The interior of the old barn smelled like a machine shop. Smells of oil, metal, electricity, and fuel filled the stuffy air. Large piles of junk lay near the door: spare parts from machines, both old and new. Three huge airplanes practically filled the room. The brothers immediately recognized the Sullivan Brothers custom planes owned by Hawkins Air, Clevon Brooks, and—the most recent arrival—Dale “Rock” Grissom.
Scattered about the floor lay the carefully crafted interiors of the Sullivan planes. The Hawkins Air plane was facing the door where the brothers came in. The Brooks plane was in the middle of the hangar, and the Grissom plane stood near the big doors on the lakeward side.
“See anyone?” Frank whispered.
“No,” Joe whispered back. “Let’s look around. Obviously, we’re in the right place.”
As the brothers stepped forward, the stolen plane’s engine started, and its big prop spun to life. The plane lurched forward, and the propeller bore in on the brothers, threatening to cut the Hardys to pieces.
15 Flying Finish
* * *
The wind from the prop of Jamal’s dad’s stolen plane forced the brothers back. The deafening roar of its engine filled their ears. The plane rolled toward Frank and Joe, its deadly propeller a blur in the barn’s dim light.
The Hardys backed into the junk piled by the door, and scrap metal rained down on them. They couldn’t retreat any further. They were trapped.
“Down!” yelled Frank.
He and Joe dived to either side of the propeller, and it just passed over their heads. The boys rolled as they hit the floor, then quickly got to their feet again. As they did, Joe spotted a man in a black mask holding a rifle aimed directly at Frank.
Joe pulled the cell phone out of his pocket and heaved it at the gunman. The sniper fired, but Joe’s impromptu missile hit him hard as he pulled the trigger. The cell phone smashed into pieces, but the shot went awry, missing Frank.
Frank charged forward and grabbed the gunman before he could fire again. The two of them wrestled for a moment, Frank pinning the barrel against the masked man’s chest. The man facing him was bigger and heavier than Frank. He began to force the teenager back toward the hangar wall.
Joe rushed to the plane cockpit’s door just as the second masked man piloting Brooks’s plane tried to get out. The younger Hardy hit the hatch hard, smashing the door into the thief’s chest and arm. The man yelped and staggered forward. Joe grabbed him by the shirt and punched him square in the face. The man fell backward and hit his head against the fuselage of Jamal’s stolen plane. He slumped to the floor, unconscious.
The gunman kept pushing Frank toward the wall. Out of the corner of his eye, Frank saw several big workbenches piled with rusty tools. They were right behind him. If the gunman pushed Frank into one of them, he wouldn’t have to fire a shot; he could either break Frank’s back against the table or strangle him by pressing the stock of the gun into his neck.
Frank threw himself backward onto the floor, pushing the gunman over him as he fell. The throw worked. Frank let go of the gun, and the sniper sailed past him and smashed hard into a heavy workbench. The gunman groaned and tried to swing the gun around, but Frank sprang to his feet and kicked the man in the side of the head.
The sniper hit the floor like a sack of potatoes and didn’t move. Frank went to help Joe and saw his brother already coming to his aid. “Let’s tie these guys up and find out who they are,” Frank said.
The brothers scrounged some rope from the piles of junk and quickly had the thieves securely trussed. Then they pulled off the felons’ masks.
“Mitchum and Jose,” Frank said, hardly surprised.
“Or, more accurately, Pablo Salvatore and John Michaelson, half of the remaining Carl Denny gang,” Joe said. “They must have heard us coming. Good thing they weren’t better prepared.”
“Mitchum wasn’t a very good shot anyway,” Frank said. “He missed us plenty of times in the forest.” Mitchum scowled back at Frank.
“He wasn’t a very good security guard either,” Joe said. “I think Flaubert may need to find another.”
“And a new maintenance man too,” Frank added, looking at Jose. “No wonder Scott Field is such a wreck. Let’s see if these guys found what they were looking for.”
The brothers stowed the thieves in the storage compartment of Brooks’s plane. They spent the next few minutes searching through the hangar, but found no sign of the missing coins. “Nothing,” Joe said.
“I guessed as much,” Frank replied. “If they’d found them, they would have stopped searching. Carl Denny must have died before he could tell the rest of the gang exactly where he hid the coins.”
