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.”
Davis waited. He and Green had known each other long enough that even silence between them had its meaning. It only took a few seconds.
“All right,” Green said, “shoot.”
Davis reeled off the parts from the list, along with the shipper of record and some associated letters and numbers.
Green remarked, “AN/DRA,AN/DRW? Jammer, this is all mil-spec stuff.”