Chapter 1 – The Last Salute
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Sverdlovsk Oblast, Russia — September 2014
The cold came early that year.
It wasn't the frost that settled first, but the silence. A stillness that clung to the trees, to the houses with their peeling paint and sagging roofs, to the distant hills that looked like they hadn't changed in a hundred years. Even the wind, normally impatient in Verkhnyaya Salda by this time of autumn, seemed to pause out of respect.
Leonid stood at the top of the hill near his house, hands stuffed in the pockets of his dark school coat. Below, the roofs of their small town clustered like dominoes leaning on each other. Smoke curled from chimneys in faint wisps, dissolving into a gray sky that matched the ache in his chest. Somewhere far off, a train moaned along the tracks.
But up here, it was quiet. And cold.
It had been three days since they received confirmation.
Three days since the knock on the door.
Three days since his mother collapsed in the hallway.
Three days since the word "missing" had been replaced by something permanent.
His father wasn't coming home.
Major Mikhail Vostrikov, 43 years old. Decorated combat pilot.
Shot down somewhere over Donetsk during a reconnaissance run.
They hadn't recovered a body—just pieces of a cockpit, fragments of a flight suit, and the scorched remains of his aircraft's ID tag.
That was all they were given. A bag of metal and a report.
The casket they would bury tomorrow would be filled with sandbags.
Leonid didn't cry. Not at the door. Not when his mother screamed. Not when the officer who delivered the news offered his condolences and stood like a statue by the threshold. Something inside him had gone hollow, like his chest had been carved out and filled with cold air.
He hadn't said a word in three days.
He watched as a column of smoke twisted into the clouds from the edge of town, just past the frozen river. For a moment, he imagined it was the exhaust trail of his father's Su-25, streaking into the sky like it always did.
But the jet was gone. And so was the man inside it.
---
The day of the funeral, the entire town showed up.
Men in uniform stood stiffly at attention, their medals catching brief flickers of sunlight between heavy clouds. Local officials arrived, some in somber suits, others in parade dress. His father had flown for years, and even though the town was small, his name carried weight. He had flown missions in Georgia, in Chechnya, in Syria.
Now his name was etched onto a polished plaque bolted to a coffin filled with dirt.
Leonid wore his best school uniform, a stiff black coat with golden buttons and a collar that scratched his neck. His mother stood beside him, dressed entirely in black, her face pale and swollen from sleepless nights. She didn't speak, didn't move. Just stared at the coffin like she expected it to vanish if she blinked.
But it didn't.
Three soldiers stepped forward. Blank shots echoed across the cemetery. The tricolor flag was folded into a triangle and handed to his mother by a young officer with trembling hands.
Leonid's grandfather stood behind them.
Grigori Petrovich Vostrikov was a tall, sharp-eyed man with a square jaw and shoulders that hadn't stooped despite his years. He wore a faded Soviet dress uniform, the medals of his own past lined neatly across his chest. A MiG-21 pilot during the Afghan war, he had survived battles that took most of his squadron. And now he stood like a monument at the foot of his son's grave, refusing to let the wind move him.
When the last salute was fired and the mourners began to shuffle away in silence, Grigori stepped forward and put a hand on Leonid's shoulder.
"Come," he said. "Say goodbye."
Leonid stepped forward with him. The grave had not yet been filled, and the closed coffin sat above the earth like a question that no one could answer. Grigori reached into his coat and pulled out something small — a patch. Faded, torn at the edge, but still recognizable.
It was the shoulder insignia from Mikhail's first deployment.
Grigori knelt, placed the patch gently on the coffin lid, and whispered something too low for Leonid to hear.
Then he stood again. "Your father was a good man," he said aloud. "And a damn fine pilot. Never forget that."
Leonid stared at the patch, his heart beating like a drum inside his throat.
"Do you think he was scared?" he asked.
Grigori didn't answer at first. He looked at the grave, then at the overcast sky above them.
"Every man's scared before the end," he said. "But your father wasn't the kind to run."
Leonid swallowed. His throat burned.
"I wanted to ask him how it felt to fly," he said. "Really fly. Not just… games. Not books. The real thing."
Grigori looked at him.
"Then ask me."
