largely subsided, but not individual murders, and many Chechen youths still subscribed to the credo that true manhood could not be attained without the killing of at least one Russian.
«Most of all, you must guard yourself against the Chechens,» the KGB officer said. «The Chechens use knives wantonly, and under stress they will butcher you. You know how valuable you are to our country. It is your patriotic duty to take care and ensure your own safety. Never sleep on duty. Always stand watch with a long knife.»
It sounds like hell around here! They will just butcher you for nothing! It sounds like we're in the darkest of Africa in the last century, like an outpost among savages. But this is 1969! The Soviet Union! And the Party says we've solved the nationality problem.
Flight instructor Grigori Petrovich Litvinov, tall, thin, and prematurely bald at thirty-one, looked and acted like an ascetic, abstaining totally from alcohol, tobacco, and profanity. He wore about him an air of perpetual calm and, in Belenko's hearing, never raised his voice. Upon being introduced, he insisted that they address each other by first names and admonished Belenko not to fear asking questions, however naive. «I will answer the same question a hundred times, I will stay up all night with you if need be, until you understand.»
There was no need for such special attention. After being familiarized with the L-29 jet trainer, Belenko managed it more easily and surely than he had the old prop plane in which he had learned. The wasteful, melancholy waiting in Omsk, the submission to the straitjacket life of a cadet were now repaid by his certainty that he had done right. Alone in the cockpit, he was serenely free and unbound; he was where he knew he belonged.
Toward the end of the six months of basic flight training at Grozny, Litvinov and Belenko were changing clothes in the locker room. As Litvinov picked up his flight suit to hang it in the locker, a thick little book, small enough to be hidden behind a man's palm, tumbled out of a front flap pocket onto the floor. Belenko glanced down and saw the title of the book: Holy Bible. Litvinov's eyes were waiting to meet his when he looked up. They asked: Will you inform? Belenko's answered: Never.
Neither said anything, nor was the incident ever mentioned subsequently. Belenko thought about it, though. It's his business what he reads. If the Bible is full of myths and fairy tales, let everybody see that for himself. Everybody knows that a lot of what the Party makes us read is full of shit; we can see and prove that for ourselves. Why not let everybody read anything he wants to? We know our system is the best. Why be afraid of other ideas when we can show they are not as good? Unless… unless, of course, we're afraid that our ideas aren't the best.
The schedule stipulated that the cadets would study the MiG-17 for two months back at Armavir preparatory to the final phrase of training. But the two months stretched into four because an emergency had sprung up in the countryside — another harvest was nearing. Each weekend and sometimes two or three more days a week, officers and men alike were packed into buses and trucks to join the battle of the harvest. For Belenko, it was a pleasant diversion. They mostly picked fruit and ate all they wanted. Because the schools and colleges of Armavir had been closed for the harvest, many pretty girls worked and flirted with them in the orchards. The farmers were hospitable and slipped them glasses of cider and wine. And at night they went back to the barracks, a good meal, and a clean bunk.
Yet Belenko despaired at the acres and acres of apples, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of apples, rotting because nobody had arranged for them to be picked in time. He remembered how precious apples were in Siberia, how once in Rubtsovsk he had paid a whole ruble to buy one apple on the black market.
Why doesn't anything work? Why doesn't anything change? It's barely ten years before 1980. But we're no farther along toward True Communism than we were when they first started talking about it. We're never going to have True Communism. Everything is just as screwed up as ever. Why?
In April 1970 Belenko was assigned to a MiG-17 training regiment seventy-five miles northwest of Armavir near Tikhoretsk, whose 40,000 residents worked mainly in canneries and wineries. Although not accorded the privileges of officers, the cadets now, by and large, were treated as full-fledged pilots. They arose at 4:00 A.M. for a bountiful breakfast, then flew two or three times, breaking for a second breakfast around 9:30. The main meal at noon, which always included meat and fruit, was followed by a nap of an hour or so. They attended classes from early afternoon until early evening — tactics, future trends in aerodynamics, technology of advanced aircraft, military leadership, political economics, science of communism, history of the Party, Marxist/Leninist philosophy. Passes were issued on Saturday nights and Sundays, unless they were called to clean factories or work in the fields on weekends, requests which occurred roughly every other week.
