by Ward Larsen
The meager results were fed up the chain of command, rumors swirling that it rose all the way to the White House. All anyone could say for sure was that within thirty minutes of the day’s last progress report being sent up, a second order came down.
Everyone was to stay the night and keep looking.
FORTY-ONE
The crane ratcheted to a noisy stop at the side of a dirt path, shattering what had been a still and silent night in the western foothills of the Lebanon Mountains. Smoke hissed from its stubby exhaust, creating an eerie shroud in the shine of headlights from the dump truck following behind.
Mohammed Jalil stepped down from his crane to meet the man who had hired him. Jalil’s eldest son, who was driving the dump truck, stayed respectfully in place.
“All right,” Mohammed said, “we are ready.”
His employer for the evening, who’d been standing in the dark waiting, looked at him with concern. “You are late,” he said.
“There was a minor technical issue,” Mohammed replied. “Everything is working now.”
“Can you still have the job done one hour before sunrise?” The man was old and Christian, and therefore doubly cantankerous, but Mohammed was in no mood to argue. The old man was the leader of the Hamat village council, while Mohammed hailed from Batroun, four kilometers south. There had been divisions between the villages for a thousand years, but none of their fathers’ squabbles mattered tonight. Mohammed was a simple man in a simple business, and when people paid cash in advance he easily put aside that he was an occasional Muslim.
“Of course,” he replied. “Six hours is more than enough. Do you care what I do with the scrap?”
The man seemed to consider it. “Do what you will. The only stipulation is that you carry it at least three kilometers from here.”
“Three kilometers?”
“Is that a problem?” asked the village elder.
“Not at all,” said Mohammed. “But it is an unusual request. I can only wonder why the people of Hamat are being so particular. This thing has been rotting away here for twenty years. Now it must be dealt with under the cover of darkness, and the remains taken far away?”
“These restrictions were not dictated by the people of my village. We both know this airplane was left here long ago by the government. It has been forgotten since your son was a boy, and the liars in Beirut—they would leave it here until Jesus rises again. No one cares that it is an eyesore, or that our children have been hurt trying to climb inside. Twice we have sealed the doors and windows shut … but time has its way.”
Both men regarded the massive jet that loomed like a mountain in the darkness before them. Something of a local legend, the aircraft had arrived on an equally black night decades ago—the exact year was the subject of some debate—and had not turned a wheel since. Back then the place was called Wujah Al Hajar Air Base, an outpost of hope and security before the troubles had begun anew. The buildings were nearly gone now, their wooden walls and planked roofs defeated by age and the elements, the remains long ago scavenged for cooking fires. Aside from a handful of cobblestone foundations, the only structure remaining was a single ancient shed with a warped roof, the door long missing. When the Air Force pulled out, the place had been designated hopefully as an international airport, but without funding or flights everything had gone to seed, even the runway deteriorating to the point that the rich kids from the coast had given up using it to drag race their European cars. Only one thing remained to suggest this place had ever been a thriving airfield: the shell of a single old airplane.
It was an American machine, Mohammed knew, something called a Tri-Star. Its engines had long ago been salvaged, and one wing drooped as if the bones inside were cracked. All the low-hanging aluminum panels that could be pried free had been pilfered long ago by scrap hounds. The wheels were no more than rusted steel hubs, these surrounded by piles of vulcanized rubber nuggets. Birds nested in any number of openings, leaving their offerings to accent the chipped off-white paint, and the cockpit windows had long ago been smashed out by stone-throwing boys. Adding insult to the once proud jet’s injuries, a black mark on the tail evidenced a lightning strike that had occurred some ten years ago, God having his own say on the matter.
“This thing should have been dealt with long ago,” Mohammed agreed, surveying the old carcass. “Why now?”
“Because someone has given us the money to do it.”
“But not the government, you say?”
The old man spit on the ground. “The government does nothing. A man has paid us in advance.”
