One for One (John Flynn Thrillers Book 3)

by A. J. Stewart

“I don’t want to hear it, father,” Joanna Loup said as the aircraft backed toward Paris.

  “You want to lose? You want to not make the team? You want to fail to be an Olympian?”

  “I’m already an Olympian, father. You were there.”

  “I was there to hear the German national anthem, not French.”

  “You didn’t win a gold medal either, father.”

  “I won silver, and you know the other guy had that horse doped up.”

  “And yet, they test all gold medalists, and they found no such thing.”

  “You can’t medal if you don’t get on the team. And I assure you with that performance, you won’t make the team.”

  “And you wonder why mother doesn’t come to the country house anymore.”

  “Joanna, how dare you.”

  “Whatever, father. I’ll be back down next weekend.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re not at the country house next weekend.”

  “You have something on? I can still go.”

  “No. You need to be in Paris next weekend.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you can’t be at the country house. End of discussion.”

  Joanna rolled her eyes. “Whatever father. Whatever.”

  Loup watched his daughter’s eye roll. It was no wonder he preferred the company of his horses.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Flynn and Gorski drove the short way back around to the retail center and waited for David to come out of the Aldi Marché. Gorski noted Flynn’s wet legs and Flynn recounted his dunk in the river.

  “Night vision?”

  Flynn nodded. “To be expected.”

  “And what was the detail after Loup left?”

  “Exterior was one perimeter and one on the patio until dark. Then everyone went inside. I assume they rely on video at night.”

  “They should have motion sensors in the forest.”

  “The deer would trigger them constantly.”

  “They should get rid of the deer.”

  Flynn shrugged. “I suspect deer are part of the charm.”

  “Deer are good eating, that’s all I know.”

  “I don’t think rich guys like to get that close and personal with their food. What about at the airfield?”

  “Good, but not great security. But taking him would be hard. Especially on an air force base. There are always guys with guns on a military base.”

  “I like the estate. Security isn’t up to par when Loup’s not there.”

  “I think the key is that he’s not there.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” said Flynn. “Here’s David.”

  They saw the plane spotter wander out of the supermarket. He walked with a slow gait as if he had once been injured. He stopped and looked around. Flynn and Gorski got out of the car and called to him.

  David suggested they walk. It turned out his apartment block was wedged in between the retail center and the airfield. It predated the retail buildings by at least two decades. They walked up the stairs.

  “You want to see the dish?” he asked.

  “Sure,” said Flynn.

  They continued up the stairs until they reached a locked door, which David opened with a key. Then they were on the roof. It was covered in tar, and wide and flat except for the air-conditioning units.

  David led them over behind the bank of condensers. Fastened to the roof were two satellite dishes and a couple of small steel boxes. There was a long thin antenna sticking high into the air.

  “What is all this?” asked Gorski.

  “My hardware,” said David. It was the closest Flynn had seen him come to smiling. Clearly he was impressed with his setup, and happy to have someone to show it off to.

  “What does it do?”

  “It tracks flights. See this,” he said, pointing at something that looked like a CCTV camera. “This is my motion sensor. It’s rigged to activate on any motion on the strip at the airfield. It’s attached to a DVR in my apartment. And this,” he gestured at the long thin antenna, “is my ADS-B antenna. With this I can track the transponder on any flight in or out of the area. Even if they don’t land.”

  “And the satellites?”

  More tracking,” he said. Then with a sheepish grin he added, “And I pirate the English Premier League.”

  David led Flynn and Gorski back down the stairs to his apartment. It was small and dark but neat and orderly. A bookcase housed electronic equipment of all varieties. Flynn recognized a digital tuner and an amp, and an Apple TV box. There were other metal boxes that looked like home built components.

  David sat at a desk and powered up a tower system computer. Then he typed some passwords in. His fingers were nimble and too fast to follow, even if either Flynn or Gorski wanted to do so. Then he brought up a page on screen, and leaned forward with a huh.

  “What?” asked Flynn.

  “Did you know that Monsieur Loup’s Dassault Falcon 8X just took off.”

  “Yes, we knew that.”

  “It’s en route to Le Bourget. See.”

  He showed them a screen with a map of France. A small rectangle with a number inside slowly moved toward Paris. The rectangle had a line behind it that showed its flight path from Ambérieu-en-Bugey.

  “That’s realtime?” asked Gorski.

  “Of course.”

  “How?”

  David pointed at a black box on the bookcase. “My ADS-B receiver. Guys have these all over the country, in fact, all over the world. We all feed our data into a central database. You can track pretty much any aircraft, anywhere.”

  How does that work?” asked Flynn.

  “Every aircraft has a transponder. That’s how air traffic control and other aircraft see them on their systems. We’re just catching the signal.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “Of course. Why not?”

  “And you can track any aircraft?”

  “Oui. This site you are looking at now is a public site I feed data into, so I get a free subscription. They don’t publish military transponders to the site, and private owners can request that their data be suppressed.”

  “Why would they do that?” asked Gorski.

