“Control, Bravo’s down! Stebut’s down!” Doleckis shouted on the command-post frequency. “Position, approximately forty-two kilometers northeast of Lida Naval, north of the Nemas, almost on the border. Bravo was hit by a missile fired from the American tilt-rotor.” He paused, momentarily unsure what e should do next — but when he saw Stebut’s Sukhoi-17 disappear into the trees a second later and explode in an oily ball of smoke, he knew what he was going to do. “Seven-one-one is engaging.” If his wing commander said something over the radio in reply, Doleckis did not hear it.
“I can’t believe it,” General John Ormack said from the pilot’s seat of the Fisikous-170 stealth bomber. “I think I can fly this thing with my eyes closed.” Hal Briggs, Patrick McLanahan, and Dave Luger were with him in the cockpit of the massive, exotic aircraft, marveling over the controls and equipment. “It looks like an exact copy of the B-52’s cockpit. Everything’s in place — everything!”
He was right. The pilot’s left-hand crew station was an exact duplicate of a B-52’s pilot’s station, with the addition of one more cathode ray tube in the center of the instrument panel. The control wheel, throttle quadrant, arrangement of instruments, and even the material and shape of the aluminum-and-vinyl glare shield were all precisely the same as the B-52’s at the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center that Ormack and McLanahan worked with every day. But the more Ormack talked, the quieter Luger had become.
Patrick, sitting in the copilot/bombardier’s right-side seat, noticed Luger’s slumped shoulders and detached expression. “Dave, what’s wrong? This thing is incredible! It’s still flyable, isn’t it?”
Luger raised his eyes long enough to scan the instrument panel. “Hit the battery switch and main bus switches,” he said to McLanahan. The switches were on the copilot’s side instrument panel, exactly like on a Boeing B-52.
When McLanahan flipped the two switches, the cockpit lights and battery-powered gauges came alive.
Luger scanned the forward instrument panel. “It needs fuel… looks like no weapons aboard… might be a few access doors open in the back. Otherwise, yes, it’s flyable.” He sat back down in the seat and stared at a spot on the floor, remaining completely emotionless.
“Amazing.” Ormack sighed. “My God, I feel like double-oh-seven. Imagine… sitting in a Soviet bomber in a Soviet research lab. Man, I think I know how successful spies feel when they go back and see what their mission accomplished.”
Luger looked at Ormack as if the General had slapped him, then turned away before Ormack looked toward him.
When Ormack saw Luger’s ashen face he realized what he had been saying. “Hey, Dave, I didn’t mean—”
McLanahan finally realized what was eating his friend. “Dave, forget it, man. You were brainwashed. We saw what those bastards did to you, that chamber of horrors they hooked you up in. There was nothing you could have done—”
“I didn’t resist hard enough,” Luger said bitterly. “I could have tried harder. They got to me and I talked — almost from the first fucking day.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it,” Briggs said. “You were alone, and injured, and confused. You were ripe for the pickin’. There was no way you could have resisted.”
“Yes, there was,” Luger insisted. “I caved in. I thought of nothing, nobody but myself. I betrayed everything I believe in, everything.”
“Dave, that’s not true—” McLanahan said.
“Look at this thing! Luger snapped, sweeping a hand across the cockpit. “I re-created the pilot’s and radar nay’s crew station from memory, in precise detail. I was obsessed with it. This isn’t the work of a tortured POW, Patrick, this is the work of a traitor. If I had tried harder to resist, if I had just let them kill me, I never would have done so much work for them.”
“Dave, you know as well as I do that it’s impossible to resist them for any period of time — especially the kind of torture they were using,” Ormack said. “You can resist for a few days or even a few weeks, but if they control your environment and your movements, eventually they’ll control your mind. You can’t resist. Eventually everyone talks, or they go crazy, or they die. You’re not a traitor — you’re a hero. You saved our lives and quite possibly helped fend off World War Three. So you helped build this thing? Well, now you can help us take it away from them.”
“And maybe even use it to fight off the Byelorussian invasion if we can get some weapons loaded on it,” McLanahan said. He searched out the cockpit windows. “Where did our Lithuanian helpers go? They were supposed to be wheeling some of those cluster-bomb missiles over here.”
“I’ll go find out,” Briggs said. “Sittin’ in this thing is makin’ me nervous anyway, especially when you start talkin’ about bombin’ stuff.” Briggs climbed down the short entry ladder and disappeared out the front end of the hangar. He returned a few minutes later with General Palcikas and an interpreter following close behind. Briggs donned a pair of crew-chief headphones connected by an interphone cord to the cockpit: “Bad news, boys,” Biggs said. “It looks like the Lithuanians are leavin’.”
“What?”
“Several long convoys of vehicles are heading out. Here’s the General.”
Palcikas put on the headphones, shrugging off his interpreter, and the crew in the cockpit had to turn down the volume to guard against Palcikas’ booming voice: “Hey, you spies, you look good in strange Soviet plane. Good you up there. We go now. Over.”
“This is General Ormack. Where are you going, General?”
“We going to meet General-Leytenant Voshchanka and Home Brigade in Kobrin town — or in hell,” Palcikas said. “He has crossed border with forty thousand troops and many tanks. He is moving very rapidly… may take Vilnius before my Iron Wolf get position. More may come from Kaliningrad and Chernyakhovsk. Not good stay in Fisikous. Over.”
“Can you spare some English- and Russian-speaking men for us? We’d like to load the plane and—”
“No. Very sorry, General,” Palcikas replied. “Not possible. We leave demolition team only to destroy Fisikous if Byelorussian troops advance. No soldiers stay. Maybe you go to embassy now. We go now. Over. Bye-bye.” Palcikas handed the headset over to Briggs, saluted the stealth bomber’s cockpit, and trotted off.
“Well, it looks like we load the plane ourselves,” Ormack said with resignation. “Dave, I’d like you to translate the refueling manual for Patrick first. Once we start pumping gas, Hal and I will see about loading weapons. Let’s go.”
Dave Luger was expending all his energy just climbing in and out of the aircraft and hobbling across the polished concrete floor of the hangar, and he had to rest several times as he explained the refueling process to Patrick. Finally McLanahan was unreeling the refueling lines from the pump bay and was pulling the hose across the hangar floor.
“Reminds me of when you did that in Anadyr, Patrick,” Dave said, sitting near the single-point refueling adapter on the left-front side of the Fi-170.