The Kremlin Phoenix (2 page)

“Why? . . .” Goldstein begged,
confused.

Nogorev never answered.

* * * *

Craig Balard arrived for work early
next morning, cappuccino in one hand, brief case in the other and a copy of the
New York Times wedged under his arm. With sandy colored hair, light brown eyes
and a bent nose from a high school football accident, he was masculine rather
than handsome. The fact that he’d graduated in the bottom third of his class at
Harvard disguised the fact that he had a sharp intellect and a stubborn streak
that had gotten him into trouble too many times to count. He dropped the paper
on his desk, slumped into his comfortable leather chair and gulped down two
headache pills with his coffee to keep his hangover at bay.

“Oh man,” he muttered as he rubbed
his temple. He knew he was drinking too much and sleeping too little since his relationship
with Nikki Angelo had gone to the next level. She was a well educated banker,
sophisticated and stylish with an appalling ability to drink him under the
table. What was even more disconcerting was that she was increasingly on his
mind, and he was even beginning to wonder if she was the one.

Craig slowly began pulling files from
his brief case when his direct line rang. “Balard speaking,” he said, balancing
the phone between his jaw and shoulder.

“Craig Balard?” The man asked with
a thick accent.

“The one and only.”

“Your father was Colonel Jack
Balard, United States Air Force?”

Craig straightened, dropping the
last file on his desk. “That’s right.”

“Your father was shot down over Serbia,
2nd May, 1999.” A statement, not a question.

“Who are you?” It had been a long
time since he’d discussed his father with anyone.

“Your father was a traitor and a
coward!”

“That’s a god damned lie!” Craig
exploded. “My father was a hero. He was killed in action.”

There was silence for a moment,
then the other man spoke in a low, purposeful tone. “Your father was not killed
in action Mr Balard, and he was a traitor.”

“Bullshit!” Craig slammed the phone
down angrily, thinking the caller was some kind of psycho freak trying to piss
him off for his own sick amusement.

He took a deep breath, calming
his anger. He’d never really known his father, but he’d idealized his memory. Colonel
Balard had flown in the 1991 Gulf War, and again in Serbia, where he’d been shot
down. His body and the wreckage of his ultra secret F117 Nighthawk stealth
bomber had never been recovered.

Craig’s phone rang again. “Yes?”

“I can prove it.”

“Screw you,” Craig said, about to
slam the phone down, but stopping at the last moment. “How?”

“Look in the glove compartment of
your car.” The caller said before hanging up.

Craig placed the phone back on
the cradle, deep in thought, then headed for the elevator.

At the far end of the office,
Jerry Goldstein’s secretary sat at her desk, sobbing. Craig glanced down the
hall absently, wondering what was going on. Several people were gathered around
her, comforting her. Ed McCormack, one of Goldstein, McCormack & Powell’s
senior partners, stood beside her desk speaking into the telephone.

Craig avoided the commotion by
taking the back way out, then rode the elevator down to parking level three. When
the doors opened, he hurried to his small black BMW, climbed into the passenger
seat and opened the glove compartment. Inside was a medium sized envelope. He retrieved
it, wondering how anyone could have broken into his car without triggering its sophisticated
security system.

Craig tore open the envelope to
find a single, poor quality, black and white photograph inside. The picture
showed a man in a USAF flight suit, kneeling and bloodied on a dirty concrete floor,
his hands tied behind his back.

Craig had seen pictures of his father
in uniform before, but they’d been images of a cocky pilot filled with confidence
and bravado. This was a picture of a broken man in a hopeless situation, a man
desperate to survive.

“They told us you were dead!” he
whispered.

* * * *

May 2, 1999

“Merk Four, this is Aviano Control. You
are cleared for take-off. Over,” the air traffic controller’s voice sounded
over the speaker.

