Word: meeker
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...