Fortune again gave Belenko a good flight instructor, Lieutenant Nikolai Igoryevich Shvartzov, who was only twenty-four. He longed to be a test pilot and was able enough; but he had given up this ambition because he had no influence in Moscow, and nobody, so it was believed, could become a test pilot without influence. At the outset, Shvartzov gave Belenko only two instructions: «Let's be completely honest with each other about everything; that way we can trust and help each other,» and, «If a MiG-17 ever goes into a spin, eject at once. You can pull it out of a spin, but it's hard. We can always build another plane. We can't build another you.» Throughout their relationship, they were honest and got along well.
The MiG-17, light, swift, maneuverable, was fun to fly, and Belenko had confidence in it. Vietnam had proven that, if skillfully flown at lower altitudes, it could cope with the American F-4 Phantom. Should he duel with an American pilot in an F-4, the outcome would depend on which of them was the braver and better pilot. It would be a fair fight. That was all he asked.
Every four or five weeks the regiment received a secret intelligence bulletin reporting developments in American air power — characteristics, strengths, weaknesses, numbers to be manufactured, where and for which purposes they would be deployed. The bulletins were exceedingly factual and objective, devoid of comment or opinion and dryly written.
Reading quickly, as was his habit, Belenko scanned a description of the new F-14 fighter planned for the U.S. Navy and started another section before the import of what he had read struck him. «What?» he exclaimed aloud. «What did I read?» He reread the data about the F-14. It would be equipped with radar that could detect aircraft 180 miles away, enable its fire-control system to lock onto multiple targets 100 miles away, and simultaneously fire six missiles that could hit six different aircraft eighty miles away — this even though the F-14 and hostile aircraft might be closing upon each other at a speed up to four times that of sound.
Our radar, when it works, has a range of fifty miles. Our missiles, when they work, have a range of eighteen miles. How will we fight the F-14? It will kill us before we ever see it!
Belenko put the question frankly to an aerodynamics professor the next afternoon. The professor stammered, equivocated, evaded. Every aircraft has certain weaknesses. It is only a question of uncovering them and learning how to exploit them. It may be possible to attack the F-14 from close range with superior numbers.
Shit. That's ridiculous. Besides, if what our own intelligence says is true, the F-14 still could outfty anything we have even if we got close to it.
The professor who taught the technology of advanced aircraft was respected for his intelligence and technical background, so Belenko asked him openly in class. He answered succinctly. We presently have nothing to equal the F-14. We are experimenting with something that could be the answer. It is designated Product 84.
Subsequently Belenko read details of the F-15 being built as an air-superiority fighter for the U.S. Air Force, then accounts of the planned B-l bomber, and they were still more devastating to him. The F-15 would fly at nearly three times the speed of sound and climb to altitudes above 60,000 feet faster than any plane in the world, and at very low levels, where metallurgical problems restricted the speed of Soviet fighters, it could hopelessly outdistance anything the Russians had. The capabilities of the B-l seemed other-worldly. A thousand miles away from the Soviet Union, it could commence firing missiles armed with decoys and devices to nullify radar and nuclear weapons to shatter defenses. Then it could drop to tree-top level, beneath the reach of radar and missiles, and, at speeds making it impervious to pursuit, skim over the target area. Having unleashed a barrage of nuclear bombs, it could skyrocket away at extreme altitudes, at 1400 miles an hour.
The professor of technology again was candid. He said that presently there was no known defense, practical or theoretical, against the B-l should it perform approximately as designed. The history of warfare demonstrated that for every offensive weapon, an effective defensive weapon ultimately emerged, and doubtless, one would be developed. The broader difficulty lay in Soviet technological deficiencies. The Russians still could not develop an aircraft engine that for the same weight generated the same thrust as an American engine. They were behind in electronics, transistors, and microcircuitry. And all technological difficulties were compounded by the comparative inadequacy of their computer technology. Cadets should not be discouraged by these handicaps but rather consider