“Who is he?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care. He came to us weeks ago and gave us a good wage to do the job in a certain way. ‘On this exact night,’ he tells me, ‘take the pieces at least three kilometers away, and have it done one hour before sunrise.’” The old man shrugged. “Maybe he is one of the princes from the coast, with a castle and a blue swimming pool. Or perhaps he owns land nearby and wants to build a resort, and this beast is blocking his view. Why should I care if he wants it done quietly in the middle of the night? All that matters is that it will finally be done.”
Mohammed nodded. “So be it.”
He went back to the cab of his crane and fired up the diesel. Turning on his work lights, he looked upon his task with a measure of anticipation. He routinely destroyed condemned buildings and razed crumbling barns, yet tonight’s job would require a degree of artistry. To knock things down and tear them apart was often disparaged, seen as little more than a brute’s work. But to do it well, with skill and efficiency—that was something else. Mohammed knew because he had been demolishing things all his life, beginning with a sledgehammer and a wheelbarrow, and graduating over the years to full-blown mechanization. If you took something down the wrong way, he knew, you could damage your equipment, even put your life at risk. At the very least, a proper teardown hastened completion and minimized cleanup, which in turn got you home or to the next job that much more quickly.
The dump truck pulled near and Mohammed lowered his cable. The special attachment, carried in the bed of the truck, was an improvisation—a slab of steel two-inches thick and four meters square. He had taken it from the hull of a merchant ship he’d scrapped years ago, and it had long served in Mohammed’s yard to bridge a gulley in the lot where he parked his equipment. He’d always thought it might prove more useful—and therein lay the artistry. Mohammed needed something special for this job, and a two-ton steel plate seemed just the thing.
When his son had the cable attached, he gave a thumbs-up, and Mohammed raised the boom to its maximum height and rotated everything into place. He started at the left wing, the one that drooped, and waited for the plate, which was spinning slightly, to reach the desired angle. When it looked just right, Mohammed pulled the release lever. The massive steel sheet scythed down cleanly and did its job, a five-meter section of the left wing crashing to the ground.
Mohammed smiled with profound satisfaction. He then maneuvered to his left, raised the metal plate high, and again poised his hand over the release lever.
FORTY-TWO
CB68H landed at Basrah International Airport in Iraq during the lee hours of that same morning. The control tower had been unmanned since ten o’clock the previous night, but as was common, the airfield remained open in a proceed-at-your-own-risk type of operation. In the black of night, the big jet taxied clear of the runway, and on the receiving taxiway a small Toyota pickup flashed its lights, and then pulled in front of the behemoth in the classic manner of an airfield “Follow Me” truck.
The MD-10 did exactly that, and the odd convoy came to a stop minutes later on a remote corner of the airfield. Two fuel trucks were waiting, along with a trailered set of loading stairs, and nearby were a forklift, two pallets of gear, and a tanker truck carrying water. Three people waited to greet the pilots: a grizzled Iraqi who would manage the refueling, a slight Indonesian here to drive the forklift, and a second Iraqi,
slightly built and much younger than the first, who appeared to be in charge.
Everyone worked quickly, and thirty-six minutes after touching Iraqi soil the jet was fully refueled and its cargo loaded. During that time the aircrew was also busy. The copilot mounted a ladder to service the port engine with oil. The captain did his best to hammer shut an access door on the lower fuselage, first using the side of his fist, and then a large rock. The panel, normally used by maintenance to access an unpressurized electronics bay, could simply not be latched in place, and in the end the captain used nearly an entire roll of duct tape to seal it shut.
At the forty-minute point, the copilot went to the flight deck and ran through the preflight checklist. The younger Iraqi also climbed on board, while the captain met with the refueler and the Indonesian at the Toyota.
