showed nothing, just the misty blue morning behind me. Looking back was a waste of time. If they launched on me, it would be from a distance of at least six miles.
Again I juggled the stick in my right hand to trip the chaff dispenser with my left thumb. I had no choice but to slide even lower toward the gentle blue swell. Down here, one false move, one slip with the control stick, would slam me into the sea. But I had to stay this low for several minutes longer, protected by the cloud of chaff from the radar lock-on of an Alamo. I had no choice. At least death would be fast in either case.
The haze had formed a circle now, obliterating the horizon ahead and behind. All I could do was hang on, waiting for the Turkish mountains to appear ahead. Or for a missile to slam into my tail pipes.
The radar receiver lights flashed briefly once more, then went dark. A minute passed. My chaff supply was exhausted. But the threat did not return.
Now I felt sick and dizzy, a sour metallic taste in my dry mouth. I knew I might pass out at any moment. Better to fight it than surrender. I eased the stick back and let the plane float up to 1,500 feet. At least the radar altimeter was working. At this altitude I would be visible to the radars of any Navy ships out there to the right, especially to the new precision search radars on the Udaloy class destroyers based out of Poti.
But I had to take this risk. Before I passed out or grew even weaker, I had to strap into the ejection seat. I might be too groggy to land this airplane, and I had no intention of dying because I hadn’t the strength to strap in properly.
But this proved almost impossible. My right arm was useless now, and I needed my left hand to fly. In a series of jerky motions that sometimes sent the plane lurching hard right or left, I managed to free the twisted straps and buckles behind me. Then I discovered I could grip the stick loosely with my knees and use my left hand to reach behind and pull the safety pins from the arm restraints. Freeing the pin from the seat igniter system was the hardest task of all. Normally the mechanic used two hands to twist and jerk the locking mechanism. I had only one, and the pin was located high and behind my headrest. If I strained to reach it, my knees slipped off the stick and the plane careened violently through the sky. Even at an altitude of 1,500 feet, I was dangerously low at this speed. So I climbed another 600 feet, pushed myself up on my haunches, and somehow fought the pin free.
Time seemed to stop. I was no longer just flying this fighter, I was battling for my life. Then I looked up to find I had clasped the last buckle of the harness in place. I slid the safety pin free of the ejection-seat firing handle between my knees and dropped it on the deck with the others.
I found myself smiling. In those minutes I had fought the ejection harness and the pins, I had passed into Turkish airspace. A brown hump loomed ahead in the mist and slowly gained definition. The coast of Turkey, the mountainous headland of Fener Burnu. I had made a perfect landfall after flying almost one hundred miles right down on the waves. And I was strapped into a fully armed ejection seat.
Whatever happened now, at least I would not die in this airplane.
It was safe to climb even higher. I eased the throttles back to eighty percent and leveled off at 3,000 feet. The tan and green bulk of Turkey rose steeply from the sea, sliced by geometrically flat bands of milk-white mist. Below, a fishing boat cut a widening V-wake through the calm water. This was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen. I stared at those wild brown mountains as they swelled toward me.
Then I remembered what that landfall meant. It was my primary navigation point. Trabzon lay to the left, fifteen miles east of the headland. And the city’s airport lay about another mile further east, just past the port. At least according to the detailed VVS navigation chart I had memorized then burnt with my other papers in the soccer field.
I rolled slowly left and scanned the coast. There was a town, but it seemed too small to be the port of Trabzon. Those low stone buildings and the wooden wharf had to be Akcaabat, a little fishing port on my chart. A band of snow-white mist lifted from the coast and I suddenly saw the modern city of Trabzon marching up the bluff from the sea. Trabzon was sliced by steep ravines. The winding streets were rivers of shade trees leading down to the port. I saw large warehouses, a long concrete commercial pier, and an overlapping brown breakwater. There was the tall lighthouse that had been marked on my chart. Behind the city, older houses with orange tile roofs spread into pale green tea groves. I slid the throttles back and eased down the nose.