“Aviano Control, Merk Four, Affirmative,”
Colonel Jack Balard acknowledged, releasing the brakes, letting his F117
Nighthawk begin to roll down Aviano Air Base’s main runway. It was three hours
past sunset when the Nighthawk climbed into the sky over north eastern Italy,
and turned towards the Adriatic. The route over the sea was the long way
around, but there was no alternative. Allied aircraft were not allowed to
overfly Bosnia for political reasons. The restriction made their flight paths
more predictable than good tactics demanded, yet it was the reality of fighting
in a such a politically sensitive region.

Jack leveled off at two thousand meters
above sea level, settling in for a slightly bumpy, moderately low level flight
to his target. The awkward shape of the F117, nicknamed the Wobbly Goblin, was
designed to deceive radar, not provide efficient aerodynamics. She wasn’t a
fighter, and she wasn’t pretty, but she hit her targets hard.

Flying alone, he watched the
lights of small Croatian coastal towns slide by until it was time to turn east
and sneak across Montenegro into Serbia. Occasionally, he picked up Allied radio
traffic, mostly NATO controllers and other combat aircraft, while he maintained
radio silence all the way to Belgrade. Somewhere to the south was an EA-6B
support jammer and a pair of F-16CJs carrying High-speed Anti-Radar Missiles. Their
job was to destroy enemy ground radars threatening his Nighthawk. It was
proving to be a task more difficult than expected. There’d been problems with
the Serbs moving their ground radars, and with the mountainous terrain, which
had made the suppression of enemy air defenses much harder than in the ‘91 Gulf
War. That earlier war had been a walk in the park compared to the Serbian
campaign. Even so, Jack was confident his support team had his six.

Soon the outskirts of Belgrade appeared
on the horizon. As expected, the capitol city was blacked out, which was no
defense against satellite navigation, but it made the defenders feel less
vulnerable. Off to the south, he saw ground flashes from HARMs, launched from
high altitude, striking their targets. It occurred to him that his support team
had drifted a little far to the south, although it might mean there weren’t air
defense radars along his flight path. Streams of triple-A laced the sky to the
south as anti-aircraft guns threw a wall of shells up at the high flying fast
movers, but there were no flashes in the sky indicating hits.

His map display indicated he was
coming up on his aim-point. At various locations across Greater Serbia, other
F117s were approaching similar points on their flight plans as part of a
coordinated attack on Serbia’s electrical power infrastructure. It would be hard
for the Serbs to continue their ethnic cleansing of defenseless peasants
without electricity.

Jack opened the bomb doors and
armed his payload, a BLU-114/B. The super secret ‘soft bomb’ was not a
conventional explosive. Its purpose was to scatter a carpet of submunitions
over the target area. When the submunitions detonated, they spread a cloud of
chemically treated graphite filaments over critical electricity distribution
equipment, causing them to short circuit while inflicting very few civilian
casualties. He knew tonight the world would discover the existence of this new,
strange weapon, a weapon which had never before been used, and was about to
bring another murderous dictator to his knees.

A radar alarm sounded in the
cockpit, warning that ground radars ahead had suddenly activated and were searching
for him. He quickly began the process of activating the cruise missile that
would carry the soft bomb to a large substation in northern Belgrade. If
successful, a quarter of the city would be blacked out. A second alarm sounded,
one he’d never heard while flying a Nighthawk.

Missile
tracking?
he realized.
They must be firing blind.

Jack knew he wasn’t invisible,
but he was certain the Serbs had nothing that could track him well enough to
get a lock. What he didn’t know was that the Serbs had discovered they could detect
an F117 if they operated their radars at unusually long wavelengths. They didn’t
have a perfect fix on his Nighthawk, but they knew where he was and where he
was heading. With his bomb bay doors open, his observability increased enough
for them to fire.

