But it was the man, dressed in plain brown slacks and a sweater, who had grabbed White’s attention.
Knowlton prodded. “Hey, Paul, who is he? A long-lost brother or something? You know this guy?”
White nodded, taking the photo back. “A guy I knew at Ford—”
“Ford Air Force Base? You’re kidding, right? Maybe he just looks like him.”
But White had thought of that and instantly discarded it. He remembered hearing the reports of Lieutenant Dave Luger’s death, three years ago in a plane crash in Alaska, test-flying a supersecret bomber. He’d never fully believed the report — the facts didn’t wash and everything was too neatly wrapped.
He’d heard the rumors circulating through the Air Force about a preemptive strike against a ground-based laser site in Siberia, and about the aircraft that accomplished the mission: a modified B-52, reportedly from the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center. How or why a research center had a strike aircraft in its inventory was still unclear. But there was never any inquiry or details about the mission and the threat from the Soviet laser — if there ever had been one — had suddenly disappeared.
As did two navigators from Paul White’s old B-52 wing at Ford Air Force Base, Patrick McLanahan and David Luger.
They had gone TDY several weeks before the alleged incident. Neither had returned to Ford. Later, Paul White found out about Luger’s death, and learned that his crew partner, Patrick McLanahan, had suddenly received a new duty assignment. White did not know where McLanahan had gone, or why — but he was one of the most gifted bombardiers in the nation, so White never thought McLanahan had gotten himself in trouble or kicked out of the Air Force. White had liked both men — they were sharp, very sharp — though Luger could be a bit of a hothead. Still, he’d done well at Ford, as had McLanahan.
And now Luger had, it seemed, turned up alive at a secret Commonwealth research center in Lithuania. White rubbed his chin. What was going on? Was Luger a defector? A mole? He turned to Knowlton: “It’s the guy from Ford, I’m sure of it. An American military officer in fucking Lithuania, of all places. This guy was declared dead in 1989.”
Knowlton looked skeptical. “Paul, how can an American Air Force officer killed years ago suddenly turn up in Vilnius, Lithuania?”
“Stranger things have happened. Look at some of the Vietnam vets we’d written off for dead who’ve suddenly turned up in the past few years.
“But Vietnam was a war, Paul. You’re bound to have misreported casualties. This guy—”
“David Luger. That’s his name.”
“Okay, this guy, Luger… wasn’t in a war. Was he?”
White ignored the question. “I’m going to upchannel this one immediately. This can’t wait. The mission Luger was on, well — if he’s there and alive, people need to know it. The… uh, mission was too important.”
Knowlton shook his head. “You can’t make a call like that from the Mistress, Paul. You know that. An unnecessary secure communication this close to Russia, to Belarus, hell, that’ll compromise us and the satellite channel both.”
“Look, I know this guy. I ran him through my course at Ford.”
“You gonna risk the entire MADCAP MAGICIAN program to help him? If the Russians get wind that we’re anything but a marine salvage-and-rescue ship, everything goes down the drain. Years of your work, Paul.”
He could tell White was mulling it over. Knowlton hadn’t seen him this agitated in ages, which meant he was pretty damn sure of his I.D. of this guy. White had long joked he’d always forget a name, but never a face. Now he’d remembered both. “Look, Paul… send an urgent message in the photo packet to alert the intelligence section, then wait until we get to Oslo — the embassy has the facilities you need, and everything will be waiting for us. We can delay the CV-22 a few minutes until you draft a message.
White was ready to go connect the channel himself, but realized the best thing to do was wait. If he alerted Intel, God knows where it would end up. Some asshole looking for one less problem to deal with would just sweep it under the rug. And Paul White was damned if that was going to happen.
“There it is,” the Lithuanian Self-Defense Force helicopter pilot radioed to his passenger. “My God, look at what the bastards have done to that farm.” He nodded toward the crash site. Several helicopters, dozens of Vehicles — including some BTR armored combat vehicles — and hundreds of soldiers had surrounded a small dark splotch on the muddy ground. The troops had used combat-engineering vehicles to carve a wide path from the main road to the crash site, shearing straight through several hundred meters of wire, wood, and stone fencing, bulldozing down a corral and six acres of corn and cutting down about four acres of pine forest to get to the crash site. The three kilometers from the main road to the crash site looked like the path of a tornado.
“The Byelorussian infantry is efficient, that’s for sure,” General Dominikas Palcikas, commander of the Lithuanian military, said as he studied the area carefully from the front copilot’s seat. “The trucks have been dispersed throughout the area,” he told the pilot. “See? They’re blocking all the roads and open areas nearby with armored vehicles. They don’t want us to land.”
The chopper pilot nodded in understanding. Although Lithuania had separated from the Soviet Union in 1990, it wasn’t until the USSR fell and the Commonwealth of Independent States was created that a transition treaty between the CIS and Lithuania allowed a CIS military presence within the Baltics — ostensibly to keep the peace. But it was a concern of every Lithuanian that these forces — especially the Byelorussians— would overstep their “obligations” and someday make a play for Lithuania.
“What do you want me to do, sir?” the pilot asked.
“Try the bastards again on the radio. Get them to clear that parking area there.”
The pilot radioed, trying to get a reply.
Palcikas waited for a response from the Byelorussians, his expression getting angrier and darker with every passing second. General Dominikas Palcikas was a fifty-three-year-old combat veteran, born in Lithuania but trained and educated in the former Soviet Army. His father had been a Russian general, commander of a Lithuanian division nicknamed the Iron Wolf Brigade after the Lithuanian Grand Duke’s fierce armies of medieval times. Palcikas’ father’s brigade became heroes in World War II, making Palcikas’ own rise within the military easy. He rose quickly through the ranks to Colonel, served in the Far East Military District, then in Afghanistan as commander of a tank battalion. Later he was reassigned to the Western Military District after the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. But his career suffered because of the military defeat in Afghanistan, and he was reassigned to the Byelorussian SSR in the Interior Ministry’s Troops of the Interior, in charge of a border patrol regiment. The sudden halt in his career affected his outlook on the Soviet Union: what the Soviet Union was turning Lithuania into was not much better than the poverty he saw in Afghanistan. He became a student of Lithuanian history, and his disenchantment with the Soviet occupation of Lithuania grew and peaked in 1989 and 1990 with the bloody massacres in Riga and Vilnius at the hands of special units of the Soviet Interior Troops called the Black Berets. He resigned his commission in the Soviet Army in 1990 and emigrated to Lithuania. Upon the independence of Lithuania in mid-1991, he accepted a commission in the Forces of Self-Defense, in the rank of General and Commander in Chief. He named his initial cadre of officers and enlisted volunteers the Iron Wolf Brigade, invoking not only the spirit of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania, but the memory of the World War II unit, led by his father, that saved Lithuania.