I debated over it for a couple of days, then showed it to my mother.
She recognized my father instantly.
So, given that someone ― or something ― had taken a picture of my father much older than he'd been at the time he'd disappeared over the bridge, what were the odds that he was still alive? Minimal ― both my mother and I knew that.
The second bit of the puzzle was the one that bothered me the most. A clipping taken from what appeared to be a small, cheaply printed newspaper.
The same man, noticeably older than he'd been in the first photo, smiling and waving at the camera.
The date ― seven months ago.
This time, I did go the official route. Having three stars on my collar, plus the four that my uncle sports, gives us a fair amount of horsepower. Within a couple of hours, the intelligence organization at the Pentagon was able to identify the paper and produce a complete page, the one this clipping had been torn from, along with a translation of the article.
The man in the picture was celebrating his recent marriage. His first, according to the Russian writer.
Not according to my mother. Over the years, she'd found ways to live with losing Dad. On the surface, she sounded like she was convinced he'd died. She and Batman were alike in that way, although I think Batman's conviction went to his core. With Mom, it was just a way to survive. But I could tell from her involvement in the POW/MIA groups that she'd never really given up hope.
The paper covered a small area around Nikolayev, another military air base to the south. While not as important as Hidden Archer and the Kola Peninsula during the Vietnam War, Nikolayev had had its own share of notoriety as a weapons test facility.
I was going there. I wasn't certain how or when, but sometime during the next two weeks I was going to Nikolayev.
"Lead, two." Skeeter's calm, professional voice broke into my thoughts. I'd been flying the aircraft by reflex, caught up in the anger and the possibility of hope, blinded by my emotions. Skeeter, in an unusually tactful maneuver for him, had simply brought my attention back to the present.
"Lead," I acknowledged.
"Starting pre-landing checklist."
"Roger ― we are, too."
I could hear my RIO fumbling through his checklist. I flipped open the right section and began reading aloud.
We made a beautiful, precision formation approach, with Skeeter slipping in to land just five seconds after I did. He maintained the precisely correct formation distance throughout the approach, touchdown, and taxi, one of the smoothest bits of formation flying I'd seen in a while. You don't do a lot of formation landings on an aircraft carrier, and maintaining proficiency is tough.
A yellow follow-me truck met us at the end of the landing strip. I used my nose-wheel steering gear to fall in behind him. The turbofans were spooled down to a gentle thunder now, oddly reassuring in the notion that I could turn, power up, and be airborne again within moments if I wanted to.
There was something surreal about taxiing down a Russian airfield.
For those of us raised in the Cold War, the idea that someday we would be voluntarily landing some of our most advanced fighter aircraft inside Soviet territory would have been unthinkable just five years before. Five years ― just a small portion of the time I'd spent in uniform, but longer than Skeeter's entire career to date. He'd joined the Navy after the Berlin Wall fell, after Desert Storm and Desert Shield, at a time when the most formative politicians of my career were just old bogeymen.
No matter that Russia ― and China, as well ― continued to foment disorder and conflict in this brave new world we fought in. The official party line was that it was over. We'd won, and were now entitled to a well-deserved peace dividend.
Then why did I end up with MiGs shooting at me and my aircrews so often?
I glanced back at Skeeter, who was now closing the distance between us. How would it be, to have grown up in his times? How much difference did it make in the way we saw the world ― the Russians, in particular? I resolved to have a quiet word with him again about the need for a little respectable paranoia while we were on the ground in Arkhangelsk.
It probably wasn't necessary. Commander "Lab Rat" Busby, the senior intelligence officer onboard Jefferson, had briefed us extensively on our visit. In particular, he'd pointed out that it was important for us to watch everything we could, make note of anything that seemed new or different from what we already knew about Russian aviation. He gave us two solid capabilities briefings, complete with quizzes, getting us up to speed on the very latest U.S. information on Russian systems and technologies so that we'd know what to look for.
Like most nasty games, intelligence collection works both ways. The birds we were flying into Russia were specially configured, stripped of some of the very latest toys and technologies we didn't think they knew about yet. Most of the avionics were useless without the Zip drive cassette plugged into the instrument panel in front of me ― Lab Rat made sure we understood that. We were to take our Zip cassettes with us everywhere we went, keeping them on our persons at all times. Without them, the Russians could learn nothing of use from the bare carcass of our airframes. And there were other telltales as well. The most sensitive avionics compartments were wired with small devices intended to keep anything but a charred black box from falling into their hands. Lab Rat assured me that the fires were too localized to do any permanent damage to the airframe, and that even if one were triggered, we'd be able to safely fly the aircraft out. I was not reassured.
"What happens if we lose one of these super-secret Zip drives? Or damage it?" Skeeter had asked. An eminently sensible question, I'd thought.
"Your Tomcats will still fly without them, if that's what you mean," Lab Rat had answered. "You'll lose most of your advanced decision aids as well as some resolution on your targeting packages, but that's about it.
The techs on the COD will take some diagnostic software with them, a few replacement parts, but not replacement disks."
"Can they make anything out of them without the Tomcat's gut?" I'd followed up.
Lab Rat looked thoughtful. "Honestly, I don't know. The guys at NSA ― National Security Agency ― don't think so, but I wouldn't want to bet on it. It's supposed to require the same crypto load that's in your communications circuitry, but you know how that is. With computers they've pirated from the West, they might be able to get something out of the tapes. That's why there won't be any duplicates on the COD."
"Sounds risky, putting us in over there," Skeeter said.
Lab Rat nodded. "I think so, too. But evidently this is important to somebody with a hell of a lot more firepower than I have. So we do what we can to minimize the risks. Really, though, I don't think there'll be any problems. Not if you're careful with the Zips. The Russians need us for friends right now a lot more than we need them."
And that was the truth. With a resurgent China prowling Russia's borders, massing and moving divisions of armored troops every couple of weeks for supposed routine exercises, Russia had good reason to want to be on good terms with the United States. We'd faced China down before, in the Spratly Islands and in other hot spots around the globe, something Russia couldn't do on her own right now.
Finally, we reached the end of the apron and a yellow-shirted handler stepped out from the crowd to replace the follow-me truck. Confidently and with stunning precision, the yellow shirt began flashing the standard hand and arm signals used on the flight deck of a carrier to signal to us. "You believe this fellow?" Skeeter said, his amusement clear over our private coordination circuit. "Man, they been practicing or what?"