release pulsed on the left margin of the screen. When I pulled up hard, my G-meter immediately registered “5” and I was forced deep into my seat. The horizon fell away and I was climbing vertically on afterburner. The seconds to auto release blinked silently to zero, and I felt the weapon lurch as I crested through a loop angle of 120 degrees at 3,600 feet.
Now I had one minute to make my break before that gray monster exploded. Had this been a real nuclear mission, I could have been buffeted by a hellfire flash, a brutal shock wave, and an invisible but powerful electromagnetic pulse. Now, on this realistic training sortie, I prepared my cockpit for the EMP, knowing that all my computerized instruments would be rendered inoperable by the pulse and I would have to navigate back to Mary by analog instruments and magnetic compass alone.
When I touched down and taxied to the apron, I saw a line of smiling faces among our maintenance staff. Preliminary strike results had just come in: All targets destroyed. Only one aircraft lost. The regiment had “killed” the NATO AWACS and shot down nine of their twelve F-16s. This was a spectacular success.
That afternoon Colonel Torbov cautiously suggested that we might actually become the first regiment in the Soviet Air Force to be judged combat operational with the MiG-29.
Like all successful tacticians, my commanders had played our strengths into the enemy’s weakness. And high-level intelligence briefers had stressed that NATO in general, and the American Air Force in particular, underestimated the new tactics of the VVS, which were grounded in our new equipment.
In fact, we had learned, the Americans judged us based on a series of myths. According to American military intelligence, Soviet wingmen were helpless without their leaders; this was false. We were all taught to fly independently and were free to maneuver and select our own targets. The Americans also believed we were totally dependent on our GCI battle-control officers. In fact, we worked with them to build the total threat picture, and were actually more independent of radar control than the Americans, who relied so heavily on their AWACS. The U.S. Air Force also taught its pilots that their Soviet counterparts were simply interceptor pilots trained to fire missiles from poorly maneuvera-ble aircraft. They were confusing the PVO with the VVS.
American myths about rigid Soviet tactics and training procedures were based in part on the poor performance of Soviet clients, especially the Arabs, in air combat against the Israelis.
The Americans somehow believed that we provided the Arabs with our best tactics and training methods when we sold them our airplanes. And, for some strange reason, the Americans also chose to equate Syrian and Egyptian pilots — who usually gained their assignments through family connections — with professional Soviet Air Force pilots who underwent stiff competition to win their place at academies like Armavir.
As the GRU colonel who briefed us on this scornfully indicated, the Americans had somehow put things cherez zhopu, “ass backward.” Training in the Israeli Defense Force was based almost entirely on the Soviet military. In fact, during the Israeli War of Independence in 1948, their ground and air officers had been Red Army veterans of the Great Patriotic War. And today, Israeli pilots were trained exactly as I had been: selected as teenagers right out of school, and flying jets in their second year at an academy.
If anything, the amazing record of success Israeli pilots had achieved over their Arab opponents was an endorsement of Soviet training doctrine, not a condemnation of it. But, as our GRU colonel reminded us, if the Americans chose to believe differently, so much the better.
On a foggy afternoon two weeks later when flights were grounded at Tskhakaya, Colonel Torbov was summoned to division headquarters. When he returned, he presented the compliments of the division commander and the Air Force chief of the military district. The Moscow evaluators had scored us: 4/5 “Horosho,” Good. This was not a 5/5 “Excellent” rating, but it was quite acceptable compared to the 2/5 the Kubinka and Ros regiments had scored. The 176th Frontal Aviation Regiment had become the first combat-ready MiG-29 unit in the Soviet Air Force, beating out two better-known regiments, including the famous Guards of Kubinka.
Even more exciting, Colonel Torbov continued, was the news that the Ministries of Aviation and Defense had selected our regiment to be the official test evaluation unit for the new fighter’s air-combat tests.
The colonel declared a regimental holiday, and we all unearthed our private caches of good brandy.
