by Ward Larsen
Green cocked his head. “I don’t know if that’s going to tell us much. The most relevant part is right there—her crew saw something hit the water.” He thought back to the radar data he’d seen yesterday. “The time is right,” he said. “But like I told you, I watched that radar tape over and over. The airplane I saw did not go down. It went right back to Khartoum International and landed.”
Graham said, “When I heard this VHF data, I called the National Reconnaissance Office and had them dig up one more thing.” She switched to another file on her computer, and a sequence often photos came to the screen. She enlarged one. “As I’m sure you know, we have a considerable array of satellite assets covering this part of the world. These are composite images, radar and infrared, for the area in question right before the ship made that radio call.”
Green looked closely as the DNI stepped through the series. The images were virtually blank—cold, featureless ocean—except for one where there was a clear disturbance, a spray of white near the center.
“What’s that?” Green asked, pointing to the blob of white.
Graham pointed to the central five photos in sequence. “Nothing, nothing, splash, nothing, nothing.”
“So something did go into the water,” Green said.
“Something big,” Graham confirmed.
“But I still can’t get past those radar tapes. That airplane landed back in Khartoum shortly after this picture was taken.”
Graham shrugged. “Doesn’t make sense, does it?”
“I’ll need to tell Jammer about this right away.”
The DNI gave him a circumspect look. “Larry, listen. I appreciate all that Jammer is doing, but you both need to remember one thing—he is there to find Blackstar, or at the very least figure out where it went. This DC-3 crash is only a license for him to go poking around. Nothing more.”
Green shook his head. “You’ve got to understand him, Darlene. If I tell Jammer to blow off this crash, he’ll dig in his heels. Just how he is. I’ve always trusted his instincts in situations like this, and he hasn’t disappointed me yet.”
Graham didn’t reply, and in the ensuing silence Green began to ponder. There had been something nagging him, ever since he’d seen it on his own screen.
He said, “That radar stuff you gave me—do you think it was good data?”
“You mean as far as quality?”
Green nodded.
“Our best stuff is in the Middle East. If two ducks have a midair collision, we know about it.”
Green gestured to the computer, and said, “Do you have a copy of it here?”
“Larry, are you not listening? I told you to forget about this crash!”
Green said nothing, only stared at the DNI.
She sighed and began typing. Soon the radar sequence began playing out on the screen. On Green’s prompt, she advanced to a point midway in the flight. The airplane symbol turned circles over the Red Sea, and both watched closely when it reached the point in time when the radio call and satellite data indicated that something had hit the water. Nothing happened.
Green felt as if he was missing something. Watching Air Sahara 007 turn south and head for home, he realized what was different. Realized what wasn’t there.
“Go back,” Green said, “ten minutes.”
Larry Green had a lot of flying time under his belt, so he had a lot of experience with radar. The equipment could be temperamental, prone to spurious strobes and false returns. That was what he had initially thought he’d seen on this tape—a false echo. The second white square that had come and gone, like an intermittent shadow on a partly cloudy day. Green had figured it for a nuisance reflection or a software glitch. But as Graham ran the loop, he could see it was real, consistently in and out. Until, as now confirmed by the other data, the moment of impact. Afterward, on the way back to Khartoum, no more ghost. Which meant that the secondary reflection wasn’t a ghost at all.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
They took off from Kampala an hour later, at three in the afternoon. Davis watched the city fade away beneath them. It looked like an urban lesion on the jade-green jungle, a handful of roads creeping into the treeline like some kind of concrete kudzu. Just over his shoulder, on the starboard side, Davis could make out Kilimanjaro in the distance, sans Hemingway’s snows.
Dead ahead was a big thunderstorm, classic in its anvil shape. To the left and right, cumulus formations were building in the late afternoon heat, huge vapor dirigibles climbing into the stratosphere. Soon they’d all shoulder up to one another, bond and mix to saturate huge chunks of sky.
