Only one woman showed any hesitancy about giving up her passport to the man checking off their names. But a sharp command from one of the guards escorting the women ended that. Like the others, she handed over her passport and walked up the ramp and into the lighted cargo deck. No seats had been rigged and she sat on her suitcase. The man collecting the passports did a quick count. “Forty-seven fresh cunts,” he said, speaking Russian. He handed over a small aluminum suitcase to the men guarding the women. They huddled around and quickly counted the money. “Yes?” the first man asked. “All is correct?”
The man holding the suitcase replied in Russian. “As agreed, two thousand dollars each, ninety-four thousand dollars U.S.” He spoke to the others in Ukrainian and they trooped off the aircraft, leaving the women to their new masters. The Il-76 started engines and taxied for the runway. Within minutes, it was airborne and turned to the northwest, heading for Minsk in Belarus. The creaky aircraft never climbed above 12,000 feet for the thirty-minute flight and only made one radio call when it crossed the border into Belarus.
The radar antenna on top of the 345-foot tower outside Bialystok, Poland, swept the horizon every five seconds. The twin parabolic reflectors were stacked one above the other and rotated in unison, feeding information through a cable net to a bunker two miles away. A sign over the bunker’s blast doors announced it was the home of CROWN EAST, the easternmost of three radar early-warning and ground-controlled intercept sites that formed a chain across central Poland. Inside the bunker, the radar operator on duty noted the track of the Il-76 in his log and marked it down as routine traffic. He did not bother to track it to Machulishche, an old Soviet air base outside Minsk, Belorusskaya, nor to wake the tactical-threat officer.
A follow-me truck was waiting for the Il-76 when it cleared the runway at Machulishche. The big plane lumbered after the truck, following it to a remote parking apron where heavily armed guards surrounded two low cargo-carrier trucks loaded with pallets. The Il-76 shut down its engines as the first cargo carrier backed up to the aircraft’s loading ramp. The first three pallets were quickly pushed on board and the truck pulled away. The women had to move to make room for the cargo and most stood beside the stacks of white plastic-wrapped bricks, holding onto the cargo netting. The high-grade cocaine was worth more than they were.
The second cargo carrier pulled up and three more pallets were rolled on board. Like the cocaine, there was no attempt to disguise the half-kilo bricks of tarry hashish. A third truck rolled up and a line of men formed a chain to pass cardboard boxes on board. The boxes were broken open and the bricks of high-potency marijuana, sensimilla to be exact, were stowed around the pallets, filling the cargo deck. Finally, the women were left sitting on top of the drugs.
Less than an hour after landing, the Il-76’s pilots started engines and made one radio call. On the other side of the airfield, two pilots walked leisurely out of an underground bunker. The cargo plane taxied for the active runway and, without waiting for clearance, took off into the clear night. But this time, the Il-76 leveled off at 5,000 feet as it headed directly for the Polish border, 160 miles away.
The two pilots walking across the apron climbed into their waiting Sukhoi Su-35 fighters and strapped in. The Su-35s were a single-place, twin-tailed, twin-engined fighter about the same size as the U.S. F-15 Eagle. An observer, unable to see the foreplanes mounted above the intakes, might confuse the two. But unlike the Eagle, which went out of production in the early 1990s, the Su-35s were brand new and, with their advanced avionics, a serious threat to the United States’ newest fighter, the F-22 Raptor. The pilots finished cocking their jets for a scramble. Now they had to wait.
The radar operator sitting in the darkened bunker at Crown East swore silently in Polish. The P-50 radar, known to NATO as Barlock, was going out of calibration — again. The Polish Air Force had inherited the system from the Warsaw Pact and it was showing its age. The operator cursed the radar’s Soviet makers and manually tuned it. A blip caught his eye. Then it was gone. He retuned the radar and caught it again. He noted the azimuth and distance: 075 degrees at 150 nautical miles. He called out the target and the plotter stirred to life, angry at having her sleep disturbed. She plotted the target on the Plexiglas situation board at the back of the room.
“An airliner taking off out of Minsk,” the young woman muttered.
“It’s tracking toward us. I don’t have a flight plan and there is no radar transponder. It should be squawking a code.”
The girl shrugged. “Russian maintenance.” They had heard all the rumors about the deplorable state of Russian aircraft.
The operator studied the scope. “It’s definitely heading toward us. Still no squawk. Wake the tac officer.” The tactical-threat officer stumbled out of his cubicle and zipped up his pants. He rubbed his eyes as he looked over the radar operator’s shoulder. “I have an unknown, sir. No flight plan or IFF squawk.” Again, the operator called out the azimuth and distance for plotting as he activated the computer’s automatic tracking system. Much to his surprise, it worked and a readout appeared on the scope. “The target is still heading directly for us.” He changed the antenna into sector sweep for confirmation. “Maybe it’s an airliner headed for Warsaw with a malfunctioning transponder. You know the Russians.”
“They still act like they own the world,” the tac officer muttered. He bit his lip. It was still a bogie, an unknown target, that would penetrate Polish airspace in eighteen minutes. “Notify sector command,” he ordered, sending the problem upstairs. The radar operator made the radio call without bothering to activate the encryption circuits.
The controller at sector command answered immediately, his voice loud and clear over the clear radio channel. “A single target at that speed and altitude is no threat. It’s probably a Vnukova flight.”
“Damn,” the radar operator said. Vnukova was the call sign for Russian diplomatic aircraft with special overflight rights left over from the days of the Warsaw Pact. The name came from the airport twenty miles southwest of Moscow where the flights supposedly originated. “They’re still required to file a flight plan and be transmitting the proper IFF code for identification.”
“Their whole system is screwed up,” sector control answered. In six words, he had explained the lack of a flight plan and IFF squawk.
“Why not a Bravo?” the radar operator ventured. A Bravo was a practice scramble of fighters setting air-defense alert. “We can use the practice.”
Sector control considered it. Fuel and flying time were very costly and he’d have to justify the scramble. But the pilots did need the practice. He hit the Klaxon button. The two fighter pilots in the alert facility next to sector command were jolted out of a sound sleep and they raced for their waiting aircraft, two F-16s recently purchased from the United States.
The intelligence listening post at Brest in Belarus had monitored Polish communications for years and was still manned. The technician on duty intercepted the radio call between Crown East and sector command scrambling the F-16s and passed it on as a routine matter. Normally, it would have died in the bowels of the military command structure. But on this particular night, the system worked as designed and a green light from the Minsk control tower flashed at the Su-35s sitting alert on the ramp. Immediately, the Su-35s’ big Saturn AL-35 turbofan engines spun to life and the fighters fast-taxied for the runway. The pilots made a formation takeoff in afterburner, not because they required the extra thrust, but for the fun of it. Besides, the air force wasn’t paying for the fuel.