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 runway. 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.
Now I had to investigate what type of drug would meet my needs. I studied the pharmacy text I had bought so many years before as a cadet. In the section “Hypnotics and Tranquilizers,” I found a long list of possible candidates under the category “Available at State Pharmacies.” But I discovered that almost all of the strongest drugs — guaranteed to put a man to sleep — were not water soluble. There were, however, two possibilities: a sedative called chlorpromazine and a barbiturate known as clonazepam.
After a fruitless search among the pharmacies in Tskhakaya the next afternoon, however, I learned that neither drug was available, with or without a prescription — or even a suitable prezant. Then I remembered the unused bottle of neozepam tranquilizers that Lieutenant Colonel Frolov had prescribed me. The pharmacy manual said that neozepam was often indicated for insomnia. Two of the normal ten-milligram tablets would put a man to sleep for several hours. Back in town the next day, I found that neozepam was available in three of the pharmacies.
Another calculation revealed how much neozepam I would need. There would be ten guards sleeping in the bunk room, one on apron duty, one at the guard desk inside the alert building door, three engineers and maintenance officers, and the two alert pilots. That made a total of sixteen men to drug, seventeen if the desk guard drank drugged tea. If not, I could overpower and bind him before setting out for the apron, provided the other men were deep asleep.
Then I made an unpleasant discovery. Neozepam was available in the appropriate quantities, but it was not water soluble. Again I found myself pacing the walkways and ramps around the alert building, chewing on the problem. If I couldn’t get these men to drink tea, I suddenly realized, I could certainly entice them all to eat a tempting sweet. Given the high prices and shortages, it had been a long time since any of us had seen cake or pastry.
That night I crushed a neozepam tablet, wet the tip of my index finger, and gingerly licked the dull white powder. It was almost tasteless.
I searched my kitchen cupboard and found a cache of two kilos of sifted white flour. I knew I could obtain butter, sugar, and eggs at the bazaar. Sweet condensed milk for the frosting would probably be a problem. But I still had enough money left from the poster sale to make all the required purchases to fill my unusual cake recipe. I had to be certain the cake was big enough and adequately laced with drugs to incapacitate at least sixteen men.
For the first time, I made actual written notes. If the Osobists discovered them, all they’d find was a shopping list for a cake. Let the bastards ponder that.
Then I performed another mental calculation. Sixteen men times two tablets equalled thirty-two. But I wanted them sound asleep, not just groggy. I certainly did not want to give the PVO any of the half hour they needed to come on-line. That precious thirty minutes was my life insurance. So I decided to lace the cake with six times the minimum neozepam required to put those men to sleep. The pharmacy text made it clear that there was no danger of a lethal overdose, but warned “prolonged torpor” could result from taking too many.
My goal was to purchase eighteen ten-tablet bottles. The next Saturday afternoon I began my shopping. My ploy was simple. Dressed in civilian clothes, I went to the chief pharmacist of each store, explained I was a patient at the nearby sanitarium and that I had “problems sleeping.” Then I requested neozepam, making sure to flash my thick roll of new red ten-ruble notes. By the next Tuesday, I had twelve bottles of the drug. After a quick bus trip to Poti, I had the other six bottles.
By Friday, May 12, I had the 180 neozepam tablets and almost all the other ingredients for the cake. I was nearly ready to execute the plan. Now I had to pick my day. It suddenly came to me. May 19, a Friday that week, marked the fortieth day since the Tbilisi massacre. In the Orthodox religion this was a significant anniversary, the day the souls of the dead finally departed their bodies. I planned to give them a suitable ceremony to mark their passage into the next world.
But an unexpected obstacle presented itself. There was no condensed milk to be had in the bazaar. Even Malhaz could not locate any. Finally I managed to borrow six cans of Sgushyonka from my neighbor Natasha, a female warrant officer who was our regimental control tower dispatcher. I did find fresh spring strawberries in the bazaar, however, and spent fifty rubles of my depleted war chest to buy two kilos. Now I had all my ingredients.
If I had any qualms about my actions during that final week, they were quickly banished by Lieutenant Colonel Dovbnya, our regimental zampolit, who kept up a constant harangue about our patriotic duty to “suppress adventurist elements” who might capitalize on the tense situation here in Georgia. His message was clear: The regiment had to be prepared to turn its weapons on our fellow citizens. He made me sick.
One afternoon in the duty-alert dayroom I found myself alone with Petrukhin. His orders to the military training mission in North Korea had just come through. But he still had three months to serve in Georgia.
“What do you think of Dovbnya’s stirring words?” I asked him, probing. “Are you ready to fly missions against your fellow Soviet citizens?”
Petrukhin shook his head at once. “Of course not.”