---
That night, Leonid couldn't sleep.
He lay on the couch in the living room, blanket wrapped around him like a cocoon. The television was on but muted — an old war documentary flashing silent explosions and tank columns. His mother hadn't come out of her room. She hadn't spoken to him at all after the burial.
Grigori was in the kitchen, drinking tea with a dash of something stronger. The clink of the spoon against the glass was the only sound.
After an hour of staring at the ceiling, Leonid rose and joined him.
The kitchen smelled like kerosene and old wood. Grigori sat at the small table with a stack of yellowed papers in front of him. He didn't look up.
"You want to fly?" he asked.
Leonid nodded.
"Then sit."
Grigori pushed a few pages toward him. Handwritten. Neat. Each one labeled with dates and flight numbers.
"My logbook," the old man said. "Every mission I flew in Afghanistan. Bagram, Shindand, Herat."
Leonid picked up a sheet carefully. June 3, 1986. Escort run. Hind gunships. RPG fire from the ridgeline.
"They tried to hit us from the cliffs," Grigori muttered. "Lucky bastards. Almost got a Hind. We turned, lit the ridge up with rockets. Didn't have time to check if anyone was still breathing."
He sipped his tea. "That was the job. Fly, fight, get out alive."
Leonid looked up at him.
"You think I could do it? Fly like that?"
Grigori finally turned to face him, eyes like steel under frost.
"You can learn to fly. But to survive?" He leaned in. "That takes something else."
---
The training began the next morning.
Not at an airfield. Not in a simulator. But on the frost-covered lawn behind the house.
Grigori woke him at dawn, threw a sweatshirt at him, and pointed outside.
"Run."
Leonid blinked. "What?"
"You want to fly? Then start with your legs. Five kilometers. Now."
Leonid laced up his shoes and ran, breath freezing in the air. His lungs burned, legs shaking before he even reached the halfway point. When he returned, panting and red-faced, Grigori handed him a bottle of water and a folded diagram.
It was the cockpit layout of a MiG-21.
"Start learning."
The next few weeks passed in a haze of pain and routine.
Wake up. Run. Study cockpit layouts. Recite checklist procedures. Learn how a turbofan engine works. Recite the NATO phonetic alphabet until he could do it in his sleep.
In the evenings, Grigori would tell him stories.
Of dogfights over the Khyber Pass. Of narrow escapes with flak punching holes through his wing. Of watching friends vanish in fireballs and smoke.
He told them not as glory tales, but as lessons.
"Your father," he said one night, "was more like your grandmother. Quiet. Disciplined. But when the sky opened up and the fire came, he didn't blink. He just acted. Like a real pilot."
Leonid listened. Absorbed every word.
He didn't talk much anymore. Not to his mother, not to the neighbors, not even to his few schoolmates who still came by. His world had narrowed to his grandfather's voice and the pages of manuals he could barely understand.
And yet, for the first time since the funeral, something in him began to stir. Not joy. Not peace.
But purpose.
---
The training wasn't formal — there were no ranks or instructors, no graded evaluations or progress reports — but it was more brutal than anything Leonid had experienced in school. And that was the point. Grigori wasn't preparing him for school. He was preparing him for survival.
By the second week, Leonid could diagram the airframe of the Su-25 from memory. Grigori, ever demanding, would grunt and shake his head at small mistakes, pointing at a misaligned turbine or a mislabeled panel on Leonid's sketches.
"You don't get second chances in the sky," he said, jabbing a finger at a line in Leonid's notes. "You mislabel this, you cook the engine, and that's your ass in a crater."
They spent an entire afternoon in the backyard with an old crate and chalkboard, simulating the cockpit of a trainer jet. Grigori barked orders while Leonid shouted checklists back, flipping imaginary switches and running through start-up sequences under pressure.
"Battery on!"
"Hydraulics, green!"
"Fuel pressure good!"
"AOA indicator… working!"
"Throttle idle!"
"Start engine one!"
Each time he stumbled, he ran laps. Grigori didn't coddle him. Every mistake was a lesson carved into muscle memory.
Inside the house, things remained quiet. His mother wandered the rooms like a ghost, washing the same dishes twice, folding the same shirts over and over. Leonid tried once — awkwardly — to sit beside her, to tell her what he was doing, what he was working toward. But her eyes never met his. Only once did she speak clearly.
