Fly by Night (11 page)

“I’m here to investigate an aircraft accident.” He gestured to the DC-3 parked nearby. “One of those went down two weeks ago.”

She glanced at the airplane and seemed to thaw. “Yes, I heard. It was a terrible tragedy. I knew one of the pilots.”

“Really?”

“He helped at our clinic once or twice.”

“Tell me, doctor, does FBN Aviation bring in all your shipments?”

“Most of them. But we sometimes use other carriers.”

Davis eyed the clipboard sitting on the front fender. He walked over and picked it up. It was interesting, not some standard-issue aid agency request form, but an actual load manifest from the airplane, or at least a copy of it.

Looking over the list, Davis asked, “Would you have had an ohmmeter in that shipment?”

“A what?”

“It says here there was an ohmmeter. You know, for measuring electrical resistance.”

“No, that would not have been ours. We receive only part of each
shipment. FBN is too lazy to create separate manifests, so they make copies and highlight our portion of each delivery in yellow.” She stepped over and pulled a finger down the list. “See? The rest goes elsewhere.”

“Really? Like where?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, when you unload your cargo and there’s a secondary load on these FBN flights, where does it go?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Sometimes the airplanes stay here when we leave. Other times they are towed away.”

Davis could just see the FBN Aviation hangar from where they were standing. “Have you ever seen one of these airplanes towed over there? To that hangar in the distance?”

“Once or twice, perhaps.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve ever been over there? Inside?”

“No. Why are you so concerned with this? Has it to do with your investigation?”

“I don’t know. Tell me, do you keep these load sheets on file?”

“We keep a permanent record, yes.”

“At the clinic?”

She nodded.

“You know,” Davis said, “it might help my investigation if I could see them.”

Her mouth parted immediately, about to say no, but then she hesitated. “You want my help? After the damage you have done?”

“Maybe I can make it up to you. You told me another pilot helped at your clinic.”

“The other pilot was a decent man.”

Davis said nothing.

The doctor stared at him, made some kind of survey. “However,” she said, “you might be useful.”

“I can be very useful.”

“If you come, will you come to work?”

Davis considered that. He had an airplane crash to solve, a lost drone to find. “I have a lot on my plate right now,” he said, “but I
could make some time. Let’s call it a trade—I help you at the clinic, and you let me take a look at those records.”

“Very well. Tomorrow morning.” She gave him directions to the camp.

“Twenty miles,” he remarked. “I don’t have a car.”

“You seem resourceful.”

“When I need to be.”

For the first time he saw something different in her eyes, a glimmer that wasn’t sharp or accusing. There was a crease at the corner of her mouth. Light, even playful. The lady was stunning. Even better, she didn’t give a damn. Davis liked that. He watched her climb up to the driver’s seat of her empty truck. Watched her sidle into the cab and pull the door shut hard. Harder than she needed to.

He called through the open window. “By the way, my name’s Davis. Jammer Davis.”

She looked down, paused to make him wait. Like women did.

“Antonelli,” she finally said. “Dr. Regina Antonelli.”

With that, the truck jerked into gear and was gone. A thin cloud of blue smoke trailed behind, and that soon dissipated into a brilliant red sky as the horizon split the sun.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Davis woke at seven in the morning, sunlight streaming through cracks at the covered window. He heard the same noises you’d hear at any airport hotel in the world. Outside, the dawn patrol taxiing out for take-off. Inside, bumps and grinds from the plumbing as his neighbors showered and shaved.

He had been right about the elevator on both counts. The shaft was indeed two feet from his pillow. And it hadn’t bothered him. He undid the clothespins on the curtains, drew them open to call the morning into his room. Davis shaved over an avocado-green sink before turning on the shower. With the handle full cold, he got lukewarm. He dressed and followed his nose to a coffeepot near the operations desk. Wherever you found pilots, you found coffee. The brew wasn’t as good as the fancy stuff he’d had a few days ago in a posh Fredericksburg cafe, but it put a check in his caffeine square.

Antonelli’s clinic was twenty miles away, so Davis hit up Schmitt to borrow his Mercedes. Got told to piss off. Investigator-in-charge Davis insisted on something, so the chief pilot scrounged up a key from the bottom of a drawer.

