Fly by Night (12 page)

The clinic had some basic hand tools, and Davis found a few more under the seat of the truck. It took most of the morning, but he finally identified the problem as being in the fuel feed—a severely clogged filter and a faulty shutoff valve. The filter he simply removed. The valve Davis rehabilitated by way of brute force—hammers and wrenches, banging and bending. Neither repair was permanent, but the unit would be serviceable for a few weeks.

It was nearly noon when he finished, and Davis was covered in grease and diesel. He went looking for Regina Antonelli, and found her in the supply tent digging deep into an almost empty box.

“The generator is up and running,” Davis said. “But it’s only a temporary fix. I’ll need a few things to make the job permanent. I
made a list of the parts, along with the make and model number of the generator. I’m not sure how long it will take to get spares like that, but maybe I can twist some arms at FBN Aviation, get them to expedite a shipment for us.”

Antonelli eyed him, top to bottom. He had to look like he’d been in a grease pit all day. She smiled a half smile, but a smile all the same. It was just like he’d expected. Downright stunning.

“Thank you,” she said. “Anything you can do to get replacement parts would be greatly appreciated.”

He began cleaning his hands with a rag.

“So how long have you been here?” he asked.

“Since June, but my term is nearly done. Three new physicians arrive tomorrow. I’m hoping they will bring supplies to replace those we lost.”

“So you’re leaving? Back to Italy?”

“In a few days. I must first oversee the delivery of a shipment to a small village north of here—al-Asmat, on the Red Sea. Even in the north there is need. After two days there, I will continue to Port Sudan and take a passage home.”

Davis nodded. “Are you looking forward to it? Going home?”

She shrugged. “In a way. But it is a difficult transition. The people in Milan, they can be rather self-absorbed. Nice food, expensive clothing, exotic cars. It all seems rather trivial when one sees things here. To watch a thirty-year-old pregnant woman die for need of a two dollar dose of medicine—it gives one a certain perspective.”

“I’m sure it does,” he said.

“But I do not wish to paint myself as a saint. I too have fine clothes, a decent car, and a house twice as large as I need.”

“I have all those things too,” he said. “Do you think less of me?”

She looked at him thoughtfully. “Sometimes I feel …” she hesitated.

“Like you can never do enough?”

She nodded.

“My investigations make me feel that way sometimes. It can be frustrating.”

“That reminds me, I have something for you.”

Antonelli retrieved a satchel and pulled out a stack of papers that were neatly clipped together.

“These are the load manifests you asked for. They cover the last five months. Please take them if it helps your investigation. I only ask that you return them when you are done. We must keep our records current to avoid funding cuts.”

“I’ll make sure it all gets back to you. And thanks for digging them out, I know you’re busy. I have to get back to the airfield now, but I’ll finish with that generator when the parts arrive. I also might be able to get your sterilizer working better if—”

“Dr. Antonelli!” a strident voice interrupted. A nurse came into the tent and rushed to Antonelli’s side. Eying Davis with caution, she leaned close and whispered into the doctor’s ear.

Antonelli closed her eyes. “Thank you,” she said in a soft voice.

The nurse disappeared.

Antonelli seemed to lose her focus, much as she had earlier.

He raised an inquisitive eyebrow. “Bad news?”

“Yes. The man I was treating when you first arrived, the dengue patient. He has died.”

“I’m sorry,” Davis said. He really was, but he wondered why she seemed so close to this case. Maybe she’d gotten to know the man. Maybe something deeper.

“Was he a friend?” he asked.

“Yes,” she replied, her voice shot with anguish.

Davis wanted to help her find strength. He said, “Regina, there are a lot of other patients here depending on you. Being staffed so thin—you are vital to their well-being.”

She looked up at him curiously, took a deep breath, and seemed to pull herself together. “Yes, I know. You are right. But perhaps I should have explained. The man who just died—he was the other doctor.”

Larry Green was at his desk, ten-mile run complete, by seven in the morning. It had been less than a day since he’d forwarded Davis’
requests to Darlene Graham, and answers were already coming in. This told him that the emphasis on finding the lost Blackstar drone hadn’t wavered one bit.

