Repeat your destination.
Told them Zaysan.
Use your Mode 4.
Said I’d try.
I didn’t think much of my chances now because this wasn’t Dzhezkazgan Traffic Control calling me: it was the Red Air Force.
I let sixty seconds go by and called them.
A different voice came on.
What is the purpose of your flight?
It was the Red Air Force and somewhere between Zhmerinka and this part of the sky above the wastelands of Golodnaya they’d started to investigate me on the computers and now they were going to give me the full treatment.
I refuse to divulge a military secret.
Thirty thousand feet and still climbing with the jets blowing out thunder and the windscreen darkening: there was no visual fix but the stuff I was going into looked like cloud-base.
The new voice began asking questions again: aircraft number, name of pilot, squadron, so forth.
Who the hell are you? I asked him.
Major-General Ivan Yashenko.
He didn’t give his unit so the name should obviously be known to a colonel in the 36th Squadron of the 3rd Air Command. I put my left hand on the thumb wheel turning it slightly back and forth while I was speaking.
The purp — my flight is — test the fuel-range — MiG-28D with — tanks of capacit — conditions of high -
Ten seconds.
You will repeat that.
So we were into the act and I moved the thumb wheel every time I answered him and made sure to dick back on to his frequency when he was speaking. There was a limited amount of smoke I could put out now and it wasn’t going to cover me for more than a few minutes but it was worth doing because I was now levelling out at thirty-five thousand feet and sustaining Mach 18. At this velocity the sound inside the cockpit had taken on an orchestral quality as the ancillaries spun at close to their peak revolutions, whining thinly above the bellow of the engines. The hollower roar of the exhaust was no longer audible because the machine was outstripping the sound of its passage by a factor of more than two, and this had brought a strange decrease in the overall volume: the ears, used to greater sound at greater speeds, felt deafened.
This is General Yashenko. Can you hear me?
Can — you intermitt — but — either channel. If -
I left it at that and stayed on 3 and watched the contrails. They were about equidistant, one in each of the side mirrors, and had curved in from the left.
Yashenko had gone quiet and I spun the thumb wheel because it was possible he was now in touch with the two other aircraft. The contrails were expanding slowly and I could now see the machines themselves, small black shapes silhouetted against the white plumes they were leaving behind them across the sky.
I had to assume they were Foxbats, since according to NATO Intelligence reports that was the only aircraft capable of gaining on me so fast at my present airspeed of 1200 knots.
I watched the mirrors.
— Ko — Can you hear -
I waited.
This is General Yashenko. Can you hear me?
I can — times — but -
You are ordered to land your machine immediately.
One of the doors slammed in my mind: one of the doors to survival. I’d been expecting the order but not so early. Something had started travelling faster than the three of us up here, some new element of intelligence.
I didn’t reply.
The two aircraft were now beginning to come up on me and their shapes were in each of the three mirrors, quite large configurations with rectangular sides and inclined tail fins, perfectly outlined against their white contrails.
Colonel Voronov. You are ordered to land immediately.
Sometimes a few seconds are worth saving and I moved the thumb wheel across and across a ten-degree arc as I spoke.
Suggest contact — base commander at — or — yevsk satellite field. My — to remain on — mission -
I set the wheel and concentrated on the two Foxbats as they drew gradually abreast, one on each side at a distance of something like a hundred yards. I could make out the pilots’ heads: the one on the left had his face turned to watch me and I thought I saw his hand waving. I waved back. The one on the right was also waving, with a distinctive hand motion pointing over and down, over and down. I suppose they were calling me up and not getting any answer. I waved again to acknowledge and then checked instruments and made a calculation on the log. The city of Yelingrad was twelve minutes ahead if I remained on course and the white ridges of the Khrebet Tarbagatay range were moving into the bottom right-hand corner of the windscreen.
General Yashenko to Colonel Voronov, aircraft SX454 -
I took a quick look at the Foxbat on the right and saw the pilot signal again, his hand jerking impatiently. Below him was the glint of grey water as we flew parallel with Lake Balkhash, and I checked the green-code map for the last time.
— I personally order you to land immediately.
Connors had told me to yell at them and show my authority but I was outranked and there wasn’t any point in using the radio again because the two interceptors had been sent up here to signal me what I had to do. There was a fractional delay when I hit the throttle to the end of the quadrant and the Mach number swept up and held there while I pulled the stick back and watched the nose come up and the dark cloud swing across the windscreen.
Action is always faster than reaction and I had the Finback streaking over into a left-hand roll before the other two aircraft showed any change in their attitude. They were still in level flight as I met the wall of the cloud at an angle and ran into total obscurity.
The cloud-face had been ten or twelve miles away when I’d started the manoeuvre and it had taken upwards of twenty-five seconds to cover the distance but the interceptors must have lost something like a fifth of that period in total reaction time from the alert in the pilot’s brain to the start of military power and for the moment they’d lost me.
The tight swing of the turns had sent the blood into my legs and the g-suit was swelling and compressing them but there was a tendency to blackout and the bellow of the jets kept fading and coming back as I tried to keep my eyes open and couldn’t manage it, too much singing, the head dropping on one side, it doesn’t really matter because everything’s — it does matter — singing softly and the light — it does matterpull out of it pull yourself out of this — the head coming up and the panel lights glowing below the blank windscreen and reflecting down from the canopy as the thunder of the jets came back and I shifted the controls and set the Finback into an inverted downward curve because I had to get out of this cloud and get out fast: I was still on their ground radar and they could reach me with a blind-flying missile if they decided to get one off.
White ice was forming on the outside of the canopy and I flipped the lever for defrost and began watching the altimeter: the cloud base had looked something like ten thousand feet high when I’d last seen it but at one thousand knots airspeed I was being taken down so fast that I could find cloud at zero feet at the point where I came out. There were voices in the headset but the cloud was putting out too much static and I couldn’t hear what they were saying.
Assume they are ordering a kill.
Six thousand feet and going down like a stone.
Five thousand.
The city of Yelingrad should be somewhere east by south but the compass had been shaken up by the turns and the aircraft was still at an acute angle of descent and half-way through a curve designed to bring me put at two thousand feet in level flight but you don’t take this big a chance on instruments alone and I was easing the stick forward at four thousand feet.