by Ward Larsen
Slaton rushed down and rolled him over. The man was out cold, his breathing shallow and ragged. Slaton performed a quick pat down but found no ID, nor any weapon besides the one that had bounded down the stairwell. He also noted a lack of body armor. They’d known he would be unarmed. A comm device was clipped to the man’s belt, a unit Slaton didn’t recognize with controls labeled in English. It looked damaged and he left it where it was. Then he found something more useful—on the man’s inner bicep, a familiar tattoo. A swooping, long-winged bird of prey with a lightning bolt in its talons. Polish Special Forces—GROM.
The breathing stopped, and in the next moment he heard a sound from below. Reinforcements had arrived. Slaton strained to see down the darkened stairwell. The man’s gun was nowhere in sight. Ignoring the burn in his thigh, he ran back out to the roof. A siren blared in the distance, the police responding. He doubled back in the direction he’d come, retracing his steps, loose stones and broken bits of tile scattering as he ran. It was a counterintuitive move, and not without risk. Mdina was a classic fortress, hundred-foot walls and gated entrances, an ideal design for repelling marauding Byzantines. Yet as with any such defense, once the bastions are breached the fortress becomes a trap.
At the roof’s end he looked straight down and saw what he wanted—twenty feet to his left, a second-floor balcony. They were common in the otherwise flat-faced tenements, added by noblemen over the centuries as platforms from which available daughters could be advertised for marriage. Slaton slipped over the roof’s edge, hung briefly by his fingertips, and dropped ten feet to the balcony. The next fall was slightly more, and he landed on the cobbled street in a parachutist’s landing, bent knees followed by a roll onto his left hip and side. He ran east, away from the building where he imagined his pursuers were cautiously climbing stairs and clearing rooms.
He was wrong.
Thirty meters ahead, at the next corner in the medieval maze, he saw one of the squat twins. The man spotted him immediately, and after a frozen moment Slaton turned. The man with the glasses was behind him, reaching into a shoulder holster.
Cut off in both directions, there was only one option—he sprinted up a staircase that led to an observation deck. The overlook was empty, no lingering tourists appreciating the glittering jewels of Malta at dusk. Slaton veered right, and where the deck ended he mounted a two-foot-wide ledge that topped the outer bastion. A sheer stone wall vaulted upward on his right, and to the left was simply a black precipice. Arms outstretched for balance, he traversed the granite ledge like a man on a high wire.
A bend in the wall approached, and Slaton knew what lay beyond—the patio of a popular restaurant, a sea of comfortable wooden chairs and square tables under candy-striped umbrellas. He had dined there some months ago, a lazy Sunday with pasta and bread, a steaming espresso his companion afterward. He remembered looking out over the island on that bright autumn day and seeing all the way to Sicily. Now he saw only distant lights and blackness, felt a chill wind swirling.
Rounding the bend, the restaurant was there. The place was alive: waiters scurrying beneath strings of naked bulbs, early diners waiting for meals and drinking down bottles of the harsh house red. He rushed past a waiter who was furling patio umbrellas, cranking them closed one by one as the sun had given way to stars. Slaton jumped down from the wall, ran inside, and skidded to a stop near the maître d’ station. Diners and servers looked at him uneasily, and a hush fell about the place.
The realization struck too late—from his earlier visit he recalled crates of greens and wine being wheeled in through the front door. Which meant there was no back door. He looked through the entrance and saw a street bordered by old revetments—the restaurant had been wedged neatly into an otherwise dysfunctional corner of the district. He spotted two familiar silhouettes trotting up the street, alert and purposeful. The only other way out was the way he’d arrived, the narrow ledge that was certainly covered.
Slaton was trapped, and reckoned he had a ten-second window. He saw white bulbs and brightly colored canvas. Stone walls and a black night. He saw a hundred eyes fixed on him.
Ten seconds.
The rest of his life if he didn’t do something.
