Read the Excerpt: The Defector by Chris Hadfield
Prologue
North Vietnam, June 1965
“Contact ten left, low, Kaz!” The voice from the back seat of the F-4B Phantom was clipped, urgent. “Looks like it’s moving west, away from us.”
“What range, Toad?”
Kaz Zemeckis, the pilot, craned his neck, looking down through the thick windscreen, trying to see past the Phantom’s bulbous black nose. He was the lead on this combat air patrol, flying off the aircraft carrier USS Independence, stationed a hundred miles off the coast of Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin. Providing top cover against enemy fighters.
Pedro Tostado, long since nicknamed Toad, was head-down behind him, working the radar. “It’s intermittent, too much ground clutter.” Toad was Kaz’s RIO, his Radar Intercept Officer.
Kaz glanced left. His wingman was just beyond his Phantom’s wing-tip, another pale-gray F-4B with a Jolly Rogers skull-and-crossbones painted on the tail, holding loose formation. Its pilot was looking back at him, waiting for direction.
Toad’s voice rose in pitch: “Bogey’s turned hard back into us, Kaz, solid lock now! Eighteen miles!”
“Copy.”
Kaz turned his whole helmet towards his wingman and made a brush-off motion with his gloved left hand while porpoising the plane slightly. A clear signal. The other Phantom immediately banked crisply away, its glossy white belly revealed, moving out to tactical formation at the same altitude, still abreast but a mile distant. Close enough to keep sight, but with room to maneuver independently in case there was a dogfight.
Kaz pushed a button on the throttle to transmit on their discrete frequency. “Victory Flight, jettison tanks.” With an unidentified fighter pointing at them, neither of the jets needed the added weight and drag of their external gas tanks if they had to engage. And there were plenty more tanks stored back on their aircraft carrier. Kaz reached forward, selected centerline, and pushed the red button on his stick to pickle off the tank. He and Toad felt the slight lurch as the plane got lighter.
The wingman’s voice came harshly into their helmets. “Two has con- tact left eleven low, maybe a pair of bogeys, climbing towards us now!”
Kaz dropped the Phantom’s nose to point where he expected the enemy planes would be; a mile to his left, the wingman did the same. Two F-4Bs moving at Mach 0.9, 90 percent of the speed of sound, covering a mile every six seconds. They had their missiles armed, but they needed to visually identify the targets before the US Navy’s Rules of Engagement would allow them to fire. They knew the Soviet-made fighters didn’t have missiles, only 20- and 30-millimeter plane-mounted guns. Minimal threat head-on.
Both pilots urgently scanned the hazy, humid air in front of them, looking for the telltale silver of MiGs against the green-brown of North Vietnam.
Toad spoke. “Locked bogey descending now, Kaz! Looks like they’re dropping back down into the weeds again!”
Why would they do that?
Suddenly Kaz knew. He whipped his helmeted head around, squinting against the brightness, searching the blue of the sky beside and behind
them for movement. He raised his left hand to block the glare and saw a metallic flash.
“Bandits, seven o’clock high!” he yelled into his mic. “Two, extend out, I’m breaking left!”
Flames instantly leapt from his wingman’s exhaust as the pilot slammed the Phantom’s throttles into full afterburner and pushed on his stick to get to zero g, minimizing drag, maximizing acceleration. To outrun the enemy’s guns, and then be able to pitch back in and fire missiles. Kaz buried his stick in his lap and pushed both throttles into max afterburner, his arms and back straining to haul the big jet around to face the threat. Both he and Toad grunted as they fiercely clenched the muscles of their legs and lower bodies to squeeze the blood up into their heads against the heavy eight-g turning force.
At the edges of his graying vision Kaz saw small balls of fireworks arcing down towards his canopy. “Tracers!” he yelled, and rolled as he pulled to avoid the line of gunfire coming from the North Vietnamese fighters. The Phantom climbed as the enemy planes descended, whipping past each other in the blue.
“MiG-17s!” Kaz and Toad yelled, recognizing the swept wings, rounded tips, triple wing fences and high T-tails of the Soviet fighter. Both men rapidly processed the mental image of color details and markings, and Kaz got it first. “Not Chinese, North Vietnamese,” he said, twisting his head to follow their descent behind him. Some of his early dogfights had been with MiG-15s of the Chinese Air Force. “I see two of them, descending and running!” He rolled and pulled, bringing the Phantom around again to seek a missile solution.
