O’Shea replied, “Tricky, but we’ll give it a shot.”
“Okay,” Alevy said, “here goes.” Alevy took a chloroform pad from his pocket, ripped open the foil envelope, and reached around the pilot’s face, clamping the pad over his mouth as O’Shea jumped forward into the copilot’s seat and grabbed the controls of the wobbling craft.
The pilot thrashed around, kicking the control pedals and yanking on the collective pitch stick. The helicopter began tilting dangerously as O’Shea fought for control. He shouted, “Get him out of there!”
Alevy stood and ripped the pilot’s headphones off, then with Brennan’s help pulled the pilot up and over the seat, dropping him on the floor of the cabin. The pilot groaned, then lay still.
Alevy took a deep breath and leaned forward. “Okay, Captain. The seat is yours.”
“Right.” O’Shea rose carefully from the copilot’s seat. “Hold on.” He cut the throttle, and the helicopter began to drop. O’Shea vaulted sideways into the pilot’s seat, grabbing at the controls as his feet found the antitorque pedals. The dropping craft yawed and rolled, then steadied as O’Shea got control. He opened the throttle, and the helicopter began to rise. “Okay, okay.”
Alevy crossed over to the copilot’s seat as Bert Mills and Bill Brennan moved forward into the middle seats. Alevy asked O’Shea, “Well, is it as easy to fly as it looks?”
O’Shea smiled grimly. “This is a bitch. I haven’t flown rotary-wing in ten years.” He added, “The main rotor in Soviet choppers turns the opposite of Western rotary-wing. So the rudder pedals are opposite.”
“Is that why we’re zigzagging all over the place, Captain?”
“Yeah. Takes a while to get used to.” O’Shea pointed to a switch. “What does that say?”
Alevy leaned forward and read the Russian switch plate. “Svet… light… moving… landing.”
“Controllable landing light,” O’Shea said. He switched it off. “I saw the pilot hit it a few minutes ago. We don’t need that.” O’Shea pushed the cyclic control stick to port and worked the antitorque pedals to keep the craft in longitudinal trim, swinging the helicopter west, away from Sheremetyevo, away from Moscow. O’Shea said, “I’ll need about fifteen minutes of maneuvers before I feel confident with these controls.”
Alevy replied, “Try ten. We need every drop of fuel. Did that training manual help?”
“Yes, but it’s no substitute for hands-on.” O’Shea added, “It’s okay, men. Just relax. I’m getting it.”
Alevy put on the headphones and listened to the radio traffic from Sheremetyevo tower. He said to O’Shea, “Don’t get too far west. I have to call the tower.”
“Right.” O’Shea practiced some simple maneuvers.
Alevy looked toward the east and saw the bright lights of Moscow on the distant horizon. The sky was unusually clear, very starry, but there was only a sliver of a white, waning moon tonight, he noted, which was fine. Below, the farmland and forests were in almost complete darkness.
Seth Alevy stared out the windshield. Spread before him was Russia in all its endless mystery, the land of his grandparents, a black limitless space so dark, deep, and cold that whole armies and entire nationalities — Don Cossacks, Volga Germans, Jews, and Tartars — could disappear without a trace and without a decibel of their screams being heard beyond the vast frontiers.
Alevy looked west out to where the dark sky touched the black horizon. Soon they would be plunging into that void, and though he could smell the fear around him, nothing frightened him so much as the thought that they might be too late.
Bill Brennan, sitting now behind O’Shea’s seat, with his feet on the unconscious Aeroflot pilot, asked Alevy, “Do you want me to dump him?”
“There’s no need for that.”
“Okay. Can I break his nose?”
“No. Just tie him up.”
Brennan tied the pilot’s wrists and ankles with a length of metal flex.
Bert Mills looked at his watch. “We’re about five minutes overdue at Sheremetyevo.”
“Right.” Alevy said to O’Shea, “Let’s kill all the lights.”
O’Shea scanned the instrument panel and referred to an Mi-28 cockpit diagram that he and Hollis had made up with English subtitles some weeks ago.
“Here,” Alevy said. “This says ‘navigation lights.’”
“That’s the one.”
Alevy hit the switch and the outside lights went out. “You just fly, Captain.” He took the diagram from O’Shea and found the interior light switch and flipped it, throwing the cabin and cockpit into darkness. The instrument lights cast a pale red glow over Alevy and O’Shea’s face and hands.
The effect of the nearly total darkness inside and outside was somewhat eerie, Alevy thought, and he could hear the other three men’s disembodied breathing above the sound of the rotor blades. Alevy held the diagram on his lap and scanned it. He found the radio transmit button on the cyclic grip. “Okay.” He depressed the transmit button and suddenly shouted in Russian into the mouth mike of his headset, “Kontroler! Kontroler!”
A few seconds later the control tower at Sheremetyevo replied, “Kontroler.”
Alevy said excitedly in Russian, “This is Aeroflot P one one three — lost engine power—” He stopped talking, but continued depressing the button the way a pilot would do as he contemplated the ground rushing up at him. Alevy screamed in Russian, “God—!” then lifted his finger from the button and heard Sheremetyevo tower in his headphones, “—one one three, come in, come—” Alevy shut off the radio power and removed his headphones. “That should keep them busy searching for wreckage, as well as making them reflect on man’s need for divine comfort in the last second of life. Okay, Captain O’Shea, let’s head west.”
O’Shea swung the tail boom around and pointed the Mi-28 west, then opened up the throttle and changed the pitch angle of the rotor blades. “This thing moves.”
Alevy looked out over the dark landscape. “Let’s get down there, Captain, and find a place to park it awhile.”
O’Shea began his descent from twelve hundred meters. As the ground came up, Alevy, Brennan, and Mills scanned the terrain. Brennan said, “Forest there. Open farmland over there. Too open. There’s something — what’s that?”
They all looked out to starboard at a light-colored area about five hundred meters away.
Alevy said, “Get in closer, Captain.”
O’Shea slid the helicopter to the right and dropped in closer. He said, “It looks like an excavation. A quarry or gravel pit.”
“That’ll do,” Alevy said.
O’Shea banked around toward the large shallow excavation that appeared to encompass about an acre dug out of the open plains northwest of Moscow. “Okay,” O’Shea said, “let’s see if this helicopter knows how to land.”
O’Shea looked below to see if there were any smokestacks or anything that would give him an indication of the wind direction, but he saw nothing. He guessed that the wind would be coming from the northwest as it usually did this time of year, and he banked around so he could make his landing heading into what he hoped was the prevailing wind.
He maintained a constant rpm so there would be no variation in torque forces that could make the craft yaw around its vertical axis. The pedals, which were reversed because the rotor direction was reversed, were his major problem; what should have been second nature was becoming a thought process, like driving a British car on the left side of the road.
Alevy said, “You’re doing fine.”
“You talking to me?” O’Shea’s instinct was to glide in at a shallow angle, as with a fixed-wing, but he knew he had to maintain sufficient altitude until the last few seconds in the event he did something to stall the engine, which would necessitate an autorotative landing; a free fall that could only be made successfully if there was time to throw the transmission into neutral, adjust the pitch of the blades, allowing the uprushing air to turn the rotors to produce enough lift to cushion the crash.