Последние тайны СССР – Проект Марс 88 - [9]

Andrey felt that it was his colleague by the department, came up and shook his hand. Pilots had somewhat strange pendants… The colleague laughed and said that these were the amusements of local demo bees: they found cartridges somewhere and polished them with sand paper in their free time. The trick was that the cartridges in arms rooms were strictly accounted, and it was hard to imagine where they took these.

They started talking, Igor turned out to be a landsman, and they got on more familiar terms.

Pilots and technicians finish their working shift soon, and they are going to play volleyball. Shall we join them? – Igor suggested.

Let’s try, said Andrey. And where’s the ground? – It’s near the airfield, we can cut through the forest. Soldiers trod paths to every quarters, Igor answered.

There were at least ten paths from the asphalted part of the air regiment’s camp to all cardinal points. There was taiga everywhere, and you could get lost in ten meters from separate buildings of the camp. However, one could see the high control tower of the airfield.

Igor selected the path leading to the left, and soon they crossed an asphalt road that ran almost parallel the airfield: one could see massive АN-12 cargo aircraft from it.

The path divided into three again, but one could already see the ground with a row of houses on wheels (shelters), a hangar with almost unneeded, cumbersome plane parts that were probably written off, and a smoke room in the form of a large covered octagonal pergola. The volleyball ground was located not far from it.

Everything was painted green, just the white volleyball net stood out. A technician sometimes went out of the shelters that merged with the forest, and it could seem from afar that some wood spirits appear from nowhere…

By the end of the working day soldiers from different groups appeared one by one, carrying testing equipment and instruments. The whole plane – all its components and systems – were divided among three to four groups, each of them had its own shelter on wheels which served as a storeroom for parts and a small workshop for small and quick repairs.

The attitude to instruments in the aviation is special, a forgotten screwdriver or pliers could get anywhere during the take-off and height gain: into the elements of elevators or ailerons control system, into the gear leg; vibration or rolling motion could make any forgotten screwdriver to move somewhere, and it could result in a plane crash.

So when technicians and mechanics were leaving the shelter to provide servicing to planes, they checked the availability of the whole set of instruments, after they worked with the planes – checked again, and then again when returning to the shelter.

If there was a shortage, almost the whole squadron started to look for the missing instruments. No plane could take off until the screwdriver was found. There surely were such cases, but they were quite rare and the instruments were quickly found. At best, the guilty one got off with a few extra duties.

But once a young soldier forgot all the instruments at once on the plane, the whole iron case. It was found in less than five minutes, but the whole squadron where it happened flipped! Nobody remembered anything like that – forgetting all at once…

Moreover all the instruments were branded: they contained eight or ten digits, the first two stood for the last two digits of the unit number, two more – the service group number, then the number of instrument on the list and something else. If these were, for example, pliers or nippers, the brand was put on both parts.

This topic was the theme of numerous jokes. Each AN-12, besides a lot of different equipment, contained an ordinary broom with a long handle, used to remove snow from the plane where it was difficult to reach or to sweep inside the plane, and there was also a whisk broom. But the ordinary broom was used more often.

Once several technicians were sitting in a spacious smoking room after dinner. A chief of regiment staff – the half colonel – came in. His position did not imply flying, it was more of a bureaucratic character, for there were a lot of papers, plans and reports in the regiment. The chief was always bemused about something, and this time, too, he was thinking about something connected with his service, smoking a Belomor cigarette…

And then one of the technicians decided to joke and asked half colonel if they should brand the brooms. The chief said in surprise: Haven’t you branded them yet? The jaws of all the technicians in the smoking room dropped. The technician who tried to joke said: and where should we brand it – on the handle? The half colonel replied: yes, on the handle and on each twig separately…

On the whole, officers and warrant officers in the air regiment were mainly young, aged from 20 to 35. There was less than a tenth of those aged forty and over. So when they had a little free time, they played the fool as they could.

They did so especially in winter: they liked to dump somebody in the snowdrift or just play snowballs. They removed a small entrance ladder to the shelter of the neighboring service group and quickly put up a hill of snow. A technician who went out of the shelter did not suspect anything, made a step and… felt a bit of a paratrooper during his very first jump.