Fulcrum

by Alexander Mikhaylovich Zuyev

  I glanced away from the windscreen to verify my remaining fuel. Still 5,500 pounds, enough to make Trabzon, if I didn’t have to take violent evasive action. When I looked up, a huge black fence filled the horizon. Instinctively I hauled back on the stick and bounced up to 300 feet. Just in time to clear a double row of drooping high-tension power lines.

  I had not realized I was already this far. Those power lines turned south toward Batumi only two miles from the coast itself. Then the entire horizon winked and rippled with the grapey blue of the Black Sea at dawn. The narrow coast road and tan beach sailed by. I was free of the land.

  But, stupidly, I hung here too long. The SPO-15 radar-warning receiver display in the right corner of my panel suddenly twinkled like the lights on a tree. I was being swept by the acquisition radar of a missile system. The outer circular row of yellow priority lights blinked in the upper right quadrant, marking first ten degrees, then thirty, then back to ten. That radar beam held me steady for a moment, possibly long enough for launch acquisition. Then three of the nine green bearing lights winked on, indicating that the sweep angle of the beam had narrowed. A moment later the inner row of yellow oblong power lights pulsed. The search and acquisition had narrowed and intensified. That had to be the PVO brigade in Poti.

  Without hesitating, I pushed the stick hard forward, steadied it with my numb right fist, and tripped the chaff dispenser switch at the lower center of my instrument panel, flipping to manual control. The chaff dispenser in the boat tail between the two engine exhausts was now popping chaff packets every 1.5 seconds. These packets instantly shredded in the transonic slipstream, bursting into wide clouds of hair-thin aluminum dipoles. Within seconds, I knew the chaff target would swell on the PVO radar screens into a ragged oval, masking my descent toward the waves.

  My radar-warning panel went dark. Luckily I had not been wearing earphones so I had not heard the nagging beep of an imminent lock-on.

  I was free of that threat, but had to quickly overcome another. Flying at transonic speed so close to the water was much more dangerous than over land. There were no trees or telegraph poles to give definition to the flat, plum-blue surface of the sea. And the distant horizon was masked in evaporation haze. This was like flying into a constricting tunnel of blue glass. I suddenly lost orientation and felt that the plane was sliding inexorably onto its right wing, even though the stick was well centered.

  But again I refused to panic. Instead of looking ahead at the flowing sheet of the surface, I rolled my head right and left to stare past the wingtips. The plane was flying straight and level. Off the left wing I saw a darker jumble on the hazy southern horizon. That would be Batumi, the port close to the Soviet-Turkish frontier. The reinforced PVO brigade there had every conceivable air-defense missile and gun in the Soviet arsenal, Dvinas, Nevas, Rombs, and Kubes. But my radar-warning receiver remained dark. Either the Batumi brigade had not yet been alerted, or I was safely below their radar horizon.

  I craned my neck to ease the cold cramp spreading from my right shoulder. The adrenaline had flushed through my system and I felt suddenly sick, spongy inside. I clenched my teeth and breathed as deeply as I could. There was still over a hundred miles of this dead flat sea to traverse before the Turkish coast.

  Then I was instantly erect in the seat, throbbing with fresh adrenaline. The concentric circles of yellow and green warning lights on my SPO-15 display flashed again, this time from the right rear quadrant. I was being probed by a radar from behind. A quick calculation revealed that the only possible radar back there had to be airborne. Either it was Petrukhin, or the PVO had managed to scramble Su-27s from Gudauta. A scan of my cockpit mirrors showed nothing, just the misty blue morning behind me. Looking back was a waste of time. If they launched on me, it would be from a distance of at least six miles.

  Again I juggled the stick in my right hand to trip the chaff dispenser with my left thumb. I had no choice but to slide even lower toward the gentle blue swell. Down here, one false move, one slip with the control stick, would slam me into the sea. But I had to stay this low for several minutes longer, protected by the cloud of chaff from the radar lock-on of an Alamo. I had no choice. At least death would be fast in either case.

  The haze had formed a circle now, obliterating the horizon ahead and behind. All I could do was hang on, waiting for the Turkish mountains to appear ahead. Or for a missile to slam into my tail pipes.

