Carrier 13 - Brink of War

by Keith Douglass

  Not officially, of course. The party line was that none of it had ever happened. But there were more avenues of information than government agencies and press releases. I'd found some of them. In at least one instance, they'd found me, and the possibility that my own government, the one I'd faithfully served for so long in uniform, might have lied to me about my father cut deep. I didn't want to believe it of my own country.

  Tracking down the truth about POWs is like being on a ship. You want the real scoop on what's going down, the latest in information and data, you don't watch the skipper's announcement on closed-circuit TV. You might--just might, mind you, if you can get access--head for the deepest, darkest compartments in the intelligence spaces, the ones that they call SCIF--Specially Compartmented Information. This is the stuff you always hear called "burn before reading," so sensitive that the average fighter jock never even knows the capabilities exist. But even with all its esoteric magic, SCIF isn't the place for the real truth.

  No, every sailor knows where to get the gouge--MDI. Mess Deck Intelligence. Somehow the cooks and the galley slaves and the mess cooks knew the real truth about what's going on far before anyone else on the ship. MDI is the tightest, fastest, and most righteous information collection and dissemination network in existence. Don't ask me how it works--no one knows--but it does.

  Within the family-of-POWs network, there's something similar. It doesn't have a physical location like MDI does, but it's damned near as effective. The outer layer is all for show--the Internet web pages, the public posters and pamphlets and the letter writing campaigns, the copper bracelets we wear in remembrance of those that aren't coming back. That's just the tip of the network, just like the skipper's daily pep talk on the closed-circuit TV. Under neath that are the E-mails, the hand-delivered copies of documents and resources passed from family to family when electronic means are deemed too sensitive, the volumes and volumes of in-country contacts that these survivors have amassed over the decades since Vietnam.

  Discolored photos, shards of personal belongings, snatches of transcripts blurred by being photocopied and handled so many times, evidence--of what? Of men that were alive and weren't brought home, just like my father.

  I'd had some help on the first part of my search for my father in the form of in-country contacts. Now that the trail pointed to Russia, information was significantly harder to get, more ambiguous, and, in some cases, downright wrong. But it was there, flowing from the other survivors, the Navy Department, even from immigrants.

  During the Vietnam War, the air bases just outside Arkhangelsk had attracted the Central Intelligence Agency's attention. The activity around the base was inconsistent--aircraft parked on aprons, a cover story that claimed the base was an advance training facility, but a notable lack of routine takeoffs and landings. You expect a sort of cyclical activity at a training facility as classes graduate and new students arrive a spate of simple orientation and formation flights as student pilots become accustomed to new aircraft, followed by increasingly difficult training missions including ACM and bombing runs; then, a period of quiet, the time after a class graduates and the next one starts; then the whole cycle repeated over and over again.

  That didn't happen at Arkhangelsk. In fact, it had more transit flights--aircraft originating from somewhere outside our satellite coverage and vectoring in to the isolated base--than it did training flights. That worried the CIA enough to give this one particular base code-word sensitivity and scrutiny.

  They called it Hidden Archer, the name itself peculiarly appropriate for the facility. Over the next five years of painstaking observation and critical analysis, the CIA arrived at the conclusion that Hidden Archer had one primary function--to serve as a debriefing facility for captured aviators.

  In the early days of the Vietnam War, satellite technology wasn't what it is today. But by late 1970s, even after the war was officially over, we had satellite and surveillance capabilities that would have seemed like Buck Rogers science fiction to military men of just a few decades earlier.

  We could read license plates on cars from space, discern a man's face as he walked between buildings. In response to these technological developments, training for aircrews changed, and the SERE--Survival, Evasion, Rescue, Escape--schools emphasized continually looking up at the sky, every chance you got. There was no telling when a satellite or high-flying reconnaissance aircraft might be overhead, and exposing your face to the sky maximized your chances of being identified.

