African Ice

by Jeff Buick

  Kerrigan was pressed to catch the flight. He walked at a brick pace until he was out of sight of the police, then broke into a fast jog. He made the gate just as they were closing the door. The ticket agent ripped his boarding pass in half and ushered him onto the ramp. Ten minutes later, the plane was pushed back from the terminal and taxiing onto the runway. He breathed deeply as the pilot hit the throttle and the engines roared to life. They bounced down the runway; then came the smooth sensation of becoming airborne. He relaxed fully into the business-class seat and accepted a drink from the flight attendant.

  Christ, that had been close.

  Close all around, he thought. Egypt was one country he would never visit again. He had miraculously escaped a horrific life in a Cairo jail, but he had also lost Samantha Carlson. And with her, he had lost the location of the diamonds. He sipped his drink, his thankfulness for evading capture in Cairo slowly turning to rage. Samantha Carlson. She had gone up against him and she had won. McNeil and his small band of mercenaries had managed to wipe out Mugumba’s troops and kill Liam O’Donnell and his entire team. He cursed himself for failing to pull the trigger when he’d had McNeil in his sights. That was stupid. He had used the man for bait while trying to extract the location from Carlson, but it had backfired. If he had shot the man, she probably would have caved. The long quest would have finally been over. But hindsight was twenty-twenty, and he had screwed up. He mulled over his options as the plane clipped through the high-altitude clouds en route to London.

  Garret Shaw, his ace in the hole. Shaw had never failed him. Where O’Donnell was professional and efficient, Shaw was lethal. There was no hesitation, never a mistake. Once his Washington connections ferreted out Carlson, and they would, Garret would get the assignment. With or without Travis McNeil, she was dead. Tortured first to reveal the formation, then killed without remorse.

  He felt a warm glow creep down his spine, and it wasn’t from the free alcohol.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The peninsula that cradled the sleepy town of Lindos jutted into the Mediterranean Sea, a tiny appendage on the island of Rhodes. Sandy beaches rimmed the scrub-covered rocky hillside that rose from the sea. Whitewashed houses encircled the hill about halfway up, a band of white against the paramilitary browns and greens that dominated the landscape. The aging acropolis shared the hilltop with the Castle of the Knights, a monolithic medieval structure capped with turrets. An ancient defense to repel ancient intruders, stark against the deep blue of the Greek sky. The sky mirrored the era when the castle was necessary, a defense against marauding hordes, but modern times had overtaken Greece. Now tourists littered the beaches and shallow waters of the leeward coves, their bronze bodies glistening in the afternoon heat.

  Samantha stepped onto the balcony of her room at the Lindos Mare, a four-star resort that peered down on Vlicha Bay. She watched a hotel employee, dressed in crisp white linen, serve drinks to the well-heeled guests reclined on chaise lounges at the pool. He smiled each time he delivered a libation, his white teeth in contrast to the darkness of his tanned skin. And then he smiled again as his clients tipped him generously, especially the women. A noise in the room behind her caused her to turn. Travis swept aside the frail curtain covering the patio doors and walked onto the balcony. He looked rested.

  They had left Adel Hadr’s car on a quiet residential street in Mage after crossing the border from Egypt into Israel. The Israeli border guards were suspicious, but their American passports eventually allowed them access to the Jewish state. They were broke, but not without resources. Samantha had slipped one diamond into her pants pocket when they first arrived in Cairo, and that forethought had paid dividends—fifty thousand dividends. And at that price they had demanded American dollars in cash. The diamond merchant couldn’t capitulate quickly enough, understanding the incredible value he held in his hand. They took the money and kept moving.

  Israel was too hot for them. Security was heightened by a recent rash of Palestinian uprisings, and soldiers were everywhere, constantly checking personal papers and, in their case, passports. It was just a matter of time before they were detained for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Travis found a small charter airline that would fly them from Tel-Aviv to Nicosia. Once on Cyprus they purchased new clothes and baggage, two wedding rings, and then chartered another flight to Rhodes, the jewel of Greece. Just another husband and wife enjoying a late-spring vacation on the Mediterranean. They checked into a suite at the Lindos Mare and immediately slept, Travis on the pullout and Samantha in the king-size bed. Morning brought a clear blue sky and both of them felt rested and safe.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said as he padded across the balcony in his bare feet. “So calm and peaceful.”

