Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 09 (20 page)

 
          
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 armed.
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.