The Death Trust

by David Rollins

  A short time later, I turned off the highway and into the security post. The guard scanned my CAC card with a portable gizmo and checked that I looked as handsome in real life as I did in the photo. Satisfied, he then said, “Thank you, sir,” and waved me through. Before moving off, I asked for directions to Hangar B3. Ramstein, as I said, is a huge facility, and the soldier had to go back inside and consult a map. He returned moments later with a photocopy of the base layout. A line drawn in blue ink meandered across the page to the hangar.

  Ten minutes later, I pulled up outside my destination. B3 was at least the size of two, possibly three, football fields. It was so big, it was impossible to tell how big. I walked to a side door feeling dwarfed by the structure. Huge overhead lights illuminated the interior. There were several C-5 Galaxies parked inside—transport planes roughly the size of 747s. I stopped an airman and asked for further directions. He pointed down the far corner of the hangar.

  I eventually found what I was looking for, an area sealed off by walls of plastic and tape. Signs warned that this was a restricted area and that access was for authorized personnel only. I did what any investigator worth his pay would do and figured the signs weren’t talking to me. I parted the plastic and looked inside. On the floor were the remains of what I assumed was General Scott’s glider—pretty much every little piece—laid out for examination. The plane had hit the ground with such force that it appeared to have literally exploded. At least a dozen personnel were picking through these remains, cataloguing them. It was a mammoth task. There weren’t many whole sections left intact.

  I made my way to what would have been the cockpit. There was a lot of dried blood on the pieces. That figured. The human body is really just a big bag of water. When it hits the ground at over one hundred and fifty miles per hour, it bursts.

  “You right there, mate?” said a voice behind me. The man wore the uniform of a Royal Air Force squadron leader, except his accent was about as English as mine. Australian. I’d come to recognize the accent after a stint in Afghanistan, where Australia’s Special Forces, the Special Air Service, were deployed. Those boys were smart and very tough. I owed my life to half a dozen of them.

  “Special Agent Vin Cooper,” I said, flashing him my OSI creds.

  “Wayne Roach.”

  I recognized the name. Roach was heading the crash team investigating the wreckage. He was looking for cause. His was the signature on the report I’d read.

  “OSI. Not the local branch, I take it?” he asked.

  “Flew in this morning.”

  “You working with that Masters chick on this?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Lucky man. She’s a spunkrat. Young to be a major, too. Rumor has it she can suck-start an F-16.”

  That gave me an interesting perspective on Masters. She had a reputation. Also, this guy thought her meteoric rise through the ranks had something to do with qualities other than those for which officers usually received promotion. I didn’t add to the conversation, which might have made the squadron leader nervous. Parts of the services are, in some ways, even more PC than private enterprises.

  He cleared his throat and said, “You read the preliminary?”

  I nodded. “You’ve had a couple more days with this since you and your team did the initial write-up. Got anything to add?”

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact.”

  I followed the squadron leader to a bench covered with various items of metal and fiberglass. Roach was short and bald, and the crotch of his pants appeared to get sucked up his butt as he walked, springing off his toes with each step. His uniform was a size too small for his frame, which didn’t help. Maybe he was getting fat and didn’t realize it. Or couldn’t accept it.

  Hanging on the wall behind the bench was a large photograph of the smiling, relaxed General Scott standing next to his sailplane. The aircraft’s wingspan was a tad under sixty feet. The nose where the pilot sat was small and bulbous, with a large Perspex bubble canopy. Now, only shards of the glider remained—slightly more than what remained of the general, according to Masters’s report. I ran my eyes over the individual pieces spread out across the floor and found it difficult to imagine that this was the aircraft in the picture. Roach picked up an aluminum bracket.

  “I can tell you now that General Scott’s plane was sabotaged.” He held up a piece of metal. “Check this out.”

  Sabotage meant murder. I didn’t bat an eyelid at the news, though once the folks Stateside heard it, the shit would definitely fly. “What is it?” I asked.

