The explosion that followed seemed to come from somewhere deep within the earth beneath my feet. The R9 jumped maybe a foot, and then it broke apart with flames that tore rents through the fuselage of the F-16 beside it. The fighter’s wings sagged and hit the ground and then they too exploded as the fuel inside them heated, vaporised and ignited. Without thinking about it, I dove behind the heavy ramp of the nearest transport and buried my head under my hands as a huge fireball rolled through the air towards me. A wave of heat seared my throat and I smelt a mixture of burning kerosene and my own singed nostril hairs. Next, steaming, smoking pieces of aircraft began to rain down, pummelling the tail ramp I’d sheltered beneath. A large wheel hub thumped into the concrete not two yards away, cracking it, and sizzled as the ice around it melted into a pool of water.
Twenty-two
I stood up, grabbing hold of the plane to steady myself. The world was swaying, but that could have been me. I must have been unconscious for a few minutes at least. Personnel were already rushing around with portable fire extinguishers. Spot fires were burning here and there for 200 yards all around the main body of the inferno that was consuming the F-16’s fuselage and wings, as well as the remains of the R9, the van, and its unfortunate occupants. Four hundred yards away, the main fire-fighting team swerved into view, lights and sirens competing with each other.
I turned around, feeling shaky. Several guys were on their knees pointing nine-millimetre Berettas at my chest. Their back-up arrived next – a swarm of Security Force vehicles. Men in full combat gear with MP5 sub-machine guns jumped out and yelled at me. I put my hands in the air. Three guys rushed in. One hit me in the back of the legs with a nightstick to get me into the more respectful, on-my-knees position.
As far as pretty much everyone was concerned, I’d just destroyed an aircraft worth millions. Index fingers twitched outside trigger guards. Handcuffs tightened around my wrist. Two of the men hoisted me up and I was led off to a van and thrown in the back.
*
They took me to a cellblock that was once a shipping container. My legs throbbed from the nightstick cracks while the dive to the ground was playing havoc with the cracked rib. I figured I’d be fine as long as no one made me laugh. A Turkish military policeman with enough food in his moustache to make a kebab padded me down and locked me in a cell.
Half-a-dozen of his buddies eyed me off, frowning, cigarettes drooping from their mouths, one of them banging a nightstick against the metal wall. Maybe the wall had been giving him trouble. The guy with the smorgasbord above his lip pulled my wallet. His eyeballs bugged out of their sockets when he got a load of the shield inside it.
Special Agents Arlow Mallet and Seb Goddard mooched in and exchanged a few quiet words with a couple of the Turkish guards. Mallet cased the block and saw me sitting on a stool behind bars, handcuffed to one of them. He came on over wearing an appreciative grin. ‘Finally achieved your level, Cooper?’
‘Someone make a loud noise when your face was in the oven, Mallet?’
‘Good to see you’ve still got your pathetic sense of humour,’ he sniggered, ‘even when you’re up to your eyeballs in shit.’
‘You guys – and I use the term loosely – went to see Artie Farquar at TEI. Looks to me like you’re running a concurrent investigation. Who gave you the brief?’
‘Blow me, Cooper.’ Mallet shook his head slowly from side to side. ‘Destroying a Galaxy? You’re in no position to be asking the questions. They’ll be taking this one out of your pay for the next three hundred years.’
‘Ask me to blow you one more time, Mallet, and I’ll seriously start to think maybe that’s why you keep following me around. I asked you where your brief came from.’
‘Y’all’s in no position to be asking anything. In fact, with you in there and us out here, I can’t help feeling that a little natural order has returned to the good Lord’s earth. Hey, Goddard,’ Mallet called out, enjoying himself, ‘come on over here and feed the chump a banana.’
Goddard joined his partner. ‘Look who’s on show now, asshole.’ he said with a sneer.
‘So, Cooper, you get a look at the two driving the van?’
‘How do you know it was two, and why should I tell you?’ I said. Mallet just looked at me. ‘Hey, if double-barrel questions are too hard for you to handle, I can give them to you one at a time.’