The information had again come by courier, and the papers in front of Green ranged in classification from
CONFIDENTIAL
to
TOP SECRET
. On top were the most recent satellite and radar images of the hangar outside KNIA, Khartoum International Airport. Green had seen a lot of surveillance in his day, and what he saw here didn’t add anything new. He leafed through the rest, flicking aside a CIA overview of Sudan’s political situation, along with a security assessment on the upcoming Arab League conference in Egypt. He guessed some wonk had thrown that in just to make the file seem a little more substantial. At the bottom of the stack he found a computer disc in a plastic case. A handwritten sticky note was attached:

Larry, Got this from a Navy cruiser that was in Gulf when FBN aircraft went down. Thought you might make something out of it. Still working on aircraft histories for the two tail numbers JD gave you and 121.5 records. DG

Green took the disc, which was dated September 20, the date of the accident, and slid it into the drive on his desktop computer. The screen came alive with a familiar picture, one Green recognized as a slight variation of other displays he’d seen. It was a radar tape, a digital record of what some Navy cruiser had been painting on the night of the crash. Green could see that certain data readouts and information bars at the top of the screen had been sanitized, blacked out electronically to mask sensitive information regarding the range and operational modes of the ship’s radar. The Navy might be helping, but turf wars were eternal.

Green oriented himself to the display and saw that north was up. There were no geographic boundaries drawn on the screen, but instead the references used by air traffic controllers—airspace boundaries. Green knew the general area in question, so the layout of the airspace made for a pretty clear picture. Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia,
Sudan. For a pilot, these were hard lines you didn’t cross, not unless you either A: had the necessary authorizations and a carefully filed flight plan, or B: were in the mood for an armed fighter escort.

As the recording began, Green saw a dozen commercial flights floating across the screen, tiny white airplane symbols with blocked data tags to give their altitude, call sign, and airspeed. There were a handful of other aircraft on the screen, but data on these had been blacked out—once again, the Navy keeping itself to itself.

A time counter at the bottom of the screen told Green he was watching a forty-two-minute show. Ninety seconds in, he saw an airplane take off from Khartoum International. Call sign:Air Sahara 007. Air Sahara was FBN Aviation’s corporate call sign. He watched the blip move north and climb. In terms of performance, he was used to watching military fighters and commercial jets, so the whole show looked like it was running in slow motion as the ancient DC-3 clawed for altitude and ambled toward the Red Sea. He also noticed an occasional shadow to the primary return, a second tiny square of light that blinked occasionally into view, then disappeared. Green had seen plenty of echoes like it in his years working with radar, and he was mildly surprised that the Navy’s shipboard gear wasn’t better. Once the airplane was over what had to be the Red Sea, it started a turn, then another. Soon it was tracking what looked like a nice lazy holding pattern over the water.

Green watched for half an hour as the airplane spun round and round. He waited patiently, expecting the data block to start flashing some kind of warning, expecting the altitude readout to start spinning down like a car odometer getting tripped to zero. But that never happened. The airplane just kept flying, boring a pattern of oval holes in an empty sky. Finally, Air Sahara 007 turned toward Khartoum International, began a slow glide down, and settled to what looked like a pretty nice landing.

“What the hell?” Green muttered.

Had the Navy sent the data for the wrong day? And what had the airplane been doing? If the crew had really been performing some kind of maintenance test flight, there was no need to go out and fly
circles over the water. The airplane would have just taken off, done a quick circuit over the home drome, then landed. But it was the pattern that really put Green’s thoughts into a spin. It reminded him of missions he’d done himself, a long time ago in an F-15 over the Gulf of Mexico—radar test work with a captive-carry air-to-air missile. That was what it looked like, a test pattern to gather data. Only the DC-3 was a seventy-year-old airplane, and an airplane that old didn’t have much left to test.

No, Green thought, none of it made sense. Not one bit.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

His shirt went into the trash, but the pants were salvageable.