  “The wings of the glider slide off and on to make transporting it from field to field possible. That makes this piece crucial. It’s the bracket that clamps the main wing spar to the fuselage.” Roach pulled the clamp apart and the top section split into two separate pieces across a fine, ragged crack. “That’s not supposed to happen, by the way,” he said. “This is seven-oh-seven-five—aircraft-grade aluminum alloy. It’s light and, as you might expect, extremely strong. At least, it’s supposed to be.”

  He passed me a black-and-white photo. “What’s this?” I asked.

  “A photo,” he said, being a wiseass. “Well, actually, it’s called a macrograph—makes it easy to see the metal’s crystal structure. This is what seven-oh-seven-five should look like.” He passed me another black-and-white print. “Compare them.”

  I put the two prints side by side. On one, the crystals were big; on the other, they were small. Easy to see the difference, sure, but I still didn’t know squat.

  “Basic metallurgy lesson number one: When the crystals are small, the metal is good and strong,” Roach said. “The bigger those crystals get, the weaker the metal becomes. Milled nonferrous metals like aluminum don’t take kindly to stress. They have almost zero elasticity. Put too much stress on them and they don’t bend or deform, they just crack. Pah-ting,” he said, musically.

  “Do you mind putting it together for me like I was a five-year-old, Squadron Leader?”

  Roach swapped the photos for a couple of bits of aluminum he’d recovered from his bench. “We’ve duplicated what we believe happened to the failed clamp that held on the general’s wings. We heated and cooled it rapidly a couple of dozen times. Doing that to a metal—just about any metal—changes its crystal structure, making it weaker. The seven-oh-seven-five in your left hand failed at one-tenth the load of the seven-oh-seven-five in your right. Take a closer look.”

  I did as I was asked and examined the metals. On the outside, they appeared identical. In cross-section where they’d cracked, though, one piece had broken clean while the other had a porous honeycomb appearance.

  “Nothing like this could happen by accident?” I asked. I knew the answer to that before I asked the question, but I’ve found it sometimes pays to ask the obvious.

  “No bloody way,” the squadron leader said, shaking his head. “Someone got to the general’s plane, removed the clamp, and then went to work on it, or exchanged it for this one, knowing full well what the consequences of that would be.”

  “Don’t stop now, Squadron Leader. You’ve got a captive audience here. What happened when that clamp failed?”

  “You read about it in the report,” he said.

  “I’ve read an eyewitness account. Tell me in your own words what you think happened.”

  He shrugged. “On the morning of the crash, the general and another pilot were chasing thermals, maybe ten miles from the base. The weather was good and the conditions were ideal for soaring. The general, like the pilot in the other plane, was climbing to around twelve thousand feet and then doing aerobatics—loops, rolls, and spins—down to around five thousand feet. They’d apparently done that twice—gone up and then come down—before the general’s day flew into the crapper. When he reached altitude for the third time, he put the glider into a flat spin. I reckon the clamp was probably already broken by then, but it’s impossible to say. According to the witness, the right-hand wing on the general’s plane appeared to fold.
The airflow ripped it clean away a second or two later as what was left of the aircraft began a spiral dive.

  “It dove like that, spinning, for several thousand feet before the g-forces tore the other wing off. Within moments, gravity accelerated the wreckage to around two hundred and fifty miles per hour. General Scott would’ve had plenty of time to contemplate his end before it came. From the clamp letting go to impact took around thirty seconds. That’s a lot of time for your life to flash before your eyes.” Roach paused. Maybe he was picturing the man trapped inside his fiberglass coffin heading for the ground. I certainly could. Roach snapped out of it and cleared his throat. “The tail broke off at about two thousand feet of altitude. The nose of the aircraft hit a tree, which is why so little of it was left intact. Not much of the tree left, either. The general’s remains—what they could find, at any rate—were scooped into buckets with a ladle. Shooting the bugger with a twelve-gauge at close range wouldn’t have been nearly as effective, or messy. Not a great way to get your card punched.” Roach paused for another moment of consideration before asking, “Anything else, Special Agent?”