Home in Samara on leave in early May, I noticed a small article on the inner “Regional News” page of the local Izvestia. Apparently there had been a fire at a nuclear power station near the town of Chernobyl, sixty miles north of Kiev in the Ukraine. The story was only two paragraphs long and concluded with the reassurance that there was no danger of radiation spreading because “the situation was quickly brought under control.”
Sitting on that park bench near the Volga with the laughter of children ringing in the sunshine, there was certainly no reason why I felt the sudden stab of alarm. Under Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, the Central Committee of the Party and the Politburo had unanimously endorsed complete openness in the news media. Indeed, I had actually read a few unusually frank stories on Aeroflot accidents and industrial explosions over the past year that never would have been printed before glasnost.
Still, there was something in the bland, neutral language of that page-four story about the power plant fire that nagged at me. Perhaps it was the phrase “under control” that triggered my inner alarm system. I suddenly remembered my Afghansti friend Valery’s cynical advice. “Sanya,” he’d repeatedly told me, “never believe the shit in the official press. If you want to know what’s really happening, listen to Radio Liberty.”
Unfortunately I didn’t have my shortwave radio with me on this leave. But friends told me that both the Voice of America and Radio Liberty had been suddenly subjected to incredibly thick jamming, as if Moscow was intent that no details of the accident would reach the Soviet people. I asked my mother if she’d heard of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant.
She nodded, her face set, as always when she spoke of disasters. There had been a notice posted at the Hydroelectric Institute, she said, requesting “volunteers'-concrete construction specialists, carpenters, and structural engineers-to work at Chernobyl. “Do you know the kind of salary they’re offering?”
I shook my head.
“Three hundred and fifty rubles,” she recited, “per day.”
We looked at each other for a moment in silence, both grasping the implications. If the authorities were willing to pay volunteers a month’s salary for every day they worked at that plant, the situation could hardly be “under control.”
“Some people,” my mother said, “have already signed up to go.”
I immediately thought of Jana. A fire in a nuclear power plant might easily spread radiation more than a hundred miles. But if the city of Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, was in danger of radioactive fallout, surely there had to be more in the news than that brief article.
The next day there was in fact more mention of Chernobyl. Now the newspapers and television commentators spoke of the “incredible sacrifices” of heroic fire fighters who had battled a stubborn blaze in the power plant’s reactor number 4.
Whenever the Party ordered the press to speak of “sacrifice,” there had to be some serious problem. I decided to find Jana and convince her to leave the city.
The Kiev airport was chaotic, crowded with hundreds of families sleeping on the floors of the big modern terminal. I noticed that many of the thousands of passengers waiting uncomfortably on this warm spring afternoon were small children, flocked together in groups supervised by tired and frustrated women.
Two miles from the airport the motorway divided, with one road turning right, north toward Chernobyl. Here there was a military roadblock and a small convoy of GAZ field cars with long whipping radio antennas. The soldiers on station between the steel spike pads of the roadblock wore nuclear warfare gauntlets and rubber boot covers. They carefully examined every vehicle arriving from the north, pushing the long snouts of their battlefield Geiger counters under the hoods and chassis. Anyone carrying produce or poultry for sale in the city had their load confiscated.
I had never been to Kiev before and was excited to be driving along the riverbank, then climbing up the long curved motorway toward the high bluff of the Upper Town above the river. Kiev was the first capital of the Russian nation, dating from the Dark Ages of the tenth century. The gilded domes of St. Sophia’s cathedral glittered through the budding beech and maple trees around Bohdan Khmelnytsky Square. But after seeing the city half-deserted, I lost my enthusiasm for tourism.
At the Hotel Ukrainia I tried Jana’s phone number again, but there was no answer at her dormitory. Then I contacted a friend named Ivan who worked at the Antonov plant in the suburbs. He and another friend, Alexi, had been reserve maintenance officers at Tskhakaya and were now engineers working on the huge An-224 Ruslan
