Commander-in-Chief

33

Kaliningrad’s Chernyakhovsk air base was blanketed by fog at five thirty a.m., but this was of no great concern to Captain Chipurin, the pilot of the Ilyushin Il-20M on the taxiway. He flew through the clouds all day long, after all, so taking off into thick, obscuring vapor was hardly an issue. Landing, on the other hand, required more skill, but Chipurin and his crew would not be landing for another eight hours, and that would be 800 kilometers away at Saint Petersburg, where the weather was predicted to be cold but clear.

The one thing that was a potential concern for Chipurin today, however, was the weather out over the Baltic Sea. Massive thunderstorms had developed overnight and moved northeast from Germany, and at sea level now there were reports of forty-mile-per-hour winds and twelve-foot waves. It was a typical Baltic autumn storm, lots of cells popping up then petering out, and other pilots in the area had reported that the tops of many of the cells rose above 40,000 feet. Chipurin knew this meant he’d have to be on the lookout for weather, even at his cruising altitude of 38,000 feet.

Upon gaining clearance from the control tower, the captain goosed his power levers forward slightly, turned the nose of the big, dull gray aircraft to face the length of runway 6, and then he pushed the levers all the way forward, sending full power to his four turboprop engines.

This aircraft wasn’t based here in Kaliningrad — rather, its home was Chkalovskaya, near Moscow — but it had left for its reconnaissance flight of Sweden two days earlier, and halfway to its destination it had developed a problem with its electrical system. Chernyakhovsk had been the nearest friendly place to land, and as this was a spy plane, Chipurin very much preferred landing at friendly airports, lest he be stripped of his rank and thrown out of the military.

The electrical problem was fixed after a day, so this morning the Il-20M was again taking to the skies.

At five thirty-four a.m. it did just that. The controllers in the tower watched the plane lift off, fading quickly into the mist above their runway. Only the small red star on the vertical stabilizer was visible at fifty meters off the ground, and this too disappeared within a few seconds as the gray airship melded with the saturated air.

Of course the aircraft’s flight path had been altered by the fact that it was beginning its day at a different airport than planned, but once Chipurin left Kaliningrad and got up to his cruising altitude he would merge with his original flight path and carry out his orders. This would take him northwest over the Baltic to Sweden’s Gotland Island, which he would circle, just outside Swedish airspace, at an altitude of 20,000 feet. After this he would turn due north, flying along the Swedish coast, passing Stockholm out his port-side window before performing a series of racetrack patterns in the Gulf of Bothnia between Sweden and Finland. Here the sensor operators in their seats behind Chipurin and his copilot would conduct tests on Swedish radar capabilities and listen in on military communications. After two hours of this, the big Ilyushin would leave the skies over the gulf and return to the Baltic Sea proper, heading east past Helsinki before descending over the Gulf of Finland to land finally in Levashovo air base, north of Saint Petersburg.

It was a routine electronic intelligence flight for Chipurin and his ten-person crew in most respects, other than the fact they were taking off in Kaliningrad and would have to change their route to avoid the storm cells.

Just after takeoff Chipurin turned off his aircraft’s transponder, the electronic signaling device that emits information to air traffic control and other nearby aircraft giving its location and identity. This meant the military turbo prop was essentially invisible to other aircraft, as its radar signature would be all but lost in the clutter from the storms around. Nor would Chipurin make or respond to radio communications with civilian air traffic control or non-Russian military aircraft.

This was a military reconnaissance flight, after all; Captain Chipurin did not take to the skies to make friends.

There was no international law that said military aircraft needed to use transponders, follow standard routes used for civilian traffic, or communicate with air traffic control. But despite the lack of a mandate to do so, flying without a transponder was inherently dangerous.

Civilian aircraft do have onboard radar, but contrary to much public perception, these are not designed to identify other aircraft in the sky. They are instead used for weather and, at low altitude, terrain, but an aircraft in the sky on an onboard radar would appear as a tiny speck, if at all. Tiny specks could also represent rain, birds, or false echoes of nothing that the radar displayed in error.

Commercial aircraft do carry onboard traffic avoidance systems, but these simply collect the transponder codes from aircraft in the area that choose to broadcast them, and show the location and heading of these flights to the pilot.

If a plane does not use its transponder and if the aircraft controller looking at his radar just sees a vague, intermittent, primary signal on his screen, there is a chance, a good chance, that another pilot in the area would never know there was another big, fast-moving, and heavy mass racing along nearby unless he looked out his window and saw it.

And pilots, as a rule, hated such surprises.

But Chipurin thought nothing of this. He was just following his standard procedure for an electronic intelligence reconnaissance flight. Russian ELINT planes virtually always operated in international airspace without using their transponders. Chipurin and his copilot had been doing this sort of thing in steady rotation for several months, and they had been flying for several years, so they had become masters at both getting near and staying clear of other planes in the skies.

In today’s weather there was no way the aircraft controller watching over this section of the Baltic could relay every primary signal to every pilot he was responsible for. Chipurin knew this, but he just told himself he’d stay out of known aviation lanes, he’d avoid the most congested airspace around Stockholm and Helsinki, and he’d keep his eyes sharp.

The first hour of the flight went by quickly. While the captain and his copilot negotiated the weather, altering their path to proceed directly toward Gotland Island as opposed to their original planned-on northwesterly course near Lithuania, the men and women in back calibrated equipment and began listening in on civilian maritime traffic to check audio levels.

Around Gotland, Chipurin ignored the radio calls from the Swedes like he always did when flying near his target’s airspace. He normally didn’t like being noticed up here, but on a day like today, when the weather on so much of their flight path was shit, he was secretly pleased to see that some Swedish ATC had his eyes in his scope.

