Deep Black (12 page)

20

By the time Dean heard the truck coming, Karr had already begun walking toward the road. Dean trotted up to him, A-2 rifle
parallel to the ground. Karr put his hand out to lower it. “Ours,” he said.

Maybe it was, but it looked like a Russian Ural-375, the ubiquitous 6X6 that was to the Russian Army what the M35 series once
was to the U.S. It had rather garish red stars on its dull white cabin, and a canvas top flapped loosely over the slatted
sides. The truck stopped on the road, then backed off toward Karr, stopping when the muck reached halfway up the deep treads
of the tire.

“Gotta load it on the highway,” said Karr.

The truck whined and groaned as the driver ground the gears and shoved it forward to the drier ground, stopping on what passed
for a shoulder to the narrow two-lane road. The cab door opened and Lia jumped out.

“Find anything?” she said, going to the back.

“One hit, up near the edge of the swamp,” said Karr. “A little metal there. Nothing beyond that.”

“They must’ve been fried. The sniffers aren’t that sensitive.”

“Hmmph. Maybe. One definitely. Maybe two.”

“You’re getting too paranoid. You’re going to be like Rubens soon. Show me where it is.”

Karr pointed to the area where the sniffer had registered something. Lia climbed onto the tail end of the truck and hauled
back the canvas, disappearing inside. When she returned, she had a large boxy device that looked a little like the leaf blower
a parks maintenance worker might use.

“High-tech vacuum,” Karr explained to Dean. He held him back. “Damn thing’s louder than hell. Just let her do her thing. When
she’s done, we’ll load the pieces into the truck. Then you take them back for analysis.”

“Back where?”

“The farm,” said Karr. “Home.”

“Home being the States?”

“Who says you’re slow, Charlie Dean?”

The vacuum revved up. Dean’s eardrums rattled so badly he put his hands over them. Karr, meanwhile, went around to the front
of the truck. He returned with a brown paper bag, from which he took out a pair of sandwiches. Before Dean could unwrap his,
Karr had swallowed the other whole.

A metallic oily smell filled Dean’s nose as he opened it.

“Some kind of sturgeon they stick in oil,” explained Karr. “Goes good with the egg. Beer, too, but we don’t have any.”

Dean looked at the sandwich doubtfully. He brought it up to take a bite, then thought better of it. Just the smell was enough
to wrench his stomach.

“It’s good,” insisted Karr, even as he took the sandwich back.

When Lia finished her vacuuming, Dean helped Karr cut the long pieces of blackened metal so they could be easily piled into
the truck. The metal had obviously been burned by a serious fire; pieces of plastic and other material had adhered to it,
and in sections were thicker than a phone book. This, along with scattered clumps of congealed plastic and metal, was all
that remained of a top-secret elint-gathering section that had been part of the aircraft.

Karr, though he professed to know nothing of the mission, said that the high-tech gear would have been rigged to self-destruct
if anything went wrong, incinerating itself. There would have been no way out for the pilots and operators.

“You don’t think they could get around that?” said Dean.

Karr shrugged.

“If it were me, I’d find a way,” Dean told him.

“Good thing it wasn’t you, then,” said Karr.

“Maybe your gear doesn’t work right.”

“Hey, look around. Definitely. I’m not thrilled with the results myself. Like I told Lia, I doubt there were more than two
bodies fried into the mush there.”

“Maybe they were there and left.”

“Nah. Doesn’t work that way. The sniffer—” Karr jerked his head around midsentence. Lia was already running across the road,
taking a position on a knoll that overlooked the wreckage.

“Just a car,” Karr said. “Keep working. She’ll cover us.”

The vehicle, which looked as if it dated from the end of the Soviet Union, slowed but did not stop. Dean stripped off his
shirt as it passed. This might be Siberia, but the afternoon had turned remarkably warm. Karr had given him an ointment to
ward off the flies; it had an overly sweet citrus smell but was infinitely better than having to swat the things away.

“Jesus, put your shirt back on,” squealed Lia from her vantage across the road.

“Hey, I like his pecs,” laughed Karr.

“Why don’t you take off yours, Lia?” said Dean.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“I wouldn’t,” said Karr. “My stomach’s not strong enough.”

