MiG Pilot: the Final Escape of Lt. Belenko

A red warning light flashed in the cockpit at 1:42, and an instant afterward a panel lit up, illuminating the words «You Have Six Minutes of Fuel Left.» Belenko reached out and turned off the warning lights. Why be bothered? He was over water again, having crossed the peninsula above Volcano Bay, so he banked into a ninety-degree turn northward toward land, still flying at 1,800 feet. Straight ahead he saw another mass of clouds, but he elected to maintain altitude and plunge into them. They might form just an isolated patch, and the lower he went, the more rapidly the MiG would consume fuel, and the less his glide range would be.

Suddenly a dulcet female voice startled him. Emanating from a recording he did not know existed, the voice was as calm as it was sweet: «Caution, Oh-six-eight! Your fuel supply has dropped to an emergency level. You are in an emergency situation.»

Belenko replied aloud, «Woman, wherever you are, tell me something I don't know. Tell me where is that aerodrome.»

The fuel gauge stood at empty, and Belenko guessed he had, at most, two minutes left. The clouds had not dissipated, and there was nothing else to do. So he pointed the MiG-25 down toward land and the unknown.

CHAPTER II: Viktor's Quest

Why? Of all officers, why Belenko? Nowhere in the recorded history of his life and career was an answer discernible. None of the conventional causes that might motivate a man to abandon homeland, family, comrades, and privilege could be found. Belenko was not in trouble of any kind. He never had associated with dissidents or manifested the least ideological disaffection. Like all Soviet pilots, he underwent weekly medical examinations, and physicians repeatedly judged him exceptionally fit, mentally and physically. He drank moderately, lived within his means, was involved with no woman except his wife, and had the reputation of being honest to the point of fault.

In their initial consternation, the Russians did not believe, indeed, could not bring themselves to believe, that Belenko had vanished voluntarily. They preferred to think that he had been lured by invisible forces beyond his control. In a way they were correct, for Belenko was a driven man. And in his flight from the Soviet Union, he was continuing a quest that had motivated and dominated most of his life, a quest that caused him also to ask why.

Belenko grew up as a child alone, left to chart his own course according to destinations and bearings fixed by himself. He was born on February 15, 1947, in a mountain village between the Black and Caspian seas, about a year after his father's release from the Soviet Army. His father had been conscripted in December 1941 at age seventeen, eventually promoted to sergeant, trained as a saboteur and assassin, then assigned to help lead partisan forces. Thereafter he fought with partisans behind German lines, swimming for his life across icy rivers, hiding in frozen forests, and witnessing the slaughter of numberless comrades by enemy patrols, which in combat with irregulars neither gave nor received any quarter. Combat hardened him into a physically powerful, blunt, strong-willed man concerned with little other than survival and the pursuit of women.

When Viktor was two, his father divorced his mother, took him away to Donbas, the great mining region of southwestern Russia, and subsequently prohibited her from seeing him. They shared a hut with another woman until his father quit her, consigned him to the care of his own mother and sister, and departed for a job 5,000 miles away in a Siberian factory managed by a wartime friend.

The grandmother and aunt lived in one of some forty mud and straw huts that constituted a village near Mine No. 24. Coal dust darkened every structure of the village and so permeated the atmosphere that after a storm temporarily purified the air, food tasted strange. The women occupied one room of the hut and built a bed for Viktor in the other, where they cooked and ate. His aunt rose daily at 5:00 A.M. to draw water from the communal well, stoke the fire, and prepare soup and bread for breakfast before she walked to the mine. There she worked from 7:30 A.M. to 6:00 P.M., sorting debris and alien particles from coal passing on a conveyor belt. She had no gloves, and often her hands were bruised or bleeding. His grandmother, in her seventies, hobbled about with a stick during the day, acting as a good Samaritan, visiting the sick and elderly and attending to an invalid widow who received no pension. Each evening she chanted long litanies before an icon in the corner.

Winter confined Viktor to the hut because, until he was six, he had no shoes. From the sleeves of an old jacket his aunt sewed slippers useful for dashes to the outhouse but unsuitable for prolonged wear in snow. Incarcerated alone, he could amuse himself only by the exercise of his own imagination and curiosity.