Читать книгу The Memories of Dead Pilot - Yuriy Sobeshchakov - Страница 5

We were the first to take off. After achieving flying altitude I turned the aircraft towards the Komandor Islands. Leaving the last bit of dry land belonging to the Soviet Union far behind, we turned towards the American border. My battle mission included verifying the anti-aircraft defenses of the potential enemy. At a distance of two hundred miles from Attu Island I began the descent. At an altitude of one hundred and fifty feet and a speed of six hundred knots, we headed towards the enemy islands. When we had approached to within one hundred miles of them I saw a pair of fighters. Our little war game had ended. Our aircraft had been detected and, theoretically, shot down. But we did not consider ourselves to be losers. After all, six minutes before, my navigators had worked out the training launch of missiles against the American air force base. The three-ton miniature plane, breaking away from the pylon of my aircraft, would reach a height of sixty thousand feet, and from there, would come down on the Americans almost vertically, scattering the concrete squares of their runway for hundreds of feet around.

The fighters rushed past us, turned sharply, and hung over the left and right wings of my aircraft. The pilot of the leading fighter saluted me and made a sign for me to open the bomb compartment. I reduced the flight speed and transmitted his request to my navigator. When the green light glowed to show that the “bomb compartment is open”, I gave the American pilot the thumbs up. He understood this international gesture correctly. He slipped beneath the fuselage and, having convinced himself that, as usual, our bomb compartment was empty, he took his place above the left wing.

Escorted by the American aircraft, we reached our cruising altitude and flew about an hour together. Then I waved at the fighter pilots and took a course towards Kamchatka. The pair of F-15s accelerated, and, catching up with us, rolled and banked away.

That’s it, I thought in relief. My first battle assignment has been successfully completed. I called out to anyone who cared to listen, “Let’s get the hell out of here!”

The nervous tension subsided and I began to relax, even daydreaming about the leave I had just completed…..

Two months before, having received my leave ticket from the hands of the chief of staff, the whole crew and I had left for Vladivostok. After that our paths diverged. My crew flew off to their relatives, while I settled into a hotel with the romantic name “Dawn of the East.” The object of my attention was the discotheque of the medical school. After two weeks of drinking bouts with the students, and having slept my way through the entire physical therapy department, I unexpectedly encountered a point-blank refusal from a future physician to spend a charming night of love in a dark place. This took the wind out of my sails to such an extent that I couldn’t think of anything else except the woman who had turned me down.

“How could that be?” I reasoned. “To say ‘no’ to me, to a naval pilot? I haven’t ever heard that word before from women, and, most importantly, I don’t want to hear it now.” But the beauty turned out to be more stubborn and certainly smarter than I. As a result, by the middle of my leave we were married. There was one more factor that had influenced my hurried decision – her father was the head of the Pacific Coast Defenses, and although he had no connection to aviation, he nonetheless bore the proud title of rear-admiral, a rare commodity in the Pacific fleet….

I heard the navigator report: “Commander, we’ve reached the descent point.”

“Roger that.” I pushed the control column forward, lowering the nose of the aircraft while simultaneously slowing the engines’ revolutions per minute to idle. It immediately became much quieter in the cabin. Looking over at the co-pilot, I noted his bored stare, his thoughts elsewhere. Ice floes are only so interesting and that only lasts a while. The poor fellow really did not have much to do, true to this assignment. Ahh, the life of a commander. My thoughts returned to Vladivostok and my new wife.

The second half of my leave was taken up with our honeymoon. The speed of our wedding left no room for vacation planning and the approaching winter term did not leave my wife even a week of free time. So it was my parents-in-law that came up with the solution. They took up residence in the posh hotel downtown, giving us free reign in their home. We spent almost the whole time in bed, alternating reading Olga’s lectures with practical exercises in more profound and all-inclusive study of human anatomy. We devoted special attention to the differences in structure between the male and female bodies. And although we did not make any great new discoveries, pleasure from the process of studies was obtained on both sides. The pleasant memories brought a smile to my face…

“Commander, the screen of my on-board radar has gone out!” The voice of the navigator brought me back to stark reality. It’s odd that the sound is coming to me directly, and not through the headset of the aircraft communication system. I looked at the instrument panel. There were more than thirty instruments on it, but I was interested in only two of them – those that indicate the revolutions per minute of the left and right engines. The pointers of both of them vibrated, indicating autorotation, a stall. I checked fuel flow. Nothing! “Shut off all electrical devices!” I yelled to the two navigators and the co-pilot. Then, I looked at the engine control levers and immediately our circumstance became clear. Eight minutes prior, commencing the descent from thirty thousand feet, shifting the engines from cruise to idle, I must have pulled them a bit further, into the stop position. Without having verified the instrument indications, my aircraft had descended smoothly to ten thousand feet. During that time the working aviation equipment and most of all the powerful on-board radar had completely discharged the batteries.

I pressed the “air start” button for the third time without effect. On the older model of the TU-16 there was no “lock flight idle” to prevent the unhindered shift of the control levers through their full range. And, engulfed by my pleasant recollections, I had turned off both engines by mistake.

At the beginning of the fifties, when Stalin’s aircraft designers had been planning this type of aircraft, they had not anticipated that, for one, forty years later the planes would still be flying, and secondly, that the pilots flying them would have their minds on a woman, rather than the engine, rotating underneath them.

