“I must go,” the doctor said, and leaned conspiratorially toward Luger. “This room is not… bugged, now, but since you are now awake it will be, so we must be careful in our conversations. I will bring something that will mask our voices.” The doctor gave Luger a sly wink. “I have done this before.” He then held up the syringe and squirted its contents onto the wall behind the bed. “Act sleepy or they might be suspicious. I will try to help you. Be careful of Teresov. Trust no one. I will return. Be brave.” And the doctor rapidly departed.
Luger sank back in bed after the doctor left, feeling more drained than ever, but with a glimmer of hope that he clung to with all his might. Here, in the middle of Siberia, there was a co-conspirator, a confidant.
Or was there? How could you ever know? How could you be sure it wasn’t just another mind game? Luger, cold and aching from head to toe, had never felt so alone — or unsure — in all of his twenty-six years.
Maybe there was still a chance to survive …
“Dr. Petyr Kaminski” walked into his office a few minutes later. Inside were two plainclothesmen, and Teresov was sitting at his desk with headphones against one ear. Teresov stood at attention as Kaminski — otherwise known as KGB General Viktor Gabovich — entered. Teresov asked in Russian, “How did it go, sir?”
“Better than I ever hoped,” General Gabovich replied, taking the desk from Teresov. “The young fool couldn’t wait to talk to me — he practically kissed my hand when I told him I’d watch out for him. One, maybe two days, and he will be committed. It is true — Americans trust doctors without question. You could have sawed off his entire leg, but he will eventually tell me his whole life story simply because I appear to be a doctor.”
“Did he tell you anything else, sir?”
“If I started to interrogate him, he would have gotten suspicious of me,” Gabovich said. “No, but he will talk when he’s ready. He’s young, afraid, and facing death otherwise. What choice will he have?”
“So we proceed as planned?”
“Yes,” Gabovich replied. “Pump sleeping gas into his room in five minutes — low dose only. Then wake him up in two hours. He’ll think one day has already gone by. You’ll interrogate him some more, then I’ll come back and see what he has to say. The closer we get to his ‘execution’ day, the more he’ll talk. In five days, no more than six, he’ll be ready to move.
“Move?” Teresov echoed incredulously. “Sir, you’re still planning on taking him to the Fisikous Institute?”
“Of course,” Gabovich replied. “Luger is an aeronautical engineer, an honor graduate of the Air Force Academy, a highly trained aircrew member, a trained Strategic Air Command navigator, and his last assignment was the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center. If we turn Luger without destroying his intellect, he can supply enough information to put Fisikous in the lead in new aircraft technology. It will be the intelligence coup of the century — we can turn Fisikous into a bigger aircraft-design bureau than Sukhoi or Mikoyan-Gurevich.”
“But Lithuania is becoming a battle zone,” Teresov said. “The pro-independence movement there is gathering too much momentum — and attracting too much attention. Fisikous could be easily jeopardized.”
“We will never lose Fisikous,” Gabovich said. “The Party will never allow it. I think we will never lose the Baltic states, but even if we do, Fisikous will always belong to the Soviet Union, like the Baltic Sea Fleet headquarters in Riga and the Tupolev-92 bomber base in Tallinn. We built those places — they belong to us forever.”
“Are you willing to bet everything on that, sir?” Teresov asked. “The Fisikous design bureau is being moved to Kaliningrad in a few years— perhaps Luger should be transferred there or kept here in Moscow…”
“We are in no danger,” Gabovich repeated. “This independence movement will eventually die out.”
General Gabovich was being blind, Teresov thought, trusting another organization or unit for his own security. “But, sir.
“Luger can be moved quickly enough if the situation warrants — until then he belongs in Vilnius,” Gabovich insisted. “I will see to it. The government insists that Vilnius and the Fisikous Institute are secure — all KGB apparatuses have been moved there — so I can trust it.”
“Yes, sir,” Teresov said. Gabovich had made up his mind — there seemed no dissuading him. “Now, as to Luger…”
“He ceases to exist as Luger now, except to ‘Kaminski,’ “ Viktor Gabovich said. “From now on he will be known by his file designation, 41 dash Zulu. We will begin the disorientation cycle immediately. Wake him up in two hours for his first session, then drug him to sleep, then wake him up two hours later. He will think another day has gone by. After twelve hours, he will be begging us not to execute him — if he lasts that long,” he sneered.
V-22 Osprey Joint Service Aircraft
ONE
Stand by for team launch,” Air Force Colonel Paul White radioed on the intercom. “All decks, get ready to rock and roll.” Captain Joseph Marchetti, the senior ship’s officer standing beside White, looked at his colleague in amusement and consternation. Rock and roll? Things were going to get critical here very, very fast.
Paul White was fifty-one years old, but, as he himself would readily admit, capriciously, only seventeen or eighteen. And he could not have been more out of place than on this ship — or having more fun than if he had an A-pass at Disneyland. It was at times like this that White longed for the flying skill and combat nerve needed to get knee-deep in the action. Although he had designed trainers and simulators for the Strategic Air Command and other organizations over the years, he had never earned a flying rating nor seen combat — but anyone who had flown in his modified super-realistic simulators back at Ford Air Force Base would have sworn they’d just been in combat when they finished a grueling session.
His current assignment with the Intelligence Support Agency — a support agency of the Director of Central Intelligence — was also not considered a combat assignment, but if something went wrong on this mission, or if they were discovered, they could be just as dead as if they were in the middle of World War III.
The twenty-nine-year veteran Air Force officer was on the bridge of what had to be the most unusual vessel in the world, as befitting one of the most dedicated yet unusual men in the world. The USS Valley Mistress was a maritime salvage and deep-sea construction vessel registered under the U.S. flag. Officially, the Mistress was part of the U.S. Navy’s Ready Reserve Fleet, leased from a private company from Larose, Louisiana, but for the past few months she was detached from her reserve duties and was on a “privately contracted” voyage to northern Europe, performing a variety of jobs in Finland, Sweden, Germany, Poland, and even the Commonwealth of Independent States, or CIS — what used to be known as the Soviet Union. Three hundred and twenty feet long, sixty feet in width, with a draft of twelve feet and a manifested crew of only twenty, the Mistress had put in a considerable number of miles on voyages all over the world.
Originally an oilfield support tug, the Mistress had been converted to an undersea construction, salvage, and rescue vessel with the addition of a large steel pressure enclosure on the middeck specifically designed to support a Navy deep-submergence rescue vehicle, or DSRV, which was its primary Naval Reserve Fleet assignment. The Mistress also sported a thirty-five-ton crane abaft the main superstructure, ostensibly to load and unload the DSRV, and it had a large helicopter landing pad on the fantail, so big that the sides of the pad hung out over the ship’s gunwales and several feet behind the transom. Her hull had been ice-strengthened to be able to operate in the Arctic and Antarctic, and a pressurized recovery hatch had been added in the hull to allow a DSRV or pressure-suited divers to be raised and lowered directly inside the enclosure. Her three big fourteen-thousand-brake-horsepower diesels propelled the three-thousand, five-hundred-ton vessel at a snappy twenty knots; computer-controlled stabilizers ensured a relatively smooth ride in all but the most treacherous waters; and side-thrusters and a sophisticated navigation and electronics suite allowed her to be positioned anywhere near a rescue site with great precision, or to locate submerged objects in up to two thousand feet of water.