The Memories of a Dead Pilot

            

YURIY SOBESHCHAKOV

THE MEMORIES
OF A DEAD PILOT


 
            
HALIFAX 2000





"The Hero of Our Time, kind sirs, is indeed a portrait, but not of just one man: it is a portrait composed of the vices of our entire generation, at the height of their devel-opment."


"The Hero of Our Time" Mikhail Lermontov 1841

               
 
"There have been worse times, but there was none more deceitful."
               
Prince Hamlet






The key characters, along with all those Admirals, officers, their wives and mistresses, col-leagues, and drinking buddies—they're not based on any real folks, mind you. I conjured them up with one purpose: to tarnish our once-glorious past—a time when family values, religious be-liefs, and recognizable morals gave way to the clutches of Communist ideology. And if, by any chance, you find yourself thinking that such things might have actually happened, think again.

Nope, it wasn't like that.















Prologue

Every part of my body aches. Darkness engulfs me as I struggle to see. Slowly, I force my eyes open, and the world around me comes into focus.

The source of the pain is unmistakable: the control column is rammed into my chest, pinning me against my ar-mored seat. A burning sensation spreads through my abdomen—broken ribs, internal bleeding.

I turn my head, searching for my crew.

The navigator’s cabin is gone. Captain Vasiliev’s station has been reduced to a twisted snarl of aluminum, shat-tered glass, crushed instruments, and bloodied remains. Flight engineer Gennadiy Rybnikov, who sat between me and the co-pilot during landing, hangs forward in his harness. His seatbelt saved him from being hurled through the windshield, but his forehead is crushed against the instrument panel. His hands dangle lifelessly. Blood trickles from his scalp onto the body of the radio operator below.

Just before we slammed into the storm drains concrete collector at Cam Ranh Air Base—once American, now Soviet—radio operator Nikolai Onoprienko had been seated behind my co-pilot, transmitting our landing report in Morse code to the Pacific Fleet’s Fifteenth Flotilla. In a desperate attempt to see how I would land a sixty-ton transport plane with only half the landing gear deployed, he crawled beneath the flight engineer’s seat. He pre-ferred facing danger to ignorance. He almost reached the cockpit before the impact hurled him into the naviga-tion console.

My co-pilot sits headless.

The jagged fuselage sheared off his head along with the headrest. It lies beside me, still tangled in the headset cord, blank eyes fixed in an expression that might be contempt—or shock. He never had the chance to tell me the price the Vietnamese paid to board our flight from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City.

Before takeoff, the flight engineer smuggled thirty locals into a pressurized cabin designed for ten.
No clearance.
No authorization.

Our original destination had been the former capital of South Vietnam, but we were rerouted to Haiphong to collect cargo from the Soviet Union.

Landing there with illegal passengers aboard a Ministry of Defense aircraft could mean prison. There was no Plan B—so I devised Plan C.

I sent my co-pilot, Sergey Kovalenko, to compile a passenger list and obtain the aviation supervisor’s signature at Hanoi’s military airfield. It would require a substantial bribe. Fifteen minutes later, Sergey returned, visibly shaken.

“What happened?” I asked.

Gasping, he said,
“Glebov wants twenty-five percent of what we collected from the Vietnamese—for his signature.”
“And how much is that?” I took the wad of bills from him without counting.
“Trust me. You don’t want to know. We’re not making a profit on this.”

Takeoff was imminent. I decided to deal with the finances after the mission.

Now Kovalenko will never speak again—to me or to any military investigator.
First responders raced toward the wreckage from every direction. They would be in for a shock when they dis-covered my hidden passengers.

But why was it so quiet back there?

During landing, I had drained nearly all the fuel from the wing and fuselage tanks—that was why we hadn’t ex-ploded on impact. The cockpit was destroyed, but the passenger cabin should have remained intact.

Yet there was no sound.
Strange.
Still, I couldn’t think about them now.

Rescuers swarmed around me, prying at twisted metal, trying to free my broken body. My vision blurred. One thought remained clear:

I needed to understand how I had arrived at this catastrophe—both literally and figuratively.

Memories flooded back.
A grim sign. My brain had accepted the inevitable and was now sifting through the defining moments of my squandered life.



Chapter 1

On October 22, 1980, I landed in Kamchatka Peninsula—the far eastern edge of the Soviet Union, where the sun rises even before it touches Japan, the so-called Land of the Rising Sun—to begin my military service after graduating from the Higher Military Aviation School for Pilots. In my pocket was an order instructing me to re-port to the commander of the 304th Independent Long-Range Aviation Regiment of the Soviet Pacific Fleet for assignment.

I collected my suitcase and duffel from the conveyor belt and stepped out of the terminal.

Yelizovo Airport greeted me with a warm wind and a thin drizzle. By late October, central Russia is usually locked in frost, and Siberia is already covered in snow, but here the trees still burned with yellow, crimson, and rust-colored leaves.

Flocks of birds wheeled overhead, practicing their formations before the long migration south. From Kamchat-ka to Japan along the Kuril island chain was no small distance.

Watching them, I realized I was preparing for a long journey of my own.

As a newly minted officer arriving from the mainland, I had expected to be met. Not in the chief of staff’s jeep with a warrant officer at the wheel—that ride was reserved for squadron commanders—but maybe by a courier or an ordinary seaman.

No one came.

My fellow passengers dispersed quickly toward the bus stop, eager for hot showers and edible food after the cramped ten-hour flight. The bus to the regional capital, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, slid to a halt, swallowed them up, and rolled away down Star Street.

“Officer,” a voice called behind me.

A police sergeant approached, two officers lingering in the terminal doorway.

“Why didn’t you head into town?”
“I’m not going into town. I’m reporting to the Yelizovo garrison. I’m a pilot.”
“Your orders, please.”

I handed him the document. His tone softened as he read.

“You’ll want the number eight bus. Every twenty minutes. Next one’s in three.”

He returned inside. I made the bus.

From the window of the rattling bus, I watched Yelizovo unfold in muted shades of gray and rust. Long, rectan-gular apartment blocks—four or five stories of weather-streaked concrete—stood shoulder to shoulder as if bracing against the wind. Their flat roofs sagged under the damp weight of Kamchatka’s autumn, and laundry lines sagged between balconies like tired signal flags. The streets were little more than patched asphalt and mud, crisscrossed by narrow footpaths worn into the earth by generations of boots.

Beyond the residential blocks rose the low, functional buildings of the garrison—warehouses, garages, admin-istrative offices—indistinguishable in color from the sky above them. A smokestack exhaled a thin column of smoke that drifted sideways in the wind. In the distance, the dark hills formed a heavy backdrop, and farther still, snow-capped volcanoes hovered above the horizon, impossibly white and detached from the drab geome-try below.

That was my new posting.

Not the gleaming frontier of aviation glory I had imagined at the academy, but a disciplined cluster of concrete at the edge of the map. As the bus lurched toward regimental headquarters, I understood that whatever ambi-tions I had brought with me would have to survive here—between these buildings, beneath these mountains, under this enormous, indifferent sky.


The officer on duty, a broad-shouldered captain with a permanently dissatisfied expression, received me in the dim hall of a two-story building that looked as if it had not been renovated since the 1950s. Without ceremony, he led me to the reception room of the rocket-carrier squadron commander.

Behind the battered oak desk sat the squadron commander’s secretary, a young sergeant in a cream blouse and black skirt—an unexpectedly refined presence in that remote garrison. The desk was built in the old bureau-cratic style — two heavy pedestals supporting a wide top, leaving a narrow-shadowed space between them.

From where I stood, that shadow was not empty.

Through the gap between the desk’s pedestals, I caught sight of her legs, crossed with deliberate ease. The dim light from the window traced the clean line of her calves before disappearing beneath the hem of her skirt. She shifted slightly, and the movement—small, unintentional, or perhaps entirely intentional—was enough to an-chor my attention there.

The captain was speaking to her about my arrival, but his words dissolved into background noise. I nodded when appropriate, though I heard almost nothing. My gaze lingered shamelessly in that narrow strip of visible skin, as if it were a private revelation meant for me alone. After months of academy discipline and the sterile company of cadets, the sight felt like oxygen.

She noticed.

Without looking directly at me, she adjusted her posture—crossing her legs the other way—and reached for the telephone with calm precision. If the gesture was a rebuke, it was delivered with elegance. If it was an invita-tion, it was a dangerous one.

“Don’t get any ideas. Someone above your rank is already using her.” the duty officer muttered at my side.

But ideas were precisely what I had.

She replaced the receiver, briefly nodded toward the commander’s door, and resumed typing.

I entered an unknown future and left as co-pilot on Major Antonov’s crew—assigned to an aging Tu-16 rocket carrier whose best years were long behind it.

There were no alternatives.

I spent the next four years as a copilot in the right seat of a long-range bomber before becoming an aircraft commander.


My bachelor evenings were filled with cards, vodka, and women whose names blurred together by morning. None of them, fortunately—or unfortunately—were a commanding officer’s secretary. Rumor had it that the sergeant, I met on my first day, possessed talents that went well beyond her typing speed.

Before long, romantic adventures with the local beauties became one of my favorite pastimes. And there were always plenty of them around the garrison.

Strange as it may sound, the place that had struck me as bleak and unwelcoming on the day of my arrival grad-ually revealed itself in a completely different light. Whether Kamchatka had changed, or I had, I still cannot say. Most likely, it was me.

I still don’t know how it happened, but the tiny district center of Yelizovo—granted city status only a year be-fore I arrived—was a unique place on Kamchatka. No other village, urban settlement, or even the regional capi-tal could claim that its female population significantly outnumbered the men. It was a curious phenomenon, one I never quite managed to explain. What, after all, was lacking in Yelizovo for a man?

The fishing on the Avacha River was magnificent. What could be tastier than Kamchatka trout? And what could be more exciting than wrestling with a Chinook salmon that never seemed willing to surrender?

The hot springs of Paratunka, Nachiki, and Malki were practically next door. The town itself was clean, com-pact, tidy, and peaceful. Summers were warmer than in regional center — Petropavlovsk, and the climate was much drier. A beautiful place. In spring the bird cherry trees bloomed; in summer the lilacs followed, and flow-erbeds brightened the streets. And for the view of the snow-covered peak of Koryak Volcano and Avacha Vol-cano rising over the town, the locals could probably have charged admission.

For that matter, Yelizovo even had a zoo.


I might have remained a co-pilot for years, but Major Antonov, marooned too long in that garrison, had begun speaking his thoughts aloud. Eventually, that habit cost him.

One evening, well supplied with vodka, he told us what he called a harmless joke—a fictional exchange be-tween a local Party secretary and an Orthodox priest.

“Father,” the Party man says, “lend us some chairs for tomorrow’s Communist conference.”
“I won’t,” the priest replies. “Last time your comrades carved obscenities into them.”
“Then I won’t send Boy Scouts to sing in your choir.”
“Then I won’t send monks to help with Saturday cleanup.”
“And I won’t assign any Komsomol members for your religious procession.”
The priest pauses. “Then there will be no more nuns for your sauna.”
The leader of the party cell froze for a second and said:
“And for such words, Father, our organization will expel you from the Communist Party.”

We roared.

I was well aware that our Orthodox Church was far from being independent. It had deep ties with the state, col-laborating with the KGB, police, and the Communist Party of the USSR. Yet, this cooperation remained hidden from the public eye. Making jokes or speaking critically about such connections, especially during Stalin's era, could result in dire consequences, like being sent to the GULAG, officially known as the Main Directorate of Northern Prison Camps. Even in the early 1980s, it could lead to expulsion from the party and the loss of one's job, putting individuals like me in a perilous position.

Despite the fact that everyone present was aware of the potential disastrous consequences this funny story could bring upon the narrator, we still laughed together at the joke. However, in a few days, the good Major be-came the subject of a serious investigation by our Party Committee. 

Who wrote the denunciation, I could not ascertain. Not being a party member, I was spared from the suspicions that circulated among my coworkers.

Within a week Antonov was unanimously expelled from the Communist Party—an expulsion that, in the Soviet system, usually meant the end of a man’s career. A month later he was quietly forced into retirement from the armed forces.


In few weeks after Antonov’s dismissal, I was summoned to the wing commander’s office.

To my surprise, nearly the entire regimental staff were present. I stood on a threadbare carpet before the colo-nel’s desk and wondered why so much attention had been assembled for a junior officer.

“Comrade Colonel, First Lieutenant Romanov reporting as ordered.”

I fixed my gaze somewhere between humility and defiance. For a moment I imagined myself as Governor Vasi-ly Zavoyko on Signal Cape in 1854, studying the approaching Anglo-French fleet through a spyglass during the Crimean War, when British and French warships tried—and failed—to capture the remote Russian port of Pet-ropavlovsk on Kamchatka.

But this fleet was sailing straight for me.

In those days a summons to the wing commander’s office could mean almost anything. A man might walk out with a promotion—or disappear quietly from the roster by the end of the month. I had just watched it happen to Antonov: first the Party expulsion, then retirement from the service as if he had never existed.

Now it was my turn to step inside that office and learn which way the wind was blowing.

I stopped in the middle of the room and wondered what awaited me: a firing squad—or a coronation.

The chief of staff began questioning me, comparing each answer against the contents of my personnel file as if confirming I was not a CIA mole. Satisfied, he closed the red folder and passed it to the colonel.


The squadron commander rested his broad hands over the Soviet coat of arms embossed on its cover. He glanced at his assistants and deputies, who were standing against the walls, took a deep breath, and spoke,

"Well, then, Romanov, your time has come. The Motherland, represented by me, and the Communist Party, rep-resented by the deputy commander of political affairs, have decided to appoint you pilot-in-command of a rocket-carrier.”

Despite myself, pride rose in my chest.

“However,” he continued, “there are conditions.”

The pride receded.

“You will fulfill three requirements. First, you will join the Communist Party. Second, you will marry. Third—and not least—you will reduce your drinking.”

I considered this.

The first two could be managed. The third would require negotiation with my own nature.

“I give you my word,” I said. “Six months for the Party and the marriage. I’ll stop drinking tomorrow.”
“Why tomorrow?” the political officer asked.
“I should celebrate the promotion today, Comrade Major.”

Laughter circled the room.

The hammer seemed to hang in the air, and at that moment, I processed the demands. Enrolling in the Party might not be a major challenge, marriage could be managed somehow, but curbing my drinking was a real prob-lem. Vodka had always been a loyal companion to military members who served far from the comforts of real civilization.

Nevertheless, I signed the papers placed in front of me, promising to fulfill all three conditions within the next six months.


Chapter 2

Becoming an aircraft commander brought more than a little extra pay and a certain respect from the people around me. It also came with a long list of new responsibilities.

I could no longer disappear for an entire weekend in Lyudmila Salnikova’s bed or …or standing before the flight surgeon for mandatory medical clearance, my face still swollen from vodka—were over.

In the past the doctor would sometimes say, while taking my blood pressure:
“Romanov, breathe the other way. Your vodka fumes make my eyes water.”

Everything changed at once. My reckless youth was over.

The day before the tragedy that would completely change my life, I sat in the flight-planning room among the other aircraft commanders, listening to the mission assignments. One by one the service chiefs reported what we should expect from the weather, the probable enemy, logistics, and communications.

Most of it barely concerned me.

From everything I heard I took only the essentials: the next morning at 0800 I would be the first aircraft off the runway. Four hours later I would be back at base. Four hours after that I would be drinking beer with my friends in the officers’ quarters, celebrating my first combat mission.

So instead of listening carefully, I studied for the hundredth time the posters hanging on the classroom walls.
Nearly twenty panels, each eight-by-six-foot, described the Tu-16 crashes step by step, clearly demonstrating at what point the situation went from difficult to critical. Almost every one of them had the same explanation: mis-takes in piloting technique or poor decisions.

In scientific language they called it the human factor.

Looking at those examples of other people’s carelessness, I thought to myself:
You won’t drag me into a mountain that easily. I’m not going to let anyone get me killed.

After all, at twenty-five I had already been trusted with a combat patrol toward the American Aleutian Islands.

I had flown that route many times before as a right-seat pilot, but in those days my only responsibility was sim-ple: not to interfere with the aircraft commander as he controlled the airplane and the crew.

Now things were different. The responsibility of preparing the crew for the mission rested entirely on me.

The situation had changed.

I didn’t.

Inside, I was still the same carefree screw-up.

My crew spent barely an hour on real preparation for the patrol along the American border. I should have spent more time reviewing the documents regulating flight operations, and I was supposed to check the readiness of each member of my crew.

I was supposed to.

But then more experienced pilots from other crews stopped by and invited us to the garrison gym.

I gave in to temptation. The entire crew went to play volleyball.

The final two hours of that working day I spent at a card table in the doctor’s office, along with the regimental physician, the communications chief, and the squadron navigator.

The doctor hung a sign on his door:

DO NOT ENTER — PATIENT EXAMINATION IN PROGRESS

The door itself was padded with technical cotton and covered with black leatherette, so our triumphant shouts—and occasional outraged protests over bad cards—couldn’t be heard outside.


The next morning, I sat in the pilots’ mess waiting for Lyudmila, the waitress assigned to our squadron, to bring my breakfast.

Our brief affair had ended six months earlier, but she had developed feelings for me, which came as a surprise. I had no idea she had been making life plans that included me.

God knew how many women I had slept with in those four years.

That didn’t mean I had to marry all of them.

And certainly not Salnikova.

She had what could only be described as a guitar-shaped figure: a broad chest, a narrow waist, and wide hips.

She was magnificent in bed.
But I was embarrassed to take her to the Officers’ Club to dance or to a restaurant.
Marriage to her had never even crossed my mind. God forbid. So, I gradually reduced our meetings to nothing and tried to remain on friendly terms. Not knowing the real reason for my cooling off, Lyudmila remained cheerful and kind toward me.

Until the rumor spread around the garrison that I had gotten married.

Her attitude toward me changed instantly.

Very few people knew why a confirmed bachelor like me had taken such a step. When I returned from leave, I reported to the regiment commander that I had fulfilled one of the conditions of our agreement. Unfortunately, he didn’t bother keeping it quiet. As a result of his lack of discretion, the service my crew received in the pilots’ mess deteriorated sharply.

The squadron jokers didn’t miss their chance.

“Valeriy, it’s better not to sit at the same table with you anymore,” they would say.
Or:
“That’s it, Romanov. Your time is over. Once a man gets married, he eats last.”

On any other day I might have sat there until the end of breakfast, ignoring the jokes and waiting until the other pilots left so I could try to talk to Lyuda calmly. But that day was different. I had to get to the pre-flight briefing and had no time to wipe tears from my former lover’s eyes.

Trying to catch the waitress’s attention, I raised one hand like a diligent schoolboy who knows the answer.
Then the other.
The pilots started watching.
Some even put down their forks to see what would happen.

When Lyudmila passed my table again, she said with open contempt:
“Romanov, you can raise your legs over the table if you want. You’ll still be the last one to eat.”

I answered loudly, separating each word and putting as much sarcasm into my voice as I could.

“Lyudmila, raising legs over tables—especially spread ones—is more your specialty.”

The entire squadron exploded with laughter.

The young woman, caught by the cruel joke, threw the tray with the dishes onto the floor and ran into the staff room in tears.

A few minutes later the mess duty officer sent another waitress to our section.

Veronika came straight to our table. While we were choosing breakfast, she leaned closer and said quietly:
“I always told her she shouldn’t expect anything from you except nastiness.”


Chapter 3

Responding to the nose-wheel steering lever, my Tu-16 rolled out of revetment Post Number Four. Leaving the terminal building behind us—with its neon sign reading Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky—the bomber taxied slowly between the transport squadron’s parking stands and the concrete shelters of the air-defense fighters.

A few fighter pilots walking toward their MiG-25s—the triple-Mach interceptors designed specifically to chase the American SR-71 Blackbird—waved to me. I took it as a wish for a good flight and returned the salute with my left hand. It wasn’t exactly regulation, but from the commander’s seat I was turned toward them with my left side. They wouldn’t have seen my right hand anyway.

That day we were the first aircraft to take off.

After climbing to cruising altitude, I set course for the Commander Islands. Once the last strip of Soviet land disappeared far below us, we headed toward the American border. My assignment was to test the air-defense readiness of the probable enemy at Erickson Air Station.

The mission involved a complicated series of training exercises.

From Yelizovo to Attu Island was just over a thousand kilometers. In two and a half hours we could fly there and back and report mission accomplished before lunch.

An experienced pilot would have done exactly that.

But I was twenty-five, and I wanted to impress the fathers-commanders with my initiative.

After the briefing, I approached the squadron commander and proposed conducting the mission under condi-tions as close to combat as possible.
“I’ll approach the enemy airbase not by the shortest route, but in a wide arc,” I told him. “I’ll appear on their radar screens from the Alaska direction.”

Seeing no immediate objection, I added:
“It’ll triple the distance, but it should give us complete surprise.”

The colonel looked at me with obvious bewilderment. His eyes asked the silent question:
Why the hell do you need that?

During the few seconds of silence that followed, I already regretted opening my mouth and was about to apolo-gize for bothering him. But I didn’t get the chance.

He shrugged:
“Go prepare your plan. Under the personal supervision of the flight commander.”
________________________________________
On the final segment of the flight, I was supposed to enter the launch envelope of the K-10 cruise missile, simu-late a strike against the American early-warning radar station, wait for interception by enemy fighters, fly alongside them along the islands, and then return home.

In that flight we carried out almost everything exactly as planned.

At our service ceiling we passed over the Kronotsky Nature Reserve with its active volcano, the large lake, and its famous geysers. Then we admired Bering Island and spent another hour and fifteen minutes flying northeast over the sea along the International Date Line.

Three hundred miles from St. Matthew Island, we turned south and began our descent, aiming to slip below the coverage of American air-defense radar. Descending to one hundred fifty feet and accelerating the missile car-rier to six hundred miles per hour, we raced toward the hostile island.

Three minutes after the descent, the copilot announced the simulated missile launch.
In my imagination, the three-ton miniature aircraft dropped from its pylon, climbed to twelve miles, and then plunged almost vertically onto the American base—destroying their radar and scattering concrete slabs of the runway across the tundra.

Of course we carried no missiles. Not even a training one.

They all rested back at our base in a reinforced concrete shelter deep underground, and they looked very much like a scaled-down MiG-15 fighter—the same aircraft that had fought so successfully in Korea more than twen-ty years earlier.
After flying about fifty kilometers over the water, I saw two interceptor fighters rapidly approaching. The little war game was over. Our aircraft had been detected—and theoretically shot down.

The navigator marked the interception point on the map while I pushed the engines to maximum power, began climbing, and engaged the autopilot.

The McDonnell Douglas F-18 Hornet fighters rushed past us, skillfully maneuvering to flank my aircraft.

I saluted the Americans.

“Navigator, write it down,” I said over the intercom. “Four minutes after the simulated missile launch, we were intercepted by a pair of Hornets from the 525th Fighter Squadron. Aircraft numbers two-two-one and…”

I glanced at the copilot.

“Two-two-two,” he added, studying the fighter on our right wing. “The squadron identification is confirmed by the emblem under the cockpit.”

“What’s on it?” came the voice of the second navigator.

The poor man sat behind me in his compartment like in an iron box and could see nothing outside except his in-struments.
“A bulldog’s face,” I replied. “Green eyes. A bandage taped in a cross on his forehead. Two fangs sticking out—the left one gold. A spiked collar around his neck.”
“Commander, do you really memorize squadron numbers and identify aircraft by their insignia?” The naviga-tor’s voice carried equal parts admiration and doubt.
“I wish my memory worked that well,” I said honestly. “But it’s simpler than that. Under the bulldog it says in big blue letters: 525th Fighter Sq.”

 

Escorted by the American interceptors, we climbed back to cruising altitude.

The lead pilot saluted and signaled for us to open our bomb bay. I reduced speed and passed the request to the navigator.
When the green light BOMB BAY OPEN illuminated, I gave the American pilot a thumbs-up with my left hand. He understood immediately. Sliding beneath our fuselage, he checked that our bomb bay—as always—was empty and returned to formation over the wing.

For about half an hour we flew together.

One hundred miles west of Attu Island, I gave the fighter pilots a brief farewell and turned toward Kamchatka.

They accelerated to open distance, performed a couple of aileron rolls, and banked away toward their base.

That’s it, I thought with relief. First combat mission was completed successfully.

I called out to anyone who cared to listen, “Let’s get the hell out of here!”

The tension drained away, and my thoughts drifted back to the vacation I had just taken.

Two months earlier, after receiving our leave papers from the chief of staff, the entire crew flew to Vladivostok that same day.

There we went our separate ways. The others went to visit relatives. I rented a room in the center of the city on Lenin Street at a hotel with the heroic name Pilot Chkalov. A bronze plaque beside the wide entrance doors marked the famous pilot’s flight across the North Pole to the United States in 1937. It had been worn smooth by years of hands brushing past it.

Before long, the disco at the local medical institute became my main destination in that provincial capital.

After two weeks of drinking with students and sleeping with almost the entire female population of the medical faculty, I suddenly encountered an absolutely firm refusal from one future doctor when I invited her to spend the night somewhere more comfortable.

The rejection stunned me.

After that I could think of no one else.

“How is that possible?” I muttered to myself one night while walking along Partizans Avenue. “A woman tell-ing me ‘No’? To a combat naval aviator? I’ve never heard that word from a woman before—and I don’t intend to start now.”

But the beauty turned out to be more stubborn—and smarter—than I was. By the middle of my vacation, we were officially married.

There was another factor that influenced my sudden decision.

Her father was the commander of coastal defense for the Pacific Fleet. Though he had nothing to do with avia-tion, he held the rank of rear admiral.

And there weren’t many admirals in the fleet.

The navigator’s voice broke into my thoughts.

“Commander, descent point.”
“Roger. Beginning descent.”

I pushed the control column forward and pulled the throttles back to idle.

The cockpit became noticeably quieter. I glanced at the copilot. He was staring through the side window at drifting ice floes, completely detached from the flight. Probably remembering something of his own, I thought, and drifted back to Vladivostok.

The second half of my vacation had become our honeymoon.
We had no intention of traveling anywhere. My wife had exams coming up and couldn’t spare even a week. Her parents moved out to their country house, leaving us the apartment.

We spent almost all our time in bed—alternating between studying her medical notes and conducting practical exercises in a detailed exploration of the human body. We paid particular attention to the structural differences between male and female anatomy. We made no great discoveries. But both sides enjoyed the research.

I caught myself smiling.

“Commander, my onboard radar screen just went blank!”

The navigator’s voice snapped me back to reality. It felt strange that I was hearing him directly, not through the aircraft intercom.

I glanced at the instrument panel. There were more than thirty gauges and indicators in front of me, but my at-tention was drawn immediately to just two—the ones showing the revolutions per minute of the left and right engines. Both needles were trembling in autorotation, a clear sign that the engines had stalled.

My eyes shifted to the fuel flow indicators.

Nothing.

The needles were frozen at zero.

“Cut off all electrical devices!” I shouted to both navigators and the copilot.

The gunner and radio operator couldn’t hear me—they were in the tail compartment.

I slammed the air-start button again. No response.

Then I looked at the throttles, and everything became clear.

Eight minutes earlier, while beginning our descent from ten thousand meters, I had pulled them back from cruise power toward idle.

But I had pulled them just a little too far. Into STOP.

Without checking the instruments, I had continued the descent. During that time, the onboard systems—especially the powerful radar transmitter—had completely drained the batteries.

I tried the in-flight engine restart. No reaction.


Early Tu-16 Badger models had no throttle idle-stop lock.
Immersed in my pleasant memories, I had shut down both engines with my own hand.

When Stalin’s aircraft designers created this bomber in the early 1950s, they probably never imagined that thir-ty years later a pilot would be thinking not about engine Revolutions Per Minute —but about the rotational speed of a woman’s hips.

It wasn’t enough to just kill me, I thought. I should have been killed, buried, exhumed, and killed again. The wa-ter was getting closer and closer, and I couldn’t even send a distress Mayday. The radio wasn’t working. Para-chuting was already out of the question—it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway. Climbing out into icy water and then into an individual rubber raft, with the air temperature at twenty degrees Fahrenheit, we would survive no more than two hours.

A shiver ran through me as I tried to take it all in.

"Damn, this is the end. I've never landed on water before. What will happen if I misjudge the distance from the plane to the sea surface before landing? A foolish question. What will happen? What will happen? Any pilot will tell you what will happen. We'll skim without engine power eight to ten meters above the water, and then, losing speed, we'll crash onto the water. Despite its apparent softness and fluidity, it'll be harder than concrete for us. The fuselage will crack along riveted seams, the wings and tail surfaces will break off immediately, the crew's spines will crunch nauseatingly from the vertical overload, snapping the spinal cord in several places. And we'll swiftly sink, conscious and with paralyzed limbs."

The picture that emerged wasn't enviable. Fear gripped my heart. My shoulders twitched involuntarily, and nau-sea rose in my throat. I looked at the co-pilot on the right. The Lieutenant gripped the control yoke so tightly that his fingernails turned as white as chalk. His pale face was covered in large drops of sweat.

"Look at that, a paradox. Not a drop of blood on his face, yet he's as wet as if he just stepped out of a steam bath. I wonder, do I look the same or even worse?" This thought pushed my own concerns out of my head.

I grabbed the control yoke, gently swayed it left and right, and in complete silence, I said calmly:
“Let go.”

He placed his hands on his knees and closed his eyes.
 
"Bidding farewell to life," I managed to think, trying to find a landing spot relatively free of ice.
 
That thought pushed my own panic aside.

Below us the Pacific waited.
________________________________________

Just before the water's surface, I pulled the control yoke towards myself. The plane slowed its descent, the fuse-lage kissed the water, and, clearing separate floating pieces of ice with the glass nose of the navigator's cabin, it glided on the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

The water landing was successful. Miraculously, my rocket carrier remained intact, and at least two navigators, the co-pilot, and I were alive. The fate of the gunner and radioman was unknown to me. Now, the most im-portant thing was to leave the plane as quickly as possible.

As I focused on the landing, the navigator, bombardier, and co-pilot left their stations, gathering beside my seat, poised to operate the emergency hatch above us. With a brief struggle, they managed to release it, allow-ing me to crawl out first. I sprinted back along the top of the fuselage toward the mid-station hatch, which had automatically blown open upon impact with the water.

Reaching for the silk lanyard, buoyed by a compressed air balloon and connected to the orange-shrouded in-flatable emergency raft floating near the open hatch, I retrieved a knife from my flight jacket, then severed the balloon, securing the remaining lanyard around my hand. Stumbling and slipping, I dragged the raft behind me to the aircraft's nose.

At this point, the three crew members were standing on the fuselage, ready to descend onto the port wing, now partially submerged with small ripples and a veneer of ice coating the super-cooled metal.

Just as my mind registered the hazard posed by the icy aluminum, and a split second before my voice caught up, my co-pilot leaped onto the wing. His legs lost traction, throwing him off balance. He tumbled onto his back, skidding down the wing. His arms flailed wildly, attempting to grasp onto anything, everything. In a des-pairing cry, choked and cut off, he vanished beneath the water's surface.

His fur parka, insulated coveralls, and high leather boots lined with dog fur turned into an enormous sponge, absorbing water and leaving him no chance to stay afloat, not even for a moment.

Horrified by the scene before us, we stood frozen beside the open upper hatch of the cockpit—until the metallic thuds against glass jolted us back to reality.

The gunner and the radio operator, situated at the tail of the pressurized hull, were pounding their pistol han-dles against the plexiglass of the rear hatch.
 
The muffled echoes of their desperate attempts reverberated eerily along the entire length of the fuselage. The tail section hatch, designed to open downward under normal circumstances, was now submerged under at least three feet of icy water, and the opposing pressure rendered any attempt to open it futile. This left the two Non-Commission Officers trapped in the sealed compartment.

In an emergency, they were supposed to parachute out, but they couldn't do it without my command. As soon as the internal radio communication failed, I couldn't issue such an order anymore, and once we hit the water, they had no way out.

Haunted by the gruesome fate of the copilot and now confronted with the dire cold reality of the two in the aft, the navigator, the bombardier, and I aided each other in a cautious descent onto the wing.

Then, we carefully maneuvered the raft closer to the aircraft, and I instructed the bombardier to take the leap first. The Lieutenant, new to the service for several months, shot me a resigned glance, yet trusting my exper-tise, he leaped.

The slippery wing didn't provide much traction for a running start, causing him to narrowly miss his landing. His right leg smacked against the resilient rubber wall of the raft, propelling him over the water's surface. He plunged in, submerged by a wave—but against all odds, he managed to clutch the thin safety line encircling the raft. Within seconds, he resurfaced, and as he emerged, the navigator dropped to his knees and gripped his young colleague's flight jacket collar, preventing him from going under again. I tugged the raft's cord taut to the wing's trailing edge, and together we aided the Lieutenant in scrambling onto the flap and then tumbling in-to the raft.

While we grappled to rescue the bombardier, the aircraft was gradually sinking into the ocean. The wavelets over the wing evolved into full waves. Icy water licked at the top of our boots. As the navigator and I clambered into the inflatable shelter after the drenched bombardier, we began to row with ferocity, striving to put as much distance as possible between us and the plane.

The raft floated past the tail compartment, and to my dismay, I witnessed the gunner and the radio operator—bearing an uncanny resemblance to wild animals—firing their .35 caliber pistols at the glass.
Amidst the deafening noise and panic, it momentarily felt as though they were aiming at us. Aghast, I shifted my gaze away, intensifying my rowing effort.

Not yet distanced significantly from the scene, I turned to the navigator and said,
"They must understand that the glass of their compartment is impervious even to the impact of the six-barrel Gatling-style rotary cannon Vulcan. They'd do better to save a bullet or two to end their own suffering; other-wise, they'll meet a dreadful death from suffocation."

"Very true, Commander, but I'm afraid their fate, much like the copilot's, will weigh on your conscience," he re-sponded, his eyes glistening with tears.

"Row harder, damn it. The plane could descend beneath the waves any moment now. Our raft could easily be caught in the whirlpool. Let's put as much distance between us and this spot as possible. We can discuss my conscience later," I replied, and after a brief pause, I added, "If we manage to survive.”

 

The bombardier remained silent, curled in a fetal position and trembling. About a hundred feet away, the air-craft began to tilt its nose higher and higher until it reached almost a vertical position, then abruptly plunged beneath the water. Enormous air bubbles surged from the forward hatch, creating a powerful geyser—a final tribute to a once-proud plane. I managed to seal the rubber door of the raft just in time. We were lifted upward and then tossed downward. The sea, having claimed three victims out of our six-person crew, settled back into its calm state.

Now, we had to conserve our strength and wait.

Our destiny rested in the hands of the long-range radar operator. I was confident that he was monitoring our movements and would swiftly report the disappearance of our aircraft from the radar screen. I envisioned that, following his report, the entire fleet's resources would be deployed to search for us, and they would unques-tionably locate us.

As I shared this belief with the navigators, the bombardier muttered with a desperate edge,
"The hell they'll find us."

His older colleague, marked by bitterness in his voice, quietly countered,
"They will undoubtedly find us, but the question is, when?”






Chapter 4

We had no inkling that the man responsible for watching our aircraft on the screen of the P-35 Saturn two-coordinate early-warning radar, Sergeant Vladimir Yelizarov, was busy with entirely different matters.