Sure, I admit to being distracted, but I didn’t deserve to die. The water was coming up fast and I couldn’t even send out a “Mayday.” Already, it was too late to parachute out of the aircraft and besides, such a course would have been useless anyway. The wind chill associated with bailing out into minus twenty six degrees added to the shock of smacking into near freezing water, combined with struggling to get out of the icy water into an individual rubber boat, a body could only survive, at best, two hours. Desperately, I tried to locate a route more or less clear of ice floes. Making the adjustments to starboard and an instant before we hit the water I pulled hard on the control column, slowing the descent enough to allow the fuselage to kiss the water, followed instantly by the knock out punch as the nose dipped, pushing the glass of the navigators compartment under water.

Somehow, we were in one piece and everyone was alive. Now we had to get out of the plane as quickly as possible.

While I was occupied with the landing, the navigator, bombardier and the co-pilot, abandoning their working positions, moved to stand alongside my seat, ready to operate the emergency hatch over our heads. After a brief struggle, they got it free, allowing me to crawl out first. I ran back along the top of the fuselage to the mid-station hatch, blown open automatically from the impact with the water. I grabbed for the silk lanyard, held aloft by a compressed air balloon, and attached to the orange sheltered inflatable emergency raft bobbing by the open hatch. I got my knife out of my flight jacket, cut the balloon free, winding the remaining lanyard around my hand and stumbling, slipping, pulled the raft behind me to the nose of the aircraft. By now, the three crewmembers stood as a unit on the fuselage, ready to descend onto the port wing, now partially awash with tiny wavelets and a patina of ice spread over the super-cooled metal. Just as my brain registered the danger presented by the iced aluminum and an instant before my voice caught up, my co-pilot jumped down onto the wing. His legs slipped out in disarray, causing him to loose balance. He fell heavily on his back, sliding down the wing. As he slipped he waved his hands in jagged gyrations, trying to catch hold of something, anything. In a choked-off cry of despair he disappeared beneath the water. His fur parka, warm coverall, and high leather boots lined with dog fur all acted like a huge sponge, sucking in water, removing any chance for him to stay on the surface for even for a moment.

Sickened by what we had seen, we stood motionless by the open upper hatch of the cockpit – until the pinging of metal against glass brought us back to our senses. The gunner and the radio operator, at the tail of the pressurized hull were smacking the butts of their pistols against the plexi-glass of the rear hatch. The muted sounds of their desperate efforts transmitted eerily along the full length of the fuselage. The tail section hatch that, under normal conditions, opened downwards, was now under a minimum of three feet of frigid water and the back pressure made opening it impossible, trapping the two NCOs in the sealed compartment. Without sufficient prior warning of an impending emergency water landing, they had remained in the compartment – now, with absolutely no possibility of getting to them from outside or for them to escape from within.

Terrified by the gruesome death of the co-pilot and now besieged with the terrible frigid fate of the two in the aft, the navigator, the bombardier, and I helped one another to descend carefully onto the wing. Then we pulled the raft as close as possible to the aircraft, and I ordered the bombardier to jump in first. The lieutenant, who had only begun service a month previous, gave me a resigned look, but trusting my experience, jumped. It was impossible to get a good running start on the slippery wing, and he missed his landing by inches. His right leg, striking the resilient rubber wall of the raft, bounced him up and over the water. In he went, submerging fully in a wave – but against all odds, he managed to seize hold of the thin safety line girdling the raft. After a couple seconds, when he again appeared on the surface, the navigator fell on his knees and seized his young colleague by the collar of his flight jacket, preventing him from going under again. I pulled the cord of our raft taut to the trailing edge of the wing and we helped the lieutenant clamber first onto the flap and then tumble into the raft.

While we were struggling to save the life of the bombardier the aircraft was slowly sinking into the ocean. Wavelets over the wing became full waves. Icy water bathed the tops of our boots. Clambering into the inflatable shelter after the wet bombardier, the navigator and I began to row furiously, trying to get away as far as possible from the plane.

The raft floated past the tail compartment and to my horror, I saw that the gunner and the radio operator, like wild animals, shooting at the glass. Deafened and panicked, it seemed to me at that moment as if they were shooting at us. Horrified, I shifted my gaze away, putting more force behind my rowing. I said to the navigator:

“They know that the glass of their compartment can’t be broken even by the impact of a twenty-millimeter automatic gun. They’d do better to leave a bullet or two to shoot themselves with; otherwise they’ll die horribly from suffocation.”

“True commander, but I suspect their deaths, like the co-pilot’s, will be on your conscience.”

“Row harder, damn it. The plane will go under any minute now. Our raft could easily be caught in the whirlpool. We get as far away from this place as far as we can. We’ll talk about my conscience later,” I said, and, after a moment’s thought, added: “If we survive.”

The bombardier didn’t interrupt as he lay in fetal position and shivered. About a hundred feet away, the aircraft began to lift its nose higher and higher and, coming almost to the vertical, suddenly plunged beneath the water. Huge air bubbles escaping from the forward hatch produced a mighty geyser, the last testament of a proud aircraft. I buttoned up the rubber door of the raft in time. We were carried upwards and then thrown down. The sea, having taken three victims out of the six in the crew, grew calm once more.

Now we had to conserve our strength and wait.

Our fate was in the hands of the operator of the long-range radar. I was certain that he was tracking us and would immediately report the disappearance of our aircraft from the radar screen. I imagined that after his report all the forces of the fleet would be searching for us and would find us without fail. I told the navigators this. The bombardier answered gloomily:

“The hell they’ll find us.”

And his older colleague, with bitterness in his voice, objected to him quietly:

“They will certainly find us, but when?”