His fantasy of flying an F-16 Fighting Falcon emblazoned with a Ukrainian flag on the tail was just that, a fantasy, so Tychina turned his attention to his backseater: “Are you all right back there?” he called back on interphone in English.
“I’m doing fine, sir,” came the reply. Tychina had an American “Combat Camera” military cameraman from March Air Force Base in California in the back seat of the MiG-23UB, filming this entire flight. NATO cameramen and producers had been at L’vov Air Base in western Ukraine and other bases all week, conducting interviews and taking pictures. It was a far cry from the old Soviet multilayered secrecy and isolation. But it made Tychina and his comrades feel good, as if they had finally joined the family of nations, as if they belonged to something other than the stifling, soulless Soviet-Russian domination.
As soon as they passed 650 kilometers per hour airspeed, Tychina swept his MiG-23’s wings back to 45 degrees, and the ride smoothed out considerably. They maneuvered east to stay away from the Polish and Slovenian border, then leveled off at three thousand meters. The visibility was well over 160 kilometers. The mountains ringing the Black Sea and the Crimea were beautiful, there were plenty of natural landmarks to help orientate a distracted pilot, and air traffic control restrictions were fairly relaxed, even when flying close to the Russian and Polish borders. The Polish air traffic controllers liked trying their Ukrainian and English out on the MiG pilots.
That was not true of Moldova, unfortunately. For nearly five years a conflict had been raging between ethnic Russians and ethnic Romanians in the former Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. Since Moldavia declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, becoming the Republic of Moldova, the Russians living in the Republic, especially the rich landowners and factory owners in the Dniester region, were afraid that they would be persecuted by the ethnic Romanian majority. Moldova used to be part of Romania, back before World War II, and there was a lot of talk about Moldova realigning itself with Romania once again — hell, they even changed the name of the capital city of Moldova, Kishinev, back to its original Romanian name, Chisinau, just like they changed Leningrad back to St. Petersburg in Russia.
Russian fat cats living in Moldova, with their huge farms and modern German-designed factories, were very nervous — even terrified — that Romania might take away the Russians’ land and property in Moldova upon reunification, so they rebelled against the Moldovan government, Tychina remembered from his intelligence briefings. That really took a lot of balls — Moldova was still part of the old Soviet Union when the Russians in the Dniester region “claimed” their “independence.” But then those guys always had balls bigger than their brains. The new Moldovan government was pissed, of course, but they couldn’t do anything because most of their Russian troops sided with the damn Russians in the Dniester region. The former Russian armies, located mostly in two cities in Dniester, Bendery and Tiraspol, were twice as strong as the rest of the Moldovan army.
In comes Romania, offering its military forces to help Moldova retake the Dniester region. Russia steps in, telling Romania to stay out, and backing up their warning with flights of warplanes from Minsk, Brest, Br’ansk, and Moscow. Only problem was, Russia never bothered to ask permission of the Ukraine before sending warplanes into Moldova. A joint Commonwealth of Independent States agreement allows joint military maneuvers and provides for common defense between Russia and the Ukraine, but it says nothing about using a member nation’s territory as a staging ground for attacks on another country. The Ukraine insisted on a cease-fire, negotiations, and territorial sovereignty; Russia insisted on free overflight and full support from the Ukraine. Naturally, Moldova distrusted both Russia and the Ukraine. It was actually kind of silly: the Ukraine was big, but it was less than one-tenth the size of the Russian Federation in every respect, including the category that mattered here — military strength. Russia could squash Romania, Moldova, and the Ukraine without working up a sweat.
In any case, no one trusted anyone these days, especially not the Russian President Vitaly Velichko, a hard-line nut who had seized power from Yeltsin, who was now living in Siberian exile. So the Moldovan-Ukrainian border area was strictly off-limits, as was the Russian-Ukrainian border. Moldovan air defense units had been taking surface-to-air missile shots at any and all unidentified aircraft straying near. They were usually shoulder-fired SA-7 rounds or small-caliber antiaircraft artillery stuff — not a real threat to fighters above two thousand meters or so — but it was best to give the trigger-happy Moldovans a wide berth.
“So what would you like to see?” Tychina radioed over to the F-16 crew. The F-16D two-seater also carried a Combat Camera photographer, taking films and still shots of the MiG-23. This was really just a technical flight so the photographers could set up their camera mounts; later in the day they would tow some aerial targets over the Black Sea and let the F-16s and MiG-23s shoot them down, then go over to the bombing ranges in the “Bunghole” region of northwestern Ukraine and let some MiG-27s show their stuff alongside the F-16. “The Carpathian mountains farther south perhaps, and the Crimean Mountains along the Black Sea are very nice,” Tychina was saying.
“We’d like to try some low-level stuff and tight turns,” the chief photographer radioed back, “so we can torque down our camera mounts.”
“Okay,” Tychina replied in his best English, which he had an opportunity to practice more and more these days. “We must stay above one thousand meters because of the … visibility, but low level is better.” By “visibility” he meant smog.
“We got a target on radar at two o’clock position, sixty miles — that’s one hundred and ten kilometers — low, about two thousand … ah, I mean, about six hundred meters altitude,” the pilot of the Turkish plane radioed over. He was a big shot in the Turkish Air Force, a colonel or general, and he was always showing off for the cameras. “Let’s go get him, shall we?”
Tychina turned his Sapfir-23D search radar to TRANSMIT but did not bother searching for the target — the radar had a maximum range of only one hundred kilometers, and for targets that far below them, they had to be practically right on top of them before the radar would pick them up. “Ukrainian radar coverage is poor in that area,” Tychina said. Radar coverage in the Ukraine was poor everywhere, but he wasn’t going to admit that, either. “We should get permission first.” He switched over to his secondary radio and said in Ukrainian, “Vinnica radar, Imperial Blue One flight of two, overhead Vojnilov at three thousand meters eastbound, flight code one-one-seven, request.”
It took a moment for the controller to look up his call sign and flight plan, then find his blip on radar; then, in very impatient Ukrainian: “Imperial Blue One flight, say your request.”
“My VIPs request permission to descend to five hundred meters and accomplish a practice intercept on the low-flying aircraft currently at our twelve o’clock position, one hundred ten kilometers. Over,” said Tychina.
There was another long pause, probably so the controller could look up the flight plan and, more importantly, the passenger status code of the aircraft they wanted to intercept. Most politicians and a few senior officers didn’t like fighters, even unarmed ones, flying too close.