Joe nodded. “He probably stashed the money when he was working at the Sullivan Brothers customizing shop. Since he was working on airplanes, it would be easy to hide some rare coins in the paneling or upholstery. Plus an airplane makes a great escape vehicle.”
“I think if we check,” Frank said, “we’ll find that all the planes that have been ransacked during the air show were in the Sullivan Brothers custom shop on the night Denny made his big escape.”
“So, in the confusion of the police chase, Denny escaped in the wrong plane,” Joe said. “That makes sense. The planes were probably all painted fairly similarly at the time since they weren’t finished. But if the stolen coins aren’t here . . .”
“There’s only one place they can be,” Frank said. “We need to get back to Scott Field before someone in the gang does.”
“The Jeep may not be fast enough,” Joe said. “Which plane should we take?”
“Grissom’s is our best bet,” Frank said. “It hasn’t been here long enough for them to chop it up too badly. Open the barn doors while I start it up.”
He hurried over to the Grissom plane and jumped in. Joe opened the big doors out onto the lake and then climbed into the copilot’s seat.
“They’ve ripped out the radio,” Frank said, “but the rest of the control panel is still good. I think we can fly it.”
Joe nodded. “Let’s roll!”
Frank taxied the slightly beaten-up Sullivan plane out onto the lake and, following the tracks laid down in the thin snow by the planes that had been stolen and hidden, executed a perfect takeoff.
“Whew!” he said. “Don’t ask me to do that again.”
“All you have to worry about now,” Joe replied, “is getting us to Scott Field before the other thieves get away.”
They headed south southeast toward the air show.
“Hey,” Joe said, picking something out the ashtray near the center of the control panel, “Here’s the picture from that newspaper article Grissom was using as blackmail. He must have stashed it here for safe keeping.”
“Are the remaining members of the gang who we think they are?” Frank asked.
“Yep,” Joe replied.
“Too bad you smashed our cell phone,” Frank said, “or we could call ahead and alert the cops.”
“Which would you rather have, a smashed cell phone or a shot in the head?” Joe asked.
“You made the right choice,” Frank said with a smile.
As they arrived back at Scott Field, they saw another plane on the tarmac that was heading for the runway.
“The last scratched-up Sullivan custom,” Joe said, “straight from the consignment block. Any bets who’s in the pilot seat?”
“Hang on,” Frank said. “I’m going to bring us in low and fast.”
Frank banked their borrowed aircraft low over the control tower, just to get the authorities’ attention. Then he made a sharp turn and brought the plane on the runway. He taxied to a stop right in front of the final Sullivan custom plane, blocking its takeoff.
He and Joe hopped out onto the tarmac as police sirens wailed, toward them. Flaubert and other air officials ran out onto the field with Jamal in tow.
A very angry man climbed out of the blocked plane’s cockpit and raised his hands up in irritation. “What rig
ht do you have to do this?” he asked. “We could have been hurt!”
“Not half the menace you are, Mr. Manetti,” Joe said. “You’ve stolen planes and sabotaged this whole air show.”
“That’s absurd,” Manetti said. “I’ve just bought this plane! Now get out of my way. I’ve had enough shenanigans at this convention.”
“You had to buy it,” Frank said. “With Mitchum and Jose tied up in Kendall State Park, you had no chance of stealing a fourth plane.”
“You and the rest of Carl Denny’s gang are behind all the trouble at the Fly By & Buy,” Joe said, “and we’ve got the picture to prove it.”
As the police, airport security, the NTSB agent, Elise Flaubert, and Jamal closed in, Joe held out the picture of the Denny gang from the newspaper article.
“I think you’ll recognize four of those people, Ms. Flaubert,” Joe said. “After all, two of them worked for you.”
“You might as well come out too, Ms. Davenport—or should I say Mrs. Beth Denny,” Frank said to a figure still lurking in the cockpit of the final Sullivan plane. “Seems you’re grounded!”
By the following morning, the police and aviation officials had rounded up the rest of the Denny gang and locked them all in jail. The local authorities took credit for capturing the criminals, and this was fine with the Hardys. The brothers were used to being left out of the spotlight, and frankly, they preferred it that way.
Just before noon Amy Chow took the brothers and Jamal out to brunch, to thank them for catching the criminals who had sabotaged her plane.