The twenty-year-old village boy couldn't have cared less about airplanes, ships, or military service in general. He had sent his assistant — an ordinary seaman — off to lunch at the sailors' mess hall.

“Bring my lunch here. And make sure it’s still hot. If it’s cold, you’ll be back peeling potatoes in the galley. Understood, rookie?” he asked sternly.
“Got it,” the sailor replied reluctantly.
“Not ‘got it.’ Say ‘Yes, Sergeant.’ Try again.”
“Yes, Sergeant,” the sailor muttered.
“And one more thing,” Vladimir added, softening his tone. “Don’t rush back. Take your time.”

Left alone at his station, Yelizarov immediately called the garrison switchboard.
“Svetlana,” he said when she answered. “Get over here quickly. I’ll be alone for about forty minutes.”
________________________________________
Three years earlier, Svetlana Mukhina had been stationed in Vladivostok. Her father commanded the communi-cations battalion that served the Pacific Fleet headquarters.

After finishing high school, she flatly refused to continue her education. No matter how hard her parents tried to persuade her to apply to one of the city’s institutes, she would not budge.
In the end, her father simply arranged a position for his lively daughter at the battalion telephone exchange, where he could keep an eye on her.

About a year later, during a routine morning formation on the small parade ground between Fleet Headquarters and the Officers’ Club, the battalion commander introduced a new arrival to the unit.

Twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant Viktor Fedorov had just been assigned to military unit 35768.
Fedorov grew up in a builder’s family near Irkutsk. As a teenager he often spent Sundays helping his father construct summer houses outside the city. The hard work had given him powerful shoulders and especially strong hands. When people shook hands with him, they sometimes had the uneasy feeling that the lieutenant could crush a brick in his palm.
The young officer was handsome, confident, quick-witted, and an excellent storyteller. He also possessed an endless supply of jokes.

Within a few weeks almost every young female telephone operator in the battalion had fallen in love with him.
Svetlana was no exception.

It took less than a month for Viktor to become a frequent guest in the home of Lieutenant Colonel Mukhin.
Their relationship developed rapidly. The lieutenant’s vanity was flattered by the fact that the commander’s daughter spent every lunch break in his office — stretched out with him on the leather couch or perched on his knees beside his desk.

Svetlana had already begun dreaming of marriage and a happy family life.
Nothing, it seemed, could stand in the way of their happiness.
But her plans collapsed in a single moment.
________________________________________
At one of the family dinners the entire household sat at the table — Svetlana, her younger sister Oksana, their parents, and Viktor. Raising his wine glass, the handsome lieutenant proposed marriage.

But not to Svetlana.

He proposed to her younger sister.

Oksana clapped her hands with delight, threw her arms around his neck, kissed him on the cheek, and happily accepted.
Tears welled in Svetlana’s eyes.

“What’s the matter?” her father asked with a smile.
“Tears of joy for my sister,” she replied, quickly wiping them away.

Her parents exchanged puzzled glances.

They had never suspected how far the relationship between Viktor and their elder daughter had gone.
They had always assumed that the lieutenant visited their house because of Oksana.


Fedorov was not only intelligent — he was calculating.

When the chief of staff had first introduced him to the battalion personnel, he had not paid special attention to Svetlana. But the moment he learned that the cheerful, plump telephone operator was the daughter of his imme-diate superior, his attitude toward her changed overnight.

Soon, however, the lieutenant began to regret his impulsiveness.

Svetlana proved to be temperamental and nearly impossible to control. Her desires always outweighed common sense. Sometimes the lieutenant was even late for formation simply because, in Svetlana’s opinion, he had not kissed her enough that morning.

Breaking off the relationship was impossible. If he offended the commander’s daughter, he could forget about any future promotion.

He felt trapped.

Then, during his first visit to the Mukhin family home, he discovered a way out.

That evening they were celebrating Oksana’s eighteenth birthday. Viktor danced with the birthday girl all night long. Her parents, seated at the festive table, paid little attention to the innocent flirtation of a young officer.

From that day on, Oksana met him almost every evening — supposedly going to the cinema or to dances with friends.
Viktor asked her to keep their meetings secret. Officially, he claimed he wished to avoid gossip among fellow officers.
In reality he was afraid that Svetlana might find out before Oksana was ready to marry him.

Meeting the younger sister secretly became more dangerous with every passing week. Someone might see them together in a caf; or in the park. Worse still, Oksana might proudly tell her sister about her wonderful lover.
That would end in scandal.

Viktor counted the days. He knew that sooner or later the girl would come to him frightened by the news from a doctor.
Her pregnancy would be his trump card.
And eventually it happened.

Pale and nervous, Oksana told him what he had been waiting to hear.
Viktor didn’t even have to pretend to be happy. He immediately proposed marriage and promised to ask her parents for their blessing that very evening.

Thus, the engagement was arranged.

The next morning, a storm broke out in the office of the communications center chief.

“How could you?” Svetlana shouted at Fedorov. “You’re a traitor. You swore you loved me. During the day you whispered tender words to me on that very couch—and in the evenings you were running around with Oksana.”

Her voice broke into sobs. Covering her face with trembling hands, she burst into tears, no longer trying to hide her emotions. The soft body of the young woman shook, while her plump lips muttered curses at Viktor mixed with self-pity.

After a few choking sobs, Svetlana suddenly raised her head and looked around through her tears. Between the couch she sat on and the document safe stood a simple army nightstand. On it lay a metal ashtray filled with cigarette butts and a desk lamp with a mushroom-shaped lilac shade.

With a quick motion, she grabbed the ashtray in her right hand and hurled it at Viktor’s head.

The lieutenant, sitting at his desk, ducked. The ashtray flew past his temple and smashed into the glass door of a bookcase. His dark-blue officer’s jacket was dusted with gray cigarette ash, and shards of glass scattered over the long-neglected volumes of the leader of the world proletariat lining the shelves.

“Bastard,” the woman growled, frustrated that she had missed.

She reached for the desk lamp, yanking it toward herself with both hands, but the cord was too short and too strong. The prongs of the plug bent, but it didn’t come out of the socket. Failing to tear it free, she hurled the lamp to the floor in anger.

Fedorov realized he wouldn’t be able to keep silent. Passive defense was unlikely to lead to peace with his sis-ter-in-law.
He brushed ash and a few cigarette butts off his jacket, stood up, and walked toward her.
Before he could get close, Svetlana stepped toward him and began pounding on his chest with her fists. Fedorov caught her wrists in one hand. She jerked two or three times, trying to free herself from his iron grip, but only hurt herself.

“Don’t be foolish,” Viktor said quietly. “Don’t get so worked up. My marriage to Oksana won’t affect what you and I have. If anything, it’ll make things easier. We’ll keep meeting at work—and take every chance we can at your place.”

While Svetlana stood there sniffling, trying to process his words, he released her hands, slipped an arm around her waist, kissed her gently, and pushed her down onto the leather couch behind her.

Behind the office door, the telephone operators—her friends—were trying not to miss a single word of the con-versation they were eavesdropping on. When they heard the old couch creak, they exchanged disapproving glances and returned to their stations.

The general opinion of the girls was voiced by Svetlana’s best friend, Victoria:
“She’s completely lost her pride.”

The lieutenant had not lied. He did not change his habits. At night, he slept with his calm, slender wife. During the day, he entertained her older sister in his office.

How long this could have gone on—and how it might have ended—no one knew. But the head of fleet counter-intelligence, Colonel Medvedev, intervened.

He summoned Lieutenant Colonel Mukhin.

“Good morning, Nikolai,” the head of the military counterintelligence branch said, extending his hand.

Mukhin took the colonel’s hand without hesitation and gave it a firm, confident shake.
“Not such a good morning if it starts in your office.”

“It doesn’t matter where it starts. What matters is that it doesn’t end in a KGB detention cell,” Medvedev re-plied with a smile.
“Are my affairs really that bad?” Mukhin asked, feigning concern.
“Not catastrophic… but still,” Medvedev replied meaningfully.

Mukhin had known him for over ten years and understood perfectly well: if something serious had happened, the conversation would be very different. If they had caught an enemy spy in the communications battalion, or one of his operators had met a foreign tourist, or someone had made unauthorized contact with a foreign radio center—there would be no polite greeting. Medvedev would be shouting loud enough for the Chinese across the border to hear.

If he was shaking hands, then nothing extraordinary had happened. Still, a morning summons “to the carpet” never meant anything good.

“What’s new in the battalion?” Medvedev asked.
“Nothing.”
“And at home?”

So that’s where the wind is blowing from, Mukhin thought.

“Worse than in the battalion,” he said.
“Really?” Medvedev raised an eyebrow.
“Unfortunately. My son-in-law is sleeping with both my daughters—and doesn’t even try to hide it. The young-er one, so foolish that she is, notices nothing. The older one was always difficult—and now she’s completely out of control.”
“And how long do you plan to tolerate Lieutenant Fedorov living with both your daughters?” Medvedev asked coldly. “How long will this debauchery continue in the unit entrusted to you?”

Mukhin felt the shift immediately—the warmth gone, replaced by steel.
“Griboedov wrote: ‘What a commission, Creator, to be the father of grown daughters…’” he muttered quietly.
“Griboedov wrote about one daughter,” Medvedev replied dryly. “You have two. As a father of a son, I sympa-thize. But put your house in order. Without my involvement.”

Mukhin said nothing.
“If you don’t resolve this in two weeks,” Medvedev added, “I will. And you’ll be growing cucumbers at your country house. Or guarding a puppet theater.” He nodded toward the window. “Retired.”

After leaving the office, Mukhin went straight to his superior.
Navy Captain Razumov, the Fleet Communications Chief, was playing chess with the Pacific Fleet’s deputy chief of staff.

Mukhin asked to have Svetlana transferred to a remote garrison—and to bring his younger daughter in her place.

“Sound idea,” Razumov said, picking up a bishop from the chessboard and studying it. “If a bishop can’t live peacefully surrounded by two pawns, we’ll move one forward two squares. Will Kamchatka suit her?”
“Perfectly,” Mukhin replied.
“Tell her to submit a report tomorrow requesting transfer to Yelizovo. I’ll sign it.”

The deputy chief of staff nodded approvingly—whether at the move on the board or the decision, Mukhin couldn’t tell.

Razumov had long known about Fedorov’s behavior, but he himself was no stranger to young telephone opera-tors. One of them—Viktoria Toropova—who loudly condemned Svetlana, was in fact his favorite “kitten.”
That affair had already cost him any real chance of becoming a rear admiral. Razumov did not end the relation-ship; he valued it more than his promotion.

So, deeply entangled in his own sin, the head of the communication department had no desire to start cutting off heads.


A week later, Svetlana embarked on a journey to her new duty station aboard a transport aircraft. She was the only passenger on the flight.

Consumed by anger toward the entire world — her parents, her younger sister, and even her former lover — she stared out the window at the vast expanse below the wing. Endless forests stretched to the horizon, dark ever-green trees covering the Soviet Union’s Far East like a carpet.

Tears welled in her eyes and fell onto her black uniform jacket. Two dark streaks of mascara ran down her cheeks.

An officer stepped out of the cockpit into the passenger cabin. Seeing the girl’s pale, tear-streaked face, he asked,
“What’s the matter, sweetheart? Did someone hurt you, or are you just airsick?”
“The flight’s fine, Commander,” she replied quietly. “It’s just that my soul feels heavy today.”

Sensing the possibility of an interesting conversation, the deputy commander of the transport aviation regiment for political affairs — who happened to be flying as the navigator on this crew — sat down beside her.
“Tell me what’s troubling you,” he said, placing his warm palm on her hand in a fatherly gesture. “It might make you feel better.”
“I’d rather not talk about it,” the girl replied.
“Had a quarrel with your boyfriend?” the political officer asked, prying with professional curiosity.
“Something like that,” Svetlana answered evasively.
“Maybe you’d like a drink? It might cheer you up. We’ve got beer, vodka, and even pure alcohol.”
“If you’ll keep me company and there’s something to eat with it, I wouldn’t mind a little vodka.”

The political officer quietly stepped into the cockpit and returned a few minutes later carrying his briefcase. Af-ter locking the cabin door behind him, he explained,
“I’m the navigator on this flight, and I’d rather the pilots didn’t see me drinking on duty.”
“Isn’t that dangerous for us?” she asked.
“First, we still have three hours left in the air. Second, I’m not planning to drink much. And third, you can call me by my first name.”

He poured two glasses.
“I’m Leonid,” he said.
“My name’s Svetlana,” she replied, raising her glass. “Nice to meet you.”

They drank, had a small snack, and he poured on her another glass.
“And what about you?” she asked, already beginning to feel light-headed.
“I’ll stick to beer. I never allow myself more than one shot of vodka during a flight,” he said, spearing a piece of sardine from a tin with a plastic fork. Still chewing, he raised his glass.
“To a safe landing,” the lieutenant colonel proposed.

Svetlana intended to drink only half, but the political officer lightly lifted the bottom of her glass with his fin-ger and said instructively,
“For a toast like that, young lady, you drink it all.”

After two glasses of vodka, and having eaten nothing since morning, Svetlana quickly became drunk. She laughed loudly at every joke the forty-five years old lieutenant colonel made, and he seemed younger and younger to her.

When he kissed her on the lips, her head began to spin.

She offered no resistance when Leonid Sokolov slipped his hands under her skirt. Encouraged by the pleasant sensation and the girl’s compliance, he began undressing her. Soon he laid her across the passenger seats and climbed on top of her.

The feeling of something familiar did not leave Svetlana the entire time Sokolov fussed over her body.
The same abrupt words.
The same haste.
The same clumsy movements constrained by half-removed clothing.
And absolutely no tenderness.
The only difference was the place where men laid her each time.
On the old office sofa.
Across airplane seats.
Or on the kitchen table in her parents’ apartment while her younger sister took a shower.

“No,” Svetlana thought, pulling on her panties and straightening her bra. “This has to end someday.”

She cast a contemptuous glance at the deputy regimental commander for political affairs, who was fastening his trousers.

The officer smiled smugly and hummed his favorite song — The March of the Communist Brigades:

People will be happy,
Happy all their lives.
Soviet power is mighty—
In strength it always thrives.

“The power of the Soviet government may indeed be mighty,” she thought bitterly, “but yours, my friend, is not. One might even say the opposite.”

Still slightly drunk, she smiled at the thought and was about to say it aloud to the officer responsible for the moral character of the regiment’s personnel.

But Leonid Sokolov gave her no chance.

He placed the empty bottle and the two glasses back into his briefcase and, without saying goodbye, returned to the cockpit.
________________________________________
For several months, Sergeant Yelizarov and Svetlana had seized every possible chance to be together. As soon as the door closed behind her, Vladimir initiated a series of tender kisses, guiding her towards his desk.

The fervent desire of the two young lovers to intertwine their arms and legs coincided with the very moment when my aircraft, descending with engines powered off, about two hundred miles away from my home base.

The tiny glowing dot, marking our aircraft on the green radar screen, faded…
flickered once…
and then disappeared.

Svetlana was sitting on the desk, her skirt pulled up to her chest, leaning back against the radar display.

Yelizarov was busy whispering declarations of love and promises of a bright future together.

Svetlana didn't believe a word of it. She was five years older than the sergeant and had lost count of how many young seamen had promised to marry her after demobilization during intimate encounters.

Still, she felt good.

Here, inside the radar station, with the massive antenna rotating above their heads and no living soul for hun-dreds of yards around, she could finally let herself go.

She no longer had to worry about her roommates overhearing her.

No need to hide a lover under the bed from the ever-watchful dormitory matron.

Here she could cry out as loudly as she pleased.
________________________________________
The sergeant was getting tired. Keeping Svetlana’s plump legs in his arms while standing and shifting his weight was no small effort.

He finally sat down in his chair.

But Svetlana gave him no rest and immediately climbed onto his lap.

As he wrapped his arms around her and kissed her neck, his eyes drifted across the radar screen.

Then he froze.

Svetlana noticed the sudden change. She leaned back slightly and looked at him sharply.

“What’s wrong, my dear? Why did your ‘friend’ suddenly go soft?”
“Where is he?” Yelizarov whispered.
“Who?”
“Seven-one-six.”
“Where was he?”
“When you came in, he was right here.” He pointed at the screen. Then he glanced at his watch. “By now he should be at least a hundred kilometers closer.”
“But he’s gone.”

Svetlana immediately understood how serious the situation was. She buttoned her blouse, straightened her skirt, and said firmly:
“Report the disappearance of the target to the flight director. Immediately.”

Then she practically tumbled down the iron ladder and ran toward the communications building.

As soon as the door slammed behind her, Yelizarov lifted the direct-line telephone with a trembling hand.

“Comrade Lieutenant Colonel,” he reported, “this is Sergeant Yelizarov, operator of the long-range radar sta-tion. Target 716 disappeared from the screen ten seconds ago.”

Then he added from memory:
“Range two hundred fifty kilometers. Azimuth one-zero-five.”

That was the exact point where he had last seen our aircraft ten minutes earlier — before he pulled Svetlana on-to his desk.

From that moment on, we no longer existed for him.


Chapter 5

Securing all the rubber door buttons, I stretched out on the raft's floor. The inflated bottom shielded us from di-rect contact with the frigid ocean waters. Unfortunately, we lacked a source of heat, just as we had neither vod-ka nor grain alcohol to rub down the completely drenched bombardier.

His responses to our questions had dwindled over the last few hours. We attempted to rub warmth back into him with our bare hands, but our energy quickly waned. Drained both physically and mentally, we surrendered to sleep. When we roused ourselves from our unconsciousness the next morning, we discovered that the young Lieutenant had perished.

The navigator's grief exploded upon the cold body as he began to wail. The bombardier had been akin to a younger brother to him. Countless hours were shared between them, during which the seasoned navigator im-parted the intricacies of bomb hatch operation, bomb release angle calculations, wind and altitude adjustments — all the nuances of the bombardier's craft. Breaking off his lament over his friend’s body, he abruptly raised his head, staring at me with hostility. He seemed on the verge of speaking, yet a cough, deep from within his lungs, choked his words.

The navigator’s eyes burned with fever. It dawned on me that he was burning up. The previous day, while res-cuing his comrade, he had pushed himself far harder than I had and had ended up partially soaked.

My own condition didn't worry me much. We have enough provisions for ten days, we were only two, not the six the supplies had been meant for. My companion’s condition, however, indicated that we might be two for no more than a couple of days.

By that time, they should find us. Based on my calculations, we were merely a hundred miles away from the peninsula. I even knew the direction in which Kamchatka's shore lay. But that knowledge didn’t help much.

The navigator positioned himself on the rubber floor, his back against the raft's side. He shot me with a menac-ing look.

It abruptly occurred to me that each of us had a pistol and eight rounds in the left pocket of our coveralls. This realization did little to improve my mood. Hoping to prevent any aggressive moves by the navigator, I unzipped my jacket and reached for my pistol with my right hand.

The navigator’s eyes widened. His pupils began to move and by the from his expression, I could tell…, I under-stood that he was beginning to realize the nature of the situation.

Not wanting to provoke him to some unconsidered act, I slowed my movement. Smoothly grabbing the handle of the pistol, I gently removed it from my pocket. Without taking my eyes from the navigator for a single in-stant, I aimed the barrel of the pistol upward and inserted a bronze-coated piece of lead into the cartridge.

The navigator's lips curled into a sardonic smile.

"You're afraid of me, Commander?" he asked, his posture unwavering.

"No," I replied, "I'm more concerned about polar bears prowling the ice floes in search of seals. If one of those bears decides to tear through the rubber raft, our fate would be far grislier than that poor bombardier's."

"But it would be simpler than the fate of the radio operator and the gunner. Tell me honestly, Commander, have you already forgotten about them?"

"Just the opposite. I recalled how they shot at the glass of their cabin, and it occurred to me that we also have firearms. In case of an emergency, we could use them too," I answered.

He fell silent for several minutes before saying, "But you lied about the bears, Commander. The chances of en-countering them are so slim that you wouldn't flinch until you heard some stranger's breathing in this eerie si-lence." He let out a heavy sigh and continued after a pause, "We both know I'll be the first to go. And you, my commander, are concerned that I might shoot you before I die, to avenge the deaths of those good men. And you're right to be concerned. I didn't think of it before, but now I see it's not a bad idea. So, here's a proposition: shoot me now. Don't wait. Toss my body into the sea. You can tell the investigators that I perished alongside the co-pilot. There won't be any witnesses of your supposed negligence left alive. After all, our young bombardier won't be able to tell anyone anything."

Well, if he wants to talk openly, I thought, I might as well share my view.

"You're right. It's not the bears I'm truly worried about—the gun is just a precaution in case you get any ideas. Have you ever considered why, in the late 1960s, political relations between the Soviet Union and China came close to the brink of crisis?"

He didn't respond, so I continued my monologue, almost as if I was speaking to myself,

"During that time, Mao Zedong was on the decline but still in control. Our government had valid concerns that a dying Mao might precipitate a nuclear war, dragging millions from both nations into the abyss. Dying men are unpredictable. That's why my pistol is cocked, resting in the unzipped pocket of my jacket. Though the safety is on, I could draw it faster than you. You can say and think whatever you like about me, but it would be wise for you to keep your hands off your own pistol.”

"Then kill me. I've already suggested that," he said, with a contemptuous smile on his face.

And there I was, thinking he hadn't been paying attention to my words.

"That won't work," I replied curtly.

"Why?" he retorted.

"Because accidentally shutting off the jet engines is one thing, but cold-blooded murder is a whole different level."

"But if I survive, I'll spill everything to the investigators. You'll stand trial and end up in jail for sure."

"I have no doubt, but I'll find a way to live with the guilt of the mistake that's already cost four lives," I empha-sized the word 'four,' "whereas I could never forgive myself for intentionally taking a single life."

I pulled out the survival kit and began a detailed inspection of its contents.

The compass was put aside as momentarily useless. I picked up the signal mirror and the signal gun, opening the rubber door wider, and gazed at the sky. Heavy clouds stretched from one horizon to the other, the cloud base barely two hundred feet above.

Even if I hear the sound of a passing plane, I thought, neither the signal mirror nor the signal gun will be of much help. The signal rocket fired into the gray cumulo-stratus clouds will be visible for a mere couple hun-dred feet, and the mirror without the sun is nothing more than a tool to evaluate the growth of my beard.

Returning to my spot, I continued my examination of the survival kit. I took out the fishing kit with hooks, bob-bers, lures, and weights, wondering: Who on earth thought this would be useful? I wasn't much of an angler, and it's quite possible that my thoughts were off-base, but then I imagined catching fish on the raft would re-quire live bait. A worm, a fly, a piece of raw fish or meat. And to use a lure, I'd need a fishing pole. After all, a lure needs to move under the water, mimicking a small fish in motion, not just hanging vertically. I pushed all of this aside as useless for our situation and continued my inspection. Next was the knife. Why was a knife in-cluded here? No crew member boards an aircraft without a personal knife. The next was the medical kit with pills and bandages.

I tossed it under the navigator's feet without opening it and said,
"Navigator, see if you can find some antibiotics for yourself. Maybe it'll bring your temperature down, even if temporarily.”

“That’s no use,” he answered.

It seemed as if all the recent tension in our relationship had evaporated. I shifted the survival kit to one side and crawled on my knees to his section of the raft. I opened the box of tablets and poured half a dozen antibiotics into his mouth.

“Swallow them,” I ordered.

He shook his head. I returned to my corner, scooped up some seawater with the aluminum lid from the fishing gear, threw in two purification tablets, mixed them with my index finger, and went back to the navigator.

“Drink this,” I offered.

He took a couple of swallows and questioned me,

“Why are you doing this? Do you really think there's a chance for a rescue team to find us, let alone find us alive?”

“Today, I'm not certain of either, but there's nothing else to be done. Why not fight a bit for your life? For now, let's hold on. Just look, in the time I’ve been talking to you and investigating the survival kit, the day has al-ready turned to night. I'll check out our food supply, and after supper, we can rest.”

I opened two cans of hash that looked more like dog food than human sustenance, nudging one of them toward the navigator with my foot. Then, tossing him a packet of wafers, I began my own meal.

The next two days brought a storm on the ocean, and we lay on the raft's floor in total darkness. The door was firmly buttoned shut, and the waves tossed us up and down, turning our stomachs inside out. Constant nausea plagued us, but there was no vomiting. Our stomachs had been empty for a while. In that hellish rocking, all we wished for was to lose consciousness and wake up when it was all over. It seemed to be the same for the naviga-tor because, from time to time, his body, much like the deceased bombardier's, rolled over onto me.


By the end of the fourth day, my hope of being rescued rapidly diminished. The navigator's fever was escalat-ing, and he began to hallucinate, calling out to his wife and having conversations with his two sons. It became unbearable to listen to. I took some cotton wool from the medical kit, stuffed it into my ears, and lay there, try-ing to move as little as possible, lost in thought:

What will happen to me if I am actually found?


The rescue operation for my crew started the moment the commander of the rocket carrier squadron, Lieuten-ant-Colonel Maksimov, who was acting as the flight director that day, ordered all the airborne crews to return to base. After reporting the disappearance of mark 716 from the radar screen to the Fleet aviation commander, he convened the command staff of all the units and wings stationed at the Yelizovo Airbase.


While waiting for all the invited officers to gather, Maksimov approached the chief of staff. The Major stood, leaning over a map of the southern part of the Bering Sea, drawing circles with a compass. Maksimov looked at the circles, radiating from a hypothetical point in the sea, and quietly asked the chief of staff:

"Do you believe he crashed into the sea?"

The Major removed his glasses and looked the commander straight in the eyes.

"If he landed on the Aleutian Islands with the Americans, you and I will end up in prison. Do you understand that?" Maksimov asked again, not waiting for a response.

The chief of staff wiped the sweat from his bald spot with a handkerchief and finally replied to the commander:

"I don't think he did that. He just got promoted, married well. He's supposed to grow and advance in his career. I don't see any grounds for treason."

"The military counterintelligence will find the grounds quickly. Don't forget, Romanov served under Antonov's command for four years. And we didn't kick the Major out of the party for drinking or marital infidelity. Roma-nov could easily absorb the apolitical sentiments of his former commander."

"And what about his wife?" the chief of staff inquired.

"What about his wife?  Recall when Viktor Belenko famously landed the supersonic MiG-25 fighter on the Hokkaido Island in Japan, in 1976. He had a wife and a daughter, and he was promoted to the position of depu-ty squadron commander. Nothing stopped him."

"If Romanov wanted to land on the Aleutians, he would have done so immediately. No need for him to fly al-most a thousand kilometers back. He would have shot the crew to avoid interference and landed without any nerves on an enemy airbase."

"Well, I hope you're right. If we find wreckage in the ocean, we'll get reprimands, but if my suspicions are con-firmed, we'll have to face the consequences."

While they were talking, the assembled officers had taken their seats around the oval table, quietly discussing the incident. The meeting began with a report from the chief of staff. The Major briefed those present on every-thing that was known at that moment.

Over the next hour, a coordinated search operation was organized by the naval and air units of the Kamchatka flotilla.

The chief of staff, together with the squadron’s senior navigators, outlined a circular search area with a radius of forty miles from the coordinates given in Sergeant Yelizarov’s report. The outer half of this circle was as-signed to the Tu-16 squadron, while the inner half was divided evenly between the anti-submarine squadron flying Be-12 amphibious aircraft and the border guard helicopter squadron. Surface ships were dispatched from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatka to assist the aviation units in the presumed disaster zone.

For seven days the pilots took turns flying low over the water, using every hour of daylight to search. Yet nei-ther they nor the sailors aboard the frigates found so much as an oil slick on the surface of the sea, let alone any wreckage of the aircraft or the bodies of the lost crew.


My orange shelter, meanwhile, drifted much closer to the coast than anyone had expected. Left alone among the ice floes with the bodies of the two dead navigators, I was slowly losing my grip on sanity.
At first, I began to sing. I sang every song I knew, one after another. But when I reached the eleventh verse of Grenada, the poem by Mikhail Svetlov, the full weight of my situation suddenly struck me.

I repeated the same lines over and over like a broken record:

The platoon did not notice the loss of the man
And sang its last “Apple” song out—but in vain—
For softly across the sky there were drawn
On the velvet of sunset the tears of the rain.

Tears streamed down my face, just like the drops of rain in the song.

It felt as if I were sitting in the middle of Captain Livanov’s counter-intelligence office. On the wall behind him hung a portrait of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Extraordinary Board of Inquiry for the Struggle Against Sabotage and Banditry. Behind me, two investigators from the Military Prosecutor’s Office carefully recorded every word I said.
Captain Livanov conducted the interrogation. His voice was soft, almost affectionate, but like a wind-up toy he kept repeating the same question again and again.

“Well then, what exactly happened during your flight, Romanov?”
I told him about the engines failing. But he continued to ask the same question over and over. I repeated my story, trying to be absolutely precise in every detail. The investigators occasionally asked clarifying questions, but I was forbidden to turn around and face them. I was to answer only Livanov.

He stared at me as relentlessly as the portrait of Dzerzhinsky behind him. His smile was calculated and cold. Suddenly he jumped up, leaned across the desk, and shouted straight into my face:
“Don’t lie to me, Romanov! The engines couldn’t simply fail! You shut them off yourself! Because you’re the enemy!”
I began to cry like a child and muttered helplessly,
“They could have failed on their own… they could have!”
He struck me sharply under the chin and I toppled backward, chair and all, onto the floor.


What was that sharp smell?

My head jerked back. I opened my eyes slightly and saw an officer in a white coat standing over me. The high collar of his naval uniform was visible beneath it.

Only doctors on naval ships and submarines still follow the old tradition of wearing white coats over their uni-forms, I thought with sudden relief.
That meant they had somehow found me. And for the moment I was still in the hands of doctors, not investiga-tors—although I knew that sooner or later I would face them.

I tried to raise myself onto my elbows.

“Just lie still, Lucky, and don’t move,” the military doctor said. “At least until the IV is finished.”

A needle protruded from my left arm, and a pleasant warmth was spreading through my body.

“Is that glucose?” I asked.
“Yes,” he answered briefly, continuing to write in his journal.

At that moment I loved that submarine doctor.

It was the same feeling a patient experiences toward a surgeon who, when asked, “Doctor, will I survive the op-eration?” does not shrug cynically but smiles confidently and replies, “Of course you will. Everything will be fine.”

My gratitude toward him outweighed even the vast Pacific Ocean—a place I had learned to despise.

Only someone who has felt the sudden reprieve from what seemed like a certain death sentence can understand the depth of that relief.

“What’s the date today?” I asked, simply craving human conversation.
“The eighteenth,” the doctor replied, noticing my need to talk and setting his notebook aside.
“I lost two comrades,” I said quietly. “One two days ago. The other five days ago.”

He said nothing.

After a moment, my curiosity got the better of me.
“How did you find me?”

The doctor briefly explained that submarines usually cover the last fifty nautical miles on the surface when re-turning to base after an underwater mission, to reduce the risk of collisions with fishing vessels and unseen ob-stacles in coastal waters. Once we surfaced, the duty officer, who had been on the sail, spotted the orange life raft. From that moment on, the only question was whether anyone on it was still alive.

“We’ve already reported your rescue to headquarters,” he added, glancing at his watch. “We’ll reach shore in about an hour. I believe an ambulance is already waiting for you.”


On the pier of the 25th Submarine Division in Vilyuchinsk—though, strictly speaking, the division’s piers were located in Vilkovo—I was met by the regiment commander and Captain Livanov. They stood under a fine, driz-zling rain in black wool overcoats, about two meters apart, silently watching as two sailors carried me up the metal gangway on a stretcher.

There was no real need for that, and I told the submarine’s doctor so.
“I’ll have to climb the vertical ladder myself anyway. I can manage twenty meters along the gangway.”

But the doctor, a man who clearly preferred certainty to improvisation, insisted.
“If you keep resisting,” he said calmly, “I’ll have you carried out on a stretcher through the torpedo loading hatch—right after the bodies of your navigators. I’ll assign six sailors instead of two. But if you cooperate, you’ll come out on your own from the conning tower on the opposite side of the floating pier, lie down on the stretcher there, and a procession of two sailors will carry you straight into the sticky hands of justice.”

While they transferred me ashore from the submariners’ stretcher to an ambulance stretcher and loaded the bodies of my fallen comrades through the rear door of a bus, I briefly outlined the crash to the regiment com-mander and the security officer.

Livanov immediately hurried off to the naval headquarters to report to his superiors by phone.

Left alone with me, Maksimov spoke in a low voice:
“Valeriy, I don’t believe your version about both engines failing at the same time. But I’ll stand by you no mat-ter what.”
“Why, comrade Colonel?”
“I don’t believe it because in eighty-five percent of aviation equipment failures, people are to blame—mostly pilots. And I’ll defend you because you survived.”

He paused, then added quietly:
“You didn’t shoot yourself. And you didn’t throw your dead comrades overboard.”
“Thanks for that, Commander,” I replied.


The counterintelligence officer, Captain Livanov, tried to post an armed guard outside the intensive care ward where I had been placed. When the head of the hospital, Colonel Ivanchenko, learned about it, he immediately ordered the guards removed.
“For now, I am in charge here, not the KGB,” he said curtly.

The chief of counterintelligence for the flotilla soon intervened. He contacted the hospital director and ex-plained in detail that the witness, Captain Romanov, currently under treatment in the ward, was of critical im-portance to the investigation.

After long negotiations, Ivanchenko reluctantly agreed to a compromise. Two sailors were allowed to sit out-side my door, but they were to remain unarmed and sit at a small desk so as not to attract attention.
The official investigation into the deaths of the five members of my crew began the moment I finished describ-ing how each of them had died.

Ahead of me lay many hours of interrogation.

Whether I remained a witness or became the accused would depend entirely on how convincing my explana-tions were.

The investigator from the military prosecutor’s office believed, quite reasonably, that the investigation would proceed more efficiently if I were protected from informants.

But what I needed most was information. What did the investigators already know? And what was still a mys-tery to them? That was the only question that mattered. The answer would determine whether they accepted my version—or caught me in a lie that would force me to tell the truth.

Getting past an armed guard would have been difficult. Getting past a bored sailor on night watch was much easier.
First Lieutenant Filatov, the ground technician of the lost aircraft, had no trouble solving the problem. He slipped a bottle of vodka to the sleepy sailor sitting outside my door, and the young man promised to forget that anyone had visited.
My technician even had a respectable excuse for the visit: he had come to bring fruit to his commander, who had recently returned from an unpleasant encounter with the ice floes of the Bering Sea.

The First Lieutenant had gone gray during the days since our disappearance. He told me that after the crash everyone in the squadron had been interrogated—officers and sailors alike. The investigators had carefully re-constructed every detail of our preparation for that fatal flight.

They knew about the volleyball game. They knew about the card games in the doctor’s office.

For me, that information was priceless. It showed me exactly which road my defense had to follow.
“Thank you, First Lieutenant,” I told him quietly.

His seemingly harmless nighttime visit saved me from prison.

Although sometimes I wondered whether the five years promised to me by the prosecutor of the Kamchatka flo-tilla might actually have been easier to endure than the memory that haunted me every night—the sight of my navigator’s blood spurting from his throat just before he died.

I held firmly to my story: engine failure during the transition from Idle to Cruise. In my written explanations I admitted everything—the volleyball games, the cards in the doctor’s office.

