Fly by Night (8 page)

“Hamburg?” Khoury said hesitantly. “Is this not dangerous ground, Fadi? The West watches certain exports very closely. This device you have ordered, might it be on someone’s list of sensitive technology? Are you sure there will be no questions?”

The engineer shrugged to say no. Or perhaps to say that he hadn’t really considered it.

Khoury let it go and moved to more familiar ground. He asked the question he always asked. “Will the deadline still be met?”The edge in his voice was clear.

“Yes, sheik. I will install the part as soon as it arrives. Yet …” Jibril hesitated, “I can only perform the most basic of bench tests. If there were more time—”

Khoury chopped his hand upward to cut the engineer off. There was a time for coddling and a time for discipline. He gave Jibril his most solemn gaze.

Jibril was duly inured. He bowed, and said, “It will be done, my sheik.”

The bed was surrounded by paper as Davis studied the maintenance records for a second time. Every airplane has a logbook, a bound record of that airframe’s flight and maintenance history. Since they always stay on board, the original logbook for the mishap aircraft was now resting on the bottom of the Red Sea. Fortunately, logbooks also have duplicate pages that are removed and kept as a permanent record. This was what Davis had in his hands.

The tear-out sheets were dry and brittle, like the paper had been baked in an oven. Arranged in chronological order, he was able to see where the airplane had been. Ten days prior to the crash, a hop from Dubai to Khartoum. The next day, an oil service and tire pressure check, then off to Lagos, Nigeria. On it went, bouncing around Africa and the Middle East. Two tires changed, a landing light replaced. A few gripes written up by pilots, subsequently addressed by maintenance.

Every write-up he saw was entered after a landing in Khartoum, so there had never been any contract maintenance performed at a faraway airport. In an outfit like this, Davis knew, 95 percent of pilot complaints regarding inoperative systems came after landing at the home field—not a function of where things broke, but a function of the five hundred U.S. dollars FBN Aviation would have to pay for a contract mechanic in Cape Town or Mombasa. Or the five hours the crew would have to wait for them to show up, if they showed up at all.

The logbook pages advanced chronologically until Davis reached the day before the crash. He saw a pilot-entered discrepancy:
Ailerons out of trim—five units right of neutral required for level flight
. Signed legibly at the bottom:
Captain Gregor Anatoli
. Then below, the corrective action:
Ailerons rerigged and centered to zero units in accordance with maintenance manual procedure 56–7. Test flight required
.

So there it was in black-and-white. The ailerons were long tabs that ran along the trailing edges of the wings, the surfaces that made an airplane roll and turn. A critical flight control. The pilot had reported that they were out of adjustment. The attending mechanic had certified that he’d realigned them to perfection. Everything in order. Everything by the book. Davis looked at the signoff block and checked to see if the time and date made sense. They did. Then he checked the signature, saw the mechanic’s name, along with his Airframe and Powerplant certificate number. Muhammed al-Fahad. The Jordanian, no doubt.

Then something hit him.

Davis shuffled back to the crew profile sheet and compared it to the logbook write-up.
Gregor Anatoli
. The captain’s signature was right there on the logbook page, clear and legible. Maybe a little too legible.
Anatoli
, with one “i.”The captain had spelled his name wrong.

Davis looked closer. He was no expert in handwriting analysis—it wasn’t the kind of thing that usually came up in aircraft accident investigations—but this one didn’t look right. A pilot like Anatolii would have a signature that was smooth and quick, like he’d done it before fifty thousand times. Which he certainly had. A captain was always signing for something—a flight plan, cargo paperwork, crew
accommodations, fuel slips. But the signature on this logbook page had perfect lettering, slow and deliberate. Not like any pilot Davis had ever known. He went back over some old pages in the logbook, and a week before the crash found another write-up by Captain Gregor Anatolii. Correct spelling, two i’s, different signature. Completely different. Barely legible from the speed. Probably whipped out in a second, two at the most.

Davis leaned back in the tiny chair and rubbed his temples. The more he found, the less sense everything made. The write-up for the ailerons—the purported reason for the accident—was almost certainly bogus. Which meant that the corrective action by the Jordanian mechanic had to be equally bogus. But why? An excuse for the crash, inserted into the records after the fact?