  The radar receiver lights flashed briefly once more, then went dark. A minute passed. My chaff supply was exhausted. But the threat did not return.

  Now I felt sick and dizzy, a sour metallic taste in my dry mouth. I knew I might pass out at any moment. Better to fight it than surrender. I eased the stick back and let the plane float up to 1,500 feet. At least the radar altimeter was working. At this altitude I would be visible to the radars of any Navy ships out there to the right, especially to the new precision search radars on the Udaloy class destroyers based out of Poti.

  But I had to take this risk. Before I passed out or grew even weaker, I had to strap into the ejection seat. I might be too groggy to land this airplane, and I had no intention of dying because I hadn’t the strength to strap in properly.

  But this proved almost impossible. My right arm was useless now, and I needed my left hand to fly. In a series of jerky motions that sometimes sent the plane lurching hard right or left, I managed to free the twisted straps and buckles behind me. Then I discovered I could grip the stick loosely with my knees and use my left hand to reach behind and pull the safety pins from the arm restraints. Freeing the pin from the seat igniter system was the hardest task of all. Normally the mechanic used two hands to twist and jerk the locking mechanism. I had only one, and the pin was located high and behind my headrest. If I strained to reach it, my knees slipped off the stick and the plane careened violently through the sky. Even at an altitude of 1,500 feet, I was dangerously low at this speed. So I climbed another 600 feet, pushed myself up on my haunches, and somehow fought the pin free.

  Time seemed to stop. I was no longer just flying this fighter, I was battling for my life. Then I looked up to find I had clasped the last buckle of the harness in place. I slid the safety pin free of the ejection-seat firing handle between my knees and dropped it on the deck with the others.

  I found myself smiling. In those minutes I had fought the ejection harness and the pins, I had passed into Turkish airspace. A brown hump loomed ahead in the mist and slowly gained definition. The coast of Turkey, the mountainous headland of Fener Burnu. I had made a perfect landfall after flying almost one hundred miles right down on the waves. And I was strapped into a fully armed ejection seat.

  Whatever happened now, at least I would not die in this airplane.

  It was safe to climb even higher. I eased the throttles back to eighty percent and leveled off at 3,000 feet. The tan and green bulk of Turkey rose steeply from the sea, sliced by geometrically flat bands of milk-white mist. Below, a fishing boat cut a widening V-wake through the calm water. This was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen. I stared at those wild brown mountains as they swelled toward me.

  Then I remembered what that landfall meant. It was my primary navigation point. Trabzon lay to the left, fifteen miles east of the headland. And the city’s airport lay about another mile further east, just past the port. At least according to the detailed VVS navigation chart I had memorized then burnt with my other papers in the soccer field.

  I rolled slowly left and scanned the coast. There was a town, but it seemed too small to be the port of Trabzon. Those low stone buildings and the wooden wharf had to be Akcaabat, a little fishing port on my chart. A band of snow-white mist lifted from the coast and I suddenly saw the modern city of Trabzon marching up the bluff from the sea. Trabzon was sliced by steep ravines. The winding streets were rivers of shade trees leading down to the port. I saw large warehouses, a long concrete commercial pier, and an overlapping brown breakwater. There was the tall lighthouse that had been marked
on my chart. Behind the city, older houses with orange tile roofs spread into pale green tea groves. I slid the throttles back and eased down the nose.

  Where was the airport? The highway leading east of the city seemed to widen into a long gray motorway. No. That highway was the airport’s single runway. It was right on the edge of the water, perched there like an aircraft carrier. My nose was lined up perfectly. I decided to skip a normal landing circuit and fly a straight-in approach. But I made sure to check the airspace for traffic. There was nothing in sight.

  Steadying the stick with my knees, I dumped landing gear, set the slats, then the flaps for landing, and began to verify my panel. But I had no proper instruments, just the radar altimeter and the angle-of-attack gauge, a circular dial just left of the HUD.

