviation charts that included Turkish airspace. Now I studied those charts late at night in my kitchen, my apartment door double-locked. I had marked headings and flying times to several potential NATO targets. Unfortunately the big air base at Incirlik in the south of the Anatolian peninsula was out of range. If I could only land there, I would fall literally into the hands of the American Air Force, without having to depend on Turkish intermediaries.

  And I realized that, whatever my destination, I would have to fly low, right down on the deck, below radar detection, where fuel consumption was maximum. And I would have to fly fast, at least until I was well clear of Soviet airspace. If I actually managed to steal a MiG-29, there would be other fighters sent up to intercept and destroy the plane before I crossed the frontier. Flying fast and low would limit my escape radius to three hundred miles. I measured that distance on the chart and looked for suitable airports within the fan-shaped wedge of my flying range.

  I immediately spotted the civilian airport at Trabzon, a port 130 miles west of the Soviet border along Turkey’s mountainous Black Sea coast. Given the steep coastline, the Trabzon airport was down at sea level and looked long enough to accommodate civilian airliners. At least I hoped it was. Trabzon became my primary destination.

  The next problem was obvious. I had to find a safe course to Trabzon, a route that offered the maximum chance of survival. Flying a direct southwest course from Tskhakaya across the Black Sea would take me over the Soviet naval base at Poti, which was defended by a PVO brigade, armed with low-, medium-, and high-altitude missiles, as well as with radar-controlled antiaircraft artillery. Equally bad, the Soviet naval contingent at Poti was almost exclusively antiaircraft missile frigates and destroyers. On any given day during the coming good spring weather, a number of ships from the flotilla would be at sea on maneuvers, fully armed with Dvina and Neva antiaircraft missiles. Those naval units’ specialty was intercepting both low- and high-flying intruders.

  But if I chose the wiser course of hugging the mountainous coast and flying through the narrow valleys and hopping ridges when necessary, I would have to pass right over the extensive PVO missile complex at Batumi on the Soviet-Turkish frontier. Using the coastal mountains for terrain masking from both Soviet and Turkish radar, however, was the attractive feature of that route.

  So my Plan One would be to fly south from Tskhakaya, right down on the deck, cut a sharp dogleg around our air base at Meria, and climb into the mountains well east of Batumi, still north of the frontier. I would then climb a valley, masked by the ridges, and pop over the summit ridge into Turkey to descend down the opposite valley. That would be risky flying, but the whole escape was a risk. If for some reason that route was not possible, my Plan Two would have to be the direct course over the Black Sea.

  My next hurdle was obvious: how to gain access to one of our armed and fueled MiG-29s without being challenged. I needed an armed plane to destroy our parked aircraft.

  All the MiG-29s parked on the aprons were fueled and carried a full cannon magazine of 150 shells. But seizing one, even late at night, would be difficult. Since the Tbilisi massacre, the guard patrols had been increased and the normal guard roster on the parking aprons doubled
. So merely climbing into one of the parked aircraft at night would arouse suspicion.

  And there was another problem. When the maintenance officers put our regiment’s MiG-29s “to bed,” they always secured the throttles with a thick split-pipe lock that slipped right over the rails and held the throttle knobs in the stop position. Locking the throttles had acquired the status of an important ritual in 1986, when the Osobists had warned us that a Western spy had been ordered to steal a MiG-29 and fly it out of the Soviet Union. But there was no way a spy or one of our pilots could fly an aircraft with that lock in place, and the maintenance officers kept possession of the keys. I certainly could not climb into a cockpit and start cutting away with a hacksaw without being arrested.

  There was another possibility. The keys to these locks were kept in the technical maintenance building, a facility I visited regularly, day and night, as part of my newly assigned duty. It might be possible to steal the keys, make impressions of them, and have duplicates made in the bazaar. Copying keys from wax or clay molds was illegal, but this was Georgia.

