Shattered Bone (7 page)

But inside his mask he was smiling. He loved it! It was just what they were looking for! It was exactly the kind of mentality that a combat pilot would need. From that day on, Ammon's fighter was almost guaranteed.

First Lieutenant Richard Ammon graduated number one in his class. As such, he was entitled to get his first choice of aircraft and assignment. Lt Ammon didn't even have to think.

He selected an F-16 to Bitburg Air Force Base, Germany. Not only would this assignment make it easier for him to be “handled,” but he would have access to important intelligence information concerning NATO and the American forces in Europe.

He was in Europe for almost a year before he heard again from the Sicherheit. He was told early to protect his position and not to take any chances that might expose his operation. They would need him later in his career, and they didn't want to take any unnecessary chances at this time. As a result, he was never asked to pass along any information before he was transferred back to the States.

It was then that things had begun to unravel.

Few Americans watched the fall of the Berlin Wall or the breakup of the Soviet Union with as much interest as did Richard Ammon. Over the next few years, he watched in bewilderment as one communist government after another fell, along with their anti-West intelligence machines. During this time Ammon's contact with his handler became less and less frequent. After a while he was not sure any of his former supervisors even remembered he was there. Now it had been years since he had any communication with them, and he doubted they knew of his assignment to Korea.

So Ammon couldn't have been more surprised when, two days earlier, he was contacted. The message was simple. “The train is leaving at two. Gather your luggage.” Translation: Expect to be brought in. No more than two days. Gather any classified information that you can and be ready. We will act.

He wondered who had ordered him in? Who were they working for now? What government did they represent, and what did they really want?

But he realized his concerns didn't matter. In such things he had very little choice.

So he gathered what information he could and prepared for the unknown. Although he knew the microfilm he brought with him was worthless, hopefully his superiors wouldn't. And that would buy him their trust, and maybe a little time.

Thinking of the microfilm brought Ammon back to the present. He reached down to massage his wrapped knee, feeling the plastic bag as it rubbed against his skin.

Ammon stared into the darkness as they cruised toward the dim lights of P'yongyang. Amril remained silent, studying oceanic charts that lay on a small table by the pilot's wheel. Ammon glanced at his watch, then returned his gaze to the darkness, his eyes unblinking, deep in thought. But he wasn't considering the possibilities of his future, or even reflecting on the life he had just left behind. The only thing he was thinking about was how hard it would be to find a telephone once he arrived in the communist city of P'yongyang.

OSAN AIR FORCE BASE, SOUTH KOREA

Eighteen hours later, all nine members of the accident board that would investigate the downing of the F-16 met together for the first time inside a cavernous hangar. They watched in huddled silence as a deflated raft was brought through the hangar doors and placed on a stainless steel table in the middle of the floor. Normally, the place would have already been strewn with charred and splintered pieces of aircraft wreckage, carefully laid out, like pieces of a huge jigsaw puzzle. Normally, chunks of engines, computers, and fuselage would have already been placed end-to-end and piece-to-piece in an effort to determine the cause of the crash.

But not this investigation. The Yellow Sea had seen to that.

Air Force Colonel James Wood stared down at the deflated life raft and admitted to himself for the first time that it would likely be the only piece of evidence he would ever have to work with. The Falcon had gone down in more than 1,800 meters of shark-infested water. The initial report from the Navy indicated that the possibility of recovering the aircraft was fairly remote, perhaps impossible. Upon impact with the water, the F-16 would have been blown into a thousand shattered pieces. The fragments would have then been scattered across miles of ragged ocean floor, drifting here and there with the cold water currents.

No, unfortunately, there would be no aircraft wreckage to help them in their investigation. The accident board would be on their own.

Wood ran his hand over his head and let out an audible sigh. He watched the flight surgeon don surgical gloves and carefully spread the raft out upon thc examination table. As the accident investigation board president, it was his responsibility to determine exactly what had caused the F-16 to go down. He had spent the past eighteen hours talking to the KC-135 refueling crew and taking their statements, coordinating the rescue effort, searching through Capt Ammon's official flight records, and organizing the members of the accident investigation team.

