Perilous Skies (Stony Man)

by Don Pendleton

  Another was collision. The aircraft were designed to be extremely small, but with proportionally large interior space. This was meant for users who routinely shipped special cargo.

  His users knew what he meant.

  To achieve this, virtually none of the interior space was used for mechanics or for fuel storage. Fuel was stored in the wings, but also in a capillary piping system within the body of the fuselage. This, Zordun emphasized, made the aircraft especially well balanced in flight. Fuel drained not from a single source, which would have changed in-flight weight distribution, but from throughout the aircraft, keeping the aircraft balanced throughout the flight.

  It was his way of selling this feature as a safety benefit, when in fact it was perhaps the most dangerous aspect of the craft.

  Zordun knew that designing the aircraft that way would make it more prone to fire, but even he was surprised at how easily and quickly his aircraft, with even a small puncture, could ignite, burn and melt into little more than a puddle of waste plastic.

  After the first few fatal accidents, Zordun began offering his buyers an extended, month-long training program. No one had taken him up on that offer. The one-week program was sufficient. He made them sign affidavits—entirely non-legal and nonbinding, of course—affirming that they had been advised of the specific operational idiosyncrasies of the Zordun stealth aircraft.

  In fact, if there was anything more entertaining than watching his clients’ in-flight sexual activities via his secretly streamed video feeds, it was watching them crash.

  He had become enthralled with these videos, from the first one he had ever seen.

  There had been a buyer from Zordun’s home province in China. Liang was a longtime acquaintance of Zordun, who despised the man. It didn’t bother him that Liang brought heroin into their hometown; Zordun simply thought that the man was crude and petty.

  But Liang made a good living, and Zordun convinced him, without too much effort, that his business would boom if he used one of Zordun’s new stealth aircraft to move product into and out of China. He had demonstrated the aircraft to this man, using Zordun’s own personal aircraft. It was essentially like the models that he had just started to sell, although with some safety upgrades.

  Zordun and Liang buzzed the local municipal airport, and Liang was furious, convinced they would be arrested the moment they landed. Only later did it become apparent that the airport had never seen the aircraft on radar. They had only become aware of it when it had buzzed the traffic control tower—and of course there were no markings to identify it. Once it left visual range, it was untraceable.

  Liang purchased an aircraft. He learned to fly it, and was soon enjoying remarkable success. He could move large shipments in and out of China with no danger of detection or arrest. This enabled him to cut transport costs and still sell at a discount. Business and profits boomed.

  As Zordun’s first buyer, his video streams were also the first videos in Zordun’s media archive. He had video of Liang christening the aircraft with his mistress, and another video of him christening the aircraft with his wife and an Urumchi whore simultaneously. The exterior cameras had recorded video of Liang landing at an isolated field in Tajikistan and loading up a shipment of narcotics.

  But the true masterpiece was captured by both the interior and exterior video cameras. They showed Liang climbing into the aircraft, unsteady and intoxicated, with a bottle of vodka in one hand, and giddily flying the aircraft through rock formations several miles outside the city. The video of him skimming those cliff faces was exhilarating. The moment when he flew the aircraft into the cliff face was so startling it almost gave Zordun a heart attack the first time he viewed it.

  He had been so excited he had watched that video again and again.

  Finally his curiosity had overwhelmed him. He’d gotten in his car and driven out to the rock formations, where he’d found the remains of the aircraft—still there, four days after the crash. He’d also found the remains of Liang. No one had reported him missing, apparently—or if they had, no one had bothered to follow up on it. And how would they have known to come and look for him in the rocks miles from town?

  The wreckage had also demonstrated to Zordun just how catastrophically his aircraft could fail. There had been no remaining piece bigger than a shopping bag....

  Since then, there had been a number of dramatic wrecks, preserved forever on video in his personal library.

  But until recently the video feature had been little more than a novelty. There had been nothing, strictly speaking, useful to the business that had come out of these videos.

  Even the video from South America, of the aircraft being destroyed in the Mayan ruins, had been only an entertainment at first. There really was little to see on the video, which faced front, and showed him just distant images of the shootings and mayhem.

  But one time he did get a close-up view of one of the faces of the attackers. A man had passed close by on the right-side nose-cone video pickup, and for a moment he was rendered in crisp detail.

  He was some sort of a soldier, well outfitted, with a serious-looking weapon and a competent demeanor. Whoever this man was, he was very good at what he did, and he knew it.

  When the man spoke he revealed himself to be, of all things, British.

  Zordun could not imagine circumstances that would have brought British Special Forces to the jungles of southern Mexico.

  The most interesting and exciting moment of that particular video was the four-camera shot—front, left, right and interior—of the moment the aircraft was hit with an explosive round and it burst into flame. The cameras continued to function for several seconds as the aircraft burned in vivid detail.

  One of the most amusing videos came from a buyer in southern India. The man was smug and considered himself superior to everyone he had ever met. He had only grudgingly attended the pilot-training sessions, and even then had paid little attention. And his superior attitude had been his undoing.

