the base of his colleague’s skull, shoved him aside, and thrust his foot in the space between the door and jamb before it could close. In a second he was through it, pushing the engineer backward onto the flight deck. The man on the floor behind him rose, grabbed the flight guard’s own automatic, a standard KGB Tokarev nine-millimeter, followed through the steel door, and slammed it behind him. It locked automatically.
Two minutes later, under the guns of David Lazareff and Lev Mishkin, the Tupolev turned due west for Warsaw and Berlin, the latter being the ultimate limit of their fuel supply. At the controls Captain Mikhail Rudenko sat white-faced with rage; beside him his copilot, Sergei Vatutin, slowly answered the frantic requests from the Minsk control tower regarding the change of course.
By the time the airliner had crossed the border into Polish airspace, Minsk tower and four other airliners on the same wavelength knew the Tupolev was in the hands of hijackers. When it bored clean through the center of Warsaw’s air-traffic-control zone, Moscow already knew. A hundred miles west of Warsaw, a flight of six Polish- based Soviet MIG-23 fighters swept in from starboard and formatted on the Tupolev. The flight leader was jabbering rapidly into his mask.
At his desk in the Defense Ministry on Frunze Street, Moscow, Marshal Nikolai Kerensky took an urgent call on the line linking him to Soviet Air Force headquarters.
“Where?” he barked.
“Passing over Poznan,” was the answer. “Three hundred kilometers to Berlin. Fifty minutes’ flying time.”
The marshal considered carefully. This could be the scandal that Vishnayev had demanded. There was no doubt what should be done. The Tupolev should be shot down, with its entire passenger and crew complement. Later the version given out would be that the hijackers had fired within the fuselage, hitting a main fuel tank. It had happened twice in the past decade.
He gave his orders. A hundred meters off the airliner’s wing tip, the commander of the MIG flight listened five minutes later.
“If you say so, Comrade Colonel,” he told his base commander. Twenty minutes later, the airliner passed across the Oder-Niesse Line and began its descent into Berlin. As it did so, the MIGs peeled gracefully away and slipped down the sky toward their home base.
“I have to tell Berlin we’re coming in,” Captain Rudenko appealed to Mishkin. “If there’s a plane on the runway, we’ll end up as a ball of fire.”
Mishkin stared ahead at the banks of steel-gray winter clouds. He had never been in an airplane before, but what the captain said made sense.
“Very well,” he said, “break silence and tell Tempelhof you are coming in. No requests, just a flat statement.”
Captain Rudenko was playing his last card. He leaned forward, adjusted the channel selection dial, and began to speak.
“Tempelhof, West Berlin. Tempelhof, West Berlin. This is Aeroflot flight three-five-one. ...”
He was speaking in English, the international language of air traffic control. Mishkin and Lazareff knew almost none of it, apart from what they had picked up on broadcasts in Ukrainian from the West. Mishkin jabbed his gun into Rudenko’s neck.
“No tricks,” he said in Ukrainian.
In the control tower at East Berlin’s Schonefeld Airport, the two controllers looked at each other in amazement. They were being called on their own frequency but being addressed as Tempelhof. No Aeroflot plane would dream of landing in West Berlin—apart from which, Tempelhof had not been West Berlin’s civil airport for ten years. Tempelhof had reverted to a U.S. Air Force base when Tegel took over as the civil airport. One of the East Germans, faster than the other, snatched the microphone.
“Tempelhof to Aeroflot three-five-one, you are cleared to land. Straight run-in,” he said. In the airliner Captain Rudenko swallowed hard and lowered flaps and undercarriage. The Tupolev let down rapidly to the main airport of Communist East Germany. They broke cloud at a thousand feet and saw the landing lights ahead of them. At five hundred feet Mishkin peered suspiciously through the streaming perspex. He had heard of West Berlin, of brilliant lights, packed streets, teeming crowds of shoppers up the Kurfurstendamm, and Tempelhof Airport right in the heart of it all. This airport was right out in the countryside.