The elevator rumbled past, and his little pile of papers vibrated. Frustrated, Davis stuffed them back in the folder, put the folder on the nightstand. He got up and stretched, thought about sleeping but knew he couldn’t. He was restless. It was the same feeling he got when he took a spell on the bench in a rugby match. There was a lot you could learn from sitting back and watching a game flow. You could study and theorize. See who was fast and who was slow. Who held formation and who didn’t. But after a time, sitting and watching was a pursuit of diminishing returns. There came a time to lace up, trot back out on the pitch, and start throwing yourself around.

So Davis switched to his work boots and laced them up. Grabbed his room key and headed for the flight line.

CHAPTER NINE

The heat was everywhere as Davis walked across the tarmac, as if the world had a fever. It radiated down from the sky, up from the earth, into everything. His shoes, his clothes, his lungs. And there was probably no worse place in all Sudan than right where he was standing—on a busy flight line. Superheated exhaust from big turboprops, jet engines at takeoff power, brake assemblies smoking after high-energy landings. It was all there, seared into the breeze.

He saw two FBN airplanes in the process of being unloaded, men pushing cargo out of the openings, stacking crates on the concrete ramp. Davis adjusted his vector in that direction. Just as Schmitt had said, there was no security in sight. Just two DC-3s parked on a broiling ramp, their cargo doors open wide like a pair of mouths straining for air.

It was for aircraft like the DC-3 that the word venerable had been created. Davis knew they’d been around since before the Second World War, and that tens of thousands had been built. Three quarters of a century later, hundreds were still in the air, plowing through equatorial thunderstorms and landing on Arctic tundra. Davis hadn’t seen one in a long time, and he figured there were more in museums than in the air.

Different airplanes had different looks. Some, like the F-22, looked fast. Some were pretty, like the Boeing-757. The DC-3 in front of him wasn’t any of those things. It was all business, functional and boring. From a distance, these two specimens looked in decent shape. They were dressed in a generic paint scheme, a coat of eggshell white that had been faded by dust from the Sahara and rain from the Amazon and
soot from China. There were no corporate marks or logos, no gaudy fin flashes to establish ownership. For a company like FBN Aviation, that was probably the idea—anonymity. From where Davis stood, the only way to tell the two airplanes apart was by their registration numbers, this an unavoidable acquiescence to international law. X85BG and NH33L. Big airlines often paid a little extra to get sequential registration numbers, which helped to keep a fleet organized. These two numbers looked like they’d been chosen using Ping Pong balls from a wire tumbler. As random as you could get. Once again, maybe by design.

When Davis got closer to the airplanes, he started to see differences. Dents on cargo doors and fuselages, hail damage on the wing leading edges. The front aircraft’s radome was pocked, and the paint looked like it had been sandblasted off, probably from flying through a sandstorm. Such minor damage was inevitable on two aircraft that had over a hundred years of service between them. All the same, given their far-flung histories, these DC-3s were about as much alike as any two could be.

The airplane to the rear had already been unloaded, and a flatbed truck parked next to it was piled high with boxes and shrink-wrapped supplies. It looked like a legitimate load, some of the boxes having red crosses, others bearing the caduceus emblem, two snakes around a winged staff, to signify medical supplies. The loading crew was walking away, leaving two people near the truck, a teenage boy and a woman. The woman was securing the load with tie-down straps while the boy buttoned up the cargo door on the airplane.

Davis went the other way, toward the lead airplane, where a guy was sitting on a forklift with his thick arms crossed over the steering wheel. He was watching closely, giving a few directions, as a large wooden crate was being eased out through the cargo door. The box’s length was longer than its width, and with a little tapering at the sides might have passed for a coffin. It was obviously heavy, and the three guys struggling to move it had one edge jutting out into the air. The side panel was covered in Cyrillic writing, which was a mystery to Davis. The translation could have been
MEDICAL EQUIPMENT
or
MOSQUITO
NETTING
. More likely
ROCKET PROPELLED GRENADES OR SURFACE-TO-AIR MISSILES
. He hoped they didn’t drop it.

