Corsair

by Clive Cussler

  Fifteen minutes later, they moved around a sharp rise in the topography and came across the first bit of wreckage. It was a mangled piece of aluminum the size of a trash-can lid—a section of a wing, perhaps. An aviation expert would have identified it as part of the hatch that covered the 737’s front gear assembly.

  Juan looked up the slope and saw it was littered with debris. In the distance, three-quarters of the way to the hill’s summit, lay the largest section of the aircraft’s fuselage. It looked to him like the aftermath of a tornado, where bits of some poor family’s house lay scattered in no discernible order.

  There was no denying the savagery of the impact. Apart from the fifty-foot length of charred fuselage, most of the chunks of metal and plastic were no bigger than the first they had come across. The ground has been torn up by the crash, leaving huge scars in the earth. The explosion of aviation kerosene had scorched most of the area as if a forest fire had passed by, only here there were no trees.

  During their approach, the wind had been at their back, so they couldn’t smell the stench of fuel. Now it lay heavy in the air, making breathing difficult. All four tied cloth around their noses and mouths in an effort to filter the worst of it.

  They fanned out as they searched the scene. Mark was taking digital photographs of some of the larger pieces, focusing in on where the metal had torn. He took several of the sheared-off bolts that had once secured a row of seats to the cabin floor. He had already looked around in vain for the tail section, the part he and Eric Stone had suspected had come apart and caused the crash. If they were right, it would be miles from here.

  “Chairman,” Linda called. She was off to the left near the mangled remains of one of the plane’s CFM International engines.

  He was at her side in a moment. She pointed silently at the ground.

  Juan looked closer. Half buried in the dirt was a severely burned human hand. It was little more than a twisted claw, but judging by the size it was male. Cabrillo snapped on a pair of latex gloves and bent over the severed member. From his knapsack, he took out a plastic tube. He popped open one end and extended a swab. He took a sample of blood from the ragged tear along the wrist and resealed the evidence-collection tube. He then slipped off the wedding band from the third finger and examined the inscription inside.

  He handed it to Linda. She took it and read the inscription aloud. “FXM and JCF 5/15/88.” She gave him a steady gaze. “Francis Xavier Maguire and Jennifer Catherine Foster. Married May fifteenth, 1988. I studied the crew and passenger manifest. He was on Katamora’s Secret Service detail.”

  Any hope Juan had harbored that Secretary Katamora was still alive evaporated. It wasn’t that he had seen anything suspicious in the satellite photographs. It was his own desire to see something that had tricked him into believing. As final confirmation, Linc approached, his expression dark.

  “I found a partial identification tag on the port engine. The serial number checks out. This was their plane.” He laid a meaty hand on Cabrillo’s shoulder. “Sorry.”

  Juan felt as though he’d been kicked in the gut. He was well aware of the global implications of her death. He also knew that until a team of experts arrived they would never know the cause of the crash. The evidence was so badly damaged that he considered calling off their search. Their very presence here could contaminate the site for the group from the NTSB. But he had a contract to fulfill with Langston Overholt, and Cabrillo wasn’t one to leave a job half finished no matter how futile.

  “Okay,” he finally said. “We’ll keep getting samples. But be very careful.”

  He looked down at his feet. All of them wore shoes with no tread on the soles. They were leaving no footprints. He replaced the wedding band on the amputated hand and made sure it was in the exact position in which they’d found it.

  Mark had already gone ahead to the large section of fuselage, so the three of them followed suit. The length of cabin ran from just aft of the cockpit and included half of the area where the wings attached to the aircraft. On the port side, where there would normally be a row of windows, the fuselage was torn open, so the aluminum bent inward like a long, obscene, lipless mouth. Severed wires and hydraulic lines dangled from the aircraft, and fluid had leaked from some of them to stain the rocky soil.

  Beyond it, farther up the hill, was the shattered remains of the cockpit. The nose of the aircraft was punched in for a good eight feet, so the metal skin resembled the accordion joint of a tandem bus.