They finished removing the blackened classified section of the aircraft around three o’clock. Lia, meanwhile, had been looking
at a piece of the tailplane that had been left behind. As Karr tied up the rear of the truck, she announced that the plane
had been taken down by a radar-guided missile.

“How do you know?” Dean asked.

She ignored him, repeating the information for Karr, who only shrugged and went to sit in the shade next to the truck. Sweat
had soaked his shirt, and the skin exposed at his neck and arms was beet-red from the sun.

“How do you know it was a radar missile?” Dean asked. “Are you an expert?”

She made a face and tapped her ear. Obviously the people in the Art Room had been feeding her data.

“How do they know?”

“Number one, because the engines were intact,” Lia told him. She went to the driver’s side of the truck, returning with a
large bottle of Gatorade. She gave it to Karr, who polished off about half before handing it to Dean. To Dean’s surprise the
liquid was so cold it hurt his back teeth.

“Don’t drink it all,” said Lia.

Dean glanced at her and realized she was trying not to be caught staring at him. He held the bottle over toward her, then
started to jerk it away, but she was too quick, grabbing it from his tired grip.

“If it had been a heat-seeker, it would have hit one of them. There also would have been burn marks on the tail,” she said.
“And there weren’t, at least not that we saw. That confirms that the shootdown was done from a reasonable distance.”

“And?”

“No visual ID. They knew what they were firing at.”

“Or maybe they didn’t,” said Dean. “Maybe they were too far away to see but assumed they were right.”

“True.”

“Or maybe the mission was compromised,” said Dean. “So they were targeting it all along.”

“Then why is it still here?” said Karr. “If we shot down a spy plane in Nebraska, would we leave it sitting on the ground
until someone else came and picked it up?”

“Another car,” said Lia. She grabbed her gun and ran back across the road.

“Art Room warns us,” said Karr. “They sowed small detection units along the approaches before we got here.”

“They’re not watching us from space?” said Dean.

“Not in real time. We’re too low a priority,” said Karr, who could dish out sarcasm but obviously had trouble detecting it,
at least from Dean. “Besides, you can only get stills every sixty or ninety seconds, and they tend to lag even further. Real-time
video from space doesn’t really work too well.”

Dean wanted to ask why they weren’t high-priority, but Karr had taken one of the A-2s and surreptitiously crouched behind
the truck in case it was needed. A small Fiat approached from the north, slowing as it came close. Two men, both so large
they seemed comical in the small car, stared at him. They were wearing suits and ties.

Dean glanced toward the ground, making sure his own rifle was nearby. For a moment he thought the Fiat would stop, but the
driver downshifted and it picked up speed.

“Not good,” said Karr. “But we’re leaving anyway.”

By the time they got to the small airport where Fashona was waiting with the helicopter, it was close to 6:00 P.M. Karr and
Dean had changed into military fatigues that bore no insignias, and sat in the cab of the truck. Lia had managed to wedge
herself among the wreckage and curled beneath a tarp in the back. Their weapons were hidden beneath the seat of the truck,
with the exception of a miniature pistol that Karr passed to Dean as they pulled up to a post guarding access to the cargo
section of the airport.

Karr took some papers from the dash and spoke to the police officer in a tired voice. Dean had no idea how fluent his Russian
was, but undoubtedly the stack of euros he’d passed with the papers spoke eloquently enough. Cleared through, they rounded
a dusty access road past a row of military transports, then headed across weed-strewn concrete to a row of hangars that looked
big enough to house a Saturn rocket. Their Hind sat in front of one, so dwarfed it appeared almost forlorn.

“Everybody’s corrupt here,” said Dean.

“Everybody’s hungry,” said Karr. His face was serious for a second, as if contemplating that fact; then it shifted back to
its usual bright smile. “This used to be a big military base. They had IL-76s in the hangars, along with some weird-looking
planes with their engines on top of their wings. Big mo-fos. When they decided to rent out the hangars, they took the planes
and pushed them off into the field over there. We’re thinking of buying one. Apparently they’re real dogs, though. Pilots
don’t want to fly them. Don’t even mention them to Fashona. He’ll bite your ear off, no shit.”

Karr backed the truck around to the helicopter, whose cargo doors were open. While Lia went to find Fashona, Karr and Dean
loaded the chopper.

