Night of the Hawk, page 8
part #4 of Patrick McLanahan Series
“Everything’s ready to jettison,” Knowlton said. “The pods are in the pressure chamber. If those choppers try to deliver a boarding party, we can dump the weapon pods and most of the classified stuff out the recovery hatch. We can also—”
“Shit! Look at this!” White exclaimed, staring at a photo. It was a blurry but very readable picture of what had to be the most unusual-looking aircraft either of them had ever seen. “What the hell is it?”
“It looks like a … like a fighter, I think,” Knowlton said. “Like a stealth fighter, only with a curved fuselage and wings. It reminds me of the alien spacecraft from the movie War of the Worlds, except with a pointed nose. You think the Russians have a fighter like this in development-in Vilnius, of all places? They’re building a bomber in the middle of a revolution?”
“Well, Fisikous is a major aerospace research-design complex,” White explained. “They probably got a dozen models like this…” White found a magnifying glass and peered intently at the photo. “I don’t think this is a model. It’s too big! See the sentry standing over here? The lower root edge of that wing has to be twenty feet high. It’s gotta be bigger than the B-2 bomber. And they’ve got pneumatic and electrical cables running to it. Maybe it’s a prototype. The Pentagon is gonna love this.”
“Think it’s a fake? A decoy?”
“Could be,” White admitted. “If young Lieutenant Litwy was blown, they might have set up some fake aircraft at Fisikous.”
“Or Litwy could be a fake,” Knowlton observed. “The real Litwy could have been tortured for the passwords and responses, a mole put in his place. This whole thing could be a big ruse.”
White gave Knowlton a lopsided grin and a shrug of his thin shoulders. “That’s above our pay grade, Carl,” he said, flipping to another photo. “It’s up to Defense Intelligence and the CIA to find out if Litwy’s for real. We don’t kiss ‘em or shoot ‘em—we just snatch ‘em. Let the guys in the bad brown suits worry about—”
Paul White froze. He was staring at a photo he’d just flipped to, his eyes riveted to it, not believing what he was seeing.
Knowlton saw his superior officer’s wide-eyed look. “Paul? What is it? Litwy bring back a gory one? Let me see—”
White glanced up, confusion and disbelief spreading across his face. He lowered the photo, handing it over to Knowlton. It was a picture of a group of three soldiers—all elite Black Beret troops who occupied many of the more important ex-Soviet facilities in the Baltic states, including the Fisikous Research Institute—surrounding a younger man. One couldn’t tell whether the Black Berets were protecting an important civilian or if he was a prisoner.
But it was the man, dressed in plain brown slacks and a sweater, who had grabbed White’s attention.
Knowlton prodded. “Hey, Paul, who is he? A long-lost brother or something? You know this guy?”
White nodded, taking the photo back. “A guy I knew at Ford—”
“Ford Air Force Base? You’re kidding, right? Maybe he just looks like him.”
But White had thought of that and instantly discarded it. He remembered hearing the reports of Lieutenant Dave Luger’s death, three years ago in a plane crash in Alaska, test-flying a supersecret bomber. He’d never fully believed the report—the facts didn’t wash and everything was too neatly wrapped.
He’d heard the rumors circulating through the Air Force about a preemptive strike against a ground-based laser site in Siberia, and about the aircraft that accomplished the mission: a modified B-52, reportedly from the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center. How or why a research center had a strike aircraft in its inventory was still unclear. But there was never any inquiry or details about the mission and the threat from the Soviet laser—if there ever had been one—had suddenly disappeared.
As did two navigators from Paul White’s old B-52 wing at Ford Air Force Base, Patrick McLanahan and David Luger.
They had gone TDY several weeks before the alleged incident. Neither had returned to Ford. Later, Paul White found out about Luger’s death, and learned that his crew partner, Patrick McLanahan, had suddenly received a new duty assignment. White did not know where McLanahan had gone, or why—but he was one of the most gifted bombardiers in the nation, so White never thought McLanahan had gotten himself in trouble or kicked out of the Air Force. White had liked both men—they were sharp, very sharp—though Luger could be a bit of a hothead. Still, he’d done well at Ford, as had McLanahan.
