From the configuration of the coastline, initially visible to him about 1:30, he deduced that he was approaching Hokkaido’s southwestern peninsula. Chitose lay to the northeast, roughly toward the middle of the island, behind a range of mountains still shrouded in clouds. The gauge indicated he had sufficient fuel for another sixteen to eighteen minutes of flight, maybe enough to carry him to Chitose if he immediately headed there. If he went back up into the clouds and over the unfamiliar mountains, however, he would forfeit all control of his fate. Only by sheer luck might he discover a hole in the clouds that would enable him both to descend safely and to sight the military field before exhausting his fuel. Without such good luck, the probabilities were that he would crash into some invisible peak or have to attempt a forced landing on impossible terrain. Had his purposes been different, he might have considered probing for a safe passage downward until his fuel was gone, then bailing out. But to Belenko, preservation of the MiG-25 was more important than preservation of his own life, and he was determined to land the plane intact if there was any chance, even one in a thousand.
Hence, he decided to stay beneath the clouds, fly eastward past the southern end of the mountain range, then turn north toward Chitose. He appreciated that he did not have enough fuel to follow this circuitous course all the way to the air base. But so long as he could see, there was a possibility of finding some place, a stretch of flat land, a highway perhaps, to try to land.
A red warning light flashed in the cockpit at 1:42, and an instant afterward a panel lit up, illuminating the words “You Have Six Minutes of Fuel Left.” Belenko reached out and turned off the warning lights. Why be bothered? He was over water again, having crossed the peninsula above Volcano Bay, so he banked into a ninety- degree turn northward toward land, still flying at 1,800 feet. Straight ahead he saw another mass of clouds, but he elected to maintain altitude and plunge into them. They might form just an isolated patch, and the lower he went, the more rapidly the MiG would consume fuel, and the less his glide range would be.
Suddenly a dulcet female voice startled him. Emanating from a recording he did not know existed, the voice was as calm as it was sweet: “Caution, Oh-six-eight! Your fuel supply has dropped to an emergency level. You are in an emergency situation.”
Belenko replied aloud, “Woman, wherever you are, tell me something I don’t know. Tell me where is that aerodrome.”
The fuel gauge stood at empty, and Belenko guessed he had, at most, two minutes left. The clouds had not dissipated, and there was nothing else to do. So he pointed the MiG-25 down toward land and the unknown.
CHAPTER II
Viktor’s Quest
Why? Of all officers, why Belenko? Nowhere in the recorded history of his life and career was an answer discernible. None of the conventional causes that might motivate a man to abandon homeland, family, comrades, and privilege could be found. Belenko was not in trouble of any kind. He never had associated with dissidents or manifested the least ideological disaffection. Like all Soviet pilots, he underwent weekly medical examinations, and physicians repeatedly judged him exceptionally fit, mentally and physically. He drank moderately, lived within his means, was involved with no woman except his wife, and had the reputation of being honest to the point of fault.
In their initial consternation, the Russians did not believe, indeed, could not bring themselves to believe, that Belenko had vanished voluntarily. They preferred to think that he had been lured by invisible forces beyond his control. In a way they were correct, for Belenko was a driven man. And in his flight from the Soviet Union, he was continuing a quest that had motivated and dominated most of his life, a quest that caused him also to ask why.
Belenko grew up as a child alone, left to chart his own course according to destinations and bearings fixed by himself. He was born on February 15, 1947, in a mountain village between the Black and Caspian seas, about a year after his father’s release from the Soviet Army. His father had been conscripted in December 1941 at age seventeen, eventually promoted to sergeant, trained as a saboteur and assassin, then assigned to help lead partisan forces. Thereafter he fought with partisans behind German lines, swimming for his life across icy rivers, hiding in frozen forests, and witnessing the slaughter of numberless comrades by enemy patrols, which in combat with irregulars neither gave nor received any quarter. Combat hardened him into a physically powerful, blunt, strong-willed man concerned with little other than survival and the pursuit of women.
