And the engines were even now beginning to spool up. In seconds the plane would lurch forward and then it would lift into the sky and disappear.
And Tracie would be left behind, despite being so close to the aircraft it almost seemed she could reach out and touch it.
She didn’t hesitate. She slammed the accelerator to the floor, while the Lada was still on the dirt/rocks/snow of the embankment. The four wheels spun crazily and the rugged tires kicked the dirt and the rocks and the snow up from under the vehicle, and after a moment the tires gained traction and the vehicle shot onto the frozen surface of the lake in a spray of powdery snow that splashed thirty feet in all directions.
The C-130 began moving as the Lada approached, inching forward at first but quickly gaining speed, the powerful propellers blasting the loose snow away, turning the moderate snowfall into a raging blizzard behind the aircraft. Tracie kept her foot to the floor and angled the truck toward the plane.
Steering was almost nonexistent now that she’d left the embankment behind, but so far it looked like her course was taking her toward—and in front of—the plane. It was what she needed if she stood any chance of getting the truck to a point where she would become visible inside the flight deck, to let the crew know she was here.
The lake was relatively small, and they would have to spot her soon, or else the big C-130 would reach the point of no return: there wouldn’t be enough room remaining to stop the aircraft before it simply slid off the lake and into the trees at the far end. Once they reached that point, the crew would have no choice but to lift off even if they saw her.
The Lada’s engine screamed, but soon the sound was drowned out by the heavy thrumming of the C-130’s four massive props as the plane and the truck approached on a near-collision course. The plane’s speed was increasing rapidly, and while Tracie’s snap judgment had been that she could outrun the aircraft to the middle of the lake, she now began to question her assessment.
Part of her feared that not only would she be unable to get in front of the plane, the little Lada and the massive C-130 would collide before the crew could react.
Everyone would die.
But it was too late to stop.
Too late to change direction.
She was committed.
She kept going.
43
February 3, 1988
2:45 p.m.
South of Mezhgorye, Bashkir
Extraction point
The SUV’s tires were spinning madly and losing their already-minimal traction when the vehicle skidded across the C-130’s path.
Tracie held her breath and tried to milk every last bit of speed she could out of the Lada, knowing anything less would guarantee a collision. The plane’s engines roared, throaty and angry, sounding like they were about to cut through the sheet metal and rip Tracie to shreds.
She risked a glance into the rear view mirror and gasped. The gigantic fuselage was all she could see, and it was barreling ever closer.
And then she was clear of the airplane’s path. It rocketed past, missing the rear of the vehicle by no more than ten feet.
And it was slowing!
The crew had obviously seen her—how could they not?—and instead of climbing into the sky they were desperately trying to stop the aircraft before they ran out of room. The pilot engaged the reverse thrust and the props churned the thin mountain air relentlessly, dragging the aircraft to a stop in an absurdly short distance.
The snow that had been blown behind the aircraft now choked the air in front of it and for a moment the C-130 disappeared entirely, lost in a screen of white. Seconds later it reappeared, taxiing out of the blowing snow as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.
It moved across the lake and eased to a stop in the exact location Tracie had seen it when she blasted out of the forest, engines now idling quietly. She shifted into reverse and backtracked across the lake, not wanting to take the time to try to steer the truck in a circle on the icy surface. She reached the embankment and kept going, moving backward until the truck had pulled fully clear of the ice and would present no potential obstacle to the departing aircraft.
The crew had lowered the cargo door by the time she stepped out of the Lada. She slung her backpack over one shoulder and began shuffling as quickly as possible across the ice. As she reached the aircraft, she looked up to see Lieutenant Schlichter standing in the entryway.
He was shaking his head as he watched her approach, but a smile lit up his face and he said, “What’s the matter? Four days alone in the heart of the Soviet Union didn’t give you enough excitement, so you decided to play chicken with an airplane big enough to pulverize you?”
Her heart was still racing from the near-collision and she could feel her arms and legs quivering, but she grinned. “Never a doubt. I had it all the way.”
“We actually lost sight of you as you passed in front of us, that’s how close we came to squashing you like a very pretty bug.”
She waggled her eyebrows. “’Almost’ doesn’t count except in horseshoes and nuclear war, remember?”
His eyes widened when he caught sight of the blood staining her clothing, but he said nothing. He was still shaking his head as she passed by and moved deeper into the airplane.
***
The lake had appeared impossibly small to Tracie during the landing four days ago. But now, surrounded by centuries-old trees that looked hundreds of feet tall, the task of getting airborne seemed all but impossible. She’d seen the crew manage it after they dropped her off, but from this vantage point—inside the flight deck, looking out at the thick forest surrounding the lake—she wouldn’t have bet any money they could do it again.
The rest of the crew greeted her upon her arrival, but the reunion was a brief one, the air thick with tension. Tracie thought it might be thanks to their annoyance at the stunt she’d just pulled, and maybe that was part of it. But then she recalled Schlichter’s statement that the amount of fuel carried inside the C-130’s auxiliary tanks was barely sufficient to allow for a return trip to Incirlik.