  At the time he was flying, my father knew something of how fast technology was coming along. He was an engineer by training, and from all accounts a pretty damned smart man. My uncle says I remind him of my father, his brother. I usually take it as a compliment, but there's something in me that protests at that. I've been shot down a couple of times, but I always made it out somehow. Out of the cockpit, out of the fire zone. That's the one difference I'm sure of between me and my father.

  But what my father knew about satellites added credibility to the odd, ragged photo that had turned up carefully sandwiched between two pieces of cardboard. It had come to my house, not the office, in a nondescript brown padded envelope. Address in neat, printed letters, no return address.

  Correct postage, and a postmark showing it was mailed from Washington, D.C.

  Not much to go on. I suppose I could have reported it to the FBI, had them dust it for fingerprints or DNA or some such, but I didn't. I looked at the grainy photo and saw my own face staring back at me. It was blurred, either a high-resolution camera shot enlarged past its tolerance or a shot taken while moving. But the similarity was unmistakable. Even with some of the features blurred, I could see the line of my jaw in it, the set of my head on my own shoulders. It wasn't me, but it was someone who looked a hell of a lot like an older me, a Tombstone that the forces of gravity and time had warped and wrinkled.

  I debated over it for a couple of days, then showed it to my mother.

  She recognized my father instantly.

  So, given that someone--or something--had taken a picture of my father much older than he'd been at the time he'd disappeared over the bridge, what were the odds that he was still alive? Minimal--both my mother and I knew that.

  The second bit of the puzzle was the one that bothered me the most. A clipping taken from what appeared to be a small, cheaply printed newspaper.

  The same man, noticeably older than he'd been in the first photo, smiling and waving at the camera.

  The date--seven months ago.

  This time, I did go the official route. Having three stars on my collar, plus the four that my uncle sports, gives us a fair amount of horsepower. Within a couple of hours, the intelligence organization at the Pentagon was able to identify the paper and produce a complete page, the one this clipping had been torn from, along with a translation of the article.

  The man in the picture was celebrating his recent marriage. His first, according to the Russian writer.

  Not according to my mother. Over the years, she'd found ways to live with losing Dad. On the surface, she sounded like she was convinced he'd died. She and Batman were alike in that way, although I think Batman's conviction went to his core. With Mom, it was just a way to survive. But I could tell from her involvement in the POW/MIA groups that she'd never really given up hope.

  The paper covered a small area around Nikolayev, another military air base to the south. While not as important as Hidden Archer and the Kola Peninsula during the Vietnam War, Nikolayev had had its own share of notoriety as a weapons test facility.

  I was going there. I wasn't certain how or when, but sometime during the next two weeks I was going to Nikolayev.

  "Lead, two." Skeeter's calm, professional voice broke into my thoughts. I'd been flying the aircraft by reflex, caught up in the anger and the possibility of hope, blinded by my emotions. Skeeter, in an unusually tactful maneuver for him, had simply brought my attention back to the present.

  "Lead," I acknowledged.

&
nbsp; "Starting pre-landing checklist."

  "Roger--we are, too."

  I could hear my RIO fumbling through his checklist. I flipped open the right section and began reading aloud.

  We made a beautiful, precision formation approach, with Skeeter slipping in to land just five seconds after I did. He maintained the precisely correct formation distance throughout the approach, touchdown, and taxi, one of the smoothest bits of formation flying I'd seen in a while. You don't do a lot of formation landings on an aircraft carrier, and maintaining proficiency is tough.

  A yellow follow-me truck met us at the end of the landing strip. I used my nose-wheel steering gear to fall in behind him. The turbofans were spooled down to a gentle thunder now, oddly reassuring in the notion that I could turn, power up, and be airborne again within moments if I wanted to.

  There was something surreal about taxiing down a Russian airfield.