Boudreau was working the weather radar. The storms ahead showed up as coded colors. Green meant rain, yellow meant heavy rain, and red was a place you just didn’t go. Presently, Boudreau was navigating through a broken maze of green and yellow splotches, turning left and right to find the path of least resistance. A lot like me, Davis thought.
His thoughts settled on what had happened in the jungle. Davis was pretty sure he’d been set up. Somebody had given Achmed an assassin’s mission, with him as the target. But who? Schmitt was a possibility. But Rafiq Khoury, cleric gone wild, was a much more likely suspect. If that was the case, it meant that something Davis had done, or might do, was making Khoury nervous. It could have to do with his reconnaissance mission last night. Maybe Khoury had discovered that it was the American investigator, not just a pack of wild dogs, who’d stumbled across the bodies of the two missing pilots. Or maybe
Davis had asked about FBN Aviation’s hangar once too often. Whatever the case, he was getting close to something. There was a time when that would have given Davis a sense of satisfaction. But right now he didn’t feel satisfied. He felt restless, uneasy.
He had almost crashed twice today in a fifty-year-old airplane, near misses with a forest buffalo and then an equatorial jungle. In the last twenty-four hours he’d been shot at twice, one more statistic he had no desire to extrapolate forward. He was riding a tailwind of good luck, one that could end as abruptly as the wind gust that had saved him and Boudreau a few hours ago. He knew what Larry Green would say if he knew all this. Chuck everything and go home, Jammer. You should be sitting at the kitchen table having a quiet chat with Jen.
But that wasn’t going to happen, and for the most discomforting of reasons. Davis was looking forward to that next shot across his bow. The next surge of adrenaline. It was like flying a jet through a canyon, approaching a turn at five hundred knots without knowing what was around the next bend. Another canyon? A fork in the path? A sheer wall of rock? You never knew unless you kept going.
His thoughts were derailed by what sounded like a thousand tiny hammers hitting the windshield. The din increased until it became a constant static, like they were flying through gravel.
“Hail,” Boudreau said in a calm voice. The voice any normal person would use if, say, a sun shower had started to sprinkle on their Buick. “Shouldn’t last long,” he said, fiddling with the radar. “We’ll be through it in a couple of minutes.”
“Best news I’ve heard all day.”
“I’ve got the power up,” Boudreau said. “We should reach Khartoum in about four hours. There’s a cot and a pillow in the rear cabin, near the galley. Why don’t you get some rest, then come back up to the wheelhouse in an hour and spell me.”
Davis thought it sounded like a good plan. He had no idea what might be waiting for them in Khartoum. Chances were, Rafiq Khoury wasn’t expecting to see this airplane again. Certainly not expecting to see him. So when they taxied up and parked, there might be raised eyebrows. Or, for all he knew, another gunman to finish what Achmed had started. Things were getting ugly fast, so Davis would have his guard up from here on out.
Ready for the next curve in the canyon.
Air Sahara 12 landed in Khartoum an hour before sunset. Davis got the landing, and while it wasn’t his smoothest, he didn’t do any damage. Boudreau taxied in, esch
ewing the painted yellow taxiway lines for a direct route to the parking apron. They worked together to put the airplane to bed, powering down radios and instruments, running a simple shutdown checklist for a simple airplane.
“I guess I’ve got a few logbook write-ups to make,” Boudreau said. “Bullet holes in the fuselage, hail damage on the radome, an access door ripped off. Johnson won’t be happy.”
“Mechanics rarely are,” Davis replied. “They figure pilots for gorillas whose only job is to go out and tear their airplanes apart.”
“What about Schmitt? Who’s gonna tell him about Achmed’s lousy marksmanship?”
“I think I should,” Davis said. “He and I have a few things to talk about anyway.”
“Okay. But if you need backup, let me know. Once I finish here, I’m heading to the bar. A day like this, a man’s gotta replace his electrolytes.”
“Right.”
