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  But first we had to learn to fly.

  The L-29 was built by Aero Vodochody in Czechoslovakia, and was the standard basic advanced training aircraft of the Warsaw Pact. Over three thousand had been produced. The tandem twin cockpits, each with a complete set of flight controls, sat well forward of the straight wings.

  At Pirsagat I was fortunate once again in the instructor I was assigned. Senior Lieutenant Anatoli Tveretin was demanding and meticulous, but personally relaxed in his approach to flight training. Tveretin, who seemed a young man of almost miraculous patience, never lost his composure. I was lucky because Karpich and I were the only cadets on the lieutenant’s training crew that term. But he did expect us to study hard and not repeat the same mistakes.

  Lieutenant Tveretin reiterated that flying was primarily a physical, not an abstract, exercise. “Zuyev,” he told me that first day I strapped into the front cockpit, “get a good feel of that ejection seat. Pilots have to feel their airplane with their butts.”

  The Americans, he said, had supposedly once conducted an experiment in which they had injected pilots in the ass with novocaine, and none of them could properly land his plane. “The point,” he added, “is that you control the aircraft. The aircraft does not control you.”

  Waiting to take off on my familiarization ride around the training circuits, Lieutenant Tveretin urged me to pay close attention. “If you don’t understand something,” he said, “ask me.”

  He started the engine and we closed and latched our canopies. I was immediately struck by the smell, which I later recognized as the distinctive odor of Soviet military cockpits, a combination of hot electronics, stale sweat, and rubber. It had a sour quality that almost made me gag. Before me, the instrument panel suddenly seemed completely unfamiliar, even though I’d learned the systems perfectly in the classroom. Tveretin released the brake and advanced the throttle. We were trundling along the taxi ramp toward the end of the runway. Now we had swung out and were square on the centerline, facing the broad concrete runway rippling with heat mirage. I hated to admit how nervous I was. In the closed cockpit, with the sun pouring in, the cloying sour smell grew stronger. Luckily our Samarskiye mentors had told us to carry plastic bags in our flight suits in case we got sick on our first training flights. A cadet would be immediately grounded if an instructor reported he had actually vomited in the cockpit. “If you’re going to puke,” our friends warned us, “do it in the bag, then hide the bag.” That same harsh rule, I learned, applied to all Soviet military pilots. This first flight in a jet was not starting well. And then, as if telepathic, Tveretin reassured me. “Fear is normal,” he said calmly. “Don’t be surprised to be afraid. The fear will go away with experience.”

  On this first sortie I was to rest my feet lightly on the rudder pedals and my hand loosely on the control stick to get the feel of the controls. Now Tveretin opened the throttle to full military power and released the brakes. We slid slowly down the runway. The acceleration increased, but we were still rooted to the ground. Only after a ponderously long, deliberate takeoff run did Tveretin gently rotate the nose and we climbed. The gear came thumping up and the flat brown horizon slid away. I felt the stick in my right hand. The airplane was alive.

  Tveretin put the plane through a series of steep quarter-rolls as we climbed around the airfield approach circuit. He was doing me a favor, pointing out the various landmarks below that I would later need to recognize when I flew solo. But tilted way over on the right wing, staring straight down through my canopy as we sailed above the Azerbaijan desert, was not soothing to my stomach. The hot rubbery smell of the cockpit grew worse. I slipped the folded plastic bag from my flight-suit pocket.

  Then, while Tveretin had me hold the controls on the landing approach, I knew I was going to vomit. If I didn’t hide it from the lieutenant, my career as a military pilot was going to end prematurely. “Please take over, Comrade Lieutenant,” I managed, sliding the open bag to my face.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “My kneeboard slipped,” I said into the intercom microphone. Then I vomited up my breakfast.

  Tveretin was too busy flying from the rear cockpit to notice. I knotted the bag and stuck it in my pocket.