"I don't want to lose you too."
Then she left the room.
After that, Leonid stopped trying. Grigori never said anything about it, but the old man began placing two cups of tea on the table instead of one.
---
By October, snow had begun to appear. Not in heavy storms, just early dustings that kissed the edges of rooftops and clung to the grass at dawn. Leonid's boots grew heavier on his morning runs. His breath came out in thick clouds. But his legs grew stronger. His lungs deeper. He started timing himself, shaving seconds off every week.
One morning, Grigori waited at the door not with the usual schematic or checklist — but with a folded envelope.
The logo was official. The paper thick.
"Military preparatory school," Grigori said simply. "Applications open in three months. You'll be sixteen soon enough. If you want this, we make it official."
Leonid stared at the envelope like it was glowing.
"What are the requirements?"
"Excellent physical condition, academic pass rates, interview, aptitude testing, and an endorsement."
"From whom?"
Grigori didn't smile — he rarely did — but his lips twitched. "Leave that to me."
The idea of Yeisk Military Aviation School was no longer a dream, but a destination. The most prestigious pre-aviation program in the region. Feeders for the Krasnodar or Voronezh academies. From there — real combat aircraft.
The thought made Leonid's chest tighten — not with fear, but with anticipation.
---
The next phase of Grigori's training was psychological.
"Flying isn't just knowing how to work a machine," he said, drawing two crude aircraft on a napkin. "It's knowing how to stay alive in chaos."
He dropped the napkin and suddenly barked, "Left engine failure. Altitude 2,000. Fire light is blinking. What do you do?"
Leonid blinked.
Grigori shouted again. "Don't think — act! What do you do?"
"Throttle back, shut the engine, deploy extinguisher, maintain altitude, report emergency!"
"Better. Again. This time — hydraulic failure, no elevator response. You've got seconds."
Leonid's heart raced. "Cut throttle, level with trim, prepare for emergency landing—"
"Not enough time. You're too high to land and too low to bail. What's your call?"
Leonid froze.
Grigori narrowed his eyes. "And that's what separates a dead pilot from a living one. Decision. Not knowledge."
From then on, the questions came without warning.
During lunch. On his runs. In the middle of reading a technical manual.
"You're being locked by SAM radar. Do you break left or drop chaff?"
"Wingman's hit. He's spiraling. Do you stay or finish the mission?"
"Your canopy cracks mid-flight. What do you do?"
Each time, Leonid had to respond instantly. Fast wasn't enough — he had to be right.
Grigori didn't let up. He would retell missions from Afghanistan and pause at critical moments.
"We were coming out of Khost valley. Tall ridges on both sides. A Stinger launches from the treeline. What did I do?"
Leonid would answer. Grigori would correct. Then they'd break down every second — altitude, speed, cloud cover, direction of wind.
"Combat flying isn't romantic," Grigori growled once. "It's terrifying. That fear — it'll eat you alive if you let it. So you give it a name. You talk to it. You control it."
---
In late November, Leonid was invited to the local school to speak about his father. It was part of a state memorial project. Heroes of the Federation. A photo of Major Mikhail Vostrikov was placed on an easel beside a lit candle.
Leonid stood in front of twenty-five students. Some he knew. Most he didn't.
He read from a short letter he'd written. About his father's career, his belief in the service, his calm demeanor before missions. He didn't cry. He didn't stutter.
But when he finished and stepped away from the podium, one student raised a hand.
"Do you want to be like him?"
Leonid hesitated. The room was quiet.
Then he nodded.
"No," he said. "I want to be better."
---
The first simulator he sat in was a broken-down L-39 cockpit frame stored in the back of an old veterans' club. It had no screens, no power. Just the shell of a trainer jet left to rust.
But Grigori brought tools. They spent three weekends rewiring parts of the dashboard, replacing the stick with a refurbished one from a scrapyard, and installing a gutted PC case with switches rigged to toggle lights. It wasn't flight-capable — not really — but it simulated systems.
Leonid climbed inside. Grigori stood behind him like a flight instructor.
"Startup procedure. Begin."
