Fly by Night (2 page)

Green said, “I’m surprised you let her go, Jammer. You’ve always been a little heavy-handed with Jen. Especially since Diane died.”

Davis’ wife had been killed in a car crash, the kind of tragedy that strikes out of the blue. The kind of tragedy that only strikes other people. A friend of a friend, a distant relative. When it happened to Jammer Davis and his daughter it was like a hurricane, and ever since he’d made it his job to act as Jen’s foundation, to hold things together. It didn’t help that she was at that maddening age when kids start to separate anyway, start loosening their genetic tethers.

“She was getting restless,” Davis said. “That’s how teenagers are supposed to be, or so everyone tells me. I thought it was time to give her a little freedom.”

“Norway is a long way from home.”

“I know. But she’s with Nordo and his family.”

Davis saw instant understanding in Green’s expression. Nordo was Sven Nordstrom, a Norwegian F-16 pilot who’d done an exchange tour with the squadron back when Larry was in charge. Nordo was a great guy with a terrific family, and he was the only reason Davis had let his teenage daughter fly off to Scandinavia for three months.

“So what’s this all about, Larry?”

“That’s what I like about you, Jammer. You think like I run—no wasted effort.”

They began strolling the sideline.

“I’ve got a job for you,” Green said.

“The kind where I fly an airplane or the kind where I pick up the pieces?”

“A crash.”

“Where?”

“Sudan.”

“Sudan? Africa?” Davis shook his head. “Don’t airplanes ever crash in Tahiti?”

“Not lately. But if it happens, I’ll take care of that one myself.”

Davis still had his beer. He took a long pull.

“You know, that’s not a good way to hydrate,” Green admonished.

“Want one?”

“Honestly, it looks pretty darn good. But how about I buy you a cup of coffee instead?”

“That’s not a good way to hydrate either.”

Green waited impassively.

“You’re serious.”

No reply.

Davis sighed. “All right, coffee it is.”

CHAPTER TWO

They found a coffeehouse two blocks south. It was a toney place, the very air inside seemingly brewed in rich aromas taken from exotic mountains—Sumatra or Colombia or Java—and flown halfway around the world. There was furniture the color of well-steeped tea on dark wood floors. The coffee was four bucks for a
venti
, which was Italian for big. Even at that price they had to stand in line, so Davis figured it had to be good stuff. He watched the lady in front of them pay eight bucks for what looked like a milkshake. When it was their turn he ordered a large coffee, plain and black. Green got a bottle of water along with the tab.

Davis was still wearing cleats with his warm-up gear, so when he followed Green across the room to a table his steps clacked over the hardwood floor. The shoes made him an inch taller than he already was, and the bulky clothing made him wider. He was limping on a sore ankle, and his wet hair was matted with sweat and grass, and probably traces of blood. In what had to be some sort of statement on contemporary society, nobody gave him a second look.

Green led to a pair of wide chairs in one corner that were covered in a supple, leathery material. Dark and smooth. Just like the coffee. Davis settled in and took a long sip from his cup. It really was good.

Green began his pitch. “What do you know about unmanned aerial vehicles, Jammer?”

“UAVs? They’ve become big business. As an ex-fighter pilot it breaks my heart, but the reality is that thirty years from now the Air Force won’t have pilots flying tactical missions. It’ll all be drones.”

“I fear you may be right, that’s where things are going. And I’m
sure you know it’s not just the military flying them. The CIA operates a big fleet. Intelligence, surveillance, even strike missions. Most of the airframes they use are common to Air Force versions, but the CIA has also undertaken a handful of black projects. One of the most recent is a vehicle known as Blackstar.”

“Never heard of it,” Davis said.

“That’s good, because it’s classified. They’ve been operating a handful of these airframes for about a year, based out of airfields in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan.”

“Okay. Good for them. Why are we talking about it?”

Green looked around the room. Davis noticed that the seats Green had chosen were as far as possible from the rest of the quietly chattering patrons. It broke a lot of rules to talk about classified information in a public place, and Larry Green was typically a by-the-book guy. But with a little discretion and a dash of common sense—it happened every day.