THREE
The man with the glasses was on the ledge, his gun level as he approached the bend where his target had disappeared. His name was Ben-Meir, and he cursed with each step along the precarious bastion wall. Finger on the trigger, he rounded the corner and was surprised to see a busy restaurant. His target was nowhere in sight.
Keeping to the shadows, he bent his chin toward his tactical microphone. “Position.”
“Near the restaurant entrance,” said his second-in-command, a Bulgarian named Radko.
Radko’s partner, who’d been in charge of mission planning and was thus the most familiar with the city’s layout, added, “I recognize the place—there’s no back door. I repeat, no back door!”
Ben-Meir cursed again, this time more loudly. “Does anyone see him?”
A long pause, then two negative replies.
They had their man surrounded, his back to a wall. Not good. Ben-Meir had wanted to finish things quickly and cleanly, but the mission had proved costly and taken far longer than it should have. He activated his transmit switch.
“Pull back!”
He had no sooner unkeyed the transmit switch when he heard a loud crash and a chorus of screams.
“Pull back! Pull back!” he repeated.
It happened in a flash. Near the outer wall a bolt of movement and color. In a defensive instinct, Ben-Meir shifted his weapon to the spot. His target was there, a blur in the transition between the restaurant’s bright lights and the darkness beyond. He seemed to be clinging to something, and then, incredibly, the man in his sights flew over the rampart ledge and into the black void beyond.
Ben-Meir fired once, a certain miss as gravity accelerated the crazy, cartwheeling silhouette into the night sky. He ran into the restaurant while patrons bolted toward the exit. Ben-Meir knocked aside an empty table in his scramble toward the ledge, and to compound the confusion he waved his gun and yelled, “Police! Police! Everyone out!” It might buy thirty seconds.
At the ledge he leaned over and looked down, but saw only a void, the lights all around spoiling his night vision. He did, however, hear a series of crashes that rang like muted gunshots. Then a more imperative sound from behind—a fast-approaching siren. With one last look down, he ordered the egress.
* * *
It was fifteen minutes later, with their car withdrawing quietly through the Mdina gate, that Ben-Meir and his team realized how badly things had gone. Kieras was dead, and there had not been time to recover his body. He’d been the youngest and most fit of the lot. Not the most lethal, perhaps, but a good fighter all the same. Radko had found him in the stairwell, and while there was nothing to be done, it never sat well with soldiers to leave comrades behind. Ben-Meir would at least not have to notify Kieras’ next of kin—a minor consolation of commanding an off-the-books army.
“How could this have happened?” said Radko.
“Shut up,” said an irritated Ben-Meir. “It’s our own fault. We knew he was good.”
“Apparently not good enough. You saw how it ended—our mission failed in the worst way. What will we report?”
“I said shut up!” roared Ben-Meir. “We report nothing until we’re sure.”
The ensuing ride was short and silent, weaving through Howard Gardens before a loop around the city to the north. The driver pulled onto a gravel siding where the road reached its nearest point to the calamity. Ben-Meir and Radko got out, and from the lower elevation they jogged a kilometer uphill to the foot of the bastion walls. They had no trouble finding the spot—the restaurant above was lit like a carnival—but they were stunned by what they didn’t find. The body of their target was nowhere to be seen.
“I don’t understand,” said Radko. “No one could survive a fall like that.”
Ben-Meir cupped a hand over his chin, but said nothing. In the spill from the lights forty yards above, he saw something on the ground. He moved closer, recalling the flash of color as their quarry had gone spinning over the wall. One of the big red-and-white patio umbrellas from the restaurant lay on the ground. Partially open, most of the fabric had been ripped from its bent frame, and metal rods jutted out at odd angles.
His lieutenant looked on with disbelief. “He jumped from a cliff and survived by holding that? The man is suicidal, I tell you.”
The commander scanned the ground with his flashlight and found branches that appeared freshly broken, one as thick as his arm. He shifted the beam upward, into a thick bay tree, and followed from top to bottom where the arboreal gauntlet had been run.
