The Bleiberg Project (Consortium Thriller)

by David Khara

  Nodding heads confirmed the message had been understood. Everything was going as planned, and the mission was proving less complicated than he had anticipated. The herd of sheep hardly had much choice.

  Andrei began calling out names from his list. Scientists and engineers filed past in an almost cordial atmosphere. Andrei was thankful for the generosity of Stalin and his henchmen. Forcing these men to work under hard conditions would result in the loss of their expertise. Or send them into the open arms of the Western powers.

  Gradually, the trucks parked a hundred yards away were filled until only one recruit remained, a chemist-geneticist about whom Andrei had virtually no information besides his glittering university career.

  “Bleiberg, Viktor.” The elegant young man strode forward.

  “You studied with Professor Hahn. Very impressive. Radiation research—a sensitive subject. We will offer you the possibility to continue your work.” They began to walk toward the trucks.

  “I don’t think so,” Bleiberg replied without so much as a glance at Andrei.

  “You’d rather face trial?” the Russian asked in a barely veiled threat.

  “No. You see, I’m no longer at the experimentation stage, and other people require my services.”

  They paused. Their eyes locked as they stared each other down. “You are in our hands. Who will come for you now?”

  Bleiberg cracked an evil grin and jutted his chin toward the convoy. “They will.”

  The commissar glanced around and felt sick. Corpses were sprawled around the cars and trucks. His escort lay in pools of blood. A dozen hooded men dressed in black from head to foot had guns trained on Andrei’s herd. Not the slightest sound had accompanied the massacre.

  Andrei reached for his holster, but before he could draw, he felt the cold steel of a gun barrel nudging the side of his head. Bleiberg grinned at him. The scientist leaned closer and adjusted the commissar’s uniform.

  “I wish I could say that fortune played a mean trick on you. Alas, we cannot take fate into consideration. Allow me to salute the pertinence of the list you drew up despite the Americans beating you Soviets to the draw. They were quicker and smarter than you. But thanks to your expert analysis, Stalin was about to get his dirty hands on some eminent scholars, engineers and technicians.”

  Shaken to his bones, the Russian stammered, “You knew of the operation? You’re an American agent?”

  Bleiberg pressed his lips to the Russian’s ear. “I’m a member of an international organization for which borders, flags and patriotism have no meaning. When your list was communicated to us, I was struck by the intelligence of your selection. Excellent military choices and superb industrial vision.”

  “I suppose you’re going to eliminate me now?”

  “Eliminate you? You couldn’t be more wrong, Kourilyenko. I am going to complete your mission.”

  Petrified since the start of their conversation, Andrei now looked on the verge of collapse. “I beg your pardon?”

  Viktor Bleiberg grasped the dumbstruck commissar’s right hand. “My dear commissar, I came here to recruit you.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Zaventem, Belgium, Saturday.

  The address scrawled on the map was on a narrow street lined with shops in the center of town. Intrigued, Eytan parked outside a pizzeria with a marquee in the colors of the Italian flag. At nearly four in the morning, downtown Zaventem was dead. Except for a couple of cars, there wasn’t a soul to be seen. The streetlights seemed superfluous in this small, ghostly town. Stuck between the Ring, the freeway that connected Brussels to its outskirts, and the international airport, Zaventem was a charmless commuter town.

  Jet lag and physical and nervous exhaustion had caught up with Jeremy. He’d been fast asleep for a good two hours. A big nudge from Eytan jerked him out of his slumber. Jackie was accorded a slightly less brutal awakening. Barely a minute later, the three of them were walking cautiously down the sidewalk, alert to the slightest movement. An ambush on a narrow street like this would be infinitely less manageable than the attack at the rest stop. The two agents stayed on either side of Jeremy. A car turned into the street. Eytan grabbed the trader’s shoulder and dragged him into an alcove that housed an ATM. Jackie ducked behind a parked car, one hand on her revolver.