Together, he, the maintenance supervisor, and the chief flight surgeon had huddled in conference as they tried to put the initial pieces together. But as was usually the case, the early pieces did not fit very well.

Never had he seen anything quite this odd. Never had he heard of a fighter simply exploding in mid-air. The tanker boom operator had described it as a huge explosion—a billowing fireball of blue and yellow flame. He had been very specific. A bright blue and white explosion, followed by a billowing yellow fireball.

The yellow made sense. The blue surely did not. Yellow was within the color spectrum of burning jet fuel. Blue was not. Blue indicated a much hotter flame—a much more powerful explosion than one would expect from burning jet fuel.

Another fragmented piece to the puzzle.

And then there was the most troubling question of all. What had happened to Captain Richard Ammon? What sequence in the survival chain had failed him? Where was his body? Why was he dead?

There had been no radio call. No emergency beacon. No flares or smoke or signaling device of any kind.

And then the rescue helicopter had located the empty life raft floating around in the sea, half inflated and smeared with diluted blood. This would give them some answers. This was where they would begin.

Colonel Wood watched in silence as the flight surgeon and two assistants began to take blood samples on thin cotton swabs and place them in sterile containers. These would be used to make a DNA comparison of Captain Ammon, which would hopefully lead to a positive identification. The blood samples would also be analyzed to help determine the cause of death.

As the Colonel watched the flight surgeon work, a young captain approached him and tapped him lightly on the shoulder.

“Sir, there's someone here I think you should talk to.”

The colonel turned and looked at the captain. “Who is it? What do they want?”

“It's one of the tanker pilots, sir. He has something he wants to add to his official statement. Something about seeing a small boat ncar the crash site. I don't know, sir. Why don't you come and see what you think?”

For the next half hour, the colonel listened carefully as one of the tanker pilots described what he had seen the night before. It looked like a small speedboat, he remembered, heading northeast away from the crash site at a very high speed. He had only caught the briefest glimpse of it in the moonlight while they had been orbiting at two thousand feet. But he was certain it was there. He had clearly seen the splash its bow made in the moonlight and he had even seen its wake spreading out behind it as it ran. There was a boat in the area, he was certain of that. A small craft, but very fast, and it was operating without any lights.

“But that doesn't make any sense,” Wood muttered. “A small boat, out in the middle of the night, more than a hundred miles from shore, at the exact location of the downed pilot. It sounds very odd. So think. Think very carefully. What else could it have been?”

The tanker pilot met Wood's eyes with a cold and self-assured stare. “It was a small boat, colonel. I know that. Now who it was, and why it was there, I guess that's something you ought to look into. All I'm telling you is what I saw.”

For two days Colonel Wood stewed about what the captain had told him. Three times he interviewed him again, hoping to find some crack in his story, hoping the pilot would rethink what he saw, hoping it would just go away. But the captain held firm, and so, much as the colonel hated to open such a rotten and unpromising can of worms, he felt compelled to follow his instincts. Late in the evening on the third day after the accident, he sent a highly encrypted message to a very small and crowded office deep in the bowels of the USCOM building at Bolling Air Force Base, Washington, D.C.

TO: Director, Internal Counter-Espionage Division (ICED)

FR: President, Accident Investigation Board, F-16-12-21

RE: USAF Directive 99-03

Sir:

We find ourselves in the midst of a class A accident investigation involving a Captain Richard Ammon, 445-78-932l.

Although insignificant and completely unsubstantiated at this time, there are certain factors which lead me to believe that it is at least possible that espionage and/or sabotage may have played a part in this accident. These factors include, but are not limited to the following unusual considerations:

- Captain Ammon's body has not been recovered.

- The sudden explosion onboard the incident aircraft cannot be explained, nor does the eyewitness account of the explosion fall in place with what we would expect from a fuel-feed fire.

- Witness places an unidentified watercraft in the vicinity of the accident at the time rescue attempts were under way.