  For those of us raised in the Cold War, the idea that someday we would be voluntarily landing some of our most advanced fighter aircraft inside Soviet territory would have been unthinkable just five years before. Five years--just a small portion of the time I'd spent in uniform, but longer than Skeeter's entire career to date. He'd joined the Navy after the Berlin Wall fell, after Desert Storm and Desert Shield, at a time when the most formative politicians of my career were just old bogeymen.

  No matter that Russia--and China, as well--continued to foment disorder and conflict in this brave new world we fought in. The official party line was that it was over. We'd won, and were now entitled to a well-deserved peace dividend.

  Then why did I end up with Migs shooting at me and my aircrews so often?

  I glanced back at Skeeter, who was now closing the distance between us. How would it be, to have grown up in his times? How much difference did it make in the way we saw the world--the Russians, in particular? I resolved to have a quiet word with him again about the need for a little respectable paranoia while we were on the ground in Arkhangelsk.

  It probably wasn't necessary. Commander "Lab Rat" Busby, the senior intelligence officer onboard Jefferson, had briefed us extensively on our visit. In particular, he'd pointed out that it was important for us to watch everything we could, make note of anything that seemed new or different from what we already knew about Russian aviation. He gave us two solid capabilities briefings, complete with quizzes, getting us up to speed on the very latest U.S. information on Russian systems and technologies so that we'd know what to look for.

  Like most nasty games, intelligence collection works both ways. The birds we were flying into Russia were specially configured, stripped of some of the very latest toys and technologies we didn't think they knew about yet. Most of the avionics were useless without the Zip drive cassette plugged into the instrument panel in front of me--Lab Rat made sure we understood that. We were to take our Zip cassettes with us everywhere we went, keeping them on our persons at all times. Without them, the Russians could learn nothing of use from the bare carcass of our airframes. And there were other telltales as well. The most sensitive avionics compartments were wired with small devices intended to keep anything but a charred black box from falling into their hands. Lab Rat assured me that the fires were too localized to do any permanent damage to the airframe, and that even if one were triggered, we'd be able to safely fly the aircraft out. I was not reassured.

  "What happens if we lose one of these super-secret Zip drives? Or damage it?" Skeeter had asked. An eminently sensible question, I'd thought.

  "Your Tomcats will still fly without them, if that's what you mean," Lab Rat had answered. "You'll lose most of your advanced decision aids as well as some resolution on your targeting packages, but that's about it.

  The techs on the COD will take some diagnostic software with them, a few replacement parts, but not replacement disks."

  "Can they make anything out of them without the Tomcat's gut?" I'd followed up.

  Lab Rat looked thoughtful. "Honestly, I don't know. The guys at NSA--National Security Agency--don't think so, but I wouldn't want to bet on it. It's supposed to require the same crypto load that's in your communications circuitry, but you know how that is. With computers they've pirated from the West, they might be able to get something out of the tapes. That's why there won't be any duplicates on the COD."

  "Sounds risky, putting us in over there," Skeeter said.

  Lab Rat nodded. "I think so, too. But evidently this is important to somebody with a hell of a lot more firepower than I have. So we do what we can to minimize the risks. Really, though, I don't think there'll be any problems. Not if you're careful with the Zips. The Russians need us for friends right now a lot more than we need them."

  And that was the truth. With a resurgent China prowling Russia's borders, massing and moving divisions of armored troops every couple of weeks for supposed routine exercises, Russia had good reason to want to be on good terms with the United States. We'd faced China down before, in the Spratly Islands and in other hot spots around the globe, something Russia couldn't do on her own right now.

  Finally, we reached the end of the apron and a yellow-shirted handler stepped out from the crowd to replace the follow-me truck. Confidently and with stunning precision, the yellow shirt began flashing the standard hand and arm signals used on the flight deck of a carrier to signal to us. "You believe this fellow?" Skeeter said, his amusement clear over our private coordination circuit. "Man, they been practicing or what?"

  "Get that out of your system before we shut down," I ordered.

  "They've put some effort into it and the last thing we need to do is start off by pissing them off laughing at their personnel."

