Despite détente, the Iron Curtain is still a forbidding barrier for Eastern Europeans who would like to live in the West. To penetrate it, desperate refugees swim rivers, crawl under barriers or run a murderous gauntlet of barbed wire, savage patrol dogs and armed guards. One of the boldest escapes of all was carried out last week by an American pilot, Barry Meeker, who whisked three escapees from Czechoslovakia by helicopter.
A Viet Nam veteran who had been shot down seven times on chopper missions, Meeker, 33, had secretly and uneventfully flown a total of eight refugees out of Czechoslovakia on two other occasions, the second only two days earlier. His third trip, as he recounted to TIME Correspondent Christopher Byron, was less routine. Accompanied by a friend, he took off from Munich’s Riem Airport in a rented Bell JetRanger helicopter. Avoiding radar detection by sometimes flying as close as 3 ft. to the ground, he crossed the West German border, passed through neutral Austria and at 150 m.p.h. whipped across the Czech frontier near the Moldau reservoir, a sparsely populated wooded vacation area. As before, he was supposed to set down in a meadow, pick up his four passengers—East Germans like all the others—and within seconds be on his way home.
But the plan went awry. The refugees—a middle-aged couple, their daughter and an unrelated male university student—were waiting in the wrong spot. Before they reached Meeker’s helicopter, Czech sharpshooters had them in their sights. The two male refugees scrambled inside, but when the girl was 30 ft. from the aircraft, she suddenly stumbled and her leg spouted blood.
Meeker’s helper, Thaddäus Kobrzynski, 26, literally threw the wounded girl into the cabin. An instant later, the girl’s mother also stumbled, apparently wounded. Kobrzynski sprinted 100 ft. down a grassy hill to help her. At that moment a bullet shattered Meeker’s left elbow and hit a rib, a second slammed into the main combustion chamber of the chopper’s turbine and a third struck near the fuel tank. “They’re aimed shots,” Meeker remembers thinking. “In five seconds we’ll all be dead.”
He screamed to Kobrzynski to abandon the woman and come back, but his voice was drowned by the turbines’ whine. Working the controls with his right hand, Meeker lifted off and hovered briefly, trying to draw the guns away from his friend. Realizing that he could no longer help him, Meeker raced for the Austrian border four miles away. Blood from his wounds made his maps unreadable, and the damaged turbine gulped twice as much fuel as it was supposed to. Luckily, Meeker knew his way through the difficult terrain and dangerous wind currents. He set the chopper down where he had landed many times before, next to a hospital at Traunstein, 15 miles inside West Germany. He had 80 seconds of fuel left.
Taste for Danger. Some German papers criticized Meeker as a soldier of fortune, but most West Germans hailed him as a hero, a latter-day Scarlet Pimpernel. In fact, Meeker says he was paid $3,900 for each mission, and money was not the question. His friends and former colleagues believe him. A handsome, mustachioed graduate of Columbia University who speaks six languages, he is described by a U.S. Army official as “one of those kinds of guys”—a Terry-and-the-Pirates type of airman with a taste for danger. Flying assault and rescue missions in Viet Nam in 1969 and 1970 as a captain, he won two Purple Hearts, three Air Medals, the Bronze Star and the Distinguished Flying Cross.
The Czechs immediately branded Meeker “a bandit” and charged that their troops had been fired on before they began shooting (“Goddamnedest lie I ever heard,” said Meeker. “The most dangerous weapon on board was a ballpoint pen.”). Though the West Germans were uncomfortably mulling over the various laws he had broken, including filing false flight plans, he is likely to get off with a wrist slap. More worrisome to Meeker were the uninsured damages to the helicopter, which could cost him anywhere from $23,000 to $39,000—unless a benefactor turns up to bail him out.
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