Everything except my own unforgivable mistake.

When the investigators finally ran out of questions, I was sent to Vladivostok to await the decision about my fate.
The command wanted me removed from the garrison as quickly as possible.

And they were right to hurry. By then, the atmosphere around me had changed beyond recognition.

During the symbolic funerals—empty coffins lowered into the frozen ground—the widows of my comrades stood shoulder to shoulder, wrapped in black, their faces rigid with grief and something harder, colder. They mourned their husbands, and in the same breath they condemned me, though many of them never spoke my name aloud.
It did not need to be spoken.

It hung in the air above the coffins, heavier than the frost, heavier than the silence. It was as if they all knew with absolute certainty: if I had survived, then I must be the one responsible.

No investigation could change that. No explanation could reach them.

Gradually, the faint aura of heroism that had surrounded me in the first days after my rescue dissolved com-pletely, as if it had never existed. In its place grew something else—an emptiness filled with glances, whispers, and silence that lingered a second too long.

In the garrison, people began to lower their voices when I passed. Conversations broke off mid-sentence. Some avoided looking at me altogether; others looked too long.

The widows did not lower their eyes.

When they passed me in the street, dressed in black headscarves, they would stop, point at me, and say to their children in a voice that carried far enough for me to hear:

“Look at that man, sonny.
He killed your father.”



Chapter 6

I had to endure more than a month of waiting for the official results of the investigation. If not for the constant weight of uncertainty, those days might easily have passed for a well-earned vacation.

During that month, a tribunal was convened for Sergeant Yelizarov and the telephone operator, Mukhina. The radar operator received a sentence of two years’ service in a punishment battalion. Mukhina, however, was de-clared innocent. The tribunal found no grounds to charge her with a crime. She was dismissed from military service for “abandoning her post while on duty without negative consequences” and sent back to Vladivostok.

One day Svetlana called and asked to meet with me.

I didn’t know her personally and tried at first to decline politely, claiming that I was busy. But she insisted. She said she felt terrible about the men who had died and at the very least wanted to express her condolences to me.
I made one more attempt to avoid the meeting, telling her that I had long since forgiven everyone involved. But she kept asking, and eventually I gave in.

Why not? I asked myself. My wife was at the university, my father-in-law was at work, my mother-in-law was at the dacha, and I had nothing urgent to do. I could spend an hour or two consoling her and wiping away her tears. It would cost me nothing.

I asked where she would like to meet. She suggested a caf; on the outskirts of town, and I promised to be there in an hour.

On the way I realized that I had no idea what she looked like. I had forgotten to ask during our telephone con-versation and had no idea how I would recognize her.

But my concern turned out to be unnecessary. She had proved smarter than I had expected. She had written her name — SVETLANA — in large letters on a paper napkin and placed it in the empty vase at the center of her table.

When I lifted my eyes from the napkin to her face, my first thought was:
She’s not only smart. She’s beautiful.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so eager to avoid this meeting. Although at that point nothing had happened yet.
I approached the table, introduced myself, and after sitting down asked,
“How about a glass of old cognac this early in the morning?”
“That would be nice,” she replied.

I called the waitress and ordered a bottle of French cognac — Larsen — along with a box of chocolates.

“An officer’s choice,” Svetlana remarked once the waitress had left.
“Do you have a lot of experience with officers?” I asked, trying to match the tone she had set.
“Yes,” she said calmly. “Quite a lot. And not very pleasant experiences.”
“Well, I hope your experience with me will be more pleasant than with my predecessors.”
“While there’s life, there’s hope,” she replied philosophically.
“It does. I’ve learned that the hard way—hope is the last to die.”

After a few playful remarks our conversation settled into a calmer rhythm. Two people connected by the same tragedy were talking surprisingly easily. There were no excuses and no tears of pity.

After a few sips of cognac, Svetlana told me the whole dramatic story of her first love. The intimate details she omitted out of modesty were easy enough to imagine.

While she spoke, I studied her face and couldn’t help thinking about her sister’s husband, Lieutenant Fedorov, living comfortably among two dozen young women in his battalion. It was like letting a fox into a henhouse.
If only I had his job for a month. On second thought, I probably wouldn’t last that long. I’d die of exhaustion.

My attention began to wander. My eyes drifted from her face to the neckline of her dress, where two inviting curves rose and fell gently with her breathing.

Noticing my gaze and realizing I was no longer listening very carefully, Svetlana lowered her voice and asked:
“Valeriy… would you mind continuing our conversation at my place?”

She didn’t have to ask twice.

I picked up the half-empty bottle of cognac and followed her.

Starting the morning with good cognac turned out to be an excellent idea. By two o’clock we were already shar-ing a shower and exchanging well-earned compliments. After several more hours in bed and after hearing the rest of her life story — I left, promising to keep in touch.

A week later I received a summons from the Commander of Pacific Fleet Aviation.

His manner gave me hope that things were not as bad as I had feared. The fact that he asked only about what happened after the emergency water landing seemed like a good sign.

He asked me to describe in detail how I had managed to survive nine days on the raft. I told him everything — about the storm, the cold, the food, the equipment in the survival kit, and the conclusions I had drawn from the experience.
The commander asked me to prepare a written report for headquarters describing the usefulness of every item in the survival kit — what had helped us survive and what had been missing.

I promised to complete the report within three days and noted that the most critical thing we had lacked was wa-terproof suits. Our clothes had been constantly soaked, and our body temperature had dropped dangerously low.
When our conversation was almost over, the Lieutenant-General suddenly asked:
“Captain Romanov, if you were offered the position of Lieutenant Colonel in charge of the search-and-rescue service, would you accept it?”

For a moment a bleak picture flashed through my mind: a life spent in staff offices from nine to five, slowly drying out in the dusty corridors of headquarters.

Or worse — becoming the scapegoat for every failure in emergency training, just like the unfortunate officer who had held that position before me.

Even the temptation of skipping the rank of Major and jumping directly to Lieutenant Colonel could not change my mind.

Fate had already given me a second chance at life.

But I remained stubborn.

“Comrade Lieutenant-General,” I said, “if the alternative to your offer is any pilot position — I will choose the pilot’s seat.”
“Too bad,” the commander said thoughtfully. “In the entire history of our naval aviation no one has survived nine days under such conditions. Your experience could be extremely valuable. A living example gives crews confidence when they must spend hours flying over the ocean.”

He paused.
“But I understand your choice.”

He picked up the telephone and called the fleet aviation chief of staff.
“What do you hear about Romanov?”
He listened for a moment.
“Good,” he said, and hung up.

Then he looked at me with a slight smile.
“The order will arrive from Moscow within a week. I think you have nothing to worry about.”


Leaving his office, I almost ran to my father-in-law’s office. But instead of praise for my determination, I re-ceived a harsh lecture.

“You’re thinking only about yourself. Have you forgotten that you have a wife? It would be better for you to serve under my protection here at headquarters while Olga finishes her studies. Otherwise, they may send you somewhere unpleasant — say, to Khorol. And then you’ll see what happens to officers who refuse to become lieutenant colonels.”

He paused for a moment, then added thoughtfully,
“Do you know what pilots say about the Khorol air base?”
“No,” I admitted. “I’ve never met anyone from there.”
“They say: if the entire Soviet Far East is one big backside, then Khorol air base is the asshole.”

Fortunately, they didn’t send me quite that far.

As the General had promised, my new assignment arrived within a week. I was appointed pilot-in-command of an An-12 Cub transport aircraft in the naval aviation transport wing.

The wing was stationed at Vladivostok International Airport near the small mining town of Artyom.

On my way home from fleet headquarters I decided to stop by Svetlana’s place and share the news. It seemed like a good excuse for a small celebration. Instead of the cognac we had enjoyed two weeks earlier, I brought two bottles of champagne.

“I’ll be working under the watchful eye of your old acquaintance — Political Officer Sokolov,” I told her, gen-tly stroking her back.
She pressed herself closer, enjoying the moment. Resting her head against my chest, she smiled and asked:
“You’re not jealous of my past, are you?”
“No,” I replied. “Only a little jealous of your future. I’m leaving tomorrow. The day after that you may already have forgotten what I look like.”

She moved slightly away from me, as if preparing to leave the bed.
“All you men are the same. You have wives waiting at home, yet that isn’t enough. You want a faithful mistress too.”
I had no desire to argue, especially on the eve of my departure. Instead I recited an old anonymous verse:

The seeker asked the wise old sage,
“Pray tell me, master of your age,
What treasure in this world we see
Outweighs a woman’s beauty?”
The sage thought long, then calmly said:
“Two beauties would be better instead.”

She laughed, settled comfortably against me again, and said in a conciliatory voice:
“All I can promise you, Valeriy, is a place under my sheets whenever you feel like coming back.”





Chapter 7

The generals and senior officers stationed at headquarters are indeed wise men—especially those entrusted with making difficult decisions. Transferring me to a transport wing was an elegant way out of a complicated situation.

The board of inquiry investigating the disaster could not reach a unanimous conclusion about the simultaneous failure of both engines in flight. The engineering specialists tended to blame the aircraft commander, suspect-ing that some pilot error had been concealed. Experienced pilots who worked alongside them argued that, in theory, anything could happen. Since the military prosecutor had already declined to bring criminal charges due to lack of evidence, they stood firmly in my defense.

The carefully worded reassignment satisfied both sides.

Officially, the transfer from a missile carrier to a transport aircraft was considered a demotion. For me, howev-er, it felt like a reward—better than a medal or even a promotion to Major.

Every pilot secretly dreams of such an assignment.

It doesn’t matter whether you fly fighters, bombers, or—worst of all—helicopters. Deep down, every one of you envies the transport crews.

Of course, you would never admit it. Not even to yourself. And certainly not in front of your comrades. You merely watch the transport pilots who come into the mess hall for dinner and think to yourself:
What a mistake it was to enroll in an Air Force flight school in Tambov… or Barnaul… or Borisoglebsk — in-stead of Balashov. Back then I didn’t even know that the Balashov Transport Aviation College existed.

Even if you did know about it, in your youthful arrogance you probably dismissed its graduates as mere truck drivers of the sky.

You believed that the real life of a pilot consisted of dogfights, missile launches or flying endless hours at ex-tremely low altitude dropping sonar buoys and torpedoes in search of enemy submarines.

Or perhaps soaring at forty-five thousand feet above the Earth, hoping—vainly—to intercept the legendary American reconnaissance aircraft, the SR-71 Blackbird.

In reality, you fly eight hours in one direction and another eight hours back in a Tu-95 Bear strategic recon-naissance aircraft, strapped into your parachute harness with an oxygen mask on your face, staring at the end-less ocean and hoping to spot an American carrier strike group.

Gradually, as you grow accustomed to the realities of combat flying and begin comparing your work with that of the transport crews you once despised, you start to understand why those crews refuse to retire even when you practically chase them away with a stick.

Meanwhile, your own friends begin counting down the years until retirement only three or four years after graduating from flight school. They calculate everything according to the formula:

One year of flying equals two years of service.

Their goal is simple—to qualify for the maximum pension as early as possible.

Of course, I grieved for my fallen comrades. But sometimes I couldn’t help thinking that every misfortune car-ries a hidden advantage.

In my heart I thanked fate—and my father-in-law—for giving me the chance to take the position I had always dreamed about.
After three months of training flights, my new crew finally received our first transport mission.

We were about to cross the entire Soviet Union.

Our task was to deliver military cargo from Vladivostok to Moscow, unload commercial cargo in Crimea, fly empty to Leningrad, load seven tons of newsprint from the paper mill for the fleet newspaper On Guard, and then return to Vladivostok.


The chief of staff who assigned the mission never specified what the “commercial cargo” was.

So, I was somewhat surprised on the morning before departure when I saw two fully loaded five-ton trucks parked beneath the open cargo ramp of my aircraft. Their cargo holds packed to the ceiling with Japanese tele-visions, VCRs, and cassette recorders.

Beside the trucks stood three civilians, a petty officer, and five seamen.

The civilian passenger seemed to be arguing with the petty officer responsible for the loading crew. Judging by their raised voices, the discussion concerned money. Apparently, the question was whether the sailors should be paid for handling the cargo.

As I approached, I heard the businessman say:
“You, military people, have become far too arrogant. I already paid three generals at fleet headquarters in Vla-divostok. At this airbase a wing commander and a chief of staff have taken their share. And now you want me to pay you and the seamen as well?”

Turning to his hefty companions, he continued:
“Everyone talks about protecting the interests of the state. But when the time comes, everyone wants cash—and nobody gives a receipt.”

One of the bodyguards silently pointed me out to him.

The young man turned, realized that I must be the aircraft commander, and hurried to explain the situation.
After confirming my suspicions, I called the petty officer over and ordered him to load the aircraft. At the same time, I warned him that we would discuss the question of payment later—in the wing commander’s office.

And so that he wouldn’t die of fear while waiting for his execution, I leaned closer and whispered:
“Provided I don’t forget about this little incident during the mission.”

The petty officer hurried off to carry out the order.

The businessman extended his hand.
“My name is Pavel,” he said. “And these are my associates. They’ll be flying with us to keep an eye on the car-go.”

During the entire flight to Moscow, I kept thinking about my superiors who had pocketed a considerable sum for arranging this mission.

I thought, “People certainly know how to make others earn cash for them.

Here I was, sitting on my parachute for seven hours staring at prehistoric instruments, while they sat comforta-bly in their offices playing chess or cards and counting their money.

I also wondered how legal this cargo was from the point of view of customs.

What if it’s contraband?

And then another thought crossed my mind.

Perhaps I could earn something from this situation myself…

I glanced at my co-pilot.
I needed only one accomplice.
Kovalenko would do perfectly.

I gestured for him to remove his headset and step onto the emergency hatch between our seats.

“Sergey,” I said quietly, “listen carefully and don’t ask any questions. I’ll explain everything later.”

He nodded.

“As soon as we land at Chkalovsk Air Base, I’ll go to the dispatcher. You go to the passengers and ask them to prepare all documentation for the cargo. If they ask why, tell them it’s standard procedure. All aircraft passing through that base are inspected by a special board of inquiry. The first thing they check is whether the cargo transported by the Ministry of Defense is legal.”

Sergey looked puzzled, but remembering my order not to ask questions, he nodded obediently.

Chkalovsk Air Base, located thirty kilometers northeast of Moscow, unofficially served as the main aviation hub of the Soviet armed forces. It provided air support for Star City—the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center—and played a crucial role in the Soviet space program.

From this base Yuri Gagarin departed for Baikonur, the Soviet space launch site, in April 1961, before his his-toric flight around the Earth. It was also from here that he took off for his final flight on March 27, 1968.

Among pilots, however, the base was famous not only for its size or its connection to the cosmonauts.

It was also notorious for corruption.

During the Afghan War, the transport crews stationed there had access to opportunities that tempted even dis-ciplined officers.

By the middle of the war strange rumors began to circulate throughout the Soviet Union.

Zinc coffins containing the bodies of soldiers killed in Afghanistan were reportedly disappearing from graves.
Investigators eventually uncovered the horrifying truth.

Drug traffickers operating in Afghanistan sometimes separated the heads of fallen soldiers from their bodies. The heads were placed inside the coffin for identification through a small window of plexiglass. The rest of the space was filled with heroin.

In this way enormous quantities of narcotics entered the Soviet Union, transported by the very aircraft crews entrusted with carrying home the bodies of the dead.

As a result of the military prosecutor’s investigation, many transport aircraft commanders, numerous co-pilots and flight engineers, and even several officers from division headquarters ended up in prison.

The board of inquiry I mentioned to my co-pilot really did exist. It had been created specifically to prevent crimes like those committed during the Afghan War.

The board worked together with customs and border authorities to monitor military transport flights.

Naval aviation aircraft, however, were not subject to these inspections. Air Force regulations did not apply to us.
I had learned this from my squadron commander, who had not only taught me to fly the An-12 but had also ex-plained some of the finer points of transport aviation.

Now it was time to see whether the amount of vodka I had drunk with him was equal to the amount of knowledge I had absorbed.

I was walking toward my aircraft with clearance for departure to Simferopol in my pocket.

Under the wing Pavel was waiting, nervously chewing his fingernails.

When he heard my footsteps, he turned and hurried toward me.
“Well, Commander,” he asked anxiously, “are we leaving?”
“The cargo will be inspected first,” I replied calmly. “Then we’ll go.”
“Can’t we take off without the inspection?” he asked.
“We can,” I said. “With enough money you can do anything.”

He opened the attach; case he had guarded during the entire flight and, without showing me the contents, asked quietly:
“How much?”
“A thousand dollars for the head of the member of the board of inquiry,” I said. “And a hundred dollars for each crew member to keep quiet.”

He handed me a thick bundle.
“Here are two thousand. Please take care of it.”

I slipped the money into the pocket of my flight suit and headed briskly toward headquarters.

Halfway there I encountered a Major walking toward the aircraft.

Knowing that Pavel was watching from a distance, I decided to reinforce my story with a small performance.

“Comrade Major,” I said, blocking his path, “could you tell me where your political officer is?”
“In headquarters. Second floor,” he replied impatiently.

I switched to a more familiar tone.
“Listen, Major. I’ll give you two bottles of vodka if you walk me to his office.”
“Looks like you really need to see him,” he said with a shrug and led the way.

On the second floor I handed the unsuspecting officer enough money to buy ten bottles of vodka and asked him not to leave the corridor for a few minutes.

Meanwhile Pavel, staring at the headquarters building from the aircraft, was probably imagining the worst pos-sible scenario.

In his mind I had just committed a very serious crime on his behalf—bribery of a government official on a large scale.

My composure never left me.

When I was a boy, my father used to tell his friends:
“He’s too stupid to understand how dangerous his adventures really are.”

I always disagreed with him. I simply never allowed anyone to see my fear.

And so, I walked along the same road once used by Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space.
In my pocket was a sum equal to two years of my salary.

And I wasn’t even walking any faster.
Only when I came within a hundred feet of the aircraft did I signal the passengers to board and wave to the flight engineer to start the engines.


Chapter 8

The co-pilot, having received permission to taxi and dying of curiosity, asked me over the intercom,
“Well, how did it go?”

The navigator and the flight engineer both looked at me expectantly. That meant Sergey hadn’t been able to keep his mouth shut, and now I would have to share the dollars with them as well.

Still wet behind the ears, I thought. I told you to keep quiet. Now the whole crew knows about the money.

There was nothing I could do.

I announced to everyone:
“After we unload the cargo in Crimea, each of you will receive a small bonus.”


In Simferopol, after we said goodbye to the passengers and their cargo, the crew began persuading me—quite enthusiastically—to spend the night on that blessed Ukrainian soil.

I thought it would be wiser to put as much distance as possible between ourselves and the mafia. I had no doubt we had just parted company with an organized criminal group.

It was a night flight. Our maximum duty time—from the first takeoff to the final landing—was already nearing its limit.

As soon as we reached cruising altitude and engaged the autopilot, fatigue overwhelmed me. I settled deeper in-to my seat and fell asleep to the steady drone of the four turboprop engines.

I have no idea how I ended up in this dimly lit room.
Where am I?
It looks like an empty office. Or maybe a storage room. A narrow window near the ceiling lets in a faint strip of light. A basement.
I try to move—but I can’t.
I’m sitting on a chair. My legs are tied to the chair legs. My hands are bound behind my back with a leather belt.

“You’re awake, our little carrier pigeon… Did you take us for idiots? Never mind. We’ll squeeze you until our money comes squirting out of your eye sockets.”

One of the two gangsters standing beside me says this calmly.

Where have I seen these stupid faces before?
I try to remember, but I can’t.

The other one—the one I can’t see—suddenly pulls a plastic bag over my head. He tightens it around my neck.
I jerk violently.
Air disappears.
My eyes bulge. My mouth opens, desperately trying to suck in even a trace of oxygen.
I’m going to die.

Someone nudges my shoulder.
I open my eyes.

My torso has slumped forward in the seat, and the cord of my headset has wrapped itself around my neck.

I look around in relief.

The familiar cockpit surrounds me. The co-pilot is asleep. The navigator is writing something in the flight log. The flight engineer—the one who woke me—grins slyly.

“You looked like you were dreaming about your mother-in-law.”
“No,” I say, smiling. “About the political officer.”

But the smile quickly disappears.

When I look at the instrument panel, I see that something is very wrong.
The radio compass needle is slowly spinning in circles. The gyro compass shows that we are flying east—even though I know perfectly well that Leningrad lies due north of Simferopol. No matter how many times they re-name cities, geography doesn’t change.

Vasiliev looks at me from the navigator’s station with a puzzled expression.
“You seeing this too?” I ask, pointing at the instruments.

He nods.
“Where are we approximately?”
“Over Velikie Luki.”
“Sergey.” I punch my co-pilot lightly in the shoulder. “Report to the Pskov air traffic controller that we’ve just passed Velikie Luki.”

He makes the call.

No reply.

Which means that, on top of everything else, the radio is dead.

“At least the engines are still running,” the flight engineer remarks.

Whether he was hinting at my past or simply relieved, I couldn’t tell.

Suddenly the clouds directly ahead of us flared with light.


In a silence that feels like a graveyard, we continue flying in an unknown direction.

A few minutes later the navigational instruments began working again. Static returns to our headsets.

Then the voice of the Pskov air controller bursts through the radio, scolding us for missing the mandatory checkpoint report.

Sergey was about to answer when I stopped him with a quick hand gesture and apologized to the controller for our “inattention.”

“Why are you apologizing?” my co-pilot whispers. “Just tell him what happened.”
“What exactly should I tell him?” I ask. “About the giant flashlight that appeared in front of our nose? Or the fact that our instruments and radio both failed?”

I shake my head.
“Until we agree among ourselves what we actually saw, it’s better not to report anything.”

Then I look at him.
“What do you think it was, Sergey?”
“Looked like a rocket launch,” he says. “Or some kind of enormous searchlight.”
“I agree. That’s what it looked like. But the temporary failure of all our electromagnetic instruments doesn’t fit very well with that explanation.”

I think for a moment.
“The meteorologists didn’t warn us about any storms in this sector. So, it wasn’t lightning. There are no mag-netic anomalies here, and no space launch sites either. It’s unlikely that air defense would fire a missile into an airway used by civilian traffic.”

I shrug. “The only explanation I can think of is a possible encounter with an unidentified flying object.”
“Yes,” the flight engineer says with a grin. “That’s exactly what you should have told the controller. That we missed our checkpoint because of aliens.”
“And five minutes after landing we’d be locked in a psychiatric ward,” I reply.

To make sure there’s no misunderstanding, I add:
“I’ve never heard of a pilot keeping his wings after reporting a UFO. Anyone foolish enough to try usually fac-es serious consequences. And if he insists on what he saw, they send him ‘to the sack’—a psychiatric hospital, far away from normal people.”
“What sack?” Sergey asks. “Like the ones we store potatoes in?”

He is still young.
He doesn’t yet understand how Soviet psychiatry works.

“To keep the ‘madmen’ from resisting, they dress them in a tight sleeveless robe,” the flight engineer explains patiently. “Two holes—one for the head and one for the legs. That’s why they call it the sack.”

The navigator nods.
“The kind who could say things like that—the one who first went out into open space—and get away with it. A man like that is practically a god. His name is written in capital letters. We’re just ordinary cargo haulers.”
“More irony,” the radio operator says. ”Just tell me when we’re landing, hauler. I need to radio Moscow our ETA for Pushkin.”

The navigator clears his throat theatrically.
“At Pushkin Aerodrome in the glorious Leningrad region, our fearless crew will land their mechanical Pegasus in precisely…”

He performs several calculations with his slide rule, checks the flight log, studies the instruments.
“…eighteen minutes.”
“Hurrah,” the co-pilot says. “I thought we’d be flying for the rest of our lives.”
“It has been a long day,” I say. “But it’s not over until we reach the hotel. Cut the chatter and prepare for de-scent.”

I reduce engine power and listen to the steady hum of the propellers.

Flying feels much better when you can actually see your engines. All you have to do is glance out the left win-dow and watch the propeller turning.

For the rest of my life, during every descent, I would check whether the propellers were still spinning.



Chapter 9

The military hotel in the town of Pushkin, in the Leningrad region, stood right in the center of town, occupying the fourth floor of a nineteenth-century building. As I climbed the steep spiral staircase to the reception office, I rang the bell to summon the administrator. While we waited for Her Majesty to appear, we had time to inspect the interior of our potential lodging.

It looked as if the hotel had last been renovated sometime after World War II… or maybe after World War I… or perhaps even after the Crimean War of the mid-nineteenth century, when the Russians defended Sevastopol against the British, French, and Turks.

The long corridor, painted a gloomy dark blue, was lined with the heavy doors of ten-bed rooms. A mild sense of discomfort came from the sight of iron bed frames with sagging springs, though the real source of unease was probably the smell drifting from the communal toilet at the end of the corridor. Its door hung on a single hinge and could not be fully closed.

All this gave the hotel a certain air of revolutionary times. The only thing missing was a sailor in a black pea coat, a Mauser pistol in a wooden holster on his belt, sitting under a red banner at the entrance.

The stout administrator, meeting my crew well past midnight, said irritably,
“What brings you here at this hour? Let me make one thing clear right away—you won’t be getting private rooms. You’ll share with the guests who are already here.”
“We can’t share a room with strangers,” I protested. “We have flight documentation on confidential stationery, and our personal belongings might attract unwanted interest.”
“Your documents could be top secret, and it wouldn’t make the slightest difference to me. Leave someone in the room when you go out. The hotel administration bears no responsibility for the property of its guests,” she replied calmly.
“We’re planning to stay here four days. What do you expect us to do—post an armed guard every time we leave the room?”
“Captaine, do whatever you like. You can leave and find a hotel more to your taste. But here I’m in charge, and if you stay, you’ll take what I give you,” she said, cutting short my attempt to defend our rights.

I had dealt with this kind of unfriendly service before and knew perfectly well that further argument would not only be useless but even risky. At any moment the administrator could report us to the garrison commander of the comfortable little town of Pushkin, and my crew would be accused of conduct unbecoming of officers.

“Let’s get out of here, guys. While we still have the car, let’s try to find something better,” I told the crew.

Back in the van, we asked the driver what our chances were of finding a decent place at this time of night.

“There are plenty of hotels in town,” he said, “but not all of them would suit you.”
“We’re not looking for the Ritz or the Hilton,” I replied, “but we’d rather not stay in a place like that military hotel. Take us somewhere quiet—preferably away from the city center.”
“I have another idea,” our nocturnal companion said. “About three hundred yards from here, in the former Ly-ceum of Tsar’s Village, they’ve opened a new hotel.”

Tsar’s Village, I thought. The imperial school where Pushkin had studied.

The driver went on:
“Before the revolution the Chinese cooks from the Tsar’s kitchen lived in a little village there. It was built by order of Emperor Paul the First in the park at the end of the eighteenth century. Not long ago the Tsar’s Village Museum administration renovated the houses and turned them into separate cottages for tourists. You won’t even have to deal with the front desk every day. Each cottage has its own entrance. The only inconvenience is that the doors are locked at eleven.”

“That sounds more like an advantage than a disadvantage,” I said. “When you have a crew like mine, a few ex-tra control levers don’t hurt.”

My sleepy crew didn’t even smile. They simply said they were ready to stay anywhere—as long as we got there quickly.


Chapter 10

I was dreaming that my wife was sitting with Svetlana Mukhina in a bathroom Jacuzzi. They were hugging and fondling each other, and when they saw me, they waved for me to join them. I moved toward them, stripping as I went. I was just about to step into the warm water when…

Brrnnng!

The shrill ring of the telephone shattered my wonderful dream and echoed through the still-sleeping hotel cor-ridor. The damned telephone… Who would be calling me on this beautiful Friday morning?

My navigator didn’t even attempt to lift the receiver, even though the telephone was on his nightstand. Vasiliev knew that if someone were calling us, they would certainly want to speak to the crew commander.

The person on duty at the paper mill informed me that two rolls of paper, weighing a combined 15,000 pounds for our fleet newspaper, were ready and already loaded onto the truck. However, the truck driver hadn’t shown up for work because his son was getting married. So, it would be impossible to get the cargo to the Pushkin air-port by Monday.

While I was listening to all this, my mind was occupied with one question:
What was I going to do to keep my crew busy for the next three days?

“What should we do for the weekend, Vadim?” I asked my navigator.
“Let’s go to Leningrad. It’s just twenty miles from here,” he replied.
“And what about the others?” I couldn’t help thinking that leaving the guys without supervision might not be the best idea.
“They can find their own fun—they’re not children.” My navigator had known them much longer than I had.
“That makes sense. Would you go and ask the crew to come to our room? I have a pleasant surprise for all of you.”

Vasiliev went to wake the guys, and I retrieved the cash I had hidden in my socks and counted out a hundred dollars for each of them.

There would have been more if Kovalenko hadn’t run his mouth.

Hiding the remaining fourteen hundred back in the smelly stash, I composed a brief speech about the crew’s material interests.

Ten minutes later, the still half-asleep guys were standing around the table in the middle of my hotel room.

“If anyone didn’t get enough sleep, I apologize,” I said. “You can catch up tomorrow and the day after. I gath-ered you here early in the morning to share two pieces of news with you.”
“One good and one bad?” Kovalenko asked.
“No, Sergey, you didn’t guess right. I have good news, and the other is even better. Today we’re not flying an-ywhere.
The flight is postponed until afternoon on Monday. We have three days to relax. That’s the good news. Before I share the very good news, I want to say a few words.”

I emphasized the importance of the moment with a brief pause. The crew, not understanding where I was head-ing, stood in silence.
“I’ve never asked how you dealt with ‘extra’ income while flying under Voitsekhovsky’s command. That’s not my concern. Now that I’m your commander, and since we share the risks equally in flight, I believe the money that comes our way should also be shared equally. But remember that being a member of my crew means not only the privilege of receiving an equal share but also the responsibility to keep everything beyond official matters confidential.”

I looked at them.
“And now, each of you will receive one hundred dollars.”

I approached the table, took seven bills from my pocket, and placed six of them in front of the guys. I kept the last one for myself.

Nikolai Onoprienko picked up the bill lying in front of him, held it up to the lamp hanging above the table, and then put it back down.

“I can’t believe my eyes,” he said, rubbing them with his fists.

The guys laughed together, took the money, and went to their rooms, while the navigator and I headed to the most beautiful city in Russia.


Leningrad, known as Saint Petersburg before World War I, was a city of unparalleled beauty, rivaling the gran-deur of Paris or London.

Constructed in the early eighteenth century by Peter the Great, it served as the capital of the Russian Empire for two centuries. Successive rulers tried to emulate the finest European cities. The buildings, bridges, palaces, and museums that make up the heart of the city are nothing short of a historical and cultural treasure.
Vadim and I sauntered along Nevsky Avenue, starting our stroll near the Faberg; Museum. A slow stream of students, tourists, and young women in spring dresses flowed along the main street of the city, brushing past us in the warm afternoon air.

The atmosphere was alive with the sights and sounds of Leningrad. We passed charming boutiques, caf;s, and street performers, each adding its own touch to the vibrant tapestry of the city. As we walked, the grand facades of historic buildings lined the avenue, reminding us of the rich history resonating in every corner.
The Anichkov Bridge, adorned with its famous horse sculptures, caught our attention, and we couldn’t help but admire the elegance of the surroundings. Our leisurely stroll took us past the majestic Kazan Cathedral, its mas-sive colonnade towering above us.
We knew that our destination—Palace Square with the Winter Palace and the Hermitage—awaited at the end of this enchanting walk.
On the way, we admired the historic buildings and glanced at the storefronts of modern shops housed within them, like little children enjoying ice cream. Since childhood, the exquisite taste of creamy Leningrad ice cream—waffle layers filled with dense cream and covered in milk chocolate—had seemed as magnificent as the city itself.
Before buying this delicacy, Vasiliev suggested we stop by a caf; known locally as the “Frog Pond,” just be-yond the Griboyedov Canal, and taste ice cream served in small dishes.
I persuaded the navigator to abandon that idea and enjoy Leningrad ice cream on the go.
I employed a clever tactical maneuver and reminded Vasiliev that in both Shakespeare and Agatha Christie people were often murdered with poisoned desserts served from an innocent-looking little dish.
“And on a serious note,” I added, “I really don’t feel like sitting on worn-out green sofas among students skip-ping classes on this delightful spring Friday.”

Crossing the People’s Bridge over the Moyka River, we found ourselves on Kazan Island, within a block or two of Palace Square.
There we noticed an eye-catching advertisement inviting all residents and visitors of Leningrad to explore an exhibition of unconventional artists. With a modest entrance fee, we began our skeptical exploration of con-temporary works.

Truth be told, I couldn’t spot a modern Rembrandt or Rubens among them.

Pausing before some pieces, we exchanged quiet critiques. Much of our commentary could be summed up by the idea that we, too, could have painted Kandinsky’s Two Sailors from the Sea of Azov just as competently.

While some works contained bold ideas, many artists seemed to have forgotten about technique. In other cases, the technique was evident, but traces of pencil-drawn grids could still be seen beneath the layers of paint.

Whether haste or a lack of respect for the audience was to blame was hard to say.

We didn’t want to admit that perhaps our taste was lacking, so we continued our search for a work worthy of our role as amateur critics of modern art.

I was already beginning to regret the five rubles spent on the ticket when, at last, I discovered the single work that later prompted me to bring my entire crew here.

In a discreet corner, as if deliberately avoiding attention, hung a small wooden panel about ten inches high and fifteen wide.
On a double page torn from a West German magazine, a professional photographer had printed images of sau-sages, smoked pork, wieners, sprats, roasted chops, poultry, lamb ribs, and game-bird fillets, with three bottles of horseradish in the background.
The advertisement declared:
“You Can Eat Whatever You Like with this Horseradish.”
In the upper left corner, coated with colorless lacquer, was affixed a ration card for two pounds of sugar, issued by the Leningrad City Executive Committee for March 1985.

The depth of the artist’s concept touched the heart of any Russian.

Where was justice?

In Germany, defeated by the Red Army and later rebuilt with the help of the Marshall Plan, horseradish was ad-vertised alongside mountains of delicacies, while in a city that had lost two-thirds of its population to starva-tion, forty years after the victory sugar was still rationed at two pounds per month.

We left the exhibition feeling somber and resolved to bring our crew here on our next flight to Leningrad.
I even set aside money, intending to buy this conceptual masterpiece.
Yet very soon I experienced a strange mixture of deep disappointment and pride in my own taste.

Several months later, when with my crew in tow, I asked the exhibition administrator about the piece of art ti-tled Horseradish, he spread his hands and informed us that it had been sold long ago.
Hoping to convey my genuine interest, I asked,
“Excuse me, I also wanted to buy it. Could you tell me the price it fetched?”
“That’s no secret.”
He opened his journal, found the catalog number, and said,
“It was acquired by the Swedish National Gallery of Contemporary Art for forty-five thousand crowns.”

I had no idea whether that was an enormous sum or a modest one, but I understood perfectly well that forty-five thousand Swedish crowns exceeded the thirty solid Soviet rubles I had set aside for the purchase.

Late that evening, Vasiliev and I were returning to Pushkin on the interurban train.
My navigator was so tired that he rested his head on my shoulder and fell asleep.
I gazed absent-mindedly at the door leading to the next car.

