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 mazg!”
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 ci vilian, 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?”
“I can't, Annie,” was all Luger could say. “I... I’m sorry, but I can't.”
“Can’t... or won’t?”
He had no answer, no more words for her the rest of the evening. He was silent as he walked her to her apartment door, then as she kissed his cheek and squeezed his hand good-bye.
Metyor Aerospace Center IIG headquarters, Zhukovsky Air Base, Moscow, Russian Federation
The next morning
“Thank you for coming. Comrade Kazakov,” Pyotr Fursenko said, extending a hand in greeting. “Welcome to your facility.”
Pavel Kazakov had arrived at the Metyor Aerospace Center facility very late in the evening, after the swing shift had gone home and the factory and administration building maintenance workers had finished. He was accompanied by two aides and three bodyguards, all with long sealskin coats. When they set off the metal detectors built into the doorway in the rear of the administration facility, but kept right on walking alongside Kazakov, Fursenko knew they were heavily arme
d. Kazakov himself was dressed casually, as if he had left his home for a walk around his estate—he resembled many of the swing-shift engineers or middle managers at the plant, working late in the office.
“So, what is so important that you needed me to come at this hour, eenzhenyer?” Kazakov asked. His voice was stem, but in fact he was nervous with anticipation.
“I thought very long and hard about the things we spoke about when we met, Comrade,” Fursenko said. “Someone needs to punish the butchers who killed your father and my son in Prizren.”
Kazakov looked around the first hangar they entered. The huge forty-thousand-square-foot hangar, its ceiling over fifty feet high, was in immaculate condition, clean, well-lit, and freshly painted—and completely empty. The young financier was visibly disappointed, growing angry. “You, Doctor?” Kazakov asked. “With this? What do you intend to do? Invite them all here for a game of volleyball?”
“Crush them,” Fursenko said. “Destroy them, exactly the same way they destroyed our family members—swiftly, silently, in one night.”
“With what, Doctor? I see a bucket and a mop in that corner and a lamp on that security desk. Or do those things transform themselves into weapons at your command?”
“With this, Comrade,” Fursenko said proudly. He walked to the back of the hangar. The back wall was actually a separate hangar door, dividing the massive building into a semi-secure and secure area. He swiped a security card, entered a code into a keypad, and pressed a button to open the second set of hangar doors.
What was inside made Pavel Kazakov gasp in surprise.
In truth, it was actually hard to see, because the aircraft was so thin. Its wing span was over one hundred and forty feet, but its fuselage and wings were so thin that it appeared to be floating in midair. The wings actually swept forward—the wingtips were in line with the very nose of the aircraft. The wings swept back gracefully to a broad, flat tail, where the engine exhausts for the four afterburning jet engines were flat and razor-thin, like the rest of the aircraft. The aircraft stood tall on long, seemingly fragile tricycle landing gear. There were no vertical control surfaces—the tail area swept to a point and simply ended, with no visible flight control surfaces whatsoever.
“What.. . is ... this thing?” Kazakov breathed.
“We call it Tyenee—‘Shadow,’ ” Fursenko said proudly. “It was officially the Fisikous-179 stealth bomber that we built here at Metyor from plans, jigs, and molds we recovered before Fisikous was closed. Over the years we added many different enhancements to it to try to modernize it.”
“ ‘Modernize it’?” Kazakov asked incredulously. “You don’t call this ‘modern’?”
“This aircraft is almost twenty years old, Comrade,” Fursenko said. “It was one of my first designs. But back then, I simply did not have enough technical knowledge about stealth design versus aerodynamic requirements—I couldn’t make it fly and be stealthy at the same time. I worked on it for almost ten years. Then Ivan Ozerov came along and made it fly in six months.”
Kazakov stepped closer to the aircraft and examined it closely. “Where are the flight control surfaces?” he asked. “Don’t airplanes need things on the wings to make them turn?”
“Not this aircraft,” Fursenko explained. “It uses microhydraulic actuators all over its surface to make tiny, imperceptible changes to the airflow across the fuselage, which create or reduce lift and drag wherever it’s needed for whatever maneuver it is commanded to perform. We found we didn’t need to hang spoilers or flaps or rudders into the slipstream to make it turn, climb, or fly in coordinated flight—all we needed to do was slightly alter the shape of a portion of the fuselage. The result: no need for any flight control surfaces in normal flight. That increases its stealthiness a hundredfold.”
Pavel continued his walkaround of the incredible aircraft, eventually coming to the bomb bay. There were two very small bomb bays—they looked big enough for only a few large weapons. “These seem very small.”
“Tyenee was just a technology demonstrator aircraft, so it was never really designed to have weapons bays at all—the bays were used for instrumentation, cameras, and telemetry equipment,” Fursenko said. “But we eventually turned them back into weapons bays. They are large enough for just four two-thousand-pound-class weapons on each side, about sixteen thousand pounds total. There are external hardpoints under the wings for standoff weapons as well, which would be used before the aircraft got within enemy radar range. Tyenee also carries defensive weapons, built into the wing leading edges itself to reduce radar cross-section: four R-60MK heat-seeking air-to-air missiles, specifically designed for this aircraft.” Kazakov looked, but he could not see the missile muzzles—they were that well-concealed.