  Juan climbed up into the fuselage. What once had been an opulent cabin befitting a cabinet secretary was now nothing but ruin. Puddles of melted plastic pooled all along the floor. Seats were identifiable only because of their metal frames.

  He did a quick count and totaled up eleven corpses. Like the Secret Service agent’s hand, they were burned beyond recognition. They were just genderless piles of charred flesh. No clothing remained, and because of the violence of the crash they lay scattered haphazardly. The stench of cooked meat and putrefaction was strong enough to overpower the smell of aviation fuel. The drone of flies rose and fell as they scattered and resettled when Juan moved from body to body.

  The sudden jet of nausea-induced saliva forced him to swallow hard.

  Mark Murphy was on his hands and knees peering under one of the burned-up club chairs with a miniature flashlight clamped between his teeth. Despite the grisly surroundings—or maybe because of them—he was humming to himself.

  “Mr. Murphy,” Juan said, “if you don’t mind . . .”

  The Chairman’s voice startled Mark up from where he was working. He pulled the flashlight from his mouth. “This has got to be the best con job I have ever seen.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “The crash site is bogus, Juan. Someone’s been here before us and tampered with the evidence.”

  “Are you sure? It looks about how I’d expect.”

  “Oh, the crash is legit all right. This is Fiona Katamora’s plane, but someone has been fooling around with it.”

  Juan settled down on his haunches so he was eye level with Murphy. “Convince me.”

  Instead of addressing the Chairman, Mark called over to Linc. “You notice it yet?”

  “What are you talking about?” Linc replied. “I notice a seriously messed-up airplane and some bodies that I’ll be seeing in my night-mares for the rest of my life.”

  Mark said, “Take that rag off your face and sniff.”

  “No way, man.”

  “Do it.”

  “You are one squirrelly dude,” Linc said, but lowered his bandanna and took a tentative breath. Detecting something, he breathed in deeper. A spark of recognition widened his eyes. “I’ll be damned. You’re right.”

  “What is it?” Juan asked.

  “You wouldn’t recognize it because I doubt very much you ever came across it during your CIA days, and neither would Linda because the Navy doesn’t use it.”

  “Use what?”

  “Jellied gasoline.”

  “Huh?”

  “Like napalm,” Linc said.

  Mark nodded at the former SEAL. “Most likely, a good old-fashioned flamethrower. Here’s the scenario as I see it. They somehow forced the plane to land somewhere inside Libyan territory and took the Secretary off. Then they flew it here and intentionally crashed it into this mountain, using either a retrofitted remote-controlled system or, more likely, a suicide pilot.

  “When they came up here to make sure everything’s okay and remove any trace of said pilot, they discovered the cabin hadn’t burned as much as they’d like, so they squirted it with a flamethrower. If we hadn’t come along the smell would have dissipated and would have been undetectable. The anomaly would only have shown up when the guys from the NTSB analyzed their samples under a gas chromatograph and discovered traces other than aviation fuel.”

  “You’re both sure?” Juan asked, looking from one man to the other.

  Linc nodded. “It’s like the perfume of your first girlfri
end.”

  “She must have been something,” Linda quipped.

  “Nah, it’s one of those smells you never forget.”

  Juan felt like he was being given a second chance. His earlier pessimism sloughed off, and he felt a charge of energy surging through his body. And then he had another thought, and his mood soured. “Wait a second. What evidence do you have that the plane landed before the crash?”

  “That should be in the landing gear. Follow me.”

  As a group, they climbed down out of the fuselage and clambered into the dim cargo area below the passenger cabin. It reeked of burned fuel, but they didn’t have to contend with the smell of what a couple days in the desert did to the bodies. Mark went unerringly to an access panel set into the floor. He popped the toggles and heaved the hatch open on its long piano hinge. Below lay the large tires and truck of the 737’s portside landing strut. Everything looked remarkably well, considering.

