For the first time, I made actual written notes. If the Osobists discovered them, all they’d find was a shopping list for a cake. Let the bastards ponder that.
Then I performed another mental calculation. Sixteen men times two tablets equalled thirty-two. But I wanted them sound asleep, not just groggy. I certainly did not want to give the PVO any of the half hour they needed to come on-line. That precious thirty minutes was my life insurance. So I decided to lace the cake with six times the minimum neozepam required to put those men to sleep. The pharmacy text made it clear that there was no danger of a lethal overdose, but warned “prolonged torpor” could result from taking too many.
My goal was to purchase eighteen ten-tablet bottles. The next Saturday afternoon I began my shopping. My ploy was simple. Dressed in civilian clothes, I went to the chief pharmacist of each store, explained I was a patient at the nearby sanitarium and that I had “problems sleeping.” Then I requested neozepam, making sure to flash my thick roll of new red ten-ruble notes. By the next Tuesday, I had twelve bottles of the drug. After a quick bus trip to Poti, I had the other six bottles.
By Friday, May 12, I had the 180 neozepam tablets and almost all the other ingredients for the cake. I was nearly ready to execute the plan. Now I had to pick my day. It suddenly came to me. May 19, a Friday that week, marked the fortieth day since the Tbilisi massacre. In the Orthodox religion this was a significant anniversary, the day the souls of the dead finally departed their bodies. I planned to give them a suitable ceremony to mark their passage into the next world.
But an unexpected obstacle presented itself. There was no condensed milk to be had in the bazaar. Even Malhaz could not locate any. Finally I managed to borrow six cans of Sgushyonka from my neighbor Natasha, a female warrant officer who was our regimental control tower dispatcher. I did find fresh spring strawberries in the bazaar, however, and spent fifty rubles of my depleted war chest to buy two kilos. Now I had all my ingredients.
If I had any qualms about my actions during that final week, they were quickly banished by Lieutenant Colonel Dovbnya, our regimental zampolit, who kept up a constant harangue about our patriotic duty to “suppress adventurist elements” who might capitalize on the tense situation here in Georgia. His message was clear: The regiment had to be prepared to turn its weapons on our fellow citizens. He made me sick.
One afternoon in the duty-alert dayroom I found myself alone with Petrukhin. His orders to the military training mission in North Korea had just come through. But he still had three months to serve in Georgia.
“What do you think of Dovbnya’s stirring words?” I asked him, probing. “Are you ready to fly missions against your fellow Soviet citizens?”
Petrukhin shook his head at once. “Of course not.”
“What about your next assignment?” I leaned toward him still pressing hard. “Will you attack the South Koreans if ordered to do so?”
He jumped up from his easy chair and threw down the illustrated sporting news he was so fond of reading. “Leave me alone,” he muttered. “That’s a different matter and you know it.”
I had my answer. If ordered to scramble and intercept my hijacked aircraft, Petrukhin would not hesitate to shoot me down.
Next I prepared an escape kit containing a flashlight, compass, extra socks, matches, and two cans of stewed beef. I hid the waterproof sack in the high grass near the airfield perimeter. If I failed in my hijack attempt. I planned to head south into the nearby swamps on foot and make my way to the mountain frontier.
Slipping the bag into the weeds felt strange. It was my first overtly treasonous action. Then I got to my feet and breathed the cool moist air. I felt calm again. It had finally begun.
The next afternoon I brought a French video film to the duty-alert dayroom and presented it with great fanfare. “We can watch it tonight, boys,” I told the engineers. “It will be a welcome treat after all the good news on Vremya.”
They laughed and clapped.
“There’s more where this came from,” I said, placing the video beside the television set. “My Georgian friends tell me they’ve got something pretty spicy.”
Again my comrades clapped. The stage was set.
Alone in my apartment the next morning, I removed pictures from my photo albums and began selecting the ones to take with me. This was a harder task than I had imagined. I certainly did not want the pictures I left behind to fall into the hands of the Osobists and be stuck on the bulletin board of some investigator’s office. So I planned to burn those I didn’t take. But the actual choice was a wrenching experience. Finally I stacked twenty pictures of my family and friends on one side of my kitchen table and swept the others into a paper bag. That night I burned them with my personal papers out on the far corner of the soccer field. When I came back to the apartment, I sat for a long time staring at the pictures I had selected to carry with me. There was my grandmother with her wide, stoic face and kindly eyes; me in a sailor suit on a river excursion; my first day of school with my white collar and my heavy book bag; a picture with my mother the summer I was fourteen, just before I left with the survey brigade. She looked young and untroubled. I looked so innocent, so optimistic. Then there was Kursant Sergeant Zuyev, Alexander M., in his first year at the Armavir Academy. There was Karpich with his big nose and ears, and Firefly after his first solo in the L-29. Finally I could no longer look into my past. I slid the precious mementos of my life into an envelope and sealed it.
Later that night I carefully reviewed my handwritten diagrams and specifications of the MiG-29’s missile and fire-control systems, and the multiple pages detailing the latest Soviet air-combat maneuvers. To the Americans, these documents would be my most valuable cargo. I lay them carefully inside my flannel helmet bag.
I definitely intended to reach the safety of American custody as quickly as possible, even though it was impossible to fly directly to the NATO base at Incirlik. For several weeks I had been thinking about the last Soviet fighter pilot to escape, Senior Lieutenant Viktor Ivanovich Belenko. In September 1976, Lieutenant Belenko had flown an advanced PVO MiG-25 interceptor from a base in the Soviet far east to Japan. The official Soviet explanation of his escape flight and defection to America had been that the unfortunate young pilot had become lost in bad weather and had only landed in desperation at the Hakodate Airport in northern Japan when he was completely out of fuel. Belenko had then been “kidnaped” by the Americans, at least according to Soviet authorities.
Viktor Belenko was a graduate of the Armavir Academy. His audacious exploit was a taboo subject among the cadets. But we all suspected his flight had been a well-planned escape, not the unfortunate result of bad weather. Our suspicions were confirmed later when the KGB circulated reports in the Soviet military that they had tracked down and executed the “traitor” Viktor Belenko in America. I doubted that the KGB had actually accomplished this; their propaganda was intended to scare pilots like me from attempting a similar escape flight. But in any event, I knew the Organs of State Security were capable of such behavior. Delivering a MiG-29 to the West would mark me for death, but I didn’t intend to become an easy target for KGB assassination squads.
I baked my cake on the morning of Wednesday, May 17. It was magnificent, a full seven pounds and three layers high, frosted in creamy white, and studded with fresh, ripe strawberries. Looking at this beautiful cake, there was no way for anyone to know that the lower right-hand corner was any different from the rest. But the creamy frosting in that corner was free of the crushed neozepam tablets that I had so carefully mixed into the other frosting. Just to be certain, I placed the biggest ripe strawberry on the safe corner. That would be the piece that I cut first and set aside for myself.