"You are qualified to fly in the right seat, Doctor," the pilot said, smiling behind his oxygen mask. "If you would like to take command of this aircraft, you are most welcome." The pilot said that for the benefit of the continually running cockpit voice recorder, which was carefully reviewed after each flight. If control of the aircraft was not positively transferred, blame for a mishap could be misplaced. Surely, the pilot thought, not even the unorthodox Ozerov would want to disrupt this test flight, only minutes from the first bomb run.

"Climb up to mm safe altitude and climb out of there, Strike," Luger said. The pile had no choice-he directed the copilot to switch seats with Ozerov In less than a minute Ozerov was strapped in.

"All right, let's not wait until the bomb run to run the weapon checklist," he said. Without prompting from the pilot, Ozerov accomplished

every step of the "Before Weapons Release" checklist, from memory, not missing a step-although no one but the ground crew examining the recordings would know after post-mission analysis, because the pilot, engineer, and instructor could hardly keep up.

Ozerov had the pilot activate his switches when prompted. Minutes later the checklist was done. Ozerov used nonsensical little rhymes and ditties, mostly in English, to run the checklists: "Bomb-cursor-man, as fast as you can; aim-cursor-auto, don't get into trouble . . .

Turn-time-track-tweak-tunetrackbreakers-triple . . . checklist complete.

"Okay, we're ready to go. I just need to hit the BOMB button, recheck switches, and we're done. From now on we jink and jive until we reach the weapon-release point."

The turnpoint at the bomb run initial point came, but Ozerov did not turn. "Turnpoint five kilometers ago, Strike..

"Too early," Ozerov said. "The autopilot only turns at fifteen degrees -bank. The turn radius is too large-we wake too many bad guys up that way. Tight turns IP inbound." He grabbed the throttles in the middle of the center console and pushed them all the way up to military thrust. "And we go balls-to-the-wall, too-none of this ten-klicks-per-minute shit." Ozerov waited until nearly ten kilometers past the turnpoint, then threw the huge bomber into a 40-degree bank turn to the right. As the plane went into its steep turn, its supercritical wings lost lift, and the aircraft edged downwards. But that was exactly what Ozerov had in mind. As he rolled out on the new heading, he leveled off only one hundred meters above ground.

"High terrain, one o'clock, twelve kilometers," Ozerov reported. "Now, terrain calls mean something." Both Soviet pilots were frantically scanning outside the cockpit windscreen, trying to spot terrain, buildings, transmission towers, tall antennae-why, Ozerov couldn't figure, since it was pitch-black outside...

Well, not totally dark. Just then they caught a glimpse of a few trucks in a convoy rolling down a highway-the M7, the main east-west high-way running between Baranovichi, the town of Slutsk, and the city of Bobruysk. Their track crossed the M7 at a steep angle.