“I got a call from Darlene Graham yesterday.”

This got Davis’ attention. Darlene Graham was the director of national intelligence, a sharp woman who’d taken over a post that had been little more than symbolic for many years, and turned it into a powerful overseer of the old-school intelligence agencies. And while the NTSB didn’t typically overlap with the D.C. intelligence community, a year earlier Davis had blurred the lines between the two when a crash investigation he’d been working on had blossomed into a full-blown global crisis. Working with Graham and the CIA, Davis had averted a disaster. Since then, he’d been on leave of absence to concentrate on his daughter.

Green continued, “The CIA had a Blackstar go Magellan on them last winter, just wandered off and started exploring after the uplinks and data feed stopped. Eventually, they lost it.”

“Serves them right for not having a pilot on board.”

Green smiled.

Davis asked, “Could it have been shot down?”

“Doubtful. The operators would have seen something. A fighter in the area, radar activity from a surface-to-air missile site. And it was flying
too high to be hit by small arms fire. Since Blackstar is a brand-new design, the odds are it was just a technical glitch.”

“But what does that have to do with us?” Davis asked. “We’ve never been in the UAV business. Those are exclusively military toys, including collecting the smithereens when one hits the dirt. If the CIA needs help investigating this crash, they should talk to the Air Force.”

“It’s not that simple. Blackstar was operating in the Horn of Africa, right on the border of Somalia and Ethiopia. After contact was lost, there was an intense search. Every imaging device we have scoured the area, but couldn’t find a thing. In the end, the CIA decided it must have gone ballistic, ended up in the Red Sea or maybe the Indian Ocean.”

“That sounds a little hopeful.”

“You and I see it that way. We investigate stuff like this. But the CIA is just getting their feet wet when it comes to aircraft. They decided to write the whole thing off—that is, until last week.”

“What? Did some fisherman pull up a piece of Blackstar in his net?”

“Worse. The CIA got an intel report that an advanced UAV of some kind was squirreled away in a hangar at the new airport outside Khartoum.”

“But you said it went down east of there, in Somalia.”

“Khartoum isn’t that far away from the crash box. Certainly plausible. And when you consider the number of places you could stash aircraft wreckage in that part of the world—well, you get the idea.”

“What was the source of this information?”

“Darlene Graham would only tell me that it was a reliable human source.”

“Reliable,” Davis repeated.

Green shrugged.

“So is this a government-owned hangar?” Davis asked.

“That’s the funny thing. It’s owned by a private party, an outfit called FBN Aviation.”

“What do they do?”

“On paper they fly cargo, but in reality it looks like your standard
shell company. It was set up in the Bahamas by a law firm that does that kind of work exclusively—Franklin, Banks, and Noble.”

“FBN,” Davis said.

Green nodded. “The company directors are three lawyers who probably couldn’t tell a DC-3 from a salad shooter.”

“DC-3s? People still fly those?”

“Apparently this company does. They work about a half dozen airplanes around Africa and the Middle East.”

Davis had seen companies like it before. The corporate office in a place with loose regulatory oversight, the operations end set up in a dark corner of the world. From a distance, FBN Aviation would look a lot like UPS, a company designed to move air cargo. But up close it would look very different. There would be legitimate shipments, but mixed in you’d find arms and drugs and diamonds. You’d find record-keeping that looked like it was done in a mirror.

Green said, “The guy in charge is named Rafiq Khoury. He’s some kind of cleric. Other than that, we don’t know much about him.”

“A cleric needs a cargo airline?”

“I didn’t like the sound of that either.”

Davis heaved a sigh. “Okay. So Darlene Graham lost one of her toys. And it might be sitting in a hangar owned by some kind of arms merchant. That doesn’t explain why a cheapskate like you just bought me a cup of coffee. You said you had work for me, Larry, a crash. Are we talking about something besides this drone?”

“We are,” Green said. “A DC-3 went down two weeks ago off the coast of Sudan, in the Red Sea. The exact location is a little fuzzy, but the crash site is clearly inside their territorial waters. Sudan has jurisdiction.”

“Let me guess—FBN Aviation.”

