The attractive blond woman glanced at the papers on her desk and replied snippily in excellent English, “Yes, everything is all right. What is there to confirm?”
“I know how well everything runs in this country, but I want to be certain about my arrangements.”
She looked at him a moment, then replied a bit more civilly, “I know that your helicopter is already here, Mr. Burns. It leaves in fifteen minutes. Go to the lobby and see the bell captain. I haven’t heard of any problem with your Finnair flight.”
“Thank you.” Alevy gathered his passport, visa, and tickets, slipping them into his trench coat. He walked back to the lobby and spotted his luggage, which had been taken from his room. The film crew was wrapping up the shoot, and a porter was trying to get the blood off the carpet.
Alevy approached the bell captain. “Helicopter?” He made a whirling motion with his finger. “Helicopter?” he said more loudly, remembering that Americans had a reputation of shouting English to foreigners in the belief that if it was loud enough the natives would understand it. “Hel-i-cop-ter!”
“Ah, vertolet.” The bell captain pointed through the glass doors to a small white Aeroflot bus.
“Swell.” Alevy pointed to his bags and showed the man his hotel bill with his room number on it.
The bell captain nodded and called a bellboy over, saying to the boy in Russian, “You didn’t think the American was going to carry his bags twenty meters, did you? Be nice to him, and he may take you to America in his suitcase.”
Alevy smiled vacuously at the bell captain and gave him a ruble.
The man touched his cap and said, “Da svedahnya.”
“Good-bye,” Alevy said, and followed the bellboy toward the doors where the doorman wished him a pleasant journey, making Alevy think that indeed some of them were getting it right.
Alevy boarded the Aeroflot minibus and nodded to three other men who were seated. The bellboy stowed Alevy’s overnight bag and suitcase in the rear of the bus. Alevy held on to his attaché case. The driver started the bus.
The man across the aisle from Alevy said to him, “American?”
“Yes.”
The man smiled. “Hey, can you believe helicopter service in Moscow? They didn’t have this when I was here five years ago.”
The man behind Alevy added, “I can’t believe this hotel. It was nearly up to standards.”
They all laughed.
The fourth man, in front of Alevy, looked back at the other three. “Did you men see that cops and robbers movie they were shooting there in the lobby?”
They all nodded. Alevy said, “It was actually a CIA-KGB caper. Silly Hollywood kind of stuff. Never hear about that in real life.”
The bus pulled away from the circular driveway, and the four men, all Americans, exchanged small talk about their stay in Moscow. It turned out that they were all taking the 10:45 Finnair flight to Helsinki, the last flight to the West until morning.
The man in front of Alevy said he was a frequent traveler to Moscow and added, “I always feel good when I get clear of this place. I’ve kissed the tarmac at Helsinki so many times my lips are getting black.”
They all smiled in recognition.
The bus took them around the west side of the hotel to a concrete helipad near the International Exhibition Hall, close by the Moskva embankment road. An Mi-28 helicopter sat on the floodlit pad, its turbojet engine warming. Alevy regarded the white helicopter a moment. Rather than landing skids, it sat on wheels like most Soviet helicopters. It had four main rotor blades, sitting atop two four-hundred horsepower Izotov turbine engines. The Mi-28 saw service in the Soviet military, as it did with Aeroflot as a transporter of VIPs. It was fast, comfortable, and reliable. Or so he’d been told. Like all Soviet aircraft, this one had a NATO code name, and as with all helicopters, the code name began with H. The code names were supposed to be meaningless. He hoped so. The Mi-28 was called The Headstone.
The bus stopped ten meters from the helicopter, and the four Americans carried their own luggage off, the bus driver helping them with their bags of Beriozka items.
The pilot opened the cabin door and took the luggage, stowing it in the narrow space behind the last two seats. The four Americans tipped the bus driver in rubles and climbed aboard the helicopter.
Alevy sat directly behind the pilot and noted that the copilot’s seat was empty as was usually the case on these short hops to the airport.
The other three men settled into the remaining seats. One of them, the frequent Moscow traveler, commented, “At this hour we could make Sheremetyevo by taxi in thirty minutes. The Russkies probably think we’re nuts to spend this kind of money to make it by chopper in ten.”
Another man replied, “They’re learning how to part us from our greenbacks. Ten more years and you’ll see hard currency strip joints on Gorky Street.”
Everyone laughed.
The helicopter lifted vertically over the Trade Center complex, and Alevy looked down at the handsome buildings below: the fifteen-story hotel, the taller office buildings, and the trade exhibition halls. “A true window to the West,” he said. “To the world. Even the Soviet paranoia about everything Western seems to be missing from the place.”
