Deleted scene: I’ll Tell You No Lies
I’ll Tell You No Lies is out August 1, 2023 from Macmillan/Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers. Pre-order here.
Baltiysk Air Base • Kaliningrad, Soviet Union • June 4, 1955
Very early this morning, Senior Lieutenant Maksym Ivanovych Kostyshyn lifted an RGD-5 hand grenade from one of the crates in the supply hangar.
They would discover the theft eventually. One way or another, it wouldn’t matter to him after today.
The MiGs had come last night on trucks directly from Aircraft Factory 30 in Moscow — two of them, Ye-4s, the latest prototype. They were to be flight tested here at Baltiysk, out of the public eye, only in absolute secrecy and only by experienced pilots and committed members of the Communist Party.
“You have been given a great honor,” Flight Instructor Zaitsev said in the darkness of the briefing room. It was uncharacteristic of gruff, terse veteran Flight Instructor Zaitsev to make speeches, but the political officer was there too, Zampolit Vasilevsky, and also a high-ranking production manager from Aircraft Factory 30 and an ambiguous, unintroduced third man who Maksym knew had to be an officer of the KGB or possibly, terrifyingly, of the GRU. Flight Instructor Zaitsev must have been sweating under the pressure to impress.
Evgeny Andreyev pretended to sleep through the briefing, which was entirely characteristic.
Maksym took the opportunity, when Zaitsev’s back was turned, to dig an elbow into Zhenya’s ribs, not gently. Zhenya nearly fell out of his chair and spent the rest of the briefing hunched and shaking silently, trying to suppress his laughter.
“You’re going to get yourself shot,” Maksym said seriously as they crossed the taxiway to the two waiting planes afterward. The hand grenade in the pocket of his flight suit felt as if it weighed fifty kilos.
“Relax. Comrade Khrushchev is a man of peace. He doesn’t believe in shooting people,” Zhenya said. “Anyway, why would they shoot me? Zaitsev just said I’m ‘a skilled pilot and a committed Party member.’ Weren’t you paying attention?”
“Just do your job, Zhenya,” Maksym said.
That was the last thing they said to each other. Zhenya was a skilled pilot. He was all business once he was in a cockpit. And they had been ordered to keep strict radio silence in flight, just in case Western ears at Karup or Ramstein or one of the NATO bases in Norway picked up on their frequency.
Ten minutes into the flight, Maksym took the hand grenade from the pocket of his flight suit and rested it carefully on the narrow ledge above the instrument panel.
Under his breath, he said it again like a prayer.
Do your job, Zhenya.
Then he dropped the wing fuel tanks and put the MiG into a steep dive — straight for the hazy, gray-blue surface of the Baltic Sea six thousand meters below.
