Paul White was on board as soon as it was safe to approach the aircraft. He saw four Marines surrounding a smiling young man. White went over to the newcomer, extending a hand. “Lieutenant Fryderyk Litwy?”
The young man nodded enthusiastically, shaking White’s hand with both mittened hands. It was the first time Lobato had realized that this guy might have a real name.
White had been studying Lithuanian phrases for a week just for this moment. “Labas vakaras. Glad to see you. Welcome to America.” To the Marines surrounding RAGANU, White said, “Excellent job. Bring him inside and get him something to eat.”
As the Marines escorted Lieutenant Litwy out of the CV-22 and into the pressure chamber, White met up with Lobato, who pressed the briefcase into White’s hands. “Mission accomplished. We checked it over and swept it for bugs and transmitters. Clean. Pretty good-quality set of photos in there. Definitely a worthwhile trip, I’d say.”
“Fantastic,” White said gleefully. “I’ll make copies and uplink them to HG, then send the package with a destruct mechanism with you to Norway. Good job, Gunny. Pass a well-done to your troops.”
The fuel lines were being retracted and the assault team was returning back to the plane as White crossed through the pressure chamber to the first MISCO trailer and turned the briefcase over to the technicians waiting inside the darkened room. The CV-22 was not going to stay on the Valley Mistress—the ship needed to be transformed back into a salvage vessel as quickly as possible. The CV-22 would take the Marines, the photos, and Lieutenant Litwy to U.S. Embassy officials in Oslo as quickly as possible so formal political asylum proceedings could begin. Litwy would be yet another American intelligence success story.
Before they could leave, however, the photos that they had risked so much to retrieve from occupied Lithuania had to be successfully copied, and the originals taken back to the United States. it was not enough to Simply take a picture of a picture — too many successful exfiltration operations were ruined by careless handling of retrieved photos. White was determined not to let this happen to him, and he had designed MISCO number two to safely, quickly, and redundantly process photos without damaging them or triggering some secret destruct process.
One by one, Litwy’s photos were examined with a variety of methods, principal among which were plain sight and feel. Many photos were treated with chemicals to kill the person handling them, or to self-destruct if handled too much or if exposed to flash photography. But these appeared to be standard 8-by- 10 and 5-by-7 matte-finish photos — judging by their brittle, curled appearance. They were processed hastily in an amateur-photography darkroom with old enlarging paper and old, cold chemicals, then allowed to air-dry. White photographed each one with high-resolution video and still cameras without using any extra light or flash units, followed thereafter by Xerox copies and digitized computer scans. The digitized pictures were transmitted via satellite to U.S. Special Operations Command headquarters in Florida and to the National Security Agency intelligence-data collection center in Virginia. White waited impatiently as the data was transmitted to the satellite, relayed to other satellites ringing the globe, then dumped to the NSA’s ground station in Ft. Belvoir, Virginia.
Major Carl Knowlton arrived at the MISCO 2 trailer a few moments later, just as the last of the photos were being successfully uplinked to the satellites. “PATRIOT reports rotary-wing choppers from Liepaja about forty miles out, heading this way,” Knowlton reported. “ETA, twenty minutes. They’re surface-scanning. No air radars reported.”
“We’re finished here,” White said, packing the original photos in waterproof bags, then turning them over to a technician for packing in a special transfer case. “Ladybug will be halfway to Oslo in twenty minutes. What is the Gagarin doing?”
“It’s headed our way as well,” Knowlton replied. “ETA to radar horizon crossing, forty-five minutes.”
“If the Russkies launch fighters from Vainode, Riga, or Kaliningrad, we’ll be in for a rough time,” White said soberly. The photos were ready to go; White inspected the self-destruct package himself, locked the photos up, and armed the package. If the lock was tampered with, or if someone attempted to cut the case open, an incendiary charge would burn the photos inside and probably kill anyone standing within a few feet. “We better get permission from the Swedish government for an overflight. Are the weapons pods off the bird?”
“You bet. Checked on that myself. The fire-control boxes were pulled also.”
“Good.” The U.S. government would have to certify to the Swedish government that any aircraft requesting overflight were unarmed — if the CV-22 crashed in Sweden with weapons aboard, even a few 20-millimeter cannon shells, it would create a disastrous international incident, akin to the embarrassment of Soviet submarines running aground in Swedish waters, and U.S. aircraft and ships would be barred from Sweden for years. White began to flip through the copies of the photos as he continued: “First sign of anyone trying to board us, we deep-six the gun pods and the Intel MISCO trailers.”
“Everything’s ready to jettison,” Knowlton said. “The pods are in the pressure chamber. If those choppers try to deliver a boarding party, we can dump the weapon pods and most of the classified stuff out the recovery hatch. We can also—”
“Shit! Look at this!” White exclaimed, staring at a photo. It was a blurry but very readable picture of what had to be the most unusual-looking aircraft either of them had ever seen. “What the hell is it?”
“It looks like a … like a fighter, I think,” Knowlton said. “Like a stealth fighter, only with a curved fuselage and wings. It reminds me of the alien spacecraft from the movie War of the Worlds, except with a pointed nose. You think the Russians have a fighter like this in development-in Vilnius, of all places? They’re building a bomber in the middle of a revolution?”
“Well, Fisikous is a major aerospace research-design complex,” White explained. “They probably got a dozen models like this…” White found a magnifying glass and peered intently at the photo. “I don’t think this is a model. It’s too big! See the sentry standing over here? The lower root edge of that wing has to be twenty feet high. It’s gotta be bigger than the B-2 bomber. And they’ve got pneumatic and electrical cables running to it. Maybe it’s a prototype. The Pentagon is gonna love this.”
“Think it’s a fake? A decoy?”
“Could be,” White admitted. “If young Lieutenant Litwy was blown, they might have set up some fake aircraft at Fisikous.”
“Or Litwy could be a fake,” Knowlton observed. “The real Litwy could have been tortured for the passwords and responses, a mole put in his place. This whole thing could be a big ruse.”
White gave Knowlton a lopsided grin and a shrug of his thin shoulders. “That’s above our pay grade, Carl,” he said, flipping to another photo. “It’s up to Defense Intelligence and the CIA to find out if Litwy’s for real. We don’t kiss ‘em or shoot ‘em — we just snatch ‘em. Let the guys in the bad brown suits worry about—”
Paul White froze. He was staring at a photo he’d just flipped to, his eyes riveted to it, not believing what he was seeing.
Knowlton saw his superior officer’s wide-eyed look. “Paul? What is it? Litwy bring back a gory one? Let me see—”
White glanced up, confusion and disbelief spreading across his face. He lowered the photo, handing it over to Knowlton. It was a picture of a group of three soldiers — all elite Black Beret troops who occupied many of the more important ex-Soviet facilities in the Baltic states, including the Fisikous Research Institute — surrounding a younger man. One couldn’t tell whether the Black Berets were protecting an important civilian or if he was a prisoner.