And now Luger had, it seemed, turned up alive at a secret Commonwealth research center in Lithuania. White rubbed his chin. What was going on? Was Luger a defector? A mole? He turned to Knowlton: “It’s the guy from Ford, I’m sure of it. An American military officer in fucking Lithuania, of all places. This guy was declared dead in 1989.”
Knowlton looked skeptical. “Paul, how can an American Air Force officer killed years ago suddenly turn up in Vilnius, Lithuania?”
“Stranger things have happened. Look at some of the Vietnam vets we’d written off for dead who’ve suddenly turned up in the past few years.
“But Vietnam was a war, Paul. You’re bound to have misreported casualties. This guy—”
“David Luger. That’s his name.”
“Okay, this guy, Luger… wasn’t in a war. Was he?”
White ignored the question. “I’m going to upchannel this one immediately. This can’t wait. The mission Luger was on, well—if he’s there and alive, people need to know it. The… uh, mission was too important.”
Knowlton shook his head. “You can’t make a call like that from the Mistress, Paul. You know that. An unnecessary secure communication this close to Russia, to Belarus, hell, that’ll compromise us and the satellite channel both.”
“Look, I know this guy. I ran him through my course at Ford.”
“You gonna risk the entire MADCAP MAGICIAN program to help him? If the Russians get wind that we’re anything but a marine salvage-and-rescue ship, everything goes down the drain. Years of your work, Paul.”
He could tell White was mulling it over. Knowlton hadn’t seen him this agitated in ages, which meant he was pretty damn sure of his I.D. of this guy. White had long joked he’d always forget a name, but never a face. Now he’d remembered both. “Look, Paul… send an urgent message in the photo packet to alert the intelligence section, then wait until we get to Oslo—the embassy has the facilities you need, and everything will be waiting for us. We can delay the CV-22 a few minutes until you draft a message.
White was ready to go connect the channel himself, but realized the best thing to do was wait. If he alerted Intel, God knows where it would end up. Some asshole looking for one less problem to deal with would just sweep it under the rug. And Paul White was damned if that was going to happen.
OVER WESTERN LITHUANIA
LATER THAT MORNING
“There it is,” the Lithuanian Self-Defense Force helicopter pilot radioed to his passenger. “My God, look at what the bastards have done to that farm.” He nodded toward the crash site. Several helicopters, dozens of Vehicles—including some BTR armored combat vehicles—and hundreds of soldiers had surrounded a small dark splotch on the muddy ground. The troops had used combat-engineering vehicles to carve a wide path from the main road to the crash site, shearing straight through several hundred meters of wire, wood, and stone fencing, bulldozing down a corral and six acres of corn and cutting down about four acres of pine forest to get to the crash site. The three kilometers from the main road to the crash site looked like the path of a tornado.
“The Byelorussian infantry is efficient, that’s for sure,” General Dominikas Palcikas, commander of the Lithuanian military, said as he studied the area carefully from the front copilot’s seat. “The trucks have been dispersed throughout the area,” he told the pilot. “See? They’re blocking all the roads and open areas nearby with armored vehicles. They don’t want us to land.”
The chopper pilot nodded in understanding. Although Lithuania had separated from the Soviet Union in 1990, it wasn’t until the USSR fell and the Commonwealth of Independent States was created that a transition treaty between the CIS and Lithuania allowed a CIS military presence within the Baltics—ostensibly to keep the peace. But it was a concern of every Lithuanian that these forces—especially the Byelorussians— would overstep their “obligations” and someday make a play for Lithuania.
“What do you want me to do, sir?” the pilot asked.
“Try the bastards again on the radio. Get them to clear that parking area there.”
The pilot radioed, trying to get a reply.