It could have been candy-apple red, deep burgundy, or just brown. The dust was so thick there was no way to tell.

He found the dilapidated Ford pickup parked near a Dumpster at the side of the building. The odometer read 289,000 miles, which, in Davis’ experience, was about the limit for a vehicle like that. He’d been told that the truck was used by FBN’s mechanics—Johnson and the
elusive Jordanian—and also shared with other wrench-turners on the airfield. The cab smelled like grease and glue, and discarded plastic packaging on the floor evidenced everything from spark plugs to potato chips. But the truck started on the first try—score one for the mechanics—and seemed to run smoothly.

Indeed, as Davis picked up the southern road for the half-hour drive, the air conditioner blew like an Arctic wind. Davis had to smile at that. He knew all about mechanics. The original air conditioner had likely given up under the local climatic conditions, so the mechanics, on a slow day, had gone out and requisitioned something a little heavier. Something like the compressor from a Mack truck. They’d have jerry-rigged it into the old Ford’s engine compartment, serviced it until coolant was oozing from every seam. What had been a bare bones tool-wagon became a refrigerated break room, even an office where they could do their paperwork.

The road shimmered in the early morning, the sun’s angle still low enough to reflect. Not penetrate. Along the margins, scrub-covered terrain materialized out of the dawn, a prickly array of drab color. The truck’s undercarriage creaked, and the Mack truck air conditioner spewed chunks of ice. He slowed when he reached the marker Antonelli had given him as a reference, a road sign showing the distance to Wad Rawah as twenty-one. Only somebody had crossed out twenty-one and scrawled thirty-three. It could be that the original version was wrong. Or it could be that somebody felt the need to convert miles to kilometers. Then again, maybe the town had just moved. They were nomads, after all.

Davis looked for a turnoff, but didn’t see one. No road, no sign with an arrow, no building in the distance. Nothing but a rocky path on one side that meandered off into the desert. It looked jarring, but Davis decided this had to be the place. He yanked the steering wheel hard right, and a lousy road turned into a raw trail. The truck bounced and groaned, left a rooster tail of dust as it pounded over ruts and loose stone. A minute later he arrived. From a distance it looked like a Boy Scout jamboree, a small city of canvas and wooden poles and rope, all
situated in the lee of a large hill. The tents were the open air variety, no sidewalls, some at least fifty feet wide. Military grade, he guessed, probably surplus from a war. Iraq or Afghanistan. Maybe Korea.

Davis parked the truck, and resisted a suburban urge to lock the doors. There was no entrance to the compound, no front or back or reception area. It was just an amoebic outpost of hope in the middle of a godforsaken desert. He searched under the tents—or more accurately, tarps strung tightly over stiff wooden poles—and saw Dr. Regina Antonelli at the side of a bed. Only it wasn’t a bed, but rather a blanket on the sand. Around it, fifty other blankets. And in the next tent fifty more. There were a few raised cots, perhaps reserved for the most seriously ill. But only a few.

Antonelli spotted him and waved. Davis maneuvered carefully through what seemed like a human minefield. The condition of the patients was all over the board. Men and women. Young and old. Expectant mothers waiting for their joyous hour. Stricken old men waiting for God. He could discern a few nurses, though no two wore a common uniform. He could tell them apart by the simple fact that they were standing and working. More telling was what was missing. There were no gurneys, beeping monitors, or IV poles. In fact, aside from the patients and blankets, there wasn’t much to advance the idea that this was even a clinic.

He watched Antonelli inject something into the arm of her middle-aged patient. His black skin glistened in sweat, and his breathing was shallow and uneven. Davis stood at the foot of the blanket and waited for her to finish.

“Welcome to Al Qudayr Aid Station,” she said, beginning to write on a chart. “I will be with you shortly, Mr. Davis.” When she finished writing, Antonelli set the chart in the sand near her patient’s foot. “We have a great deal of work here.”

“I can see that.”

“On the best day, we have nine nurses and two doctors to care for our patients.”

He surveyed the place. “How many patients are there?”

Antonelli shrugged. “We have no time for such trivia. We simply go from one to the next. Do what we can.”

“This place seems pretty remote. Where do they come from?”