  After getting sick three more times — always unnoticed by Tveretin — I learned to skip breakfast and lunch on flying days. Eventually my stomach settled down. Although Tveretin never acknowledged my airsickness, he did explain the Coriolis effect that provoked dizzy nausea when you moved your head too fast during banks and turns. From then on, I moved my head very slowly, especially when we were steeply banked.

  As we trained through that stifling Azerbaijan summer, the Stavka high command in Moscow suddenly announced that the Armavir PVO Academy was being transferred to the Air Force, the VVS. This abrupt transformation, we were told, was part of a general reorganization and modernization of the entire Soviet military ordered by Deputy Defense Minister Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov. The Air Force would be expanded with additional regiments of advanced fighter aircraft, while the bloated and inefficient PVO would be trimmed down to a proper size.

  I had not understood the difference between the two services as a schoolboy in Samara. But a year at the academy had taught me that the PVO Air Defense Force provided much more comfortable duty than the VVS. Despite the dire warnings about the guardhouse, Armavir was a quiet sanctuary from overly strict military discipline. On the other hand, the VVS had a reputation for rigid adherence to regulations and snap inspections by incorruptible teams from the Ministry of Defense. In the PVO command, inspections were usually scheduled months in advance.

  The PVO had evolved during the Great Patriotic War from antiaircraft artillery units and had less of the traditional elan than the VVS, which had descended from the colorful Hussar cavalry regiments. Senior PVO officers had a reputation of being stolid dolts, oxen not thoroughbred horses. One of the forbidden stories at Armavir concerned an account of several PVO generals being flown by helicopter on an inspection tour. When they kept the helicopter crew waiting at one base several hours while the generals enjoyed a long lunch, the pilot got revenge by claiming his engine wouldn’t start because the battery had run down.

  “Comrade Generals,” he said, “you’ll have to get out and push.”

  The credulous generals climbed down, took off their bemedaled uniform blouses, and pushed the gawky Mi-8 along the runway until the pilot decided to hit his start button. Later, one general wrote a report condemning the poor design of the helicopter.

  But we soon discovered that Air Force generals had both similarities and differences. A delegation of senior VVS officers descended on Pirsagat to look over their new charges. One tough, clearly arrogant colonel general named Gorelov, who wore the wings of a Sniper pilot, inspected our barracks. He seemed aghast that the floors and furniture were painted in pleasant shades of blue and green.

  “In the Air Force,” General Gorelov bellowed, hardly controlling his outrage, “we do not have painted furniture. Scrape it all to bare wood.”

  Once Tveretin was satisfied I had mastered the feel of basic flight maneuvers, he nipped any overconfidence I might have exhibited by setting out a more difficult challenge: precision flying.

  “You can even teach a bear to fly,” he said. “It’s really not hard to fly dirty. But a good fighter pilot flies clean.”

  By “clean” he meant flying the aircraft with absolute control and certainty, so that you could consistently arrive at any given point in the sky with a minimum correction. Tveretin’s approach to instruction combined multiple repetitions of basic skills like flying landing approaches with more challenging maneuvers.

  All the cadets were required to keep a personal logbook to record their training sorties. But I had a separate, private logbook in which I carefully noted every phase of my training with brutal honesty. “Cannot manage power for climbing right. Lost 120 feet of altitude on 60-degree turn,” I wrote. Two days later I noted, “Poor elevator trim on left-hand
descent to final approach.” The next week I logged, “Huy ovo, all fucked up,” after a sloppy landing flare.

  In early October, six weeks into our flight training, I was expected to be the first in my crew to solo. But Siskin, my skinny friend from Uralsk, was doing just as well with his instructor. We had each flown over thirty training sorties and could now accomplish the basic curriculum maneuvers required for solo flight. Lieutenant Tveretin, however, was not completely satisfied with my performance, although he assured me I wasn’t a “giraffe,” a student pilot with impossibly slow reactions, as if his hands and feet were too far from his eyes and brain. That was a compliment, coming from him.

  On October 5, 1979, Siskin became the first in our class to solo after thirty-six sorties. Tveretin and I stood on the parking apron, watching Siskin complete his mandatory triple krug oval racetrack maneuver and descend onto final approach for landing.

