'What a stupid, stupid fool you are! Run a tank dry at this altitude! Idiot. Idiot! Idiot!!'
And no one ever so severely berated himself while smiling as happily as did I.
After a restless night I silenced the alarm and rose to prepare for another day of hunting. The dry, clear weather persisted. It would be another busy one. I switched on the TV to catch the morning news while brewing up coffee. The tube came to life with a story in progress of a plane crash last night. I sat down and watched with the concerned curiosity that any pilot would have. Then I froze with shock. A Cessna Skymaster had crashed in the forest north of Evergreen. There was one fatality, cause unknown. Dick was dead.
Although I had my hunches, I never learned why it happened. But it really didn't matter. Whenever a pilot is killed, his death serves to remind ushis friends and peersof our own mortality. It makes us mindful of that stealthy, indiscriminate hunter that bides its time and waits for any of us to fly near its clutches. Sometimes we're sucked into it without warning, through no fault of our own. More often, the cause is our own carelessness. But if Dick is allowed to be forgotten, then he will have died for nothing, and I'll be closer to the hunter's grasp.
It's the hunter of which Ernest Gann wrote. It's the one Dick saw for an unearthly millisecond.
Fifteen.
Face of the Bear
For several minutes Cairo Control has played the devil, trying to establish radio contact with another aircraft. It happens sometimes; the plane is a bit too far away from the control center's antenna, or someone's transmitter or receiver is weak. I'm not paying much attention to Cairo's problem, and I'm jolted when I hear them call us.
'MAC Bravo 5523, Cairo, can you relay to Aeroflot 16214?' Relay? Me? To a Russian? Yeah.
'Roger, Cairo, what's the message?'
'Tell him to contact Athinai on frequency 125.2, please.'
I comply with Cairo's request and succeed in informing the Soviet that he is to call Athens Control. The Russian voice is thickly accented and grateful for my assistance. He sounds like a decent guy. Maybe he's the one I met last year. I wonder what that guy did with my wings.
Flying in the Middle East was new to me. With a single exception, I had been no farther east than Incirlik Air Base near Adana, Turkey, when Desert Shield started. But that one flight into the mysterious, forbidden regions beyond NATO's eastern frontier transformed my vision of the world.
It was the eeriest piece of atmosphere I had ever flown through. I developed a case of the creeps, just thinking about where we were. Off to the left was Mt. Ararat, upon which the Ark had supposedly been wrecked. But we only occasionally got glimpses of the historic mountain as we descended below its towering heights through layer after layer of gray stratus cloud. Somewhere off to the right was another huge rock shrouded in cloud. We hoped the Soviet radar was accurate enough to keep us clear of the mountain spires.
We were more than a bit apprehensive and had a right to be. We were descending through heavy cloud into a valley with great mountains all around. Even the valley floor was almost 3,000 feet above sea level. There was no room for error or sloppy flying. And complicating it all was wayunorthodox to usthat the Soviets structure their airspace. Their altitudes are measured in meters, so that we must convert to feet in order to use our altimeters accurately. In addition, they measure atmospheric pressure in millibars, and again we must convert to inches of mercury in order to adjust our altimeters. Topping it all off, they measure flight levels above airport elevation, not above mean sea level, as most of the world does. Climb on board almost any U.S. registered airplane, military or civilian, except for one major airline (not mine) that does it the Soviet way, and you'll see that the altimeter registers the height above sea level of the airport at which you're sitting. Thus we had to correct our altimeters yet again. If you then add in another supremely complicating factorthe easily misunderstood, thick accents of the Soviet radar controllersyou have a recipe for disaster. Two days before, one of the Soviets' own airlifters had cratered somewhere down below while trying to get into Yerevan, killing all aboard.
But there was still more to be concerned about. We were among the first foreign aircraft ever to be allowed in the Soviet Union without an onboard Soviet escort. So we were completely on our own. The big concern was the Iranian border, just a few miles off to the right. We were pretty sure the Soviets didn't intend to splash us if we strayed off course, but we feared that the Iranians would not be as scrupulous.
