"Now, as to Luger.. ."

"He ceases to exist as Luger now, except to 'Kaminski,' " Viktor 36

PROLOGUE

Gabovich said. "From now on he will be known by his file designation, 41 dash Zulu. We will begin the disorientation cycle immediately. Wake him up in two hours for his first session, then drug him to sleep, then wake him up two hours later. He will think another day has gone by. After twelve hours, he will be begging us not to execute him-if he lasts that long," he sneered.

NIGHT

OF THE HAWK

ONE.

84'

7"

22'7

~5,00O

lb.

~0,50O lb.

ABOARD THE USS VALLEY MISTRESS

2015 gal.'

OFF THE COAST OF THE LATVIAN REPUBLIC

29 NOVEMBER, YEARS LATER, 1233 LATVIAN TIME (0633 ET)

tand by for team launch," Air Force Colonel Paul White ra k) dioed on the intercom. "All decks, get ready to rock and roll." Captain Joseph Marchetti, the senior ship's officer standing beside White, looked at his colleague in amusement and consternation. Rock and roll? Things were going to get critical here very, very fast Paul White was fifty-one years old, but, as he himself would readily admit, capriciously, only seventeen or eighteen. And he could not have been more out of place than on this ship-or having more fun than if he had an A-pass at Disneyland. It was at times like this that White longed for the flying skill and combat nerve needed to get knee-deep in the action. Although he had designed trainers and simulators for the Strategic Air Command and other organizations over the years, he had never earned a flying rating nor seen combat-but anyone who had flown in his modified super-realistic simulators back at Ford Air Force Base would have sworn they'd just been in combat when they finished a grueling session.

His current assignment with the Intelligence Support Agency-a support agency of the Director of Central Intelligence-was also not considered a combat assignment, but if something went wrong on this mission, or if they were discovered, they could be just as dead as if they were in the middle of World War III.

The twenty-nine-year veteran Air Force officer was on the bridge of what had to be the most unusual vessel in the world, as befitting one of the most dedicated yet unusual men in the world. The USS Valley Mistress was a maritime salvage and deep-sea construction vessel registered under the U.S. flag. Officially, the Mistress was part of the U.S. Navy's Ready Reserve Fleet, leased from a private company from Larose, Loui and vessels for many miles in all directions and then feed that digitized data directly to White's crew on the Valley Mistress. Even though the Warsaw Pact had disbanded, East Germany had fallen, and the Soviet Union had broken up into many fragments, a NATO

radar surveillance plane was still on patrol twenty-four hours a day over Eastern Europe, tracking aircraft and vessels over the horizon and correlating the information with civilian and military sources. The Cold War may have been over, but President Ronald Reagan's famous words, "Trust, but verify," were the new watchwords in West-East relations in the 1990s.