“You sneaked a photograph inside the lining of your jacket?” Elliott asked incredulously.
“You’ll see why in a second.” White opened it and handed a photograph to Elliott. “He’s alive, General. We got that photo several months ago from an informant in Lithuania. That’s him. I know it is.”
There was no mistaking it. Elliott assumed it would be one of the typically fuzzy photos taken from long distance, or deliberately fuzzied to protect the informant’s identity or methods used to obtain the photograph — but it wasn’t. It was Dave Luger. He was going through a security checkpoint, emerging from a metal detector. The photo was taken from slightly above head level — with the photographer or informant standing halfway up a staircase in front of the security area perhaps — but it was clear and sharp, perhaps computer-enhanced.
Luger looked thin and pale, but it was definitely him — the eyes, the shape of the head, the long legs, the slight slouch, the big Texas-sized hands with long fingers. Luger was carrying a briefcase. He was wearing a simple brown overcoat, no gloves, no hat, even though the men accompanying him wore thick fur hats and leather gloves against the obvious cold outside.
“Want to kick me out now, General?” White asked, a hint of a smile on his face.
“Shut up, White,” Elliott grumbled. “Another word and I’ll personally close that mouth of yours.” Elliott sat down, running his hand through his hair, studying the picture more closely, trying to see if there was anything… anything at all… that indicated a setup. God knows he’d Seen a lot of them in the press over the years, especially the faked POW pictures coming out of Vietnam. Elliott sighed. This one looked real, which actually made things harder: It meant Luger hadn’t died… and that raised a lot of questions. Where was he? What had happened? Had he been captured and turned by the Soviets? Or, worse, had he… Elliott dismissed the thought immediately. Yes, someone would probably wonder if it was possible Luger had always been working for… someone else… but Elliott knew that was absurd. He’d spent too much time with Luger. Elliott knew Luger as well as he knew McLanahan and the rest of the crew.
No, David Luger was no traitor. At least, he hadn’t been. He was, if anything, a prisoner. Or a brainwashed collaborator. It happened to the best of them. Elliott had seen it himself, with his own men, back in ‘Nam. But if they could get him back…
White couldn’t stand the silence any longer. “We’ve got to talk about this, General Elliott.”
“Hold it. Just shut up for a second.” He paused for another moment, then pressed his interoffice intercom button and said, “Sergeant Taylor, I’ve got the ceremony taken care of. See to it I’m not interrupted except by a priority-one call.”
“Yes, sir,” came the reply.
“We call our office recording devices ‘sandwich’ instead of ‘ceremony,’” White said with a smile. “We find we can use it in more conversations.”
“This is not funny, White,” Elliott said. “I’ve never shut that tape recorder off in over six years of working behind this desk — I’m not even sure how to do it. Let’s dispense with the cute comments now. Who do you work for, White?”
“The Intelligence Support Agency,” White replied immediately.
Elliott knew they were the troubleshooters of the Director of Central Intelligence, the special team that assisted and augmented the regular field-intelligence forces of the United States. They were the ones who were called when the spooks got in trouble or when something needed doing outside normal DCI channels. “What program?”
White hesitated. It was a normal reaction to his highly classified position. But to Elliott it was a sign of insincerity, that this really was a trap. “You better not clam up on me now, White!”
“MADCAP MAGICIAN,” White replied.
“Never heard of it.”
“And I’m sure you’ve got a few things inside these hangars I’ve never heard of, General,” White said. “We’re a combined-forces military unit, mostly Air Force and Marine Corps special ops, based on the cargo ship USS Valley Mistress. We use some of the CV-22 PAVE HAMMER aircraft that were developed here. Human intelligence is our specialty.”
“You were handling this informant in Lithuania?”
“CIA was handling him, but they lost him when he rabbited. The KGB was closing in on him.”
“There is no KGB anymore.”
“Wrong, sir. There’s plenty of KGB, especially in the Baltic states. They call them the MSB, the Inter-Republican Council for Security, but they’re all KGB, Internal Troops. OMON, Black Berets — the names have changed, but the faces have not. They were too powerful to destroy; now they’re rogue elephants, guns for hire. They don’t work for Moscow anymore — they work for whoever offers them the most money. We’ve been tracking this KGB cell in Vilnius, particularly around the Fisikous Research Institute, where the KGB provides ‘specialized’ security services — bribes, threats, and executions — in order to convince local Lithuanian officials not to close down Fisikous. We run up against them all the time.”
“So you were sent in to get the informant?”
“He was a Lithuanian officer in a Byelorussian outfit representing the Commonwealth and based in Vilnius,” White explained. “The informant was an intelligence officer in a unit in Vilnius. One of his unit’s tasks, along with harassing Lithuanian citizens and helping the Byelorussians get rich while ‘guarding’ the country, was to guard the Fisikous Institute of Technology.”
“The Institute itself? He was in it? That means Luger’s in Fisikous?”
“Apparently so,” White replied. “He’s been working in the aircraft-design bureau for a while, perhaps years, under the name Doctor Ozerov. Ivan Sergeiovich Ozerov.”
“I know the names of every scientist and every engineer working in every aircraft-design bureau in the Commonwealth,” Elliott said, turning in his seat to look at White, “and I’ve never heard of Ozerov.”
“Our informant indicates that he’s not a part of the normal staff” White explained, “but he’s there all right, under constant guard by the KGB contingent at Fisikous. He is very well respected, considered a bit of an oddball — very freewheeling. But he commands respect and admiration throughout the facility.”
“So maybe it’s someone that just looks like Luger.”
“Maybe.” White was silent for a moment. Then: “But your reaction was the same as mine when I saw that picture, and the others the informant brought out. It’s David Luger all right. He looks like he’s been mistreated perhaps drugged or brainwashed, but it’s him. His primary project 15 some large, weird aircraft that looks like something out of Star Trek.”
“Tuman?” Elliott gasped. “My God… Luger is working on Tuman?”
“What is it? Some new bomber?”
“It could be the world’s most sophisticated warplane,” Elliott said. “It’s a combination and enhancement of the B-1 and B-2 bombers. Stealth technology, supercruise capability at high gross weights — that means a four-hundred-thousand-pound stealth bomber traveling over the speed of sound without afterburner — self-protection technology, slow-flight and close-air-support technology, terrain-following, air-to-air capability, even fractional orbital bombardment capability — it’s the only advanced warplane in the world still being developed, after our B-2 stealth bomber program was canceled. You saw it?”
“The informant got pictures of it.”
“Jesus. Tuman really exists,” Elliott exclaimed. “It’s been rumored to be on the drawing board for five years.” Elliott began thinking out loud: “Who would’ve thought it would be at Fisikous? With Lithuania a free nation, Fisikous was the last place you’d expect a bunch of old Soviet sympathizers to keep a multibillion-dollar aircraft project—”