Fifty-eight minutes after touchdown, CB68H was again lifting into the sky with its crew of two, one passenger, and a peculiar load consisting primarily of water and lead which, even though low in volume, summed a respectable fifty-six thousand pounds. The copilot activated the flight plan by radio, and a generic white blip blossomed on an air traffic control radar screen in the Iraq Civil Aviation Authority’s southern sector. The copilot claimed to be flying a Challenger 600, an aircraft with similar speed and climb performance to an MD-10. According to the filed paperwork, the aircraft was registered to a corporation in Iran, and the destination was listed as Al-Qusayr Airfield in Syria, a former military facility notched near the northeastern corner of Lebanon.
The air traffic controller was familiar with such missions. There had been a constant flow in recent years, humanitarian relief flights from the Middle East and beyond to aid the beleaguered victims of the war. The Challenger was a regular customer, and while Iranian-registered jets usually rounded Iraqi airspace on their goodwill missions, a few paused for technical stops at the airfield in Basrah, a rare instance of cooperation between cranky Mesopotamian neighbors. Indeed, the controller had seen a Challenger arrive at Al-Basrah earlier that evening at the beginning of his seven-hour shift, and so the man only yawned as he passed the flight strip over to the controller working the adjacent sector.
It was roughly at this time, with the blip solidly in radar contact and having been cleared on direct routing, that the navigation lights on CB68H suddenly extinguished. Because the aircraft was twenty-two thousand feet above open desert, no one noticed.
Along the same lines, during the brief time CB68H had been on the ground there was but one person at Basrah International Airport who might have witnessed her stay. His name was Zaid, and he was the night security man. Yet because he was only responsible for what lay inside the terminal building, and because he was in the middle of a flaming row with his girlfriend and busy texting on his phone, Zaid never noticed the big jet’s arrival or departure. Nor did he see, roughly one hour later, a small Challenger business jet that quietly taxied, took off, and made a gentle easterly turn in the general direction of Iran.
Also unknown to Zaid, although he would soon be questioned thoroughly, was the matter of two bodies a mile away that were resting in the bed of a Toyota pickup, freshly executed and fast coming to one with the cool desert night.
* * *
It was two hours before dawn when the Lebanese Navy AMP-145 patrol boat, Saida, caught up with the shadow it had been chasing all night. They intercepted the Cypriot-flagged tuna boat, Kosmos, to find it trailing a wandering arc eight miles offshore and running at full throttle, this evident by a stream of black soot belching from her exhaust and explosions of white spray at her bow, all highlighted in reflections of drawn moonlight.
Saida paralleled the fishing boat’s irregular course for ten minutes. She sounded her siren and followed established protocol by issuing verbal warnings using both radio and bullhorn, all while her searchlight danced a galloping pattern over the longliner’s old wooden hull.
There was no response, and Saida’s skipper, Commander Armin Gemayel, watched in amazement as Kosmos’ crew ignored their warnings and continued an erratic course. The little ship battered mercilessly through a rising southwestern swell, sheets of spray flying over her decks. With the twelve-mile limit looming, and Saida herself taking a beating, Gemayel lost his patience and gave an order that surprised everyone. The patrol boat moved closer to issue a final radio warning, and when nothing happened the forward deck gun crew opened fire.
In a testament to either the crew’s marksmanship or good fortune, the second round issued struck a fatal blow to Kosmos’ engine. The steady stream of black from her funnel became a torrent, and soon the old ship was bobbing listlessly on a choppy sea.
The boarding process was quick and efficient, and when the all-clear was given after ten minutes, Commander Gemayel followed his advance party aboard. By that time a woozy George Demitriou had been cut free of his bindings and was sitting with his back against a side wall. The Lebanese officer hovered over him.
“Where is this Israeli spy you promised me?”
Rubbing his reddened wrists, Demitriou jabbed a thumb toward the bow. The commander made his way forward, and on the starboard foredeck he saw an empty clamshell container the size of a barrel. It was orange and white in color—and quite empty.
An angry Gemayel stormed back to the wheelhouse. “He went ashore in your life raft?”
Demitriou gestured to his swollen temple. A large knot had risen and blood matted his thinning hair. “What could I do? The man is dangerous—he took me by surprise.”