  That would have to guide me through the approach. I set up at an initial AOA of ten degrees, with the throttles still at eighty percent. With no airspeed indicator, I had to judge this well. I did not want to overshoot the threshold at the edge of the sea because I had no idea how long the runway was. But I did not want to undershoot either.

  The plane came whistling down, “steady as a train,” as Tveretin used to say. Now I lifted the nose to twelve degrees AOA and used my rudders gently to keep the nose aligned with the long gray runway. The gravelly white beach sailed past. I caught a glimpse of painted lines. I was over the threshold. The main gear touched smoothly, with only a slight squeal. And I was surprised by the gentle bounce of the nosewheel’s contact. Instinctively I tripped my tan drag chute and watched the canopy blossom in my mirror.

  I sagged in the ejection harness with the sudden deceleration, still surprised to be on the ground so smoothly. If anyone was watching, he had seen a fine display. That was undoubtedly the best landing I had ever flown.

  I let the airplane roll past the small terminal and squat control tower. Passing the buildings, I saw no parked aircraft, not even any vehicles. The modern airport looked deserted. I couldn’t help but notice how smooth this runway was. If I had any doubt I had left the Soviet Union, this beautiful seamless concrete runway reassured me. I parked at the far right-hand edge of the runway to be clear of any incoming traffic, shut down the engines, popped the canopy, and breathed deeply. The air was cool and clean, with a salty hint of the nearby sea.

  Only five hundred yards away, huge double-trailer trucks rumbled along the coastal highway. They were lovely trucks, brightly painted, with shiny cabs and strange orange and yellow letters painted on their tall flanks. I had seen such trucks in Western movies. They were an unmistakable sign of wealth, of commerce, of a world I did not know. Then I noticed the billboards on the other side of the highway. They were also printed with large, bright Roman letters. There were pictures of women in shiny kitchens, a smiling man at the wheel of a car. I wished I could read the words. I was confident they were advertisements, not propaganda slogans.

  “I made it,” I whispered, then laughed out loud. A warm joy I had never before experienced rose inside me. Then I remembered I was a Soviet Air Force pilot on my last mission. I went to work to set my cockpit straight, happily tripping circuit breakers and shutting down systems. I stared at the left-hand corner of my panel and felt a sudden stab of cold.

  The master weapons sensor panel switch was still in the off/safe position. That was why the cannon had not fired.

  “Blyat,” I swore, hitting the panel with my left fist.

  In my muddled condition on the Tskhakaya runway, I had not noticed that switch because the panel had been half-hidden by the accordion-fold anti-glare curtain, meant to shield the HUD from the instrument lights. For years, my fellow pilots and I had written reports complaining about that damned curtain. But the inertia-bound Soviet bureaucracy had not responded. Now those lazy bureaucrats deserved decorations. They had just inadvertently saved twelve MiG-29s from destruction.

  I looked at the clock, 0547. I had been on the ground a full seven minutes, but no one had come for me. Maybe Turkey was in a different time zone and it was only just past five in the morning here. I decided to taxi to the terminal. This time, I remembered to set the throttles properly for engine start.

  As I swung back down the runway, my shoulder suddenly throbbed with hot pain. All my reserve of adrenaline was burnt. The pain began to swell. I would need a ladder to get out of this cockpit safely. I taxied slowly and swung across the yellow lines of a vehicle parking zone just beside the modern terminal. I shut down my engines and unstrapped the ejection harness to raise in my seat. The terminal still seemed deserted.

  Then I saw three faces peering at me through the wide glass doors of the terminal, an old man and two younger fellows. Their eyes were fixed in wide stares. When I waved, the two younger men scurried away into the shadows. But after a while, the old man opened the door and came ahead cautiously to stand near my left wing.

  I smiled. Then waved him toward me, trying to gesture that I needed a ladder. He came closer. I saw the white stubble on his cheeks. I realized he was a watchman. This was my first contact with authority in Turkey. I had planned carefully for this moment. I wanted the news of my arrival to reach the Americans as quickly as possible.

  “American,” I shouted, following my careful plan to this final step. I tapped my chest and called once more in the English words I had painfully memorized from my dictionary. “I am American.”

  The old man’s eyes had been focused on the huge red stars on my twin rudders. Now he smiled.

