“I’ve got a whole collection of American rock tapes,” I told her. “And Yuri’s got a great machine to make dupes.”
Jana smiled and stared at me with those luminous blue eyes. “Could you possibly make me a few copies?”
She wrote her university address and the dormitory telephone number with a neat hand. Before I realized exactly what was going on, we had exchanged addresses and agreed that I would write her when I sent the tapes.
After Jana left that night, Yelena, a good Air Force matchmaker, was radiant.
“She’s a wonderful girl, Sasha,” she said. “A young officer could do a lot worse, you know. Her father will be a general soon.”
I shrugged. “I’m not interested in her father,” I told Yelena honestly.
“Ah,” she said, “but are you interested in Jana?”
I knew how these girls worked among themselves. If I said no here, that would be the end of it. Again I was honest. “Yes,” I said. “I certainly am.”
That autumn Jana wrote every week, and I replied as often as I could. I also made sure that Yuri copied my best tapes on good blank cassettes. Jana appreciated the gesture and we agreed to see each other for the New Year’s holiday.
When Jana came back to Tskhakaya in late December, there was a subtle difference in her attitude toward me. Now she revealed in small ways that she had been too busy with her first-year classes to attend any dances. In effect, she was saying that she was available for me, if I chose her. But I knew enough about Air Force etiquette to avoid the obvious temptation of seducing a senior colonel’s young daughter. If I was going to see much more of Jana Baglai, we were going to have to become engaged.
I was only twenty-four, however, and, as much as I was attracted to Jana, I wasn’t ready for marriage. And she wasn’t even nineteen yet. I decided to delay any decision. For the moment, we both had full agendas.
By early March 1986, all the regiment’s pilots had qualified on the MiG-29, and we were ready for our combat proficiency test at the Mary center. We all understood how much depended on our performance out there. Both the Kubinka Guards regiment and Ros in the Ukraine had failed their ten-day test at Mary that winter. Obviously, if the glory boys from Kubinka couldn’t charm the humorless judges from the Defense and Aviation ministries who scored the Mary test exercises, our chances of passing the test were not good. But on the other hand, if we somehow did manage to score well, we’d become one of the hottest units in the Air Force.
When a regiment went to Mary, the entire unit deployed, right down to clerks, cooks, and drivers, and the civilian waitresses in the officers’ dining room. Our intelligence officers had briefed us on the Red Flag air-combat exercises the American Air Force conducted out in their western desert bases. Apparently only those pilots deployed with their planes; the maintenance and administrative personnel remained at the home base, presumably reading Playboy magazine, or however such people amuse themselves.
That was hardly a realistic test of a unit’s combat proficiency. So, when the 176th Regiment deployed to Mary, our entire ground support structure flew ahead of us aboard several Il-76 jet transports. Our armorers, mechanics, meteorologists, and maintenance officers would be there to meet us when we flew in, just as if we had deployed to a Warsaw Pact base during a real military operation against NATO.
Our first success came when all forty of the regiment’s MiG-29s, plus two MiG-23UB trainers, took off from Tskhakaya right on schedule. This was a tribute to our maintenance and engineering staff who had worked around the clock all week to prepare the aircraft. Our second success came late that afternoon when all the aircraft had landed at Mary West Air Base in four-plane zveno formations. We had flown the nine hundred miles from Tskhakaya to the Kara Kum Desert of the Turkmen Republic, making one refueling stop at Sital Chay on the Caspian Sea, without incident. The other two MiG-29 regiments that had failed the Mary center test had come straggling in like wounded ducks over a period of several days, due to maintenance aborts en route and, in the case of one sad pilot from Ros, landing with his gear up.
The weather was good throughout the flight. And once more I marveled at the comfort and stability of the aircraft. After crossing the Caspian, we flew almost due east, leaving the snow-crusted mountainous frontier with Iran well off our right wingtips. Ahead the even higher white ramparts of the Hindu Kush rose above the dark browns and charcoal gray of the flat Kara Kum, the “Black Sand” desert. Mary was an oasis town sprawled among vegetable plots on the banks of the Karakumsky Canal, a geometrically straight irrigation and barge channel that provided one of the few landmarks in the featureless desert.