On the platform between the cars stood a young man. He smiled, nodded, and waved his hand invitingly for me to join him.
I glanced around, thinking he might be signaling to someone else, but there was no one behind me.
Adjusting the navigator’s head against the window, I was about to stand up when the elderly woman sitting next to me suddenly asked,
“Are you a homosexual?”

I was caught off guard by the unexpected bluntness of the question and sat speechless for a moment. The wom-an looked like a relic from another era, someone who had survived the turbulent years of revolution and civil war.
I simply shook my head.

“Well, that’s what he might think,” she continued. “He probably saw how your friend fell asleep on your shoul-der and assumed you were one of his kind.”
“Thank you for the clarification, ma’am,” I replied. “I’m from the Far East region, and we don’t have much of that there.”
“That sort of thing exists everywhere,” she said with a hint of regret. “In the provinces they may hide it, but in the megalopolises, like Leningrad or Moscow, some people feel freer to show it.”


Chapter 11

Saturday kicked off with a hearty brunch. The crew members who had stayed in Pushkin the previous day de-cided to mark their inaugural outing with the new commander with an all-out celebration. Without a word to me about their plans, they had managed to secure ten bottles of vodka, two bottles of cognac, and twenty beer bot-tles.

The goal was to finish it all off today, and it was no small feat. As a result, we opted not to wait until evening and gathered around the table in the radio operator's hotel room when the clock struck half-past ten. By eight in the evening, I had reached my limit when it came to eating and drinking. I suggested to Vadim that we take a walk in the park to stretch our legs a bit.


As we walked under the arch of the Grand Caprice, Vasilyev suggested that we climb onto it.

"Don't you want to climb to the chapel? It's just over there," I teased him. "I can barely keep you on your feet, and you want to climb around the ruins. Cool your jets, brave navigator."

Navigating poorly in the twilight in an unfamiliar park, I led Vasilyev to the Mirror Pond, although I had planned to end up near the White Tower.

"Where are we?" The navigator muttered as I sat him down on a white-painted bench at the foot of a sculpture of a naked woman.

"I think we're at the Mirror Pond in Catherine’s Park. At least that yellowish building, reflecting in the water, really reminds me of the Upper Bath," I looked around trying to understand how we ended up here.

"Where were we heading?"

"To see the White Tower, in the Emperor Alexander Park."

"Upper Bath you said? Is there a Lower Bath too?" Vadim asked and hiccupped returning to the topic I men-tioned five minutes ago.

"Yes, there is."

"What's the difference?" Vasilyev persisted.

"The difference is that in the Upper one, royalty bathed, and in the Lower one, the courtiers. It was even called the Cavalier's Soap house.”

"Cavalry's Soap house,” my tipsy friend chuckled. "So, they bathed there with horses."

"I said Cavalier's, not Cavalry's."

At that moment, Vasilyev raised his head and saw a marble statue of a half-naked woman standing on a pedestal a few meters behind us.

"Oh, tits," he crudely reacted, appreciating the work of art.

"So, you didn't notice the dolphins, faces at her feet, but the tits, of course," I parried without hiding my sar-casm, and with a gesture, I turned Vasilyev's head, redirecting his gaze along the path. " You'd better take a look over there."

We were barely a hundred steps away from the Chinese houses when we came across two delightful young women or at least, they seem to us.

At least, then it seemed to us, because we were under the strong influence of the god of winemaking Bacchus.

"Hey, guys," one of them greeted. "Are you busy right now?"

"We always have time for you, ladies," my navigator responded, gripping my arm to steady himself.

"Please excuse us," I intervened on his behalf. "Vadim and I might have had a tad too much to drink, but if you're willing to wait about forty minutes, we should be in a better shape to lend you a hand if needed."

"I'm not so sure about that," the second woman remarked.

"Well, you'd be mistaken," Vadim retorted, putting in all his effort to appear more sober than he was.

"Just tell us what the issue is, and then we can assess our capabilities together..." — how self-assured I felt at that moment...

“This morning we took a bus from Moscow for a two-day trip to Leningrad. We spent the whole day in muse-ums, and then they brought us here and put us up in the same hotel you’re staying in. But we don’t feel like wasting the night sleeping, so we’re trying to gather a group to go out and watch the drawbridges go up over the Neva. The driver said if we can get twenty people, he’ll take us. Otherwise, he won’t even start the engine.”

"And how many do you have so far?" Vadim inquired in a tipsy tone.

"Well, if you two agree to join us, we'll have a group of four.”

"Not a large group," I performed a simple arithmetic calculation. "Here's the plan: we'll take a walk through the park and return in an hour from now. While we attempt to sober up a bit, you can try to convince others to join us. If it works out and we manage to gather more people, we'll join you for the bridge event. If not, we'll come up with an alternative to the raised bridges."

With the girls in agreement, Vadim and I strolled down the wide avenue of the Empress Catherine Park, sur-rounded by ancient oaks and classical sculptures.

To my surprise, Vadim perked up considerably after our hour-long walk. But what surprised me even more was that as we approached the hotel, the girls were still waiting for us. It wasn't difficult to guess that their attempts to find willing participants for spending the night outdoors in a splendid city like Leningrad had fallen flat. The suggestion of another stroll was met with enthusiasm by our two adventurous companions, and once again, the four of us headed back to the park.

I briefly introduced Vadim and myself, allowing our companions ample opportunity to share their own stories. Marina took me by the hand and led me along a path in the park. Her family's history was both unique and fas-cinating. Just her patronymic alone would have caught the attention of anyone listening. Encountering a Marina Sebastianovna in central Russia was a rarity.

Her father, Sebastian Jose Velasco, was a mere six years old when he, along with three hundred other young Spanish boys and girls, boarded a large ship in the port of Barcelona. It was 1936. His father, a commander of a communist infantry regiment, had perished in battles near Madrid several months prior to that fateful day. His mother, leaving her son in the care of her sister, had gone to the front to seek vengeance against the Franco forces. Unfortunately, his aunt left him in an orphanage, from which Sebastian and the other children were eventually taken by the Russians.

The ship took a grueling four days to journey from the Spanish shores to the Soviet port of Odessa. Peculiar men and women, speaking an unfamiliar language, provided the children with food twice a day. Initially, he couldn't bring himself to eat, as everything tasted foreign to him. However, hunger eventually forced him to partake. When he disembarked from the ship, Sebastian was placed on a train bound for Ivanovo, where he spent the next ten years in a boarding school. Within a month, pasta with fried ground beef and boiled potatoes combined with pork sausages had transformed into the most delectable meals in his world. After World War II, he relocated to Moscow, convinced for the remainder of his days that it was the finest city on the planet.

The granddaughter of the Spanish regiment commander was less willing to talk about herself than about her grandfather and father. A typical Moscow woman's destiny: school, institute, marriage, a son, work – an engi-neering job at one of the defense factories. She had one best friend and three or four acquaintances, just like anyone else. Yet, her heart yearned for something more – holidays, festivals, dances, carnivals, and, of course, adventures filled with intrigue.

Well, you're a real discovery, I thought, a grin spreading across my face. I'll give you an adventure filled with more intrigue than you can imagine!

We decided to continue the party at the girls' place, hoping it would lower the chances of the drunken crew members finding Vadim and me and offering us another round of drinks.

As the hours passed, my heart raced from the numerous cups of coffee consumed during our casual conversa-tions. I didn't want the night to end, but it was well past the hour for bedtime. Everyone anticipated this moment, yet no one wanted to explicitly state it. It's one thing when lovers meet in a cozy apartment, quite another when an audience is present. Vadim and I weren't particularly bound by principles, yet our lack of experience showed. I opted for an improvisation.

"Vadim and I aren't really keen on leaving," I began somewhat awkwardly. "It's not that we're asking to share your beds, but it's already two in the morning. So, I'd like to propose something..." I paused here, hoping they would catch on – "We can all sleep in the same room, Vadim and I in one bed, and you two in the other."

The most foolish idea in the world couldn't have matched the absurdity of what I suggested. Yet, I had this no-tion that the comical situation I was attempting to create for four grown adults might lead to a defining moment, and that everything would find its resolution.

"Perhaps you could still go back to your room? It's not very appropriate to share a bed with strangers on the very first night, especially considering one of us is married," Marina's friend, Tanya, said.

"I agree with you," Vadim responded. "But unfortunately, we can't leave. The doors to both our cottage and yours were locked from outside at eleven. So, until seven in the morning we’re stuck here."

Marina laughed, "So you knew, but didn't inform us about it. We returned from our stroll a quarter to eleven."

"Well, since you're so clever, why don't you both share my bed, and I'll sleep with Marina," Tanya said.

“Since neither Vadim nor I had ever shared a bed with individuals of the same gender,” I said after exchanging meaningful glances with Vadim. “We simply took off our shoes and lay down on the bed fully dressed in jeans, shirts, and sweaters.”

The women burst into laughter, changed into their nightshirts, and like old friends, settled down - side by side on the adjacent bed.

Vadim and I tossed and turned in the bed for about half an hour.

The ladies were quiet as church mice, and it seemed as if everyone would fall asleep if Tanya didn’t undertake something.

Suddenly, she got up from her bed, took Vadim by the hand, and led him to the now vacant spot. Marina slipped under my blanket, wrapped her arm around my neck, and pressed her naked body against mine.



Chapter 12

In the evening, we were roused from our slumber by my former classmate from military flight college, Oleg Sviridov.

The young women from Moscow had departed for their excursion much earlier, leaving a note on the table stat-ing that they wouldn't return before nine in the evening. Hoping for an undisturbed rest, Vasiliev and I had de-cided to catch up on sleep in their beds. But it turned out we were mistaken.

Our unexpected visitor was a pilot-in-command of a Tu-16 stationed at one of the airbases of the Black Sea Fleet. Having arrived at the Pushkin aircraft repair plant after Friday's lunch, he had spent two days searching for me. Not finding me in my room and receiving vague answers from my crew members about my wherea-bouts, he had begun knocking on the doors of every room in the “Chinese Village.”

Eventually luck favored him.

I looked at him and wondered:
Why is he so delighted to see me? We were never particularly close in college, and in the seven years since graduation we hadn’t crossed paths even once. So where is this excitement coming from? He even brought two bottles of cognac.

The real reason became clear after the third shot.

After opening with a few polite questions about my family and my health, Oleg gradually steered the conversa-tion toward the details of my crew's accident.

Vasiliev, who had been drinking with us until then, soon found a polite excuse to leave the room.

For a moment I felt the urge to kick Sviridov out of the room where my navigator and I had spent such a won-derful night. But despite the considerable amount of cognac already circulating in my blood, I understood that this would be unwise.
A captain wouldn’t spend money like that on his own initiative.

Behind Oleg’s friendly smile I sensed the invisible presence of the KGB directing this conversation. His leather briefcase never left the chair beside him.

I was being watched.

I found it difficult to believe that last night’s revelry and the cheerful Moscow girls had been part of some elaborate operation to uncover the truth. Most likely it had been a coincidence. But Oleg was pushing far too hard to win my confidence for me to believe his sympathy was genuine.

The thought that I might be under surveillance crept into my mind and refused to leave.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that somewhere, somehow, someone was listening carefully to every word I said.
At the same time, I tried to dismiss these suspicions as the product of an overactive imagination. Perhaps I was simply seeing conspiracies where none existed.

Caught between these two possibilities, I found myself weighing every phrase before speaking it.

Fortunately, many people have a tendency to talk far more than they listen. Captain Sviridov was no exception.

Convinced that I had not yet drunk enough to reveal the whole truth, and while I lamented my fate on his shoulder, he soon began talking to himself.

The subject of our conversation lacked originality.

After all, what would two drunken pilots talk about?
Women — if they were friends.

Or aviation disasters — if they were former classmates… and if inside one of their briefcases, alongside two bottles of cognac, there happened to be a pocket tape recorder.

Oleg told me about the death of a mutual acquaintance at the Mongokhto airbase, where a squadron of super-sonic missile carriers had been conducting paired night flights along a designated route.

The crew in question, immediately after takeoff in their Tu-22M2 Backfire, abandoned their instruments and began searching visually for their leader, who had taken off three minutes earlier.
Their eyes were fixed on the clear night sky, trying to detect the fiery glow of jet exhaust among billions of stars. In doing so, they failed to notice that their aircraft had begun to descend.

When the automated ground-proximity warning sounded, it was already too late.
Heavy with fuel, the supersonic missile carrier was too sluggish to recover quickly.

The aircraft struck the ground nose-first and exploded in a massive fireball. Debris from the fuselage and en-gine components — designed to withstand extreme heat — was scattered over a wide area around the crash site.

The search-and-rescue team quickly located the orange fireproof sphere known as the “black box.”

The recordings of the crew’s final conversation confirmed the initial conclusion of the investigation:
A fatal error in piloting technique.

After briefly discussing the tragedy, we raised our glasses of cognac — one toast to the memory of the dead crew members, and another to the pilot from our class who had served as their co-pilot.

But an even more terrifying catastrophe had taken place at the 33rd Combat Training Center in the southern Ukrainian city of Nikolaev.

The very same aircraft model had once lost a variable-geometry wing during a routine daytime takeoff in fa-vorable weather conditions. The pilots, noticing an increasing bank to the right, attempted to correct it by turn-ing the control column to the left—right up until the moment of impact with the ground.

The navigators, seated behind the pilots in their own compartment, quickly grasped the situation and attempted to eject. The junior bombardier reacted faster to the emergency and ejected one second before the navigator. That second saved his life.




 


At the moment of his ejection, the bank angle had reached forty-five degrees, and his parachute deployed with sufficient altitude above the ground.
The navigator was far less fortunate.
Reacting a moment later, he ejected when the bank had already reached one hundred degrees.

Propelled by the jet blast of his ejection seat, he was launched almost parallel to the ground and struck the dry Ukrainian soil about two hundred feet from the runway. His parachute never had a chance to deploy.

To be frank, the navigator—who also served as Head of the Navigators’ Department at the Training Center—left behind a scene that defied description. The impact was so violent that the colonel’s remains were driven in-to the clay and became almost indistinguishable from it.

Despite the raging fire, both pilots remained at the controls of the doomed aircraft until the very end. Although severely burned, their bodies were still identifiable.

The two pilots and the navigator were buried as heroes.

A squadron of fighters from the air defense wing flew over the funeral procession. Just as the jets passed direct-ly above the servicemen carrying the coffins, three of the eight MiGs suddenly pulled upward and disappeared into the blue sky, symbolizing that although the flyers were being buried, their spirits would forever rise toward the heavens.

The only surviving member of the crew, miraculously spared, insisted on returning to flying.

A month after the tragedy, as he walked along the concrete taxiway toward the parking stand of his new air-craft, all the aviators and technicians stopped what they were doing, turned toward him, and applauded.

Having finished his story, my guest remembered the reason for his visit that Saturday evening. But Oleg had barely begun to speak about my own catastrophe when the door swung open and the delightful occupants of the room entered, accompanied by Vasiliev.

I smiled at Sviridov and said,
“It’s time for you to leave. Thank you for the interesting conversation. And tell your handler that I am not re-sponsible for my crew’s deaths.”
“What handler?” Sviridov asked, feigning surprise.
“You know the answer better than I do,” I replied, and added for clarity, “The man who sent you here.”

The uninvited guest left.

The girls stood in the doorway for a moment, somewhat bewildered, staring at me in astonishment. Marina was the first to recover. She closed the door behind her and sat down at the table across from me.

With the tone of someone entitled to an explanation, she asked directly,
“Valeriy, what is going on here? Whose death were you talking about?”

I told them the story of how I had drifted among the ice floes with my frozen comrades. When I finished, I looked at the girls and asked,
“Any more questions?”

Tanya answered calmly,
“Yes. What is a handler?”

“A handler is what they call a counter-intelligence officer in the armed forces,” my navigator answered for me. “Something like a puppeteer—he puts his hand inside the puppet and makes it move.”

“Let me put it a little differently,” I added. “A handler is the person who directly manages an informant or an agent. He gives instructions, assigns tasks, and keeps control over everything the agent does.”

Tanya looked puzzled.
“What does counterintelligence have to do with any of this?”

“When they have nothing better to do, they start inventing work for themselves,” I said. “They have to justify their generous privileges somehow. That’s why they interfere in everyone’s business. There isn’t the faintest trace of espionage in the fleet, but they still must keep themselves busy. The investigation of my case ended six months ago. I’ve even been assigned a new position, yet they keep trying to catch me in some kind of lie and send fellows like Oleg here with bottles of cognac.
As if cognac could change the past… or make me contradict myself after a few drinks. I don’t know what they expect to achieve, but they won’t get it.”

The girls from Moscow had gone pale. They sat silently at the table, looking at me with pity.

My navigator, who had known the whole story for a long time, finally said,
“Maybe we should drink something in honor of our commander?”

I poured four glasses of cognac that remained after Sviridov’s visit and raised my glass.
“I propose a toast,” I said. “To those who have flown away and will never return.”

As if on cue, both girls burst into tears.

For a while none of us spoke. The room felt heavy with grief and silence.

Exhausted by the long journey from Moscow, worn out by the uncomfortable bus ride, having spent a second sleepless night in Vadim’s arms and mine, and after wandering through museums all day, they were in no con-dition to hear such a toast.

We had no choice but to lead them to bed, hoping that a few embraces and kisses might soothe their frayed nerves.
Little did we know that the ladies had the same idea.

As the hours passed, laughter and stories gradually gave way to whispers and quiet intimacy, and the weight of their earlier tears slowly melted away.


Chapter 13

Human memory is a peculiar thing. I can’t feel my arms or my legs, yet the most ill-timed memories keep press-ing into my mind.

Instead of my father and mother—those I would want to see before dying—it is Kaliningrad that comes back to me.
A place at the far opposite end of Russia from where I served.

March. Still cold. The snow has already melted, yet there is none of the filth that clings to the streets of most Russian cities.

However hard the state and Party authorities tried to drive out the German spirit and erase the memory of this land’s true masters, they never fully succeeded. K;nigsberg, built by the Germans, stood in stark contrast to other regional centers—its architecture, its cleanliness, even the bearing of its people setting it apart.

Even in the late eighties, the city still carried its wounds openly: ruins left standing, even in the center, as if time itself had hesitated. I had seen them more than once and never knew how to read them—whether they were meant as a warning, or left standing just in case everything had to be handed back one day.

I thought about all of this as we wandered aimlessly through the city in search of what we considered worthy adventures—through what had once been East Prussia, its capital K;nigsberg in another life, where history lin-gered in the stones whether we chose to notice it or not.

After all, it was difficult to take seriously pursuits like visiting the Amber Museum, paying respects at Kant’s grave, or admiring the Schiller Monument. The local girls, for their part, found us even less compelling. Our flight jackets with “Air Force” stitched onto the sleeves—and our invitations to share a meal that might, with luck, extend into breakfast—left the women of Kaliningrad entirely unmoved. Even the female students from the Fishery Institute, whom we approached over a glass of amber liquid at the beer garden near their campus, declined without hesitation.

We stopped by the bronze sculpture Struggling Bisons. Two giants with bulging muscles and raised tails clashed their horns against each other. It looked as if they were trying to knock one another off the pedestal and into the broken fountain below. The crew’s radio operator and mechanic climbed onto the marble slabs, grabbed the tails of the bronze beasts, and dangled from them like two oversized sausages.

 

Our radio operator and flight engineer climbed onto the marble slabs and, grabbing the bronze tails, hung from them like two plump sausages.
“Hey, you two,” I said, “which one of you is the prosecutor, and which is the defense attorney?”

There was no answer.

“What are you talking about, Valery?” the navigator asked.
“I’m talking about the popular name of the sculpture. In 1912, the sculptor August Gaul placed those bison out-side the Supreme Court of East Prussia, and people started calling them ‘the Prosecutor and the Defense.’”
“Where did you pick up such encyclopedic knowledge of culture?” the navigator asked in surprise.
“I used to spend a lot of time alone at home,” I said. “So I read a lot. How do you think I managed to charm the daughter of a Marine Corps commander? With my Hollywood looks?”

I shook my head.

“That wouldn’t have been enough. Women love with their ears. The more interesting a man is to talk to, the bet-ter his chances of something lasting—meaning marriage.”

I changed the subject, calling out to the guys hanging off the bison.

“Enough of this childish nonsense,” I said. “It’d be a disgrace if a police patrol picked up a bunch of perfectly sober naval aviators.”

The radio operator and flight engineer had let go of the bronze tails, dropped down from the slabs, and wan-dered back toward us.

“Nothing’s biting today,” the navigator sighed gloomily.
“You didn’t show them your rod—that’s why nothing’s biting,” the radio operator shot back, grinning, as he joined us.
“Head to Ivanovo,” the co-pilot said. “Three women for every man. They don’t call it the city of brides for nothing—you won’t walk away empty-handed there.”
“Let’s head back to the hotel. This isn’t our kind of town,” I said. “At least we were lucky with the accommoda-tions. There’s even hot water in the rooms. And there’s a beer bar on the first floor. Anyone who wants can go there, but everyone should return to their rooms for lights out.”
“No, I’m going to do some laundry,” the navigator said. “I’m not much of a beer drinker. Vodka with a few girls like we had in Pushkin—that would be different. But as you can see, there aren’t any around here.”
“I’ll keep you company,” I replied. “Let the younger fellows enjoy themselves without the older generation hanging over them.”


The decision to do laundry turned out to be well timed. After the fourth day of the mission, the collars of our beige shirts had turned the color of coffee without cream. Our socks were so stiff they could have passed for shoe-polishing rags if someone had left them outside the door.

Stripped down to our underwear and hanging laundry over the backs of chairs, Vadim and I sat down in front of the television with cups of tea.

We had barely finished the first one when the crew’s radio operator, Nikolai Onoprienko, burst into the room without knocking and announced breathlessly from the doorway:
“Commander, we’ve found some fresh faces at the bar…”
“Quite the silver tongue you’ve got there, Comrade Petty Officer,” the navigator said dryly. “You sound like a professional pimp.”
“Save your reprimands,” I said, coming to Nikolai’s defense. “First, I appreciate your initiative. Second—why are you still standing there? Bring them in.”

The radio operator shot out of the room like a bullet. Vadim and I hurriedly pulled on our trousers, put on our still-damp uniform shirts, and disguised the absence of socks with bedroom slippers. We had barely finished dressing when the door opened and the “fresh faces” appeared.

Their arrival produced a mild shock on both sides.

I was twenty-seven, the navigator twenty-nine, the flight engineer barely thirty, the radio operator twenty-five, and the co-pilot just twenty-two—an average of about twenty-six.

The four women hesitating on the threshold, unsure whether to enter, were at least forty on average. The differ-ence in age was obvious at a glance.

They stepped over the threshold, but when they noticed the navigator and me—and realized that we were prac-tically boys compared with them—they instinctively tried to step back. Unfortunately for them, the radio opera-tor and the mechanic were already standing behind them, gently nudging them forward. And so, before they quite understood what had happened, they found themselves inside the room.

The effect of their presence was immediate. Seated on the sofa in the middle of our suite were the leaders of the USSR automobile industry trade union.

After a long day of meetings, the delegates who had gathered from across the country for their annual confer-ence had gone to the bar to relax. That was where our younger crew members encountered them.

Apparently, the radio operator and the co-pilot had suggested that their commander and navigator were consid-erably older than they were, so the ladies had expected men of thirty-five or forty. Instead, they found them-selves facing a group of very young officers and a couple only slightly older.

They were still deciding whether this was a pleasant surprise when I raised my glass.

“Welcome to our modest temporary quarters,” I said. “I’m Valery. May I have your names?”
“I’m Elena,” one of the guests said, extending her hand. “What shall we be drinking, boys?” she asked with a hint of irony as everyone introduced themselves.
“As usual—pure grain alcohol, ladies,” Vadim replied in the same tone.
I nudged him with my elbow and whispered, “Don’t be too lively or they might get offended and leave.”

But offending these women turned out to be difficult. They kept pace with us drink for drink, chasing each swallow of alcohol with pieces of smoked fish. Before long, they no longer looked like the old cows I’d taken them for at first.

I decided to accomplish two things: first, reduce the age gap and balance the numbers by removing the young-est participant—the co-pilot—and second, quietly replacing the alcohol in my glass with water.

Sergey proved the harder problem. Already quite drunk, he was reluctant to leave. By the door I explained qui-etly that he could easily be the son of one of these women.

“And you?” he asked stubbornly.
“I could pass for a younger brother,” I replied.

He put his arm around my shoulders and said warmly, “Well then, I hope you enjoy yourselves with these love-ly sisters.”

The second task was far easier. As soon as Sergey left, I quietly replaced my glass of alcohol with Rybnikov’s glass of water. In front of each of us stood two glasses—one with vodka and the other with water, so the substi-tution went unnoticed.

We began proposing toasts one after another. After the navigator and I had spoken, Gennadiy Rybnikov asked for his turn.

Gena had never been known for his eloquence, but that evening he came up with something worthy of a classic. Raising his glass—filled with straight alcohol—he declared:
“As one stand-up comedian once said, it’s not enough to know your worth—you have to be in demand. And you, ladies, are exactly the kind who know how to do that.”

He knocked it back in two gulps, then reached for what he thought was water—only to grab my glass of pure alcohol instead.

Expecting relief for his dry throat, he swallowed half the glass in one gulp and then washed it down with an equal amount from the other glass in his hand.

Slowly he turned toward me, looked me straight in the eyes, muttered a string of colorful curses, and collapsed between the sofa and the small table where our hastily assembled supper stood.

The women burst into laughter while Vadim, Nikolai, and I lifted the flight engineer and carried him into the bedroom.

The awkward incident turned out to be fortunate for everyone. There was no longer any need to persuade any-one that it was time to move from drinking to dancing.

Vasiliev and Onoprienko took the initiative, inviting their chosen women onto the dance floor. They swayed gracefully in the center of the main room of our spacious suite. As for me, I remained seated on the sofa, torn between deciding which of the two remaining beauties deserved my attention. Holding them both lightly by the shoulders, I felt their hands wander over me, deftly undoing buttons and freeing garments.

After a short dance, Vadim seized his partner by the waist and led her toward the adjoining office of the suite. Only the considerable amount of alcohol they had consumed could explain their indifference to the glass door separating the two rooms. As the navigator settled himself at the office desk, the radio operator abandoned the dance and sat down on the floor beside the sofa, watching the developments in the adjoining room with keen in-terest.

Absorbed by the kisses showered upon me from both sides, I nearly missed the moment when events in the of-fice began to depart from Vadim’s expectations. Natasha was kneeling in front of the desk, her trembling hands resting on the navigator’s thighs. At first, I could not understand what exactly he was doing, but when I caught sight of the helpless, bewildered expression on my friend’s face, I almost slid off the sofa with laughter.
The woman was on the verge of losing her dinner.

Within seconds his still-damp trousers and shirt became the canvas for everything she had consumed that even-ing. I suspect the navigator had expected a rather different sequence of sensations.

Two of the ladies—who only a minute earlier seemed ready to spend the rest of the night in my company—jumped up from the sofa and hurried Natasha back to their suite.

Vasiliev, swearing at all women and shaking his fist at us, set about cleaning the room. We retreated into the hallway, still laughing, theatrically pinching our noses shut with our fingers. With one last volley of curses the navigator disappeared into the bedroom where Rybnikov lay sound asleep.

I unfolded the sofa I had been sitting on into a wide bed and instructed Onoprienko:
“Nikolai, contact our older acquaintances and tell them we’re waiting for their return. And ventilate the office after Vasiliev—you’ll be sleeping there tonight.”

Expecting our guests to reappear at any moment, I stretched out fully dressed on the blanket and tried to recall how unbearably dull my time in Kamchatka had once seemed. Soon the memory of what Mukhina had done to me in Vladivostok drifted back into my mind, and before I knew it I had fallen asleep.

As it turned out, someone had begun undressing me. But this time there were two seductresses involved, which meant that sleep was unlikely to remain my immediate destiny.

At six the next morning, a cautious knock sounded at the door of the suite. Wrapping a sheet around my naked body, I opened the door and found a courier holding a package.

I unwrapped it and began reading the letter inside.

“What does it say, Valeriy?” Elena asked.
“It says that all the trade union members from your Gorky Auto Plant have been on strike since yesterday,” I replied, reclining on the bed between the two women.
“And what about the Chelyabinsk Tractor Factory? Did they mention anything about it?” Galyna asked, plant-ing gentle kisses on my shoulder.
I murmured. “They mentioned you personally.”
“What did they say?” she asked again, playfully competing with Elena for my attention.
“You have been awarded the honorary title of ‘Hero of Sofa Labor.’ The ceremony for presenting the Golden Phallus will take place upon your return from the conference.”

Elena burst into laughter, and Galyna gave me a playful—though slightly painful—pinch in the side.

“But on a serious note,” I said after a moment, “I have to leave for Moscow in two hours. So, if you want to make the most of our time together, you’d better get to work on my weary body.”


Chapter 14

The first coherent thought that crossed my mind after I closed the door behind my nocturnal guests concerned the impending medical examination.

How was I supposed to pass the pre-flight medical test in my current state? Alongside me, the vomit-covered navigator, the thoroughly intoxicated flight engineer, and the sleep-deprived radio operator had all enthusiasti-cally participated in the previous night’s revelry. The co-pilot might have been feeling slightly better, but he was too young to stand in for me during the medical examination.

I gathered the entire crew in my suite and informed them that the cargo we had been scheduled to transport had turned out to be too heavy and had therefore been dispatched by train instead. We were due to take off in an hour, and for various reasons not everyone was in a condition to pass the medical exam. I therefore suggested that the gunner and the cargo mechanic dress up as me and the navigator, take a two-pound can of caviar from our emergency supplies, and—with the assistance of that caviar—persuade the doctor that the entire crew was in excellent health.

There was simply no other feasible way for us to depart from Kaliningrad.

By the time I started the engines, only a few minutes remained before the scheduled take-off time. There was no opportunity to go through the pre-flight checklist thoroughly. I taxied to the preliminary starting point and, without pausing at the threshold, pushed the levers of all four engines to maximum revolutions, beginning the take-off roll.

Almost immediately after we became airborne, Gennadiy Rybnikov asked:
“Captain, did you set the pressurization lever to the ‘closed’ position?”

A chill ran down my spine. I glanced at the lever, and my suspicion was instantly confirmed—I had forgotten to close it. Panic surged through me as I pressurized the aircraft, remembering a similar incident that had occurred two years earlier with a crew flying the same aircraft type.
They had been drinking all night and were ordered to fly from Ufa to Kiev the following morning. The com-mander forgot to activate the pressurization after picking up the gunner, who had been standing by the aircraft during engine startup and had entered through the nose emergency hatch. At an altitude of twenty-four thou-sand feet, everyone on board—crew and passengers alike—lost consciousness from oxygen deprivation.

As I corrected our settings, I carefully adjusted the route waypoints and radio contact points, making certain not to miss any, while recalling the details of that episode.

The aircraft—later nicknamed the “Flying Dutchman”—eventually approached Moscow. Intercepting fighters reported that the crew members were visible at their stations, though it was impossible to tell whether they were merely unconscious or already dead. The AN-12 would have continued flying until its fuel was exhausted if it had not been for the co-pilot, a final-year trainee from the Air Force college. He regained consciousness be-cause of the intense cold, managed to establish radio contact with ground control, and ultimately carried out a rough landing at a military airfield near the city of Gorky.

The subsequent investigation assigned blame to everyone involved. The entire crew—including the heroic trainee—and even the doctor who had signed the flight-readiness certificate, were dismissed from the armed forces.

We reached our cruise altitude. Far below us stretched picturesque Lithuanian villages. A freight train raced eastward along the tracks. High above, a passenger jet heading toward Western Europe passed perhaps ten thousand feet above our aircraft, leaving four long white contrails trailing behind it.

I imagined the scene inside that airliner: flight attendants moving along the aisle, serving breakfast to the pas-sengers; the captain sitting comfortably in an immaculate white shirt and black tie, four gold stripes gleaming on his shoulder boards. As he sipped his morning coffee, I could almost see him mentally calculating his ex-pected earnings for the month. Meanwhile, the first officer’s thoughts drifted to the sixteenth-century icon he had quietly slipped into his briefcase—something he’d picked up for pennies back home and worth a fortune in Paris.

I wondered whether pilots flying routes to Western Europe ever had affairs with their tall, elegant flight attend-ants.

Unlikely.
Such behavior could jeopardize their positions on elite crews. One scandal, and they might spend the rest of their careers flying to Siberian destinations like Surgut or Urengoy, with permanently intoxicated oil workers as their passengers.

Such is life.
Only a year earlier I had envied transport pilots. They could move about the cabin during flight, play cards with passengers, or challenge the radio operator to a game of chess. Now, watching that spotless white airliner glid-ing far above us, the old envy returned once again.

I wished that just once someone would bring me a cup of coffee during a flight. I would remember such a mo-ment for the rest of my life.
Instead, I had wasted the night with two shameless trade-union chairwomen—and now I was so sleepy my eye-lids were closing on their own.

I began working through every trick I knew to fight off sleep.

First, I rubbed my ears. Then I licked the roof of my mouth. Finally, I reached behind the seat pocket of my pi-lot’s chair, took out an oxygen mask, and breathed pure oxygen for several minutes.

Nothing helped.

I nudged the flight engineer, who had long since fallen asleep.
“Gennadiy,” I said. “Pass me some matches.”

He fumbled in his pocket and asked drowsily,
“What do you need them for? You don’t smoke.”

In reply, I held up the oxygen mask.
“I want to light them in pure oxygen.”
“Go ahead,” Rybnikov said, handing me the box. “At least we’ll have something to do until we reach Moscow.”

The radio operator, overhearing us, joined the conversation.
“What’s the plan until Moscow? Cards or something? I’m in.”
“No,” Gennadiy answered. “The captain wants to ignite pure oxygen. I told him we’ll probably spend the rest of the flight putting out a cockpit fire.”
“Well, that’s a brilliant idea,” the navigator added dryly.
“Especially if the squadron commander decides to listen to the cockpit voice recorder when we return to base.”

Instead of keeping my promise, I took two matches from the box and wedged them beneath my eyelids. My eyes instantly filled with tears, but at least they would not close.

A moment later my forehead struck the control column with a painful knock.
That meant I had managed to fall asleep with my eyes open.
I removed the matches and looked around the cockpit.

The co-pilot was sound asleep, snoring loudly.

Gennadiy Rybnikov had dozed off again almost immediately after handing me the matches. The navigator sat holding his slide rule upright, apparently hoping that if he nodded off it would fall and wake him—or that his forehead would strike it if it remained standing.

Determined to shake off the crushing drowsiness, I stood up on the emergency hatch between the pilot seats.

“Sergey!” I shouted directly into my co-pilot’s ear. “Wake up! Crawl over to the navigator and make sure he doesn’t fall asleep before we start descending. If he nods off, we won’t land in Moscow. We’ll end up some-where in the north—behind bars and wearing prison uniforms.”

The young man jerked awake, wiped the drool from the corner of his mouth, and reluctantly climbed out of his seat. Dropping to all fours, he crawled forward into the glassy navigator’s cockpit.

“What’s got you moving?” Vasiliev asked.
“The captain sent me to keep you entertained.”
“What a perceptive commander we have,” Vadim said with a sly smile, glancing up at me from below. “Since he sent you, go ahead—entertain us.”