“Where did he go ashore?”
“South of Tripoli … Batroun perhaps. I can’t say for sure. When I got my senses back Kosmos was running seaward.”
Gemayel was livid. At this point he had few options. He could tow Kosmos into the naval base, but a Cypriot tuna scow and her bruised skipper were hardly a prize. Worse yet, if he turned Demitriou in to the thugs of GDGS, Lebanon’s ruthless intelligence service, they would interrogate him properly. Under duress Demitriou would certainly divulge the insertion of an Israeli spy into their country, not to mention the relationship he kept with a certain midgrade naval officer who was fresh into his new command, and who had effectively allowed the Israeli to slip through after being forewarned.
One of Gemayel’s men came from below and spoke quietly into his ear. More bad news. Not only had Demitriou botched the rendezvous, but he wasn’t even carrying anything worth appropriating. No drugs, no guns, no money. Unable to hold back, Gemayel kicked the toe of his boot into Demitriou’s good temple.
“Your father and mine knew how to do business,” he snarled. “During Chamoun and the insurrection, they knew how to make a profit while keeping out of trouble. Clearly you did not inherit this gene. Don’t ever come near my waters again without the tax!”
The boarding party loaded into their inflatables and crossed back to Saida.
George Demitriou stood slowly, his stance wavering, more from his spinning head than the rough seas. He watched the naval boat churn away, and when it was a hundred yards distant, he reared back and spit a mouthful of blood toward the ship and her mother country.
Just as his father had done so many years ago.
FORTY-THREE
“Maybe this airplane really did crash,” said an analyst to Sorensen as they went over the latest reports.
Davis, who was officially part of the hunt now, had staked out a comfortable leather armchair for the night. He said, “There was no crash. We’re just not looking in the right place.”
The air in the room was heavy and scented in coffee—not the boutique aroma of a five-dollar-a-cup blend, but the burnt-bean odor of a cheap diner.
“What about camouflage?” Davis asked. “You know, like tarps or netting. The Russians and Cubans used to do that kind of thing, right?”
“The Cold War was a long time ago,” Sorensen responded.
“Are you calling me a dinosaur?”
She smiled good-naturedly. “I’m saying that kind of deception works with visible imagery, but it’
s pointless against radar.”
“And everybody has radar sats these days,” said another analyst.
Davis watched a bank of monitors where technicians were scrolling through images. Airport after airport flipped by in God’s-eye views, a few warranting a pause and magnification before being discarded.
“It’s a big world,” said Sorensen from behind his shoulder.
Without looking at her, he replied, “Yeah, but it’s also a big airplane. And you’re not going to find it at CDG.”
“Where?”
Davis pointed to the image currently on the central monitor—a tremendous airport with four parallel runways. “That’s Paris Charles de Gaulle. Someone went to a lot of trouble to steal this airplane. They simulated a crash, for Christ’s sake, so they’re not going to turn around and fly it into a major European hub. We need to narrow things down, which means putting ourselves in their position.”
“All right,” Sorensen prodded. “How would you hide a wide-body airplane?”
“First let’s assume this scheme is not being run by a country. I think we can rule out the Chinas and Russias of the world. Of course, Iran or North Korea are always possibilities, but even they’d use a surrogate—no country would want its fingerprints on something like this.”
“So we can stop looking in Iran and the PRK?”
“I would. This jet has to be in some out-of-the-way place.” Davis stared silently at the screens as images snapped past. He finally broke out in a smile. “But you know where I’d hide it?”
Sorensen looked at him, and the photo-surveillance slideshow paused as an entire bank of analysts who’d been listening turned around. Davis told everyone his idea, and within minutes the battery of screens went blank as a new search was prepared.
* * *
Slaton paddled onto the beach in darkness and immediately dragged the emergency life raft into the dunes above the high-tide line. He stabbed the raft with a knife from its own survival kit, and buried the rubber remnants in a sand swale.