Assassin's Silence: A David Slaton Novel (29 page)

Slaton returned to the helm, and in the storage bin he discovered an old six-shot .45 revolver. It was big and clumsy, an elephant-pistol whose black steel had gone green, and whose barrel-mounted sight was severely bent. Still, it might have worked. Slaton had expected something like it—no smuggler worked these waters without protection, and it was also just the thing for taking potshots at nuisance sharks that might threaten a nearly boated prize bluefin.

He emptied the cylinder of four bullets, threw them overboard, and put the gun back in the storage bin. Slaton checked the compass and set a new course, then pushed up the throttle until the tachometer hit the red line.

*   *   *

What Slaton could not know was at that very moment, one hundred and ninety-six miles over his head, an image of
Kosmos
was being logged by a satellite of the United States’ National Reconnaissance Office. It was called BASALT, a synthetic aperture radar bird nearing its perigee, the point at which an orbiting body is closest to the earth.

Within seconds that image was devoured by computers at the NRO, which automatically scrubbed through a list of prioritizations.
Kosmos
was quickly identified—her length and beam and rigging were distinguishing enough, and she had long been on file as one of the thousand or so fishing boats that frequented these waters. The fact that she was approaching Lebanese waters caused barely a ripple. The NRO’s assets had very recently been tweaked with new commands, and in the next minutes along her elliptical path BASALT would scour every airfield in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan for a mysterious MD-10. Longline tuna boats, regardless of the waters in which they sailed, had fallen precipitously on the list of priorities.

BASALT was not alone.

For the last four hours America’s most advanced satellites and drones had been scouring the earth. They downloaded images using every manner of sensor, the variances in their products essentially a matter of spectrum: electro-optical, infrared, radar, laser. These results were pored over at first by computers, with the most promising results, along with those that remained ambiguous, forwarded to legions of interpreters at the CIA and NRO.

It had already been ascertained that no fewer than two thousand airports existed across the world with a runway big enough to handle an MD-10. At that moment, 92 percent of them had been scanned by one method or another. The only airfields ignored were a handful of landing strips below 75 degrees south latitude—an arena that lacked regular satellite coverage for anything except ice sheets, and whose few airports harbored more flightless birds than aircraft.

As a subtheme, analysts determined that there were one hundred and twenty-two hangars on earth capable of swallowing an MD-10, thus potentially rendering their target invisible. The vast majority of these were owned by either airlines or maintenance repair and overhaul companies, legitimate and responsible businesses who one-by-one confirmed what was on hand in their shelters. There were loose ends, of course, and these were dealt with on a case-by-case basis. A shadow at an airfield in Sudan was eventually written off as a canvas decoy, the newly independent South Sudan trying to impress their tormentors to the north. An airframe on a taxiway in eastern Kenya raised hopes, but the aircraft was eventually identified as a derelict Russian model of similar size and silhouette.

Across the globe, CIA field operatives were dispatched to take pictures of some sixteen large aircraft hangars, and friendly intelligence services were tasked to quietly scout another dozen. A U.S. Navy drone was diverted to fly past the open door of an aircraft paint barn in southern Iran, and an Antarctic geological team—a professor and two graduate students from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who were preparing for a mission funded by NOAA, and whose communication suite was first rate—were quietly asked to peek into a cavernous maintenance facility that had been abandoned in southern Chile.

By seven that evening, Eastern Langley Time, the count was down to thirty-six airfields, all in decidedly nether regions of the world, whose tarmacs had not been thoroughly canvassed. Nine hangars also remained whose contents were unaccounted for. Of these, four were in North Korea—and as such were under constant watch anyway—along with three in China and a pair in Siberia. None seemed likely prospects.

In bunkers all around Washington, D.C. teams of image analysts descended into a collective gloom as they fired blanks in a rare full-court press. Some began to express doubts that the airplane they were searching for even existed, whispering that it perhaps had crashed in the waters off Brazil after all, and that a certain air accident investigator was off his rocker. The crash inquiry in Brazil was monitored from afar, but there were no new developments.