Palcikas waited for a response from the Byelorussians, his expression getting angrier and darker with every passing second. General Dominikas Palcikas was a fifty-three-year-old combat veteran, born in Lithuania but trained and educated in the former Soviet Army. His father had been a Russian general, commander of a Lithuanian division nicknamed the Iron Wolf Brigade after the Lithuanian Grand Duke’s fierce armies of medieval times. Palcikas’ father’s brigade became heroes in World War II, making Palcikas’ own rise within the military easy. He rose quickly through the ranks to Colonel, served in the Far East Military District, then in Afghanistan as commander of a tank battalion. Later he was reassigned to the Western Military District after the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. But his career suffered because of the military defeat in Afghanistan, and he was reassigned to the Byelorussian SSR in the Interior Ministry’s Troops of the Interior, in charge of a border patrol regiment. The sudden halt in his career affected his outlook on the Soviet Union: what the Soviet Union was turning Lithuania into was not much better than the poverty he saw in Afghanistan. He became a student of Lithuanian history, and his disenchantment with the Soviet occupation of Lithuania grew and peaked in 1989 and 1990 with the bloody massacres in Riga and Vilnius at the hands of special units of the Soviet Interior Troops called the Black Berets. He resigned his commission in the Soviet Army in 1990 and emigrated to Lithuania. Upon the independence of Lithuania in mid-1991, he accepted a commission in the Forces of Self-Defense, in the rank of General and Commander in Chief. He named his initial cadre of officers and enlisted volunteers the Iron Wolf Brigade, invoking not only the spirit of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania, but the memory of the World War II unit, led by his father, that saved Lithuania.
“No reply, sir,” the pilot reported. “Only a warning to stay away.”
Palcikas was boiling: “This is my country and my airspace, and no one will tell me what I will do. Hover near that group of vehicles, the one with the flag. Tell the other helicopters to stay by.”
“But sir, that appears to be the investigation team chiefs vehicle.”
“I said hover near it. About twenty meters upwind and ten meters overhead.” Palcikas unstrapped from the copilot’s seat and made his way aft. On his way to the cargo section of the small Soviet-made twin-engine Mil-8 assault helicopter, he passed his aide-de-camp and headquarters executive officer, Major Alexei Kolginov, a young, Russian-born infantry officer who had served with Palcikas for many years. “Follow me, Alexei.”
“Are we going to—?” And then Kolginov stopped and looked at Palcikas in surprise—his superior had just put a pair of heavy, rough leather gloves on his hands and had unstowed a four-centimeter-thick rope from its overhead storage bin. He checked that it was secure on its anchor hook on the ceiling of the helicopter’s cabin. “Sir, what are you—?”
“Just follow me.” Palcikas checked his sidearm, a Soviet-made Makaroy TT-33 automatic, then slid open the portside entry door ‘and peered outside. Kolginov knew what Palcikas had in mind, and scrambled to put on his gloves and secure his AKSU submachine gun.
The three-star commander of all Byelorussian forces in the western part of his country, General Lieutenant Anton Osipovich Voshchanka, cursed aloud as the Lithuanian assault helicopter moved nearly overhead. It quickly drowned out all voices around him. He grabbed his service cap before it twisted away in the wind, raised his voice, and turned to his commander of detached forces in Lithuania and Kaliningrad, Colonel Oleg Paylovich Gurlo, and yelled, “Get that asshole’s tail number and find out who the pilot is! I want him brought before me in thirty minutes!”
The Colonel had been in command of all Byelorussian armor and infantry units in Lithuania for many months. The loss of the attack helicopter the night before, and the subsequent appearance of his commanding general at the crash site, was turning into a real nightmare for him. This irritation was going to ice it for him—he would be lucky to hold on to his position for another hour.
The Colonel looked aloft and squinted against the swirling dust. “It is a damned Lithuanian helicopter,” he said. “I will deal with—”
Suddenly a man leaped out the portside cargo door of the hovering helicopter. At first it looked like a suicide attempt, because the man virtually leaped headfirst. But the shock wore off quickly, and the Colonel recognized the maneuver—a man doing an Australian rappel, the fastest assault rappel known. In only two seconds the man reached the ground, pulling himself upright three meters before his face smashed into the earth. He was followed shortly thereafter by another man, accomplishing a more conventional feetfirst rappel from the same rope a few moments later.