  “Let’s say you are the CEO of a major corporation, and you use the company jet. Flight patterns might give away trade secrets. For example, you are in Paris and plan to take over a competitor in Berlin. Repeated, unexplained flights to Berlin might show your hand.”

  “But the company could suppress their flight data?” asked Flynn.

  “That’s right.”

  “And you couldn’t track it then?”

  “Oh, I can track it. It just wouldn’t be published onto any of these public websites. But there are other sites.”

  “What other sites?”

  “Dark web,” said David. His fingers danced across the keyboard again until he was on a very different looking website. There was no attractive design or easy to use navigation.

  “Ugly,” said Gorski.

  “On purpose,” said David. “This is not for public consumption. We keep these sites secret, and making them unattractive keeps any user who somehow gets here accidentally from getting too far in.”

  “You could find this accidentally?”

  “Not easily, but that’s why it would be called an accident.”

  “So what does this tell you?”

  “Anything. Any aircraft, anywhere, anytime. I even tracked the US president when he visited Paris last year.”

  “You tracked Air Force One?”

  David nodded enthusiastically. “Sure. Air Force One needs to be seen in the sky by other aircraft and traffic control, just like every other aircraft up there.”

  “Surely it’s military so it doesn’t have a transponder.”

  “Military aircraft have transponders, just like private aircraft. I’m telling you it’s how they get seen. Without it, someone might fly into you.”

&nbs
p; “But the enemy could use this site to see you coming? That can’t be right.”

  “It’s not,” said David. “They can turn the transponder off. If they were flying a covert mission that’s certainly what you would do. But otherwise military aircraft share the same sky as private and commercial aircraft.”

  “So Loup could turn off his transponder, if he wanted to?” Flynn asked.

  “He could. In fact, he has. But not in France. Not in European air space. It would be a big no-no, and if authorities saw it there would be a big fine.”

  “He can afford it.”

  “Plus he would be risking his life. Few people survive midair collisions.”

  “If he were on board. So are you telling me your network can see where Loup’s jet goes?”

  David nodded and typed some more. “I can get the data related to his tail number, and then download it. There. Now . . .”

  He opened a spreadsheet that was a mess of numbers and letters and codes that neither Flynn nor Gorski understood.

  “This is the Dassault’s flight data for the past six months. You see here?”

  “No. It’s gibberish.”

  “Okay. These are airport codes. This is origin and this is destination. So these flights, see the repeated codes? That’s Paris Le Bourget to here, at Ambérieu Air Base 278. Almost every week. That’s Monsieur Loup coming down and going home to Paris.”

  “I see it,” said Flynn. “What are these others?”

  “So there are a few Le Bourget to London City, and a few to Berlin. This one is to Oslo. And this one? I don’t know this code.” David looked at a new screen.

  “Teterboro?” he said.

  “New Jersey,” said Flynn. “Possibly a meeting in New York City.”

  David nodded and looked at the screen like he was locking that information away in his memory for future use. Then he returned to the spreadsheet.

  “So there are a couple of others here. This one. The jet came from Paris to Ambérieu, and then went on to Riyadh.”

  “Saudi Arabia?”

  “Oui.”

  “Maybe he does business with the Saudis.”

  “Probably,” said David. “And this one is also via Ambérieu, onto Hong Kong. And this one is Nigeria.”

  "He gets around,” said Gorski.

  “Let me cross check,” said David. He started typing furiously again. For several minutes he typed and read and typed some more. Flynn and Gorski looked around the room. There was a large television and a gaming console, and an expansive view of the airbase from a small balcony.

  “Okay, this is interesting,” said David. Flynn and Gorski turned back to him.

  “I cross-referenced these flights with known databases, news portals and so on.”

  “What does that tell you?” asked Flynn.

  “Well, for this flight, for example. It tells me that his jet flew from Ambérieu to Riyadh and was on the ground for only forty-five minutes, but while it was still somewhere over Saudi airspace, maybe over Jordan, Monsieur Loup was at a black tie dinner in Paris.”

  “So he didn’t go to Riyadh?” asked Gorski. “That is interesting.”

  “But not definitive,” said Flynn. “Other executives might represent him and use the jet,”

  “For a forty-five minute meeting?” said David. “And here’s another. The jet flew all the way to Hong Kong while Loup was riding in an equestrian event in Warendorf, Germany. And this one: Jet in Abuja, Nigeria and Loup in Paris at a gallery opening. And the jet is never on the ground for more than an hour.”

  “Okay, that’s curious,” said Flynn. “But nothing more, not by itself.”

  “What if I check the other aircraft? The Avro?”

  “We know he doesn’t fly in that one,” said Gorski.

  “But where does it go?” David asked himself. Then he tuned out. Flynn and Gorski waited. They were good at waiting. They had done lots of it. All soldiers had. David typed more and read more. Then he pulled up a spreadsheet that looked like the last one.

  “Here’s what I found so far. This aircraft is interesting. It goes to a lot of crazy places. Algeria, Morocco, Côte d'Ivoire. Liberia, Sierra Leone, Azerbaijan, The Philippines.”

  “North and West Africa, former USSR and South East Asia,” said Gorski. “Eclectic.”