The co-pilot began telling a joke about the crew of a passenger airliner and a newly hired stewardess,
“The captain of the plane, after reaching cruising altitude, unfastens his seatbelt, reclines the pilot’s seat, and, getting up, says to the first officer over the intercom:
‘We have a new flight attendant. I’ll go give her a try.’
The first officer shrugs, implying, ‘Do as you wish—you’re the one in command.’

A few minutes later the captain returns and takes his seat. The first officer, still watching the clouds drifting be-low, asks casually,
‘So, how was she?’
‘Nothing special,’ the captain replies curtly. Then, after a short pause, he adds,
‘My wife is better.’

At that point the first officer stands up and declares,
‘All right, then it’s my turn to assess her worthiness.’

He returns after roughly the same amount of time, fastens his seatbelt, puts on his headset, and gazes out at the endless ocean of clouds.

Curiosity finally gets the better of the captain.
‘Well, young man,’ he asks, ‘what’s your verdict on our new crew member?’
‘You were right, Captain,’ the first officer replies calmly. ‘Your wife really is better.’

The navigator winced as if suffering from toothache.
“Give me a break,” he muttered.
“Huh?” the copilot said. “What do you mean?”
“I’d like to call your grandmother and let her know you’re stealing her jokes,” Vadim replied.
“Sergey, do you know the latest doctor joke?” I interjected.
“Tell us one, Valeriy,” the navigator said to me over the intercom. “Your jokes are much spicier than the copi-lot’s.”

“All right,” I began. “A doctor walks into the waiting room of the maternity ward and shows a young father his newborn baby. The father reaches out to take the child in his arms, but instead the doctor grabs the baby by the feet and smashes it against the wall. Brain matter splatters everywhere. The father faints in horror. The doctor revives him with smelling salts and says,
‘Don’t take it so hard. I was just kidding. Your child was stillborn.’

“What was that supposed to be?” the copilot asked. “A warning?”
“No,” I replied. “That was a direct threat. If you keep making jokes about captains’ wives, I’ll do to you exactly what the doctor did to the baby—and then I’ll tell the wing commander you were born that way.”

Sergey’s innocent joke had touched a sensitive nerve.

My young wife lived in the bustling port city of Vladivostok, fifty miles away from my home in the small town of Artyom. She could only visit me on weekends. What she did during the rest of the week was something I pre-ferred not to think about. I chose to believe it had nothing in common with the way I behaved during my mis-sions.

I pushed the melancholy thought aside. It was time to begin our descent—and to come up with a convincing reason for my crew to remain in Moscow for a few days. I wanted to see the young women we had enjoyed our-selves with in Pushkin a month earlier.

Leaning close to the flight engineer’s ear, I whispered so that the others would not hear:
“Gennadiy, we need to sabotage something on the plane. Vadim and I could really use a couple of days in Mos-cow.”

Rybnikov considered the idea. A few minutes later he whispered back just as quietly:
“It’s time to replace the tires anyway. We planned to do it when we got back to base, but we can just as easily do it in Moscow. What’s the difference? Brake hard during landing. By the time they dig up new tires from the warehouse, we’ll swap the old ones out and you’ll have your three days. Just make sure you leave the crew with me.”

I nodded.

Bringing the aircraft down on a slightly higher approach than usual, I executed the landing. At the same mo-ment I engaged propeller braking, I pressed the wheel brakes fully.

From the rear compartment the gunner reported:
“The tires are smoking. They’re leaving black streaks on the runway.”

I immediately released the brakes. I couldn’t risk even a single tire exploding. If that happened, changing tires would no longer be enough. It would be classified as a landing accident, and the engineers would make my life miserable.

After we taxied safely to the apron, I informed the ground engineer who met us that the aircraft required tire re-placement.
I tried not to think about how I would eventually justify all this when I returned to Artyom.

But the thought kept returning.

I could already imagine the particularly unpleasant conversation awaiting me with the political officer. He had disliked me from the moment we first met. I was the only aircraft commander who refused to submit reports de-scribing the conduct of each crew member during missions.

Lieutenant Colonel Leonid Sokolov had devised this subtle but insidious reporting system years earlier.

Some commanders who didn’t want to betray their crews simply filed brief, formal reports. Others, hoping for promotions or unscheduled foreign flights, described every incident in excruciating detail—occasionally in-venting events that had never happened at all.

Sokolov controlled the transport wing the way Cardinal Richelieu had once controlled seventeenth-century France.
He understood perfectly well that the man who possesses information possesses power.

My refusal, however, had nothing to do with moral scruples—I was hardly famous for those. My reasoning was purely practical. I saw no personal advantage in cultivating the political officer’s favor. No one was going to send me abroad with my damaged reputation. It was too early in my career to worry about promotion, and there were no grounds for demoting me back to co-pilot.

Sensing the temporary stability of my position, I chose to deal with him without the slightest hint of deference in my voice.

In an attempt to break my stubbornness, Sokolov once invited me to what he called a ‘friendly conversation’.
‘I’ve heard rumors, Valeriy,’ he began, ‘that you never miss an opportunity to seduce a pretty woman during your missions.’

He paused, waiting for my reaction.

In reality, I had two possible responses: I could joke my way out of the situation—or I could counterattack.

With his next words, he eliminated any chance of a peaceful outcome.
‘I could call your father-in-law and tell him about your behavior on these flights,’ he said casually.
‘Well, when you do,’ I replied, ‘make sure you also tell him how you organized the transportation of red caviar from Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk to Voronezh. And don’t forget to inform counter-espionage how much profit you made reselling it.’
‘How dare you speak to me like that, Captain?’ he barked.
‘I’m not worried, Comrade Political Officer,’ I said calmly. ‘You’ll simply have to endure it. Just as Svetlana Mukhina had to endure you, you old pig, when you got her drunk and threw her across the passenger seats while flying over the Sea of Okhotsk. Or Olga Morozova, who slept with you in the back seat of your car in your garage just to move up the waiting list for an apartment.’

I leaned slightly closer.

‘That’s what you should do, Lieutenant Colonel. Before you dial my father-in-law’s number, call your own wife and confess all of this. Then call your superior—the head of the Political Department of the Pacific Fleet—and confess everything to him as well.’

His face turned crimson with rage. He wanted to shout, but instead he hissed like a cornered snake:
‘Get out, Romanov. And remember—I won’t forget this.’

I almost replied, Neither will I. But I remained silent.

Pouring oil onto a small, contained fire like that might only turn it into a blaze. I could have reminded him that I also knew about the wing administration’s theft of anti-icing alcohol, or the bribery of crews for profitable as-signments, among other things.

Instead, I kept that knowledge to myself—for a more appropriate moment.


Chapter 15

My call to the Tushino Machine-Building Plant, where Tanya and Marina were making the ceramic heat-shield tiles for the Soviet Union’s first space shuttle, Buran, caught both women by surprise. It was a pleasant one.

Hearing the hesitant voice of the Spanish beauty on the other end of the line was especially gratifying—more so when she admitted they remembered us well and were eager to meet again. We agreed to meet in the very heart of Moscow, by the fountain at the Bolshoi Theatre.

When we arrived, they were already there, waiting for us—with four ballet tickets in hand.

That evening’s performance was Spartacus.

As the gladiator battled the Roman commander Marcus Crassus on stage, I discreetly ran my hand along Mari-na’s leg, my thoughts drifting toward what awaited us after the performance. According to our plan, we were to go to her place for a ‘friendly dinner’.

Marina’s husband, it turned out, had a peculiar habit. Every Friday after work, he would disappear into the for-ests outside Moscow for the weekend. He enjoyed spending nights in a tent, even in winter—strumming his gui-tar by a campfire, sipping tea from an iron mug, melting snow to fill the kettle.

Marina told me all this at the theatre buffet. We sat on high stools at the bar, sipping coffee laced with cognac, discussing her husband’s hobby.

I wasn’t convinced.

“Your Peter is probably sitting in some cozy apartment,” I suggested. “More likely, he’s soaking in a warm Ja-cuzzi somewhere, being looked after by a sweetheart. And tonight he’ll be lying under a blanket with her—not freezing in a sleeping bag on the snow. Then on Sunday evening he’ll come home from his ‘expedition,’ tell you and your son heroic stories about damp firewood, howling wolves, and unbearable cold—and then collapse into bed, exhausted.”

Marina listened, mildly surprised, then shrugged indifferently.

“I don’t really care,” she said. “Whether he’s in the forest with his friends or in a Jacuzzi with a mistress—as long as I get a break from him. At least two days a week.”

The third bell rang, signaling the end of the intermission, and we returned to our seats.

Peter was not mentioned again that evening.

Frankly, I no longer cared whether he was freezing in the woods or indulging in luxury. What mattered was that his wife would soon be warming me with her body. All we had to do was wait for Spartacus to finish his dance.

As the final notes of the ballet faded, the defeated leader of the slaves was carried off the stage on Roman spears. The curtain fell.

The expected miracle did not occur—evil triumphed over good once again.

The audience, perhaps long accustomed to such endings, rewarded the performers with a prolonged standing ovation.
But we were in no state to appreciate it. Driven by far more immediate desires, we hurried through the rows of the parterre, eager to retrieve our coats and make our way as quickly as possible to Marina’s small one-bedroom apartment on the northwestern outskirts of the city.

We devoured supper so quickly that an awkward silence settled over the table.

Tanya was the first to break it, her voice tinged with playful sarcasm.

“What are you two—refugees from a famine region? We just ate at the theatre buffet.”

Vadim, never at a loss for words, replied instantly:
“Tanya, we’re not from a famine region—we’re from the Maritime region, where we’ve been starving to see you again. The faster we eat, the more time we’ll have to spend with you alone.”

Marina pretended to take offense.
“Well, look at that,” she said. “I cooked dinner, tried to impress you, and all you can think about is getting into bed.”

But Vasiliev was no longer listening. He scooped the petite Tanya into his arms and carried her straight into Marina’s son’s room.

Marina moved to clear the table, but I caught her by the hand and pulled her toward me.

“Leave it,” I said. “You’ll have time in the morning to clean up after the nomads.”

She settled onto my lap, slipped her arms around my neck, and said softly,
“I never thought I’d see you again after Pushkin.”
“I was sure we would meet again,” I replied. “I was only afraid the reunion might be… less warm.”

She kissed me, then went to prepare the bed.

When I returned from the shower, Marina was already lying beneath the terrycloth sheets, watching television. Seeing me wrapped in Peter’s bath towel, she burst out laughing, then lowered the volume and lifted the sheet in silent invitation.

Half an hour later, I swung my legs out of bed, heading for the bathroom.

“Will you be long?” Marina asked lazily, stretching.
“Go to sleep,” I said. “When I come back, I’ll wake you.”
“If I fall asleep, don’t wake me,” she replied. “If I like what’s happening, I’ll wake up on my own. Otherwise, you can tell me about it in the morning.”
“You little devil,” I laughed. “I’m making all this effort, and you’re just teasing me.”
“Then you’d better try harder,” she said. “This is one place where there are no limits.”

I filled the bathtub with hot water and foam, switched off the light, pulled the curtain closed, and submerged myself until only my nose remained above the surface.

I felt like a submarine at periscope depth in hostile waters.
Following the metaphor further, I imagined the submarine beginning to fall in love with a destroyer.

How do I avoid getting caught in an anti-submarine net of emotions? the warning flickered in my mind.

I wondered what Vadim and Tanya might be doing. Should I check on them?

The captain of my imaginary submarine had not yet made a decision when the bathroom door opened, the light came on, and Tatiana entered.
Unaware of my presence behind the curtain, she stopped in front of the mirror and began carefully wiping trac-es of lipstick from her neck and chest.

What persistent lipstick, I thought. It had traveled from her lips to Vadim’s—and from there to her skin. The navigator had clearly been doing his best.

I watched, motionless beneath the water.

There is a particular kind of pleasure in observing a beautiful young woman unaware of being watched. For a moment I forgot about Marina entirely, remaining submerged, waiting to see whether Tanya would step into the shower and discover me.

After finishing her inspection, she turned toward the bathtub and pulled the curtain aside.

Her reaction was immediate—a flash of surprise, almost alarm. Instinctively she covered herself with her hands.

Like some fairy-tale creature rising from the depths, I stood up. Water streamed down my body, carrying away the last traces of foam.

Understanding my intention, she tried to open the door without turning her back to me—but I remembered that she had locked it upon entering.

“So,” I said quietly, stepping closer, “you’re trapped.”

She pressed herself against the door, then slowly raised her hands and placed them against my chest, trying to hold me back.

“Don’t, Valeriy. Let’s just stay friends.”
“We will,” I replied. “Just… on a different level. Being friends is good. Being close friends is better.”

Before she could respond, I touched her lips with my finger, then guided her hands to my shoulders.

“We’re wasting time.”

I lifted her by the waist and set her on the washing machine opposite the mirror.

Her eyes searched mine—uncertain, almost pleading. For a moment it seemed she might cry.
Not wanting to see that, I reached back and switched off the light, then drew her close.

Before returning to Marina’s room, I picked Tatiana up and gently lowered her into the still-warm bath.

“You won’t tell Vadim about this, will you?” she asked quietly.
“Of course not,” I said. “Take a bath. Calm down. Nothing terrible has happened.”

Marina was lying diagonally across the bed. There was no way for me to slip in beside her without waking the granddaughter of the Spanish hero.

“Why did you take so long?” she murmured, wrapping her arms around me. “I’ve already had my beauty sleep—and now I won’t let you have yours.”

I sighed inwardly. This is going to be difficult. Submarine, why did you dive so deep? Surface now—show her the true fighting spirit of the Soviet Navy.

But the battle never even began.

The sound of the elevator reached us—it had stopped on our floor.
A brief pause.

Then a cautious ring at the door.
Marina froze.

While she hurriedly slipped into her underwear and robe, I stepped to the window and looked down at the flow-erbed far below from the eleventh floor.

Even if I jumped and landed on soft ground, I wouldn’t survive, I thought.

“It’s my husband,” Marina whispered, her voice tight with restrained panic. “Quick—grab your stuff and Va-dim’s and go to their room.”

From the bathroom came the sound of a toilet flushing. A moment later, Tatiana—still naked—slipped silently into the son’s room.

With clothes hanging off me in every possible way, I grabbed both my jacket and Vadim’s from the coat rack in the hallway.

Behind me, Marina was buttoning her robe, deliberately stalling, speaking through the closed door:
“Peter? Is that you?”
“Who else would it be?” came the irritated reply.
“Just a second—I’ll open it. I can’t find the key for the bottom lock. I’m still half-asleep.”
“There’s a spare key in the right pocket of my work pants. They’re on the hanger. Use that one if you can’t manage—clumsy.” Peter snapped, his irritation unmistakable even through the door.
“She’s not clumsy—quite the opposite,” I muttered under my breath.

I kissed Marina lightly on the cheek, gathered the rest of our things, and slipped barefoot into the boys’ room.

Vadim and Tatiana lay under the blanket, staring at me with wide, frightened eyes.

“Who’s at the door?” Vadim whispered.
“Our cuckold has returned from his expedition,” I whispered back, covering my mouth and motioning for si-lence.

I remained standing, arms full of clothes, pressing my ear against the door, straining not to miss a single word of the conversation between husband and wife.

Behind the thin wall, the lock clicked.
The door opened.
A pause.
Footsteps.

And all the while, my pale, un-tanned backside caught the moonlight filtering through the sheer curtains.

“What happened, Peter? Why are you back in the middle of the night?” Marina’s voice came from the kitchen.
“Yesterday Ivan Koval was chopping firewood for the campfire and nearly split his leg open with an axe,” the weary traveler began. “We carried him through the forest—eight miles, taking turns—until we reached the sta-tion. Called an ambulance, took him to the village hospital. After that I hitchhiked to the Ring Road and walked the rest of the way. No one had money for a taxi. The subway closed from one to five. So, I spent two hours hik-ing home in the middle of the night with a backpack.”

Would’ve been better if you’d gotten lost, I thought. Or stayed in the forest gathering firewood with your friend Koval.

“I’m starving,” he added. “Leonid had just started cooking over the fire when it happened. After that, food wasn’t exactly on our minds.”
“I’ll fix something quickly,” Marina replied, not giving him time to ask about the dirty dishes already covering the table. “We were celebrating the tenth anniversary of our department with the girls. Elena Kuzmina and Olga Rasputina already left. Tanya’s asleep on Dima’s sofa—had a bit too much to drink and stayed over. You know how it is—dangerous for a young woman to be out in Moscow at night, even sober. Let alone drunk.”
“And where’s our son?” Peter asked, irritation still in his voice.
“At Tanya’s mother’s place. With her boy.”
“I don’t like your friendship with her. What could you possibly have in common with a single mother?”
“Peter, don’t start,” Marina said sharply. “I’m not thrilled about your night expeditions into the forest either. But I don’t make you stay home. Your way of relaxing is your business, and mine is mine. There—on the fridge—you’ll see four tickets to the Bolshoi. Would any of your forest companions go there with you? Don’t bother answering—I already know. They avoid ballet like the plague. For them, singing around a fire with a guitar is the height of culture. But we went to see Spartacus—and we loved it.”

Especially after the performance ended, I couldn’t help adding silently.

While Marina balanced on the edge between peace and argument, the hungry traveler devoured everything he could find on the table. Gradually, he relaxed—yawning, stretching, the tension leaving his body. At four in the morning, it was easier to choose bed over conflict.

“All right,” he said at last in a conciliatory tone. “No need to get worked up. If we’re so different, we’ll just have to find a way to live with it.”
“That applies more to you,” Marina replied, still slightly offended as she rinsed the dishes.
“Come here,” he said. “Let me make it up to you.”
“You can apologize in the morning,” she answered. “You’re too tired to do it properly now.”

He went to bed.

Marina finished the dishes, then quietly stepped into our room. Seeing me behind the door, she spoke in a low voice:
“You’ll leave at six. I won’t get up—I don’t want to wake him. Let Tanya sleep until I wake her. We’ll meet to-night at the Prague Restaurant and celebrate your departure.”

She took something from her pocket and held it out.

“Your underwear, Mr. Spy. You dropped them in the corridor. I picked them up just in time—while Peter was taking off his boots.”

I tried to pull her closer, my hands sliding along the opening of her robe, but she slipped away.

For the first time since we met, she said the word we had both been avoiding.
“I couldn’t understand why I fell in love with you at first sight,” she said quietly. “And now I know. It’s your restlessness… your appetite for risk… your constant search for trouble. I don’t think I could ever live with you—I’m too much the same. But having you as a lover… feels like a gift from fate.”

She left.

I set the alarm on my wristwatch for six and slipped under the blanket beside Tatiana and Vadim.

Those two hours of sleep passed in an instant.

It felt as though I had just closed my eyes when the alarm whispered in my ear:
Get up, Commander. The Motherland expects new feats from you.

Luckily, my arm wasn’t under the pillow—otherwise I might have slept through it, and at nine in the morning I would have run into Peter on his way to the bathroom.

“Morning, brother,” I would have said, clapping him on the shoulder.
“I’m not your brother,” he’d reply.
“Of course, you’re the milky one—we’re feeding from the same source,” I would say.

With thoughts like that running through my head, I carefully tried to wake Tatiana, who lay between me and the navigator.

When my hand brushed her thigh, she turned toward me, finding herself in my arms. We tried to move quietly, but the old sofa betrayed us with a creak. So, I slid off onto the floor, pulling her down with me.

She moved above me with surprising confidence, eyes closed, head thrown back.

She didn’t see Vasiliev watching us from under the blanket. He briefly showed me a clenched fist before turn-ing away toward the wall.

We left the apartment without incident.

Back at the airbase, we managed to get a few hours of sleep at the hotel. That evening we met again at the res-taurant, reliving the events of the previous night over drinks, laughter, and dancing.

Then we said our goodbyes—until our next trip to Moscow.

They would be waiting a very long time for that return.

Our friends in Moscow would never learn what had really happened to us.

The worst part was this: they would think we had simply disappeared. Forgotten them. Turned our backs.

My wife would be notified. My relatives would know. Even Mukhina would hear of my fate. Perhaps even Lyudmila Salnikova, the waitress in distant Kamchatka, would shed a tear.

But in Moscow, among those who had become closest to us—no one would come.

No one would tell them.



Chapter 16

People love comparing life to a zebra—white stripes of luck alternating with black stripes of trouble.
But almost no one bothers to follow that picture all the way to the end—back to what’s under the zebra’s tail.
And that’s the point: it doesn’t matter whether your life has more white stripes or black ones—sooner or later, we all end up under its ass.

Similar to an aircraft, a person’s life is made up of takeoffs and landings. In the air, the aircraft truly lives; on the ground, it merely exists. Sometimes it falls ill—just like a human—and instead of hospitals, it goes to repair facilities. At times it suffers accidents: a burst tire, an engine failure—the equivalent of a broken bone or a heart attack. And sometimes, like a man in a car crash, it simply doesn’t survive.

More often, though, the aircraft just grows old. Its usefulness fades, its flights become fewer, until one day it is retired and sent to a scrapyard, where it is dismantled piece by piece. Whether it spent more time in the sky or on the ground makes no difference in the end—its fate is the same: disassembly or destruction.
A man’s life is no different. No matter how many white stripes of joy or black stripes of misfortune he accumu-lates, the final destination remains unchanged—an unavoidable meeting with death.

The first attack came from the KGB counterintelligence officer assigned to our wing.

He suddenly “discovered” that I had deliberately damaged one of the six landing gear tires during our landing in Moscow.

His problem was that I had spent four and a half years at flight college studying aviation engineering, His prob-lem was that I had spent four and a half years at flight college studying aviation engineering, while he had spent his time at KGB school studying psychology, interrogation techniques, and the fine art of paperwork.

Taking full advantage of that imbalance, I wrote three pages explaining the landing in meticulous detail—weather conditions, glide slope, runway length—and added an entire page on braking coefficients in wet condi-tions.

The officer skimmed through it, nodded gravely, and said he would consult an aviation specialist.

He never mentioned the matter again.

The second unpleasant episode took a different turn.

At a routine Party meeting, I suddenly found myself the main subject of discussion.

Once everyone had settled in, the Party secretary stood up and addressed the room:
“Comrades, we have one issue on today’s agenda. It concerns Comrade Romanov’s political immaturity.”

I put aside my crossword puzzle and listened.

The secretary opened my file—ominously thick—and began to read:
“After returning from a routine mission, Comrade Romanov, in a state of intoxication, made the following statement to his colleagues—quote: ‘You have to really hate your own people to make your pilots—excuse the language, comrades, but this is a direct quote—shit outside in minus twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit.’ End quote. What exactly did you mean by this, Valeriy? And who were you referring to?”

A ripple of suppressed laughter ran through the room. Nearly a hundred communists set aside their newspapers and magazines, suddenly very interested in the proceedings.

From behind me, our squadron’s communications officer muttered to his neighbor:
“Valeriy’s gotten himself into trouble again.”
“Let’s see how he gets out of this one,” came the reply.

I glanced back at them.
“Don’t laugh too soon, boys,” I said quietly. Then, without standing up, I said aloud:
“That’s a lie.”
“What is a lie, Comrade Romanov?” the Party secretary asked, visibly startled. “You’re not denying you said it, are you? Please stand up and explain yourself.”
“The lie,” I said, getting to my feet, “is that I was drunk when I said it. It happened three weeks ago, after we re-turned from the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site. Have you ever been there, Comrade Secretary?”
“You know perfectly well I haven’t,” he replied stiffly. “I’m a Party worker, not a crew member.”
“Exactly. You sleep in your own bed, next to your wife, and use a warm bathroom with a clean porcelain toilet.”
I continued, not waiting for his answer:
“As for me—quartered in a military hotel built in 1947, without indoor plumbing—I had to walk about a hun-dred feet through the snow to a wooden outhouse.”

I paused.

“There was a path in the snow, packed down by generations of pilots. No lighting, of course—running electrici-ty to a shack in the middle of nowhere would be excessive luxury. I opened the door and, in the moonlight, saw a pyramid rising from the hole in the wooden floor.”

A few people in the room shifted in their seats.

“At minus twenty-two degrees, human waste doesn’t fall—it accumulates. Upward. Into a pointed mound. So, in order not to injure myself on that structure, I relieved myself outside and used snow instead of toilet paper. As you may know, even in the late twentieth century, we still have certain… supply issues with toilet paper.”
“You wiped with snow?” The flight surgeon cut in, dripping with sarcasm. “That’s actually good for preventing hemorrhoids.”

The room burst into laughter.

“When we got back,” I continued calmly, “I told this story to a few friends. One of them decided to pass it on.”
“Your attitude is unacceptable,” the Party secretary tried to regain control.
“Of course it is!” I shot back. “What else would you expect from someone as politically immature as me?”
“I’m not questioning your intelligence,” he said. “But if you look at the world map, you’ll understand the situa-tion our country is in.”

He walked over to the large political map behind him, picked up a wooden pointer, and began his lecture.

“Our country is surrounded by enemies. In the West”—he gestured broadly, including even Turkey—“NATO. To the south—Afghanistan and an increasingly aggressive China. In the East—the US Seventh Fleet and Japan, which still hasn’t signed a peace treaty with us. Beneath the Arctic ice—American nuclear submarines. Strate-gic bombers can reach us via the shortest route—over the Pole. We are encircled.”

He turned back toward the room.

“In such conditions, the Party and the government are focused on the security of the entire nation—not on the delicate comforts of individual Romanovs. What we need are strategic missiles, not comfortable toilets.”

After such a speech, one almost felt compelled to applaud, shout “Hurrah,” and wipe away a patriotic tear.

Instead, I asked:
“And how long are these ‘temporary difficulties’ supposed to last? When will the Soviet people finally begin to live like human beings?”
“The Party’s course is aimed at d;tente,” he replied, regaining his official tone. “In time, this will allow us to reduce military spending and redirect resources toward improving the standard of living.”

I should have held my tongue at that point—let the Party organizer bask in his own eloquence, maybe even re-consider my case. But something stubborn inside me refused to stay quiet, and I spoke again:
“We can only dream of such times…”
“I see, Valeriy, that you are determined to persist in your misguided views,” he replied sharply. “That is doubly unacceptable for a commander, who should serve as an example to his subordinates. Today you criticize the government; tomorrow it will be the Party; and the day after that, you might be running to the American embas-sy with classified documents—or trying to defect to Japan with an aircraft. We cannot allow that. Comrades, is there anyone here who wishes to condemn Comrade Romanov’s politically immature remarks?”

Not one of the flight crew stepped forward. They all knew the truth—and kept their mouths shut.

But the Party organizer was a professional. He had anticipated the crew’s response and made the necessary preparations beforehand.

Two ground technicians—both from rural backgrounds—rose to speak. They steered the discussion back to the subject of the toilet and began comparing it to the living conditions of much of the country.

They spoke about people who bathed once a week in public bathhouses. About the absence of hot water—not only in villages but in many Soviet towns. About women washing clothes in holes cut through river ice. About wooden outhouses being the norm, not the exception. About how there was, in fact, nothing to complain about.
What fools, I thought. They’re missing the point entirely.

I knew perfectly well that most people in the country still lived as if it were the nineteenth century—and were grateful just to have electric light in their homes. People who grew up sharing space with livestock considered anything better than a pigsty to be paradise. Years spent waiting to move from barracks into a real apartment were treated as a brief inconvenience—just a transition between hardship and happiness. And in that “brief” in-terval, children grew up, playing war games in endless corridors. Families broke apart over housing shortages at a rate no one even bothered to count.
I knew all this.
I wasn’t na;ve.

All I wanted to understand was: who is responsible?

But before I could even ask that question aloud, it felt as if someone had already thrown a brick at my head. I could have told them:
You’re ready to defend the Party organizer to the last breath—but it never occurs to you to ask why he’s so ea-ger to protect the Party’s interests. You’ve spent your lives wearing out your boots on concrete taxiways, freez-ing in winter, burning in summer, day and night, smashing your fingers against metal, fighting stubborn bolts with worn-out tools. And even then, half your salary still goes toward renting a room.

Meanwhile, he—who hasn’t spent even a year in the wing—already has a three-bedroom apartment. Every year he goes off to a special resort to “recover” from his battles against politically immature Romanovs like me.
He doesn’t believe a word he’s saying.
He’s just looking for a way out—out of this backwater, into Vladivostok… or better yet, Moscow. Somewhere he can sit comfortably in a political department, far from anyone who might ask inconvenient questions.

After the technicians finished, the voting began.

There was no doubt about my guilt. The only question was the severity of the punishment. The options were simple: a reprimand, a formal censure, or a severe censure entered into my Party record.

They voted unanimously for a formal censure.

To hell with it, I thought. A censure isn’t an ulcer—and it won’t cut my pay.

As soon as the meeting ended, my crew gathered around me.

They looked uneasy. Avoiding my eyes, they began assuring me that none of them had gone and ratted me out.

“I know it wasn’t you,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. Just find out who did.”
“You know, Commander,” the navigator said, “a wise man once said: ‘Don’t look for the snake that bit you—look for the antidote.’”
“Who said that? Omar Khayyam?”
“Maybe Khayyam… or maybe I am,” Vasiliev shrugged.
“Vadim,” I said, “the best cure for a wounded soul is the death of the snake. You can quote me on that.”


Chapter 17

A few days after that unfortunate Party meeting, when the memory of it had begun to fade, I found myself in a classroom, studying a chess problem on a magnetic board. Playing both sides, I figured out how to counter White’s Queen’s Gambit attack.

The door opened. My radio operator, Nikolai Onoprienko, stepped in. He glanced around the room, then came over and sat opposite me. Leaning over the board as if absorbed in the position, he said quietly:
“Commander, it was Semyon Zorin. Borisenko’s radio operator. He’s the one who ratted you out.”
“What are you talking about, Nikolai?” I replied, still moving the pieces.
“The Party meeting.”

My interest in the game vanished, though I kept my hands moving out of habit.
“Details,” I said. “How did you find out?”
““His wife told me. Yesterday, after he flew out around noon. As soon as I knew his plane was airborne, I went over. Veronika was home alone with the baby. We’re… on good terms.”

He paused, watching my reaction, then continued:
“We spent a couple of hours together. Before I left, she asked if you’d really been chewed out at the meeting. I played it down and asked what she’d heard. She told me she’d known about it in advance. Doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots.”
“And you’re certain she doesn’t have someone else besides you and her husband?” I asked, still pretending to study the board.
“She’s been married two years. Not even twenty yet. No phone in the apartment. Hard to juggle a crowd under those conditions. In the past year, I haven’t noticed anything suspicious.”
“You’ve done quite the investigation,” I said dryly. “The child isn’t yours, I assume?”
“No. I can’t swear it’s Zorin’s, but it’s definitely not mine.”
“And you’re so sure because…?”
“I met her when she was already two or three months pregnant.”
“Fair enough.” I slid a piece across the board. “Where is Zorin now?”
“Gym. Our squad’s playing the second and third squadrons. Basketball.”
“Then I suppose it’s time I got some exercise,” I said, closing the box of pieces and slipping it into my brief-case. “Coming?”

Onoprienko stood up.
“Judging by your face, Commander, I think I’ll stay in the staff building.”
“Suit yourself.”

I changed in the locker room and entered the gym with about ten minutes left on the clock. Our bench waved me over immediately—we were down by six, and a fresh pair of legs looked like salvation.

I stepped onto the court. But I wasn’t thinking about the score.
I was watching Zorin.

He was playing well—fast, aggressive, everywhere at once.
He fought for rebounds, cut through defenders, and repositioned himself perfectly. If we’d had one or two more like him, we’d have crushed the combined squads without effort.

After one of our attacks, I subbed in, replacing the exhausted chief of staff. At twenty-eight, I still had lungs. He didn’t.
We started to close the gap.

Less than two minutes remained.
Zorin broke through again, caught the ball, and drove toward the basket. I was right behind him.
As he pushed off, I stepped forward and brought my foot down on the heel of his supporting leg.

His body pitched forward. He managed one more dribble, searching for a pass—but his left foot was pinned un-der my size-nine sports shoe, the words Made in China stamped across the sole.

He cried out and went down.
Hard.
The gym froze.

Zorin lay motionless. Then his leg twitched, the muscle contracting unnaturally, drawing up beneath the knee.

Not bad, I thought. Achilles.

If they didn’t get to him quickly, he’d be walking with a limp for the rest of his life. Either way, flying was over. At best—desk work in some forgotten communications unit.

We gathered around him, concern written on every face.

It had all happened too fast, in too much chaos, for anyone to piece it together.

The verdict came quickly: rupture under strain. Bad luck.

The doctors arrived, confirmed it, and carried him off on a stretcher.

At dinner that evening, the entire wing buzzed with the story.

Onoprienko sat beside me, leaned in, and said under his breath:
“Well, Commander… you don’t mess around when it comes to settling scores.”
“It wasn’t me,” I said calmly. “Pure coincidence.”
“Of course,” he grinned. “A perfectly pure coincidence.”

I shrugged.
“Look on the bright side. While Zorin’s in the hospital, Vera will be home alone. You should go and comfort her. Shed a tear together for poor Semyon.”

He paused, then added with a smirk:
“Women appreciate sympathy for their husbands—especially when they’re in your arms.”