“So, the old Carl Denny gang was behind all of the trouble at the Fly By & Buy?” Amy asked.
“Yep,” Joe replied. “They got caught during the big coin robbery, but Denny got away. He stashed the loot in an airplane at Sullivan Brothers when he worked there. But when the police nearly caught him, he took off in the wrong plane.”
“He probably spent the rest of his life searching for the coins,” Frank said. “If we check some old news stories, we might even find a trail of Sullivan plane vandalism leading back to him.”
“But he died of cancer before he found the stolen coins,” Jamal said. “Man, is that ironic!”
Joe nodded. “As the fax Phil sent last night confirmed,” he said, “the rest of the gang was in prison until a few months ago. When they got out, Denny’s wife tracked him down. He was dying at that point, but he managed to tell Rita, or should I say Beth, that he’d stashed the coins in one of the Sullivan Brothers planes that were in the shop the night he escaped.”
“He couldn’t tell her which one, though,” Frank continued. “The planes have all changed hands and been repainted a couple of times since. The one that looked closest to the plane Denny stole—eight-seven-eight—was Jamal’s plane. That’s why the gang stole Jamal’s plane first.”
“Lucky me!” Jamal said, a hint of sarcasm in his voice.
“It was lucky for the thieves that all those Sullivan planes were here at the show together,” Chow said.
“Not lucky at all,” Frank replied. “Scott Field was in bad financial shape. Flaubert was grasping at straws to keep the airport afloat. She told us that Tony Manetti suggested that she bring the planes to the show. Remembering that tipped us off to Manetti’s ties with the criminals behind the trouble.”
“So Manetti set this whole scheme up?” Jamal said.
“With Davenport,” Joe said, nodding. “They were the brains behind the operation, though Manetti brought plenty of brawn too.”
“It was Manetti who broke into the administration office and the control tower,” Frank said. “The gang needed the show registration papers to figure out which of the Sullivan planes were from the group Denny worked on. Jose helped Manetti escape us that time. He misdirected us so that we wouldn’t catch his boss.”
“Rita Davenport covered up for Manetti during the control tower break-in,” added Joe. “That time they were trying to use the tower computer to cover up the flight paths they’d taken when stealing the planes. Davenport screamed that night to keep us from catching Manetti.”
“So the attack on her was completely fake?” Jamal asked.
“Exactly,” Joe replied. “The thieves had their scheme well coordinated; they made sure they could cover for one another. Mitchum was the pilot who flew Brooks’s stolen plane out to Kendall State Park. He’d put in a long shift the day before, and no one at the airport expected him back that day. Jose overpowered Brooks, then went with Mitchum to help strip the plane down once they reached the old barn.”
“But neither of them counted on your pulling Jose out of that plane,” Jamal said.
“No, but my interference didn’t slow them down very much,” Joe said. “Jose hooked up with Mitchum at the barn, and they came after Frank and me. They only managed to chase us into the river.”
“Having Mitchum as the field’s main security guard and Jose working as a janitor was a huge help to this operation,” Frank said. “The gang had been planning this for a long time—long enough to get two people working inside the airport.”
Amy shook her head. “They played Elise Flaubert like a violin.”
“I feel bad for her,” Jamal said. “This might end her career.”
“Let’s hope not,” Frank said.
“She doesn’t deserve it,” Joe added. “This was a very slick operation.”
“No wonder this case was so hard to solve,” Jamal said. “Every time we thought we had one of the thieves pegged another would appear.”
“Well, no matter what the media say, I’ll still know who saved the day,” Amy said. She raised her glass of orange juice in a toast. “I heard they recovered the stolen coins from that last plane this morning.”
“It was just bad luck that the thieves chose the right plane last,” Frank said. “If they’d discovered the coins earlier, we might never have caught them. They would have probably taken their money and run.”
“I hope the reward from the recovery will pay for the damages to Jamal’s plane and the other victims’ losses,” Joe said.
“If it doesn’t,” Amy said, “maybe I’ll set up a charitable fund to cover the difference.”
Jamal smiled at Amy. “I knew there was a reason I liked you,” he said.
She laughed. “And if there’s anything I can do for you, Frank and Joe,” she said, “just let me know. Without you the criminals might have flown the coop.”
“Yeah,” Joe replied. “Good thing their wings are now clipped!”
In Plane Sight Page 10