It had been a classic aerial gunfighter tactic, choreographed by the Vietnamese People’s Air Force ground control radars: wait until the American fighters are headed inland, send two decoys at low altitude to distract them while two fighters, maneuvering from high altitude, come straight out of the Sun for a strafing pass, and then all four would dive away, too close to the ground for US missiles to follow.
Kaz kept his eyes glued to the retreating silver shapes, lining the Phantom up so Toad could get a radar relock. As soon as he called it, Kaz took triggers and sent one of his AIM-7D Sparrow radar-seeking missiles to chase the MiGs down.
It was all he could do, and Kaz silently cursed the arrogance of the politicians who had decided that the F-4 didn’t need a gun. Defense Secretary McNamara had said putting guns on fighter jets would be like using “bows and arrows in modern warfare.” Asshole, Kaz thought, not for the first time, waiting to see a flash of the missile detonating.
Nothing. Either the MiGs got too low or the Sparrow didn’t fuse.
But staring hard, Kaz saw the flashing planform of one of the MiGs against the green, pitching back up towards them. “One MiG’s headed back our way, Toad!”
“I have him locked. Shoot!” Toad yelled. Kaz squeezed the trigger again and a second Sparrow raced away, its small brain frantically solving angles as it homed in on the Phantom’s reflected radar signal. The MiG was head-on now, and Kaz willed the missile to work. He saw an explosion of white, but the growing silver shape of the Soviet jet didn’t change. “Fused late!” Toad called, and tracers zipped past just to Kaz’s left. He rolled 90 and jinked hard, clenching his teeth, but he felt no impact of bullets as the MiG flashed past. Kaz reversed his roll to watch the MiG push over and dive away again.
But it didn’t dive. Instead of using its remaining speed to lower the nose and accelerate to safety, the pilot did something with the MiG that Kaz hadn’t seen before. First he pitched hard and yawed the plane one way, and then he slammed rapidly the other direction, reversing and somehow pointing exactly back towards Kaz in one wild, seemingly barely controlled maneuver. Tracers raced towards Kaz across the void between them.
“Shit!”
Reacting immediately, Kaz did something jet fighter pilots never do and jammed his stick hard forward. The Phantom was rated for not only eight positive but also three negative g, but pilots didn’t like using it
because it pivoted the plane blindly down belly first, where they couldn’t see. With Kaz’s maneuver all the loose maps and checklists and floor dirt slammed up into the canopy, and Kaz and Toad’s shins whammed into the bottom of the instrument panel, blood rushing to their head, the whole world seeming upside down. Kaz forcefully held the stick in position for three long seconds, ignoring the disruption to the fuel and oil systems of the plane, and then rolled 90 degrees left and pulled, hard.
Shoot at that! he thought.
He and Toad looked over their shoulders, scanning the sky where the MiG had to be, and were relieved to spot it, down low now, running away. The wingman’s voice came over his headset. “Two’s inbound. Didn’t get a good firing solution!” With the speed and multi-plane confusion
of the engagement, that didn’t surprise Kaz.
“Copy Victory Two,” he said, “they’re bugging out under you. I’m rolling out headed one zero zero, four twenty knots at five thousand feet. You’re cleared to rejoin.” The wingman acknowledged with a double mic click, and Kaz and Toad’s heads stayed on a swivel, checking six to make sure the MiGs didn’t come after them again. They didn’t expect it: the MiG-17F with its afterburner was notoriously fuel-hungry and often ran short.
As the two Phantoms went feet-wet again out over the Gulf of Tonkin, cruising slower to save fuel as they headed towards the relative safety of the arresting cable waiting for them on the deck of the USS Independence, Kaz kept thinking about the maneuver he had just seen.
Where did that pilot learn to do that?
1
Syria, October 5, 1973
It was a simple mission, to a man of his abilities.
Get assigned to fly the right jet, follow the route, save enough fuel, avoid ground fire and find someplace to land.
Raz plyunut, he’d thought to himself. As easy as spitting.
He hated Syria. The place was a hellhole, compared to Moscow. Everything was brown and filthy, all the way to the hazy, rocky hills that surrounded the Tiyas T-4 Military Airbase. Even when it rained, as it had the evening before, it was just grimy mist falling onto sand. Like warm, dirty sweat from the sky, leaving smeared streaks on everything that was parked outside.
