"A few moments later, from out of a layer of clouds in front of him, an aircraft appeared. "It was coming at me very fast, and dead-on," Rust recalls. "And it went whoosh!--right over me.
"I remember how my heart felt, beating very fast," he continues. "This was exactly the moment when you start to ask yourself: Is this when they shoot you down?"
"From below and to the left, a Soviet MiG-23 fighter-interceptor pulled up beside him. With nearly three times the wingspan and more than 10 times the weight of Rust's Cessna, the MiG seemed huge. Designed to fly at more than twice the speed of sound, the swing-wing fighter had to be put into full landing configuration--gear and flaps extended, wings swung outward--in order to slow it enough to fly alongside the Cessna. Its nose rode high as it hovered at the edge of a stall." [p.3]
".
"I realized because they hadn't shot me down yet that they wanted to check on what I was doing there," Rust says. He kept watching the Soviet airplane, "but there was no sign, no signal from the pilot for me to follow him. Nothing." Soviet investigators later told Rust that the MiG pilot attempted to reach Rust over the radio but there was no response. Only later did Rust realize that the Soviet fighter could only communicate over high-frequency military channels.
"After the two pilots had eyed each other for a minute, the Soviet pilot retracted the jet's gear and flaps. The MiG accelerated and peeled away, only to return and draw two long arcs around the Cessna at a distance of about a half-mile. Finally, it disappeared."
"From both the registration number painted on the side of the airplane (D-ECJB) and the West German flag decal on its tail, the MiG-23 crew should have been able to tell that Rust's aircraft was neither a Yak nor Soviet. Marshall Sergei Akhromeyev, chief of staff of all the Soviet armed forces, admitted in a 1990 interview cited in Don Oberdorfer's book From the Cold War to the New Era that the fighter pilot's commander either did not believe the pilot's report or did not think it was significant, so the information was never passed up the chain of command." [p.4]
".
"Rust flew on, leaving the Leningrad military district and entering that of Moscow. In the handoff report, the Leningrad commander related to his Moscow counterpart that his controllers had been tracking a Soviet airplane flying without its transponder turned on. But the report said nothing about tracking an unidentified airplane from the Gulf of Finland, nothing about fighter-interceptors intercepting a West German aircraft, and nothing about an unidentified aircraft on a steady course to Moscow. As such, the report set off no alarms."
"For Rust, the flight was going flawlessly. He had no problem identifying the landmarks he had chosen as waypoints, and he was confident that his goal was within reach. "I had a sense of peace,' he says. "Everything was calm and in order.' He passed the outermost belt of Moscow's vaunted "Ring of Steel,' an elaborate network of anti-aircraft defenses that since the 1950s had been built up as a response to the threat of U.S. bombers. The rings of missile placements circled the city at distances of about 10, 25, and 45 nautical miles, but were not designed to fend off a single, slow-flying Cessna." [p.5]
".
"At just after 6 p.m., Rust reached the outskirts of Moscow. The city's airspace was restricted, with all overflights--both military and civilian--prohibited. At about this time, Soviet investigators would later tell Rust, radar controllers realized something was terribly wrong, but it was too late for them to act."
"As Rust made his way over the city, he removed his helmet and began to search for Red Square. Unlike many western cities, Moscow has no skyline of glittering office towers that Rust could see and head for. Unsure where to go, Rust headed from building to building. "As I maneuvered around, I sort of narrowed in on the core of the city," he says. Then he saw it: the distinctive turreted wall surrounding the Kremlin. Turning toward it, Rust began to descend and look for a place to land." [p.5]
".
[after landing]
"He got out of the Cessna. Expecting to be stormed by hordes of troops and KGB agents, Rust leaned against the aircraft and waited. The people in Red Square seemed nervous or stunned, not sure what was going on. Some thought Rust's airplane might be Gorbachev's private aircraft, or that it was all part of a movie production. But once the crowd realized that Rust and the Cessna were foreign--and that he'd just pulled off one of the most sensational exploits they had ever witnessed--they drew closer."
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