“What about your next assignment?” I leaned toward him still pressing hard. “Will you attack the South Koreans if ordered to do so?”
He jumped up from his easy chair and threw down the illustrated sporting news he was so fond of reading. “Leave me alone,” he muttered. “That’s a different matter and you know it.”
I had my answer. If ordered to scramble and intercept my hijacked aircraft, Petrukhin would not hesitate to shoot me down.
Next I prepared an escape kit containing a flashlight, compass, extra socks, matches, and two cans of stewed beef. I hid the waterproof sack in the high grass near the airfield perimeter. If I failed in my hijack attempt. I planned to head south into the nearby swamps on foot and make my way to the mountain frontier.
Slipping the bag into the weeds felt strange. It was my first overtly treasonous action. Then I got to my feet and breathed the cool moist air. I felt calm again. It had finally begun.
The next afternoon I brought a French video film to the duty-alert dayroom and presented it with great fanfare. “We can watch it tonight, boys,” I told the engineers. “It will be a welcome treat after all the good news on Vremya.”
They laughed and clapped.
“There’s more where this came from,” I said, placing the video beside the television set. “My Georgian friends tell me they’ve got something pretty spicy.”
Again my comrades clapped. The stage was set.
Alone in my apartment the next morning, I removed pictures from my photo albums and began selecting the ones to take with me. This was a harder task than I had imagined. I certainly did not want the pictures I left behind to fall into the hands of the Osobists and be stuck on the bulletin board of some investigator’s office. So I planned to burn those I didn’t take. But the actual choice was a wrenching experience. Finally I stacked twenty pictures of my family and friends on one side of my kitchen table and swept the others into a paper bag. That night I burned them with my personal papers out on the far corner of the soccer field. When I came back to the apartment, I sat for a long time staring at the pictures I had selected to carry with me. There was my grandmother with her wide, stoic face and kindly eyes; me in a sailor suit on a river excursion; my first day of school with my white collar and my heavy book bag; a picture with my mother the summer I was fourteen, just before I left with the survey brigade. She looked young and untroubled. I looked so innocent, so optimistic. Then there was Kursant Sergeant Zuyev, Alexander M., in his first year at the Armavir Academy. There was Karpich with his big nose and ears, and Firefly after his first solo in the L-29. Finally I could no longer look into my past. I slid the precious mementos of my life into an envelope and sealed it.
Later that night I carefully reviewed my handwritten diagrams and specifications of the MiG-29’s missile and fire-control systems, and the multiple pages detailing the latest Soviet air-combat maneuvers. To the Americans, these documents would be my most valuable cargo. I lay them carefully inside my flannel helmet bag.
I definitely intended to reach the safety of American custody as quickly as possible, even though it was impossible to fly directly to the NATO base at Incirlik. For several weeks I had been thinking about the last Soviet fighter pilot to escape, Senior Lieutenant Viktor Ivanovich Belenko. In September 1976, Lieutenant Belenko had flown an advanced PVO MiG-25 interceptor from a base in the Soviet far east to Japan. The official Soviet explanation of his escape flight and defection to America had been that the unfortunate young pilot had become lost in bad weather and had only landed in desperation at the Hakodate Airport in northern Japan when he was completely out of fuel. Belenko had then been “kidnaped” by the Americans, at least according to Soviet authorities.
Viktor Belenko was a graduate of the Armavir Academy. His audacious exploit was a taboo subject among the cadets. But we all suspected his flight had been a well-planned escape, not the unfortunate result of bad weather. Our suspicions were confirmed later when the KGB circulated reports in the Soviet military that they had tracked down and executed the “traitor” Viktor Belenko in America. I doubted that the KGB had actually accomplished this; their propaganda was intended to scare pilots like me from attempting a similar escape flight. But in any event, I knew the Organs of State Security were capable of such behavior. Delivering a MiG-29 to the West would mark me for death, but I didn’t intend to become an easy target for KGB assassination squads.
I baked my cake on the morning of Wednesday, May 17. It was magnificent, a full seven pounds and three layers high, frosted in creamy white, and studded with fresh, ripe strawberries. Looking at this beautiful cake, there was no way for anyone to know that the lower right-hand corner was any different from the rest. But the creamy frosting in that corner was free of the crushed neozepam tablets that I had so carefully mixed into the other frosting. Just to be certain, I placed the biggest ripe strawberry on the safe corner. That would be the piece that I cut first and set aside for myself.
Then I opened my kitchen curtains and made a show of washing out several shirts and a pair of trousers. I hung them prominently on the clothesline of my balcony. Any man planning a desperate action would not take the time to wash and hang up laundry. At least I hoped that was the impression I gave to any unseen watchers.
I carried two heavy boxes of my best aeronautical engineering textbooks and expensive international aircraft almanacs to the duty-alert dayroom that afternoon and told the officers they could help themselves.
“I won’t need these on ground duty,” I explained.
I had signed each of the books: “To my friends and acquaintances with the best of luck for the future.”
Even Dovbnya, the shit-eating zampolit, thought this was a magnanimous gesture.
Before leaving the building, I upbraided the sergeant of the guard for the filthy condition of the troops’ kitchen, bunk room, and latrine. “I want these areas scrubbed and painted,” I ordered. “No damned excuses.”
He began to complain that the men were already short of sleep from the extra patrols and that this duty would exhaust them. This was exactly my intention.
“No damned excuses, Sergeant,” I said in my best parade-ground voice.
That afternoon at sunset, I again climbed the green slope of Dzveli Senaki outside of town. I wanted to be alone on this peaceful mountain to gather my thoughts for the day and night ahead. Again, bells sounded in the cool afternoon. Without thinking, I had stopped before the walls of the church. I entered the courtyard. An old babushka with a twig broom smiled from the doorway. I asked if the priest was there.
He came out brushing dust from his cassock, as if he’d been helping the old woman clean the vestry. The priest was an elderly man with soft, intelligent eyes. Like most Georgians these days, he viewed me cautiously.
I had never spoken to a priest before and was clumsy when I asked him for a “blessing.”
“Why?” he asked, a practical Georgian beneath his cassock and beard.
“I need it, Father.”
He still eyed me warily. “Is it for good or for evil?”
“For good, Father. I’m a Soviet officer,” I said quietly. “I am very sorry for what happened in Tbilisi.”
The priest solemnly studied my face for any hint of mockery. “We are planning a memorial to mark the fortieth day since the massacre,” he told me. “Perhaps you can join us.”
I had other plans to mark that grim occasion. But I could not reveal them. “Perhaps, Father.”
His eyes softened and he nodded with understanding. Then he raised his right hand with the first two fingers extended and made the sign of the cross near my face. He spoke clearly in Georgian, and I understood the word “Kristos.”
Warm calm seemed to flood physically through my body. I was ready.
The weather turned suddenly bad that night. By midnight a rainy gale howled across the base. Then conditions grew worse, with an even lower ceiling and high wind. Antonovich suspended flying for the next day. I called the meteorological office and learned a sudden front had spilled across the Caucasus. We could expect below minimum conditions for the next twelve hours. Flying through the mountain passes in this weather was impossible. Reluctantly I readjusted my schedule. I would make the attempt at dawn on Saturday, May 20.