The meager results were fed up the chain of command, rumors swirling that it rose all the way to the White House. All anyone could say for sure was that within thirty minutes of the day’s last progress report being sent up, a second order came down.

Everyone was to stay the night and keep looking.

FORTY-ONE

The crane ratcheted to a noisy stop at the side of a dirt path, shattering what had been a still and silent night in the western foothills of the Lebanon Mountains. Smoke hissed from its stubby exhaust, creating an eerie shroud in the shine of headlights from the dump truck following behind.

Mohammed Jalil stepped down from his crane to meet the man who had hired him. Jalil’s eldest son, who was driving the dump truck, stayed respectfully in place.

“All right,” Mohammed said, “we are ready.”

His employer for the evening, who’d been standing in the dark waiting, looked at him with concern. “You are late,” he said.

“There was a minor technical issue,” Mohammed replied. “Everything is working now.”

“Can you still have the job done one hour before sunrise?” The man was old and Christian, and therefore doubly cantankerous, but Mohammed was in no mood to argue. The old man was the leader of the Hamat village council, while Mohammed hailed from Batroun, four kilometers south. There had been divisions between the villages for a thousand years, but none of their fathers’ squabbles mattered tonight. Mohammed was a simple man in a simple business, and when people paid cash in advance he easily put aside that he was an occasional Muslim.

“Of course,” he replied. “Six hours is more than enough. Do you care what I do with the scrap?”

The man seemed to consider it. “Do what you will. The only stipulation is that you carry it at least three kilometers from here.”

“Three kilometers?”

“Is that a problem?” asked the village elder.

“Not at all,” said Mohammed. “But it is an unusual request. I can only wonder why the people of Hamat are being so particular. This thing has been rotting away here for twenty years. Now it must be dealt with under the cover of darkness, and the remains taken far away?”

“These restrictions were not dictated by the people of my village. We both know this airplane was left here long ago by the government. It has been forgotten since your son was a boy, and the liars in Beirut—they would leave it here until Jesus rises again. No one cares that it is an eyesore, or that our children have been hurt trying to climb inside. Twice we have sealed the doors and windows shut … but time has its way.”

Both men regarded the massive jet that loomed like a mountain in the darkness before them. Something of a local legend, the aircraft had arrived on an equally black night decades ago—the exact year was the subject of some debate—and had not turned a wheel since. Back then the place was called Wujah Al Hajar Air Base, an outpost of hope and security before the troubles had begun anew. The buildings were nearly gone now, their wooden walls and planked roofs defeated by age and the elements, the remains long ago scavenged for cooking fires. Aside from a handful of cobblestone foundations, the only structure remaining was a single ancient shed with a warped roof, the door long missing. When the Air Force pulled out, the place had been designated hopefully as an international airport, but without funding or flights everything had gone to seed, even the runway deteriorating to the point that the rich kids from the coast had given up using it to drag race their European cars. Only one thing remained to suggest this place had ever been a thriving airfield: the shell of a single old airplane.

It was an American machine, Mohammed knew, something called a Tri-Star. Its engines had long ago been salvaged, and one wing drooped as if the bones inside were cracked. All the low-hanging aluminum panels that could be pried free had been pilfered long ago by scrap hounds. The wheels were no more than rusted steel hubs, these surrounded by piles of vulcanized rubber nuggets. Birds nested in any number of openings, leaving their offerings to accent the chipped off-white paint, and the cockpit windows had long ago been smashed out by stone-throwing boys. Adding insult to the once proud jet’s injuries, a black mark on the tail evidenced a lightning strike that had occurred some ten years ago, God having his own say on the matter.

“This thing should have been dealt with long ago,” Mohammed agreed, surveying the old carcass. “Why now?”

“Because someone has given us the money to do it.”

“But not the government, you say?”

The old man spit on the ground. “The government does nothing. A man has paid us in advance.”

“Who is he?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care. He came to us weeks ago and gave us a good wage to do the job in a certain way. ‘On this exact night,’ he tells me, ‘take the pieces at least three kilometers away, and have it done one hour before sunrise.’” The old man shrugged. “Maybe he is one of the princes from the coast, with a castle and a blue swimming pool. Or perhaps he owns land nearby and wants to build a resort, and this beast is blocking his view. Why should I care if he wants it done quietly in the middle of the night? All that matters is that it will finally be done.”