They climbed a ladder up the side of the nose to the crew compartment. Despite the size of the aircraft, there were only two tandem ejection seats inside, and it was extremely cramped. Power had already been applied, and the thick bubble canopy had been slid back to its retracted position. The main flight, navigation, and aircraft systems readouts were on three large flat-panel monitors on the forward instrument panel, with a few tape-style analog gauges on each side. Kazakov immediately sat in the pilot’s seat in front.
Fursenko knelt beside him on the canopy sill, explaining the various displays and controls. “The aircraft is electronically controlled by a side-stick controller on the right, with a single throttle control on the left instrument panel,” Fursenko said. “Those four switches below it act as emergency backup throttles.”
“It seems as if there are no controls to this plane,” Kazakov commented. “No switches, no buttons?”
“Most all commands are entered either by voice, by eyepointing devices in the flight helmets where you choose items on the monitors, or by touching the monitors,” Fursenko explained. “Most normal flight conditions are preprogrammed into the computer—the initial flight plan, all the targets, all the weapon ballistics. The pilot just has to follow the computer’s directions, or simply let the autopilot fly the flight plan.
“The defensive and offensive systems are mostly automatic,” he went on. “The aircraft will fly itself to the target, open the bomb doors, and release the correct weapon automatically. The bombardier in back normally uses satellite navigation, with inertial navigation as a backup, all controlled by computer In the target area, he can use laser designators or imaging infrared sensors to locate the target and guide his weapons. The defensive weapons can be manually or computer-controlled. The bombardier also has electronic flight controls in the rear, although the aircraft does not require two pilots to operate successfully.”
“This aircraft is amazing!” Kazakov exclaimed. “Simply amazing! I have never seen anything like it before in my life!” “The technology we use is at least ten years behind the West,” Fursenko said. “But it has been well tested and is solid, robust equipment, easy to maintain and very reliable. We are developing standoff attack and cruise missile technology that we hope someday will make Tyenee a most deadly weapon system.”
“When can I fly it?” Kazakov asked.
“Tomorrow. First thing tomorrow. Get me your best test pilot and a flight suit. I want to fly it as soon as possible. When can that be?”
“Never,” Fursenko said in a grave voice.
“Never? What in hell do you mean?”
“This aircraft has never and will never be cleared for flight,” Fursenko explained solemnly. “First, it is banned by international treaty. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty limits the number and specifications of nuclear weapon delivery systems that can be flown, and Tyenee is not on the list. Second, it was never intended to be flown—it was a test article only, to be used for electromagnetic lobal propagation studies, stress and fatigue testing, weapon mating, wind tunnel testing, and computer-aided manufacturing techniques.”
“But it can fly? You have flown it before?”
“We have made a few flight tests....” Fursenko said.
“
Make it flyable,” Kazakov said. “Do whatever you need to do, but make it flyable.”
“We don't have the funding to—”
“You do now,” Kazakov interjected. “Whatever you need, you’ll have. And the government need not know where you got the money.”
Fursenko smiled—it was precisely what he’d hoped Kazakov would do. “Very well, sir,” he said. “With funding for my engineers and builders, I can have Tyenee flying in six months. We can—”
“What about weapons?” Kazakov asked. “Do you have weapons we can try on it?”
“We only have test shapes, weighted and with the exact ballistics of live weapons, but with—”
“I want real weapons on board this aircraft when it flies,” Pavel ordered, as excited as a kid with a new model plane. “Offensive and defensive weapons both, fully functional. It can be Western or Russian weapons, I don’t care. You’ll get the money for whatever you can procure. Cash. I want trained crews, support crews, maintenance personnel, planners, intelligence officers—I want this aircraft operational. The sooner, the better.”
“I was praying you’d want that, too,” Fursenko exclaimed proudly. He turned to the mafioso in the left seat of his creation and put a hand on his shoulder. “Comrade Kazakov, 1 have hoped this day would come. I have seen this aircraft stolen, nearly destroyed, nearly scrapped, and all but forgotten in the collapse of our country. I knew we had one of the world’s ultimate weapons here. But all it has done in the past eight years is gather dust.”
“No longer,” Kazakov said. “I have plans for this monster. I have plans to make most of eastern Europe bow to the power of the Russian empire once again.”
With myself at its head, he thought to himself. With no one but myself at the top.
Kazakov spent several hours at the facility with Fursenko. While they spoke, Kazakov was on the phone to his headquarters, requesting background information on key personnel involved in the Tyenee project. If they passed a cursory background examination—bank accounts, address, family, time of employment, criminal record, and Party affiliations—Kazakov arranged to speak with them personally. He was impressed with the level of excitement and energy in each member of the project. It all made sense to Kazakov: the only persons who would still be working at Metyor would be persons committed to the company, like Pyotr Fursenko, since other firms in Europe were certainly busier and the future looked brighter than here.
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