  Murph jumped down into the well and played his flashlight beam on one of the tires. He crawled all the way around it, his eyes inches from the rubber.

  “Nothing,” he muttered, and hunkered even lower to check the other wheel.

  He popped up a minute later, holding up a small piece of rock as if it were the Hope Diamond. “Here’s your proof.”

  “A stone?” Linda queried.

  “A piece of sandstone wedged into the tread. And there’s sand on the bottom of the lower hatch.” When he saw the look of confusion on the faces peering down at him, he added, “This plane supposedly took off from Andrews Air Force Base, flew to London, and then crashed, right? Where in the heck could it have picked up a lump of sandstone that looks exactly like every lump of rock for a thousand miles around us?”

  “It landed in the desert,” Juan said. “Murph, you did it. That is the proof.”

  Juan slipped the stone into his breast pocket. “In case the NTSB guys miss it, this needs to be analyzed to be certain, but I’d call it a smoking gun.”

  The sound came out of nowhere, and all four ducked instinctively as a large helicopter roared directly overhead. It was so low that its rotor wash kicked up a maelstrom of dust.

  It had come in from the northeast, most likely a Libyan military base outside of Tripoli, and had to have flown nap-of-the-earth to avoid detection by the Navy’s AWACS planes. That was why no one had called in a warning. As it began to slow into a landing hover, they could see it was a big Russian-built Mi-8 cargo chopper, capable of carrying nearly five tons. Its turbines changed pitch as it neared the top of the hill about five hundred yards from the truncated fuselage.

  “You want further proof they know about this crash site?” Mark asked, and pointed at the khaki-painted helo. “That sucker knew right where he was headed.”

  “Come on.” Juan started toward the rear of the cargo hold. “Let’s find cover before the dust settles around their chopper.”

  They crawled through the fuselage and jumped to the ground on the far side. There was little natural cover near the remnants of the aircraft, so they ran down the slope until they came across a narrow dry wash that had served to drain rainwater off the mountain aeons ago. When everyone was settled, Juan buried them under a thin layer of sand and heaped as much onto himself as possible. Their view wasn’t the best, but they were far enough away he doubted anyone from the chopper would wander by.

  “What do you think’s going on?” Mark asked in a whisper.

  “I haven’t the foggiest,” Juan replied. “Linda? Linc?”

  “No clue,” Linc rumbled.

  “Maybe someone realized their little stage setting isn’t as good as they thought,” Linda said, “and they’ve come back to tweak it.”

  Up at the summit, the turbines spooled into silence and the big rotor began to slow. In moments it was beating the air no harder than a ceiling fan. The large clamshell doors under the tail boom split open and men began to emerge. They wore matching desert-camouflage uniforms, and their heads were covered in red-and-white kaffiyehs, the wraparound scarves favored by Islamic militants throughout the Middle East.

  “Regular army or guerillas?” Linc asked.

  Juan watched for nearly a minute before answering. “Judging by how they’re milling around, I’d say irregulars. Real soldiers would have been ordered into a parade formation by now. Just don’t ask me what they’re doing in a chopper with Libyan military markings.”

  To add more confusion to the situation, two men backed out of the helicopter, drawing on the reins of a camel. The dromedary fought them on shaky legs, growling at the men and spitting. Then it vomited onto one of its handlers, a copious display of what it thought of the flight. Laughter drifted down to the Corporation team.

  “What the hell are they doing with that thing?” Mark asked. “It looks half dead.”

  Juan was no judge of camels, though he’d ridden them a few times, and while he preferred horses he hadn’t found the experiences too bad. He did have to agree. Even at this distance, the animal didn’t look healthy. Its coat was uneven and dull, and its hump was half of what it should be.

  He had a suspicion about what was taking place but held his tongue and watched the events unfold.