  “The travel brochures say that Lindos is the best Greece has to offer. Sun, sand, and a castle.” He looked across the bay at the heavily fortified Castle of the Knights. “I don’t imagine it was always so peaceful here.”

  “No, I’m sure not,” she said quietly.

  Travis pulled a cigarette package from his loose-fitting shirt and struck a match. He lit the smoke and puffed deeply. He leaned against the rounded edges of the balcony and looked to her. A slight breeze stirred the air on the patio, lifting her hair back from her face for a moment. He caught her profile and tried to memorize it, every detail of her intricately carved features. Every strand of hair as it hung suspended against the forces of gravity. Then the air swirled about, changing direction, and her hair fell back against the edge of her cheeks. A solitary strand touched her face and she gently brushed it away. Even the motion of her hand seemed ethereal. “So what do we do now, Dr. Carlson?” he asked, forcing himself to concentrate on their situation and not just on the beautiful woman who stood so close to him.

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” she answered, turning away from the vista and looking at him. “Remember back in Cairo when we thought Kerrigan might have been involved in the Cranston Air Flight 111 crash?” He nodded and she continued. “We both know that he’s not going to just go away. He’s going to hunt us down, or have some of his hired killers hunt us down, and kill us. So we have to do something. Maybe, if he did have something to do with the Cranston Air crash, and we could find some proof, we could hand that proof over to the Federal Aviation Administration or the FBI. They may take care of him for us if they think he brought down an airliner and killed hundreds of people.”

  He straightened. “How do you prove it?”

  “Most of the information about the crash is public knowledge. Whatever I need should be on the Internet. Our room has a high-speed connection.”

  “There’s bound to be a huge investigation when an airliner crashes and kills more than two hundred people, but no one has pointed a finger at sabotage yet. What makes you think that you can find proof where they couldn’t?”

  “I’ll be looking at it from the other end. They see a plane crash and try to find a reason. I see a man with a motive and work backwards.”

  “Okay, maybe it’s not such a long shot,” he said, grinding his cigarette in the ashtray. “Just remember to put that proxy thing on the computer. I don’t feel like having to deal with Kerrigan any sooner than possible.”

  “No shit,” she said, instinctively rubbing her arm where the bullet had cut through her flesh only three days ago.

  “Let’s see that,” he said, moving closer to her and gently turning her shoulder so he could look at the wound. It was covered with a scab and healing well with no signs of infection. “It looks good,” he said.

  She nodded and walked into the living room, her skin still tingling from his touch. She powered up the computer Lindos Mare supplied in each of their upscale rooms and set to work building the proxy. It took a few minutes and she tested it to ensure it was active. The diagnostics were fine and she started a search on the web for Cranston Air Flight 111. The results were staggering: 7507 hits. She hadn’t expected that many. It didn’t take long to sort through the jumble and hon
e in on a few key sites. An hour later she signed off and gathered the pages she had printed from the Laser-Jet. She left the room, searching for Travis.

  Stairs led from their ocean-view suite to a series of stucco arches adjacent to the freshwater pool. She wandered through the tangle of chairs and plants in the lobby lounge and through one of the arches. The pool was almost deserted. A man and woman floated in the calm waters, bobbing up and down together with the gentle waves generated by a lone lap swimmer. The swimmer’s stroke was efficient and his body cut through the water like a shark, leaving only a small wake. She watched as he reached the edge closest to her and stopped. He stood up, snapping his head back to clear the water from his hair. It was Travis. She just stood there, expressionless, and waited for him. He pulled himself from the pool and grabbed a nearby towel.

  “Well,” he said, his breathing rhythmic, not rushed. “Did you find anything interesting?”