  The fighters on the main aprons, however, did not carry the one-ton belly tank of extra fuel, which might be the deciding factor between success and failure. I would certainly need as much fuel as possible, and that belly tank would increase my range to 430 miles. So why bother with the squadron fighters when there would always be four MiG-29s — carrying full belly drop tanks and armed with cannon and missiles — ready for immediate takeoff on the duty-alert apron, nicely isolated at the far western end of the runway?

  By strict regulation, the duty-alert planes had to be in perfect mechanical condition, ready for takeoff within five minutes of the first alert. And I knew for a fact that the throttles of the duty-alert planes were never locked. Even the Osobists could not risk having a scramble for the intercept of an actual intruder aborted because some mechanic could not find his key.

  At an absolute minimum, I could be airborne in under four minutes after I climbed into the cockpit of an alert plane. I made this calculation carefully because my life obviously depended on its accuracy. It would take fifty seconds to start one engine and begin taxiing toward the end of the runway. I could start the other engine while rolling along the ramp. Call it forty more seconds for the taxi, and twenty more for the engine thrust to stabilize. Round that off to two minutes, then double it to be on the safe side: a minimum of four minutes from the time I climbed over the cockpit sill until I slammed the throttles forward for a full afterburner takeoff.

  Now another obvious conclusion fell into place, like more tumblers in the combination lock. I had to think beyond my attack on the regiment’s parked aircraft, to my reception in Turkey. Stripped-down models of the MiG-29 had already appeared at Western air shows, so the fighter itself was no longer a mystery to the American Air Force. But the MiG-29’s advanced Archer infrared- and Alamo radar-homing missiles represented a coveted prize for the American military. A duty-alert plane became doubly attractive.

  More imaginary tumblers clicked. I would not be able to take full advantage of the belly tank fuel, after all. In order to fire the cannon, I had to drop the belly tank. After engine start, the first 220 pounds of fuel came from the main inboard tanks. Then the fuel was drawn from the drop tank. On an afterburner takeoff I would use more than half for taxi and takeoff. Depending on how long I held the tank on my climb, I might burn an additional 200 pounds. So flying a duty-alert plane with a belly tank would present a net gain of about 500 pounds of fuel, no small consideration in an emergency. Of course not attacking the parked planes would allow me to keep the fuel. But this was an act of vengeance, not just an escape.

  Of course I could never simply climb into one of the alert plane cockpits, start the engines, and taxi away. Stopping such unauthorized, nonsanktionaire takeoffs was the principal responsibility of the alert apron guard. The guard would have to be disarmed and neutralized without alarming the men of the duty section in the alert building. Somehow. Another seemingly impossible challenge.

  Ironically, as controller of flight operations, one of my principal duties was preventing such takeoffs. I was well versed in the procedures employed to stop a hijacking. At the first sign of trouble, the twelve-man guard section had orders to draw their AKM assault rifles from the armory in the alert building, then quickly block the runway with trucks. The duty-alert officer would then ask division headquarters to pass the alarm to the PVO units in the region. From experience, I knew the PVO missile batteries needed thirty minutes to warm up their terminal intercept radars and prepare their weapons for launch. Whenever the Ruslan Air Base runway was blocked by snow in the winter, we had to turn regional alert responsibility over to the PVO at Poti and Batumi. Their officers constantly reminded us that we had to give them at least a half hour before they were “up.”

  The invisible combination lock in my mind clicked once more. As flight ops controller, I was the duty-alert officer every other day. And I certainly would not sound the alarm on myself. So the hijacking would happen on a day when I had the duty — actually late at night on one of these duty days.

  There still remained the small problem of neutralizing the men of the duty-alert section. This contingent included the two ready pilots, dressed in their uncomfortable high-altitude pressure suits, three maintenance officers, and the alert guard section of twelve soldiers. The pilots and officers had their own dayroom, mess, and small dormitory. The soldiers had a separate mess and bunk room.