  After a few more minutes, the twenty or so men descended on the debris field. The two with the camel led it aimlessly over the area, tracking back and forth, laying fresh tracks over old so it would appear there had been more than one animal. It wasn’t until Cabrillo realized that some of the men wore leather sandals that he was certain what was going on.

  “Linda’s right. They don’t think the crash site will stand up under a thorough forensic review. They’re contaminating it by pretending to be a group of nomads who wandered by.”

  They watched for nearly an hour as the men systematically trashed everything they could lay their hands on. They beat on the debris with sledgehammers, yanked out hundreds of yards of charred wiring, and moved chunks of the aircraft so nothing lay in proper relation to the rest. They got at the plane’s big tires by prying open the landing gear doors and shot them flat with pistols. They also hauled parts of the plane up to the helicopter. When the helicopter was full, it flew off with a couple of the men and then returned twenty minutes later. Juan assumed they had dumped the detritus farther into the desert.

  What had been a confusing jumble of aluminum, plastic, and steel but would have been recognizable to crash experts was now completely ruined. They went so far as to dismember and then bury the bodies in several unmarked graves, and make a couple of cooking fires as though nomads had camped here for a few days. When they were finished with the camel, one of the men shot it between the eyes.

  Finally, it looked as though they were about finished up. Several men scattered in different directions, presumably to find some privacy to relieve themselves before their return flight back to their base.

  Juan turned to his team. “Here’s what I want you to do. Get back to the Pig and make for the Tunisian border, but don’t head for the coast right away. Wait for me to make contact through Max on the Oregon. Tell him what we’ve discovered and make sure he tracks me.”

  All Corporation operatives had tracking chips surgically implanted in their legs. The chip used the body’s own energy as a power source, though it required an occasional transdermal recharge. Utilizing GPS technology, the chips could be localized to within a couple dozen yards.

  “What are you doing?” Linda asked.

  “I’m going with them.”

  “We don’t even know who they are.”

  “Exactly why I’m going.”

  One of the masked men was coming to within a hundred yards of where they crouched. He was roughly the same height and build as Cabrillo, which had given him the idea. Juan’s normally blond hair had been dyed dark, and he wore brown contacts. With his fluency in Arabic and the kaffiyeh covering his features, he might just pull off the switch.

  He tossed the Pig’s keys to Linc and had started to slide back from their concealed position when Linda grab
bed his arm. “What do we do with the guy?”

  “Leave him. I have a feeling the Libyan government is going to announce they’ve located the crash site within the next twenty-four hours. Pretty soon, this place will be crawling with people. Let him explain what the hell he’s doing here.”

  With that, Cabrillo slipped away. Crawling on his elbows, he covered the distance to the unsuspecting man in under a minute. It helped that the distant helicopter’s turbines were beginning to turn over with a whine keen enough to set his teeth on edge.

  Screened from the others behind a hillock, Juan waited for the man to finish his business before rushing the last few yards. The man’s back was turned, and just as he started to stand upright and reach to pull up his trousers Cabrillo struck him in the back of the head with a fist-sized stone. He’d recalled the Somali he’d struck in a similar fashion less than a week earlier and put enough behind the blow to collapse the Libyan in the dust.

  Juan nodded to himself when he felt a pulse at the man’s throat and started stripping off his clothes. Fortunately, the man was one of the few wearing boots. They would hide the shining titanium struts of his artificial leg. Removing the kaffiyeh revealed an average-looking guy in his late twenties or early thirties. There was nothing about his features to make Juan think he wasn’t Libyan, though he couldn’t be positive. There was no wallet in his uniform pockets or any other means of identification. The clothes didn’t even have labels.

  Cabrillo dragged the unconscious man farther from the crash site, and made certain his own satellite phone was secure behind his back. Without it, he never would have considered what he was doing. Then he waited, though not for long. Someone began shouting, bellowing over the roar of the chopper’s engines.

  “Mohammad! Mohammad! Come on!”