  “Come up to the room; I want to show you something.” There was a strange tone to her voice and he gave her a quizzical look. He fell in beside her and they made quick time back to the room. She walked across the living room, dropped the handful of pages from her hand onto the coffee table, then continued to the double French doors leading to the bedroom. She turned to face him. She reached up and grasped the top button on her shirt. A small flick of her index finger and her thumb undid the button. She continued, undoing each button with a simple fluid motion. She let the shirt slide off her shoulders and onto the ceramic floor. She wore no bra. A thin white rope encircling her thin waist held up her cotton pants. She pulled it and the knot came free. She slipped out of her thong panties and stood in the doorway, waiting.

  He glided slowly toward her, his eyes moving up and down her body. He felt his breath coming quicker, shallower. He had seen her at the jungle pool in the Congo, but that was from a distance, both emotionally and physically. This was up close and personal. She was perfect in every way, her body what every man dreams of but rarely finds. He brushed against her, his hands tracing her figure from her hips up across her flat stomach to her firm breasts. He stopped, his eyes staring deeply into hers.

  “Is this really what you want?” he asked. He had to be sure.

  “Yes, Travis. I want you more than you could imagine.”

  “That’s a good answer,” he said. He could hardly control his breathing now. She didn’t speak and he tilted his head slightly and kissed her. She responded with the ferocity of a tiger, her arms reaching up and over his shoulders, her fingers grasping his hair, her lips pushing against his with an intensity he’d never felt. He picked her up and walked the short distance to the bed, falling with her onto the soft mattress. She slipped his bathing suit off and they made love with a passion that had built from the first day they met. A passion fueled partly by mutual respect and partly by the dangers they had faced together, but mostly by an incredible physical attraction to each other. The spark ignited long-simmering desires, and both partners strove to please and be pleased. They fell back onto the sheets afterward, drenched with sweat and feeling satisfied.

  They spoke quietly for a while about nothing, just small talk. An hour later Travis had drifted off but Samantha couldn’t sleep, and after a few more minutes she slipped out from under the covers and donned a bathrobe. She walked into the kitchen, every nerve in her body heightened from her wonderful experience with the man she had wanted for so long. The floor felt cool to the balls of her feet and sent tiny shivers up her legs and into her spine. They traveled slowly and she could feel every synapse as the sensation moved from nerve to nerve. It reached the base of her skull and sent the message in a thousand directions, flooding her brain with sensuous tingles. She reached out and touched the countertop to steady herself. Wow, Travis, she thought. You are some kind of lover.

  Samantha opened the fridge and poured some orange juice into a tall glass. She walked over to the coffee table and picked up the pages that held the information on Cranston Air Flight 111. She began to read, noting the details of the doomed plane. The McDonnell Douglas MD-11 departed JFK at 21:18 ADT on September 2, 2002. It was destined for Geneva, Switzerland. That made sense, she figured, as most of the contraband diamonds that reach the market do so through Switzerland. And even though these were not necessarily contraband, they were certainly undervalued. And that was why Kerrigan wanted them to land in Switzerland, or not land at all.

  The plane carried 215 passengers and fourteen crew members to their deaths that evening. Fifty-three minutes after takeoff, the pilots noticed a strange smell in the cockpit. Three minutes later, smoke was visible, and the crew sent the international urgency signal “Pan Pan Pan” to the Moncton air traffic control. She set the pages down for a moment, thinking. If Kerrigan had planted someone on the plane to disable it, fifty-three minutes certainly gave him or her enough time to set his or her plans in motion. She read on. Halifax air traffic control cleared the flight to proceed directly in for an emergency landing. The aircraft was fifty-eight nautical miles southwest of the airport. But as she continued, it became apparent that something else had intervened, keeping the plane from making a direct approach to the airport.