‘Just answer my question, wise-ass,’ said Mallet. ‘For a moment I thought I was chasing the both of you.’
‘Us? What the hell gave you that idea?’ asked Goddard, perplexed.
I shrugged. I didn’t feel like explaining.
‘So you didn’t recognise them?’ Mallet prompted.
‘No,’ I said. My answer caused the two CID special agents to share a glance with each other. It was a telling glance – the kind of glance that has meaning – only I had no idea what that meaning could be. I also knew there was no point asking for a plain English translation.
‘Did you get a good enough look at them to be sure you didn’t recognise them?’ Goddard pushed.
‘No, as a matter of fact, I didn’t. I was chasing and they were running – in a van. Now give me a little quid pro quo and get lost.’
‘Innocent people have been known to rot in Turkish prisons, Cooper,’ said Goddard. ‘Have a nice life.’
‘Your knuckles are dragging, Goddard,’ I replied.
He tossed me a final glower before leaving, both men turning up their collars, bracing for the cold before they stepped out into the late afternoon dusk.
Masters arrived, suddenly appearing in the doorway, just as boredom had settled over my jailers. ‘Who’s in charge here?’ she demanded.
One man answered with a sneering lift of his chin.
Masters held up her shield, the exact same one as mine, and said, ‘This man is a special agent in the US Air Force OSI. You need to release him. And you need to do it now.’
She got more boredom mixed with noncompliance until Johnny Oh came in behind her, shouting in Turkish. Then everyone started yelling at each other. But Turks seem to do that a lot, and I was getting used to it.
It took some Turkish colonel heading up the local investigation to finally make the call on releasing me from custody, and only after several witnesses confirmed our version of the facts. Namely, that I was giving chase to a vehicle driven by a couple of men who were trying to escape after murdering a US contractor, and that the destruction of the Israeli F-16 was an unfortunate accident and not of my doing.
As we walked out of the makeshift prison into the cold evening air, Masters said, ‘Sorry we took so long, Vin. No one seemed to know where you’d been taken.’
‘Goddard and Mallet did. I hadn’t even warmed up the seat before they arrived.’
‘Maybe CID is better connected. What did they want?
‘To gloat, mostly. They also wanted to know if I recognised the guys who took care of Ten Pin. I could be wrong, but they seemed surprised when I said that I didn’t.’
‘What does that mean?’ Masters asked.
‘It means they know more than we give them credit for. But then, I wouldn’t give them credit to buy a pint of milk, so that’s not saying much. There’s something going on with those two. And it’d be helpful to know what it was.’
‘Perhaps we could get Cain to run a check on them through their unit,’ Masters suggested.
‘Good idea.’
‘So . . . how are you feeling? You were pretty close to the plane when it blew.’
‘Okay, I guess. Sore ribs, is all.’
‘Someone up there loves you, Vin. When I saw that fireball roll over you, I thought your goose was cooked.’
‘And I thought that smell was my hair,’ I said.
Masters allowed herself the faintest smile. ‘Now that you mention it, it does look a little . . . crunchy.’ She seemed about to run her fingers through it, but changed her mind and buried her hands in her pockets instead. ‘You get a look at the guys in the bread van?’
‘I saw one of them – white male, around thirty years old, dark hair . . . Nothing a police artist could use.’
We arrived at the Explorer. Johnny Oh took the wheel. As Masters climbed in the back, she said, ‘Why do I get the feeling you don’t think those guys in the van were the killers we’re looking for?’
‘Two of them, maybe.’
‘How many are we looking for?’
‘We’re not dealing with a couple of serial killers working in tandem.’
‘Then what are we dealing with?’ she asked, confused.
‘A hit squad.’
‘A what?’
‘That’s Doc Merkit’s theory, the one I was going to tell you about,’ I said.
Masters didn’t respond immediately. I wondered if perhaps she was weighing up whether to regress and give me a little more tone over my night with the profiler.