  He flew his aircraft on a pleasure jaunt out of Chennai, out over the ocean, but he’d failed to heed warnings about the inconsistency of the fuel gauges. If he had paid closer attention during the training sessions, he would have understood that the nature of the fuel tanks, which were actually capillary tubes threaded throughout the fuselage of the aircraft, made the gauges notoriously inaccurate. There was simply no reliable way to measure the amount of fuel left. The fuel drained from the tanks in inconsistent increments. One could not get an accurate measure of the remaining flight time based on the fuel gauge alone. One had to make use of a special fuel-use app included in the aircraft operating system.

  This buyer from southern India had never gained a good understanding of reading the operating system and its warnings. Thus he had been a good five miles from the Indian shoreline when his fuel supply was used up. He began to shout angrily at the gods and at the aircraft and even at Zordun himself for selling him a faulty product. And then he had wept and kicked his feet on the floor like a stupid little boy. Zordun laughed to see this self-important, self-righteous man brought so low in the final seconds of his life. When the aircraft hit the surface of the Bay of Bengal it had essentially dismantled itself, and for a moment one could glimpse the back end of the aircraft separating from the front end and floating away. And for a moment, one could see the hands of the self-righteous man flapping at the surface of the water as he was dragged down with the cockpit, his seat belt still latched.

  Of course, Zordun was not held accountable for the accidents that happened in his aircraft. These accidents were not reported to any authorities. The accidents often happened in out-of-the-way places. Missing aircraft and their pilots were usually written off.

  Zordun had considered offering the aircraft with GPS homing beacons that would allow a search party to find the aircraft, should there be an accident. In fact, he’d offered it to some of his potential buyers. Of course, none of them had been interested in any sort of technology that would m
ake the aircraft easy to find by any sort of authority.

  Zordun had been alarmed at another similar video shot in southern Florida by one of his aircraft just before it, too, was destroyed. It happened in the night. It was a drug shipment gone bad. Soldiers emerged out of the darkness to attack the smugglers, and in the light, briefly, the video showed images of the soldiers. There had been something familiar about them. But when Zordun analyzed the video, he realized that they were not the same soldiers as in the video from southern Mexico. Different faces. Even different equipment. But they seemed to carry themselves with the same self-assurance.

  Still, Zordun returned to the video from the Mayan ruins again and again and froze the image of that face. The British soldier. Something about the man disturbed him. He was an unknown entity. Zordun could not shake the lack of rationale for a British soldier being active in the Mayan ruins.

  But it was ridiculous to think that the British soldier could be dangerous to him.

  Zordun did face real danger—from his customers. It was inevitable that he would be blamed for deaths that occurred in his aircraft. That was why he went to such pains to convince people to study the idiosyncrasies of the aircraft. That was why he stressed that these aircraft needed to be handled in special ways.

  All the disclaimers and all the training and all the warnings would be of no value if and when one of his customers became convinced that his aircraft had failed to operate as promised.

  And the people who were his customers were not the type to take him to court to prove civil damages. They were the type to come to him with a truckload of hardmen to express their disappointment.

  He had also had disagreements with the government of China. He provided them with only enough material to allow them to construct eight prototype aircraft. They had demanded much more material. They had also demanded that Zordun build them a facility to produce the material for themselves. Instead, Zordun fled China.

  He could never work for a single customer. Where was the profit in it?

  But Zordun began growing his personal security staff as a contingency against China or other disgruntled customers.

  He also needed to do a better job of hiding himself. He created a remotely located distribution center in the middle of nowhere. The aircraft were shipped out of Taiwan in a dozen different ways, taking a dozen circuitous routes, before finally ending up at the distribution center in the middle of the jungle in Malaysia.

  Zordun was no longer even involved in the sales of the aircraft. He had independent reps to do that for him. He had people around the world with special contacts, who earned a special commission on every aircraft sold.

  Meanwhile, he had further diffused his operation by separating production of his most important component, the CMC material, from the molding operation of the aircraft itself. He placed his operations in the middle of one of the biggest industrial districts on the planet, where he was in close proximity to dozens of electronic suppliers and dozens of glass suppliers and dozens of specialty rubber suppliers and all the components he needed to construct his aircraft.

  He bought out a specialty ceramics-engineering firm, and was using it to create his own CMC material. He purchased a defunct plastic-molding operation, upgraded the equipment, and was now using it to construct the complex one-piece molding of the aircraft.

  He had to admit that molding the jet of multiple substrates in a single pass was quite the engineering challenge, and it did lend itself to the occasional structural weakness in the end product, but the manufacturing efficiency could not be beat. His facility could now mold one jet in 5.5 hours. Soon he would have the process down to under five hours. He would be capable of molding two jets in a shift.

  He was beginning to think of himself as some sort of a manufacturing genius.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Akira Tokaido loved a challenge—particularly a hack. The Stony Man Farm cybernetics expert was one of the most skilled hackers on the planet.

  Once upon a time, it was easy to figure out what being a hacker meant—a digital burglar who broke into secure electronic systems. These days, anybody who managed to learn his best friend’s Facebook password and post embarrassing pictures on his wall called himself a hacker.