When Viktor was two, his father divorced his mother, took him away to Donbas, the great mining region of southwestern Russia, and subsequently prohibited her from seeing him. They shared a hut with another woman until his father quit her, consigned him to the care of his own mother and sister, and departed for a job 5,000 miles away in a Siberian factory managed by a wartime friend.
The grandmother and aunt lived in one of some forty mud and straw huts that constituted a village near Mine No. 24. Coal dust darkened every structure of the village and so permeated the atmosphere that after a storm temporarily purified the air, food tasted strange. The women occupied one room of the hut and built a bed for Viktor in the other, where they cooked and ate. His aunt rose daily at 5:00 A.M. to draw water from the communal well, stoke the fire, and prepare soup and bread for breakfast before she walked to the mine. There she worked from 7:30 A.M. to 6:00 P.M., sorting debris and alien particles from coal passing on a conveyor belt. She had no gloves, and often her hands were bruised or bleeding. His grandmother, in her seventies, hobbled about with a stick during the day, acting as a good Samaritan, visiting the sick and elderly and attending to an invalid widow who received no pension. Each evening she chanted long litanies before an icon in the corner.
Winter confined Viktor to the hut because, until he was six, he had no shoes. From the sleeves of an old jacket his aunt sewed slippers useful for dashes to the outhouse but unsuitable for prolonged wear in snow. Incarcerated alone, he could amuse himself only by the exercise of his own imagination and curiosity.
A few days after his fourth birthday Viktor sat close by the stove, a source of both warmth and mystery. What made it yield such good warmth? To find out, he slid open one of the portals, and a burning coal tumbled out onto the straw covering the clay floor. As the hut filled with smoke, he sought escape by crawling into his grandmother’s bed and burying himself under blankets. Smoke still billowed from the hut when he regained consciousness outside, lying in the snow and coughing under the watch of the neighbors who had rescued him. That evening, after they had scrubbed and straightened the hut, his grandmother said, “Viktor, God is watching over you.”
During warm weather Viktor wandered and explored, unrestrained, with older boys. A favorite playground was a forbidden area in the woods off the main road between the village and the mines. Here retreating German troops had made a determined stand, and although some nine years had passed, the battlefield had not been entirely cleared. Among trenches and revetments there could still be found live rifle and machine-gun bullets, which the boys used to make firecrackers to scare “witches' — that is, women who scolded them — and small “bombs” for killing and surfacing fish in the river.
Digging for bullets, they unearthed a large, flat, cylindrical object that seemed to them an authentic treasure — one that could be smelted down for thousands of slingshot pellets. Building a bonfire, they gathered around to begin the smelting. The fire waned, and Viktor, being the youngest, was ordered to gather more wood. As he returned, the land mine exploded, hurling him against a tree and causing a severe concussion. Hours later he awakened in the arms of his grandmother, who said with conviction, “You see, Viktor, it is as I said. God is watching over you.” The blast had killed two of his friends and badly crippled a third.
That same spring Viktor heard commotion and what sounded like wailing outside the hut. People were gathering in the street, mostly women but some older men also, commiserating with one another, weeping and sobbing, a few hysterically. “Our savior and protector is gone!” a woman moaned. “Who will provide for us now?” The news of the death of Joseph Stalin had just reached the village. Always portrayed by every Soviet medium as a kind of deity, Stalin was so perceived in the village — the military genius who had won the war, the economic genius who had industrialized a feudal society, the political genius who had liberated the Soviet people from capitalist slavery, the just and benign patriarch who had secured the welfare of all.
Accidents frequently took lives in the mines, so Viktor was familiar with mourning and funerals. He had always seen the villagers confront death with stoic restraint, and their bravery added to his regard of the miners as heroic men who risked their lives for the Mother Country. But never had he experienced such unrestrained