  "Yes, sir, Admiral. I kind of figured that out, sir, and there ain't a trace of a smile showing on this young black man's face." Skeeter sometimes fell back into a sort of uneducated slang whenever I made the very dangerous mistake of underestimating him. This time, I figured I deserved it.

  "I'm talking to myself as much as you, Lieutenant. We're all on new ground here--you see something that looks like an opportunity to step on our dicks, I hope you'll be pointing it out real quick. Got that?" I said.

  "Yes, Admiral." This time, Skeeter's voice was back to normal. "You hear that, Gib? No dick stepping."

  "Kind of you to worry," Sheila answered angrily.

  I laughed in spite of myself. If the KGB or GRU or whatever weird collection of initials that was Russia's current intelligence agency was listening in, they were going to have fun figuring that one out. Skeeter's RIO was markedly short of the required equipment.

  The Russians have always done ceremonies well. Massive, forbidding shows of force imbued with the ancient dignity of a grim warrior society.

  Ahead of us, at the edge of the airfield, Army troops were massed in formation, almost a brigade's worth I estimated. Twenty tanks flanked the formation, each with its barrel elevated only slightly above the arc that would put a missile directly on our assigned parking spot. Officers and dignitaries were festooned in the drab olive-green-accented-with-red Army uniforms, the darker, more traditional blue-black of the Navy, and a few uniforms I couldn't recognize right off. No doubt they'd changed some since the days of the Soviet Union's breakup--at least in name.

  Many brass, as befitted the historic nature of this occasion. For just a moment, I wondered whether or not we'd made an error in not following suit and ferrying in an aircraft load of dignitaries of our own.

  Just for balance, if nothing else. How did the Russians see that lack? As a sign of disrespect, an American insult in the refusal to take these games seriously? Or would they take it as a sign of weakness, this deploying of two advanced fighter aircraft to Russia's own soil without the appropriate formalities and dignitaries?

  It all seemed too trivial, given what my real mission was. For a moment I felt the fury again, but I was no longer certain whether it was directed at the Russians for taking my father or at my own country for letting it happen. Two betrayals--my father's trust t
hat the U.S. would come and get him, and my own for believing what I'd been told for so many years.

  I taxied in, stopping neatly on the spot indicated by the technician.

  Skeeter pulled in behind, slightly aft and to my right just as he was in flight. I twisted around, trying to catch a glimpse of the COD, but it was still too far out.

  We ran through the postflight and preshutdown checklists quickly, not wanting to keep our hosts waiting. Finally, our engines spooled down, and I popped my canopy. I could see the COD now, barely visible on the horizon.

  The rush of air was bitterly cold, condensing immediately into clouds as I breathed out. It bit hard into my exposed skin, and I jammed the fingers of my gloves down a bit more securely. The icy air found a thin exposed strip of skin between the glove and the sleeve of my flight suit, burrowed into it, and tried to race up my arm.

  "Let's get the hell out of here, Boss," Gator said. "Colder than a-"

  I cut him off with a gesture. "Remember, we're in Russia now.

  Anything you say can and will be used against you. And not in a court of law either, buddy. Quiet, now--here they come."

  A rickety ladder was pushed forward to our Tomcat. I motioned it away after I noted that the edges were not coated with any padding to prevent it from scraping the fuselage. The technicians paused, uncertain, and I beat them to the punch by popping out the footholds on the Tomcat, the boarding ladder, and clambering down myself. I jumped lightly off the last step, flexed my knees as I hit, and felt the shock of the cold concrete start to seep into my boots. My RIO hit the deck a few seconds after me.

  There were three officers approaching me, flanked by what looked to be a translator. I recognized the two in front from the intelligence briefings Field Marshal Gorklov and Admiral Ilanovich. I snapped up a formal, correct salute, holding it until they'd returned it. Then I held out my hand. "Vice Admiral Magruder, General. An impressive reception--thank you."