“Hey, Harniy! Pretty lady captain!” Smoliy greeted Annie Dewey. “I did not expect you tonight — I expect you to be dancing all night with my men. I told them all about you and those gentle, talented hands of yours.”
Annie Dewey approached Smoliy, and she and the officer with her saluted. Smoliy returned the salute with the butt end of his cigar. “It is too late, and I am too relaxed, for protocols,” he said. He turned his attention to the other officer and said, “If you don’t mind, Colonel, I want to be with my men tonight. It has been a long day.”
Colonel David Luger said nothing, but stared back at Smoliy, then up at the big Tupolev-22M Backfire bomber behind him. “This won’t take long, General. I promise.”
“Good, good,” Smoliy said. He studied Luger carefully for a moment, his eyes narrowing, then looking askance as if trying to dredge up some long-forgotten images in his mind. He looked again at Luger, opened his mouth, closed it. Luger looked back at him, then removed his garrison cap. Smoliy gulped, his mouth and eyes opening wide in surprise, and he gasped, “Idi k yobanay matiri …”
“Da, General,” Luger replied in casual, remarkably fluent Russian. “Dobriy vyechyeer On zassal yimu mazgi.”
Annie Dewey turned to David in surprise. “I didn’t know you spoke Russian—”
“Ozerov,” Smoliy gasped. “Ivan Ozerov. You’re here? Here in America? In an American military uniform?” David Luger swallowed hard. He hadn’t heard that name in years — but it was his, all right.
Luger was a fifteen-year Air Force veteran from Amarillo, Texas. His aeronautical engineering background and expertise in computers, systems design, and advanced systems design, along with his years as a B-52 bomber navigator-bombardier, had made him one of the most sought-after aviation project leaders in the world. If Dave Luger were a civilian, he would certainly be a vice president of Boeing or Raytheon, or an undersecretary of defense at the Pentagon … and if it hadn’t been for the Redtail Hawk incident, he might be head of an Air Force laboratory.
But in 1988, following a secret B-52 bombing raid engineered by the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center against a ground-based laser site in the Soviet Union, Luger had been left for dead on a snow-covered runway in Siberia, then captured and brainwashed while being nursed back to health by the KGB. For five years, he had been forced to use his engineering brilliance to build the next generation of Soviet long-range bombers.
To the U.S. military and intelligence community, David Luger had been a traitor. The CIA had thought he was nothing more than an AWOL U.S. Air Force B-52 bombardier that had deserted and joined the other side. The security level at the High Technology Aerospace Center was so high that no one, even the CIA, knew Luger had been on the EB-52 Old Dog bombing raid against the Kavaznya laser site or that he had been left behind at the Siberian air base at Anadyr and presumed dead; the cover story, devised by the previous director of HAWC, General Brad Elliott, had stated that Luger had died in a crash of a top-secret experimental aircraft. The CIA knew that Luger was in the Soviet Union, and assumed he had defected. All they really knew was that a highly intelligent Air Force Academy grad, American citizen, B-52 crew member, and member of a top-secret weapons research group with an advanced degree and a top-secret security clearance, had been advancing the state of the art in Russian long-range bombing technology by an entire generation.
He had been discovered and rescued by Patrick McLanahan and a special combined Air Force — Marine Corps Intelligence Support Agency operations team called Madcap Magician just before the CIA had been going to carry out plans to terminate him, at the same time averting a certain all-out war between the newly independent Baltic states and a resurgent Soviet-style military government in Russia. It had taken another five years to deprogram, rehabilitate, and return Luger to his life as an American aviator and expert aerospace engineer.
He’d made it back, fully reintegrated into the supersecret world at Elliott Air Force Base, Groom Lake, Nevada, home of the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center. He’d won his promotion to full colonel after years of dedicated work, both in his personal and professional life, and had successfully managed to drive the years of torture out of his consciousness. But now, with the arrival of the Tupolev-22M Backfire bomber and its commander, Roman Smoliy, the awful horrors were back …
… because Roman Smoliy, then a young bomber pilot with the Soviet Air Force assigned to the Fisikous Research and Technology Institute in Vilnius, Lithuania, had been one of Luger’s chief tormentors.
“Ozerov? Who’s Ozerov?” Annie asked. “Dave, what’s going on?”
“It’s not Ivan Ozerov, General, it’s David Luger,” he said, ignoring Annie, letting his eyes bore angrily into Smoliy’s. “I was never Ivan Ozerov. Ozerov was an invention by a sadistic KGB officer at Fisikous who tortured me for five fucking years.”
“I–I didn’t know!” Smoliy stammered. “I did not know you were an American.”
“You thought I was some kind of egghead goofball genius, sent to Fisikous to try to tell you how to fly a Soviet warplane,” David said. “You took every opportunity to make my life miserable, just so you could be the strutting hotshot pilot.”
“Dave, let’s get out of here,” Annie said, a thrill of fear shooting up and down her spine. “You’re really scaring me.”
“Why are you doing this, Colonel?” Smoliy asked, pleading now. “Why are you haunting me now? Everything is different. Fisikous no longer exists. The Soviet Air Force no longer exists. You are here in your own country—”
“I just wanted you to know that it was me, General,” Luger said acidly. “I wanted you to know that I’ll never forget what you and the other bastards at Fisikous did to me.”
“But I did not know—”
“As far as you knew, I was a Russian aerospace engineer,” David said. “But I was weaker than you, weak from the drugs and the torture and the mind-control crap they subjected me to for so long. I was one of you, for all you knew, and you still shit all over me!” He stepped toward the big Ukrainian officer and said, “I will never forgive, and I will never forget, Smoliy, you sadistic bastard. You’re in my homeland now.”
He turned on a heel and walked away. Annie looked at Smoliy in complete and utter confusion, then ran after Luger. “David, wait.”
“I’m outta here, Annie.”
“What is going on? Where do you know him from? Fisikous? Lithuania? How could you know him from an old Soviet research center?”
They went back to the staff car. Luger said nothing for a long while, until they were outside the front gate at Nellis. “Annie … Annie, I was at Fisikous. Years ago. I … Christ, I can’t tell you.”
“Can’t tell me? You were at a top-secret Soviet research center, and you can’t tell me how or why?” Annie asked incredulously. “David, you can’t keep a secret like this between us. It’s obviously something deeply personal, hurtful, even … even…”
“Psychological ‘? Emotional?” David said. “Annie, it goes far deeper than that, way deeper. But I can’t tell you yet. I’m sorry I brought you along.”
“You brought me along because we share, Dave,” she said. “We’re together. It’s not you and me anymore, it’s us. You asked me along because you thought you needed my support. I’m here for you. Tell me what I can do for you. Let me in.” She paused, then asked, “Does it have to do with that Megafortress memorial in the classified aircraft hangar? The Kavaznya mission? Those charts, your flight jacket with the blood on it, the story General McLanahan told us?”