  “Yes,” I managed to say. The saliva glands in my mouth were working overtime and my skin was clammy. I knew what was coming. I made it to a basin against the wall before my stomach let go. I’d be lying if I said my reaction to Roach’s re-creation had nothing to do with my own experiences in the air. The Australian had just brought it all back—the fear, the helplessness, the feeling in your guts when the hard floor beneath drops away revealing an abyss. And you just…fall…My stomach heaved again.

  “You okay, mate?”

  “Yeah, I’m on one of those weird fad diets,” I said. I cupped my hands under the water and splashed my face.

  Roach continued, “I didn’t know him—the general—but, for what it’s worth, those who did, say he was a pretty cool CO. A workaholic, apparently. First in, last out.” That phrase struck a chord with me. First in, last out—the motto of the combat air controllers, the lunatic squadron of which I was once a member.

  “How long would it have taken the clamp to fail?” I asked, wiping my face on a hand towel.

  “Yeah, well, I guess that’s the problem—from your point of view, anyway,” Roach observed. “Pinpointing when the clamp was tampered with would be a guess. Could’ve been a couple of days ago; could’ve been months.”

  Given the number of people at Ramstein and the fact that anyone could have had access to the glider, that gave me roughly forty thousand suspects. In other words, I had a trail to the murderer that was as dead as the victim. “Doesn’t anyone kill with a nine-millimeter anymore, preferably with their prints all over it?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Never mind. Just thinking aloud.” I didn’t bother asking him if he knew why Scott had been killed, or by whom. Coming up with answers to those questions was why OSI paid me so much money. Yeah, right. I cleared my throat and asked the tough question. “What about the people who maintained the plane? You got a signed maintenance schedule anywhere?”

  Roach smiled and snorted at the same time. “Take your pick from over two thousand engineering personnel—Americans, Dutch, English, German, French. The general didn’t have a crew chief on his plane. If he needed something done, he’d just ask someone to do it. The reality is that just about everyone and anyone on this base had access. And, as for a maintenance schedule, this was a glider, not a military aircraft—or even a powered private plane. It’s really no more than a snag sheet and there are no signatures.”

  “Great.”

  “Yeah, well…” said the Australian, fiddling with the clamp.

  Okay, so my list of suspects had shrunk from forty thousand to two thousand, but it might as well have been a million. I had one dead general, one sabotaged plane, no maintenance schedule, and no leads. I comforted myself with the knowledge that killing a general is a big deal. Someone on this base had to know something. I just had to find that person. “So, the glider pilot who witnessed the crash—” I glanced at my notebook. His name was Captain Reinoud Aleveldt, Royal Netherlands Air Force. “You got anything more from him?”

  “No,” said Roach.

  “How about a number for him here on the base?”

  Roach nodded and walked over to the phone on the wall. On a bench beside it was a base directory, a book the size and thickness of the average novel. Another reminder of the size of Ramstein. “How long have you been here, Squadron Leader?”

  “Coming up for six weeks now. Why do you ask?”

  “Because if there was someone wandering around here, someone who wasn’t NATO, you haven’t been here long enough to know whether they were out of place.”

  “Yeah, but bases like this…” he shook his head, “…with people coming and going all the time, wearing different uniforms, speaking different languages, you’ve got Buckley’s chance of keeping tabs on people. You just assume if they’ve got through the front gate, or come in on an aircraft, they’re okay. If you didn’t operate on that assumption, you’d never get your job done.”

  I wondered who “Buckley” was and assumed he was probably one very unlucky guy. I also thought about the security check I’d experienced at the front gate. It was pretty thorough, though hardly a retina scan. I had to show my CAC card, the identity card issued to every serving member of U.S. forces, and my name was probably also on some kind of database. As far as the CAC card went, an intruder would need to steal one and have a vague similarity to the photo on it. The reality was that, for a determined adversary, it wouldn’t have been impossible to slip through the net, certainly not for one with a premeditated plan to kill the base’s commander.