“No,” he argued. “To stay above, from his point of view—that would have been suicidal.” He reached down and picked up the bent aluminum frame. “This? This was a calculated risk. The umbrella alone would never stop his fall. Yet if he knew the trees were here, and if he could jump out far enough to find them. Ten meters, no more. The only question would be holding onto the thing during its run through the branches. That would require a certain … tenacity.”
The two exchanged a look, and the lieutenant said, “We need to be careful with this one.”
“We were careful—now Kieras is dead.”
Ben-Meir bent down and examined the fabric strips that had been torn from the umbrella. He was studying a bloody smear when voices from above drew his attention. He looked up to see a policeman in the half-light leaning over the granite ledge, next to him a waiter pointing downward.
“Come,” he said, snapping off his flashlight and turning back toward the road on a fast walk, “there is nothing more for us here.”
The driver set a brisk, professional pace, and the city fell behind them. In the front seat, Ben-Meir studied a map of the area on a tablet computer. “This is useless—he could have gone anywhere.” He addressed Radko’s partner, Stanev, who’d been their primary shooter. “You are certain you hit him?”
“No doubt,” the man said. “I saw him react. He was limping afterward.”
Ben-Meir stared at the empty map display. He removed his glasses, pinched the bridge of his nose, and took out his phone. He placed a call that was picked up immediately.
“Well?”
“We reached him,” said Ben-Meir, “only things didn’t go completely as planned. He got the better of our point man.”
“Were you able to clean it up?”
“No. There was no time to retrieve the body.”
A pause. “And your target—where is he?”
Ben-Meir looked at the topographical image of Malta on his laptop, thinking it looked bigger than ever. “We don’t know.”
“How can that be?”
“I don’t know—there could be any number of reasons. We cornered him perfectly and scored a hit, but then he started taking chances. At the end he jumped off a goddamned cliff.”
“A cliff?”
“He survived, but he’s definitely injured.”
“Badly?”
“I can’t say.”
Another pause, then, “This wasn’t what we intended.”
Ben-Meir thought silence the best option.
“All right,” said the distant voice, “assuming his injuries are not severe, there is still a chance. We know where he has to go. Be ready—and next time make no mistakes.”
FOUR
Situated halfway between Manaus and Belém in northern Brazil, the Santarém–Maestro Wilson Fonseca Airport was carved from the forest in the early 1970s. Designed and funded by the Brazilian Air Force, it was intended as a replacement for the original airfield—ten acres of crumbling asphalt that was eventually rehabilitated into a clumsily conceived commercial district, the wide runway becoming a street that could have supported ten lanes of traffic, and the tall control tower transformed into a neon-dressed advertisement for a disreputable nightclub.
In the intervening decades, the new and improved Santarém airfield had not risen to meet expectations. Never more than the fortieth busiest airport in Brazil, it today offers a meager schedule of flights from small airlines and air taxi operators, and manages an anemic flow of air cargo. The facility does, however, hold at least one unique claim—it is the only airport in the world named after a Brazilian operatic composer.
From another perspective, the new Santarém airport can be likened to many others in the Amazon basin—it is home to a rusting boneyard of forgotten aircraft. Like a collection of flightless birds—twelve if one were to count—they stand in varying degrees of decomposition on crumbling back lots. The oldest is little more than a steel tube with a tail—a Boeing 727 by consensus opinion—that had thirty years before slid off the notoriously slippery runway during a fierce microburst, and ended with its nosewheel sunk in three feet of muck on the southern bank of the Amazon River. All the aircraft here have stories, most far less dramatic and involving the collapse of one ill-managed airline or another. In more economically developed countries such surplus aircraft exist as a managed commodity, mothballed by airlines and lessors in desert airfields, valuable components like engines and avionics sealed and preserved for their value on the global spare parts market. In Santarém, however, a place strung by a bureaucratic jungle no less dense than the surrounding rain forest, these orphaned aircraft are largely left to rot in the torrid heat and tropical rain, their sleek shells assailed by mildew, nesting birds, and that most deadly of all infestations—corrosion.