  “He’s a little short,” I commented.

  Tveretin smiled. “So were you this morning.”

  As always, the lieutenant was right. Siskin had to add power and climb out of his smooth glide slope to make the runway threshold. But he did manage a beautiful touchdown.

  “Tomorrow we practice landings,” Tveretin said.

  And practice we did. I flew five sorties that day and racked up three touch-and-go landings. After we put the airplane to bed that evening, Tveretin turned to me and coolly stated, “If the weather’s halfway decent tomorrow, you will solo.” That night it was hard to fall asleep.

  And the next morning after one quick circuit of the course, my thirty-eighth training sortie at Pirsagat, the deputy squadron commander pronounced me ready to solo.

  “Good luck, Zuyev,” was all the lieutenant said.

  Taxiing out to the runway felt completely familiar. But I didn’t hear Tveretin’s terse comments in my earphones. When I turned onto the centerline and ran up my engine for the instrument check, I somehow still expected to hear his voice. It was hard to believe that I was the only man in the plane.

  I released the brakes. The L-29 was supposedly slow on takeoff. The fellows said you had time to smoke a cigarette before you reached rotation speed. But on this sunny autumn morning in Azerbaijan, the takeoff roll seemed impossibly quick.

  I was climbing straight above the runway. The gear was up and I raised my flaps at 300 feet altitude, just as Tveretin had taught me, before I fully realized I was flying solo. Then I banked right and climbed to fly the oval three-circuit krug pattern at 1,800 feet without incident. Once I was level, I craned my neck to look in the rear cockpit to make sure no one was there. I burst into a loud rendition of the Volga folk song “Stepan Razin,” which celebrated a brave and audacious rebel from czarist times. That was exactly how I felt, brave and daring.

  I was less than three months past my eighteenth birthday, and I had just soloed in a jet aircraft.

  When my class returned to Armavir that December, we found that the Air Force had ordered a complete landscaping of the parklike campus. The old laurel and plane trees that had provided pleasant shade in the summer — and welcome concealment for cadets following the “Ho Chi Minh Trail” to slip over the far wall and into town — were hacked down. The quaint old model of the MiG-15 rotating above the mossy fountain in the parade ground was demolished, replaced by an abstract sculpture of a missile, which the cadets quickly dubbed the “Monument to Hockey Players,” because of its resemblance to stacked hockey sticks.

  Our third semester began just after the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan. Official publications, including Red Star, all proclaimed satisfaction that Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev had allowed the Army to fulfill its “internationalist duty.” In January a political administration colonel from the military district headquarters in Rostov lectured us about the events in Afghanistan. The colonel was unusually informative because he had helped plan the operation. He went through the predictable rationalization for the Soviet invasion, explaining that it had been our duty to protect Socialist democracy in that fraternal country, which was under attack by medieval Muslim fanatics, who had murdered many Soviet citizens struggling to improve backward conditions in Afghanistan.

  Then the colonel described the actual invasion in great detail. He noted how Spetsnaz forces had been infiltrated into Kabul, the capital, where they had seized the international airport, which became an airhead for the Airborne intervention force. Our forces had completely overwhelmed the Islamic bandits who had resisted them. Hafizullah Amin, the Afghan prime minister who had betrayed his Socialist principles, had been “eliminated,” the colonel added. Socialist democracy would soon be restored, despite the machinations of the imperialists, who were trying to stir up resistance among the bandits.

  He reassured us that the Armavir curriculum would not be accelerated because of Afghanistan.

  As I sat in the darkened auditorium, I marveled at the organization and precision of the operation. I was a member of a powerful professional military organization that acted with courageous resolve when necessary.

  When we returned to Pirsagat for advanced L-29 training in March, the focus was on navigation, formation flying, and acrobatic and combat maneuvers, which prepared us to fly the higher performance MiG-21FM. This was a transition aircraft that would sharpen our skills for assignments to combat regiments equipped with the supersonic MiG-23.