Davis dropped the boarding stairs and was struck by the heat, another blistering day taking its time to fade into night. He smelled the desert again, sweet and musky, a replacement for the heavy, organic jungle air they’d imported from the equator. That was one of the things about flying—every time you opened the door you got a new smell, a new temperature, a new sky and horizon. It made you realize how diverse the world was. And how small.
He walked across the hot concrete to FBN Aviation. The front door rotated open, breaking its rubbery seal, and Davis stepped into the chill. Schmitt’s door was ajar, and when Davis turned the corner he found the chief pilot elbow deep in his filing cabinet. When he turned, Schmitt seemed surprised to see Davis, although not in the sense that he was looking at a ghost. So maybe he hadn’t known about Achmed’s ambush.
“Well, look who’s back!” Schmitt shoved the drawer closed and pulled a security bar into place, snapping on a combination padlock.
“Surprised?” Davis replied.
“Nothing about you ever surprises me.” Schmitt went to his desk and sat. “So how did it go? Did you get a good look at the operation?” The question came with a smile, almost like a stab at humor.
“Yeah, I got a real good look. But things didn’t go quite as planned. Your boy Achmed had a particularly bad day.”
“That idiot? He’s having a bad life. Just don’t tell me he botched a landing and bent another one of my airplanes.”
Davis looked hard, but still saw nothing. Schmitt was good at certain things. Acting wasn’t one of them. He was a guy who put every thought, no matter how ugly, right out there for you to see. And so, even though Schmitt had sent him on this flight, Davis was reasonably sure he knew nothing about Achmed’s assassination plot. Reasonably sure.
“We left him down in Congo,” Davis said.
Schmitt’s expression turned serious. He said nothing.
“We ended up in the middle of a major firefight. I’m not sure Achmed survived. He’s still down there, and your airplane is full of holes—new ones, I mean.”
“What about Boudreau? Is he okay?”
Davis didn’t have to feign the surprise that came over his face. He’d never known Bob Schmitt to care about another human being. Best guess—the chief pilot was afraid of losing his best captain.
“Boudreau’s fine.”
“And the delivery?”
“The delivery was made. You can tell that to your boss.”
Schmitt frowned. “What happened? Was it a rebel attack?”
“I don’t know,” Davis said. “I’m not sure I could tell the difference between the rebels and the good guys—if there are any good guys. The whole situation was pretty chaotic. We’d just finished the offload when people started shooting. Boudreau and I figured it was time to leave.”
“I want to see the airplane,” Schmitt said, bolting up. “You wait here.” He strode out of his office to the operations desk.
While he was busy, Davis took stock of the room. He noticed a computer situated on an L-shaped extension to Schmitt’s desk—as far as he could remember, the only computer he’d seen since arriving in Sudan. He noticed that the mouse was on the left side of the keyboard, and wondered, How can anybody do that? The guy really was weird. His attention went to Schmitt’s filing cabinet, and he noted that the locking bar on front didn’t look particularly solid. He then studied the stout hallway door, top to bottom. It looked solid. There was no keypad on the inside, but then Davis saw why—a motion detector above the inner doorframe. Keypad to get in when the door was locked, motion detector to get out. A common arrangement. He went to the entrance and paused right under the doorframe. Schmitt was still engaged at the front desk. Davis put his arms up on the top frame like he was leaning into it for support. There were certain advantages to being six foot four.
Schmitt finished at the desk and pointed to him. “Come with me. I want this story from both you and Boudreau.”
Davis stepped out into the hallway.
Schmitt reached by him and pulled the heavy office door closed. A red “locked” light on the keypad illuminated. “Let’s go,” he ordered.
“Sure.”
They were nearly to the door when Davis felt the phone in his pocket buzz.
“I’ll catch up,” he said.
Schmitt turned around and gave him a pained look, but that didn’t mean much—it was how the man went through life. Forty-something years ago he’d come out of the womb and gotten slapped by an obstetrician, and Bob Schmitt had been slapping the world back ever since. But right now he was a man on a mission, so he disappeared out the door.