The training had become ritual. His hands moved before his brain caught up.
"Battery, on. Fuel pump, on. Throttle idle. Engine start, left…"
As the winter deepened, Leonid lost weight and gained endurance. He could run ten kilometers. Hold a 3-minute plank. Recite a mission debrief from Grigori's Afghan war logs word for word.
One night, after reviewing engine stall patterns on an old textbook, Leonid looked up and asked:
"Did you ever think about stopping? After your first crash?"
Grigori didn't answer for a long time.
Then he poured two fingers of vodka into his glass and stared at the yellowed wall map of Central Asia.
"Yes," he said. "But the sky never let me."
---
The official application date came in January.
By then, Leonid's mother had started to emerge from her grief. She began preparing meals again, quiet but present. She folded Leonid's clothes, sometimes asked him how training was going.
He always gave simple answers. He wasn't sure she wanted the truth.
But the morning he submitted his application, he left the confirmation form on the table before leaving for a run.
When he came home, he found her sitting at the kitchen counter, holding it.
She looked at him with tired eyes.
"I'll support this," she said. "But don't die like he did. Live."
Leonid nodded.
"I'll fly smarter."
She nodded back.
"Then I'll keep the sky warm for you."
---
By February, Grigori no longer barked. He observed. Corrected. Refined.
"You're ready," he said one evening as Leonid completed a flawless emergency checklist under pressure. "Now let's see if they agree."
The letter came in March. Thick, embossed seal. The emblem of Yeisk Military Aviation School stamped in red.
Leonid held it in shaking hands before opening it in front of the two people who mattered most.
Grigori stood with arms crossed. His mother sat beside the tea kettle.
Leonid read the words once. Then twice.
Accepted.
"Cadet Vostrikov," Grigori said, placing a firm hand on his shoulder. "Looks like the skies have a new recruit."
---
Yeisk Military Aviation School — Southern Russia, August 2015
The heat of southern Russia was different from the chill of the Urals — heavier, more stubborn. It clung to everything like an invisible coat of grit, turning uniforms into soaked rags and boot soles into melting rubber. Cadet Leonid Vostrikov had never felt sweat stream from his back like this before.
But he didn't complain.
He stood at attention on the cracked concrete of Yeisk's main parade square alongside two hundred other cadets in stiff green dress. The academy's flag flapped lazily above the command building, the golden wings and red star of the VVS embroidered at the center. A MiG-29 statue stood nearby, its nose angled toward the sky as if watching each new recruit.
An instructor paced the line, barking orders.
"Eyes front! Chin tucked! I said tucked, not broken!"
Leonid didn't move. His back was straight, jaw clenched, eyes focused on a nonexistent point in the distance. The voice of his grandfather echoed in his mind: "Discipline isn't silence. It's attention."
After the orientation speech, they were dismissed with a whistle. The cadets marched in twos back toward the barracks, boots thudding in unison. The air reeked of heat and paint and sweat.
The moment they stepped into the barracks, the shouting began again.
"Drop bags. Stand by your bunks. You've got ten seconds—ten seconds is all the time the enemy gives you before you die!"
Leonid moved like a machine. His bunk was the second from the left, near the window. He dropped his duffel, stood straight, and waited.
The room was basic. Whitewashed walls. Metal lockers. Iron-frame beds with thin mattresses. The fan above was broken. It didn't matter. What mattered was the uniform folded on his mattress, the name tag reading "VOSTRIKOV."
Later that night, lights-out came with a quiet roll call. He lay in his bunk, listening to others whisper nervously. Someone two bunks down was already regretting joining. Someone else was silently crying.
Leonid said nothing. He stared at the ceiling and counted the seconds between train horns from the depot just outside the base perimeter.
He thought of his father. Of the casket. Of the final salute.
And he slept with fists clenched.
---
By week two, the weak had been mentally identified — not by the instructors, but by the cadets themselves. The academy didn't shout out failure. It wore it into people. Sleep deprivation. Endless drills. Hours spent in lectures, then more in the gym, then more memorizing aircraft schematics, engine diagrams, and political doctrine.
Leonid's day began at 0500 sharp. A five-kilometer run, pushups in the dirt, formation drills until their legs locked. Showers were rationed. Uniform inspections were merciless. A single thread out of place was ten pushups — in front of everyone.