  EPILOGUE

  Ankara, Turkey,

  17 June 1989, 0920 hours

  The convoy of vehicles pulled smoothly to a stop on this narrow country road. Beside us, the fields of ripe wheat moved in the breeze. The morning was still cool, but the summer sun of Anatolia was climbing in the brassy sky. Three miles to the west, Ankara’s international airport rumbled with jet traffic. The security officers from the Turkish Ministry of Defense, however, had done well in selecting this rendezvous. There were no houses in sight, no cars, or even farm tractors.

  I climbed out of the armored van and stood in the sun, waiting. Muscular young guards in gray suits piled from the other vehicles, brandishing Uzi submachine guns. We were waiting for a similar convoy from the American embassy.

  I had been in Turkey almost a month. And those four weeks had been eventful. The first hours in Trabzon, the Turks had treated me with great kindness and professional skill. I had been taken from the airport to a hospital, where my wounds were treated. Luckily the bullet from Chomayev’s AKM had caused no permanent damage, entering my upper right biceps, plowing through the muscle to exit from the thick flesh behind my armpit. An X ray revealed the bullet had not touched bone or important ligaments. I was given my own cheerful room and guarded around the clock by soldiers with automatic rifles. That first afternoon a Russian-speaking teacher was brought in to serve as translator. Through him I made my formal request for political asylum and asked that the Turks contact the Americans.

  Within hours the chief of staff of the Turkish Air Force arrived with a delegation of officers. These officers told me it was vital that I write the request for asylum in my own hand. But my right hand was still numb, my arm in a sling. So I clumsily printed my formal request, using my left hand. The Turkish Air Force officers were concerned about the safing procedures for my plane’s weapons and ejection seat. It was hard to explain where the seat’s safety pins were because I had hastily dropped them on the cockpit deck. But after a while, the officers seemed satisfied. Before they left, they patted me on the back and we all posed for pictures together. They assured me I would receive asylum.

  The next day I heard the rumble of a heavy jet landing at the nearby airport. My translator explained that a Soviet delegation had arrived from Tskhakaya to reclaim the MiG-29. Over the next confused hours, I was able to piece together what had happened. More bad luck. Although I had no way of knowing, the day I hijacked the fighter, a high-level Turkish military delegation, led by their chief of staff, was on an official visit to Moscow
, guests of Defense Minister Marshal Yazov. As soon as the news was flashed to the Kremlin, Yazov personally extracted a solemn promise from the Turkish generals that their government would return the fighter.

  The Soviet authorities also pressured the Turks for my extradition back to Georgia. Their demand was based on the claim that I was a common criminal, not a defector seeking political asylum. But again, glasnost ironically dominated the situation. In the past the Defense Ministry would have blatantly stated that I had murdered the apron guard, making me an obvious candidate for extradition. But with the new policy of openness, the authorities had been forced to reveal details about the escape that they would have hidden in the past. Corporal Chomayev had, in fact, been interviewed on Soviet television, a broadcast seen in Turkey. He was obviously not dead. And he gave an accurate account of our desperate fight on the parking apron. From this interview it was clear that I had acted in self-defense when I shot him.

  His statement, combined with my own wound, bolstered my self-defense appeal against extradition. The Turks asked me to write a complete account of my escape. They assured me that this statement would provide the evidence needed to deny the Soviet government’s extradition request, scheduled to be considered at a judicial hearing in a few days. But the Turks also told me there was nothing they could do to prevent the Soviet Air Force from reclaiming the fighter.

  When the translator explained all this, I swore bitterly. “Please don’t return that fighter,” I told the Turkish officers. “It’s a weapon and I risked my life to bring it here. If I had known you would send it back, I would have ejected.”

  Again I used my left hand to write a message, this time a formal request that the Turks refuse to return the fighter.

  But I was too late. That afternoon, maintenance officers from my regiment quickly loaded all the missiles aboard the big Il-76. Ironically the pilot who flew the plane back to Tskhakaya was none other than Lieutenant Colonel Shatravka, the staff officer I had defeated in the dogfight on my last official flying day as a Soviet pilot.