From a distance the two men walking across the weed-corrupted tarmac could not have been more alike. Both wore loose trousers and billowing shirts under the heavy afternoon sun. Both were slim and of average height, and on the lee side of fifty, this last point upheld by like crops of dark hair edged in gray. In every other aspect, the two men could not have been more different.
Umberto Donato was the airport caretaker. He was a lifelong resident of Santarém who had only once traveled outside the city, nine years ago taking a tour of the Santos headquarters of BAM Airlines, during a rare interval of corporate largesse and expansion, spending two afternoons at the airline’s general offices learning about flight operations, and two evenings in a nearby bordello overlooking his marriage vows. Umberto was responsible for the airport grounds, to include whatever drove in from town, crawled out of the forest, and fell from the sky. For a facility that covered nine square miles, plus or minus, it was no small task. He saw to it that the grass was cut, the trash cans emptied, and the vagrants booted. He’d implemented a system to have illegally parked cars towed, and made sure that the remains of flattened caimans and pythons were promptly removed from the steam-shrouded runway. And when people abandoned airliners on the fringes of his domain, Umberto’s job was to look after them—at least, as best he could given his laughable budget.
Umberto Donato was Brazilian, mostly honest, and a man who held few grievances with life. The man walking beside him was none of those things.
He had arrived this afternoon on the 1:15 flight from Brasília which, by an evident act of blessed providence, had been ten minutes early. In the air-conditioned passenger terminal the man had introduced himself as Gianni Petrecca, and produced an Italian passport to that effect. He spoke Portuguese with an accent Umberto supposed was Italian. His black hair and dark shadow of beard were decidedly Mediterranean. Gianni said he was from Naples, and that he was both a pilot and a broker of used aircraft, none of which the Brazilian had any reason to doubt. Indeed, after five minutes of conversation, Umberto was sure the man knew something about airplanes.
“Is it always like this?” the Italian asked, wiping sweat from his forehead with a shirtsleeve.
“Only in summer,” said a smiling Umberto, before adding, “but of course, here there is no other season.”
With Umberto in the lead, the two men skirted a little-used taxiway on the airport’s east side and approached the aircraft in question. It was situated
on the largest parking apron, a square pocket of asphalt the size of a soccer field that pushed insolently into the forest. The pad was surrounded on three sides by walls of vegetation, waxen green leaves the size of doormats and thick vines that seemed like arteries, binding everything into a single living organism.
The airplane looked better than most of Santarém’s sky-tramps. It had all its engines, wheels, and entry doors, and the exterior access panels appeared to be in place, although a few hung open, waving limply in the moist air that was stirring on schedule. Two reflective panels in the cockpit windshield gave the impression that the jet was taking a nap behind blinders. All these details, however, were overshadowed by one overwhelming highlight—before them was the largest aircraft ever to land at Maestro Wilson Fonseca Airport by a factor of two.
“Yes,” Gianni said, “it looks like the photograph in the listing. How long has it been on the market?”
“Only two weeks,” said Umberto. “The airport has only recently taken legal possession.”
“Nine hundred thousand U.S.—that is a lot to ask. I understand it will need a D-check soon. Heavy maintenance for such aircraft is very expensive. More than your asking price.”
“But she is a low-cycle airframe,” Umberto countered, parroting what he’d been told to say by the city fathers, even if he wasn’t sure what it meant. “Another four to six years of use, depending on how hard she is flown.” She, Umberto thought. Yes, that’s very good.
Gianni seemed unconvinced.
“I am not authorized to discuss financial matters,” said Umberto, “yet there is always room for compromise.” He did, in fact, have some knowledge of the negotiations, which were being overseen by Santarém’s município, or community council. A broker from Brasília, well-versed in resale markets, had been consulted, and he explained that each month the jet didn’t sell lowered its value in the neighborhood of 3 percent.
“What is the history of the craft?” the Italian asked.