  The Kidon agent’s relaxed approach was history. Eytan sensed they were closing in on the truth, and nothing could be left to chance until the whole sinister business was over. The small red Toyota turned left at the first intersection. False alarm. They kept walking.

  Outside No. 22, they stopped and exchanged incredulous looks when they saw the bookstore’s highly evocative name, Deep Zone. In the windows, posters for manga showed futuristic heroines with alluring, if slightly exaggerated curves. Comic books and graphic novels formed a patchwork of colors, shapes and unlikely titles. The motto on the window proclaimed the store’s ethos: The Temple of the Imagination. Which may have explained the presence of old Dungeons and Dragons game boxes. A curtain blocked off the inside of the store. Eytan checked the address on the map three times, backed into the road to confirm the number and glanced around until he found a sign with the street name on it. Clearly, he found it hard to accept that this paradise for overgrown teenagers could play a decisive role in the success of their mission.

  Jeremy, on the other hand, was psyched, pointing to various role-playing games. Collector’s editions from the nineteen eighties, he claimed, while inflicting on Jackie the complete history of a game he had been addicted to as a kid. Bemused, she nodded politely, silently praying that Eytan would quickly decide their next step.

  “We’re going in,” Eytan said, leaning over the lock on the door. Jeremy almost squealed with excitement. Jackie thanked heaven for the respite from his geekish gushing. Fifteen seconds later, the lock’s rudimentary mechanism yielded to the attack of a credit card in the skilled hands of the Israeli agent. He entered, peered at the frame and followed the wires to the switchbox above the door. The others didn’t have to wait long for his expert conclusion. The so-called alarm had given up the ghost long ago. But it didn’t seem likely that anybody would want to steal this stuff, anyway. The cash register, meanwhile, probably never held more than loose change.

  With a sharp whistle, Eytan signaled Jeremy and Jackie to enter. Jackie stopped next to Eytan and imitated his hands-on-hips pose, staring at the narrow shop that stretched back maybe twenty yards. Huge shelves covered the walls. They were packed with an array of novels, comic books and figurines, from Star Wars to Lord of the Rings. Thousands of books. A thousand square feet maybe and as many documents as Mossad’s complete archives.

  “OK, we don’t know what we’re looking for and have, at a conservative estimate, a million pages to go through. Seven hours on the road to wind up here.”

  “Eytan, maybe we should see if there’s a hiding place. That door must lead to the storeroom. C’mon, let’s get busy. Jeremy, what are you doing?”

  Hopping with glee, the trader waved a book at them. “This is an amazing place. I love it! Look, they even have a first edition of the Choose Your Own Adventure series. All this must be worth a fortune. I haven’t seen stuff like this since I was a kid. It’s wild!”

  Eytan leaned toward Jackie and muttered, “Do you mind if I punch him?”

  She frowned and clenched her fists. “Do you want me to hold him for you?”

  An hour and one stern lecture for Jeremy later, they were all hard at work in what Eytan now called the Temple of the Imbeciles. While the two secret agents looked for a hiding place, Jeremy sat behind a counter, chewing on a pen and staring at the sheet of paper on which he had copied the numbers to the code on the back of the photo in the safe-deposit box. Crumpled pieces of paper were piling up next to the cash register. So far, all his columns, tables and grids had gotten him nowhere.

  The meager light from the streetlights outside wasn’t helping. Another fifteen minutes had passed when Jeremy shouted to the others, “Hey, smart-asse
s, stop everything. I’ve got it! My old man was so warped!”

  “Or just paranoid, like anybody else who uses codes,” Jackie replied. Exasperated by the time they had wasted, Eytan avoided making any caustic remarks. This was no time for jokes. Jeremy brandished a page full of figures and letters.

  “Three first names. Jeremy, six letters. Daniel J., seven letters. Ann, three letters. And three lines with a series of numbers on them. After racking my brain, I used the keys provided by the names to decipher the strings of numbers and the four letters. In other words, six for the first line, seven for the second and three for the last. So with the Jeremy key, A, the first letter of the alphabet becomes seven, one plus six. Easy. Working from there, everything falls into place.”

