Night of the Hawk Read online

  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.

  NIGHT OF THE HAWK

  V-22 Osprey Joint Service Aircraft

  ONE

  ABOARD THE USS VALLEY MISTRESS

  OFF THE COAST OF THE LATVIAN REPUBLIC

  29 NOVEMBER, YEARS LATER, 1233 LATVIAN TIME (0633 ET)

  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.

  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 operat
ions 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 channel: “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.

  That’s where Paul White and MADCAP MAGICIAN came in.

  The radar operator aboard PATRIOT read off his position, altitude, surveillance track, date-time group of the surveillance run, and his equipment status-all in encoded format, even on the secure anti-eavesdrop channel-then continued: “Nearest vessel of interest is off your port beam, range three point one nautical miles, possible ELINT vessel. Numerous smaller vessels all quadrants appear to be at anchor, adrift, or moored to navigation aids, none considered a mission risk. Largest vessel in projected flight path confirmed identity as ferry Baltic Star. Additional vessel, the LoPresti, west-northwest of your position, is scheduled to rendezvous with you in approximately twelve hours. He is just leaving port at this time.”

  White muttered a curt “Copy.”

  The ELINT (electronic intelligence) vessel, a Soviet-CIS Gagarin-class research ship about the same size as the Valley Mistress, was a serious threat to this mission. Primarily used for spacecraft tracking and recovery, it was crammed full of communications and radar gear. Based in St. Petersburg, it had been on its way to the Atlantic when it had slowed and begun shadowing the American vessel in the Baltic, using its radar to constantly monitor the skies and seas around the Mistress. White thought that the CIS spy ship would go away after they had made their schedule port call in Tallinn, Estonia, but it had not. Then, after their inspection by Estonian customs officials in Tallinn—many of whom, White was sure, were former KGB agents—he thought the spy ship would definitely leave. Again, it had not, although it was no longer scanning them with radar. The Mistress had moved back into the Baltic, headed toward its next port of call in Norway, and the Gagarin-class research ship was right on his tail.

  It was wrong, but probably prudent, to always believe that your cover was blown. The Gagarin-class vessel was not now using its radar, but it had lots of other sophisticated sensors—infrared, laser, low-light TV, super-sensitive optical, and plain old trained “weather-eye” crewmen—with which to watch over the Mistress. Or it could be just hanging out, tracking its own satellites, conducting training missions, anything. White’s mission was too important to scrub, so some chances had to be taken. .

  The report from PATRIOT continued: “Possible military rotary-wing aircraft will be within ten miles of target vicinity at feet-dry. Subject aircraft has been observed orbiting the vicinity since sunset. Analysis indicates the target may have been compromised. Recommend postponement additional twenty-four hours. Radar downlink to follow. PATRIOT standing by. Out.”

  Well, things did not look good. A spy ship nearby, and now a military chopper in the target area. “Looks like we’ve been blown,” Knowlton said. “We don’t have a choice but to bug out.”

  “Shit,” White muttered. “You’re probably right.” But Knowlton knew White had no intention of leaving. White turned to Marchetti and said, “Let’s start putting a little distance between us and that Gagarin, Joe. Try to get us over his radar horizon.”

  “It’ll look suspicious .

  “We already look suspicious,” White said. “I’m going down to Intel. Keep an eye on things up here,” he ordered Knowlton, then hurried off the bridge.

  The confusing status of White’s HUMINT (human intelligence) target underscored the dangerous situation that now existed in the region. Even though the Baltic states had been independent for quite a long time, all still had foreign troops on their soil. Worse, those troops had a continuing identity crisis of their own. They had gone from being Soviet Red Army troops to Union of Sovereign Socialist Republic troops to Union Treaty troops to Commonwealth of Independent States troops, all in the space of a few months. Now most of those troops didn’t even belong to the Commonwealth. The Soviet troops of Byelorussian heritage in the Baltic states pledged allegiance to Belarus, while the Russian troops pledged loyalty to the Russian Federation, and Lithuanian troops supported Lithuania.