Davis saw a message to call Larry Green. He dialed, and Green picked up halfway through the first ring. Like he’d been waiting with his hand poised on the receiver.
“Jammer, I’m glad you called. How’s everything going?”
At the moment, Davis figured he could answer that in a very negative way, but Jen had been telling him he needed to become a more positive person. He said, “There are indications I’m making progress.”
“Good. I saw Darlene Graham today, and we figured a few things out.”
“I’m glad somebody has.”
“We’ve been going down the wrong path. An airplane did go down that night. We have radio traffic and satellite photos to confirm it. Right time, right place.”
“Wait a minute. You told me an FBN airplane took off, flew some circles, then went right back and landed.”
“It did, but there’s more to it. The radar returns I saw for that night showed a shadow. It came and went, so I originally figured it was just a glitch in the processing. You’ve done enough radar work to know how common queertrons like that are.”
“Sure. But now you don’t think it was a spurious return?”
“Nope. I think it was a two-ship formation.”
Davis took a few moments to think about that. “You know, if you put it together with the rest—a lost drone, some telemetry hardware—do you realize what we could be looking at?”
“I know what you’re going to say, Jammer. Exactly what came to my mind. I suggested to Darlene Graham that they might have tried to fly Blackstar, maybe with the other airplane as some kind of mother ship to control it.”
“Is that feasible?”
“The engineers back here say there’s absolutely no way. Two reasons. First, Blackstar has some very advanced flight control software, all fly-by-wire stuff. The inputs come over a secure satellite link from halfway around the world, and there’s no way anybody could duplicate that feed—everything is strictly encrypted and the frequency hops around constantly.”
“Okay,” Davis said. “And the other reason?”
“That’s the slam dunk. This is our latest stealth platform. According to Director Graham, Blackstar would have been invisible to the type of radar that took the pictures I saw. You wouldn’t get the slightest blip.”
“Okay, good point. But if it wasn’t Blackstar, then what kind of two-ship formation was out flying around in the middle of the night?”
“Beats me,” Green said. “I g
uess the important thing is that something went down in the water.”
Davis added, “And we know it wasn’t N2012L, which is what somebody wants us to believe.”
“That somebody being Rafiq Khoury?”
“Most likely.”
There was a prolonged silence before Green said, “Jammer, I don’t like how this whole thing is going down. Darlene won’t be happy, but I’m pulling you out. Get on the next plane home, we’ll have a beer tomorrow night. The CIA can fix this mess on their own.”
Davis didn’t say anything right away. He’d always known his old boss as a bundle of energy, a guy who could never sit still, so right now Davis had a mental picture of Green circling his desk as if he were training for some kind of office marathon.
“Larry, do you have good coordinates on this crash site?”
“Did you not hear me? I said get out now—that’s an order, mister!”
Davis said, “You know what I did last night, Larry? I went for a walk in the desert, over by that hangar. And do you know what I found?”
No reply.
“Two bodies. They were buried out there in the sand, only not very deep. Some dogs had started digging them up. After I left, a few of Khoury’s people went out with a backhoe and dug a little deeper. Later, I identified one of the bodies. Can you guess?”
Green responded, “The two Ukrainians?”
“Yep.” Davis let that sit for a few seconds, then said, “I don’t like how this is going down either. But two pilots are dead and Bob Schmitt is running a flying unit. Fire me if you want, but I’ve got things to do. Now, I want those coordinates.”
“You really are a dumbass, Jammer.”
Davis said nothing. Green relented and read off the latitude-longitude set. Davis searched the operations counter, found a pen and a scrap of paper, and scribbled the numbers down.
“Where do you take it from here?” Green asked.
Davis knew the answer to that question. But he didn’t say it, because his attention was now riveted outside. A big SUV was heading right for Boudreau’s bullet-ridden airplane. Davis suspected he knew who was inside.