Chapter 18

The past two weeks had worn my already frayed nerves even thinner. In the end, I decided to escape—if only for a day—and visit my wife and her remarkably well-ordered family in Vladivostok. I let them know I would arrive Saturday morning, then set off on Friday evening.
Svetlana Mukhina, meanwhile, had taken to calling me every night at the officers’ dormitory. Her attention bordered on maternal—sometimes absurdly so. She would ask what I’d had for supper, whether my room was warm enough. It all sounded like concern, but there was something else beneath it—a hint, perhaps, that I might invite her over for a day or two.
I pretended not to notice.
The last thing I needed was a domestic scandal on top of everything else. Work had already given me enough trouble to last a lifetime.
No, Svetlana, I thought. That won’t do. The dormitory should only ever know about one wife—my legal one. I’m not bringing anyone else into my little fortress. But if you invite me… that’s a different matter entirely. I’d come armed—champagne, cognac, sweets, flowers—and everything else I have to offer. Full access, limited time.
Of course, I said none of this aloud. And she, for her part, didn’t press the issue.
Still, when I stepped off the last bus from Artyom that night and rang her doorbell, she opened the door at once—as if she had been standing right behind it, waiting.
I stood there in the dim hallway, holding the standard offerings of a well-mannered visitor: a bouquet of crim-son roses and a bottle of champagne.
And I looked at her.
Chestnut hair framing a face that had appeared in my dreams more often than any other. Bright green eyes—alive, mischievous. Lips just slightly parted, as if already prepared to say something reckless.
“Here I am,” I said, as calmly as if no time had passed at all.
She paused, then smiled softly.
“Finally…”
________________________________________
We moved to the kitchen, where she had prepared a meal. It began as something close to romance—candles, soft light, anticipation—but quickly dissolved into something far more familiar.
We drank.
We talked.
We complained about life.
By the time we collapsed into bed, we were too drunk to undress. When we woke the next morning, we found ourselves exactly as we had fallen—fully clothed, tangled in sheets.
At some point, without noticing, we had shifted from lovers into something else—confidants, perhaps. Some-times that mattered more.
________________________________________
“Take your clothes off—I’ll press them,” Svetlana said when I opened my eyes. “You can’t show up to an admi-ral’s daughter looking like that.”
“Press me instead,” I muttered. “Look at the state I’m in.”
“You shouldn’t have mixed champagne with cognac,” she teased, pulling off my socks. “What a waste of an evening.”
________________________________________
While I was shaving, she slipped into the bathroom, watching me in the mirror.
“All done?” she asked, smiling.
“Almost,” I said, stretching my cheek for the razor.
“Want to do it again?”
She let her robe fall.
“No,” I replied, calmly moving to my neck.
She waited until I rinsed the blade—then, without warning, jumped onto my back.
“Well, you’ll have to,” she said.
Her body pressed against mine, warm and insistent. Arms around my neck, legs around my waist—she clung like a mischievous passenger refusing to disembark.
“Captain Romanov,” she declared, “your task is to place this unfortunate telephone operator into the bath—and proceed with emergency treatment under the shower.”
There are people in this world whose cheerfulness borders on recklessness.
With them, resistance is pointless.
________________________________________
Less than two hours later, I stood at the door of Rear Admiral Kapustin’s apartment.
The moment I stepped inside, my wife Olga threw herself at me—arms around my neck, kissing me with open, uncomplicated joy.
At least one person in this world didn’t need to hide anything.
I lifted her easily by the waist—she was light, almost weightless—and kissed her back.
Not like Mukhina, I thought automatically. Not even close.
The comparison came uninvited—and I pushed it aside just as quickly.
“Enough of that,” my mother-in-law called from the kitchen. “Breakfast is ready. Valeriy must be tired of mess food.”
“Especially yours, Mum,” Olga said brightly.
________________________________________
My father-in-law was setting the table when I entered the dining room. He shook my hand firmly.
“Good to see you. Or do you only visit us on special occasions?”
“I’d come more often,” I said, “but the fleet keeps me busy.”
“Busy,” he snorted. “You’d do better to come here than drag your wife to Artyom every weekend. Let us see you once in a while.”
“Life begins at fifty,” I replied lightly. “That’s when passions fade and reflection begins.”
“So our son-in-law is a philosopher,” he said, ruffling my hair.
Then, turning toward the kitchen:
“Ladies—bring in the main course!”
________________________________________
The table was already overflowing—herring p;t;, crab, flounder, red caviar, Olivier salad, pickled mushrooms, meat rolls, vegetables. Enough to feed a regiment.
“And this is just the beginning,” I thought.
________________________________________
Brunch stretched into dinner.
We ate, drank, talked. I told them about our visit to Spartacus, embellishing the story for effect. They laughed politely, more amused by the telling than the content.
Eventually, the conversation drifted toward culture, society, and the state of things. We agreed—more or less—that environment shapes consciousness, not the other way around.

Afterward, the women cleared the table, and my father-in-law led me into his study.
We stood by the open window, looking out over the Golden Horn Bay.
Ships moved slowly across the water. In the distance, the destroyer Admiral Zakharov lay at anchor.
“Beautiful,” I said.
“It would be,” he replied, “if not for what happened.”
He told me the story—about the turbine blade, the ruptured fuel line, the fire that followed. Twelve hours of re-al danger. Eight more to put it out. The entire city on edge.
“And now?” I asked.
“They’ve been repairing her for years,” he said. “They promise she’ll return to service. I doubt it. Cheaper to scrap her.”
He paused, then waved the thought away.
“But enough of that. Tell me—what’s happening in your wing?”
“Nothing new,” I said. “AN-12 crews trade fish and caviar for personal gain. AN-26 crews siphon off anti-icing alcohol—either sell it or drink it.”

He frowned.
“You mean they’re stealing it? How?”
“Very simple,” I said, making it clear that the Rear Admiral ought to follow without difficulty.
I laid it out for him.
He listened, arms folded.
“To prevent that, a pipe runs to the blisters, feeding them pure grain alcohol. It keeps the surface clear. The catch is—only the navigator controls the flow. Once you’re in the air, no one else can monitor how much is used. That’s where the ‘creative accounting’ begins.”
“That can’t amount to much,” he interrupted. “A pound or two.”
I shook my head.
“Official consumption is about twenty ounces a minute. In sub-zero conditions, you’re looking at roughly ten gallons an hour. Multiply that by flight time—say, a hundred hours a year—and you’re talking about three tons of alcohol quietly disappearing. Plenty of room to write whatever numbers you like in the logs.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“That’s… considerable.”
“Not as wild as it sounds. In summer, crews behave—relatively speaking. The unwritten rule is: no ‘R’ in the month, no alcohol in the report.”
He frowned.
“Meaning?”
“May, June, July, August—no ‘R.’ From September through April, though, it flows like a river. Officially or not.”
“And this is widespread?”
“From one end of the country to the other.”
“And how do they divide it?”
“Commanding pilot, navigator, and flight engineer get a gallon each. Co-pilot, radio operator, and cargo me-chanic—half a gallon apiece, from every ten-gallon batch. That is, assuming headquarters hasn’t already skimmed their share.”
He did the math quickly.
“That’s four and a half gallons. What happens to the rest?”
“Headquarters,” I said again. “Across eighteen aircraft. Every flight. Every hour in the clouds.”
He gave a dry smile.
“Transport aviation seems to have developed an… interesting side business.”
“They don’t complain,” I replied.
He studied me for a moment.
“And you? Flying an AN-12—dabbling in fish and caviar?”
“No.”
“Then where did the fourteen hundred dollars come from—the money you gave my daughter?”
He didn’t look at me when he asked it. His gaze drifted out toward the harbor.
“It came from another job,” I said, briefly recounting the flight with the businessmen and their cargo.
He listened in silence, then said quietly:
“Be careful with people like that. They’ve bought their way through half of aviation headquarters. If they think you’re unreliable, they won’t touch you directly—but they’ll arrange things so you’re finished. Uniform gone. Career gone. No one will be able to help you. Friendship is one thing. Money is another.”
We stood in silence for a moment.
Then he continued:
“You should try to get onto international routes. The money’s the same, but the risks are lower. And morally—it’s cleaner. Right now you’re taking from thieves. There you’d be paid by the state.”
“I’m not cleared for foreign flights,” I said, unable to hide a flicker of hope.
“Too many enemies?” he asked with a faint smile.
“Not many. Just influential ones.”
“Who, for example?”
I didn’t hesitate.
“The political officer. Lieutenant Colonel Leonid Sokolov.”
“What does he fly?”
“AN-12. Navigator.”
“And where does his crew pick up caviar?”
“Yelizovo, Lenino—Kamchatka. And Leonidovo on Sakhalin.”
He nodded slowly.
“The Sakhalin airfield is near the coast. That puts it under the protection of one of my coastal defense brigades. I also have friends in the fisheries inspection and the prosecutor’s office there.”
He paused, then added:
“Let me know when your political officer is scheduled to route through Sakhalin on a flight west.”
He said nothing more after that.
I understood. The matter was settled.
A knock came at the door. My wife and mother-in-law entered.
“Mikhail,” my mother-in-law said, “why don’t we go for a walk along the embankment? The weather’s perfect.”
“Will the young people join us?” he asked with a knowing smile.
“Oh, leave them alone,” she said. “Can’t you see your daughter blushing? Let them have some privacy.”
“If we leave them alone, they may end up exhausted rather than refreshed,” he muttered, heading for the closet.
“Save your jokes for your sailors,” she shot back.
A few minutes later, they were gone.
I stepped toward my wife, slipped my arms around her shoulders, and whispered:
“I missed you.”
Then I lifted her easily into my arms and carried her into her room.


Chapter 19

It took nearly a month to find a convenient opportunity to set Lieutenant Colonel Skvortsov up.

The assignment given to the crew of Lieutenant Colonel Malyshev—the regiment’s deputy commander for flight training—was perfectly suited for acquiring and then reselling a large shipment of fish. They were or-dered to pick up twenty crates of defective anti-ship missile components at the Sakhalin airfield Leonidovo and deliver them to the manufacturing plants. The flight plan listed three industrial centers along the Ural Moun-tains—Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk, and Perm. The estimated duration of the trip was seven days.

The crew, whose navigator was our political officer, covered the distance from Artyom to Sakhalin in two and a half hours and landed at Sokol airfield, built by the Japanese back in 1943. The nearby settlement was named after Leonid Smirnykh, a battalion commander killed there at the very end of the war, while the inhabitants of the Land of the Rising Sun had called the place Kamishikuka—“Near the Hills Before Your Eyes.”

The airfield was home to the 777th Su-15 fighter regiment.

The aircraft’s flight engineer securely wedged two hundred kilograms of chum salmon caviar and a ton and a half of pink salmon between the military crates.

Leonid Skvortzov counted the barrels, paid off the local fishermen, and stepped outside for a smoke by the air-craft stairs.

A battered military utility vehicle pulled up from the control tower, and the commander got out. In his hands was the flight sheet. It bore a blue stamp: CLEARED FOR TAKEOFF, along with the crooked, illegible signature of the duty officer.

Fifteen minutes remained before engine start.

Malyshev stopped beside the political officer and took out a pack of cigarettes. His hands were trembling slightly; after breaking two matches, he asked to light up from Skvortsov’s cigarette.

The political officer pulled out a lighter and asked:
“What’s wrong with you?”
“My heart’s acting up,” Malyshev replied.
“You should drink less,” the political officer said.
“It’s not the vodka. No matter how much I drink, my heart never bothered me before. But now I’ve got this bad feeling. My pulse is through the roof—twenty-eight beats in fifteen seconds. Like a premonition. Did the fish-ermen say anything to you?”
“What were they supposed to say?”
“Maybe they saw something suspicious. Strangers around the airfield, for example.”
“No. They only said the Leonidovka River is full of pink salmon, and that next time they’d deliver as much red fish right to the aircraft as we could carry.”

Malyshev was about to ask something else, but his attention was drawn to a black Volga speeding down the main taxiway toward their aircraft.

The tires let out a sharp squeal as the Volga braked hard, leaving thick black streaks on the concrete, and came to a stop under the wing of the An-12.

Watching in stunned silence, Malyshev let his cigarette fall from his lips.
The moment the car stopped a few meters from Skvortsov and his business partner, three doors flew open and four men stepped out. The driver backed the car under the tail, while two officers from the military prosecutor’s office and two representatives of the fisheries inspection service presented their IDs to Malyshev.

Spitting onto the concrete after his cigarette, Malyshev turned to Skvortsov and said:
“That’s why my heart was acting up, Leonid. Now you get it?”

During the two hours by which the departure for Chelyabinsk was delayed, the illegally transported cargo was unloaded onto the concrete apron, and a confiscation report for the caviar and fish was drawn up. In addition, the head of the inspection team promised serious trouble for everyone involved once the crew returned to base.

During the two hours the aircraft was held on the ground, the illegally transported cargo was unloaded onto the concrete apron, and a confiscation report for the caviar and fish was drawn up.

Once the formalities were complete, the route was changed. One of the prosecutors boarded the aircraft with the documents, and the crew was ordered to return to Artem immediately to report to the military prosecutor of the Pacific Fleet.


Colonel of Justice Vorobyov summoned all officers and warrant officers who had taken part in the flight for an initial interview. After briefly outlining the charges against them—liberally exaggerating, as usual—he sug-gested that everyone present write full confessional statements detailing each crew member’s role in the affair.

Still hoping to avoid a scandal and somehow wriggle out of the situation, the political officer said to the prose-cutor:
“Perhaps we could settle this unpleasant incident among ourselves. After all, the military prosecutor’s office is supposed to protect the interests of servicemen in disputed situations—especially when the plaintiff is a civil-ian organization.”

As Leonid Skvortzov spoke, Colonel Vorobyov’s face grew redder and redder, and when Skvortsov finally fell silent, the prosecutor, crimson with anger, shouted so loudly it seemed the windows would shatter and the ceil-ing collapse on their heads:
“The military prosecutor’s office protects the law—not thieving servicemen. The law, I repeat, personally for you, Lieutenant Colonel. Is that clear?”
“Clear,” the political officer replied bleakly.

The crew members, trying to shift all the blame onto the shoulders of the main organizer of the fish business, described in detail how the deal with the Sakhalin fishermen and the Sverdlovsk middlemen had been arranged.

But since no one had tasked Vorobyov with eradicating the “fish business” as a whole, he signed a decision not to initiate criminal proceedings and, with his comments attached, forwarded all the documents to the headquar-ters of Pacific Fleet Aviation.

The headquarters treated the colonel’s remarks with full attention and, without further investigation, demoted Lieutenant Colonel Malyshev, the deputy commander for flight training, to squadron commander, while Lieu-tenant Colonel Skvortsov, the deputy commander for political affairs, was reassigned as a navigator on a Tu-16R reconnaissance aircraft at the Romanovka airbase.


Chapter 20

From the runway at Artyom airfield, where my transport regiment was based, to Romanovka airfield was twen-ty-five kilometers as the crow flies. The entire flight—from engine start in our revetment to shut down on the arrivals apron—took twenty minutes. While waiting for the cargo we were assigned to pick up, my crew stepped out under the wing and stared with curiosity at a peculiar piece of engineering.

A carrier-based fighter taxied past us. Its lines strongly resembled the British Harrier. That resemblance hadn’t gone unnoticed in the West—NATO had classified the Yak-38 as “Forger.” The name was telling. It implied im-itation, a copy passed off as something original. And in this case, not a very good one. Built years after the Har-rier, our aircraft ended up heavier, shorter-legged, and underpowered—especially in hot climates, where it could barely lift off from the aircraft career’s deck at all.

The takeoff pad the Yak was heading toward was a square of metal plates about three hundred feet from us. Reaching it, the pilot turned the nose into the wind and brought the aircraft to a halt.

From where we stood, everything was perfectly visible: the lift-engine intakes opened, the main nozzles rotated straight down. He brought all four turbines up to takeoff power and, almost delicately, lifted the aircraft into a hover—five, maybe six meters above the ground.

The noise was overwhelming. Not loud—crushing. You couldn’t shout over it; you couldn’t even think clearly.
Then came the transition. The pilot began to rotate the nozzles forward. The aircraft dipped its nose, crept ahead a few meters—and suddenly snapped down. No warning, no hesitation. Just a sharp, violent peck at the ground.

At that exact moment, the ejection seat fired.
The pilot shot upward.

The Yak hit the metal surface nose-first, broke in two, and detonated almost instantly.

Within seconds, sirens cut through the fading roar. Two fire trucks came racing in, their cannons already swing-ing, flooding the wreckage with thick foam.

Above it all, the pilot was descending under his parachute.
And drifting straight toward the fire.

You could see the moment he understood it. His movements changed—sharp, desperate. He yanked on the ris-ers, collapsing the canopy halfway, trading control for speed. He hit the concrete hard—too hard—but alive.
For a second, the parachute lay still beside him.

Then the wind caught it again.
The canopy filled, dragged him, and his body began to slide—slowly at first, then steadily—toward the burning wreck. Meter by meter.

When the silk reached the flames, it flared and died. The lines went slack. The pilot stopped just short of the spreading fuel fire.

Three sailors in firefighting gear moved in, crouched low behind a wide spray of water. One of them grabbed the pilot by the leg and, without ceremony, dragged him across the concrete like a sack—away from the heat.

His helmet knocked lightly against the seams between the concrete slabs. Arms limp. No resistance.

On his left wrist, inside a black glove, the metal bracelet of a Navigator watch came undone. The watch slipped free and stayed behind on the concrete.

One of the sailors noticed. He let go of the hose, picked it up in one quick motion, and slipped it into his pocket before returning to the line.

They pulled the pilot clear, checked him briefly, then began signaling for medics. The ambulance was already on its way.

So, he’s alive, I thought. And only then realized I’d been holding my breath.

The whole thing took less than two minutes.

But it stayed.

It stirred up things I would’ve preferred to leave buried—my own crash, for one. And my father. These same places had not been kind to him either.
The arrivals apron lay at the northern end of the runway. From there, the view opened straight out over Peter the Great Gulf—barely four hundred meters away. Somewhere over those waters, back in the late fifties, his career had come apart.

Back then, Romanov Senior flew as a navigator on an Il-28 and served at the Maikhe garrison. The airfield sat at the apex of a triangle, with Artyom and Romanovka forming the base.

The Korean War was already over, but the region never really relaxed. Training was treated like combat—or as close as they could make it.

They flew constantly. Planned exercises, surprise alerts—one blending into the next.

During one of those drills, my father’s flight was scrambled. The task sounded simple on paper: a torpedo at-tack on the wake of a surface target.

In reality, a tug dragged a buoy behind it, leaving a foamy trail. The crews were to drop training torpedoes—no warheads—so they would pass as close as possible to the wake and be caught in recovery nets.

Three twin-jet engines, Il-28s formed a wedge.

Zvyagintsev led, with Captain Malyugin as navigator.

On the left—First Lieutenant Andreyev and Navigator Lieutenant Romanov, my father.

On the right—Vlasenko and Fomin.

On approach, with the target still forty kilometers out by my father’s calculations, the command came:
“Open bomb bay.”
“Too early. Four minutes to target,” my father said.
“Open it. No discussion. Lead reports visual. Vlasenko already opened.”
“Bomb bay open.”
“Release!”
“Too early—”
“Drop it! Their torpedo is already in the water.”
“Ours is away,” my father said.

And that was that.
After closing the doors, he asked:
“Alexei, did you see if Vlasenko dropped?”
“No. We broke off right after. Didn’t look.”

They landed—and were arrested on the spot.

A week later, the flight commander was discharged without pension. The lead navigator went to a tribunal and disappeared from sight. Fomin, on the right wing, was promoted.

My father received a formal reprimand:
“For attempting to attack the Commander of the Pacific Fleet.”

The explanation was as simple as it was absurd. The lead aircraft had mistaken the wake of Admiral Fokin’s boat—crossing the gulf—for the training target.

They attacked it.

The left wing followed. Only the right-wing crew hesitated.

There were no real flight recorders then. No tapes. No proof. Whatever was said in that cockpit stayed there. Vlasenko walked away clean.

My father didn’t argue his case. Without evidence, it would have made things worse.

So, he served nearly thirty years with that mark on his record—and retired as a squadron navigator, though he could have gone much further.

Herodotus had it right, I thought. History doesn’t repeat—it spirals. And if you add what we call a wind correc-tion, that spiral doesn’t just turn—it drifts.

Which means that, thirty years later, in the same place, the navigator’s son—a pilot—ends up paying his share. Some of it earned. Some of it not.

The Yak-38 crash changed nothing for us.

We took the cargo, lifted off toward the strait, climbed, turned over an unnamed bay, and set course for Mon-gokhto.

Passing over the Romanovka garrison, I rolled the aircraft gently from one wing to the other.

A small gesture. For those who had served there—and for those who hadn’t made it out clean.



Chapter 21

As I’ve already said, the Romanovka air base stood on the shore of Ussuri Bay and housed a naval regiment of vertical takeoff aircraft. What I didn’t say back when I was describing the Yak-38 incident was that the same airfield was also home to a Tu-16R reconnaissance regiment— whose primary mission was to patrol the western coast of Japan and the eastern coast of the Korean Peninsula, keeping watch over the Sea of Japan and the Ko-rean Strait

From time to time, our transport wing supported their operations. We provided airborne relay coverage for low-flying reconnaissance aircraft. Our relay plane was always parked at the far end of a secured apron, guarded by armed personnel.

Inside its cargo hold was specialized equipment designed to intercept enemy radio communications. The flight crew had access only to the cockpit; the rest of the aircraft belonged to specialists from the Main Intelligence Directorate. They would arrive from Vladivostok a couple of hours before takeoff and leave immediately after landing—escorted, as always, under guard.

On one such mission, flying at ceiling altitude and tracing long elliptical patterns along the Japanese coast, I was fighting off exhaustion. The oxygen mask pressed heavily against my face, and there were still forty minutes left before the end of the sortie.

Then the order came:
“Return immediately to base.”

That alone was unusual.

What followed was even more so.

As I approached the airfield, I saw a group of officers waiting for me. Not just the military intelligence person-nel—but the wing commander and the chief of staff as well.

Something was wrong.

What have I done this time? I wondered, replaying the flight in my mind. If I’ve somehow displeased the intelli-gence officers… I might as well prepare for the worst.

Before the propellers had even stopped turning, I unstrapped my parachute, climbed out through the emergency hatch, and hurried over to report.

The commander cut me off with a wave.
“Leave it, Romanov. No time.”

Then, more sharply:
“Did you hear anything unusual on the radio?”

Relief flickered through me—it wasn’t about me.
“Nothing to report, Comrade Colonel.”
“If you remember anything—anything at all—report it immediately.”

I hesitated, then asked:
“What’s happened?”

He looked at me for a moment, then answered.

“Two aircraft from Romanovka were sent out to photograph a new Japanese tank landing ship. According to their postwar doctrine, they’re not supposed to build offensive vessels like that. To file a protest, we needed proof.”

He paused.
“They found the target in neutral waters, seventy miles off Sado Island. Flew in low—very low—to take photo-graphs. Your aircraft maintained radio relay with headquarters. At the same time, the intelligence team onboard recorded the communications of the Japanese fighters shadowing them.
Four F-18s picked them up after the first pass. One pair stayed over the lead aircraft—he was flying at two hun-dred feet. The other pair followed the second plane, slightly higher.
The cloud base was low—two to three hundred feet. The trailing aircraft kept slipping into cloud cover, losing sight of the leader.”

He stopped for a moment.
“When they came out again… they saw a flash. Right where the lead aircraft should have been.”

I said nothing.

“The aircraft was spinning. One wing gone. On fire.”
“The Japanese fighters turned away immediately. The second aircraft circled the area—low. Saw burning de-bris, an oil slick… and a Japanese frigate heading toward the crash site.”

By the time he finished, the intelligence specialists were already leaving the aircraft under escort.
“Romanov,” the commander said, turning back to me, “until an official communiqu; is issued, you are not to discuss this with anyone. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Comrade Colonel.”
“Go complete your post-flight procedures.”

A week later, the communiqu; arrived.
We were gathered in the briefing room while the commander read it aloud.

In addition to the details of our reconnaissance flight, which I already knew from the regiment commander, it also contained transcripts of radio communications between the interceptor flight leader and ground control. From them it was clear that from Niigata Air Base, call sign “Sakura,” the following commands had been is-sued—and carried out by the pilots in the air:

Base: “243, locate your target.”
Pilot: “‘Sakura,’ target located.”
Base: “243, intercept.”
Pilot: “‘Sakura,’ interception complete.”
Base: “243, lock missile on lead aircraft.”
Pilot: “‘Sakura,’ target locked.”

And that was it.
No command to fire.
No report of impact.

The commander lowered the document.
“The Japanese have recovered three bodies and returned them. The fate of the other three remains unknown.”

He paused, then added:
“Based on the recordings, there was no explicit order to destroy the target. Three possibilities remain.”
“First—the missile launched on its own after lock-on.”
“Second—the pilot acted independently.”
“Third—the Japanese used a communication channel we couldn’t intercept.”

He looked around the room.
“Given their discipline and technology, the first two are unlikely. But their diplomats will no doubt favor one of them.”

He folded the paper.
“That’s all. Dismissed.”

Out in the corridor, the pilots gathered around me, eager for details.

When they realized I knew no more than they did, the mood lightened. Someone joked that I ought to be deco-rated for “heroically sleeping through the mission.”

“I’m as indifferent to medals as I am to reprimands,” I replied
.
I couldn’t even remember my last commendation.

But my last reprimand—that was still fresh.

And now, for some reason, those thoughts were returning to me again… here, in the cockpit, with the humid jungle pressing in from all sides.


Chapter 22

It was a deeply contradictory situation. In any normal society, such an action might have earned commendation. In ours, everything worked in reverse. Instead of recognition, I was handed consequences.

My crew was tasked with delivering about a ton of mixed cargo—and one female passenger—to Iturup Island, part of the Kuril chain. At headquarters, I was told we would spend the night there and return the next morning, bringing back several sailors at the end of their service along with the same woman.

Until August 1945, the island had belonged to Japan. Its former owners had built several airfields there, using the labor of Korean and Chinese prisoners of war.

We were heading to one of the most unusual among them.

It had been carved straight through a mountain ridge—from the Pacific coast to the Sea of Okhotsk—by thou-sands of prisoners armed with picks, crowbars, and shovels, many of whom never survived the work.

For a pilot, it was close to perfect. The prevailing winds ran parallel to the runway, either from the ocean or the sea. Sheer cliffs, rising three hundred feet, shielded it from crosswinds. The entire base was staffed by just twenty-eight men under the command of a major.

Officially, it was classified as a “jump-off” airfield—a refueling point for aircraft departing on ocean missions and returning from them. Its rocky runway allowed landings at virtually any weight.

In good weather, the airfield could be spotted from twenty or thirty miles out.

Approaching from the Sea of Okhotsk, I took in the panorama. The Bohdan Khmelnitsky volcano rose ahead. Its crater, over five thousand feet above sea level, was veiled in a thin haze. At its foot lay Kurilsk, the island’s main settlement.

The copilot scanned the Catherine Strait and the distant outline of Kunashir Island, while the navigator re-mained buried in his calculations.

We opted for a straight-in approach. Vasiliev called the descent point with precision.

About five miles from the airfield, I noticed a group of people gathered near the runway threshold. They were waving hats, some even throwing them into the air.

I had never seen anything like it.
They looked genuinely delighted to see us.

 




Flying over their heads at an altitude of forty feet, we touched down and went straight into braking. The tail gunner reported that the crowd was running alongside the runway, waving and shouting in sheer excitement. It looked like a collective euphoria had taken hold of them.

Later, when I learned what we had delivered, everything fell into place. We had one hundred and eighty reels of film on board, packed into nearly two hundred crates.

The aerodrome commander greeted me warmly, handed my crew over to his deputy, and devoted himself entire-ly to our lone passenger. I had been warned that she was no ordinary traveler, but a cashier carrying a substan-tial sum—the payroll for the entire aerodrome, accumulated over six months. What I hadn’t been told was that she was also the commander’s wife.

When the petty officer acting as deputy let that detail slip, the reason for the “special attention” became obvi-ous.

While the sailors unloaded the aircraft and the flight engineer topped off the tanks, I walked the airfield with him.

To be honest, there was nothing much to inspect. A sailors’ barracks, the headquarters building, a mess hall, and four wooden latrines stood on one side of the concrete strip, while fuel tanks buried in the ground up to their necks lined the other. A flock of sheep grazing not far away completed the bleak scene.

“I see you don’t even have dogs guarding the sheep,” I remarked.
“Where would they go?” he said, pointing at the smooth, sheer rock face. “Even a climber wouldn’t make it up those walls.”

“Tell me,” I went on, “why is there a cistern in front of the barracks?”
“That’s the Major’s invention. We call it the ‘military prison.’ If a sailor gets drunk or runs off to the village, we lock him in an iron barrel. There are air holes in the lid—you might not have noticed. We bolt it shut. No need for guards. Same principle as with the sheep. He sits there a few days, gets fed once a day, and either howls or begs forgiveness.”
“And the higher-ups are fine with that?”
“As long as no one dies under his command, they don’t ask questions.”
“You mentioned a village. Is it far?”
“Seven miles, whichever way you go.”
“Could we take a look?”
“Honestly, there’s nothing worth seeing.”
“Then why do the sailors go?”
“Some for the girls. Mostly for vodka.”
“Well, that’s reason enough. Judging by your livestock, dinner’s going to be mutton. And as they say in the Caucasus—only dogs eat mutton without vodka. No offense—you’ve had enough of it already.”
“That’s exactly our menu,” he said. “Mutton, salmon, red caviar. People on the mainland dream of it. I’ve had enough for three lifetimes.”

Two hours later, in the company of a somewhat worn-out Major, we set off for the settlement in a truck.

“You look tired, Commander,” I said. “Did you have to count the money with the cashier?”
“Three times,” he replied with a grin. “You’ve got a sharp tongue, Captain. Doesn’t it get you into trouble?”
“Sometimes.”
“And how do you get out of it?”
“Black magic.”
“Does it work?”
“Not always.”
I glanced around. “Why are we driving so far from the shoreline?”
“You’re afraid?”
“No. Just curious.”
“The sand here turns to dust when it dries. No roads on the island—only wet sand will hold a vehicle. Right now, the tide is out on this side, and on the other—”
“The tide’s in,” I finished for him.

He gave me a sideways look, then pointed ahead.

“See that wreck by the cliffs? That used to be a truck. Two years ago, some sailors drove out to visit the girls. The tide caught them. They barely made it to the rocks—the sand was swallowing their legs while the waves flipped the truck like a toy. I spared them a tribunal only because they had a month left to serve. Wrote the truck off as scrap.”

By the time he finished, we had reached Fisherman’s Village—a cluster of several hundred families. The men worked small boats; the women processed fish at the plant.

We bought a few bottles of vodka. I was about to walk around when the Major stopped me.

“Where are you going?”
“To the club. Maybe the shops.”

He laughed.

“What club? What shops? There’s nothing here.”
“Then where do they watch films?”
“You really are like a child. They have electricity from a diesel generator—but barely enough for lighting. No televisions, no irons. Certainly, no cinema.”
“So, what do they do in the evenings?”
“They count their money. Three times a night.”
“And when someone gets sick? Or a woman goes into labor?”
“They’re taken to Kurilsk along the tide. If it’s urgent, a border guard helicopter flies them out.”

The story left a sour taste, and I kept quiet for most of the drive back. Then my attention was caught by a line of tank turrets mounted on concrete bunkers every six hundred feet. Their large-caliber guns seemed to track us as we passed, never letting the truck slip out of their sights.

“What’s that?” I asked, nodding toward the installations.
“Coastal defenses,” the Major said readily. “Under each turret, behind those narrow embrasures, there are ma-chine guns. Three levels underground—barracks, mess, latrine, storage. everything necessary to conduct long-term independent defense. Ten men per position, though in peacetime you’ll find two, maybe three. They’re spaced so they can cover each other if there’s a landing.”
“Why so much around this island?”
“You don’t let go, do you?” He smirked. “All the Kuriles are like this. Before the war they were Japanese. The Japanese still haven’t swallowed that loss. No peace treaty, no handshakes. So, we don’t take chances. Coastal defense is under Rear Admiral Mikhail Kapustin. A solid man.”

He paused, then added, with a hint of pride, “We’re on familiar terms. When he inspects the units, he stays with me.”
“I know him too,” I said.
“You’ve flown him somewhere?”
“No. He’s my father-in-law.”

The Major let out a short laugh. “Now I see where your ‘black magic’ comes from.”
“Haven’t used it on anyone yet,” I replied.

Back at the airfield, the sailors were in the barracks watching a film. A faded sheet—washed to a dull gray—served as a screen. Judging by the noise, it wasn’t their first showing of the day.

“Don’t look so surprised,” the commander said. “First couple of months after a supply flight, they watch three films a day. Then they start running them backwards and laugh like children. Especially if someone’s had a drink. Imagine it—vodka pouring back into the bottle. Old tradition. You can’t stamp it out.”

After supper, I asked him to prepare the list of sailors departing with us in the morning.
“Already done,” he said. “When do you plan to take off?”
“Ten hundred.”
“We’ve arranged quarters for you at headquarters.”
“At least not a pit,” I said, hoping his night would be less comfortable than mine.
“You’re a sly one, Romanov,” he shot back.

Morning came.
After breakfast, the crew headed for the aircraft while I called for takeoff clearance. Waiting for a reply, I glanced out the window—and froze.

A group of sailors was hoisting my copilot onto a horse.

The animal stood grazing nearby, and Sergey, apparently bored, had decided to try his luck as a rider. No sad-dle, no reins, nothing. He clung to the horse’s neck, legs wrapped tight around its sides, trying to stay on.

Seeing how this would end, I stepped onto the porch and shouted:
“Enough circus—get him off that horse!”

The tone—and the fact that I flew an AN-12—had its effect. The sailors rushed in from all sides to grab the an-imal. Startled, it reared.

Sergey lost his grip, reached for the mane, missed, and hit the ground. Before he could get up, the horse lashed out, trampling his leg.

Later he said he heard his own bones crack. I didn’t hear it—but I saw the moment the joke turned into a disas-ter.

The medic arrived, took one look, and pronounced with unnecessary gravity:
“Tibia and fibula—both broken.”

That much was obvious.

We carried Sergey into the barracks and laid him on a pool table. The medic and I improvised a splint. The commander brought me the passenger list.

“You left this on my desk,” he said. “Clearance for takeoff has been granted. But shouldn’t we report the acci-dent?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’ll ground me. And if we wait for another aircraft, he might lose the leg. Ten hours minimum be-fore help arrives. We don’t have that time.”
“Why would they send another aircraft?”
“Because without a copilot I could just as easily turn toward Hokkaido instead of Vladivostok. Twenty minutes—and I’m in Japan.”
“What’s stopping you from doing that on a regular flight?”

The sailors were carrying Kovalenko on a stretcher toward the aircraft, while the major, his wife, and I walked a few steps behind, watching the pilot force a smile.

“Nothing,” I said. “But headquarters sees it differently. That’s how generals think. If a commander decides to betray his country, the crew will drag him out of the cockpit and beat some sense into him, and the co-pilot will bring the aircraft back to base—even if badly, he’ll still manage to land it.
But in today’s situation, with me alone at the controls, the entire crew becomes my hostages. I could fly them to Japan or to the Moon, and they’d have no choice but to go along.
There will always be some overcautious types at fleet headquarters who are willing to consider the possibility of my defection. No argument will get clearance for takeoff after a report like that. Believe me.
As for his leg—no one really gives a damn. The only thing they care about is covering their own asses. Because if I take off and disappear, half of those staff rats will lose their jobs.”

At the aircraft stairs, he shook my hand, kissed his wife, and when she disappeared into the fuselage, he said to me in parting:
“Get my wife to Artyom first. After that, you can fly wherever you want—Sapporo, Singapore, anywhere.”

On the approach to my home airfield, I requested that an ambulance be ready by the time I landed. To avoid causing panic among the regiment’s command, I lied and said one of the passengers was feeling unwell.

A request like that always guarantees a full reception. It includes the mandatory presence of the regiment com-mander at the parking stand of the arriving aircraft. This time, in addition to him, the chief of staff and a repre-sentative from the Special Section were waiting for me. The only thing missing was an orchestra.

When the stretcher was brought down the aircraft stairs and my superiors, approaching Sergei, recognized in the severely injured “passenger” my co-pilot, a storm broke over my head.

Without repeating everything I heard about myself, I can only say that the general meaning came down to this: “Give us a short account of what happened now, and by the end of the working day tomorrow prepare a detailed report on the incident.”

A few days later, the regiment commander gathered all officers holding positions of aircraft commander and above and read out the order from the commander of our fleet’s aviation:
“Aircraft Commander Captain Romanov is hereby reprimanded for violating flight safety.”

As we were leaving, the officers, as always, started cracking jokes:
“Now you just need a reprimand from the Minister of Defense to complete the collection.”
“Well, there you go—once again they’ve punished the ‘tsar’s offspring.’ And we thought that this time the great-great-grandson of the Little Father would finally get an award.”

No one dared to say outright that any normal man would have done the same.


Chapter 23

For six months I flew only short routes across the Far East, each time with a different copilot. Without a stable crew, we never had the chance to work as a unit, so long-haul assignments were out of the question. But by au-tumn Sergey returned from leaving his broken leg had healed cleanly. He passed his medical test, and we were a crew again.