Soldiers accompanying the two Byelorussian officers unslung their weapons and held them at the ready, but the first rappeller ignored them all as he strode right up to General Voshchanka. “What in hell do you mean by ordering me away from this area?” the Lithuanian officer yelled after waving the helicopter that he and the second man had dropped in safely. The chopper veered away. “I demand to know what in hell is going on here.”
Voshchanka’s colonel recognized the man as none other than Palcikas himself, commander of Lithuania’s puny self-defense force.
“Who are you?” General Voshchanka demanded. “What is the meaning of this? Colonel Gurlo, arrest this man.
The Colonel knew he was not authorized to touch Palcikas—it would be an act of war for a foreign officer to touch a general on his own soil—but he motioned for two security officers to move closer. They immediately surrounded Palcikas but did not touch him. In Russian, the Colonel said, “General Voshchanka, may I present General Dominikas Palcikas, commander of the Self-Defense Forces of the Lithuanian Republic. General Palcikas, I present General Lieutenant Voshchanka, commander, Western Corps Armies, Republic of Belarus, and commander of security forces of the Baltic states for the Commonwealth of Independent States.”
Neither man saluted the other.
Palcikas’ face remained dark as he removed his thick rappelling gloves. But Voshchanka said, “Palcikas! We finally meet. I’ve heard a lot about you. That was quite a stunt for an old war horse.”
“I’d be happy to teach it to you, General,” Palcikas said in very good, well-disciplined Russian, “but it is not a maneuver for the faint of heart … or those with big bellies and soft hands.”
Voshchanka, a rather short, stocky man who had never even been inside an assault helicopter, let alone jumped from one, calmly smiled away the offhanded remark.
Palcikas, eyes dead-on Voshchanka, said, “General, you will explain to me why your troops have destroyed this farm, and why your unit has been ordering my aviation and ground units away from this area.”
“There was an attack last night, General Palcikas,” Voshchanka explained. “A Lithuanian deserter from a Commonwealth unit stationed in Vilnius was being pursued by a patrol helicopter when suddenly the helicopter pilot reported that he was under attack by an unknown aircraft. Seconds later he was shot down by a heat-seeking missile of Western design. The Lithuanian traitor has vanished. We are investigating.”
Palcikas’ eyes flared at “Lithuanian traitor,” which pleased Voshchanka. Palcikas said, “I sympathize with the loss of your flyers and your aircraft, General Voshchanka, but look at what your men are doing to this farmer’s land—you are causing thousands of liths’ worth of damage. The forests you’ve decimated can’t be replaced for decades. And you’re in violation of the treaty of security and cooperation by bringing your troops here. You will assemble them and move out immediately.”
“We were … concerned about destruction of evidence, General,” Voshchanka said lamely, not acknowledging Palcikas’ orders. “Having untrained, undisciplined farm boys roving around where they are not supposed to will hinder our investigation.”
“My men or these farmers could not possibly destroy more evidence than your men have done so far,” Palcikas said.
Voshchanka knew that was true. He had obtained all the evidence he needed after the first few minutes on the crash scene. “I’ll issue orders to my men to be more careful, and I will personally see to it that these farmers are reimbursed for the damage.”
“Very well, General,” Palcikas acknowledged. He stepped toward a plywood table covered with white canvas, where several pieces of a missile were being reassembled. The lower section of a one-and-a-half-meter-long missile, blackened and twisted, rested on the cloth, with several guidance fins still intact. “I see you’ve already collected quite a bit of evidence,” he said. “A Stinger missile?”
“Very observant, General,” said Voshchanka.
“Distinctive shape of the tail fins, distinctive blast pattern of the warhead section—I saw many like it in Afghanistan after they shot down our attack helicopters.” He took a closer look, then added, “These tail fins are Somewhat larger, however, and there appears to be an attachment point for an extra set of fins in the forward section, in addition to the normal Set of retractable nose fins. An AIM-92C air-launched Stinger missile, Perhaps?”
“Excellent,” Voshchanka said. “And the origin of the missile?”
“Difficult to say, General Voshchanka. Many countries now fly the AIM-92C,” Palcikas said. “We can narrow it down to six or seven European countries outside NATO. And they are readily available on the black market, I should think. They are license-built in Belgium, and their plant security is reputed to be poor.”
