Paul White was not her skipper — on the unclassified manifest he was listed as purser, in charge of everything from buying water while in port to filling out customs forms — but he loved this ship as if he was her master. It was a strange and overwhelming feeling of pride for a man from Wyoming who had never been near the sea or owned a boat, whose whole career had been in the United States Air Force, designing and building mechanical and electronic devices for aircrews. His particular talent was engineering … things. He was into gadgets, big and small.
And the Valley Mistress was Paul White’s biggest and best gadget of all.
The vessel, and Colonel White as her operational commander, were known by the code name MADCAP MAGICIAN. The vessel’s real purpose: conduct unconventional warfare, direct action, reconnaissance, counterterrorist, foreign internal defense, and special rescue operations to support the National Command Authority and unified military commands worldwide. It was one of four oceangoing vessels modified by White and secretly operated by the Intelligence Support Agency, the CIA’s “troubleshooters.” When the CIA needed more firepower than they normally used, but did not want to directly involve the military, it called on the Intelligence Support Agency. When ISA needed a tough job done quickly and effectively, it called on MADCAP MAGICIAN.
Although perfectly capable of acting as a salvage vessel — she had already earned several million for her nonexistent Louisiana salvage company, an unexpected bonus for the U.S. government treasury — she was not doing so now. The Valley Mistress had transferred her DSRV onto another cargo ship, this one the Italian-flag vessel Bernardo LoPresti, which had been contracted by the Intelligence Support Agency to act as the Valley Mistress’s support ship, and had secretly taken aboard a very different kind of cargo: six mission-specific cargo containers, or MISCOs, and a CV-22 PAVE HAMMER tilt-rotor special-operations aircraft, now nestled in the DSRV chamber and ready to go.
Her present, covert mission: a Lithuanian-born officer in a mostly Byelorussian unit of the CIS Army in Lithuania who had been delivering military and state secrets to the CIA for several months. He had been discovered and was now in danger of being captured. As part of his double-agent deal, the U.S. agreed to extract him by whatever means when the time came.
This was it.
“Gimme the downlink from PATRIOT, Carl,” White said to his operations officer, Air Force Major Carl Knowlton. “Tell the Intel section to stand by.”
The skipper of the Mistress watched and listened as White gave his orders — although Marchetti was commander of the vessel and in overall command of the entire mission, it was White who ran this show.
“You got it, boss,” Knowlton replied casually, then relayed the order down to the Intel section. The Air Force crew had long ago dispensed with traditional military courtesies while deployed — in fact, no one on board could easily be recognized as military men. They wore civilian work clothes, not uniforms, and some sported long hair and scraggly beards. Their military I.D. cards were in a hidden safe in the Engineering section and would not be reissued to the crew until they arrived back at their home port in Kittery, Maine.
Moments later a phone rang on the bridge. White picked it up himself: “Bridge, White here. Go ahead, PATRIOT.”
The snaps and crackles of the secure radio link were audible on the radio channeclass="underline" “This is PATRIOT controller S-3. Radar plot description follows. Plot describes mission essential data.” PATRIOT was a NATO E-3B AWACS radar aircraft, orbiting over the Baltic Sea between Poland and Sweden. The plane’s powerful radar could track hundreds of aircraft and vessels for many miles in all directions and then feed that digitized data directly to White’s crew on the Valley Mistress. Even though the Warsaw Pact had disbanded, East Germany had fallen, and the Soviet Union had broken up into many fragments, a NATO radar surveillance plane was still on patrol twenty-four hours a day over Eastern Europe, tracking aircraft and vessels over the horizon and correlating the information with civilian and military sources. The Cold War may have been over, but President Ronald Reagan’s famous words, “Trust, but verify,” were the new watchwords in West-East relations in the 1990s.
The current political situation in the old USSR was confusing, complicated, and extremely dangerous. The new Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) had replaced the USSR in 1992, but the new entity was more of a collection of bickering ministers than any sort of true union. The Red Army had disbanded, split along ethnic or religious lines, but the splits were inequitable and destructive: the Russian Army found itself with most of the skilled technicians and almost all of the officers but no one willing to do the “menial” tasks, while the armies of Belarus (Byelorussia), Ukraine, and Kazakhstan — the three most powerful members of the CIS besides Russia — were left with few well-trained, knowledgeable leaders but a lot of soldiers with little technical training or formal education. To say it was a mess was an understatement.
But all four republics still had one thing in common: nuclear weapons.
Despite the Commonwealth’s initial pledge to destroy its intercontinental weapons, move all tactical weapons to the Russian interior or into storage, and place the remaining ones in joint command, no republic was willing to give up the nuclear weapons inside its borders unless the other republics gave them up first. As a result, no one gave them up. All four republics — Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Russia — had intercontinental-range nuclear weapons and the skilled soldiers to use them.
Officially, the role of the United States government in regard to the fledgling Commonwealth was simple: encourage democratic reforms and a free market, but otherwise hands off. The Commonwealth had pledged to adhere to treaties already in force between the U.S. and the old USSR, and that satisfied the White House for the time being. Talks on new trade agreements between the Commonwealth, the individual states, and the U.S. and other countries were laid, in preparation for full diplomatic recognition and lifting of all trade barriers. World markets were eagerly awaiting the millions of new consumers being unleashed by the republics; everyone seemed willing to overlook the devalued, nearly worthless ruble (the adopted currency of the CIS) and bet that the future was going to be much brighter.
The White House feeling in private was much different: monitor the nuclear weapons and military movements in all Commonwealth-member republics and develop strategies and doctrines for dealing with a possible breakup of the Commonwealth and a loss of central control for each republic’s nuclear arsenal. For the Central Intelligence Agency, that meant stepping up covert operations in the various republics, especially the strategically and politically important Baltic states.