“There is a village just over the hill.” She pointed toward the high dune. “Some are from there, and occasionally a group will arrive in a vehicle. But most—” she gestured toward the scrubland, “most simply come in from the desert. They walk in, sit down, and wait.”

The man in the bed coughed, a weak, wet expulsion. His gums were bleeding and his lips were blue. Antonelli looked at him forlornly, turned away, and began walking. Davis followed. A woman lying in the sand reached out as Antonelli passed, probably more in reflex than hope. The doctor threw out a practiced smile of patience, then dodged her like a soccer player avoiding a tackle. When she was outside the tent, Antonelli paused and stood still.

Her gaze was a faraway blank as she stared at the empty desert. Antonelli clutched her arms to her chest, and he could see anguish in her eyes, weariness in her posture. He was struck by how different she seemed, not the tough-as-nails woman who’d confronted a squad of armed men yesterday.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” she replied too quickly. “I did not invite you here to perform counseling. Judging by your performance yesterday, I doubt you would be very good at it.”

Davis said nothing.

She clutched some more, twisted her shirt sleeve up to wipe away a tear at the corner of one eye. Antonelli then looked at him more thoughtfully.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should not burden you with my problems, Mr. Davis.”

“It’s okay. And call me Jammer.”

She looked at him questioningly, then tilted her head in the direction of the patient she’d been tending. “Dengue fever, day six. His circulatory system is shutting down. I don’t think he is going to survive.”

He looked over his shoulder at the man on the blanket. He didn’t look good. Davis had seen death before, but not the kind that came in places like this. Not on this scale. He considered what to say, and only one thing came to mind.

“How can I help?”

The wailing voice beckoned, a tin warble from a cheap speaker outside the hangar. Fadi Jibril eased back on his heels, thankful for the distraction. He had been up all night, taking only one brief respite on the cot near the back wall. The parts from Hamburg had still not arrived, so he’d been slugging through software validation. He was comfortable with the code, getting good results, but there had been little time for integration testing. Jibril was neck deep in a fault injection series when his tired thoughts were mercifully interrupted by the call to prayer.

If there was one constant in his life, one thing that remained steady and true, it was his faith in Allah. He pushed a diagram aside, picked up his Koran from a nearby table, and carefully unwrapped the protective cloth. He made his way to the sink, washed thoroughly, and started off toward the prayer room. The nearest proper mosque was in the main passenger terminal, wholly impractical for those who worked here. As such, the imam had provided a makeshift place of worship in an annex to the hangar. It was an awkward venue, gilt curtains over corrugated metal, fine rugs on cold concrete. To Jibril’s thinking, not a fitting place for holy worship. Still, the room was clean, and he could not deny its convenience, so the engineer kept with the old adage:
There is no inappropriate place to pray
.

He was nearing the prayer room entrance when someone shouted his name from behind. Jibril turned and saw a lanky young soldier with a wry smile on his face.

“Special delivery,” he said. Three boxes were piled on the concrete at his feet.

Jibril nodded, and the soldier turned away and trotted out the door.

Full of hope, Jibril rushed over. The parts should have arrived yesterday,
and indeed probably had, but the local army contingent had a reputation for meddling with shipments. He could lodge a complaint with the imam, but at this point, he reasoned, there was little to gain. At the very least, the ruffians had never lost a shipment. None that he knew of, anyway.

The reinforced boxes were heavy, and Jibril transferred them to his work area one by one. That done, he put the first on a bench, and opened it using the claw end of a hammer. When he saw the telemetry modules inside, Jibril’s heart sank. He double-checked the model number, studied the connectors and saw a clear mismatch. He settled heavily onto his work stool and let out a long sigh. Another setback.

Hamburg had sent the wrong parts.

Jibril sat still for a full minute, a cloak of despair casing his thoughts. Then, with all the deliberation he could muster, he picked up his Koran and went to the prayer room.

Davis had never had much of a bedside manner. Fortunately, that didn’t matter. He was handy with a wrench, and what the clinic needed more than anything was to have an inoperative generator repaired. The whole tent city was off the larger electrical grid—which according to Antonelli was unreliable anyway—and depended on a pair of old diesel generators. One of these had been broken for weeks, and Davis was tasked to get the thing running.