But his jet was inside, protected by an arched shelter that had been hardened against missile strikes and thickly covered with sand to avoid the prying eyes of satellites. There were no hangar doors at either end, so he could start engines, taxi out and get airborne swiftly, and get back inside just as quickly after landing.
His flying boots echoed oddly off the curved walls as he walked towards his hulking silver-and-black jet. A tall, thin yellow ladder, balanced on its
tripod base, showed the way up to the cockpit. He hung his helmet on the side hook and stepped back to look at the airplane. One careful walk-around, a last chance to check all systems before takeoff.
Two things about the MiG-25 always caught his attention. The first was the bizarrely tall and thin tires. It was as if they’d been taken from some oversized off-road motorcycle and mistakenly attached to this flying machine. The bright-green hubs of the inner wheels added to the incongruity. He kicked the black rubber as he walked past, like he always did.
For luck.
The other strangeness was the enormity of the engine intakes. Yawning black rectangles, bigger than any jet he’d ever flown, leaning forward like giant shoulder pads on either side of the cockpit. Empty great mouths that could gulp down air fast enough to feed the two voracious Tumansky R-15B-300 engines within. After years of flying MiG-25s, Grief knew the deafening whistling sound they made as well as he knew his own voice.
As a test pilot, he’d pushed the plane to find its limits of speed and altitude, clawing a record-breaking 37 kilometers up above greater Moscow to where he’d seen the blackness of the sky above and the curvature of the Soviet Union below. His squadron mates had nick-named him “Griffon” after the highest-flying of all birds, the griffon vulture. The name had soon been shortened to just one harsh Russian syllable. “Grief.”
The cool of the desert night had soaked into the hardened aircraft shelter’s walls and the metal of the jet, but the day’s heat was already starting to blow in through the open doors. He could feel it on his hands and head; the rest of his body was encased in the tightly laced pressure suit he wore to protect himself from the thinness of the air at the extreme altitudes that this MiG-25 could reach. The same sort of suit that cosmonauts wore. He liked the feel of smooth pressure against his skin.
Completing his preflight inspection, Grief pulled his helmet off the hook, put it on with hoses dangling and started up the skinny ladder.
The Americans called the jet Foxbat. The first letter F had been designated for fighter aircraft in the Western military naming system, and predecessor MiGs had been clumsily nicknamed Fagot, Fresco, Fishbed and Flogger. Grief had seen the words in American reporting and disliked the lack of avian poetry; he was glad they’d chosen better this time. The actual foxbat was a flier, one of the largest bats in the world, with keen eyesight and the ability to fly stealthily and far.
The MiG-25 Foxbat was still the best in the world at what it did. The Mikoyan-Gurevich design engineers had been tasked in 1959 with intercepting and shooting down the new Cold War American high-altitude supersonic bombers and spy planes, and that deadly pur- pose had shaped everything: the big radar dish in the nose, oversized wings optimized for lift in thin air, underwing racks for multiple air-to-air missiles, and big enough fuel tanks to give long range. Mikhail Gurevich himself, late in his career, had taken charge of designing it, and the end product had made him proud; the Foxbat was a crowning glory that could cruise high in the stratosphere at Mach 2.8, nearly three times the speed of sound. Even faster in an emergency.
Halfway up the ladder, next to the large “18” stenciled on the side, Grief paused, and looked to his left. Holding on securely with his right hand, he swung his bare left wide to touch the plane’s silver skin. He liked feeling the deep cold of the stainless steel against his palm, knowing the metal would be able to withstand the intense heat of the upcoming high-speed flight. The sharp leading edges of the wings would get hottest of all, pushing air abruptly out of the way; they were made of titanium.
The metal surfaces inside the cockpit were painted green, the same reliable anti-rust green the Soviet builders at aircraft factory Plant Number 21 in Gorky had used on the tall wheels. The flight instruments and controls were black, and the weaponry buttons were yellow, blue and red. As Grief clambered over the side rail into the jet’s single seat, he glanced around, checking switch positions. As a test pilot he’d helped design the layout and he took comfort in the functional familiarity.
His hands easily found the four heavy straps that attached his harness to the KM-1 ejection seat, pulling and clipping them securely, then tightening. He plugged in his cooling, comm and oxygen hoses and clicked his helmet into place, feeling as he always did, like he was somehow transplanting himself into a more powerful host body.
Like the legendary Griffon, with the physique of a lion and the head, wings and talons of an eagle. The ultimate New Soviet Man.