  My first actual action in implementing the plan was to carefully measure the distance between the alert building and the section’s parking apron. It was almost precisely six hundred feet, as I had already estimated. That afternoon I called regimental headquarters and spoke to Major Khurikov, the operations officer. “I need to verify the combat readiness of alert section guards,” I told him. “Don’t worry if you see soldiers running around down here.”

  “Good work, Zuyev,” he replied.

  Ten minutes later I sounded the alarm and dispatched the guard section to the alert apron. It took exactly fifty-five seconds for them to run from the building to the parked aircraft. But they had not yet drawn their weapons from the armory in the corridor leading to the officers’ dayroom. The vault doubled as storage for classified documents, so the steel door was heavily reinforced and secured with a thick padlock. The chief engineer on duty kept the key for that lock chained to his belt. But if the lock was jammed, I realized, the only weapons available to the alert section would be the AKM of the single apron guard and the officers’ Makarov pistols.

  On the night I took the plane, the alert section would hear the roar as soon as I started the engines. A vigilant officer might arouse the soldiers immediately. It would take them at least thirty seconds to pull on their boots and follow the officer down to the apron to investigate. But there would be some confused delay when they found the armory padlock jammed. Call it about a minute, plus the fifty-five seconds needed to run the six hundred feet to the parked aircraft: two minutes. My margin of safety required four minutes.

  I had to find a way to incapacitate both the guard section and the officers, at least to slow them down and give me the four minutes necessary to start engines and take off. That still left the problem of the apron guard. But I was confident I could surprise, disarm, and bind him without his sounding an alarm.

  Now I ranked all the problems facing me in order of difficulty.

  Both the duty-alert building and the control tower beside it were connected to regimental headquarters by telephone lines. Preventing outgoing calls was not my only problem. I had to be certain no incoming “intruder” alert could arrive to wake up the sleeping section just as I pointed my pistol at the apron guard. So all the lines had to be cut. I could do this easily, especially late at night. I made a note to buy a pair of sturdy wire cutters at the bazaar in town.

  The duty-alert officer kept the keys for the fuel and maintenance trucks parked beside the building, which the guards would use to block the runw
ay. Without keys, the vehicles were no threat.

  I had to find a way to disable the armory lock that was both foolproof and simple. Then I picture the wide key slot on the heavy padlock. A thin file jammed inside and broken off would do nicely. That was another purchase in the hardware bazaar.

  Those problems were simple. But how could I neutralize the duty section officers and guards and the duty dispatcher and communicator up in the control tower? I had no intention of killing people. So I had to find a way to drug them, to leave them so groggy that they would take longer than four minutes to respond to the rumble of my engine starting.

  I paced around the duty-alert building and the control tower, relentlessly attacking the problem from every angle. I saw no way to overpower and drug the dispatcher and communicator in the tower greenhouse. But they were unarmed. And with their phone line cut, they only had an emergency aircraft radio channel to spread the alarm. The chances were good that alarm would go unanswered. And they certainly had no way to block the runway physically.

  So I could forget about the tower and concentrate on the officers and men in the alert building. The most serious threat lay with the twelve-man guard section. But if I did obtain knockout drugs, how would I feed them to the guards? They ate rations from their own mess, usually a disgusting slop of thin kasha or a watery ragout of half-rotten potatoes and fried fish. But they certainly did drink tea, as did all the officers in the alert section. In fact, we felt sorry for the guards and always gave them extra sugar for their tea. The boys drank it constantly.

  I entered the side door to the small officers’ dining room. The tea and sugar were kept locked in this pantry. If I obtained enough drug to spike the sugar in the large tin canister, I would make sure to deliver two hundred grams or so as a kind gesture to the guard section the night of the hijacking. And of course I would fill the sugar bowl that stood beside the electric samovar in the officers’ dayroom. I stood in the narrow pantry, engulfed with the sweet scent of tea leaves and the sharp aroma of pepper. Maybe I had found the vector for my drugs.