But Leonid thrived in it.
He had already lived through worse.
He remembered his grandfather's voice every morning: "Train like you'll fly. Fly like you'll die." It became a mantra. When he washed his face with cold water, when he ran in the heat, when he corrected another cadet's mistake without hesitation — that voice steadied him.
The instructors took notice.
By the end of the first month, Leonid had become a squad lead. He didn't want the role, but he earned it. Calm under pressure. Excellent memory. Zero errors in aircraft recognition drills. His field strip time on the AK-74 was the fastest in his platoon.
During evening briefing, he would help the others with knot tying, gear prep, and flight readiness theory.
But he wasn't popular.
Other cadets respected him, but few approached him. He was quiet, reserved, always working, always pushing. While others wrote home or gathered to watch football matches on the barracks TV, Leonid sat by the window reading old manuals or re-sketching turbine layouts from memory.
Only one cadet approached him regularly — a lanky boy from Kazan named Yuri.
"You ever smile?" Yuri asked one evening.
Leonid didn't look up from his notes. "When there's something worth smiling about."
Yuri snorted. "You're intense, Vostrikov. You're gonna be a Su-57 pilot by the time you're twenty-five."
Leonid didn't answer.
Yuri didn't push. That was rare. Leonid didn't mind him.
---
Their first simulator run came in October.
It was an old L-39 module — basic twin-seat trainer interface, recreated in virtual panels and dials. The hydraulic frame bucked and pitched as they performed simulated takeoffs, formation flying, and stall recoveries.
Leonid had waited his entire life for that moment.
Even though it wasn't real flight, the sensation was enough to electrify his spine. The first time the throttle responded under his fingers, he forgot to breathe. The simulation began over a mock terrain map of the Caucasus, and the moment the green light flashed on the HUD, his training kicked in.
Checklist. Throttle up. Airspeed alive. Nose lift. Level out.
While others flailed or overcorrected, Leonid kept his touch precise, sharp. He didn't panic when the warning light blinked mid-run. He didn't pause when the wind shear simulation kicked in on final approach. He guided the aircraft in smoothly and logged the top performance score in the cohort.
The instructor, a former Su-30 pilot with a scar over his left eye, handed back his evaluation sheet with a grunt.
"You've done this before?"
Leonid didn't flinch. "No, sir."
The man narrowed his eyes. "You're either lying or you're born for this."
Leonid said nothing.
Later that night, in his bunk, he took out the photograph folded between two pages of his journal.
It was of his father. Standing beside a Su-25 on a sunny day, helmet tucked under one arm, smiling like he hadn't a care in the world.
Leonid stared at it until the lights went out.
---
They began flight physiology classes soon after.
The human body is not made for flight, they were told. Your mind lies. Your eyes deceive. Gravity becomes your enemy.
Leonid listened to every word.
He practiced anti-G straining maneuvers in the pressure chamber, recorded his blood pressure patterns, and kept notes on oxygen saturation under load. When they put him in the centrifuge for the first time, he hit 6.5 Gs before starting to gray out — above average for his age and weight.
But he didn't stop there.
Every night, he trained his breathing. Strengthened his core. Did balance drills in the dark. Learned to read terrain at high speed. Studied the psychology of target fixation and spatial disorientation.
"Your enemy is not just the pilot across from you," the instructor had said. "It's also your own body."
Leonid believed it.
He remembered his grandfather's stories — of friends blacking out mid-turn and never waking up. Of missile evasion runs where seconds felt like hours. Of how his own father once suffered temporary blindness after a hard landing due to blood pooling in his eyes.
---
By the winter term, he had grown taller, stronger, more silent.
He didn't speak unless necessary. His reports were clean. His posture, flawless. He never failed inspection. Never arrived late. Never once gave the instructors a reason to reprimand him.
But he was not numb.
Every night, before sleep, he opened a small notebook. Inside were names. Dates. One page for his father. One for Grigori. One blank — for the future he hadn't written yet.
On the final night before their live flight phase began, he wrote a new line:
"When I climb into the sky, I carry the dead with me."
And below it, in clean, even Cyrillic:
"For the skies that remember."
---