The Foxbat was already alive around him. Its navigations system took time to align; the groundcrew had connected a thick power cable an hour previously, allowing the gyroscopes and racks of vacuum tubes to warm up. Grief’s eyes flicked across the cockpit instruments, confirming that everything was lit and working.
The Soviet Air Forces had decreed that checklists weren’t allowed during combat missions in case the plane was shot down or the pilot had to eject. He reached into his leg pocket and pulled out the single permitted sheet of cryptic, handwritten notes, with key timings, frequencies and navigation coordinates, plus a detailed map that spanned from the Turkish border to Cairo. Centered on Israel. The flight suit that he wore over his pressure suit had a metal clip on the right thigh, and he tucked the two papers securely into place.
He checked his watch, comparing it with the clock mounted in the instrument panel above his left knee; still 20 minutes until takeoff. With engine start and taxi time, that gave him five extra minutes. He held up an open hand so the groundcrew could see all five digits and nodded once. The airmen nodded back, understanding. No reason to waste fuel by starting before the allotted time.
He had woken early that morning, getting up at five a.m. for his regular dawn run on the airfield, his blood quickening and his mind emptying as he pushed the pace. Then back for breakfast at the Syrian Arab Air Force’s makeshift leotchick stolovaya, the pilots’ canteen. Lamb stew, rice, flatbread, and sweet tea to wash down the yellow vitamin pills provided by the Soviet medical doctor, who also gave him the required health check. Nothing unusual.
Four minutes to start. He’d been anticipating this day for months. When he’d seen on the roster that he was assigned to fly plane number 18, with its peculiar capabilities, the excitement of it had started a low, burning feeling in his stomach. He could feel his heart beating faster now and was glad the doctor wasn’t watching.
Three minutes. He was in Syria at the direct request of the country’s president, Hafez al-Assad, to Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. Tensions with Israel were near breaking point, and Assad had secretly asked for aircraft and pilots that could photograph what the Jews were up to. Sadat had kicked all Soviet pilots and technicians out of Egypt a year earlier in a pique of tactical nationalism, but Assad wasn’t as worried about upsetting the Americans. War was brewing, and he needed to know what the MiG-25s could show him.
Two minutes. Grief flicked up the top paper on his knee to have a final look at the map underneath. His fingertip traced the route that was programmed in the Foxbat’s nav system: climb just south of Homs across Lake Qatina, stay north of Lebanon, arc hard left at the coast to photograph down the length of Israel, reverse right over the Med for a second look up the coast, and recover back to Tiyas T-4. He leaned close to remind himself of the road that defined the Lebanese border.
Sixty seconds. Time to think of the machine. He reviewed the memorized starting procedures, and quickly ran through probable failures like engine fire or abnormal oil pressure, and what his immediate responses would be. He knew the jet intimately.
The second hand on his watch ticked past the 12. Grief raised his right hand over his head with one finger pointed skyward and made a tight spinning motion, signaling engine start.
Time to fly.
2
The Israeli Coast
When the missile warning came, it was a pleasant surprise.
Cruising at 73,000 feet, 22 kilometers above the glinting Mediterranean shoreline, racing through the thin air at nearly three times the speed of sound, Grief was supposed to have been safely above any weapon the Israelis could fire at him. But the big radar dish in his jet’s nose had detected the two enemy aircraft far below, flying faster than normal, and he’d watched with interest as the blips suddenly pulled up hard to point at him, their altitude numbers rapidly climbing. The radar warning tones in his helmet had instantly become higher and more urgent.
He leaned to his left and peered down hard, scanning the blue of the water and the brown of the land for a telltale new trace of white smoke. There it was. Unmistakable. A harsh line painted pale against the earth as the AIM-7 Sparrow missile’s rocket engine burned hot, trying to solve the angles and get the missile high and fast enough to do damage. To him. Get it close enough for the proximity fuses on the missile’s sides to detect his jet and explode the 90-pound warhead in a destructive
spreading hail of metal rods. A simple and deadly design, now racing purposefully up towards him.
He threw three switches, getting ready. A second thought occurred to him, and his left hand tensed on the throttle.
He looked intently out through the thick plexiglass of the canopy. At the exact moment he judged the missile was at its closest—he could actually see the white glint of the Sparrow itself supersonically in the sky nearing to him—his hands moved swiftly, taking action.
Oddly, he smiled.
3
Tel Aviv, Israel
It was excellent beach weather.