  “Or not so,” said David. “Each of those countries has level of internal struggle or war, or they significant energy reserves or diamonds. Or a combination thereof.”

  “Still not definitive,” said Flynn.

  “There’s more,” said David. “You asked about aircraft turning their transponders off? Well this one does.”

  “How do you know?

  “There are incomplete flights here where the Avro takes off from Ambérieu and is tracked on a particular heading but then disappears without a landing ever being logged.”

  “Maybe you don’t have friends with dishes in those places.”

  “No, that’s not it. Other flights are being tracked where the Avro disappears.”

  “Where does this happen?”

  “Here’s one. This flight is tracked over the Caspian Sea, which isn’t a path many flights take, but then it disappears.”

  “Where would the heading take it?”

  “Afghanistan.”

  Gorski glanced at Flynn.

  “And this one’s weird. The Avro flies all the way to Beijing.”

  “Why is that weird?”

  “It’s a short haul aircraft. Range up to three thousand kilometers. It had to refuel twice before reaching Beijing. Surely Loup has access to a bigger aircraft?”

  “But he’s not on it so what does he care? And he does do business in China,” said Flynn.

  “The Avro refueled in Beijing. It didn’t stop there.”

  “Where did it stop?”

  David shrugged. “Don’t know. The transponder was switched off.”

  “Where?”

  “Over the Yellow Sea.”

  “On a heading to where?”

  “Pyongyang, North Korea.”

  Flynn looked at Gorski who was rubbing his head.

  “So he’s going into countries where sanctions are in place,” said Flynn. “Trying to get into business before things open up.”

  “Like Iraq,” said Gorski.

  Flynn nodded and thought of Major Bradshaw, and of flights into Baghdad from Ambérieu-en-Bugey.

  “You said earlier that you knew someone who could find out about flights in 2011,” said Flynn.

  “The data is probably out there. It might take some finding.”

  “So find it. I want to know if that Avro went from here into Iraq in 2011.”

  “Like I said, I don’t think he had the Avro back then. But he may have had something else. I’ll look.”

  They left David to it and sat on the only two spare chairs in the room. Flynn laid back in an Ikea chair that bounced under his weight, and Gorski dropped into a gaming seat that resembled a porcupine in the fetal position. They waited again. The sky was dark outside and there would be no more action at the airfield. It took thirty minutes for David to speak again.

  “So Loup had another aircraft. A Boeing 737-300.”

  “Isn’t that bigger than the Avro?” asked Gorski as he rocked in place.

  “It is. A little too big, I would think. Not designed for this runway. It would have been a close call to get her airborne.”

  “Maybe that’s why he traded in and got the Avro,” said Flynn. “Tell us about the 737.”

  “It didn’t fly much into Ambérieu. Probably because of the size. But it did come in here in 2011. Someone at the aero club had a receiver. It looks like it flew into a place with a code I’m not familiar with. VBC.”

  “Victory Base Complex,” said Flynn. “Baghdad.”

  “Baghdad, that’s right. Is that an airport?”

  “It was the main US base in Iraq, built around the Baghdad airport.”

  David nodded like this was also a new and memorable fact.
“Well, the 737 went there. It also went into Basra.”

  “Interesting.”

  “And there are a couple of flights with the transponder issue. Like they disappeared in midair again.”

  “Disappeared where?”

  “Far eastern Turkey.”

  “On a flight path to where?” asked Gorski.

  “Possibly Northern Iraq,” said David. “But that would involved banking hard to starboard.”

  “And on a direct path?”

  “Iran,” said David. “Tehran, to be exact.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  They drove back to the farm in darkness. Flynn and Gorski were both deep in thought. About flights into Iraq, and flights into Iran, and shipments that had come overland from Iran into the south of Iraq, in the days before their operation went horribly wrong and their Legion days came to an abrupt end.

  “So what we know matches what your American major found out,” said Gorski.

  “It does. He knew flights were coming in from Ambérieu-en-Bugey. And now we know that an aircraft big enough to get to Iraq was a 737 owned by Jean Loup.”

  Enough evidence for you?”

  Flynn sighed. “It is. I’m still not keen on collateral damage.”

  “That’s our SOP,” said Gorski. “No outside casualties, if avoidable.”

  “I count his security detail.”

  Gorski shook his head. “You think they don’t know who they’re working for? They picked a side. The wrong side.”

  Flynn said nothing in reply. He wasn’t sure how far he would go. If fired upon, all best were off. But the first shot?

  They arrived back to the farm and smelled the grilling meat immediately. The scent of steaks and sausages made them both hungry. They found Elyse out by the goat barn. The refugees were out in the night, getting some air. Children played in the pen area, careful not the roam.

  Monsiuer Betesh, the man who had lost his wife and sister, was tending the meat. The trestle table had been brought outside and Monsieur Pepard was cutting bread and putting it into a bowl. There was cheese and cured meats and olives.

  Elyse saw them and offered them a smile. She had a glass of wine in her hand.

  “Just in time.”

  One of the Syrian women approached Elyse and gestured that she wished to say something to Flynn and Gorski.