The three guys in the loading crew looked local. The forklift driver didn’t. He was straight from central casting—burly, two-day growth of black beard, brown watch cap, cigar in his mouth—a longshoreman from the docks of Jersey.

Davis walked up to him, and said, “Need any help?”

The guy looked at him, up and down. “Don’t worry yourself, buddy.”

Davis thought,
Yep, definitely Jersey
. He pointed to the cigar, and said, “That thing’s not lit, is it?” He jabbed a thumb toward a fuel truck parked fifty feet away. The side of the truck had a warning stenciled in bright red letters:
NO SMOKING WITHIN 100 FEET
.

The guy reached down and turned the key, and the machine went from a rattling diesel idle to silence. He took the cigar out of his mouth. It wasn’t lit. He looked at Davis again, up and down.

“And who the hell are you?” he asked.

“Me? I’m an inspector.” Davis left it at that, glancing at the big crate hanging two feet over the lip of the cargo door. The loading crew had stopped shoving and were looking back and forth between Davis and the driver.

“What the hell kind of inspector?” the man asked.

“You know—safety.”

The guy crossed his thick forearms, chomped back down on his half-cut stogie. He was wondering why an American dressed for a round of golf was wandering around his cargo ramp. He probably had Davis pegged as being with the United Nations, or maybe an oil company. That would make sense.

“So are we?” the driver asked.

“Are you what?”

“Safe.”

Davis said, “Well, you’re cigar isn’t actually lit, so that fuel truck over there won’t explode. And you probably won’t get lung cancer in twenty years. So, yeah, I’d say you’re safe.”

“Good. Then you won’t bother us anymore.”

Davis looked at him, then looked at the crate. The driver was sweating. Possibly because he was nervous. More likely because it was a hundred and eight degrees in the shade.

Davis lunged forward.

The driver stiffened, put up an arm to defend himself, but Davis went nowhere near him. Instead, he grabbed the crowbar he’d spotted under the seat. Two long strides later, he had it jammed into the crate and was prying off the lid.

“Hey!” the driver protested. “What the hell?”

But protest was all he did. He stayed where he was, because Davis was a lot bigger and had a crowbar in his hand. The loading crew pulled back as well, disappearing into the airplane’s cargo bay. Whatever was happening, they wanted no part of it. Nails in the crate lid gave way, creaking like an old door hinge. Davis pulled the lid open.

He called over his shoulder, “Have you seen this?”

“Listen, buddy, I don’t know what’s in ’em,” the driver stammered. “I just move ’em around.”

Davis reached in and pulled out a sample. He said, “No, I mean—have you
seen
this?” He held up a packaged DVD.
Titanic
. It was one of a hundred different titles in the crate. “What about this one?” he asked, holding up
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
. “Everybody’s seen this one.”

The driver looked at him like he was crazy. Then he looked at the crowbar and nodded.

“Did you like it?” Davis asked.

Another nod.

“Me too. Only—there was one thing that drove me crazy.” Davis paused.

The driver didn’t ask.

“Those damned Imperial Storm Troopers. How could anybody shoot that bad? I mean, as many rounds as they fired? Blind luck says they hit somebody, right? Or maybe a ricochet. Do laser weapons ricochet?” Davis turned around and smiled.

So did the driver. Sort of.

Davis put the movies, which were undoubtedly counterfeit, back
into the crate. He pulled down the lid and, using the crowbar as a hammer, battered a half dozen nails back into place. When he was done, he tossed the crowbar to the driver. This clearly surprised him, but he made the catch. Davis then squatted low and, using his shoulders, pulled the crate through the cargo door, lifted it clear, and heaved it onto the prongs of the forklift. The big machine rocked forward under the weight, then settled.

Davis smiled again.

So did the driver, this time probably meaning it.

“What’s your name?” Davis asked.

“Johnson.”

“You work for FBN, Johnson?”

“Two year contract as an A and P.”

A and P stood for Airframe and Powerplant, shorthand for his professional certificate. “You’re an airplane mechanic?” Davis asked.

“That’s right.”

Davis checked his fingernails. They were dirty, which was good. It was his personal policy to never trust any mechanic who didn’t have grease under his fingernails.