We finally broke through the lowest layer and began maneuvering for our approach to the airport. The landscape below looked mystifying, like some never-never land from a folktale. The countryside was flat, peppered with villages and snow-covered collective farms, but here and there great inverted cone-shaped mountains abruptly breached the valley floor and rose precipitously into the clouds. Layers of blue smoke from thousands of fireplaces hung like thin veils over the settlements. We strained at the windows to glimpse the earthquake damage but saw none this far south of the epicenter.
We intercepted the ILS localizer course, which worked just like the ones we were familiar with throughout the world, and we soon saw the huge runway ahead. It bore the standard markings to which we were also accustomed. But turning off the runway, familiarity departed like a startled covey of quail. We were confronted by the most imposing control tower we had ever seen, a gigantic mushroomshaped thing rising high above the airport. We taxied past dozens of Aeroflot airliners parked around the circular terminal and were directed to our parking spot. We were stopped beside a column of huge Soviet planes, and our windscreen came to a halt mere inches from the blade of the biggest, most grotesque helicopter I had ever seen. Even before the engines had spooled down, scores of trucks, all of a strange make, came speeding within feet of our nose, and some of the smaller vehicles even shot beneath our wings. They carried heaping loads of earthquake relief supplies from the long line of Soviet airlifters in front of us.
Soon after we had opened the doors, a couple of solemn men in civilian attire and overcoats climbed aboard and began looking over our cargo, which was experimental portable shelters donated by a U.S. company. Then we learned how unprepared for us the Soviets were. Neither trucks nor a much-needed forklift was available to unload us. We were advised to wait. and wait we did. We sat there for hours, not daring to shut down the auxiliary power unit (APU). It supplied us with electrical power for the lights and radios. We had been ordered to keep one HF radio tuned to the frequency of 'Phantom,' which was our command post in Europe. We were to check in with Phantom every hour while on the ground. The APU also supplied a small volume of heat, which we directed to the flight deck. It was impossible for the APU's small jet engine to heat the huge cargo bay. Hour after hour we watched as big Soviet jets rolled in one after the other, and it became obvious that they really didn't need us. They had plenty of airlift capacity; it was clear that we were there only in a symbolic sense. Soviet-American relations were warming up under Mikhail Gorbachev's leadership. I figured that we had been offered by our government as a goodwill gesture. and the offer had been accepted in the same spirit.
After a while Soviet pilots began to appear and asked in broken English if they could come aboard. We welcomed them up to our warm flight deck, where we exchanged handshakes and grins. There followed much pointing at various instruments, handles, and switches, accompanied by grunts, chuckles, and sporadic expressions of mixed English and Russian. Finally, after a mutual display of wallet photos of spouses and kids, they departed, leaving us with invitations to visit their strange-looking jets.
And we did. We walked down the rows of giant jets, stealing glances behind and around us for the mystical men in long coats peering over newspapers, but there seemed to be no such eyes following us. We proceeded to climb ladders into the bellies of the behemoths and stared incredulously at the jungle of instrumented cockpits. I remembered from a briefing years ago that they painted their interiors turquoise, which their psychologists had determined was the best color for reducing pilot stress. And here it was, painted up like the dash of a '57 Chevy. But with a myriad of instrumentsmore than we had, and all of them seemed to be huge round things with bold, antiquelike numbers painted inside them. Instruments were everywhere they could be installed; they stared at us from every corner of the big flight deck. On the aft bulkheads were switches by the hundreds, which I took to be substitutes for circuit breakers.
Again we performed the ritual: pointing, grunting, nodding, grinning, pretending we knew exactly what our hosts were trying to explain to us about their big Illyushin-76 jet. As we shook hands and departed, I impulsively grabbed and ripped off my Velcro-backed name tag from my flight suit. It had silver USAF command pilot wings embossed on it, with my name and the words 'Mississippi Air Guard' underneath. I presented it to the captain of