Mohammed nodded. “So be it.”

He went back to the cab of his crane and fired up the diesel. Turning on his work lights, he looked upon his task with a measure of anticipation. He routinely destroyed condemned buildings and razed crumbling barns, yet tonight’s job would require a degree of artistry. To knock things down and tear them apart was often disparaged, seen as little more than a brute’s work. But to do it well, with skill and efficiency—that was something else. Mohammed knew because he had been demolishing things all his life, beginning with a sledgehammer and a wheelbarrow, and graduating over the years to full-blown mechanization. If you took something down the wrong way, he knew, you could damage your equipment, even put your life at risk. At the very least, a proper teardown hastened completion and minimized cleanup, which in turn got you home or to the next job that much more quickly.

The dump truck pulled near and Mohammed lowered his cable. The special attachment, carried in the bed of the truck, was an improvisation—a slab of steel two-inches thick and four meters square. He had taken it from the hull of a merchant ship he’d scrapped years ago, and it had long served in Mohammed’s yard to bridge a gulley in the lot where he parked his equipment. He’d always thought it might prove more useful—and therein lay the artistry. Mohammed needed something special for this job, and a two-ton steel plate seemed just the thing.

When his son had the cable attached, he gave a thumbs-up, and Mohammed raised the boom to its maximum height and rotated everything into place. He started at the left wing, the one that drooped, and waited for the plate, which was spinning slightly, to reach the desired angle. When it looked just right, Mohammed pulled the release lever. The massive steel sheet scythed down cleanly and did its job, a five-meter section of the left wing crashing to the ground.

Mohammed smiled with profound satisfaction. He then maneuvered to his left, raised the metal plate high, and again poised his hand over the release lever.

FORTY-TWO

CB68H landed at Basrah International Airport in Iraq during the lee hours of that same morning. The control tower had been unmanned since ten o’clock the previous night, but as was common, the airfield remained open in a proceed-at-your-own-risk type of operation. In the black of night, the big jet taxied clear of the runway, and on the receiving taxiway a small Toyota pickup flashed its lights, and then pulled in front of the behemoth in the classic manner of an airfield “Follow Me” truck.

The MD-10 did exactly that, and the odd convoy came to a stop minutes later on a remote corner of the airfield. Two fuel trucks were waiting, along with a trailered set of loading stairs, and nearby were a forklift, two pallets of gear, and a tanker truck carrying water. Three people waited to greet the pilots: a grizzled Iraqi who would manage the refueling, a slight Indonesian here to drive the forklift, and a second Iraqi, slightly built and much younger than the first, who appeared to be in charge.

Everyone worked quickly, and thirty-six minutes after touching Iraqi soil the jet was fully refueled and its cargo loaded. During that time the aircrew was also busy. The copilot mounted a ladder to service the port engine with oil. The captain did his best to hammer shut an access door on the lower fuselage, first using the side of his fist, and then a large rock. The panel, normally used by maintenance to access an unpressurized electronics bay, could simply not be latched in place, and in the end the captain used nearly an entire roll of duct tape to seal it shut.

At the forty-minute point, the copilot went to the flight deck and ran through the preflight checklist. The younger Iraqi also climbed on board, while the captain met with the refueler and the Indonesian at the Toyota.

Fifty-eight minutes after touchdown, CB68H was again lifting into the sky with its crew of two, one passenger, and a peculiar load consisting primarily of water and lead which, even though low in volume, summed a respectable fifty-six thousand pounds. The copilot activated the flight plan by radio, and a generic white blip blossomed on an air traffic control radar screen in the Iraq Civil Aviation Authority’s southern sector. The copilot claimed to be flying a Challenger 600, an aircraft with similar speed and climb performance to an MD-10. According to the filed paperwork, the aircraft was registered to a corporation in Iran, and the destination was listed as Al-Qusayr Airfield in Syria, a former military facility notched near the northeastern corner of Lebanon.