Just after eight-thirty a.m., they finished what they assumed would be the most difficult part of their day. The area around Stockholm was thick with both heavy thunderstorms and air traffic, but the Il-20M had avoided the commercial jet routes, giving them an even wider berth than normal in case other pilots had decided to deviate from the lanes due to the weather.

This had gone well. Both the pilot and the copilot knew they now had a few easy hours of racetrack patterns before things got tight again as they passed Helsinki on the way to Saint Petersburg, but the weather there would not be as much of a factor, so as far as Chipurin was concerned the rest of the day would be a breeze.

He did, however, have to get around the last of the multicell cluster thunderstorm in the middle of the Baltic, so he changed course to a heading of 353 degrees, turning slightly back toward Sweden.

Doing this helped him avoid the heavy cell, but he did not avoid moving through an updraft that seemed to develop around him on the radar. Storms like this propagated new cells with regularity, so he wasn’t concerned, and it wasn’t particularly strong yet. The Il-20M encountered moderate turbulence, but Chipurin knew it would not be an issue for either the passengers or the equipment, so he decided to just climb a few thousand feet to see if he could find his way out of the clouds.

During a surprisingly heavy buffet the copilot dropped his clipboard, sending dozens of pages onto the floor of the cockpit. The first officer left his seat to pick up several of the pages, but both the pilot and copilot simultaneously turned to help, because pages had spilled all around them. It took only a few seconds before the pilot was back up and gazing at the gray covering his windshield.

Chipurin said, “Where is the top of this shit?”

The copilot said, “Could be sixty thousand. You want to try a new heading?”

Chipurin looked at his radar and saw returns all around him.

“No. We’ll go over it or through it.” Chipurin kept scanning out his windscreen, looking for blue sky. Suddenly they broke out of the storm and began racing over the clouds, giving visual reference to the plane’s speed. When this happened it always felt to the captain like he was flying over a massive snowy field at low level, and he enjoyed the sensation. He rode along here for just a moment, then reached forward to change to a steeper climb that would take them up to 34,000 feet.

Out of his left eye Chipurin detected movement, something outside his windscreen in the clouds. He turned his head toward the motion at his ten-o’clock position, focused on the spot less than a half-mile away, and he saw a puff of white emerge from the top of one of the gray storm clouds like a flower’s bloom. Suddenly, in the middle of the puff, a large white aircraft with a blue vertical stabilizer appeared, just ahead and below the Il-20M, rising out of the clouds in a shallow climb.

“Tchyo za ga lima?” What the fuck?

It was an Airbus A330, a Swedish Airlines commercial flight. Chipurin recognized the aircraft and its distinctive markings. It did not belong right in front of the Ilyushin, there was no reason for it to be where it was, at this altitude, but Chipurin knew he needed to initiate evasive maneuvers because the Airbus was climbing on a heading that would take it up and through his starboard wing if he did not act immediately.

He turned the yoke hard to his left and pulled it back, raising his nose and banking hard to port.

This would have worked, sending the A330 just below his starboard wing, had the pilot of the Swedish airliner not also pulled up his own nose and executed a turn to starboard in response to the impending collision.

Chipurin realized both planes were converging, so he jammed the yoke to the right now and shoved it forward, trying to somehow push himself below the ascending Airbus.

But there was not enough time. His countermovement merely had the effect of correcting the climb and the bank to port, and this ensured his Ilyushin was flying straight and level when the massive A330 drove belly-first into the rear section of the Russian electronic intelligence flight at a converging speed of more than seven hundred knots.

Mercifully for those on board the Swedish Airlines Airbus, the deaths of all came nearly instantaneously as the full center tank exploded just two seconds after slamming into the fuselage of the gray Russian spy plane.

But many of those on the Russian spy plane were not as lucky. Captain Chipurin was, at first, unaware he’d lost the tail of his aircraft. He frantically put on his emergency air supply and fought the unresponsive plane all the way down with his copilot, a futile three-minute-and-twenty-second attempt to fly the unflyable through the middle of the heavy storm.

The men and women in the main cabin had parachutes, but they were not wearing them, and the dying spiraling plane meant not one of them had a chance to do anything to save themselves. Instead, all they could do was whip around in their harnesses, strapped into their chairs, arms, legs, and heads flailing, screaming helplessly into a roaring wind. Most passed out within a minute, but a few managed to get their masks on, which did nothing for them but ensure that they suffered their terror longer than their more fortunate colleagues did.

Finally, Chipurin’s broken craft slammed into the water at latitude 59.0404 and longitude 19.7576, near the middle of the Baltic Sea, well before the first bits of debris from the Swedish airliner began raining down on the water around.

None of them would ever know that Swedish Airlines flight 44, just twenty-five minutes after takeoff from Stockholm, had been given permission to deviate from its course by twenty degrees to avoid the new storm cell growing in front of it, but its request to climb out of the weather was delayed because of a Latvian cargo plane that had just been vectored into that altitude. When the final approval for flight 44’s altitude change was approved by ATC, the Airbus pilot and his copilot had missed the transmission, delaying their ascent by more than two minutes before ATC noticed the error and repeated the transmission.

The deviation and the delay put the Airbus eleven miles south of its normal route and four thousand feet lower than its normal altitude, which would not have been an issue, if not for the Russian spy plane transiting the area without squawking its transponder.

Twenty-two minutes later, at three a.m. in Washington, D.C., a man residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was awakened and given the news. He did not go back to bed. Instead, he headed for his bathroom to shower, his closet to dress, and then began the familiar walk to his office.