Half an hour later we were in Ivanov’s handsome office. The first thing I noticed were the ultimate symbols of status on the corner of his wide desk: four squat telephones. The telephones complemented the deep leather armchairs. Suddenly I remembered visiting the apartment of my young friend Elena’s family all those years before in Samara’s exclusive Microrayon 4. Then, I had naively assumed these accouterments of wealth and power were the reward for hard work. Now I knew better.
Ivanov, unlike the professional physicians on his staff, saw himself as a gruff frontline troop commander. “Is this the officer who refused to vote?” he snarled, hardly looking at me.
“Yes, Comrade Colonel,” Merkulov answered. “Captain Zuyev wants to discuss the matter of a medical discharge.”
Ivanov glowered, already shaking his head. Again I tried to reasonably explain that I could serve the State better as a civilian, and that I had no need of the small pension due an officer discharged for medical reasons.
Ivanov hardly seemed to listen. Instead, he flipped through the pages of the final review board determination. “You are officially removed from flying duty, Captain,” he said, reading from the dossier. “But you are fit for ground duty. I see no reason whatsoever to grant you a medical discharge.”
He flipped closed the dossier and reached across his desk for Merkulov to take it back. My chance to end this business reasonably had passed. Ivanov, a good apparatchik, was using all that paper in the dossier to keep his ass clean. I could bellow about this injustice for the next seven years in Kirghiz or Uzbekistan and no one would hear me. It was time to gamble.
“Comrade Colonel,” I said slowly, “when was the last time you granted an interview to members of the independent press?”
Ivanov’s head rotated slowly, like a startled land tortoise. He fixed me with his sharp eye. “What are you talking about?”
“Do you remember you had pilots from the Congo in the hospital last autumn?”
Again, his large head moved with the languid wariness of a startled reptile. Beside me, Merkulov was almost trembling with fear.
“What’s wrong with that, Captain?” Ivanov shot back.
“How many had AIDS?” I neglected any honorific title of address. This was not the time for courtesy.
“That’s not your business, Captain.”
“Why not?” I let my anger surface now. “When I was here, I used the same toilets as them and probably was injected with the same hypodermic needles.”
“We handle medical matters here, Zuyev,” the colonel shouted. “All of this is none of your affair.”
“It’s my business if I’ve been infected.” I tried to reason now. “How can you be sure none of the other pilots were exposed to the virus? Shouldn’t we all be tested?”
Now Ivanov sunk deeper into the thick folds of his bemedaled uniform blouse, the tortoise in defense. “Again, Captain, this is not your affair.”
I swallowed, and licked my dry lips. “It seems to me that this scandal has been covered up very well. But, you know, Comrade Colonel, with glasnost, it is my duty as a Communist to bring this matter to the attention of the independent press.”
Finally Merkulov tried to intervene. He realized my intent. “Zuyev, how can you talk to the colonel like this?”
I did not have time to answer. Ivanov leapt to his feet, a bull, no longer the wary tortoise. He was actually sputtering with rage. “Merkulov,” he shouted, “I give you two hours to get this captain out of the hospital. Then we will write a formal report on this outrage to his regiment.”
Merkulov had me by the arm, but I hung back. “Comrade Colonel,” I tried to reason, “you still have a chance to stop this matter before I go to the press. Otherwise, you are making a big mistake.”
Ivanov glared at me, his face a mask of hatred. “Get out!”
I was discharged from the Central Aviation Hospital before noon that day. Normally the bureaucratic process of discharge from a military hospital took several days. But Ivanov’s staff was obviously motivated to be unusually efficient.
PART FOUR
CHAPTER 12
Massacre
April 7–14, 1989
The Aeroflot flight from Moscow to Sochi on the Black Sea was scheduled to land in midafternoon. As always, the twin-jet Tu-134 airliner was filled to capacity. This flight went on to Yerevan and many of the passengers were Armenians. I noticed one group of young men seated behind me who seemed nervous, almost apprehensive. They were whispering among themselves and at one point called over the Armenian flight attendant for a hushed conference.
Their conspiratorial behavior forced me to consider my own situation. Colonel Ivanov probably had good connections in the KGB and the GRU Chief Directorate for Military Intelligence. My desperate attempt to blackmail him to obtain a medical discharge could well indicate that I was capable of even more desperate action. An officer like me serving in a MiG-29 regiment might be considered a dangerous security risk. So there was a good chance the Osobii Otdel would be waiting at the Sochi airport to put me under surveillance.
Then, on the final approach to Sochi airport, I heard the pilot apply full throttle and begin climbing away in an aborted landing. The flaps came up and the landing gear thumped back into their wells. We crossed the coast and banked left onto a southwest heading over the Black Sea. I checked the angle of the sun and noted the time, 2:27 P.M. Ten minutes later we were still heading out to sea and had obviously cleared Soviet airspace. This had to be a hijacking attempt by those furtive young Armenians behind me.
I tried to relax in my seat. This was the height of irony. Every day for the last three months I had been trying to find a foolproof escape route from the Soviet Union, and now I had apparently been given a free ticket to Turkey.
Then the engine pitch changed again and we banked further left, back toward the Soviet mainland. Soon we were set up on final approach to another airport. When we touched down, I realized at once that we had landed at Sukhumi, 150 miles down the coast. As we taxied to the terminal, the attractive young flight attendant finally deigned to tell us what was happening. “Dear passengers,” she said, batting her dark eyes seductively. “We followed our assigned route all the way to Sochi… but then we landed here in Sukhumi.” She laughed sharply and turned her back on us.
Around me the disgruntled passengers were grumbling loudly. Some were on health-cure holidays to resorts near Sochi. The buses from those resorts were waiting over a hundred miles away. These passengers realized that, once more, Aeroflot had taken their money and not delivered proper service.
As I shuffled out past the cockpit, I asked the copilot why we had aborted at Sochi.
“Sudden fog,” he said. “Zero ceiling, zero visibility.”
Walking across the sunny tarmac to the terminal, I considered this piece of news. Obviously the aborted landing had indeed been sudden; we were locked up on short final when the pilot climbed away. If the KGB surveillance team was waiting for me up at Sochi, they probably hadn’t had time to reassign a new team down here. People thought the KGB was omnipotent, with thousands of agents evenly spread across the country. But I knew from my friends Zaour and Vladimir just how shorthanded they were here in Georgia.
I had not earned a free ride to Turkey. But at least I wasn’t being followed yet.
Twenty minutes later the porters shoved my bag off their rusty cart, and I cut through the crowd to the line of Volga and Zhiguli taxis half blocking the crescent drive outside the terminal building. The taxi ride to Tskhakaya normally cost twenty-five rubles per person, but I offered a driver — a mustached young Georgian with prominent gold teeth — seventy-five to take me straight to my base with no side trips to deliver other passengers.