The young man disappeared, and Stoyanovich unbuttoned his coat.
“He will see you, sir,” the young man said, returning to the outer room.
Stoyanovich nodded. He had better see me, he thought. He walked quickly into Popovich’s office. “Good afternoon,” he said.
Popovich stood up and gave a slight bow. “It is an honor to see you, Colonel Stoyanovich. An honor.” He said it with just enough respect to be too much, just enough for Stoyanovich to know he didn’t mean it at all. “What can I do for you?”
Stoyanovich towered over Popovich but could see he wasn’t intimidated at all. “Major Vladimir Petkov,” he said.
“What of him?” Popovich asked.
Stoyanovich stared at him. “What of him?” Stoyanovich asked incredulously. “Where is he?”
“He has resigned,” Popovich said. He fought back a smile as he lit a Camel cigarette and slipped the lighter back into the pocket of his uniform.
“Resigned? That is impossible,” Stoyanovich sputtered, knowing it was exactly as Popovich had said. “He could not possibly have resigned. That would have to be approved by me. You must be mistaken.”
“No. I am sure.”
“I sent him to you for temporary security duty, not retirement! How can this be? I am his Wing Commander!”
“You were his Wing Commander. No longer. He is no longer in the Russian Air Force, defending our crumbling country from all its enemies.”
“But the paperwork must come through me for any resignations! This is impossible.”
“You are ignorant,” Popovich said, as if slapping Stoyanovich in the face. “If certain people want an officer out of the Air Force, it simply happens. No Colonel is going to stop that. There is no need for your signature on a silly piece of paper if the right people don’t feel it is necessary.”
“What ‘right people’?”
“That is none of your concern. It has been taken care of.”
“But why? He was going to be returned to flying.”
“You told him he was grounded for the rest of his career.”
“Only so he would take his problem seriously. You knew that. I was going to transfer him back in six months.”
“No longer.”
Stoyanovich heard the contempt in Popovich’s voice. “Where is he?”
“He has moved.”
“Do you know where he is?”
Popovich sat down. “Of course.”
“Where?”
“He is no longer any of your concern.”
“But he is still your concern? You, who run security on this godforsaken base, still need to know where a retired pilot is who has moved away?” Stoyanovich asked, his voice growing louder.
“Yes. He is still my concern.”
“Why?”
Popovich leaned forward and said with a leering, biting tone, “You still don’t understand, do you? You still believe one day you’ll open your eyes and everything will be like it was, a red flag with hammer and sickle and the world respecting us again. Well, that isn’t going to happen. You should let go of your fantasy world and retire yourself. You are just in the way.”
Stoyanovich yearned to respond in kind, to show Popovich where the real power lay in Russia. But he was determined to find out what he’d come to learn. His deep voice boomed around the room as he yelled at Popovich, “Where is he?”
Popovich thought of how troublesome this fat Colonel could be. Although Stoyanovich didn’t have the power he thought he had, he was not without resources. Popovich answered reluctantly, his confidence receding slightly, “He has taken a job with a civilian company.”
“What company?”
“MAPS.”
“How? Those jobs are impossible to get. With his record, he would not be able to do it, not without my help. He should have come to me…”
“He didn’t need your help. He had friends that got him the job.”
Stoyanovich paused. “What friends?”
“New friends.”
“The same criminals you call friends? Those friends?”
“Such words. You do not need to speak like that.”
Stoyanovich took his hat out from under his arm. “Gorgov?” he asked.
“What better friend could one have?”
Stoyanovich stormed out of Popovich’s office. The decay was all around him, closer than it had ever been.
12
Luke stood in the back of the ready room and made sure all the students from the first class were in their seats. They talked nervously. The minute hand on the clock in the back of the ready room clicked audibly to the 0730 position. Luke nodded to Hayes, who turned off the lights, throwing the windowless room into total darkness. Suddenly the loud sounds of an alternative rock group blared from the Bose sound system hidden in the overhead of the high-tech room. It was a pounding, rhythmic acoustic guitar that sent chills up the spine of every officer in the room. The music was far too loud to permit conversation.
Luke wanted to make Tonopah the true Fightertown, the place where all fighter pilots in the country would want to hang out, leave stickers and plaques on the wall, and build tradition and camaraderie. Ever since Miramar had reverted to a Marine Corps Air Station and TOPGUN had moved to Fallon, there hadn’t been that one place that lived in the mind of Navy pilots as the place where they all wanted to be, where they would spend every waking hour if they could. Fallon was trying, but it wasn’t there yet. Oceana in Virginia Beach was trying, but it lacked a certain something, a certain exotic feel, remoteness, or color.
Flying fighters was as much about morale and pride as it was about any one other thing. Airplanes, training, tactics, courage, opportunity—they all mattered. But without a certain belief in one’s abilities and skills, without pride, these students would almost certainly fail. Everything about the new school, including the first morning, was calculated to build excitement and enthusiasm about what they were doing.
As the music pounded, the screen in the front of the room sprang to life with video images of the MiG-29. The color footage was vivid and impressive. It was an air show routine being flown by Anatoly Kvotchur, a professional Russian Fulcrum pilot. It was probably the most famous flight demonstration ever given by a MiG-29.
The class watched in total absorption as the pilot wrapped the airplane into a tight turn in front of the throngs of people at the Paris Air Show. The airplane twisted and turned beautifully in the blue sky above Paris. The noise of the air show was barely audible over the music. The thirteen members of the new NFWS class sat enthralled by the images and the excitement. They all loved jets. They loved flying fast. They loved the concept of air combat and having the ability to beat somebody in the air. The image was clear as the MiG-29 came across the runway at Le Bourget airport and pulled up into a Cobra maneuver, in which the airplane transferred its forward airspeed into an immediate nose-up pitching maneuver intended to cause a less agile airplane following closely to streak by. The crowd was obviously amazed. But then something happened. A flame shot out of the right engine, and the airplane departed, rolling right. It pitched toward the ground in a steep dive. Everyone watching the film knew that there was no way that airplane could pull out at that attitude. The pilots in the room had all heard of the ’89 air show, but none had ever seen it. They held their breath as they watched. With the MiG-29 barely above the ground, an explosion threw off the canopy, and the pilot’s ejection seat came rocketing out of the airplane. Just as the ejection seat cleared the airplane, the MiG-29 plunged into the grass next to the runway in a ball of flames right in front of the air show crowd.
“The Zvedza K-32D ejection seat,” Luke said into his wireless microphone. “Best ejection seat in the world. He got out when he was sixty feet off the ground, his airplane headed straight down, with one engine dead and the other in full afterburner. He was outside the envelope of every Western ejection seat. Yet in his Russian seat he survived this incident uninjured.” The camera lingered on the burning wreckage as the pilot floated down next to his dead airplane.