In accordance with Air Force directives, I am therefore advising you of my intention to seek further latitude in this investigation than would normally exist. If you have any information which could be of any assistance, please advise.

Less than five minutes after Colonel Wood had sent the message, Lt Colonel Oliver Tray, assistant director, ICED, walked over to the huge office vault and pulled out a top secret binder marked:

Ammon, Richard

codename “BADGER”

With the encoded message from Colonel Wood in hand, he returned to his desk and sat down. It had been a very long time since the BADGER file had been opened. Now, here he was, opening the file for the second time in less than three days. Lieutenant Colonel Tray removed the red “TOP SECRET” cover sheet and started to read. Five hours later, he called his wife to tell her he wouldn't be home until long after supper.

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SEVASTOPOL AIR BASE, SOUTHERN UKRAINE

U
KRAINIAN
P
RIME
M
INISTER
Y
EVGENI
O
SKOL
G
OLUBEV WAS WAITING ON
the cement tarmac, standing in front of a dull brick reception building that was used exclusively for visiting dignitaries. Sevastopol was the headquarters for the Ukrainian Black Sea fleet. Because of its location on the southwest tip of the Crimean peninsula, and its proximity to the warm waters of the Black Sea, Sevastopol was one of the warmest cities in the Ukraine.

In the distance, through the smog and haze, Golubev could see the gentle roll of the Krymskiye hills that lined the south side of the peninsula. To the south lay the harbor, with its many huge ports and docks used hy the Black Sea Fleet. During the height of the cold war, Sevastopol was one of the jewels of the Soviet industrial crown. But that was long ago. Now, more than a generation had been born and raised in the shanty towns that surrounded the port city. The air, once crisp and clean, now reeked of oily smoke and rusty decay as the smokestacks of the harbor belched forth their gaseous toxins to mix with the humid air that blew in from the Black Sea. Once a favorite vacation spot of Russian Czars, the beaches were now too polluted to be enjoyed.

The day was very warm, especially for this late in the summer, and sweat beaded Golubev's back as he paced the tarmac. As the gusty hot air blew in his face, Golubev wished again that he could have waited in the coolness of his air conditioned car. But the General had been quite specific in his request. “Meet me on the tarmac and come alone.” So here he stood, his own car and driver parked some fifty paces behind him. Further back along the fence stood another black sedan. This one contained four security personnel. They watched through tinted windows as their boss walked and fidgeted on the tarmac.

Golubev looked up into the sky once again to watch the Soviet SU-27 make its final approach and landing. As he observed the fighter, it passed over the last of the runway lights. He heard the roar of the engines diminish when the pilot pulled both of his throttles back to idle. The aircraft touched down lightly only eight hundred feet down the runway.

Inside the cockpit, General Victor Lomov extended the speed brakes as he watched the airspeed indicator. Once he slowed below 150 knots, he began to pull the nose of the aircraft back up into the air. This exposed the underside of the fuselage and wings to the wind and helped to slow him down. As the aircraft slowed below 110 knots, he lowered the nose back onto the runway and then gently applied the wheel brakes. The aircraft decelerated rapidly and the general popped opened his canopy as soon as he slowed to taxi airspeed.

Because this was a surprise inspection, no officers from the base had yet come to meet him. Even now, as he taxied off the runway, they were just being notified of his arrival. It would take several minutes before they would have time to assemble the appropriate generals and senior staff. Several more minutes would pass before they could make their way to the operations center to meet him. It was time the general needed and would use.

As the Commanding General of the Ukrainian Forces, General Victor Lomov made frequent surprise inspections. It was not unusual for him to show up unannounced at one of his bases and ask the local commander if he could have a look around. It was both something he enjoyed and an extremely valuable motivational tool. But this inspection was unusual. He had invited Prime Minister Golubev to meet him and accompany him as he inspected the base. It was the first time he had extended an invitation to the Prime Minister to accompany him on an inspection. The story would be that he was so proud of the base's ability to maintain combat effectiveness that he wanted Golubev to see for himself.