  Eytan and Jackie stared at the trader with a whole new expression. This boy’s mind was clearly made to do math. “So, what are we looking for?” asked the petite blonde.

  “La Chevauchée des Justes, Editions des Noirs Secrets, 1965.”

  “No kidding. We could have kept looking forever,” Jackie muttered as she began to examine the spines of a row of books, looking for the title Jeremy had mentioned.

  Eytan heaved a sigh of relief and pulled three copies of the novel from the highest shelf at the back of the store. No member of the public, except a giant or a guy with a ladder, could have gotten anywhere near the book. “Here it is. Three copies. Written by a guy named Thomel Gevoust. Never heard of him.”

  The yellow-tinged pages testified to the books’ long shelf life. By opening each one to the last page, they soon found the edition they were looking for. They examined it from all sides, in vain. Eytan flicked through it, looking for another clue. In the end, he gave up, handed the book to Jeremy and leaned against a shelf, rubbing his neck. “We’ll have to read the whole damn thing to find anything in there. Assuming there’s something to find.”

  “You don’t like to read, or you can’t?” Jeremy teased, turning the pages.

  “You’re some comedian!” Eytan scowled, irritated.

  “That’s right,” replied Jeremy, eyes riveted on the book. “But above all, I’m our resident code breaker, and I’m going to save us a whole stack of time again.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Because just by reading the chapter headings, I can see that from page one-twenty, what’s printed in the book are my father’s notes.”

  CHAPTER 32

  September 8, 1985. A routine mission that turns into a fiasco isn’t rare. But why reward the commanding officer of the mission instead of reprimanding him? The top brass have promoted me to lieutenant general and put me in charge of a department overseeing aircraft turnaround. Basically, I’ve been booted upstairs. Ever since, I can’t stop wondering about what happened that day…

  Opportunities to fly fighter planes were increasingly rare as my career progressed. But stars on your uniform are no replacement for the thrill of flying a mission. Quite the opposite.

  So when the higher-ups asked me to pick three seasoned pilots for a test mission, I couldn’t resist the temptation to put my name on the list. The F-16 was the jewel in the Air Force crown. For the occasion, it would be equipped with a revolutionary aiming system. Take-off would be from Fort Lauderdale…

  After months of deadly dull bureaucratic routine and office politics, I grabbed the opportunity. Besides, being back in the frat house atmosphere of crews that couldn’t salute me without making vulgar wisecracks would do me a world of good. I joined the military because I love my country. I stayed in it because I enjoyed the camaraderie of the Air Force. A shared passion for aviation creates strong bonds among characters with equally strong personalities. More than once, the rules were bent in order to do a risky maneuver or to get a one-up on other pilots. The brass turned a blind eye as long as no damage was done. If damage was done, though…

  Even more than getting into the cockpit of the F-16, the flight plan got my juices flowing. After take-off, we’d be heading due south to take on an aircraft carrier and a group of mobile decoys before swinging back to base via the legendary Bermuda Triangle. That caused a lot of banter in the mess. Unstable weather conditions and, above all, pilot error could explain most of the so-called disappearances in the last fifty years. Even so, guys never failed to feel a twinge of excitement as they approached the zone.

  On the big day, incredibly bad luck struck the mission. Lieutenants Jake Sokolove and Brian Stabbleford, fellow pilots and friends, were prevented from suiting up. Their physicals revealed that they both had heart conditions and therefore couldn’t fly fighters. The medics even decided to keep them for observation. Military procedure, especially for top-secret Pentagon test flights, offers a host of options for the most unlikely scenarios, such as the last-minute grounding of two experienced pilots.

  The spare wheels, as they are known, were called in. Richard Hoffman and Christopher Durham walked onto the tarmac. Both had just arrived from Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert, which had a reputation for spawning hotheads and daredevils. My cordial welcome soon turned into a full-blown Q&A session. I had to be sure my crew was prepared. Alongside other qualities, this thoroughness was a foundation stone of my career.