  Tokaido had little in common with such hackers. He was a man who could probe the most secret computer networks on the planet. There were few electronic systems that he could not break.

  The electronic systems on the GPS homing devices planted on the hardmen from Youngstown were tough—but not really. They sent a cellular signal back to a specific monitoring site. It took him under an hour to extract all the information that could be had from the devices.

  “Not too good,” he said dismissively of the devices that sat on the table in the War Room, where he was briefing Aaron Kurtzman and Barbara Price, with Hal Brognola on the big screen.

  “Chinese,” Tokaido added. “They’re still not up to speed with the rest of the world.”

  Tokaido handed over a tablet computer, which showed the location of the monitor of these GPS devices. Price took it, and read the name and address.

  “Joe Zhang. Chinese?”

  “It is,” Kurtzman said. “He’s a known PRC spy, operating in the United States for the past three months. The CIA identified him almost immediately after he set up shop here in the U.S. and has been keeping an eye on him, just to see what he was up to. So far that appears to be nothing.”

  “The CIA was mistaken, obviously,” Hal Brognola growled. “It looks like he’s been up to something after all, and the CIA never saw it. What about these Special Forces? Did Zhang recruit them?”

  “Unlikely, not in such a short time in the country,” Price said. “The FBI took Zhang into custody half an hour ago and he’s being questioned. I predict he won’t have anything to tell us.”

  “It’s a bad day when China is able to hire our own military people to work against us—and on United States soil no less.”

  Price stood, with her arms folded on her chest, gazing up at the plasma screen and Brognola’s image.

  “Hal, there cannot be many individuals with Special Forces training that would turn traitor as these men did. You and I both know that it would take a tremendous effort to coordinate a team of American commandos to operate against the United States’s interest, especially from within the United States.”

  “I’d like to believe that’s true,” Brognola said, sounding disillusioned.

  “If we take that as stipulated,” Price insisted, “we can also assume that this group must have been an extremely valuable tool to the Chinese espionage operation in this country.”

  Brognola looked at her from his office in D.C. He was wondering where she was going with this. “Yes?”

  “I think this makes it clear that Brezius must be an important cog in this machine,” Price concluded.

  “It also means,” Brognola added, “that the Chinese are into this more than we thought. Up to their elbows. One minute this whole affair is about cheap drug-running planes in South America. Another, and it’s about the balance of military power between the United States and China. What about Brezius?”

  “Noah is in a safehouse in Philadelphia,” Kurtzman said. “Our friend Rosario has been babysitting all night, and I think he’s convinced Brezius we really, truly, aren’t going to murder him. He’s apparently been on the run for some time.”

  “So what’s the nature of his involvement?” Brognola asked. “It doesn’t sound like Brezius is the man running the operation.”

  “Clearly he is not,” Price said. “There is every indication that he’s been living in the United States—while trying to stay off the radar, so to speak—for months. He’s been a specialty-materials-development expert for several years, and there are records of him working for different global engineering plastics and ceramic specialty firms. Most of his developments have been less than innovative, until the point he started working on new developments in CMC materials approximately two years
ago. He may have developed the stealth material after leaving his last legitimate employer. There’s no record of employment for a long period, although there were frequent trips out of the country.”

  “To?” Brognola asked.

  “Sydney. Honolulu. Singapore. And a three-month stay in Kuala Lumpur. Malaysia was the final Asian trip for him. As soon as he returned he packed his stuff and moved out of his apartment in San Francisco. He’s spent four months since then moving from place to place, all over the country.”

  Brognola nodded. “I get the picture. He was involved, got scared, knew his partners would execute him if he tried to bow out. So he went on the run.”

  “We’ll know more when he talks,” Kurtzman said. “But I’d agree that’s the likely scenario.”

  “So he developed the materials, but he is not the one currently exploiting the material. He’s not the one making these aircraft. So the question is, who’s making the aircraft? That should be the first thing you ask him.”

  “It will be,” Price said. “In fact, Rosario’s been picking his brain already this morning. We’ll let you know when they come up with anything worthwhile.”

  * * *

  AKIRA TOKAIDO ALSO LOVED a new type of target. For example, he had never had a good reason to hack into a network television meteorological center before.

  It came about as a result of a morning intelligence report from Rosario Blancanales. Noah Brezius had provided them with a theoretical way to see CMC on radar. Blancanales had put Brezius on the phone with Tokaido to discuss what was needed to make the theory a reality.

  As soon as he ended the call, Tokaido started hacking.

  “Nice,” he announced.

  Aaron Kurtzman pushed himself away from another table and rolled across the room, coming to an abrupt halt at Tokaido’s side, peering at a huge, crowded display.

  “Worldwide Weather News,” Tokaido said, waving at the screen. “They’ve got new satellites, five big daddies, with fifteen little satellite children, all in geostationary orbits. The children satellite feed signals into the main satellites, which gives them a leg up on tracking storms around the world. Cost them, like, three hundred million dollars, but it just might give them the ability to identify hurricanes before anybody else. Even government hurricane centers.”