Back in his room, Davis hit the shower. The water was even warmer than this morning, but did the job—a tiny cyclone of brown mud and grit swirled at his feet. He dried himself with two tiny towels and donned fresh clothes before easing down on the bed with the paperwork Antonelli had given him. Davis was not, by nature, a patient man. In a big investigation he would have had help with this part of the inquiry, a small army of experienced people to help weed through records and documents. The only help he was getting here—a seven-thousand-mile phone link to his boss and an Italian doctor with a honey-do list.

The papers were load manifests. Every bit of cargo carried on an airplane had to be weighed and its position noted. This was critical because an airplane’s center of gravity had to remain within certain limits, everything added up as if on an apothecary’s balance scale. But the manifest had other purposes as well. Customs officers liked to see what was coming into their country. Hazardous materials had to be listed so that first responders knew what they were dealing with in an emergency. Copies of the papers Davis held were on file in lot of different cabinets. The airline. The people who did the loading. The people who did the receiving. Any number of government agencies in between. Chances were, all the copies were the same, but with a company like FBN Aviation you never knew. So Davis took a good close look.

He saw roughly twenty load sheets covering five months of shipments to Antonelli’s aid organization. In truth, he would rather have
seen the departure manifests—what had gone out. He’d like to find a load sheet originating at Khartoum International that said: CARGO: U.S. BLACKSTAR DRONE (1) SLIGHTLY DAMAGED. DESTINATION: CHINA. That was what Davis needed. Black-and-white proof so he could go home and call it a day.

What he had was a line-by-line inventory of inbound cargo. He found a lot of the things one would expect. Medical supplies, batteries, bulk food, construction materials. But there were also surprises. A Harley-Davidson Softail, a Thoroughbred racehorse, two crystal chandeliers. In one load: a two-thousand-gallon hot tub, nineteen cases of Irish whiskey, and forty thousand condoms. A dictator somewhere was planning a hell of a party.

Davis was halfway through August when he hit pay dirt, four consecutive entries that seemed to jump off the page. One dorsal tracking beacon. Two guidance transponders. One flight control interface module. The kinds of things that Rafiq Khoury was supposedly trying to sell to the highest bidder. Davis was giving these entries some serious thought when his phone rang.

It was Larry Green.

Davis got up and meandered to the window. He spent three rings deciding what he was going to ask for. Then he picked up.

“Hello, Larry.”

“Hey, Jammer. How’s Africa?”

“Tahiti would have been better.”

Davis spent a few minutes discussing Bob Schmitt. Green talked about the unhelpful reconnaissance photos, then got to his real business.

“Darlene Graham sent me some radar data this morning, but it’s not making much sense.”

“Why’s that?” Davis asked.

“Well, on the night in question the Navy had real good coverage of the area where this airplane went down. I went over the recordings twice, and you know what?”

“The airplane didn’t go down,” Davis said.

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “How the heck did you know that?”

“Just a guess. Was there anything at all on the tape?”

“Actually, yeah. An airplane with an FBN call sign did take off. It flew out over the water, roughly to where the crash was supposed to have occurred, churned circles in the sky for half an hour, then went straight back to Khartoum International and landed.”

Davis said nothing.

“Does this mean anything to you?” Green prodded.

“I don’t know. What about the radio traffic—was there anything on guard frequency?”

“One twenty-one point five? I don’t have anything on that yet,” Green said, “but the DNI’s people are working it. What are you looking for? The airplane I saw didn’t go down, so why would there have been a distress call?”

“I don’t know. Just check it. Something is screwy here. Do you have any history on those two tail numbers?”

“Not yet, but they’re working on that too.”

“Tell them to work faster.” There was an extended silence, until Davis said, “Sorry, Larry.”

Green seemed to ignore the apology. “Have you gotten near the hangar?”

“No, not yet.” Davis looked at the load manifests in his hand. “But there’s something else I want you to check. I need a description of some parts that were shipped here a few months ago.”

“Shipped
in
? I thought we were worried about stuff going out.”