‘So now two of them are off the team,’ she said. ‘Are we dealing with a beach-volleyball-size team, a basketball-size team, or something bigger? And while we’re at it, did your doctor friend go on to have any theories about motives? Or did you have more important business to attend to by then?’
I was right about the tone. I took a step to the left. ‘We going to get anything out of the fire?’
Masters shook her head. ‘Forget it. I spoke to the fire investigators. They’re saying there’ll be nothing left for identification purposes. The plane burned too hot.’
Her cell rang. It was a brief call. ‘That was the medical examiner looking at what was left of Ten Pin,’ she told me. ‘Says she has come across something disturbing.’
Denzel Nogart, aka Ten Pin, had been reduced to just two pins, namely his legs, before the console operator could shut down the engine. An ear and part of a hand, which included the thumb and forefinger, had also come through the turbine. But everything else belonging to the technician above his navel had been chewed off and turned into spray.
Rivulets of fluids ran red, yellow and brown from where Ten Pin’s top half used to be, joined together in the central groove pressed into the stainless-steel mortuary table, and disappeared down a hole at the head of the table. During the pauses in conversation, the rivulet could be heard making a sound like someone had forgotten to turn off a tap.
The medical examiner had cut off the guy’s pants as well as his underwear, and removed his boots and socks. Disconcertingly – and I had no idea why it was – there were still indentations ringing his dark brown ankles from the elastic in his socks.
The ME, a woman with an English accent, massaged her chubby chins while she regarded the naked remains. ‘Cause of death: massive trauma . . . That doesn’t seem to do this justice, does it? And bizarre, too, I’d have to say.’
‘You said you’d come across something disturbing,’ said Masters, beating me to it. ‘You’re going to tell us you found a human bone on the deceased’s person.’
‘How on earth did you know that?’ the ME enquired, a hand on her hip.
‘Educated guess,’ said Masters.
‘The last guy we saw kept someone else’s bird up his anus,’ I added, holding up a middle finger and giving it a waggle so that the ME knew what species of bird I was referring to.
She pulled back a sheet of plastic on the adjacent cutting table, revealing a stainless-steel kidney tray. ‘I found this in his back pocket.’ The object was yellow, streaked with dried blood, and the size and shape of a squashed golf ball. ‘It’s a patella.’
‘A kneecap,’ Masters said.
‘Know your anatomy, huh?’ the ME responded. ‘The guy who lost it gave us a crash course,’ I explained. The rib was giving me grief and I was having trouble breathing. ‘Doc, you ever do anything for the living?’
‘Rarely. What do you need?’
‘A little help taping up a busted rib.’
Twenty-three
‘The man who pushed Ten Pin towards the revolving steel blades tapped him on the butt first. That’s when it must have been planted,’ I said as we walked across the parking lot towards Johnny Oh, who was keeping the motor running. I stretched out an arm. The medical examiner had done a good job – taping made a hell of a difference.
‘There’s absolutely no uncertainty about this murder being number three, is there?’ Masters asked.
‘The killings haven’t made the papers, so it’s not a copycat. But, like the ME said, DNA tests will prove conclusively whose kneecap it was. I don’t believe we’re going to be getting any surprises on that score.’
‘I feel like we know even less now than we did yesterday, even though we knew enough to be down here to witness Ten Pin’s murder in the first place. Why is that? We must be close to something. I just wish I damn well knew what it was . . . Do you think those missing engines are somehow connected?’
‘Maybe,’ I said, without a lot of conviction.
‘If your doctor friend hadn’t come up with the theory about a hit squad, we’d be saying right about now that, with those two guys dying in the fire, the case is closed.’
My gut told me Masters’ frustration was peppering some kind of bull’s eye. She was on the verge of a breakthrough, of looking at the three murders in a different light. I just had no idea how to push her, us, through it.
Johnny Oh pulled up outside the engine shop, a line of articulated heavy vehicles idling in the slush, belching clouds of grey vapour into the evening. I lowered the window and called over a Security Forces non-com directing traffic with a clipboard. ‘You guys found those missing engines yet?’ I quizzed him.