If they expected to make it home without falling out of the sky, they could afford no more than a minimal delay in Bashkir. Between the time they spent idling on the surface of the lake while awaiting her arrival and the fuel they’d been forced to burn in the aborted takeoff, undoubtedly the issue was uppermost in the minds of the crewmembers.
Tracie wasted no time strapping herself in, and before the buckle on the safety harness had even snapped closed, the powerful engines were once again spooling up for departure. As it had when she was approaching in the Lada, the C-130 began moving slowly, but within seconds was rocketing across the lake on its skis, moving ever faster toward the trees—and certain death, it seemed to Tracie—on the far side of the lake.
Her knuckles were white when the plane finally lifted into the air, the end of the lake looming through the windscreen. Major Corrigan eased the nose of the plane toward the sky and the trees slid out of sight. She imagined the tops of the firs polishing the aluminum along the C-130’s belly as the engines roared, fully committed to an aggressive climb rate.
It took a long time before Corrigan eased off on the steep-angled max climb. Bashkir was located deep inside the Ural Mountain range, and Tracie imagined rocky peaks on all sides, dangerous instruments of death waiting to gash holes in the fuselage or chop the wings right off the plane. Visibility was virtually nonexistent, as an increasingly heavy amount of snow continued to fall.
Tracie turned to Lieutenant Schlichter, who had taken a seat next to her as he’d done for most of the earlier trip. “How…?” Her voice trailed off as she realized she wasn’t sure how to ask her question.
She didn’t have to. Schlichter seemed to know what she was thinking. “How did we climb through the mountains without being able to see fifty feet in front of the plane?”
“Well…yes. I’m incredibly grateful to all of you for coming through, but given the weather conditions, how
did we not end up at the bottom of a smoking hole in the side of a mountain?”
“Beats me,” he said, shrugging and shaking his head. “Sheer luck, I guess.”
Tracie felt her eyebrows rise incredulously and Schlichter laughed. “Just kidding. I’m sorry, I couldn’t help myself.”
“Fair enough. I deserve a little payback after the trouble I’ve caused you guys. But…”
The grin left his face and he turned serious. “I assume you noticed after our aborted takeoff that we returned to the exact same spot on the lake to make the second departure attempt?”
“I did notice that, yes.”
“It wasn’t by accident. We did so because we plotted the exact departure path we would take in the event of these kinds of weather conditions, including climb rate and minute course corrections necessary for obstruction clearance, before we ever left Incirlik. It was all based on surveillance photos taken over the course of many SR-71 flybys, as well as our own experience operating on the lake four days ago.”
She swallowed heavily. “I’m kind of glad I didn’t know that before we left. You put a lot of faith in that intel.”
He nodded. “That’s true, but it’s not like we haven’t practiced this exact maneuver hundreds of times in mountainous terrain during clear weather. We would never have attempted it in these conditions unless we knew we could pull it off one hundred times out of one hundred.”
Tracie must have looked unconvinced, because he smiled and said, “I’m sure you’ve flown overseas many times in your line of work, right?”
“Sure.”
“And some of those flights must have been conducted in weather much worse than what we’re climbing through right now.”
“Of course, but those flights were conducted with the benefit of navigational aids designed to plot a precise climb or descent path around all potential hazards.”
“Exactly,” Schlichter agreed. “And that’s no different from what we just did. Instead of electronic navigational aids, ours were a little more old-fashioned, a little more labor-intensive maybe, but the fact that we’re sitting here having this discussion proves they were every bit as effective.”
Tracie shook her head and laughed. “You guys are amazing.”
“Well, thank you, but what you saw is nothing more or less than the product of hundreds of hours—”
“Thousands,” Major Corrigan interrupted. Tracie hadn’t even thought he was listening, that he was too busy flying the airplane in the lousy weather to pay attention to anything else.
“Right,” Schilchter said. “Thousands of hours of practice and training.”
“Two more questions, and then I’ll stop bothering you,” Tracie said.
“You’re not a bother, believe me,” he said. “But go ahead, hit me. If I don’t know the answer I’ll make one up and we’ll see if you can tell the difference. It’ll be a fun way to pass the time.”
Tracie smiled crookedly, unsure whether he was kidding or not. “Okay, Question One: Are we going to have enough fuel to make it all the way to Incirlik, or will my stunt with the Lada cause us to drop into the Black Sea?”
Schlichter and Major Corrigan exchanged a quick glance, and Tracie said, “I guess that’s my answer. I’m so sorry.”
“We’ll be okay,” Schlichter said. “We might have to amend our routing to something a little more direct than we had planned, but barring any other unusual occurrences, we’ll make it back. And you don’t owe us any apology. We know you can’t talk about what you were doing over here, but we sure as hell understand you weren’t taking a guided tour of the countryside. We knew sticking to a schedule would be difficult and we anticipated the possibility you might not be exactly on time.”
“Thank you, but I don’t understand. What does all that mean?”
