Fly by Night

by Ward Larsen

  The storm was ebbing, and a few drops of rain began to fall in the gusty aftermath. Big globules splattered to the ground and disappeared immediately into parched, dust-laden earth. Like they’d landed on a sponge. Davis had the diving mask strung on an arm now as he skirted the edge of the village—he could get by with just squinting, and didn’t want to sacrifice any peripheral vision. He had to work fast, because soon the soldiers would be coming out to pick up their search.

  The big truck was a three-and-a-half-ton Dong Feng, a People’s Republic of China knock-off troop carrier. It looked heavy and slow. The jeep was an ancient BJ-212, the kind of thing China had been selling on the cheap to Third World countries for decades. It looked by far the more nimble of the two, and carried two jerry cans for gas, hopefully full. The jeep also had the only radio, so it was the obvious choice. Davis moved fast, angling first toward the big truck. He found what he wanted in the troop bed, a lug wrench secured to one side-wall with a wingnut. He removed it and went to work on the truck.

  When he was done, Davis kept the wrench and climbed into the jeep. He hit the start button and the engine churned, but didn’t start.

  “Damn it!”

  Davis checked the hornet’s nest, just in view around a mud-brick wall. No response. He cranked the engine again, and this time it caught. He put the jeep in gear and turned south toward the desert. He paused when he had a hundred yards of separation, waiting for the swarm. Nothing happened. He revved the engine. Still nothing.

  Christ these guys are stupid.

  He leaned on the horn, and finally three men stumbled outside. The wind was still strong enough to flatten their uniforms against their bodies. Davis was about to wave when one man shouldered a rifle. Davis revved the engine and the jeep lunged forward—as much as a Chinese jeep could.

  He was steering toward the open desert when the first bullet pinged off the frame of his windshield.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  He was high on khat, driving a Chinese jeep as fast as he could through a sandstorm in the world’s largest desert. People were shooting at him. But at least he was wearing his diving mask.

  How do I get into this shit?

  Davis decided the khat had dulled his decision making. He went for max speed just to see what the jeep could do, and at sixty-five miles an hour had the accelerator pegged to the floorboard. Not great, but maybe good enough. The steering was exactly what you’d expect from a mass-produced Communist military vehicle—the wheel seemed to float in his hands as he careened over the semi-improved road.

  Davis looked over his shoulder and saw the truck behind him. Right now, given the visibility, he figured he had to keep his adversary within half a mile—any more and they’d lose him. But he didn’t want much less either, because they had the artillery. He estimated there were four, maybe five soldiers in the truck, which meant that his plan, drug-addled as it certainly was, seemed to be working. Davis had known he was going to need a good head start to get clear of al-Asmat, yet the tactical impediment had been obvious. The soldiers had brought two vehicles. There was no way to steal both without getting Antonelli involved. Taking one and disabling the other was an option, but that carried consequences. At that point, whoever was in charge would have no choice but to call for backup—a fresh vehicle or even a whole new squad. Replacements would arrive in an hour if they came by chopper, two if it was by land or sea. In that time window, Davis might get fifty miles of separation, a hundred if he was lucky. He wanted more.

  Thus his plan to split the force. Right now he was leading half the soldiers deep into the desert. The other half were back in the village, out of the fight. The group back in al-Asmat might well have access to a satellite phone or a handheld radio. If not, they might confiscate one in the village. But they wouldn’t send for backup—not yet. That call, Davis knew, was one no field commander would make except as a last resort. It was admitting defeat, and defeat never looked good on a performance report. As long as there was a chance they could wrap Davis up on their own, nobody in this unit would call for help. So with the guys behind him engaged in hot pursuit, the soldiers back in the village would sit patiently, wait for their buddies to return with their trophy. That was Davis’ logic, anyway.

  Having successfully divided the enemy, it was time to conquer.

  With the chase established, Davis kept his speed up. Soon, however, he saw a problem. The truck was gaining. Worst case, he had figured the two vehicles for equals on performance. He’d been wrong. What do to about it? Davis had decades of military training under his belt. He knew how to fight with jets and fists and guns. Fighting with Chinese four-wheel-drive utility vehicles—not a clue. So he did what any rugby player would do. He mashed his big foot harder on the accelerator.

  With the truck closing fast, his clever plan was looking less clever every second. Davis got a picture in his mind, the right front wheel of the truck. He had loosened all five lug nuts, thrown three away, and left the final two half a turn from falling free. The big wheel had to be close to separating, wobbling as the truck spun and crashed over the rutted road. That was his theory. But reality was arguing otherwise. The troop carrier was only a hundred yards back now. Davis took off the mask to get a better look and promptly fumbled it out the door. Storm-driven sand was still swirling, and his eyes began to sting. The driver behind him had an enclosed cab.

  He never heard the sound of the second shot—only a metallic crunch as the round exploded into the UHF radio on the dashboard. Davis began to think his plan was faulty. Could one of the two remaining lugs have bent under the uneven pressure and jammed in place? If so, the wheel might never fall off. He figured he was five miles from the village, just what he’d had in mind. But until the wheel fell off, the rest of his scenario was out the window. He glanced over his shoulder. Eighty yards.

