is the tightest, fastest, and most righteous information collection and dissemination network in existence. Don't ask me how it works ? no one knows ? but it does.
Within the family-of-POWs network, there's something similar. It doesn't have a physical location like MDI does, but it's damned near as effective. The outer layer is all for show ? the Internet web pages, the public posters and pamphlets and the letter writing campaigns, the copper bracelets we wear in remembrance of those that aren't coming back. That's just the tip of the network, just like the skipper's daily pep talk on the closed-circuit TV. Under neath that are the E-mails, the hand-delivered copies of documents and resources passed from family to family when electronic means are deemed too sensitive, the volumes and volumes of in-country contacts that these survivors have amassed over the decades since Vietnam.
Discolored photos, shards of personal belongings, snatches of transcripts blurred by being photocopied and handled so many times, evidence ? of what? Of men that were alive and weren't brought home, just like my father.
I'd had some help on the first part of my search for my father in the form of in-country contacts. Now that the trail pointed to Russia, information was significantly harder to get, more ambiguous, and, in some cases, downright wrong. But it was there, flowing from the other survivors, the Navy Department, even from immigrants.
During the Vietnam War, the air bases just outside Arkhangelsk had attracted the Central Intelligence Agency's attention. The activity around the base was inconsistent ? aircraft parked on aprons, a cover story that claimed the base was an advance training facility, but a notable lack of routine takeoffs and landings. You expect a sort of cyclical activity at a training facility as classes graduate and new students arrive a spate of simple orientation and formation flights as student pilots become accustomed to new aircraft, followed by increasingly difficult training missions including ACM and bombing runs; then, a period of quiet, the time after a class graduates and the next one starts; then the whole cycle repeated over and over again.
That didn't happen at Arkhangelsk. In fact, it had more transit flights ? aircraft originating from somewhere outside our satellite coverage and vectoring in to the isolated base ? than it did training flights. That worried the CIA enough to give this one particular base code-word sensitivity and scrutiny.
They called it Hidden Archer, the name itself peculiarly appropriate for the facility. Over the next five years of painstaking observation and critical analysis, the CIA arrived at the conclusion that Hidden Archer had one primary function ? to serve as a debriefing facility for captured aviators.
In the early days of the Vietnam War, satellite technology wasn't what it is today. But by late 1970s, even after the war was officially over, we had satellite and surveillance capabilities that would have seemed like Buck Rogers science fiction to military men of just a few decades earlier.
We could read license plates on cars from space, discern a man's face as he walked between buildings. In response to these technological developments, training for aircrews changed, and the SERE ? Survival, Evasion, Rescue, Escape ? schools emphasized continually looking up at the sky, every chance you got. There was no telling when a satellite or high-flying reconnaissance aircraft might be overhead, and exposing your face to the sky maximized your chances of being identified.
At the time he was flying, my father knew something of how fast technology was coming along. He was an engineer by training, and from all accounts a pretty damned smart man. My uncle says I remind him of my father, his brother. I usually take it as a compliment, but there's something in me that protests at that. I've been shot down a couple of times, but I always made it out somehow. Out of the cockpit, out of the fire zone. That's the one difference I'm sure of between me and my father.
But what my father knew about satellites added credibility to the odd, ragged photo that had turned up carefully sandwiched between two pieces of cardboard. It had come to my house, not the office, in a nondescript brown padded envelope. Address in neat, printed letters, no return address.
Correct postage, and a postmark showing it was mailed from Washington, D.C.
Not much to go on. I suppose I could have reported it to the FBI, had them dust it for fingerprints or DNA or some such, but I didn't. I looked at the grainy photo and saw my own face staring back at me. It was blurred, either a high-resolution camera shot enlarged past its tolerance or a shot taken while moving. But the similarity was unmistakable. Even with some of the features blurred, I could see the line of my jaw in it, the set of my head on my own shoulders. It wasn't me, but it was someone who looked a hell of a lot like an older me, a Tombstone that the forces of gravity and time had warped and wrinkled.
I debated over it for a couple of days, then showed it to my mother.
She recognized my father instantly.
So, given that someone ? or something ? had taken a picture of my father much older than he'd been at the time he'd disappeared over the bridge, what were the odds that he was still alive? Minimal ? both my mother and I knew that.
The second bit of the puzzle was the one that bothered me the most. A clipping taken from what appeared to be a small, cheaply printed newspaper.
The same man, noticeably older than he'd been in the first photo, smiling and waving at the camera.
The date ? seven months ago.
This time, I did go the official route. Having three stars on my collar, plus the four that my uncle sports, gives us a fair amount of horsepower. Within a couple of hours, the intelligence organization at the Pentagon was able to identify the paper and produce a complete page, the one this clipping had been torn from, along with a translation of the article.
The man in the picture was celebrating his recent marriage. His first, according to the Russian writer.
Not according to my mother. Over the years, she'd found ways to live with losing Dad. On the surface, she sounded like she was convinced he'd died. She and Batman were alike in that way, although I think Batman's conviction went to his core. With Mom, it was just a way to survive. But I could tell from her involvement in the POW/MIA groups that she'd never really given up hope.
The paper covered a small area around Nikolayev, another military air base to the south. While not as important as Hidden Archer and the Kola Peninsula during the Vietnam War, Nikolayev had had its own share of notoriety as a weapons test facility.
I was going there. I wasn't certain how or when, but sometime during the next two weeks I was going to Nikolayev.
'Lead, two.' Skeeter's calm, professional voice broke into my thoughts. I'd been flying the aircraft by reflex, caught up in the anger and the possibility of hope, blinded by my emotions. Skeeter, in an unusually tactful maneuver for him, had simply brought my attention back to the present.
'Lead,' I acknowledged.
'Starting pre-landing checklist.'
'Roger ? we are, too.'
I could hear my RIO fumbling through his checklist. I flipped open the right section and began reading aloud.
We made a beautiful, precision formation approach, with Skeeter slipping in to land just five seconds after I did. He maintained the precisely correct formation distance throughout the approach, touchdown, and taxi, one of the smoothest bits of formation flying I'd seen in a while. You don't do a lot of formation landings on an aircraft carrier, and maintaining proficiency is tough.
A yellow follow-me truck met us at the end of the landing strip. I used my nose-wheel steering gear to fall in behind him. The turbofans were spooled down to a gentle thunder now, oddly reassuring in the notion that I could turn, power up, and be airborne again within moments if I wanted to.
There was something surreal about taxiing down a Russian airfield.
For those of us raised in the Cold War, the idea that someday we would be voluntarily landing some of our most advanced fighter aircraft inside Soviet territory would have been unthinkable just five years before. Five years ? just a small portion of the time I'd spent in uniform, but longer than Skeeter's entire career to date. He'd joined the Navy after the Berlin Wall fell, after Desert Storm and Desert Shield, at a time when the most formative politicians of my career were just old bogeymen.
No matter that Russia ? and China, as well ? continued to foment disorder and conflict in this brave new world we fought in. The official party line was that it was over. We'd won, and were now entitled to a well-deserved peace dividend.
Then why did I end up with MiGs shooting at me and my aircrews so often?
