“God dammit, Viktor, you’re speeding. Now do as I tell you. Slow down, pull off the highway, and stop and roll down the window. The state trooper will come up and ask for your driver’s license. Just give it to him, and say nothing. He will write a ticket. When he hands it to you, just nod and say, Thank you, Officer.’”
Belenko was unconcerned; indeed, he welcomed the opportunity to demonstrate to Peter his ability to cope with the unexpected. He knew what to do. Every 100 kilometers or so along Soviet roads, police maintain checkpoints and routinely stop all vehicles. The driver routinely gives the policeman two or three rubles; otherwise, he is accused and convicted on the spot of a traffic violation, and his license is punched and, with the third punch, revoked.
A tall state trooper wearing a broad-brimmed gray hat bent down by the window. “Son, do you realize you were going eighty-five miles an hour?”
Belenko grinned and tried to hand the trooper two twenty-dollar bills.
“No! No!” Peter yelled in Russian. “Take that money back, Viktor!” Then in English: “Officer, I am a representative of the Central Intelligence Agency. May I speak with you privately?” Peter got out of the car and talked with the trooper.
After a couple of minutes the trooper returned and said to Belenko, “I would like to shake your hand.”
With a seriousness that Belenko did not mistake, Peter warned that bribery of a policeman or public official was a major crime. “Some will take bribes, that’s true. But ninetynine point nine percent won’t, and if you try it, you will be arrested, and I may not always be around to rescue you. I’m telling you for your own good.”
Father Peter, he means what he says. But if officials don’t take bribes, maybe the law is the same for everybody. Well, that’s right, they put Nixon’s men in jail.
The Party depicted America as awash in pornography, a social pox communism spares the Soviet Union. Having seen none in the Virginia suburbs, Belenko asked where all the pornography was, so Peter took him to an X-rated movie. “What did you think?” he asked as they left the theater a few blocks from the White House.
“At first I was amazed. Then I felt as if I were watching people go to the toilet. Nobody loved anybody in that movie. What I don’t understand is why, if pornography is so popular, the theater was so empty.”
“Obviously, there’s a market for the stuff, or the theater couldn’t stay in business. But which would you rather do? Watch some whores go through the motions of making love or go out and find a girl and make love yourself?”
Anna invited Belenko to a Washington restaurant to meet her husband, an urbane, older man who was highly informed about the Soviet Union and spoke Russian confidently. Because Belenko was conditioned to believe that American presidential elections were meaningless, all candidates being puppets of the Dark Forces, he listened with surprise and interest as his host talked about the contest under way between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Anna favored Carter; her husband, Ford. They discussed, then debated, then ardently and angrily argued about the qualifications of the two candidates.
Wait a minute. Maybe elections here do make a difference. At least they think they do, and they are not fools.
It was the carrier, or rather, what he deduced from the carrier, that finally shattered the image of America instilled by the Party. He and Gregg landed on its deck in a small plane about 100 miles off the Virginia capes. The captain welcomed Belenko by saying that the United States Navy was proud to have him as its guest. He could see anything aboard the ship he desired; any question would be answered. But the captain believed that first he should watch the launching and recovery of aircraft, the essence of carrier operations.
As Belenko stood by the landing control officer, the fighters plummeted, thundered, roared down straight toward him. Bam! Screechl They hit the steel deck and crashed into the arresting gear. Then, with a tremendous roar that vibrated his body, the afterburners of a fighter ignited, and it shot off the deck, dipped toward the sea, and rocketed out of sight This, every ten seconds!
No show could have been more spectacular to Belenko. The technology of the ship, the planes, the diverse individual skills of the crew were incredible. But that was not what was most meaningful. Everybody of all ranks participating in the operation relied, depended on, indeed, trusted their lives to everybody else. Nobody abused anybody. They all were one team, and it couldn’t be any other way. You couldn’t terrify, intimidate, threaten, or coerce men into doing what they were doing. They had to want to do it, to believe in it. They couldn’t do it under the influence of drugs or alcohol. And this was real. The Dark Forces did not not construct this carrier or recruit and tram men just to put on a display for him. Now he was inclined to believe what he saw and was told.
“Do you have a jail on this ship?”
They showed him the brig — five or six immaculate cells with standard Navy bunks — which happened to be empty.* In answer to his questions, the captain enumerated some of the offenses for which a sailor might be confined — drinking alcohol, smoking marijuana, assault.
“Why is your jail empty?”
“Maybe we’re lucky. We don’t have much trouble aboard this ship.”
“How many people do you have on this ship?”
“About five thousand officers and men.”
It’s a small city, and nobody is in jail!
Noticing the insignia of the cross on the shirt collar of an officer, Belenko asked if the crew was required to profess faith in God.
The captain replied that although Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish chaplains regularly conducted services, crew members were free to attend or not and that religious beliefs or the lack of them was entirely a private matter of individual conscience.
Belenko wanted to know if the chaplains additionally functioned as political officers, and the captain did not at first understand what he meant.
“Who tells your men how they must vote?” He realized that the laughter the question caused was real and spontaneous. If nobody can even tell the soldiers [enlisted men] how to vote, then they do have some freedom here.
The carrier was the flagship of an admiral who presented Belenko with a fleece-lined leather jacket worn by Navy pilots. He said he hoped Belenko would wear and regard it as a symbol of the appreciation and comradeship U.S. Navy fliers felt toward him. The gift and words so affected him that he spoke with difficulty. “I will be very proud of this jacket”
He was so proud of the jacket that throughout the day he carried it with him wherever he went. All life had taught him that left unguarded, such valuable apparel certainly would be stolen.
“Viktor, leave the damn jacket here,” Gregg said as they started from the cabin to see the evening movie.
“No, someone will steal it.”
“Nobody will steal it. This is not a pirate ship.”
“No, I know somebody will steal it.”
After much argument, against all good judgment and under vehement protest, Belenko reluctantly obeyed and left the jacket on his bunk. During the movie he fidgeted and worried. “I think I’ll go back and see about my jacket”
“Sit still. Your jacket is all right.” Later Gregg slipped away to the cabin and hid the jacket in a closet
Returning from the movie, Belenko saw that the worst had happened. “You see! I told you! I told you! They stole it!” Gregg opened the closet, and Belenko grabbed the jacket, clutched, hugged it, and did not let it out of his sight again.