  Cross-country navigation over the Azerbaijan desert was a real challenge. Some guys got lost and made it back to base with only the proverbial “bucket of fuel” remaining in their tanks. In such cases, Soviet aviators could switch to radio channel 4 and request a radio-direction-finding (RDF) fix to guide them back to base. Our controllers at Pirsagat were often Central Asians who spoke with strong accents in Russian. But there was one fluent, unaccented Russian voice that sometimes answered on that frequency. It belonged to an Iranian who would try to guide an unwary young Soviet cadet over the border into Iran. We were told that he worked for the American CIA. That was one more pitfall to avoid.

  Our training climaxed that summer with a formal maneuver competition among the cadets. We flew a set of increasingly difficult maneuvers over a three-day period, each sortie flown with a different judge in the backseat.

  The first maneuvers were relatively simple, involving horizontal figure eights that had to be entered and exited at exact, predetermined headings and speeds. But as the competition progressed, we had to fly double spins and split-S’s, again entering the maneuver at a precise compass heading and exiting at a prearranged altitude and speed. I had practiced this stage of the competition repeatedly. I knew exactly when to chop the throttle, how hard to pull back on the stick, and how much rudder pressure was needed. I scored well on the first two days.

  But on the third day of the competition, we had to integrate the vertical, horizontal, and speed elements. I began the last series of maneuvers at an altitude of 9,000 feet and a speed of 270 knots. As before, I had mentally rehearsed the exact sequence many times. By the time I was in my second rolling climb to 9,000 feet, I realized I was almost finished with the hardest segment of the competition and that I had made very few mistakes.

  That afternoon the instructors met to compile the cadets’ cumulative scores. The unattainable perfect competition score totaled 400 points. When they posted the results that evening, I had scored highest with a tally of 380.

  From my point of view, the positive result of our transfer to the VVS was the sudden announcement that the Air Force had chosen Armavir as the first pilots’ academy for an experimental accelerated flight-training program. A select group of cadets from my class were to phase directly from the L-29 trainer to the MiG-23 advanced jet fighter. In the past, both PVO and VVS cadet pilots had to spend several years mastering the complexities of the high-performance MiG-21 before qualifying to fly a “third generation” aircraft like the MiG-23.

  The fifty best-qualified cadets of the 250 who remained in my class were selected for MiG-23 training. Based on my performance
at Pirsagat, I was in this group. So were my friends Sergei Mashenko, “Deep Freeze” Morozov, Dmitri from Leningrad, and “Boris” Bagomedov from Dagestan, one of the few successful Asian cadets.

  The MiG-23 cadets were assembled on a ramp near the Burav runway where a variety of fighter aircraft were kept for familiarization purposes. The big gray MiG-23 parked there was almost twice as long and four times as heavy as the L-29 trainer. The MiG-23 evoked brute power and speed. Its tapered nose ended in the bullet tip of a gray radar dome, from which a titanium Pitot instrument probe extended like a lance. Just aft of the canopy, the two tall, rectangular engine air intakes gaped open, which explained why pilots of the smaller MiG-21 called the MiG-23 the Crocodile. This image was intensified by the widespread main landing gear, protected by the angled plate of mud deflectors, which gave the undercarriage the appearance of a crouching reptile’s clenched legs. In turn, MiG-23 pilots scornfully called the MiG-21 okurok, “cigarette butt.”

  The massive Tumansky R-29 turbofan engine occupied most of the fuselage, terminating in the heavy segmented alloy ring of the afterburner. Thick, swiveling powered differential stabilizers and a hulking vertical tail over twelve feet high made it clear that this aircraft was designed for high supersonic speeds.

  The MiG-23 was a variable-geometry fighter, and its wings were the most striking feature of the aircraft. Set high on the fuselage, they had a tapered cross section, thick near the center and saber-thin at the tips. In flight the plane’s wings could be swung back from the low speed configuration of sixteen degrees from perpendicular to the fuselage, all the way to a sharply swept falcon-tuck of seventy-two degrees for the top supersonic speed of Mach 2.35.