  “Anything else, Special Agent?” asked the Australian, butting in on my speculation.

  “Yeah, can you recommend a good dentist?”

  “Wouldn’t get anything done here, mate. These blokes are butchers. You need an Aussie dentist—best in the world.”

  Australia was a long way to go to get a tooth filled. I was hoping I’d find one a bit closer, but I wasn’t having much luck on that front. “Thanks for your time,” I said.

  “The full revised report is in the process of being written up. Should have it done by this evening.”

  “Send a copy to me care of OSI here. We’re in the phone book.” At least, I assumed OSI was in it.

  “No worries, mate,” he said as I turned and walked out. So, Scott had been murdered. This had suddenly become a very serious deal, no matter who his old lady’s daddy was. Generals generally do not get murdered for the reasons the rest of us do. In fact, when you’re a general and you get killed violently by persons unknown, the motive that leads to that kind of demise could possibly have implications for national security. That’s what I was thinking as I walked toward the hangar’s exit, a rectangle of bright light in the dark corrugated wall.

  Outside, I noted it was still cold, although the sun was doing its best to rectify that situation. The clouds and rainbows had gone, chased away by a breeze that went straight through my ACU as if I wasn’t wearing one. Three C-130s taxied past, making a hell of a racket. Beyond was the distant roar of a fast jet accelerating down one of the runways in full afterburner. I flipped open my pad and checked the copious notes I’d made interviewing Squadron Leader Roach. They amounted to one solitary line on the page, the name and phone number of the Dutch air force captain, Aleveldt. I wondered if he’d be able to make things any clearer for me, but I could definitely pass on a repeat of the account of Scott plunging to his death from twelve thousand feet.

  The screech of tires caught my attention and lifted my eyes from the notebook. It was a purple Mercedes. Little puffs of dust and burnt rubber boiled around the tires as they shuddered, locked up solid. The door flew open. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Masters demanded to know as she stomped toward me, hands jammed deep in her jacket pockets.

  “Investigating an assassination,” I said, which had the gratifying effect of stopping her dead in
her tracks.

  FOUR

  Special Agent Masters drove. She ground her jaw, the small pencil-like muscles flexing. “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t just disappear off on your own. I don’t know whether you realize this, Special Agent, but we are not fucking playacting around here. People like General von Koeppen have things to do. You see them when they’re ready, not when it fits into your schedule.”

  I listened to this lecture and wondered whether I should bite. She was reminding me of my ex—not the words so much as the moral certainty that she was right and that I was a moron. “Stop the car.”

  “What?”

  “I said stop the goddamn car.” I reached across her and pulled on the hand brake. The Mercedes skidded sideways to a stop.

  “Let’s get a couple of ground rules straight,” I said as the car rocked on its suspension. “I don’t know what organization you belong to, but I’m basically a cop. I don’t give a damn about rank or privilege when I’m on a case. Also, I don’t answer to you or the CO here. I promise you, my boss back home is a lot scarier than both of you combined.”

  Masters folded her arms and shot a glance of pure poison at me.

  “Before I saw von Koeppen,” I continued, “I wanted to know what kind of investigation I was running—”

  “You’re running?”

  “That’s what the SAC usually does.”

  “Who said you were the special agent in charge here?”

  Gruyere hadn’t brought Masters up to speed. What did the big cheese expect us to do? Duke it out over who was boss?

  “You were sent to assist me,” she said.

  “Whatever,” I said. If you need to tell people you’re running the show, then you probably aren’t. If Masters wanted the poison chalice of SAC, she could have it. I changed the subject. “Squadron Leader Roach’s findings are critical. Now we can go and see your CO and tell him what’s up.”