  He who hesitates dies.

  Davis yanked the wheel hard left and turned off the road, immediately hit a dune at the shoulder and flew airborne. The jeep landed hard, skewed onto the driver’s-side wheels, then righted itself in a sideways slide. Davis corrected, and loose stones peppered the wheel wells before everything straightened out. The off-road surface was punishing, and Davis had to slow down. The truck was bearing down, even closer now, but its driver faced the same dilemma and had to slow. Davis saw the men in the truck’s bed bouncing airborne and hanging on for dear life—nobody could shoot from a platform like that and expect to hit anything. Better yet, it had to be beating the hell out of the wheel lugs.

  Davis yelled over the roar of the engine, “Come on, dammit! Fall off already!”

  The truck wasn’t gaining anymore. Stalemate. Then the ride began to smooth as the desert settled into waves of soft sand dunes. The truck began gaining again, and another shot smacked in. Too close. Plan B was dead. Davis reverted to physics. The forces on the lug nuts had to be at their highest in a hard turn, and a left turn would pull the right wheel away from the truck. Which begged the next question—how to put the truck chasing him into a hard left turn?

  Only one method came to mind.

  He spun the wheel and the jeep slid through a turn, a spray of sand arcing to the outside like a skier rounding a turn. Davis got low, using the dash as a shield, and steered straight for the truck. The closure turned extreme as the speed of the two vehicles became additive. Davis kept his head down, stealing occasional glances. Two more bullets ricocheted off metal. He favored his left just slightly in the game of chicken. Fifty feet apart, Davis took one last look, then ducked down and held tight. It was up to the other driver now to lose his nerve.

  He did.

  In a flash, the big truck flew by on the right. Davis watched it happen over his shoulder. The truck began to slide, spraying a massive plume of sand into the air. Then it disappeared completely, lost in its own private dust storm. Davis kept his eyes padlocked on the swirl of brown, and seconds later a single wheel came bouncing out of the cloud. It rolled a hundred feet, hesitated upright for a moment, then fe
ll on its side.

  Davis eased off the accelerator and began breathing again.

  He picked up Antonelli as arranged, and drove southeast along the coast road. The storm had passed, replaced by a sudden calm that was totally at odds with the maelstrom of the last hour. The haboob had left its calling card, a thick residue of dust that covered the road like brown snow.

  “Did you see any more soldiers?” he asked.

  “I heard shouting, but I was not close enough to the village to see what was happening.”

  “That’s good.”

  “What became of the others, the ones who followed you?”

  It sounded like an accusation, and he noticed her grim expression. “Look, Contessa, I’m no assassin. Their truck had an accident.”

  “How convenient.”

  “Very.”

  “We are safe then?” she asked.

  “For the moment. They’ll be confused. The guys out in the desert will spend some time trying to put their truck back together, but they don’t have the right tools. I made sure of it. Eventually, they’ll walk back to the village. That’ll take some time too.”

  “And the soldiers in the village?”

  “They know I’m not there,” he said, “so hopefully they’ll give up the search.”

  “But they have associated the two of us,” she said. “They will look for me as well.”

  “Possibly. But they won’t find you.”

  Antonelli said nothing.

  “Listen, I’m sorry. Sorry to have dragged you into this mess. I have to get you away from al-Asmat. You can’t stay here any more than I can.”

  “It’s not your fault. I—”

  “No,” he broke in, “it is my fault. If I’d been thinking more clearly two nights ago you’d be back in the village working right now and not speeding around in this stupid contraption.”

  “True. But if you had not come here, you would never have discovered the truth about the crash. I am no expert in such things, but it is clear that Imam Khoury is planning something awful. So I am glad to be here. Glad that I could help you.”

  Davis didn’t respond.

  He knew he ought to say something deep and philosophical, but his mind-set was purely tactical.

  “We have two overriding concerns. First, we have to get you safe, and the only way to do that is to go back to Khartoum and hand you over to the Italian Embassy.”

  She seemed to ignore that, and said, “What is the second concern?”

  “Whether or not those goons back in the village have communications.” He pointed to the bullet hole in the dash. “I think that was their only hard-wired radio, but they might have a satellite phone. If not, they’ll try to find one in the village.”

  “They could find mine,” she said.

  He shot her a pained look.

  “You pulled me away in such a hurry—I didn’t have time to retrieve anything.”

  “I know,” he admitted, “my mistake. We could use it right now, but there’s no going back.”

  She nodded.

  With a jolt, the jeep bounded up off the primitive road onto a strip of asphalt. The ride improved considerably. Antonelli eased the death grip she’d had on the dash and settled back into her seat. She fell silent and seemed to relax. Davis didn’t. He drove hard and fast, pushing the rickety jeep for all it was worth. It was late afternoon, and the approach of night seemed to have accelerated under the red, dust-laden sky. It had been a tumultuous day, but the night wasn’t going to be serene or restful. Khartoum was four hundred miles south, and Davis calculated that if they drove straight through they’d arrive just before sunrise. And they would drive straight through.

