Hamid the year before was certainly bearing fruit. A senior lieutenant in the VVS and three students were going to live better than a lot of senior officers.
One afternoon, Oleg told me that the three of them planned to pay their respects to the base commander, the lieutenant colonel who managed the resort. He wore a blue VVS uniform, replete with pilot’s wings, as if being up in the mountains was the same as flying duty. I wondered why students wanted to meet this officer.
I turned to Vladimir. “What institute is it exactly that you fellows attend?” When I first met them, they had seemed a little old for students, but I hadn’t thought too much about it.
Zaour looked at his pals and they nodded silently. “Frankly, Sasha,” he said, “we’re with the Committee for State Security.”
I tried not to show my surprise. To me, the KGB was a vaguely sinister institution; certainly most of my pilot friends both disliked and distrusted the KGB Osobii Otdel meddlers found in any regiment. But I was also deeply curious to learn more about their organization. I only hoped that I hadn’t inadvertently told any political jokes during our late-night parties. Then, looking at their smiling, open faces, I realized these fellows were a lot different from the humorless Osobists whom I had met in the Air Force. Certainly Oleg and Vladimir were not here to spy on me, and Zaour was hardly sinister.
In fact, they were so close to me in age and education that I understood at once that we were actually colleagues, each defending the Rodina in his own way. The KGB had a reputation as the “Fighters on the Invisible Front,” which meant they protected the Motherland from spies and saboteurs. And from what I had read in Pravda and Red Star, there were a lot of foreign espionage agents loose in the Soviet Union. The television series This Is America had focused one show entirely on the CIA spies among us. They had cameras in their shoes, electronic listening devices shaped like watches, and ballpoint pens that could fire bullets. With characters like that in our midst, I knew the kind of challenge my new friends faced. And I was glad that I had strictly followed Defense Ministry directive number 10, in my answers to their questions about my assignment:
“What airplane do you fly, Sasha?”
“A MiG.”
“How high do you fly? How fast?”
“Very high. Very fast.”
Even if I had drunk my fair share of cognac at night, I had never revealed any secrets.
The next night, the three of them spoke about their assignments. Zaour ran the KGB’s communications room at their regional headquarters. It seemed to be an inherited job, as his father was the local KGB commander. Oleg was an operations man who worked in counterespionage in the major Black Sea ports and resorts. Vladimir was a newly appointed KGB officer who had trained as a physicist in Moscow. Once he completed his field orientation in Georgia, he would undergo intense training for an overseas technical espionage assignment, probably as a member of an “immigrant” group.
“You are one of us,” Oleg told me. “You understand our work, Sasha. But keep it between us.”
When I got back to the regiment in February, my squadron was very busy. The base had been selected to host the Central Committee of the Georgian Communist Party for the February 23 Red Army Day military exposition. And I had been chosen as the representative young MiG-23 pilot.
This was my first official encounter with high Party officials. My unit zampolit, Major Vladimir Novikov, gave the younger officers direct and simple instructions as to how to respond to the visiting delegation: “To any question about conditions, you will reply Otlichno. Excellent.”
I was positioned at the nose of a well-scrubbed MiG-23 that had obviously never been flown hard. Its tires were brand-new. Laid out before me on the tarmac — which had been scrubbed clean of oil stains — was a fan- shaped display of all the missiles and bombs the aircraft could carry.
We had been told that the Georgian Party delegation would be led by its chairman, Eduard Shevardnadze, who was reputed to have good connections in Moscow. So PVO and VVS fighter interceptors were given the most prominent positions among the combat aircraft. This was in keeping with the Party and Defense Ministry policy line that the Soviet military was basically a defensive force, protecting the Socialist Motherland from imperialist aggression.
But after six weeks away from the regiment, the exposition’s hypocrisy grated on me. Certainly everything was not otlichno. The officers of the habitually understaffed maintenance sections, for example, were forced to work almost fifty straight hours to prepare for the show. Then at the last minute they were issued new black coveralls to replace their stained and ripped regular uniforms to make it appear they had merely supervised the clumsy and inept conscripts assigned to them.
The engineering officers were also ordered to clean up the frayed, cast-off cloth earphone helmets, which the pilots had given the mechanics to jury-rig as improvised hearing protection. This was a glaring example of the gap between pokazuka and reality. Ever since I’d been flying, ground crews had complained that they were never issued protective helmets against the deafening whine and blast of jet engines. Indeed, “deaf as a mechanic” was a common phrase. So, whenever they could, pilots retired the close-fitting nylon and leather earphone liners worn under the hard flight helmets and gave them to the mechanics, who stuffed the earphones with thick cotton wadding.
Now these mechanics and engineers had to pretend the helmets were State issue.
The only people really looking forward to the exposition were the conscripts. They knew that whenever an important kozyol, “goat,” of the Party visited the base, the food in the soldiers’ dining halls would dramatically improve and the kitchens would be scrubbed spotless.
But it was unlikely Comrade Shevardnadze’s delegation would perform a white-glove inspection searching for rancid grease in the soldiers’ kitchens. Sometimes, though, apparatchiks — trailed by zampolits snapping pictures — would sit at the soldiers’ dining tables to enjoy a bowl of rich, meaty soup, the only fresh beef or lamb the soldiers might see for months.
However, as I stood in my best winter flying suit waiting for the Zil limousine to come to a stop near the honor guard at the far end of the ramp on that cloudy February morning, I knew it was more than unlikely that the Party delegation would inspect the bachelor and married officers’ housing compound two miles from the base. When I had first arrived in Vaziani, Bagomed “Boris” Bagomedov and I had shared a dingy room in the bachelors’ quarters. But Boris was a hard worker and helped me make the quarters livable. We both felt sorry for the married fellows living in the shoddy, two-story brick building across from us. Their families were jammed into single rooms without toilets, equipped with a small sink and a single, cold-water tap. Every morning we saw the wives in their housecoats trudging across to the latrines on the ground floor of our building, lugging their sloshing chamber pots. Their husbands would be flying twenty-million-ruble aircraft while these women were obliged to scrub out stinking slop buckets with cold water.
After Boris got married to a girl from his home village in Dagestan, I had the room to myself, but could hardly enjoy this dubious privilege. I ate all my meals at the officers’ dining room on the base, two miles away. This meant that on weekends I had to spend hours waiting for the single shuttle bus, just to eat breakfast, lunch, and supper. So I studied the situation carefully and planned a campaign to win the support of Major Novikov, my squadron zampolit.
“Comrad Captain,” I told him, “I need my own apartment if I am to successfully complete my training.”
“Lieutenant Zuyev,” he said, “this is a most unusual request.”
I had expected that he would respond that way and was prepared to put him on the defensive. “You know, of course, Comrade Captain,” I reasoned, “that I am in a very intense training schedule and need all the sleep I can get as well as nutritious hot meals. Surely you realize our flight surgeon, Major Blustein, has recommended this regime.”
Novikov nodded neutrally.
“Captain Novikov,” I added, playing my trump card, “the flight surgeon suggested I see you to find a quiet apartment where I can sleep during the day when I’m on night training flights, and where I can prepare my own meals without wasting hours traveling back and forth to the officers’ dining room.”
Again, Novikov was noncommittal. Finding an apartment for a single junior officer would be a real challenge.
I let the silence between us deepen. “Well, Major,” I said, filling my voice with disappointment, “I’ll manage somehow. If you can’t help me, I understand. I probably made a mistake in troubling you.”
Novikov stared at me intensely. I could see he was intrigued by the challenge. “I will do what I can for you,