Where was the airport? The highway leading east of the city seemed to widen into a long gray motorway. No. That highway was the airport’s single runway. It was right on the edge of the water, perched there like an aircraft carrier. My nose was lined up perfectly. I decided to skip a normal landing circuit and fly a straight-in approach. But I made sure to check the airspace for traffic. There was nothing in sight.
Steadying the stick with my knees, I dumped landing gear, set the slats, then the flaps for landing, and began to verify my panel. But I had no proper instruments, just the radar altimeter and the angle-of-attack gauge, a circular dial just left of the HUD.
That would have to guide me through the approach. I set up at an initial AOA of ten degrees, with the throttles still at eighty percent. With no airspeed indicator, I had to judge this well. I did not want to overshoot the threshold at the edge of the sea because I had no idea how long the runway was. But I did not want to undershoot either.
The plane came whistling down, “steady as a train,” as Tveretin used to say. Now I lifted the nose to twelve degrees AOA and used my rudders gently to keep the nose aligned with the long gray runway. The gravelly white beach sailed past. I caught a glimpse of painted lines. I was over the threshold. The main gear touched smoothly, with only a slight squeal. And I was surprised by the gentle bounce of the nosewheel’s contact. Instinctively I tripped my tan drag chute and watched the canopy blossom in my mirror.
I sagged in the ejection harness with the sudden deceleration, still surprised to be on the ground so smoothly. If anyone was watching, he had seen a fine display. That was undoubtedly the best landing I had ever flown.
I let the airplane roll past the small terminal and squat control tower. Passing the buildings, I saw no parked aircraft, not even any vehicles. The modern airport looked deserted. I couldn’t help but notice how smooth this runway was. If I had any doubt I had left the Soviet Union, this beautiful seamless concrete runway reassured me. I parked at the far right-hand edge of the runway to be clear of any incoming traffic, shut down the engines, popped the canopy, and breathed deeply. The air was cool and clean, with a salty hint of the nearby sea.
Only five hundred yards away, huge double-trailer trucks rumbled along the coastal highway. They were lovely trucks, brightly painted, with shiny cabs and strange orange and yellow letters painted on their tall flanks. I had seen such trucks in Western movies. They were an unmistakable sign of wealth, of commerce, of a world I did not know. Then I noticed the billboards on the other side of the highway. They were also printed with large, bright Roman letters. There were pictures of women in shiny kitchens, a smiling man at the wheel of a car. I wished I could read the words. I was confident they were advertisements, not propaganda slogans.
“I made it,” I whispered, then laughed out loud. A warm joy I had never before experienced rose inside me. Then I remembered I was a Soviet Air Force pilot on my last mission. I went to work to set my cockpit straight, happily tripping circuit breakers and shutting down systems. I stared at the left-hand corner of my panel and felt a sudden stab of cold.
The master weapons sensor panel switch was still in the off/safe position. That was why the cannon had not fired.
“Blyat,” I swore, hitting the panel with my left fist.
In my muddled condition on the Tskhakaya runway, I had not noticed that switch because the panel had been half-hidden by the accordion-fold anti-glare curtain, meant to shield the HUD from the instrument lights. For years, my fellow pilots and I had written reports complaining about that damned curtain. But the inertia-bound Soviet bureaucracy had not responded. Now those lazy bureaucrats deserved decorations. They had just inadvertently saved twelve MiG-29s from destruction.
I looked at the clock, 0547. I had been on the ground a full seven minutes, but no one had come for me. Maybe Turkey was in a different time zone and it was only just past five in the morning here. I decided to taxi to the terminal. This time, I remembered to set the throttles properly for engine start.
As I swung back down the runway, my shoulder suddenly throbbed with hot pain. All my reserve of adrenaline was burnt. The pain began to swell. I would need a ladder to get out of this cockpit safely. I taxied slowly and swung across the yellow lines of a vehicle parking zone just beside the modern terminal. I shut down my engines and unstrapped the ejection harness to raise in my seat. The terminal still seemed deserted.
Then I saw three faces peering at me through the wide glass doors of the terminal, an old man and two younger fellows. Their eyes were fixed in wide stares. When I waved, the two younger men scurried away into the
