I groaned again and let my breath hiss audibly in my mask.
Vitaly replied immediately. “Shto? Povtari. What? Repeat.”
“Pain… in the back.” Again I groaned, more softly now.
“Can you control the airplane?” Vitaly’s voice was on the edge of panic.
“I can.”
“You are cleared for a straight-in approach. Switch to tower frequency, channel 7.”
I turned due east and aligned my radio compass needle on the Ruslan beacon. With the throttles set at eighty-five percent, I maintained an airspeed of 350 knots. I would be back in less than five minutes. As I crossed the coast, I opened my oxygen mask and jammed three fingers far back into my throat. I wanted to vomit to make the show even more convincing. But I could not. This was more than ironic. As a young cadet flying L-29 trainers, I had almost been grounded for airsickness and had to conceal my nausea by puking into a plastic bag and hiding it. Now when I needed a convincing display of vomit on my flight suit, I could not produce, even though I was gagging hard.
The city of Mikha Tskhakaya appeared in the green citrus groves and marshes ahead. I saw the long Ruslan runway. The straight-in approach was easy. And I decided not to overdo the deception by wobbling on final.
After I touched down and popped my tan, clover-shaped drag chute, the tower called, asking if I wanted to park on the emergency ramp.
“Negative,” I replied. “I can taxi to the squadron apron.”
As I turned left onto the taxi ramp, I saw the flashing orange lights of the ambulance and the white jackets of the emergency medical crew. I also saw the faces of the squadron and regimental officers. They looked grave. Obviously Vitaly had announced I was in bad shape.
I let my shoulders sag in the ejection harness and tried to assume a suitable expression of pain and disorientation. My whole future now depended on my ability to convince the medical staff I had received a serious injury in this last, violent dogfight.
CHAPTER 2
Central Aviation Hospital, Moscow
March 21, 1989
The early spring sun felt good as I stood at the window, waiting for the nurse who would escort me down the corridor and up to the second floor for my ten o’clock appointment with the psychologist. The hospital was a quiet oasis of luxury surrounded by the melting snow of Sokolniki Park.
Beyond the park’s budding maple and birch trees, several million of my fellow citizens were struggling through another dreary morning of perestroika. Some stood in endless lines, waiting to buy a kilo of rationed sugar, or for a State shoe store to finally open. There might be imitation-leather sandals for the children to wear this summer. More likely, the shelves would be empty. Others waited in the lines for the promise of a shriveled Cuban grapefruit or a bag of Moroccan oranges. Many crowded the sidewalks like cattle, clutching their avos’ka net bags, simply hoping to find the last of the winter’s bruised cabbage or maybe even laundry soap. Young people were wandering among the stalls of the Riga Bazaar, searching for an authentic pair of Levi’s or Reebok sneakers. This was the fifth year of glasnost, the fourth of perestroika. By all accounts, conditions were still deteriorating, even here in the capital.
The food shortages were nothing new, but now people lined up to feed a type of hunger many never knew existed before glasnost. They stood patiently beside news kiosks from early morning, waiting for the bundles of Ogonyok, Moscow News, or Argumenti i Facti to arrive. These new, independent publications contained an intangible commodity sweeter than sugar, more stimulating than vodka or coffee. They published the truth.
For months the men and women who stood in ranks along the sidewalks, clutching their string bags of cabbage, no longer gazed back impassively at the Zil limousines and Volga sedans as the bosses sped from their luxury apartments on Leninsky Prospekt to the Party and government buildings across the river. Now the people had learned the truth about the Party’s “eternal concern” for the welfare of the masses. Now working people, not just intellectuals, recognized the term gulag, and knew the bloody history of the Party’s Organs of State Security.
The only thing perestroika promised was more degrading shortages and hardship. But glasnost had begun to open the door of a cage that had been barred for over seventy years. People were no longer afraid. The Russian bear had been in hibernation all those decades. Now he was stirring. Soon, like me, he would be fully awake. And, like me, he would be angry.
There were already clear signs that the anger was about to erupt. For the first time in decades, there had been street demonstrations in Moscow. Several times in recent weeks, crowds had gathered in Pushkin Square, demonstrating for independence of the Baltic Republics or demanding the speedy establishment of a true parliamentary democracy. Some were mothers of young men who had been killed in Afghanistan. The demonstrators had been harshly suppressed by the militia and by the newly formed special OMON paramilitary units of the Interior Ministry. Hundreds of people had been beaten or arrested. But they mastered their fear and returned to the square.
The simmering anger of the people on the street, however, was not the concern of the men who ran this modern, four-hundred bed medical complex. The hospital was reserved for the elite of the Soviet Union: About half the patients were retired senior military and KGB officers or their families; the other half were Air Force pilots. Some came from strategic bomber and helicopter regiments.
Many were helicopter pilots wounded in Afghanistan. It always made me sad to see these young men, limping on artificial legs or waiting for plastic surgery to repair their rippled burn scars. A few helicopter pilots here were victims of another man-made disaster: the catastrophe at Chernobyl. I’d seen them wheeled down the third- floor halls to the intensive-care ward, prematurely decrepit, shrunken and bald, wasting away from the fatal radiation doses they had received flying above the Chernobyl plant to drop sand and boron into the caldron of the burning reactor.
But most of the younger pilots here were perfectly healthy. Like me, they flew high-performance MiG-23s or the new “super-maneuverable” fighters-the MiG-29 and Su-27-in elite Frontal Aviation regiments. This hospital was a good example of the primacy of the Air Force, the Voyenno-Vozdushniye Sily (VVS). Supposedly our sister service, the Air Defense Force, Voiska Protivovozdushnoy Oboroni (PVO), had equally modern facilities outside Moscow.
This was a polite fiction. Everybody knew our hospital was the best in the military. Air Force pilots were brought here from all over the vast country. The pilots of the VVS who flew several of the world’s most advanced high-performance fighters were recognized as the State’s elite warriors. Each of us represented an investment of several million rubles. Like champion race horses, we required specialized care to maintain our competitive edge. So the State invested millions more in scarce hard currency for the West German X-ray machines, the Japanese CAT scanners, and the computerized Westinghouse blood-chemistry apparatus that stood like polished icons in the treatment rooms I passed along the main corridor of the diagnostic wing.
Moscow’s Central Aviation Hospital specialized in urology, ophthalmology, and neurology. These departments, I’d been told, were staffed and equipped almost as well as their counterparts in the West. Obviously they were far superior to the State hospitals open to the “workers,” who lacked Party or military connections. In those squalid wards, patients’ families had to bring their food, and you had to bribe the nurse just to empty a bedpan. But you couldn’t even bribe the doctor to provide medication. There was none. For decent treatment, people had to spend their life savings in the new cooperative, private clinics that were springing up like mushrooms in all our cities.
So the Party elite and the military and KGB nomenklatura who were treated here well understood how privileged they were. Not only was the treatment superior to that of any other hospital; it was free.
But high-performance fighter pilots were not so pleased to be here, where the medical and personnel bureaucrats of the Air Force, not operational officers, ran the show. All aviation academy cadets had to obtain a Category 1 health certificate, the same as the rigorous standards required of the cosmonauts. So we had all started our careers in absolutely perfect condition. And, by directive of the Ministry of Defense, a pilot qualifying for the MiG-29 or Su-27 also had to be certified Category 1. In reality, however, most line pilots in MiG-29 or Su-27