He completed the cruise missile’s
pre-launch check, then released the weapon. The missile alarm was blaring in
his ears now, so he threw the Nighthawk into a sharp turn, hoping to break away
from the missile, but the Russian SA-3 Goa was closer than he realized. For a
fraction of second, it sensed his bomb bay doors and glimpsed the interior of his
bomb bay. Almost immediately, the missile’s onboard computer realized the
target was close enough for a proximity detonation. The missile exploded more
than thirty meters from the F117, sending shrapnel flying outwards at
supersonic speeds. One piece tore through his wing, striking his starboard
engine. Fire alarms sounded in the cockpit as electrical systems failed. Jack
tried to kill the starboard engine, hoping to limp home on one engine, but the
fire was already out of control.

She’s not
going to make it
, he realized as the aircraft
began a death roll.

He braced and ejected, for a
moment feeling as if he’d been fired out of a cannon, then his chute opened and
he hung in the air, watching flames snake along the starboard side of his stealth
bomber as it rolled over and nosed into the soft ground ten kilometers away.
There was no explosion, but fires burned all around the crash site, starkly
illuminating the blacked-out landscape.

Jack watched expectantly, knowing
as soon as the air force realized the stealth plane was down in enemy
territory, they’d destroy it to prevent its precious technology falling into enemy
hands. He saw the ground coming up fast, but kept his eyes fixed on the fire in
the distance, marking where his stricken plane had gone down. He hoped to see
the explosion that would signal the destruction of the remains of his aircraft,
but no flash appeared in the distance.

He hit the ground hard, and was
dragged over damp tilled soil as the breeze caught his chute. Jack clawed at
the release catches, then shrugged off his harness and stood up. After quickly checking
his pistol, radio and survival rations, he got his bearings. A small collection
of stone buildings with thatched roofs perched at the edge of the field.
Already, several men had gathered in the middle of the village and were yelling
and pointing toward him. Others began emerging from nearby houses, curious at
the commotion outside.

Jack turned and started to run
away from the village as a bullet whizzed past his shoulder. Angry voices yelled
at him, then another bullet struck the soil beside him. He considered drawing
his pistol and returning fire, but at that range, he knew he wouldn’t hit
anything. He took another step, then his leg screamed in pain and gave way. It
took him a moment to realize he’d been shot. He tried to stand but his leg
wouldn’t obey. When he pressed his hand over the wound, he felt a warm wetness
seeping through his fingers.

The thump of heavy boots on muddy
soil sounded from the dark as Serb peasants rushed toward him. Soon he was
surrounded by farmers holding shovels and brooms. They began beating him
angrily until an old veteran wielding an AK-47 barked an order, forcing the enraged
peasants to back away. They continued hurling abuse at him as the old veteran
sent a teenage boy back to the village to call the authorities.

Jack sighed, raising one hand in
surrender while his other hand pressed on his wound. Ignoring the angry
peasants, he gazed towards where his F117 had crashed, unable to understand why
he hadn’t seen a bomb destroy it. He hardly gave a thought to his wound, or the
fact that he was now a prisoner of war. His only concern was to see his downed
stealth bomber destroyed before the Serbs could carry it off.

Soon, a Serb Army truck arrived
to take him away. Even as he was dragged from the muddy field, he continued to
look expectantly towards the crashed F117, despairing that it was still largely
intact. Unable to walk, the soldiers lifted him into the truck, then several
climbed in after him. He listened as the truck drove away, hoping to hear an
explosion signaling the destruction of his stealth bomber, but it never came.

* * * *

Present Day

Why would they
lie?
Craig wondered for the hundredth time as he
sat in his office, staring at the photograph. The Defense Department had told
them his father’s aircraft had been destroyed in a devastating operation that
had disabled seventy percent of Serbia’s electricity system in a single night.
It was an amazing victory that had cost Craig’s father his life. At least, that’s
what they’d been told. His mother, Joan, and himself had attended the funeral. She’d
received the flag and had saved Colonel Balard’s medals and photos, but had
never once considered the possibility that he’d survived the crash.