The Mary base complex spread across a wide area north of the dusty, mud-brick civilian town. Mary Two, the smaller of the two airfields, was a regular VVS Su-17 base and transport stop-over for flights to and from Afghanistan, which lay over the steep ridges of the Paropamisus Range on the southern horizon. That unit had dropped bombs on the very first day of the Afghan war seven years before and was still flying combat missions.
Mary One was a much more elaborate base, with extensive maintenance facilities and ordnance depots to service the VVS regiment permanently stationed there, which flew a variety of aircraft to simulate NATO formations.
It was nice to fly into such a big, well-equipped base surrounded by hundreds of square miles of empty desert, completely free of ground obstacles or air navigation hazards. But when I flared for landing on the broad concrete runway, I was surprised to see crusty snow beside the taxi ramp. Then, pulling onto the apron with my canopy open, I saw that the snow was actually crystallized salt, caked on the sooty gray sand.
The weather at Mary was typical of the high Central Asian desert in early spring, sunny hot at midday, and chilly dry at night with a vast unbroken dome of stars. Outside the barbed-wire perimeter fence, Turkmen tribal people, the men in turbans, the women veiled, herded shaggy two-humped camels, donkeys laden with bright carpetbags, and endless herds of sheep and goats. But the base itself was definitely part of the twentieth century.
The Mary center regiment operated an unusual variety of aircraft types. They flew modified MiG-21s and MiG-23s that registered the same type of radar profile as American F-15s and NATO fighters. Heavy turboprop An- 12 transports and Mi-8 helicopters were used as electronic countermeasure (ECM) platforms to jam the radar of “friendly” aircraft like our MiG-29s. Other Tupolev and Ilyushin multi-engine aircraft had been rigged to duplicate the function and electronic signature of American AWACS and British Nimrod airborne radar planes. During our two weeks at Mary, we would eventually fly large engagement exercises involving the entire regiment against an equal unit of “NATO” planes.
Our first afternoon at the center we met with the base test officers and the high-ranking evaluation staff from Moscow. The mood of the meeting was formal and professional, with none of the typical sardonic Air Force humor exchanged among the pilots from the two groups.
In all the tests we would have to demonstrate the ability to fly the MiG-29 to the limits of its performance envelope. This meant low and slow, low and supersonic, and all the way up to stratospheric high-Mach flight. The air-combat tests would all be closing engagements, ranging from two opponents to a huge two-regiment melee spread across a hundred horizontal miles and thousands of feet of altitude. The rules of engagement for these dogfights gave our opposition MiG-23s the close to performance as American F-15s, supported by AWACS. These MiG-23s would be escorted by pairs of MiG-21s and Su-17s carrying active ECM jammers.
A separate malchi-malchi “hush-hush” technical delegation from Moscow would test my first squadron on a tactical nuclear bombing mission. We would drop the standard six-foot-long dummy nuclear bomb that we trained with on the Special Weapons poligon in Georgia. This particular test could come at any time and would involve close scrutiny of our ability to correctly and rapidly enter the secret unlocking codes into our aircraft weapons systems in the precise sequence needed to arm and drop a nuclear bomb.
The next day the test commanders presented their first surprise. Cool high pressure with minimal turbulence was the forecast in the morning. So, instead of the scheduled dogfight exercise, we were given our maximum airspeed test. Although everyone tried to take this assignment in stride, we were excited by the prospect.
Speed, of course, is what fighters are built for. But most people did not understand the full ramifications of a maximum airspeed test in a modern high-performance fighter. High Mach numbers were not always the equivalent of high airspeed.
Our maximum airspeed test would be flown on full afterburner at an altitude of 3,000 feet above ground level. Here the air was quite dense, so the speed of sound — Mach 1 — was much faster than in the stratosphere.