  The pilot cut his altitude from 32,900 feet to 19,800 in less than six minutes. He continued to descend as the plane cut in over the eastern landmass. Once away from the ocean, the pilot nosed the plane down even quicker, cutting an additional 8,000 feet from their altitude in under two minutes. She sat back for a moment, trying to envision the panic that must have gripped the passengers as the plane lost altitude so quickly. Then the pilot banked the plane sharply to the left, away from Halifax. Now, that did not make sense. The cockpit is filling with smoke, the oxygen masks are operational, visibility must be almost zero, yet the pilot steers his plane away from the closest runway. She traced the path of the plane with her finger as it continued to descend and head back out over the Atlantic. At 22:25, Flight 111 had reached 10,000 feet. At almost precisely that point, both the Flight Data Recorder—the FDR—and the Cockpit Data Recorder—the CDR—quit working. Six minutes later, the plane crashed into the six-foot swells of the frigid Atlantic Ocean. No one survived.

  A slight pressure on her shoulder startled her, and she twisted her neck to look behind her. It was Travis, a warm smile etched on his face. He leaned over and gently kissed her on the forehead. “What are you up to?” he asked, lighting a cigarette.

  “Just having a look at the Cranston Air disaster.”

  “See anything interesting?”

  “Two things strike me as odd,” she said. “The pilots had clearance to land in Halifax, yet at an altitude of under 12,000 feet they turned away from the airport and headed back out to sea. Perhaps they wanted to dump their fuel before trying to land.”

  He shook his head. “Naw, they could dump their fuel over land with no problems. That Jet A fuel would evaporate before it hit the ground. Does it tell you their fuel burn prior to crashing?”

  She looked over the data for a minute. “Yes. They had 65,300 kilograms of fuel on board at takeoff and had burned

  11,000 kilograms when the FDR stopped functioning six minutes before they crashed.”

  He nodded. “Not a problem to dump 54,000 kilograms of fuel at 12,000 feet. There was no reason for the pilot to head back out over water. And he would have known that.”

  “So you have to ask why he did it,” Samantha said.

  “It’s a good question. What else did you find? You said two things struck you as odd.”

  “The FDR and the CDR both stopped recording six minutes before the plane hit the water. Why?”

  “Show me the details on the equipment,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette and sitting beside her. She scrolled back through the data until she came to the section dealing with the instrumentation.

  “Ah, an L3 Communications, model F-1000,” he said. He ignored the screen and talked directly to her. “This recorder uses compression techniques to store data, almost foolproof. There’s no way this baby goes do
wn unless there’s a power failure, and even then there are two backup power systems in place.” He looked back at the data on the monitor. “And the CDR is also an L3. The model 93-A100-81 uses a continual thirty-minute loop recording system. You said the initial distress call was made at about 22:11 and the plane crashed at 22:31?” She nodded. “Then there’s no reason why all the data shouldn’t be there. Again, only a power outage to the recorder would cause that.”

  “It does mention a power stoppage just before both the recorders failed.”

  “Anything on the condition of the wiring?”

  “Yes, right here.” She pointed at the screen. The investigation had revealed charred wires and burnt insulation in two places. One was about three feet inside the bulkhead that closed the cockpit off from the passenger section. The other was a few yards back, in the passenger compartment.

  “Can you get a plan of the MD-11 showing the wiring sequence?” he asked. Samantha shrugged her shoulders and started looking for one. The web site she was in held the crash details but little else. She exited it and went to McDonnell Douglas, the manufacturers of the plane. Again, nothing. “Try these guys,” he said, pointing to the electrical contractors who supplied the wiring harnesses for the McDonnell Douglas planes. Samantha found the web site and pulled up the information on the MD-11. The wiring plans were there.

  “Bingo,” she said. “Each wiring harness has a part number. McDonnell Douglas must use this schematic to order the harnesses they need for construction or repairs.”

  “Check this out,” he said, tracing his finger back from the bulkhead. “You said there was evidence of burnt wiring a few yards from the bulkhead. There’s an intersection of harnesses right here. Even the backup systems come together at this point. They all use separate harnesses, but if something happened at precisely this point, it could take out all the power, even the backup. What seat number is this under?” She pulled up the seating plan of the plane and he noted the row number. The window seat was directly over it. “Christ,” Samantha said suddenly. “There’s an access panel immediately above this junction. All the passenger sitting in that seat would have to do is drop a piece of carry-on luggage over it, slice through the carpet and open the hatch. It’s only six inches square.”