“Don’t crap out on me now, Wilbur,” the President said. “I trust your judgment — don’t let it be clouded by what you feel for Luger. Do you think he’s still alive?”
Curtis sighed. “I feel it’s a sixty-forty chance he’s still alive, sir. If what our informants and agents said is true, then Luger — who they call Ozerov — was one of the Soviets’ most important engineers. He advanced the Soviet state-of-the-art several years. His value is incalculable. They might try to save him, smuggle him out, something. If not — if the Soviets find out that we’re specifically going after Luger — then they may use him as a bargaining chip to effect their own escape.”
“I disagree, Wilbur,” the President said. “I think the chances are very good that they’d dispose of Luger to hide the fact that he was ever there. If it ever came out that the Russians inside Fisikous were hiding an American flyer for all these years, our invasion would be instantly justified and they’d be finished, shut down. If Luger is not found, we’ve committed an act of war by invading a Commonwealth research facility.”
“I understand that, sir,” Curtis said, “and I must agree with you. But there is one more thing to consider: We owe David Luger this effort. We must try to rescue him. World opinion be damned for once — we know what we’re doing is right.”
The hesitation was longer this time, Curtis observed.
“This parallel operation at Fisikous is different,” the President finally said. “What the Soviets have done to this Air Force flyer is terrible … monstrous … but”—he paused, weighing his words—”I won’t go to war with the Commonwealth to get one man out of there, Wilbur. The Commonwealth is on the verge of cracking apart, and the flying pieces can cripple the entire world. I’m not going to push them to the brink of all-out war, even over your Lieutenant Luger.”
He went on: “I understand that Secretary Preston authorized the’ use of the Spectre gunship to support the rescue operation. That’s fine. But the Marines get one shot at it. If they can’t get Luger on the first try, Wilbur, I don’t want heroics.”
“Mr. President, you know my view on David Luger.” Curtis sighed. “I think the opinions that the NSC staff presented are a bunch of bull. Luger is an American hero. The previous president gave Patrick McLanahan — the man who destroyed the Kavaznya laser site and brought the bomber home safely — the Air Force Cross for what he did on the Old Dog mission. He probably deserved the Medal of Honor. Now it’s time we — uh, you, sir — do something for the man that saved Patrick McLanahan.”
“I understand what you’re saying, and I do sympathize,” the President said. “But Lieutenant Luger is already a dead man — he’s been dead for years. I’m not going to pull punches or spare your feelings here, Wilbur. Luger is already dead. If the Soviets do him in for real, nothing will change. The problem for this administration is not preventing his death, but justifying his existence. Have you thought about what you’ll do if Luger is rescued?”
“Of course, sir …” Curtis replied, somewhat hesitantly, darting his eyes away for a moment.
The President nodded knowingly. “I thought so. You just can’t bring him back, can you? He’s got a grave, a headstone, the works, right? The other crew members of the Old Dog were explainable, accountable — but not Luger. Everyone thought he was dead, so you made up a cause of death — in a plane crash in Alaska — and doctored hundreds of documents, records, and pages of testimony to make it real, all in the attempt to keep the Old Dog mission secret. How do we explain his reappearance? Resurrection? Cloning?”
“We can sequester him until the incident is unclassified,” Curtis said. “The first automatic declassification review of the records is in only six years.”
“I know you can work the problem out, Wilbur,” the President said, and I’m not saying that I’d prefer the man were dead. What I am saying is this — Luger’s life is not worth the lives of dozens of Marines. I would give a lot to get Luger or any American serviceman who was captured by the enemy in the course of his duty — trade, prisoner swap, make a deal, even pay a ransom — but I won’t risk young lives for a man we gave up for dead years ago. I can ‘t. I’d see the faces of those dead Marines in my sleep. And when their wives and mothers ask me why I had to order their husbands and sons to die, what do I tell them?”
“Dave Luger’s life is worth something too, sir,” Curtis replied quietly.
“Yes, it is,” the President agreed, his patience beginning to wear thin, but knowing he was going to have to toss Curtis a bone after the successful embassy evacuation. “Okay, it’s worth a shot—one shot. The Marines get one try at getting Luger. If they withdraw without making contact, they will withdraw to the embassy and stay there. Period.”
Curtis merely nodded his head, signaling that he understood.
“Here they come!” General Palcikas’ radio operator shouted as the message was relayed to him by the Iron Wolf Brigade’s outer security units surrounding the periphery of the Fisikous compound. “Enemy aircraft inbound! All air-defense units, stand by to engage enemy aircraft!”
Four hundred rifles raised toward the bright morning “star,” the planet Venus, which could barely be seen though fast-moving clouds to the east. The sound of an approaching heavy helicopter grew louder and louder. Dominikas Palcikas plugged his left ear with his left index finger and squeezed the radio handset closer to his right ear. He could feel his breathing quicken in anticipation of what was about to appear.
When the sound grew almost intolerable, he ordered into the radio: “Stop your position! Rotate left ninety degrees, decrease altitude to twenty meters, turn on all exterior lights, and translate right until I order you to stop.”
Dust and debris curled up from the ground, and Palcikas could feel the power of the machines approaching him. They were big helicopters, gunships in every sense of the word. They had to be …
“Look! There they are!” Palcikas saw them then as the two war machines slid right toward the spot where he was hiding. The first thing he noticed was the size of the rotors — they were huge, at least eleven or twelve meters in diameter, slow-moving but so broad of chord that they stirred up a tornado of dirt despite their relatively slow speed.
“Hold position!” Palcikas ordered into the radio. The machines stopped and hovered just out of ground effect firmly, without wobbling or swaying, as steady as if set on an invisible shelf. They were like nothing any of them had ever seen. They looked like small cargo planes, like a cantilevered twin-tail Lockheed Hercules, Aeritalia G222, or Soviet Antonov-12 transports, but then there were those two big rotors mounted on the plane’s wingtips, swiveled upwards to act like a helicopter’s rotor. Palcikas saw the weapon pods on the wheel wells on each side, and the sensor dome under the nose with its mechanical eye staring right back at them. “All right, Major Dukitas, what the hell is it?”
“It’s a V-22 Osprey,” Dukitas, Palcikas’ intelligence officer, replied, wearing a broad smile as he watched the extraordinary spectacle of these two machines, as foreign as alien spacecraft, obeying Palcikas’ word. “Tilt — rotor design. Those nacelles can swivel downwards, turning those rotors into propellers.”
“An American aircraft?”
“Yes, sir. Used primarily by the American Marine Corps and Air Force as a covert-operations troop carrier. Twice as fast as a conventional helicopter, large payload, long range, but with vertical takeoff and land capability. Judging by its paint scheme, I would say those are American Marines.”