Around the same time, the antisubmarine aviation units began receiving brand-new Ka-27 Helix shipborne hel-icopters. Our wing was tasked with ferrying equipment and supplies to support their deployment.

In Kumertau there was an aircraft manufacturing plant producing coaxial-rotor helicopters designed by the Kamov bureau. While the technicians were accepting the new machines and the pilots were test-flying them be-fore ferrying them to the Far East, we, the transport crews, were dying of boredom.

These deployments were dull, brought in no money at all, took up a lot of time, and left us with a heavy work-load on the way back. The problem was that the helicopters had a very limited ferry range. They needed fre-quent stops for refueling and crew rest.

Escorting them from the southern Urals all the way to Vladivostok, we hopped from airfield to airfield across the entire Asian part of the USSR like grasshoppers.

Those months could have been safely erased from memory, if not for my crew’s ability to find adventure even where none should have existed.

One evening, as unremarkable as any other, we were sitting in a hotel restaurant. Beneath the long tablecloth, by our feet, stood a gallon canister of pure grain alcohol. The radio operator discreetly poured it into a vodka carafe, and we drank it from shot glasses, chasing it with Bashkir mutton ribs roasted over an open flame.

Besides us, there were about twenty men in padded jackets and rough boots, and one strikingly beautiful wom-an in an elegant dress and Italian heels.

She sat with three grim Bashkir men who ate in silence, barely acknowledging her presence. Every so often, they glanced toward the entrance, where young, broad-shouldered men would appear, scan the room, and leave again.

At last, one of them walked straight to the center of the hall.

Without a word, he stepped up to the table and, with the steel-toed boot of a factory worker, drove a hard kick into the leg of one of the chairs. The wood cracked. The man went down with it, then sprang to his feet and landed a solid punch at the attacker.

A fight broke out.

The other two Bashkirs joined in, and within seconds the room erupted. Three policemen rushed in from the lobby, swinging rubber batons, driving the fighters toward the exit. The rest of the patrons followed, as if this were part of the evening’s entertainment.

We moved to the window and pulled back the curtain.

Outside, the situation escalated quickly. The three men who had been sitting with the woman were now taking a beating from a larger group waiting outside. It was clearly a setup—the kicked chair had only been the signal.
But as more men poured out of the restaurant, the fight evened out. Soon there were two roughly equal groups locked in a silent, brutal clash.

I had never seen anything like it—forty men fighting without shouting, without the usual chaos. Just dull thuds, heavy breathing, and the sound of bodies hitting the ground.

“Must be because they’re Muslims,” I muttered.

On the hotel steps, the woman stood with the policemen, wrapped in an angora jacket. She was shivering—not clear whether from cold or fear. The policemen, smoking, talked among themselves as if their job was done.

Beside me, the radio operator watched for a moment, then said quietly:
“Commander, let me step out till morning.”
“Go,” I nodded. “Just don’t get involved.”

We stayed by the window as he slipped outside, walked up behind the woman, and whispered something in her ear.
 
Then he disappeared into the darkness.

Five minutes later, she followed.

When it became clear no one was after them, we went back to the table and continued drinking.

The next morning, Onoprienko returned and told us the story.

The woman’s husband had been serving an eight-year sentence for armed robbery. Unfortunately for the inves-tigation, he was the only member of the gang the victims had been able to identify.

No matter how hard the prosecutor tried, he refused to name his accomplices, and the charge was never upgrad-ed to banditry. For a gang leader, that meant at least five extra years. He kept silent—not out of loyalty or any criminal code, but for reasons of his own.

The younger gang members saw it differently. To them, his silence was proof of loyalty. When he managed to get a message out through bribed guards, they were eager to carry it out.

He asked for only one thing: to keep his young wife faithful for the entire term of his sentence.

Eight years.

In a small industrial town already divided between rival groups, that order turned into a daily routine. Men who tried their luck with her were beaten or intimidated.

There were not many willing to risk it. Mostly men from other districts, or miners who stood by each other. Sometimes an invitation to a cinema or a restaurant was just a pretext for another clash between rival groups.

That night was no exception. No one really cared about her. The men were busy settling their own “important” matters, and she, burning with desire, once again found herself caught up in someone else’s business.

And she, left on the sidelines of other men’s battles, was simply looking for a way out.

So, when a stranger leaned in and said, “Come with me,” she went.

What followed needed no explanation.

Judging by the radio operator’s face, he hadn’t slept at all—and had no regrets about it.
Chapter 24

It’s strange that, in the anticipation of death, the mind mostly recalls emergency situations from my flights, drinking bouts, and love affairs. And yet there was also service that had nothing to do with flying. And that, at times, brought unpleasant surprises as well.

All aircraft commanders and ground service engineers took turns serving as regimental duty officer once a month. The rotation was fair: on even-numbered days, a pilot took the shift; on odd-numbered days, an engi-neer.

Being both undisciplined and, on top of that, morally unstable, I rarely managed to get through a twenty-four-hour duty shift without incident. Once, a sabotage group of naval infantry—combat swimmers, as they were al-so called—from Russky Island parachuted onto our airfield and, as part of a training exercise, mined all the air-craft with dummy charges. I caught hell for letting the sabotage slip past me.

Another time, some sailors brought women into the barracks. Not many—about five. But I had to chase them out from under the bunks until morning. I managed it, but I still got a reprimand.

And then there was one occasion when, having almost completed my duty without incident, I was counting the issued firearms of the officers and warrant officers of our unit, stored in the armory, together with my relief. We came up one Makarov pistol and sixteen rounds short. Checking the logbook of issued and returned weapons, I quickly established where the missing PM had gone: the warrant officer on duty at remote checkpoint number three had not yet made it back to headquarters and had not turned in his weapon.

In a calm voice, I tried to explain this to my relief. I showed him the signature confirming that the checkpoint duty warrant officer had received the pistol and ammunition and suggested he sign the duty transfer report and let me go home. He flatly refused.

I explained it to him again:
“You bear no responsibility. Sign for the duty shift with the weapons actually present. I’m not asking you to sign for a pistol that isn’t here. The warrant officer will answer for it—even if he’s lost it, sold it, or drunk it away. It has nothing to do with you.”

He refused again.

“All right,” I said. “It’s already eighteen forty. At nineteen hundred, the next-to-last bus leaves from the termi-nal. If you don’t sign the duty log within five minutes, I’ll miss it. I don’t have a car. The last bus is at twenty-three hundred. Because of your stubbornness, I’ll be stuck here in headquarters for another four hours. Do you understand that?”
“No,” he said.

And that was it.

What was I supposed to do with him?

“Listen,” I said. “You idiot. You’re going to accept this duty shift in one minute.”

I took my pistol from its leather holster—factory number MN-4683965—stepped into the armory, and without removing the magazine, racked the slide, chambering a round. I switched off the safety and, looking straight at the engineer as he turned pale, fired into the wall between the pistol rack and the ammunition safe.

The captain shot out of the duty officer’s room faster than a bullet from my PM. His footsteps echoed through the empty corridors of the two-story building.

Ran off to complain to the chief of staff. Ground rat, I thought angrily.

Deafened by the shot, which in the small armory sounded like a large-caliber cannon, I stood there gripping the pistol in my right hand. The slide snapped back and forward, feeding the next round into the chamber. The hammer remained cocked, ready for another shot. A thin bluish wisp of smoke rose from the barrel, tickling my nostrils.

The regiment’s chief of staff cautiously entered the room.

“Valeriy, are you all right?”
“More or less. My ears are still ringing,” I said, a foolish grin spreading across my stunned face.
“Then carefully place the pistol on the safe and step out of the armory.”

I did exactly as the lieutenant colonel asked. As soon as I stepped out, he took the keys to all the service rooms from me, locked the armory with three locks, and invited us to go to the regiment commander. As the three of us were leaving the duty room, the warrant officer from checkpoint number three walked into headquarters. I only cast a look of hatred at my relief.

In the commander’s office, I gave a detailed account of how the duty roster had paired me with a complete idi-ot. I tried to explain that my relief had driven me to the edge with his stubbornness, and that, out of exhaustion, I had forgotten to remove the magazine from the pistol and had accidentally fired into the wall while perform-ing a safety check.

The engineer stood in silence, while the regiment commander looked at me with a measuring gaze, as if trying to decide:
Is this Romanov an idiot, or just pretending to be one?

When I finally shut up, the colonel turned to the chief of staff and said:
“Don’t issue him a weapon again. And send him home in my staff car—out of my sight. Immediately.”
“We don’t have duty shifts without weapons,” the lieutenant colonel tried to object weakly. “Where am I sup-posed to assign him?”
“Then don’t assign him. And in general, schedule him for more flight duties and keep him away from the base. There’ll be less trouble that way.”

He waved us off, making it clear that our time was up and that he had no interest in nonsense like someone fir-ing a pistol inside headquarters.

A real scandal was already beginning to flare up in the unit.


Chapter 25

The Communist Party and KGB elite not only stood as a solid wall against any dissent, backing each other up, but also grew together through close personal and family ties. It was only natural that the secretary of our Party organization was the best friend of the regiment’s KGB operative. They celebrated family birthdays together, marked both revolutionary and church holidays, went hunting and fishing, picked mushrooms and berries—in short, the two families lived side by side in perfect harmony.

Gradually, an affair began between the Party leader and the counterintelligence officer’s wife. They started meeting regularly in a rented apartment on the outskirts of town. At first, it was easy for them to deceive their unsuspecting spouses, but the growing feeling filled both their hearts. Soon, their tender looks became noticea-ble to others, and it was becoming less and less like friendship.

Unwilling to wait for a dramatic ending, the KGB officer’s wife told her husband over breakfast:
“I’m leaving you for Dmitry. We’ve been in love for a long time.”
Stunned by such open betrayal, the military counterintelligence major could think of nothing better than to go to the regiment commander and tell him about his family drama. He expected support. He thought the colonel would call in the Party secretary, and the three of them would somehow find a way out of this delicate situation. Perhaps they could still save both families from falling apart.

The commander chose a different course. Not wanting to act as a buffer between two locomotives rushing to-ward each other, he immediately called both the head of counterintelligence and the chief of the political de-partment of the Pacific Fleet.

With one move, he brought two powerful organizations into a confrontation over their own subordinates.

At the military council, attended by the entire command staff of the fleet, alongside combat readiness reports from all branches, they also reviewed the moral and political climate in the transport aviation regiment.

When Fleet Commander Admiral Krasnov expressed his displeasure over this dirty affair, the head of the politi-cal department stood up and stated plainly that people, regardless of their positions, could not be forbidden to love one another.

After such a simple and elegant move, the arguments prepared by counterintelligence—about betrayal, a stab in the back, and the moral corruption of Party officials—no longer carried the force they had been meant to deliv-er. The head of counterintelligence chose to remain silent this time, but he did not put the case of adultery away in some distant drawer. He was waiting for his opponents to make a mistake, or perhaps already preparing traps for them.

The scandal seemed to be dying down. Garrison gossipers—men and women alike—began to wave it off with boredom whenever someone tried to revive the story of how a chekist and a Party organizer had fought over a woman.
For the time being, even the main actors in this family drama felt a sense of relief.



But the file didn’t disappear. It waited.
And so did the reckoning.
On January ninth, the political officers and party secretaries of all units at Artyom gathered in the garrison sau-na to commemorate Bloody Sunday—the massacre of workers by Tsarist troops.
A tragedy, officially.
In practice—an excuse to drink.
They marked the occasion with Georgian dishes—chicken in walnut sauce, shashlik—and plenty of red wine, courtesy of Sergeant Givi, the driver of our new political officer.


How a man from the Caucasus like Givi ended up serving his conscript term on the far side of the country was a mystery. He seemed out of place, as if tied to this posting by something no one else knew. Among the sailors, he stood apart. He kept his own counsel, never speaking more than necessary, never revealing what he thought. And above all, he was unwaveringly loyal to the political officer—a rare quality in a world where loyalties shifted with the wind.
The political officer had brought him along from the anti-submarine wing in Nikolaevka when he was trans-ferred to Artyom.
The first time I saw Givi, I wondered what kind of secrets a man had to carry to bring his own sergeant with him. Either the political officer had something to hide—or the Georgian had been entrusted with something special.
The commissars, flushed from the steam room, gathered around a long table. Vapor still rose from their red-dened bodies, each wrapped in a white sheet knotted at the waist. Before touching the food, they filled their glasses with Georgian moonshine and drank to the political officer’s toast:
“To our meeting.”
Soon they agreed to switch to red wine—the moonshine tasted too much like the Russian kind. Toast followed toast, each man trying to outdo the last.
When it was the party organizer’s turn, he rose, clutching his sheet with one hand and lifting a goblet of wine—red as workers’ blood—with the other.
“To the strength of our Party!”
The room went quiet for a second. No one expected such grand rhetoric from him. A few men exchanged glanc-es, someone clapped softly—but no one refused the toast.
Already drunk, he added as he sat down:
“Our boss is a marvel. Didn’t hand me over to the KGB. I’ll give him two bottles of wine for that. He’ll take a bite out of them for me—remind them who’s in charge. We’ve always had them under us, and we always will. Them—and their wives too.”
An hour later, a recording of those words lay on the desk of the head of counter-espionage and the chief politi-cal officer of the Pacific Fleet.
That sealed it.
By mutual agreement, both men—the husband and the lover—were quietly removed. Transferred to remote gar-risons, stripped of rank.
The party organizer—for his loose tongue, arrogance, and contempt for authority.
The counterintelligence officer—for failing to control his own household.
Later, my father-in-law told me what truly angered the chief political officer.
“Two bottles of wine,” he said among his fellow admirals. “If he’d said two crates of Armenian cognac, I might have forgiven him. But no one has ever valued me so cheaply. I’ll grind that little snake into dust.”
And he did.
Within a year, both the party apparatus and the counter-espionage leadership in our wing had been completely replaced. I had no more open enemies.
It was time to think about international flights again.
Though, truth be told, my worst enemy was still very much alive.
Myself.
Because even when Lady Luck finally turned her face toward me and cleared the path, I managed to make such a face at her that she recoiled and turned away again.
No matter, I thought. Turn away if you like. I’ll come at you from behind.
But that would come later.
For now—another trip. Not far this time. Romanovka.
That was when the new vertical takeoff aircraft, the Yak-38, began to appear. I was curious to see how they lift-ed off and landed without so much as a roll down the runway.


Chapter 26

We taxied to the designated apron for arriving crews and shut down beneath the wing, waiting for the loaders to bring our cargo.

A Yak-38 rolled past us toward a square launch pad some hundred yards away, its surface plated with metal sheets. Reaching the pad, the pilot aligned the nose into the wind. From where we stood, we watched him open the lift shutters and rotate the vector-thrust nozzles downward. The turbines wound up to takeoff power, and the aircraft rose smoothly—hovering at about fifteen feet. The noise was overwhelming; conversation was impos-sible.

Then the nozzles began to tilt for forward motion. The nose dipped slightly. The aircraft crept ahead—and sud-denly pitched down.

In that same instant, the ejection seat fired, hurling the pilot upward. The jet slammed nose-first into the metal plating, snapped in two, and burst into flames. Fire trucks already positioned nearby rushed in, blanketing the wreckage with foam.

The pilot descended under canopy at a safe distance at first, but the wind quickly began to carry him back to-ward the burning aircraft. Realizing where he was headed, he pulled down on the risers, trying to collapse the chute and increase his descent rate. He managed to reach the concrete, but the wind caught the canopy again, dragging him toward the spreading fire.

Three firefighters advanced with a heavy hose, fanning a wide spray ahead of them. One of them broke off, grabbed the pilot by the leg, and dragged him across the concrete, away from the flames.
His helmeted head bounced dully against the surface. His arms hung limp. As they pulled him clear, the metal strap of his watch snagged and tore free, skittering across the ground. One of the firemen noticed, dropped the hose, picked it up, and slipped it into his pocket.

They hauled the pilot to safety and knelt beside him. After a quick check, they waved for the ambulance.

Good, I thought. That means he’s alive.

It had lasted no more than two minutes.
But it stayed with me.

We loaded our cargo, flew it out to Mongokhto, and were back by evening. The flight went as planned. Nothing changed.

And yet that brief accident pressed heavily on me, stirring up memories—of my own crash, and of my father’s fate, years earlier in these same skies.

From the northern end of the runway, the view opened onto Peter the Great Gulf, barely four hundred meters beyond the airfield. Somewhere over those waters, in the late fifties, my father’s career had come undone.

Back then, First Lieutenant Romanov served as a navigator on an Il-28 bomber out of Maykhe. The Korean War was over, but tension in the region remained high. Training flights were frequent, often indistinguishable from real operations.

During one exercise, their three-aircraft formation was ordered to carry out a torpedo attack on a simulated tar-get—a buoy towed behind a vessel, leaving a foamy wake. The goal was to release inert torpedoes, so they passed as close to the wake as possible and into the nets of waiting recovery boats.

They approached in wedge formation. Captain Zvyagintsev led, with Captain Malyugin as navigator. On the left wing flew First Lieutenant Andreyev, with my father—Lieutenant Romanov—as navigator. On the right, First Lieutenant Vlasenko and Lieutenant Fomin.

About forty kilometers from the range, Andreyev ordered:
“Open the bomb bay.”
“Too early,” my father said. “Four minutes to target.”
“Open it. The lead reports a wake beyond the target. Vlasenko already opened.”
“Bomb bay open,” my father confirmed.
“Drop!”
“Too early,” he insisted.
“Release it! Their torpedo’s already in the water!”
“And ours is staying aboard,” my father replied—and with that, signed off on his career.

He closed the bay doors.
“Aleksei, did you see Vlasenko drop?” he asked afterward.
“No. We turned immediately after release. Didn’t see them.”

When they landed, all three crew members were arrested.

A week later, the verdict came down. The flight commander was dismissed without pension. The wing navigator went before a tribunal and disappeared. Fomin was promoted. My father received a formal warning—for “at-tempting an attack on the Commander of the Pacific Fleet.”

The lead crew had mistaken the wake of Admiral Fokin’s boat—crossing the gulf at that moment—for the tar-get. They had launched a practice torpedo attack on their own commander, prompting the left wingman to fol-low.

Vlasenko’s crew had opened their bay—but never released. Fomin had refused the order. There were no re-corders then, no cockpit tapes—only the word of the men involved.
Vlasenko was neither punished nor rewarded. My father did not report his disagreement with his pilot. Accus-ing his commander would only have made things worse.

So, he served on. Nearly thirty years. Reprimands instead of promotions. He retired as a flight navigator, though he might have risen much higher.

History, I thought, does move in cycles. Herodotus had that part right. But it’s not a circle—it’s a spiral. It climbs, yes, but it also drifts, like a course corrected for wind.

And sooner or later, in the same place, the son repeats the father’s path—his own version of the same trial. De-served or not.

The Yak-38 crash at Romanovka changed nothing for us. We completed the load, took off, climbed over Ussuri Bay, and set course for Mongokhto.

As we passed over the garrison, I gave the aircraft a slight bank from right to left.

A small salute—to the men who had served in that forgotten outpost.


Chapter 27

Upon returning home, news awaited us.

An order had arrived from the Pacific fleet headquarters to prepare two crews for a flight to Vietnam. One of them would embark on a one-month mission there, while the second would be prepared as a backup for unfore-seen circumstances. Our crew, once again, was not included among the candidates.

After the morning briefing at the air wing commander’s office where this news was first announced, the chief of staff, with a sly smile, answered my question about why my crew had been overlooked for a foreign mission,

"You've just returned from Mongokhto. I can't include you in the planning for another long-distance flight."

To call my one-day flight with two stopovers a long-distance mission was, at best, thinly veiled mockery. We didn't even request financial compensation for the mission, which amounted to two rubles and sixty kopecks, at a time when a single US dollar on the black-market cost at least five times as much.

But it was pointless to argue with him. He understood the situation well, and so did I.

I didn't engage in the established system of offerings and gifts, nor did I go hunting or fishing with the chain of command. I didn't spend hours with them in the sauna, discussing the merits and demerits of the new female tel-ephone operator or secretary. I wasn't a member of the narrow circle of "trusted men.”

But to be honest, even if I had gone hunting or fishing with the commander and the chief of staff of our wing, the choice would still not have fallen on me. My competitors were Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Popov, the for-ty-year-old deputy wing commander for combat readiness, and Major Sologub, the commander of my squadron, who had been flying the An-12 for over fifteen years.

There was no beating them playing fair. I’d have to play dirty—mean, and all the way through.


I arrived at the squadron aircraft parking area with the news about the foreign assignment. The crew was wait-ing for me on the aircraft. After seeing off the gunner and cargo mechanic, we gathered in the pressurized pas-senger cabin for a strategy meeting.

First, I explained to my guys what the business trip conditions entailed. The command promised those who would fly to Vietnam to fully maintain their pay at home. Cover all business trip expenses, such as food, ac-commodation, and local transportation. Plus, pay fifty American dollars for each day spent abroad. This amounted to, accounting for one day of travel there and one day back, one thousand six hundred dollars for each crew member. To earn that much at home, you'd have to work for sixteen months. As you’ve probably guessed, the chain of command hasn’t even considered us for this mission—but I still believe we deserve our share of that money."

I fell silent, and a dead hush settled over the small eight-seat passenger cabin. The guys exchanged uncertain glances. It was clear each of them wanted to say something but didn’t know what. I looked them over, and once I was sure they were waiting for my lead, I continued, "I welcome your suggestions on how we can get our share of this pie without regretting it later."

Following naval tradition, I gave the floor first to the youngest member of the crew, Kovalenko. My copilot said,
"We'll need to give presents to all the supervisors involved in making the decision about who will undertake the mission."

I started listing the officers involved in the decision, counting them off on my fingers,
"So, according to your opinion, we should buy them presents. The wing commander, the chief of staff, the polit-ical officer, the communications supervisor, the chief engineer, and the KGB officer. Are you volunteering for the delivery? No? That's what I thought. Radio operator, your turn. Present your plan."

"I propose that we wait until the crew and the aircraft for the mission have been selected, and then sabotage that aircraft," suggested radio operator Petty Officer Onoprienko.

"What a brilliant plan!" sneered the flight engineer. "First of all, if they catch us, we'll be arrested immediately. And secondly, if they don't catch us, they'll simply take our undamaged aircraft away and give us the broken one. They'll keep us occupied while our colleagues are making real money."

"That's true, it's definitely the wrong approach. Gennadiy, what do you think we should do?" I asked Rybnikov.

"I have no idea," said flight engineer.

“Navigator?"

Vasiliev shook his head silently.

"Then if you don't have any ideas, then sit and listen to a brief lecture on chess strategy," I began, settling back in my chair. "There are three fundamental pillars of success in the chess opening. The first pillar is rapid and purposeful mobilization of forces. That's what we're engaged in right now. The second is the distribution of pawns. Of course, I don’t consider you pawns—but it’s still my job to ensure each of you is in the right position and moving in the right direction. The third pillar is control of the center. We will strike suddenly and without warning at the most central piece.”

I looked around at my guys, making sure they were actually listening, and then laid out the plan.
“The departure to Vietnam is scheduled for next Thursday—exactly one week from now. By dinnertime today, the wing command will decide who flies as the main crew and who stays as backup. That gives them, at best, four and a half days to prepare. Half of today, then Friday, Monday, and Tuesday. Maybe five days if they drag Saturday into it.”

I paused, letting them follow the timeline. “Look,” I said, pulling them back from thoughts of money. “We have six crews in the squadron. One is on leave. Two will be selected for Vietnam. That leaves three. Two of those will be sent out on local flights on Monday, and only we’ll be left idle. Which leaves one problem—we need to take the other two out of the running.”
“On Wednesday, the day before departure, an inspection board from Vladivostok will arrive to check readiness. Which means we hit the main crew on Monday—and the backup on Tuesday. After that, they won’t have any other options. They’ll have to send us.”

I let that settle.

“By tomorrow morning, I want your ideas on how to take out our competitors. We’ve got three days. Navigator, focus on the charts—the route’s already set, but you’ll need the full portfolio from Vladivostok through Tash-kent, Pakistan, India, and beyond. Stay quiet, don’t draw attention. If we pull this off, it’ll happen at the last mi-nute, and you won’t have time to catch up.”

I gave him a brief nod.
“I’m keeping you out of the operational side of things—for obvious reasons.”

Then I swept my gaze across the rest of them.
“But you—start thinking. Everyone has weak spots. Find them. And remember—fortune favors those who act, not those who sit on their asses.”

The next morning brought nothing new.

During formation, when orders of the day were read out, my guys avoided my glance.

No ideas yet.

I sent the engineer off to the aircraft for the two-hundred-hour maintenance check, then pulled my copilot aside and told him to keep a close eye on how our soon-to-be “international representatives” were handling their flight documentation.

On Monday, the two crews not assigned to the mission flew out to Far Eastern garrisons on routine two-day trips. We stayed behind and finished the technical inspection of our aircraft.

After dinner, a rumor began circulating through the wing: the copilot of one of the selected crews had lost his pilot logbook.

By the evening formation, he had searched the entire staff quarter but still hadn’t found the document. And that was a problem: it contained the results of every theoretical and practical exam he’d passed over the past several years, his total flight hours and time on type, the findings of each medical flight board, and the number of para-chute jumps he’d made throughout his career. It also recorded his emergency egress training and included no fewer than a dozen flight evaluations signed by inspectors and commanders of various ranks. In short, it held everything that could confirm his qualifications.
And without that logbook, he was nobody. No qualifications. No flight.

At seventeen hundred hours, with the entire wing assembled, the Colonel delivered what he clearly believed was an inspirational speech—straight out of the war years.

He spoke about universal human values as outlined in the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism. About brotherhood among pilots. About sacrifice.

He even quoted:
“Die if you must—but save your comrade.”

I listened, trying to understand where he was going with it.
Was he preparing us for combat? Or just warming up?
Turned out, neither.
At the end, he ordered everyone to remain after formation and search the surrounding area for the missing log-book until it was found.

Officers and NCOs spread out across the airbase territory. Each squadron was assigned a sector. We moved me-thodically, combing through every patch of ground.
Two hours later, as dusk settled over the coast—while Moscow was still bathed in sunlight, the English were sitting down to lunch, Americans were just waking up, and somewhere far away the Papuans were already pre-paring for sleep—an electrical systems engineer found it.

The logbook was floating in a patch of deep, muddy sludge near the remains of an abandoned bomb shelter.

The place looked like it had been forgotten since the war. A rusted iron door hung crooked on its hinges, se-cured by an equally rusted lock. The key had long since disappeared, along with any memory of who was sup-posed to be responsible for it. Even the name on the faded plaque meant nothing to anyone anymore—not even to our forty-eight-year-old Colonel.

The document was beyond saving.
One look was enough.
The commander took it in, then gave the order to stop the search and dismiss everyone. There was no point try-ing to recover it. There simply wasn’t enough time to rebuild the logbook before the inspection.

He scanned the officers around him, spotted his deputy, and called him over.
“I’m sorry, Vladimir,” he said quietly. “Someone played your copilot. He won’t have time to restore his log-book in two days, and the inspectors won’t clear him to fly. So, I’m removing your crew from the mission. The copilot will receive a reprimand.”
“What for?” the deputy asked, stunned.
“For failing to properly maintain his flight documentation,” the commander replied, spreading his hands in a gesture of helpless formality.
“Replace him, then,” Vladimir pressed. “Why punish the whole crew for someone else’s trick?”
“Orders from above. Crews flying abroad must already be established. No substitutions.”

A pause.
“Who replaces us?”
“The backup crew. Major Sologub’s.”

When that conversation ended, the Colonel gestured for me.
I stepped closer.

“I have better news for you,” he said quietly. “Starting tomorrow, your crew prepares as the new backup. You’ll be inspected with the rest. Understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. You can—wait.”

I stopped.
“Where were you today? I didn’t see you in headquarters.”
“On the aircraft. Full maintenance check.”

He studied me for a moment, then nodded.
“Alright. Go.”


All of Tuesday was spent in accelerated preparation. We were three days behind the primary crew, but we had to be ready to face the headquarters inspection on Wednesday at 0900.

The route was genuinely difficult.

We could not reach Vietnam by the eastern route. Skirting unfriendly China over the sea, we simply did not have enough fuel. The Chinese, having their own view of our military presence near their southern borders, would not allow us to land and refuel on their territory. To reach Vietnam, our crews had to fly halfway across Asia.
For that reason, the navigator shook my hand gratefully for warning him in time that we might have to prepare.
On his desk lay a stack of charts: half the Soviet Union from Vladivostok to Tashkent, then Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Burma, Laos, and finally several sheets of Vietnam itself. Most of them were already ready.

I looked at him with admiration.
“Vasilyev, where and when did you manage to plow through all this work?”
“At home. Saturday and Sunday,” Vadim replied.
“Hero.”
“Don’t be modest, Commander. You weren’t wasting time either,” he said, hinting at the flight logbook found in the swamp water of the bomb shelter.
“That was Sergey’s work. I was at the aircraft, giving him an alibi.”

After the workday ended, I walked slowly along the forest path toward the stop for bus number 7, Airport–Center. Ahead of me, a group of our officers moved together. At the highway, they split in two.

The larger group turned toward the terminal and continued on foot; the smaller group, including me, crossed the road and remained at the bus stop.

Among the pilots heading to the international airport, I noticed my squadron commander and his navigator. Un-til that morning, they had been the backup crew. Now my crew had been named backup, while they had been made primary.

So, boys, off for a beer? Celebrating your promotion from backup to primary crew? That I understand. What I don’t understand is what you did to earn it. You didn’t lift a finger. You won’t rake in the heat with someone else’s hands. I won’t let you. The restaurant will be where they catch you, brothers mine.

I was boiling with righteous indignation.
Just let me get back to the dormitory.

The bus dropped me at the intersection of First Western and Frunze Street and after five minutes of fast walking reached my temporary quarters.

My living conditions in Artyom compared favorably with what I had in the Kamchatka garrison at Yelizovo.

First, I lived alone.
Second, I lived in the family wing, which allowed me to come and go without being noticed by the dormitory at-tendant.
Third, like all aircraft commanders, I had an office telephone. Without going through military switchboard op-erators, I could call my father-in-law at work, my wife at home, or Svetlana Mukhina. The last of them, despite no longer serving in the communications battalion, also had an office phone.

But at that moment I had no time for any of them.

The main thing is that the chief of the political department of Fleet Aviation hasn’t gone home yet, the irritating thought drilled into my head. Of course, I could reach him at home, but then I’d have to involve a switchboard operator and give my name. And then anonymity would be impossible.

I entered the room, locked the door, and dialed the number of our chief political officer.

I was lucky for the second time that day. Despite it being after six in the evening, the general was still at his desk. As soon as he picked up and identified himself, I did not introduce myself.

“Comrade General, the crew scheduled to depart the day after tomorrow on a state assignment for an interna-tional flight to Vietnam is currently drinking in the bar at Vladivostok Airport.”

I deliberately darkened the picture by choosing the most negative possible wording for the consumption of al-cohol. Who would later bother to determine the line between two mugs of beer and two or three bottles of vod-ka?
The machine had been set in motion. For the head of the political service, a signal like that was the same as a command given by an experienced dog handler.

So. Attack had been spoken. Now we would wait for morning.

While I rubbed my hands in anticipation of pleasant news, the general called my regimental commander and ordered him to immediately locate the commander of the First Squadron and his navigator, then report where they had been found.

Sensing trouble, the colonel first called both men at home. Their alarmed wives answered that their husbands had not yet returned from duty.

So they went to the airport, the commander guessed.

The airport beer bar was the only place in town where the military patrol did not hassle officers who visited in uniform. The commander entered and, among two dozen other officers and warrant officers, immediately spot-ted the men he was looking for.

The majors were seated at the same table. In front of each stood two empty mugs and two full ones.

Approaching them, the commander said:
“I’m waiting for both of you in the car at the main entrance.”

They drove back to regimental headquarters in complete silence. The colonel badly wanted to tell his subordi-nates exactly what he thought of them but starting that conversation in front of the seaman-driver was not wise.

In his office, the regimental commander let his nerves loose. After raging for several minutes, he picked up the direct line to the head of the political department and reported that both wanted officers were in his office.

“Where did you find them?” the general asked.
“In the airport bar,” the colonel replied. “But they weren’t drunk at all,” he tried to defend them.
“Of course,” the general answered sarcastically. “They went there for lemonade. You can tell those fairy tales to the aviation commander tomorrow.”

He hung up.

The commander looked bleakly at the pale faces of the pilots caught red-handed and said:
“What are you standing here for? Go back to the bar. Finish your beer, since you were in such a hurry to drink it. Now that snot-nosed Romanov will fly to Vietnam instead of you.”

The next morning, the formidable pre-flight inspection team checked the readiness of both crews. Until the reg-imental commander spoke with the fleet aviation commander, no changes were made to the execution plan. Paying little attention to my crew, the inspectors gave us the highest marks.

Perhaps the scores were inflated. The staff colonels may simply have felt sorry for the backups who had com-pleted such a large amount of work in so short a time.
After entering the commander’s office and reporting the results, the inspection’s chairman—the deputy com-mander of Fleet Aviation for combat training—called his superior and reported that both crews were fully ready for the upcoming flight.
The aviation commander ordered him to hand the phone to the regimental commander, and when the colonel identified himself, asked:
“So where did you find your falcons yesterday?”
“In the beer bar, Comrade Lieutenant General.”
“Then the backups fly tomorrow. As I understand from my deputy’s report, they prepared no worse than the primary crew.”

He hung up.

The colonel said quietly:
“That’s exactly what’s strange.”

As soon as the inspection left, I was summoned to the regimental commander’s office. In the presence of my squadron commander, the colonel announced that, by decision of the aviation commander, the state assignment was being placed on my shoulders.

Despite my youth and bitter experience, he said, he was confident I would carry it out with honor.

I left the office feeling like the Roman triumphator Octavian Augustus, granted the highest honor by the Senate for his invaluable personal contribution to the decisive victory over the enemy.

Before me stood a difficult task: not to show the joy bursting inside me.
After all, my service in the regiment would not end with this Vietnam assignment. In a month I would have to return to Artyom. And although I was the son-in-law of a rear admiral, that was still less than being the great-nephew of Julius Caesar, as Emperor Augustus had been.
It was unlikely I would return as a triumphator.
Someone, weighing all the pros and cons, might well figure us out. Though, of course, no one would be able to prove anything.

As Stalin’s prosecutor general Andrey Vyshinsky—who sent hundreds of thousands to the Gulag and tens of thousands before firing squads—once said:
“Confession is the queen of evidence.”

And I would never confess to anything.



Chapter 28

I ran from regimental headquarters to the aircraft parking area—I couldn’t wait to tell my crew.

By the time I got there, I was breathing hard.

Climbing into the cramped cabin, still catching my breath, I looked at them.

“We’re flying.” I said, unable to hide a hint of satisfaction. “That’s the good news. The bad news is we’ve got almost no time to prepare.”
“We’re ready,” the navigator replied lazily, setting his cards aside with visible reluctance.
“We’re ready for a ferry flight, not for a deployment. And those are two very different things. So listen to your mission. Sergey”—I turned to the co-pilot—“as soon as you change into civilian clothes, get to a baby food store and buy as much powdered formula as you can carry. At least a parachute bag full.”