  Davis was feeling it again, the same compelling impulse he’d had three nights ago. People had been shooting at him. People were hunting Antonelli. They had an excuse for coming after him, of course. He had banged up some thieves at a poker game, thieves who happened to be soldiers. But Davis suspected the real reason for putting a target on his back involved something more troubling. More substantial. He saw it now like he had seen it so many times before. He was getting close, nearing a solution, and people were getting nervous. Rafiq Khoury, or whoever controlled that hangar, had killed the two Ukrainians. That was for sure. Buried them twice, deeper the second time. Two good guys, by all accounts, executed and stuffed into the hot earth.

  Somebody was going to a lot of trouble. They’d guarded a secret hangar for months. Started an entire airline from scratch. Turned an ancient airplane into a drone. Performed a test flight and crashed it.

  A hell of a lot of trouble.

  Jammer Davis didn’t know the end game, didn’t know what they were aiming at. But he did have one advantage. They didn’t know he was aiming at them.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  There are reasons armies attack at four in the morning. It has to do with sleep cycles and circadian rhythms. Jammer Davis wasn’t quite so calculating—that was when he arrived.

  He was dog tired after the eight-hour drive. He and Antonelli had taken turns at the wheel, and Davis had used the time to plan. His first idea was to go to the terminal or the FBN building and find a phone, but if he did that they might be seen. And even if he could get through to Larry Green, any help would be a long time in coming. In the end, Davis decided his best weapon was invisibility. They hadn’t run across any patrols during the night. Four hundred miles north, the authorities would be scouring the coast for a man and a woman in a Chinese jeep. Nobody would expect them here.

  Davis was at the wheel now, and he turned off the airport perimeter road a mile from FBN Aviation’s hangar. He guided the jeep into the brush and covered a quarter mile before a wheel got hung up in a dry gulch. They dismounted and surveyed the problem.

  “We can get it out,” she said. “A little digging, then you can push and I’ll drive.”

  “No. It’s not worth the time or the noise. We leave it here.”

  The jeep still had a quarter tank of fuel—they’d gone through both the jerry cans—and Antonelli watched Davis drop the key in his pocket.

  “Never discard a possible asset,” he said. “An old Marine gunny told me that once.”

  It dawned on Davis that a weapon might be useful. Two days ago he’d had access to a whole tree of rifles and a semiautomatic handgun. Unfortunately, at the time there had been other things on his mind—retaliating against a band of thugs and retrieving what they’d stolen. Just one more screwup, he thought. Davis searched the jeep, expecting to find a Beretta or a Glock. Hoping for a hand grenade or two. All he found was an old pair of field glasses under the seat. Undaunted, he picked them up and trained them on the hangar a mile away.

  “I don’t see much,” he said.

  “We’ll have to get closer,” she replied.

  “No. This is where we split.”

  “But I can—”

  “No,” he broke in. “I should have gotten you safe already.”

  “I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself.”

  “Yes,” he agreed, “you are. And right now I need you to do just that. Walk to the passenger terminal and find a taxi, take it to the embassy.”

  “I don’t have any money.”

  “The driver won’t know that. Somebody at the embassy can take care of it.”

  Antonelli looked anxious, but in a way that had nothing to do with paying for cabs. Davis walked closer and put a hand on her cheek. “I need you safe, Contessa.”

  “I’m safe right now.”

  He shook his head. “No, everything I’ve done has been wrong.”

  Her lips parted to argue, but he put his index finger to them. “We’ll talk about it some other day.”

  She leaned in and kissed him. He pulled her closer and held tight.

  As soon as their lips parted, Davis said, “You know—those twins had terrible timing.”

  “Yes, they did. Perhaps another time we—”

  The dawn silence was suddenly broken by the whine of a tur
bine engine. Davis pulled away.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said, already backpedaling. “Be careful.”

  “You too.”

  Davis turned and began jogging toward the hangar. “And by the way,” he called over his shoulder, “when you get a cab, make sure you take one from the stand.”

  Antonelli stood still until Davis disappeared. She turned toward the distant terminal, but paused after only a few strides. For a very long time she stood stockstill, poised on the balls of her feet. To anyone watching she would have looked like a climber wavering at the crest of a perilous summit. Then she tipped off the mountain.

  She went after Davis.

  A thin glow was just showing in the east as he closed in on the hangar. Davis slowed his approach, much as he had four days ago. The compound’s floodlights were bright, their intensity washing out the breaking dawn. Davis’ angle of approach was such that the main hangar doors weren’t in view, but the backside of the building looked exactly as it had before. The sound of the turbine was still there. It was nothing big, and certainly not throttled to full power, but now that he was closer Davis could pinpoint the source. A jet was idling in the hangar.

  He had been moving slowly out of caution—and if he was honest, weariness—but the implications of a jet engine in FBN’s hangar shifted his stride to a higher gear. He began jogging, weaving though gullies and around vegetation. When he finally achieved line of sight to the front of the hangar, the first thing he saw was an antenna-encrusted DC-3. The tail number was N55US, a number that meant nothing to him. A number that wasn’t even in the files in Schmitt’s cabinet. From an official, regulatory point of view, the “US” at the end meant nothing. As a matter of symbolism, it gave Davis yet another mental chill.