  When I was satisfied, the pilots pulled on their helmets and climbed into their respective cockpits. I did likewise. The mission could begin. I applied full throttle but couldn’t shake off an inexplicable sense of foreboding.

  The operation went smoothly. I would even call it a total success, both in terms of the equipment we were testing and the crew’s coordination. As tradition demands, Durham and Hoffman radioed me with their congratulations, and we headed back.

  After a few minutes, we hit some clouds that didn’t seem to present any danger. Suddenly, the other two planes dropped off my radar. I had no visual contact, and my attempts to radio them on every possible frequency met with no response. Suddenly, amid all the static, I picked up snatches of a conversation.

  “They need to realize…BCI…lining its pockets.” And “we…in the sun.”

  Those were the last words I heard Durham and Hoffman utter. The board of inquiry took barely three days to conclude that mechanical failure had led to the disappearance of the two planes and their pilots. I couldn’t believe it. I knew my men. I didn’t mention the conversation I overheard after the loss of visual and radio contact. Why? I don’t know. Intuition, maybe. My transfer will be effective within one month. That gives me a little time to keep digging…

  The checklists provided by the airbase maintenance crews never reached the Internal Affairs Division at the Pentagon. Nobody seems to know what happened to these important documents relative to the inquiry. An astonishing procedural snafu…

  Sokolove’s and Stabbleford’s files are untraceable on every computer at the base and on the Air Force’s database. The people at pensions and benefits have no record of them. I called two friends at Vandenberg and Edwards. Nobody has ever heard of them…

  I start my new job in seven days, two weeks earlier than planned. My investigation has annoyed the brass. I have to be more discreet and think of every possibility. Mechanical failure is a pretext to shelve the case. Two complete unknowns with phony IDs and mission papers have stolen two fighter planes. I’m sure of it. I have to find out what BCI means. But before that, I must get my hands on the records of incidents over the Bermuda Triangle. Sunday—tomorrow. Jeremy’s sixth birthday. I’ll work in the evening…

  They’re all fake! The disappearances over the Bermuda Triangle aren’t at all mysterious. The legend is a smoke screen. I can’t tell for sure about the civilian flights and the ships, but as for the military, and more specifically the Air Force, the data has been carefully massaged. I’ve dug up a confidential memo that mentions about twenty incidents involving the Air Force. An earlier draft of the same memo mentions no fewer than thirty-five disappearances, mostly bombers. I’m on the right track…

  I’m Lieutenant General Corbin now. I should celebrate. I did with Ann and Jeremy yesterday
. Ann is a rock. She knows I’m preoccupied, but she never mentions it. I have to watch myself. I’m not sleeping, and I’m on a short fuse…

  Managing on-base personnel is my worst nightmare. I don’t have a second to myself and rarely get home before ten in the evening. The last two months have been crazy, but not crazy enough to make me lose sight of my objective. Gradually, I’m piecing together the list of mysteriously vanishing aircraft and tracking down assignment details. But I sense the number of people I can call my friends is getting smaller and smaller…

  An old friend called yesterday. We were at military academy together. Hearing from Bernard Dean was a real shot in the arm. He’s going to drop by this weekend. I’ll sound him out to see if he’s picked up on the case. It could be useful to know someone with the CIA. But I’m walking on eggshells. I have to watch my step…

  Ann and I hadn’t seen Dean for years, and yet it felt like it was only yesterday. His charisma keeps growing, whereas I’m visibly withering. Constant stress and lack of sleep are mostly to blame. I never play with Jeremy anymore. I see no resentment in his eyes, just huge sadness. When all this is behind us, we’ll get back to normal. Tonight, when Ann and Jeremy are asleep, Dean and I will have a little chat…

  Dean didn’t want to know. He advised me to be extremely careful for my sake and my family’s. Basically, he told me to drop the investigation. But he’ll be there if I get into big trouble. I sincerely hope it doesn’t come to that, but it’s not my style to let something like this go…