My co-pilot nodded silently.

“Radio operator, gunner—you’re in charge of finding and buying a seawater desalination unit. As much as you can get. Vadim, condensed milk—bring as much as you can carry. Gena, I remember you’ve got a contact in the supply warehouse—buy uniform shirts from him. And all of you”—I looked around at the crew—“dig through your closets. Anything uniform you haven’t worn to rags—tomorrow it’s on board.”
“Commander, what kind of inventory is this?” warrant officer Onoprienko, the radio operator, asked. “Desali-nation units, baby food, condensed milk, naval shirts?”
“Nikolai, you’ve never been to Vietnam, have you? No, you haven’t,” I answered for him. “I haven’t either. But experienced transport guys say two or three kilos of desalination gear can easily be traded with the Vietnamese for a VCR or a game console. Two cans of condensed milk buy you a bottle of rice vodka. One uniform shirt—five bottles. You see? Customs in Tashkent won’t let us take alcohol, but condensed milk is fine. And they won’t touch the shirts either. Got it?”
“So we’re specializing in electronics and vodka, is that right, Commander?” Vasiliev asked.
“Vadim,” I said gently, “we’re specializing in money. What brings it doesn’t matter. Personally, I’d prefer pearls and gold jewelry—but if electronics pay better, then electronics it is. Discussion over. Go home. I’ll see you at breakfast in the flight mess at six.”

Five minutes later, only the aircraft technician and I remained under the plane.

“Gennadiy, we need to talk,” I said to Rybnikov as he locked the hatch.

Rybnikov stood on the ladder, struggling to press his seal into the sun-softened putty. It kept spreading useless-ly under the brass stamp.

“Use a strip of paper,” I said. “Sign it and stick it across the door.”

He didn’t even look up.

“And when the duty officer sees that?” he said. “You think he’ll admire my initiative? He’ll drag me out of bed and ask why the aircraft wasn’t sealed properly.”

I watched him fight the melting putty for another second.
“Then stop thinking,” I said. “Just keep pressing.”

I gave it a moment, then added, almost casually, “Can you get mercury overnight?”

“Mercury?” he repeated, staring at me.

I nodded.

“What do you need it for?”
“It’s the most valuable trade item in Vietnam. I don’t know why they need it, but they say it’s worth more than gold there.”
“Commander, I can get mercury, sure. But first—it’s already worth more than gold here. And second—maybe we shouldn’t mess with it. That stuff’s dangerous. Think about it: if we get caught at the border with baby food or desalination units, we’ll get a reprimand. If they catch us with mercury, we’re all going to prison. Or worse—we poison ourselves.”
“All right. Forget it. For now, what I listed earlier is enough.”


On Thursday, with a refueling stop in Irkutsk, we made it to Tashkent. We spent the night, cleared customs and border control without trouble, took off, and set course for Karachi. Carefully threading our way past mountain peaks—sharp, snow-covered ridges that seemed almost to scrape our wings—we pushed on toward the Ganges Valley as fast as we could.

Not long before, a Moscow crew returning from Hanoi had crashed in those same mountains.

After taking off from Karachi on their final flight, passing between Peshawar and Islamabad at eight thousand meters, they flew straight into a severe storm. Instead of helping the crew avoid icing zones, Pakistani air traffic control insisted they maintain their assigned corridor. Unable to maneuver freely and boxed in by the terrain, the crew saw a wide band of hail ahead—and turned too late.

Ice the size of chicken eggs tore through the oil radiators of three out of four engines. During the turn, the dam-aged engines failed one by one. With seventy-five percent of its thrust gone, the aircraft rolled and descended, slamming into a mountain near Chitral at five thousand meters.

The crew were cursing everything and everyone once they realized it was over. Even the members of the inves-tigation commission—people used to hearing cockpit recordings—found it hard to listen. You can’t put into words what it felt like for the pilots who later heard that tape during the debrief.
Usually, crews die in silence. The pilots fight to save the aircraft to the very end, and everyone else believes in them. Sometimes they fly into mountains in cloud on approach without even having time to key the micro-phone. Sometimes, a second or two before impact, one of the pilots realizes there’s no way out and mutters a single crude word.

Take out the profanity, and it could be translated in many ways: “That’s it,” or “We’re done,” or “Here we go,” or simply “Damn.”

Only rarely does a crew lose faith so early. After the second engine failed, the Moscow crew’s chances had al-ready dropped to zero. When oil pressure fell below critical and the third prop feathered automatically, they all understood at once what that word meant—and that it had come for them.

That’s why they kept cursing for four full minutes as they descended in a banking fall from eight thousand me-ters to five.

It’s worth noting that they had a precise weather forecast for the route. Whether it was greed—since an un-scheduled overnight stay in Karachi would have cost each crew member fifty dollars—or the Russian “maybe we’ll make it through” that did them in, no one knows.

What is clear is this: they made a conscious decision to fly into the storm—with no alternate airfield.


After making it safely to Karachi, we refueled, took off again, and set course for the Burmese city of Mandalay.

Flying over northern India, between the winding channel of the full-flowing Ganges and the border with Nepal, I watched the sharp peaks of the Himalayas and found myself thinking about events that had taken place here more than a century ago.

“A hundred and thirty years ago, the sepoys rose up here—Muslim and Hindu mercenaries who had helped the British keep millions of Indians in line. The trigger was a rumor, spread by someone unknown, that the rifle cartridges were greased with a mixture of pork and beef fat. A curious coincidence with the end of the Crimean War,” I thought, developing my little conspiracy theory. “Whoever spread that rumor among armed Muslims and Hindus knew exactly what they were doing. For some, the pig was unclean—anything associated with it was forbidden to touch. For others, the cow was sacred, and its fat was just as untouchable. Looks like agents of His Imperial Majesty Alexander II did their part, planting the idea that the British were deliberately humiliating their loyal subjects.”

Strange thoughts fill your head on long flights. I look at the Ganges, think about the sepoys—and suddenly Vereshchagin’s painting of how their uprising was crushed comes to mind.

…hundreds of rebellious sepoys were tied to the mouths of cannons and blown apart with powder alone—no shot needed. A “great improvement,” as the painter wrote, over having their throats cut or their bellies slit open.

And fifty kilometers later, my mind drifts again—to another doomed flight.

Somewhere down there, far below, six Russian guys are rotting in prison among lice-ridden Indian criminals, dragged into a commercial scheme.

The crew of a small An-26 transport had been hired by a British national in Sri Lanka. They took off from Trin-comalee, in the north of the island, carrying a load of crates. According to the plan the Englishman had filed, they were supposed to land in Madras and hand over the cargo. But as soon as the aircraft reached the Indian coast, the client ordered them down to “one thousand five hundred” and told them to open the cargo ramp.

Constantly checking the map against the terrain below—and already familiar with the cargo release system—he dumped the crates over the jungle using the conveyor system in the cargo hold.

A fatal mistake followed—one born of the mismatch between the measurement systems used by Her Majesty’s former colonies and the “comrades” from Eastern Europe.
The owner of the cargo requested a descent to “fifteen hundred,” meaning feet.
Our pilots leveled off at fifteen hundred—meters.

Dropped from three times the intended altitude, the cargo drifted far from the drop zone and ended up in the hands of government forces.

The crates, as you might guess, contained weapons.

The aircraft landed safely in Madras. The client paid the captain in cash and disappeared. The entire crew was arrested by Indian security services in their hotel that same evening.

The Supreme Court of India sentenced all six accomplices of terrorism to death. But the traditionally friendly relations between the Soviet Union and India stayed the executioner’s hand.

Damn, the kind of things that run through my head in flight. Sergey is asleep. The radio operator has gone off to the pressurized compartment to play backgammon with the flight engineer.
Communications are being handled by an interpreter assigned to our crew for the flight—a quiet observer with  duties that went far beyond radio communication.

Now there’s a man with a perfect job.
Not even a job—pure honey.

He only flies abroad.

Apart from handling radio communication in English, he has no visible duties.

Only one invisible one: carefully recording everything that happens within the crew while abroad, and after re-turning to base, submitting a full report to the “special section” of military counterintelligence.

Thank God I won’t have to drag him around Vietnam with me. And thank the Communist Party of the USSR that the entire air traffic control service of the Democratic Republic has been trained in the Soviet Union and can handle radio traffic in Russian.

We passed Bangladesh. One hour to Mandalay. We’ll refuel there and, if there are no delays with fuel or weath-er, take off straight for Hanoi.


Chapter 29

On our first morning in Vietnam, we familiarized ourselves with the local military authorities—and with the scale of the task ahead.

Just as we’d expected, this was no all-inclusive paradise.

Daily flights lay before us, crisscrossing a country that was tiny compared to the vastness of the Soviet Union. These were short legs—more suited to smaller transport planes like the An-26—but the cargo was often so bulky that even our hold could barely accommodate it, let alone the An-26’s, which was only a third the size.

My assignment that day was to transport air conditioners from Haiphong to Ho Chi Minh City.
The dispatcher had warned me in advance:
“Load as many as you can.”
“How many is that?” I asked.
“A shipment just came in from Odessa,” he replied. “You can imagine how many units fit into a fifty-thousand-ton bulk carrier.”

I could.

As I stepped out of the dispatcher’s office, a crowd of locals immediately surrounded me.

I had no idea how they knew about the flight. The Vietnamese seemed to possess an almost uncanny awareness of everything happening at the airfield. They already knew my destination and were pressing money into my hands from all sides, trying to secure a place on board.

I pushed my way toward the airport hotel. Just before the entrance, the crowd stopped abruptly—as if they had hit an invisible wall.

The “wall” was a sentry.

He stood there like a monument, as if he had spent his entire life in an honor guard unit—watching over Lenin’s mummy in Moscow or Ho Chi Minh’s in Hanoi.

If I hadn’t been watching him so closely, I would have missed the barely perceptible movement he made.

The barrel of his Kalashnikov shifted just a fraction toward my would-be passengers—and they immediately took a couple of steps back.

“Just like the Bandar-log under Kaa’s spell,” I thought with a faint smirk, recalling Kipling’s The Jungle Book.

I found my co-pilot, Sergey, inside the hotel and pulled him aside.


I pointed toward the group outside.
“Make a list of passengers for tomorrow. We’re flying to Ho Chi Minh via Haiphong. Collect payment. Tell them to be here at eight sharp.”
“How many can we take?” he asked. “And what do we charge?”

I glanced at the crowd.
“They’re small,” I said. “Call it a hundred pounds each. We can fit about thirty into a ten-seat cabin.”
“And the price?”
“As much as they’re willing to pay.”
“And one more thing. I’ll choose one passenger myself. She’ll pay me in full—with herself.”

Sergey smirked.
“Can I have one too?”
“Next time.”

While he went to fetch a passenger list, I stepped back outside.

The moment I crossed the invisible line, the locals sprang to their feet as one and broke into a loud, chaotic chatter.
I winced as if from a toothache.

Then I shoved two fingers into my mouth and let out a piercing whistle.

The effect was immediate. The noise collapsed into silence just as abruptly as it had begun. A second earlier they had been a restless, buzzing mass—now they stood frozen, watching me, waiting.

“Do you understand Russian?” I asked.

Heads nodded eagerly.

“Thirty people will go. Decide among yourselves.”

I swept my gaze over them, picked out a pretty girl, and beckoned her with a finger.

Keeping her eyes on the ground and clutching a basket with her belongings, she obediently shuffled toward me.

“A student?” I asked.

Without lifting her gaze, she nodded.

“Want to go to Ho Chi Minh City to see your mother for the holidays?”

She nodded again, several times.

I took her by the chin, lifted her face, and studied it carefully.

By local standards, she could be called beautiful. The only thing that gave me pause was her childlike height—
the top of her head didn’t even reach my shoulder.

Behind me, Sergey muttered:
“Your taste is getting younger, Commander.”
“You’re mistaken,” I said. “She’s grown. Just small.”

He chuckled.

I placed my hand on the girl’s neck and gently turned her to face the others.
“She’s flying with us tomorrow morning,” I announced clearly.

I had no intention of starting the next day with a quarrel among my passengers over a girl traveling for free.
The Vietnamese began talking among themselves, clearly in agreement.

The girl dropped to her knees, took my hand in both of hers, and started kissing it. I carefully helped her back to her feet and, looking her straight in the eyes, said quietly:
“You’ll have time to kiss me later—and not just my hand.”

I wasn’t sure she understood what I meant, but she nodded so eagerly that I caught myself thinking:
Hope her head doesn’t come off.

We spent the rest of the evening and part of the night under the mosquito net hanging over my bed.

In the morning, I found her sitting on the ground near the entrance to the hotel. Not wanting to disturb my sleep, she had slipped out quietly as soon as I fell asleep. Afraid I might forget her by morning, she had spent the rest of the night by the door.

Well, we both got what we wanted.


At breakfast, I sat with the navigator, Vasiliev.

Over a plate of rice and meat, I found myself philosophizing about the Vietnam War, sharing my insights with the navigator.

“Vadim, do you know what Americans were dying for in Vietnam fifteen years ago?”
“For an idea,” Vasilyev replied between bites. “They hate Marxism—taking factories from capitalists, giving them to workers. Land redistribution too.”
“You’re wrong,” I said. “We fly for an idea. They didn’t.”
“I fly for money,” he shrugged.
“Our salary isn’t money,” I said. “It’s pocket change.”


The rice was excellent, but the conversation seemed more appealing. I pushed my plate aside, wiped the grease of some unknown animal from my lips with a napkin, and went on:
“I kept wondering why American soldiers fought so fiercely for South Vietnam. What the hell did they need it for? Sure, when crazy politicians talk about defending democracy against communist contagion, behind closed doors they’re discussing economic interests. But what made an ordinary John from Texas or Michael from California throw himself with a grenade in hand at a machine gun in tropical swamps—I just couldn’t get it.

They weren’t defending their Mississippi from bloodthirsty Russians, but the stinking Mekong, carrying brown
water full of waste from Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia.”
“So, did you figure it out?” Vadim asked, still eating.
“I did. Last night. They were fighting for sexual freedom. It hit me—here you could sleep around freely, cheap-ly, without consequences. A prostitute costs next to nothing. Asking a girl to sleep with you is about as safe as ask-ing for the time.”
“We don’t get jailed for that either,” the navigator objected.
“True, no jail. But one out of four will slap you. Two more will get offended and walk away or tell you to get lost. And only one will give you what you want. That’s twenty-five percent—not great odds. And you’ll spend half the night listening to how she’s not what you think, and how you’re some exceptional man she couldn’t refuse. Even so, we should consider ourselves lucky.”
“Why?”
“Because in the States it’s a nightmare. Men are afraid to even compliment a woman. The moment something’s off, they call the police or their lawyer. They call it sexual harassment. Nasty business.”
“And prostitutes?”
“Two dollars a minute? Not everyone can afford that. Minimum’s a hundred bucks an hour. How much fun can you have at those prices? So, after last night with a local girl, I realized—it’s not a bad deal to shed some blood for that kind of freedom. We cut them off from their global playground back in ’61—Cuba. They were ready to start World War III over it. Then Vietnam. Imagine the losses. They must hate us for that. Ideas? They don’t care about ide-as, Vadim. Women come first, ideology second.”
“Those are some conclusions you’ve got. Finish up, let’s go,” said the navigator.
“It’s all cold already. And we’re running out of time,” I replied.


The flight engineer settled the passengers in the pressurized compartment, the co-pilot wrapped things up with the head of the military sector at Hanoi airport, and we took off for Haiphong to pick up the cargo.
At Cat Bi Airport, in the port city, there were no taxiways. Once we cleared the concrete runway, we rolled onto a small patch of asphalt in front of a battered terminal building.
Waiting for us on a huge white “H” painted on black bitumen were two ZIL-157 trucks loaded with crates of air conditioners.
I climbed down the ladder and headed to the edge of the helipad to take a leak. The “H” under the trucks stood for Helicopter.
I had barely finished when a senior lieutenant in tropical naval uniform approached me. Blue shorts, a matching shirt and cap made him look more like a camp counselor from Artek than an officer.
He reported that he’d been ordered to escort ten tons of cargo to Ho Chi Minh City—and complained that there were no Vietnamese stevedores available.
I told the flight engineer to organize the loading using the passengers we had on board.
“I was told I’d be flying alone with the cargo,” the lieutenant said. “Where did the passengers come from?”
“Ask one more question like that,” I cut him off, “and you’ll be loading all ten tons yourself.”
“Sorry, Commander. I didn’t think before I spoke,” he said, embarrassed.
The navigator came back from the weather office and handed me the forecast, looking grim. I glanced at it.
“Did you file for an alternate?”
“Yes. Cam Ranh. But I wouldn’t recommend we even take off. By the time we reach Ho Chi Minh City, a warm front will be moving over the area.”
“Out here, all the fronts are warm,” I said, amused by my own joke.
“No—look closer,” he insisted, taking the chart back. “Listen to this: heavy convective rain, surface winds thir-ty meters per second, gusts up to forty, cloud base one hundred meters, visibility in precipitation two hundred meters. Lightning likely.”
He put the forecast back into his folder, narrowed his eyes, and tried one more time:
“Why risk it? Let’s delay until tomorrow. Think about that Moscow crew that went down in Pakistan. Same kind of weather.”
“I did think about them when we flew over the place where they crashed. Our situation is different. Tell me—what do we do with our little jungle passengers? We took their money to get them to Ho Chi Minh City.”
“We take them back to Hanoi.”
“And how do we refund them? The head of the military sector won’t give back the twenty-five percent he took from our co-pilot for signing the flight paperwork.”
“We borrow the money. Pay it back later.”
“Let’s say we find the money and refund everyone. By tomorrow, all of Hanoi will be calling us bad pilots. You can’t explain to them what a tropical warm front means for an aircraft. So we can’t go back—and we can’t stay in Haiphong. We’ve passed the point of no return. The Rubicon is crossed, and the bridges are burned behind us. There’s only one way now—forward.
And besides, we have an alternate. The Moscow crew didn’t. If we can’t land in Ho Chi Minh City, we’ll divert to Cam Ranh Air Base. Plenty of Russian women there—waitresses, nurses, finance clerks. Their own men have probably grown old to them. We’ll show up fresh.
You know anything about Cam Ranh?”
“No,” Vasiliev said, still frowning.
“Then listen,” I said. “I’ll tell you the story of that base while the ants haul the Baku air conditioners into the aircraft.”


We moved away from the aircraft and sat down on the grass in the shade of tropical trees at the edge of the ramp. Settling in comfortably, I began my lecture:
“Cam Ranh Air Base was built by the Americans in the deep-water Cam Ranh Bay in the mid-sixties. It suited the Pentagon perfectly for bombing territory controlled by the Viet Cong.”
“I know where the base is,” the navigator cut in. “Better tell me why they needed it. Weren’t their carrier-based aircraft enough?”
“During the war, B-52 bombers flew out of there. That’s not your carrier-based A-7 Corsair II. The difference in payload and range is substantial. The Americans put a lot of weight on that base. President Lyndon Johnson even visited it right after construction was finished. At a rally marking the occasion, he declared that the Stars and Stripes would fly over it forever.”
“Sounds like whoever wrote that speech set him up,” Vadim said. “A politician at that level couldn’t ignore the possibility of pulling out of Vietnam.”
“They’ll be back here,” I said. “You’ll see.”
“Another war?”
“No, Vadim. They won’t take losses like that a second time. It’ll be easier to pay rent than to fight for it again. We’re here for free—out of gratitude. But gratitude has limits. American money doesn’t. The moment our con-tract ends, they’ll come in with cash. Poor as they are, the Vietnamese will have to forget the napalm, the hun-dreds of thousands killed, the millions crippled.
So historically speaking, Johnson was right. Their flag will fly over this base again—just not until we’ve taken ours down. And don’t forget, when he said that, the war was far from over. The peace agreement wasn’t signed until January 27, 1973, and even after that the North kept finishing off the South for another two years.
So listen about the base,” I added, mentally comparing myself to our deputy commander for political affairs, “we’ll talk politics back home.”

I shifted slightly on the grass.

I do like myself—priceless as I am. I’ll make at least a general one day.

The comparison wasn’t in the general’s favor. I knew far more about world politics than our head of political affairs ever would.

Smiling at the absurd thought, I went on:
“A few years after the base was opened, the Americans began running their first experiments with trained dol-phins—armed with explosives and cylinders of paralyzing gas—to destroy enemy ships and divers. Later, their State Department declassified data claiming that up to sixty combat swimmers had been killed by these trained dolphins while attempting to sabotage ships in the harbor.”
“We’ve got dolphins trained in Crimea too, near Sevastopol,” the navigator cut in. “Just no one to use them on.”
“I’ve heard. But I doubt our scale matches what the Yankees were doing here. Despite the ban on hunting ma-rine mammals, the U.S. Congress authorized the Navy to capture twenty-five dolphins and sea lions annually for defense purposes.”
“Valeriy, you said they killed around sixty divers—but how many Vietnamese did they kill overall? Ever come across numbers?”
“Back home, no. But I spoke to a local officer here—he said officially about a million died during the war. In reality, more than three.
Anyway, back to our sheep. After the Americans pulled out of South Vietnam, our leadership hoped Hanoi would lease the base to us.”
“Why would we even need it?” Vadim muttered. “If you think about it, we barely have enough to eat at our own bases. And here we are, halfway across the world, stirring things up.”
“Good question—just keep your voice down,” I said. “Otherwise, we’ll be flying out of here very quickly—and not as crew, but as suspects in anti-Soviet propaganda.
Why do we need it? You asked. I can explain. The Cold War isn’t over. Remember what the party secretary used to say—we’re surrounded by enemies?
But seriously, the Ministry of Defense wanted our fleet permanently stationed off Vietnam. Shift the balance of power in the Pacific. The Americans have bases in the Philippines, Japan, South Korea. We get one in Vietnam.
But our ‘brothers communists’ weren’t in a hurry to repay us—for the weapons, for our pilots who fought Phantoms in tropical skies.
Vietnam agreed to hand over Cam Ranh only because of the Chinese.”
“What do you mean?”
“You remember Pol Pot in Cambodia?”
“The one who wiped out half his population with iron rods? Yeah.”
“When he got on Vietnam’s nerves, they kicked him out. But he had Chinese backing. So Beijing decided to teach Hanoi a lesson.
In the winter of ’79, Chinese infantry pushed toward Hanoi. The Vietnamese pulled their army south and sent in militia instead. Didn’t matter—ninety-nine percent of the men had been through the war. They fought just as well as regular troops.
After two months of trench fighting, we stepped in. The Pacific Fleet moved into the Yellow Sea, and the Trans-Baikal Military District deployed along the Chinese border. The Chinese didn’t want that fight—they pulled back.
In May ’79, Vietnam handed us both bases—naval and air—for twenty-five years, free of charge.
It would be a sin for us not to visit a place like that. Might even get a swim in. I hear the water’s excellent.”
“Where do you learn all this?” the navigator asked, impressed.
“Try reading Pravda once in a while, Vadim Mikhailovich,” I said. “Instead of flipping through Playboy all the time.”
“Then let’s fly there right now,” he said.
“No. First we try to drop off the passengers and unload the cargo in Ho Chi Minh City.”
“Your call, Commander.”
The flight engineer came up and handed me a stack of pink banknotes with the face of old Ho Chi Minh.
“What’s this?” I asked, slipping the money into my flight suit pocket.
“Dong,” Rybnikov said.
“I can see that. Where’d you get this much?” I asked, suddenly alert.
“While the passengers were hauling two hundred air conditioners, I drained two hundred liters of fuel from the belly tank and sold it to the truck drivers. They even had a barrel with them—said they carry it just in case.”
“Good initiative,” I said, feeling the tension ease. We could always write off that much fuel as headwind. “Car-go secured?”
“Yes. Crates are tied down. Passengers are seated.”
“Good.”
I turned toward the aircraft.
“Then as Admiral Farragut once said—‘Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead.’”
And with that, I climbed aboard.




Epilog

The first signs of the approaching warm front appeared a hundred kilometers from the airfield. Thin cirrus clouds began to show ahead.

I requested actual weather from Ho Chi Minh control. The military sector controller reported no rain over the runway yet, but expected it any minute.

At thirty miles out, we began our descent. I eased the aircraft carefully under the massive wall of cloud hanging above us. Going into it was out of the question. A tropical warm front can throw lightning strong enough to burn out every piece of electronics on board.

Still hoping for luck, I requested a straight-in approach.

Fifteen miles from the runway, the first heavy drops hit the windshield.

Damn. Won’t make it before the downpour. Going to minimums.
Below that—we’re not meant to land.
But we’ll see.

I decided to go down to minimums.
“Descend to two hundred feet.”

On final, the sixty-ton aircraft was tossed around like a small boat in a storm. The wind kept shifting, making it impossible to hold a steady correction.

Rain flooded the windshield. Even at full speed, the wipers couldn’t clear it.

I brought the aircraft down to two hundred feet and held it on the glide.

The cabin fell silent.

The wind kept hitting us from different directions, throwing the aircraft off balance. I worked the yoke left and right, fighting the yaw, holding course, speed, and descent.

“Two thousand feet,” the navigator reported the distance to the threshold.

Rain hammered the windshield. The wipers were useless.
“Eighteen hundred.”

Another gust rolled the aircraft. I corrected it immediately.
“Fifteen hundred.”
“Lights in sight, one o’clock,” Sergey said.

Approaching two hundred feet above the ground level, I was already preparing for a go-around. My right hand held the yoke, my left rested on the throttles—ready to push them forward the moment we hit minimums.

“Runway lights in sight, one o’clock,” Sergey reported.
“A quatre a mile to the field,” the navigator said immediately. “Too early for runway lights.”

I wanted to believe Sergey. I rolled the aircraft right and eased the yoke forward. The nose dropped slightly.
The aircraft lined up with the bright lights ahead.

I hadn’t even leveled the wings when we clipped something.
The aircraft jolted hard to the right.

Instinct took over.

I caught the roll instantly, shoved the throttles forward to takeoff power, and pulled the yoke back.

The propellers bit into the thick, wet air, fighting for lift. The aircraft resisted—heavy, wounded—but began to climb.

With the aircraft stabilized in a steady climb, I requested a situation report.

The reports came in on their own, from nose to tail.

“Navigator—okay.”
“Co-pilot—okay.”
“Flight engineer—fine.”
“Radio—good.”
From the cargo compartment the loadmaster reported: “Bruises. Nothing serious.” 

Then, just before the gunner’s turn, his voice came again—no longer steady:
“Captain—wait… We’ve got a hole in the fuselage. Big one—about ten square feet. Hydraulic fluid’s leaking—lines are torn. Crates broke loose from the upper tier—struck the inner skin… it’s damaged.”
“We’re alive… It’s good,” the gunner said quietly.
“For how long?” the navigator asked.
“Not the end,” came the loadmaster’s voice again. “Just the beginning. Right main gear is gone—ripped off completely. All four wheels.”
“Gear won’t retract,” the flight engineer said.

I understood that immediately but said nothing.

Landing on one main gear was a different kind of problem. We had never trained for it.

No nose gear? Easy—touch down on the mains and hold it off.

No gear at all? Belly landing—straightforward.

One main gear? That was something else entirely.

I knew that once speed dropped below a hundred knots, the damaged side would hit the concrete—and we would lose control.

I’d figure something out over the alternate.

“Navigator, heading to Cam Ranh.”
“Zero four five,” Vasiliev answered, his voice heavy.
“Co-pilot, inform ATC—diverting to the alternate.”
“You really wanted to go there,” the navigator said.
“Not like this. Enough. Let’s save what’s left.”

On the way to Cam Ranh, the same thought kept returning:
What did we hit?

“Navigator,” I asked, “what do you think?”
“Approach light pole,” he said. “I told you—those weren’t runway lights. Wind shear dropped us lower than expected.

We clipped the system.”
“Looks like you’re right,” I said.

Over Cam Ranh, ATC instructed us to hold and burn fuel down to emergency minimum.

Then came the briefing:
“The runway drains well—American design. Sloped surface, wide ditches on both sides. Under them, a drainage system. But every hundred meters along the runway—concrete wells, about one and a half meters high. That’s your main hazard.”

I kept circling at three thousand feet.
“If you touch down where we light the fire, even if you run off the runway, you’ll miss them.”
“Will the fire be visible?” I asked.
“They’re stacking old aircraft tires now. When you’re ready, they’ll light them. You’ll see the smoke from miles away. B-52 tires burn well.”

A short pause.
“Don’t worry about the fire. Think about how you’re going to land.”


Ten minutes before landing, they lit the fire.
The column of black smoke rose like a signal from another war.
If the wind hadn’t shifted it aside, we wouldn’t have seen the runway at all.

Senior Lieutenants Goncharov and Nikolaienko were hacking at an electrical cable two hundred meters from the runway, deep in dense scrub. Their tropical shirts were soaked with sweat. Cutting through a thick American multi-core cable with axes was no easy task. They had dug it up the previous evening and were now hurrying to finish the job before their fellow servicemen discovered the location of this “golden vein.”

“Igor,” Nikolaienko said, glancing toward the airfield, “look at that smoke rising over the runway… Do you think someone crashed?”
“Who could’ve crashed if nothing’s taken off or landed?” Goncharov shot back. “Use your head. You hear that idiot circling overhead for the past half hour? They lit that fire for him. Now stop talking and chop—I'm almost done on my side.”


The loss of hydraulic pressure meant I couldn’t extend the flaps, so I brought the aircraft in on a shallow, fast approach. Crossing the threshold, I ordered the flight engineer to shut down all four engines. From that moment on, we were flying on inertia alone—nothing but speed and gravity.

At this angle, the aircraft entered ground effect—that peculiar cushion of air every pilot knows exists but struggles to explain to his wife.

The plane hovered three feet above the runway, refusing to settle. We floated another thousand feet before the left main gear finally touched down. I immediately pulled the control column hard to the left, trying to keep her balanced on a single wheel for as long as possible.

She didn’t listen.

The right side slammed into the concrete with a metallic shriek—a sound like a mortally wounded beast. The aircraft veered off the runway, plunged into the drainage ditch, and at full speed drove its glass nose straight in-to a concrete pipe.

‘This is it,’ I thought.

But I was wrong.

Everything to my right was gone.

The cockpit. The crew. Torn away as if they had never existed.
Slowly, I turned my head to the left.

Not far from my half-ruined aircraft, two vehicles came to a halt: a fire engine and a combined watering truck—known colloquially as a “CWT” or simply a water tanker.

A brave soul clutching a fire extinguisher scrambled up onto the curved tank of the water tanker, then leapt on-to the aircraft’s wing and ran toward me.

So that’s why they came, I thought.
Only then did I notice the smell.
Burning cotton.
The fuselage interior lining was smoldering.

 

The petty officer flipped the extinguisher upside down and slammed it against the aircraft’s skin just below the window.

Nothing. Not even a hiss.

Where did he even get that thing? Probably grabbed it off the wall at headquarters on his way over here.

He threw it aside, swore viciously, and shouted for a hose.

The hose worked better.

He soaked me—and what remained of my crew—before turning the stream toward the passenger cabin door. Smoke was pushing through the seams.

Two officers ran up with axes. They stopped a couple of meters from me.

“Igor, cut around the window!” Nikolaenko shouted. “No structural frame there!”
“Don’t teach your father how to make kids,” Goncharov snapped, swinging the axe into the fuselage.”

They worked side by side.

Until then, the fire had been suffocating inside. The first blows fed it air.

Thick, acrid smoke burst outward.

Then flame.

“Comrade Colonel!” a young voice shouted. “The aircraft is on fire!”

“Then put it out, damn it!” the garrison commander shouted.

The opening was finally large enough to force the hose inside, and the sailors flooded the passenger compart-ment until no trace of smoke remained.

Soon the fire truck ran dry.

The Colonel, who had been watching from a distance, rushed to the driver’s cab and hammered onto the door.

“What the hell are you waiting for? Go get more water—now!”

But the truck didn’t move.

Poorly connected hoses had spilled water beneath it, turning the ground to slurry. The wheels spun uselessly, sinking deeper into the mud.

The firefighters abandoned the aircraft and turned to the truck. A thick steel cable appeared—hooks at both ends. They fastened one end to the watering truck, the other to the fire engine.

The watering truck lurched forward.

The cable snapped.

It whipped through the air above their heads, and the men scattered instinctively.

Nikolaenko and Goncharov hacked their way through the side of the An-12 with axes and discovered what amounted to entire “layers” of my illegal passengers packed inside the fuselage. They reported it over the radio to the garrison commander. The Colonel ordered them to abandon the aircraft where they stood and begin evacuating the victims at once.

The base commander’s adjutant cursed the sailors out and ordered them to start pulling the Vietnamese out of the aircraft. The naval aviation sailors, dazed by the flood of conflicting commands coming at them from all di-rections, grabbed stretchers and rushed toward the mangled plane.
By that time, Nikolaenko had already forced his way inside. He cleared the pile of air conditioners blocking the aircraft’s entry door and managed to open it.

The sailors carried the bodies from the passenger compartment to the concrete runway. There, a doctor checked each Vietnamese for a heartbeat, hoping to find at least one still alive. But the frail, yellow-skinned bodies were lifeless. Pairs of sailors dropped the dead one after another onto the concrete and ran back for the next victims of my negligence.

If I could have spoken, I would have told the boys,
“Take your time. Anyone who didn’t suffocate in the smoke—you drowned when you flooded the smoldering cotton.”

But of course, they were not the ones to blame.

A crane pulled up. Welders began cutting my seat out of the twisted mass of metal.

What was left of Sergey, the co-pilot, and Gena, the flight engineer, had already been recovered and taken away. They decided to deal with the navigator later.

Mechanics and engineers moved around me, busy with their work, pretending not to notice that I was watching them. They were afraid to look at my face. No one wants to see the open eyes of death.

It seemed they had cut everything free and run cables under the seat. Someone shouted:
“Easy… take it slow!”

The rescuers hooked the headrest of my seat, and the crane operator began lifting me carefully on the long boom. I hung in the harness straps.

The pain, which had briefly faded, came back ten times stronger. While I had been studying the wreckage and watching the “rescue,” I had forgotten what condition my own body was in. A groan escaped me before I could stop it.

“The captain’s alive!” the shout passed from one man to another.

The crane set me down between an ambulance and a pile of thirty bodies.

The doctor checked my pulse, shook his head, and said to the nurse kneeling beside me:
“Hurry, Larisa. We may not make it to the infirmary.”

He began cutting the harness straps with a scalpel while she worked on the parachute lines.

They laid me onto a stretcher, loaded me into the ambulance, and we sped down the taxiway—on my final jour-ney.

The nurse sat beside me on a fold-down seat, wiping the sweat from my forehead with a sterile cloth.

Through tears, Larisa told me what she knew: the tail gunner had survived without a scratch. The cargo escort—a First lieutenant—had moved to the tail compartment before landing and was alive too, though he had broken both legs jumping down.

The loadmaster, who had been in the cargo bay, was killed by the air conditioners that tore loose.

I was grateful to her—for the hot tears falling onto my hand, for begging me not to die, to hold on until we reached the infirmary, where they would surely save me.

I was grateful to fate that, in my last moments, such a beautiful girl—Larisa—was beside me.

I died in the ambulance, six  hundred feet short of the intensive care ward—
having chosen not to hold on to this life.