“It means we didn’t have to transport the Lada over here like we did the first time, so the difference in weight means we’ll eat less fuel this time. It also means we had room to install a second aux fuel tank and partially fill it. Like I said, we’ll be okay.”
Tracie felt an invisible weight lifting off her shoulders. Risking her own life was one thing; she was accustomed to doing that on a regular basis. But as sick as she felt inside after executing Ryan Smith, it would have been even worse had this talented and professional flight crew lost their lives because of her actions.
She realized Schlichter was staring at her with a look of amusement on his face and she said, “What?”
“You told me you had two questions. Math wasn’t my best subject in school, but I’m almost positive that was only one.”
“I was trying to determine whether you were bullshitting me on the first one before I asked the second,” she said with a laugh. “But I’ve decided I’ll take your word for it, plus I saw the second tank on my way to the flight deck.”
Now it was Schlichter’s turn to laugh.
Tracie said, “How do you know where to fly while we’re in the clouds? I understand you mapped out a specific flight path to get off the lake, but you couldn’t possibly have done the same thing with the entire route back to Turkey.”
“Yes and no,” Schlichter said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that we know more or less the general course we need to fly that will give us the best chance to exit Soviet airspace without any unwanted MiG encounters while also pointing us in the general direction of Incirlik.”
“But…”
“But we also have a nav system most people don’t know about.”
“I don’t follow.”
“It’s classified, but I suppose I could share a few details with the young woman who just accomplished some kind of secret mission deep inside the Soviet Union.”
‘Accomplished’ might be a bit of an overstatement, Tracie thought, but she kept her mouth shut and after a moment Schlichter continued. “Have you ever heard of the Global Positioning System?” he asked.
“I’ve heard of it,” she said, thinking back to an operation a few months ago that had brought her into contact with Dr. Edison Kiley, the elderly researcher who’d developed electronic circuitry for the early stages of the U.S. military’s GPS project.
She decided to keep that information to herself and continued, “I can’t claim any particular expertise on the subject, though.”
“It’s available for military and select law enforcement use only,” he said. “It’s based on satellite triangulation.”
“Okay…”
“As long as enough of the satellites orbiting the globe are operational, GPS allows us to plot our location to within ten feet anywhere on earth. Or in this case,” he added, “anywhere above the earth.”
She shook her head again. “Unbelievable.”
“So how did I do?” he asked with a smile.
“I’m sorry?”
“Were my answers satisfactory?”
“Like I said before, you guys are amazing.”
“And I didn’t even have to make anything up.”
44
February 5, 1988
7:30 a.m.
McLean, Virginia
“So let me get this straight,” Aaron Stallings said. “You were unable to investigate the third Soviet research area located under Ipatiev thanks to your rescue attempt of the operative known to you as Ryan Smith, is that correct?”
“Yes sir, that’s correct.”
“And you were unable to successfully effect Smith’s escape.”
“That’s also correct.”
“So the mission was an abject failure, then, wouldn’t you agree?”
Tracie had come straight to Stallings’ home office from Andrews Air Force Base after her flight from Turkey. She was tired and frazzled and had known exactly how this debrief was going to go: Stallings would be his usual aggressive, blustery self, and she would respond to his insults with a sharp tongue of her own, approaching—and perhaps crossing the line into—insubordination.
She’d been determine
d from her very first interaction with the CIA director last year not to allow him to bully or intimidate her, as he seemed to do to everyone else in his professional life. She had known that standing up to Stallings was not without its risks, and in the intervening months had lost her job, gained it back—sort of—and been tossed out of the man’s office more times than she could count.
But to her surprise, he seemed to respect the fact that she refused to knuckle under to his constant criticism and steady barrage of insults. A wise emperor knew enough to keep at least one person around unafraid to tell him he wasn’t wearing any clothes, and he’d apparently decided that for him, Tracie was that person.
So she was utterly unsurprised at the tone of the conversation. Today, though, she simply didn’t have the energy for their typical verbal thrust and parry. She couldn’t stop thinking about Ryan Smith, and about the sickness she’d felt deep inside when she’d pressed her weapon to his head and squeezed the trigger. An ugly black cancer had wormed into her soul in that horrible moment, and she knew it would continue to metastasize until eventually it consumed her.
And it would be no more than she deserved.
“Did you not hear me, Tanner?”
She realized she’d been staring down at the plush carpeting between her feet, and now she raised her eyes to meet Stallings’ hard gaze. “I heard you. Yes, I would agree with your assessment that the mission was an abject failure. I further stipulate it was entirely my fault. I’ll save you the trouble of having to spell it out. I already understand that fully.”
There was no point even attempting to argue the fact she was to blame. She’d spent the last thirty minutes describing the disastrous mission in humiliating detail. The director was now every bit as aware as Tracie of her missteps and failings in Bashkir.
Stallings pushed back from his desk. His ample belly seemed to expand to fill the available space until finally the desk chair had wheeled far enough away that a sliver of a gap appeared between his dress shirt and the desk. Then he pushed his glasses down his nose and stared at Tracie over the frames.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 145