“It’s a trick,” he yelled at Lazareff, “it’s the East!” He jabbed his gun into Captain Rudenko’s neck. “Pull out,” he screamed, “pull out or I’ll shoot!”
The Ukrainian captain gritted his teeth and held course for the last hundred meters. Mishkin reached over his shoulder and tried to haul back on the control column. The twin booms, when they came, were so close together that it was impossible to tell which came first. Mishkin claimed the thump of the wheels hitting the tarmac caused the gun to go off; copilot Vatutin maintained Mishkin had fired first. It was too confused for a final and definitive version ever to be established.
The bullet tore a gaping hole in the neck of Captain Rudenko and killed him instantly. There was blue smoke in the flight deck, Vatutin hauling back on the stick, yelling to his engineer for more power. The jet engines screamed a mite louder than the passengers as the Tupelov, heavy as a wet loaf, bounced twice more on the tarmac, then lifted into the air, rolling, struggling for lift. Vatutin held her, nose high, wallowing, praying for more engine power, as the outer suburbs of East Berlin blurred past beneath them, followed by the Berlin Wall itself.
When the Tupolev came over the perimeter of Tempelhof, it cleared the nearest houses by six feet.
White-faced, the young copilot hammered the plane onto the main runway with Lazareff’s gun in his back. Mishkin held the red-soaked body of Captain Rudenko from falling across the control column. The Tupolev finally came to rest three quarters down the runway, still on all its wheels.
Staff Sergeant Leroy Coker was a patriotic man. He sat huddled against the cold at the wheel of his Security Police Jeep, his fur-trimmed parka drawn tight around the edges of his face, and he thought longingly of the warmth of Alabama. But he was on guard duty, and he took it seriously.
When the incoming airliner lurched over the houses beyond the perimeter fence, engines howling, undercarriage and flaps hanging, he let out a “What the sheee-yit!” and sat bolt upright. He had never been to Russia, nor even across to the East, but he had read all about them over there. He did not know much about the Cold War, but he well knew that an attack by the Communists was always imminent unless men like Leroy Coker kept on their guard. He also knew a red star when he saw one, and a hammer and sickle.
When the airliner slithered to a stop, he unslung his carbine, took a bead, and blew the nosewheel tires out.
Mishkin and Lazareff surrendered three hours later. Their intent had been to keep the crew, release the passengers, take on board three notables from West Berlin, and be flown to Tel Aviv. But a new nosewheel for a Tupolev was out of the question; the Russians would never supply one. And when the news of the killing of Rudenko was made known to the USAF base authorities, they refused to supply a plane of their own. Marksmen ringed the Tupolev; there was no way the two men could herd the others, even at gunpoint, to an alternative aircraft. The sharpshooters would have cut them down. After an hour’s talk with the base commander, they walked out with their hands in the air.
That night, they were formally handed over to the West Berlin authorities for imprisonment and trial.
THE SOVIET AMBASSADOR to Washington was coldly angry when he faced David Lawrence at the State Department on January 2.
The American Secretary of State was receiving him at the Soviet government’s request, though insistence would have been a better word.
The Ambassador read his formal protest in a flat monotone. When he had finished, he laid the text on the American’s desk. Lawrence, who had known exactly what it would be, had an answer ready, prepared by his legal counselors, three of whom stood flanking him behind his chair.
He conceded that West Berlin was indeed not sovereign territory, but a city under Four Power occupation. Nevertheless, the Western Allies had long conceded that in matters of jurisprudence the West Berlin authorities should handle all criminal and civil offenses other than those falling within the ambit of the purely military laws of the Western Allies. The hijacking of the airliner, he continued, while a terrible offense, was not committed by U.S. citizens against U.S. citizens or within the U.S. air base of Tempelhof. It was therefore an affair within civil