A light wind off the Mediterranean, clear blue sky, the big thermometer on the breakwall already showing 28 Celsius. Kaz did the math. Eighty-two degrees. Nice. The beach was emptier than normal too, which he appreciated. It was the day before Yom Kippur, the end of Jewish High Holy Days, and many people were home in celebration.
“Get you another drink, Laura?”
The woman turned in her striped beach chair towards him, her face shaded by large round sunglasses and an oversized straw hat. She held out her empty glass. “Sure! More lemonade would be great.”
Kaz padded up across the warming sand to the Hilton beachside bar and got them two refills. He turned and paused as his eye caught a long-tailed kite in the sky, a child and her father running along the shore to keep it aloft in the gentle breeze.
When he got back to Laura, he found her watching the kite as well. She smiled at him as he handed her the drink. “I’m really glad we came, Kaz.”
Kaz smiled back—he was too. He had family in Israel, relatives who had fled Lithuania during the war, people and a country he’d never visited. He and Laura had rented a small car and taken day trips, navigating the narrow roads to meet Zemeckis second cousins and elderly aunts who called him Kazimieras, smiling as he struggled to communicate with his few words of Hebrew as they looked through photo albums together. They’d drunk endless cups of strong coffee and toasted new family connections with small glasses of plum brandy.
The vacation was a reward. Kaz and Laura worked in Houston, Texas, and had been deeply involved in Apollo 18, NASA’s ill-fated last voyage to the Moon. US astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts had died under circumstances that needed to remain secret for national security’s sake. When the seemingly endless classified debriefs and scientific analyses had finally wound down, they’d both needed a break.
Mostly, they were in Israel to be together. They’d been dating for nearly eight months, and when they’d transferred to board the big, new El Al 747 in New York for the long flight to Tel Aviv, it had felt like an important next step for them both.
Kaz took a sip, watching Laura still gazing up at the kite. The small white bikini hugged her long, lithe body; her thick black hair was unruly under the hat. They’d never been able to spend so many consecutive days together, and he’d relished every one of them.
“What’s that, Kaz?” Laura said.
She was pointing into the sky above the kite. Kaz squinted against the bright sun, his good right eye instantly watering at the glare; he’d lost his left eye as a US Navy test pilot in a birdstrike. He spotted a high, straight contrail, moving fast down the coast, but couldn’t see the jet that was creating it.
She noticed where he was looking, and said, “No, there. Look lower.”
Just visible against the blue, arcing up towards the high contrail, was a new line of white. He scanned the sky, but couldn’t see the jet that had launched the missile. Likely an F-4.
“That looks serious, Laura,” he said, still tracking the contrails. “Most probably an Israeli Phantom firing an AIM-7 missile up at a Soviet MiG-25 reconnaissance plane.”
No way it will reach it, he thought. He’d fired AIM-7s and knew their performance limits. The missile had fared very disappointingly in Vietnam. Just the Israeli Air Force warning the Russians off.
Now, post–engine burnout, the missile became invisible as it coasted higher, steering autonomously with small aerodynamic fins, refining its radar-guided aim towards the target. Kaz counted seconds in his head, guessing on altitudes and distances. He figured if there was no explosion by the time he got to 20, it would be a clean miss.
“What are you seeing, Kaz?”
He raised a hand, palm open, asking her to wait as he counted.
When he reached 17, he swore. The MiG-25’s contrail had visibly changed thickness, and then stopped.
Kaz turned to Laura, frowning. “We need to go,” he said.
Israel, October 1973. As the Yom Kippur War flares into life, a state-of-the-art Soviet MiG fighter plane plummets to an unexpected landing. NASA Flight Controller and former US test pilot Kaz Zemeckis watches from the ground—unaware that its arrival will pull him into a high-stakes game of spies, lies, and secrets that hold the key to Cold War air and space supremacy.
For within that plane is a Soviet pilot pleading to defect, offering a prize beyond value: the workings of the Soviets’ mythical “Foxbat” MiG-25, the fastest, highest-flying fighter plane in the world. But trusting him is risky, and Kaz must tread a careful line. As Kaz accompanies the defector into the United States, to the military’s most secret test site, he must hope that, with skill and cunning, the game plays out his way.Rich with insider detail and political intrigue drawn from real events, The Defector is a propulsive thriller from a growing master of the genre, filled with the nerve-shredding rush of aerial combat as it could only be told by one of the world’s best fighter pilots.
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