“College education,” said Karr as they hauled the piece in, “and I end up a schlepper anyway. My father always told me, you
can’t do much with math.”

The salvaged wreckage formed a pile about five feet high and almost eight feet square. They strung a large heavy-duty net
in front of it to secure it, though Dean was dubious.

Lia returned with Fashona, who in the space of a few hours had managed to grow what looked like a three-day-old beard. They’d
been introduced before, but the pilot didn’t seem to remember. He stuck his hand out.

“Fashona,” he said.

“Dean.”

“Don’t call me
Fashone
. Or none of that shit.”

“I won’t.”

“Nice helicopter, huh?”

“Looks OK.”

“Want to sit up front?”

“Up front where?” asked Dean.

“Gunner’s compartment,” said the pilot. “No gun on this flight, though. Our weapons are packed away until we need them. We
look like we’re civilians. Well, almost.”

Even without weapons strapped to its hard points and no chin gun, the helicopter hardly looked innocent, but Dean didn’t argue.

“But the front is the best seat. Great view,” added Fash-ona.

Dean shrugged but then remembered the rough landing at the field. How well could they possibly tie down the jagged metal in
the back?

He walked with the pilot to the nose cabin, which looked a little like an upside-down fishbowl. A sensor boom protruded from
the top of the cabin like a spear, its four winglets looking like knives.

“They took the cannon out before they sold it,” said Fashona, pointing to the underside of the nose.

“Bummer,” said Dean.

“Yeah, big-time. There’s something about a nose gun, you know what I mean? We have podded cannons we can slap on if the going
gets tough, but they just don’t have the same, the same something, you know—”

“Savoir-faire?”

“Yeah. I mean, they are thirty-millimeter Gats, so don’t get me wrong, plenty of firepower. More than the Commies had. But
still . . . suave. It’s lacking.”

“Sure.”

“I’m lobbying to get it back. Plus, some of these have shark’s teeth, you know? Right here?” He swung his hand up the front
of the fuselage. “That would be intense.”

“Very,” said Dean.

“OK.” Fashona pulled open the door. Dean climbed up and then slipped in, feeling a little as if he were climbing down a sewer
hole. The seat restraints were so thick, donning them felt like putting on a quilted vest.

“Headphones,” said Fashona. “They work.”

He pointed to a headset at the side, then slammed down the canopy, which failed to latch. He slammed it again—apparently the
pneumatic prop was broken, since it bounded up. Dean managed to grab it from the pilot and close it gently, latching it shut.
He pulled on the headphones just in time to hear Lia ask, “So what are you going to tell them when you get home, baby-sitter?”

“I don’t know that I’m going to tell them anything,” said Dean.

“Just tell the truth,” said Karr. “They’ll have you on a lie detector anyway.”

“Probably right.”

“Probably ask if the Princess put out,” said Karr. “In that case, you probably want to lie.”

The blades started to whirl. Dean felt the helicopter shaking back and forth and heard the engine whine—it seemed only slightly
more distant here. Just like before, the engines revved, coughed, and died.

“Stinking fuel,” grumbled Fashona. “They piss in it, I swear.”

The rotors spun again. The blades seemed awfully close to the canopy, and Dean found himself staring down at the ground as
the helicopter began to move forward, rocking up and down. There was a cough from the engines, but they kept running, the
Hind moving steadily down an access ramp that led to the runway. Dean listened as Fashona exchanged barbs with the controller—in
English.

“I’m a contract pilot,” he told Dean over the interphone circuit, which could not be heard by the tower. “Part of my cover.
Work for Petro-UK. That’s why I talk English.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s obvious I’m an American. And the aircraft, you know, it’s traceable. So it’s not a security breach or anything.”

“Don’t be so paranoid, Fashona,” said Lia. “They’re not after your ass.”

“I’m
not
paranoid,” said the pilot. “I just want the guy to know what’s going on, that’s all. For his report.”

“We’ll all get raises; don’t worry,” said Karr.

Dean could see that there were no planes in front of them. Nor did it appear that they were waiting for any to land. Nonetheless,
the controller kept them waiting more than fifteen minutes before finally clearing them to take off. By then the sun had set
and everything was turning gray.