Green nodded.

“Doesn’t Sudan have people who can run an investigation?”

“There’s a Sudanese Civil Aviation Authority, and on paper they have a guy in charge of flight safety. But he’s just somebody’s cousin, no formal training. Remember, we’re talking about a country where over seventy percent of the national budget goes to the military.”

“But if Sudan needed outside help, we’d be the last ones they’d ask. We were bombing them back in the nineties.”

“True, but Sudan is in a tight spot right now. As you know, air carriers aren’t allowed to fly international routes without ICAO’s seal of approval.”

Davis did know this. The International Civil Aviation Organization was the U.N. agency tasked to set worldwide standards for aviation. For developing countries, the bar wasn’t set particularly high, but they had to go through the motions. Otherwise, they risked losing their certification and could find themselves without air service.

Green continued, “Sudan is in the middle of an ICAO safety audit. It’s an inspection that comes around every five years or so. Teams go in and check out airline operations, air traffic control, safety programs.”

“And suddenly they have a hull loss right in the middle of their paperwork party.”

“Exactly. Sudan has to play this by the book, and the book says that when a nation doesn’t have the expertise for full-up crash investigation, it has to bring in help.”

“And the NTSB is their helper of record?”

“No, they actually use France. But the French are a little shorthanded right now, and they suggested we might be able to help.”

“How convenient,” Davis said.

“Yeah, I thought so too.”

“You think Director Graham had a hand in that?”

“Probably,” said Green.

Davis surmised, “She thinks the crash of this jalopy DC-3 will give her a ticket to look inside that hangar. Or should I say, gives
me
a ticket.”

Green nodded.

It was all starting to make sense. But Davis still wasn’t satisfied.

“Larry, you have a lot of investigators. How did I draw the short straw?”

Green paused for a hit on his water bottle. He said, “You’re the best guy for the job, Jammer. This is going to be a solo effort. No tech help from contractors or lab teams. Nobody in my office is as good on their
own as you are. Sudan will make a show of going through the paces, but the truth is, they probably don’t give a damn why this DC-3 went down. They might even not want to know—it could be that one of their air traffic controllers was at fault, or maybe their maintenance oversight is lacking. For the Sudanese, nothing good can come from any findings. They’ll want an investigator who will come in, ask a few easy questions, then shrug their shoulders and go home.”

“And you think that’s what I’ll do?”

The general smiled. “It’s only important that the Sudanese think that’s what you’ll do. All we want is one look at that hangar.”

And there was the endgame, Davis thought. A game he didn’t like for one big reason. “So nobody really cares why this airplane went down.”

“I never thought I’d say it, but in this case the cause of the crash is not an overriding concern.”

“Unless you were the one who happened to be out flying that night.”

Green grimaced. “Yeah—I had that coming. Tell you what, Jammer. Figure out why this sixty-year-old airplane went down, and next time I’ll buy you a beer.”

Davis reached for his coffee, took a long sip. He was nearing the bottom of his cup, which meant it was time for a decision.

“Larry, I appreciate your confidence in me, but there are a dozen people in your section who could handle this.”

“Not like you would,” Green argued.

Davis straightened up in his chair and stood. “Well, anyway, thanks for the offer. And the coffee.”

Davis started to walk away.

Green said, “Bob Schmitt.”

It hit Davis like an anvil.

CHAPTER THREE

Davis stopped in his tracks. Turned around and stared.

Green didn’t say a word. He pulled a handful of papers from his pocket. They were folded in a military manner, neat hard creases that made them the size of a long envelope. Davis took a cautious step back and slowly held out his hand.

“Last page,” Green said.

Davis began to unfold the pages, took his time and rifled through one by one. He was looking at a hastily thrown together briefing package, and definitely not the kind of thing the NTSB would assemble. It had to have come from Darlene Graham’s office. He saw satellite photos of the hangar and airfield. A request for technical assistance from ICAO. And on the last page, amid the corporate profile of FBN Aviation, one name highlighted in yellow. Davis hadn’t heard it in years. In truth, he’d never expected to hear it again. Bob Schmitt.