‘Yep. Look behind you, sir.’ He ran his eyes up and down the queue of trucks. ‘Turns out some moron sent ’em to the wrong warehouse.’ He shrugged. ‘So now we can all live happy ever after.’
I gestured at Johnny to drive on. ‘Where to now?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Let’s just drive around aimlessly. Seems to fit the mood of the moment. Better still, take us to the nearest bottle of single malt.’
Half an hour later, Sergeant Oh had dropped us off at the officers’ club. The place was quiet because the action, such as was available, was in Adana. A few groups from different countries and outfits occupied scattered tables, having quiet drinks amongst themselves. Masters and I were one such group, sitting beneath a huge portrait of a guy called Atatürk. He’d been painted with a benevolent yet determined set to his jaw. Apparently, this was the guy who founded modern Turkey. He was also the owner of the most spectacular set of wing-like eyebrows I’d ever seen. The waiter brought my third and Masters’ second.
‘So, to sum up, we’ve got three guys brutally murdered and no hard forensic evidence,’ I said. ‘The killings are related. The victims knew each other, and as you’ve already pointed out, the trail, what little of it there is, has led us here.’
‘They look like serial killings, but the expert tells us we’re after something different,’ Masters added.
‘So when is a serial killing not a serial killing?’ I asked. And it occurred to me like a hole in the fog had opened. ‘When it’s something else entirely.’
‘I think you should lay off the sauce, Vin, you –’
‘No, I’m serious.’
‘For once . . .’ Masters said, sipped her Bloody Mary.
‘Hear me out.’
She shrugged.
‘Portman was hacked to pieces. The violence of the crime was extreme and unnecessary. It looked like it was done by a wacko, but then at the same time the safe was cracked by someone who not only knew their way around explosives, but had access to them. So we know Portman wasn’t killed by a nutball who got dressed in his mom’s underwear and cut up the neighbourhood cats. What if it has all been just . . . theatrics?’
‘Theatrics.’
‘To send us down a blind alley – all the way to Incirlik.’
‘So, where would that leave us?’
‘Hanging around this here cul-de-sac, which is where whoever is pulling the strings wants us. If I’m ri
ght, there won’t be any more murders.’
‘And why not?’
‘Because there doesn’t need to be – if I’m right about the theatrics.’
From the look on Masters’ face, I could see she wasn’t convinced.
‘Look,’ I went on, ‘we have to assume that the hit squad set up these crimes to look like they were perpetrated by two people. Two killers died in the fire, and with their deaths, the trail goes cold – a neat full stop. If this has all been an elaborate set-up, the perpetrators can wind up the operation now and leave us wallowing down here with no leads and nowhere to go.’
‘Are you saying the two who died in the bread van were sacrificed, or sacrificed themselves, intentionally?’
‘No, they died accidentally. But their deaths could have provided their mission planners with a windfall.’
‘Then what about the rest of Portman’s bones?’
‘Red herrings.’
‘So only one of our three victims was murdered for a reason, which means the other two were just window dressing to cover it up,’ said Masters, gesturing at the barkeep for a fresh round.
‘That’s what I’m starting to think.’
‘It’s unlikely, Vin.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘If someone wanted to remove, say, Ten Pin, and wanted to muddy the trail, there’d be a lot better ways to cover it up than the scenario you’re suggesting.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as walking into a restaurant you know your victim frequents and killing everyone present at the time, waiters and cooks included.’
‘So the cops would conclude the restaurant was hit by someone who didn’t like their entrée?’ I suggested.
‘No, Vin, stay with me here – to hide the identity of the true victim by making him a statistic. Just one of a large number of deaths.’
‘That’s a good plan, Anna. Remind me not to get on your bad side.’
‘Sorry, too late.’
‘Well, who knows why the serial-killer ploy was used by the folks we’re up against, rather than the one you suggest? Maybe Portman was sick of kebabs, preferring TV dinners to going out and thereby taking your idea off their list.’
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