No one replied.
Alevy leaned forward and examined the helicopter instrument panel, its gauges and radios alight in a faint red glow. He said to the pilot, “Do you speak English?”
The pilot glanced back as he swung the helicopter north toward Sheremetyevo. “Chto?”
“Angliiski?”
“Nyet.”
Alevy nodded and sat back in his seat. He said to the other men, “Fuel gauge reads full.”
The man sitting beside Alevy, Captain Ed O’Shea, nodded. “As I said, Seth, it’s a regulation so that all aircraft, even civilian craft, are always ready for instant mobilization if the balloon goes up.”
“Good rule,” Alevy remarked. So far, so good, he thought. One pilot, full tanks. He and two of the other Americans with him, Hollis’ aide, O’Shea, and Alevy’s deputy station chief, Bert Mills, had flown out to Helsinki during the past week, then come back to Moscow individually, with new passports and forged Soviet visas, checking into the Trade Center. They were officially out of the country, and there would be few problems for the embassy if things went bad.
The man behind Alevy, Bill Brennan, who had come directly from his convalescent leave in London, said, “I want to thank you for giving me a chance to even the score.”
Alevy replied, “I thought you’d be getting bored in London.” He added, “They did a lousy job on your nose.” Alevy looked out the window and saw Sheremetyevo coming up on the port front. “Well, gentlemen, are we ready?”
They all answered in the affirmative. Bert Mills, in the rear seat beside Brennan, leaned forward and said to Captain O’Shea, “Now that you’ve seen it, can you fly it from the copilot’s chair?”
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 droppi
ng 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.
He was coming in at about forty-five degrees, and the altimeter showed five hundred meters.
He began decreasing airspeed with the collective pitch stick and throttle. As the collective pitch was adjusted, he increased his pressure on the right rudder to maintain the heading and increased the throttle to hold the rpm steady. Simultaneously he coordinated the cyclic stick with the other controls to maintain the proper forward airspeed. He wished he had another hand.
The helicopter passed over the edge of the excavation at one hundred meters’ altitude, and O’Shea realized the pit was deeper than he’d thought. The opposite wall of the pit was less than a hundred meters away now, and he was still about one hundred meters above the bottom of the excavation at an angle of approach that would put the craft into the fast-approaching wall. He felt sweat forming under his arms.
O’Shea immediately decreased the collective, simultaneously increasing rearward pressure on the cyclic, like reining in a horse. The craft’s nose rose higher, and it began to slow. He resisted the temptation to cut the throttle, which
seemed the natural thing to do to bleed off airspeed, but which would have led to a stall. “Damn… stupid helicopter.”
The helicopter continued to slow, but O’Shea knew he was in a tail-low attitude, and the rear boom might hit the ground before the wheels did.
The rotor’s downwash raised huge billows of dust and gravel, obscuring O’Shea’s visibility, and he had to look at the artificial horizon indicator to see if he was horizontal to the ground. The downwash was creating a turbulence that was interfering with his ability to hold the craft steady. He could see neither the ground nor the excavation wall to his front and was hoping to touch the ground with his wheels before he touched the wall with his nose. “I can’t see… can anybody see!”
Alevy replied, “Relax. You’re fine.”
O’Shea knew that he was too nose-up and tail-down and that the helicopter was now tilted to the left and was still moving forward faster than it was descending. He also realized he had lost control. He made a decision and twisted the throttle shut, hoping that gravity would do what he could no longer do. “Hold on!” The nose dropped, and the whole craft fell the last few feet but not straight down, the left landing-wheels hitting first. “Damn it!” O’Shea shut off the engine as the entire craft rocked from side to side, the rotor blades barely clearing the ground.
Finally the craft settled into the gravel, and the rotors wound down. They all sat silently as the dust settled, clearing their view. Alevy looked around the excavation. It was indeed some sort of open quarry. He saw a few wooden sheds to the right and earthmoving equipment but no sign of workers or watchmen. Alevy commented to O’Shea, “Are you on the upsweep of a learning curve, Ed?”
O’Shea drew a breath and nodded. He wiped his sweaty hands on his trousers. “I got this thing figured out now.”
Brennan opened the sliding door, and he and Mills carried the unconscious Aeroflot pilot out of the helicopter. They dragged him through the gravel away from the helicopter and removed his Aeroflot flight suit, leaving him tied hand and foot in his underwear.