“Sure.”
They were nearly to the door when Davis felt the phone in his pocket buzz.
“I’ll catch up,” he said.
Schmitt turned around and gave him a pained look, but that didn’t mean much — it was how the man went through life. Forty-something years ago he’d come out of the womb and gotten slapped by an obstetrician, and Bob Schmitt had been slapping the world back ever since. But right now he was a man on a mission, so he disappeared out the door.
Davis saw a message to call Larry Green. He dialed, and Green picked up halfway through the first ring. Like he’d been waiting with his hand poised on the receiver.
“Jammer, I’m glad you called. How’s everything going?”
At the moment, Davis figured he could answer that in a very negative way, but Jen had been telling him he needed to become a more positive person. He said, “There are indications I’m making progress.”
“Good. I saw Darlene Graham today, and we figured a few things out.”
“I’m glad somebody has.”
“We’ve been going down the wrong path. An airplane did go down that night. We have radio traffic and satellite photos to confirm it. Right time, right place.”
“Wait a minute. You told me an FBN airplane took off, flew some circles, then went right back and landed.”
“It did, but there’s more to it. The radar returns I saw for that night showed a shadow. It came and went, so I originally figured it was just a glitch in the processing. You’ve done enough radar work to know how common queertrons like that are.”
“Sure. But now you don’t think it was a spurious return?”
“Nope. I think it was a two-ship formation.”
Davis took a few moments to think about that. “You know, if you put it together with the rest — a lost drone, some telemetry hardware — do you realize what we could be looking at?”
“I know what you’re going to say, Jammer. Exactly what came to my mind. I suggested to Darlene Graham that they might have tried to fly Blackstar, maybe with the other airplane as some kind of mother ship to control it.”
“Is that feasible?”
“The engineers back here say there’s absolutely no way. Two reasons. First, Blackstar has some very advanced flight control software, all fly-by-wire stuff. The inputs come over a secure satellite link from halfway around the world, and there’s no way anybody could duplicate that feed — everything is strictly encrypted and the frequency hops around constantly.”
“Okay,” Davis said. “And the other reason?”
“That’s the slam dunk. This is our latest stealth platform. According to Director Graham, Blackstar would have been invisible to the type of radar that took the pictures I saw. You wouldn’t get the slightest blip.”
“Okay, good point. But if it wasn’t Blackstar, then what kind of two-ship formation was out flying around in the middle of the night?”
“Beats me,” Green said. “I guess the important thing is that something went down in the water.”
Davis added, “And we know it wasn’t N2012L, which is what somebody wants us to believe.”
“That somebody being Rafiq Khoury?”
“Most likely.”
There was a prolonged silence before Green said, “Jammer, I don’t like how this whole thing is going down. Darlene won’t be happy, but I’m pulling you out. Get on the next plane home, we’ll have a beer tomorrow night. The CIA can fix this mess on their own.”
Davis didn’t say anything right away. He’d always known his old boss as a bundle of energy, a guy who could never sit still, so right now Davis had a mental picture of Green circling his desk as if he were training for some kind of office marathon.
“Larry, do you have good coordinates on this crash site?”
“Did you not hear me? I said get out now — that’s an order, mister!”
Davis said, “You know what I did last night, Larry? I went for a walk in the desert, over by that hangar. And do you know what I found?”
No reply.
“Two bodies. They were buried out there in the sand, only not very deep. Some dogs had started digging them up. After I left, a few of Khoury’s people went out with a backhoe and dug a little deeper. Later, I identified one of the bodies. Can you guess?”
Green responded, “The two Ukrainians?”
“Yep.” Davis let that sit for a few seconds, then said, “I don’t like how this is going down either. But two pilots are dead and Bob Schmitt is running a flying unit. Fire me if you want, but I’ve got things to do. Now, I want those coordinates.”
“You really are a dumbass, Jammer.”
Davis said nothing. Green relented and read off the latitude-longitude set. Davis searched the operations counter, found a pen and a scrap of paper, and scribbled the numbers down.
“Where do you take it from here?” Green asked.
Davis knew the answer to that question. But he didn’t say it, because his attention was now riveted outside. A big SUV was heading right for Boudreau’s bullet-ridden airplane. Davis suspected he knew who was inside.
“Larry, I gotta go.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Davis walked out into the heat.
He made it to the airplane just ahead of the advancing Land Rover. The truck rolled to a stop in front of the bullet-riddled DC-3. The driver’s door opened, and an immense man got out. He was taller than Davis by a good two inches, outweighed him by fifty pounds. His arms and legs belonged on an oak. He was dark skinned, with close-cropped black hair on a head the size of a basketball. His cheeks were dark, the kind of five o’clock shadow that didn’t care what time it was. As he walked around the front of the Rover, Davis was sure he felt the guy’s footsteps transmit through the ground — like a Tyrannosaurus rex out for a stroll.
T. rex opened the passenger door, and Rafiq Khoury stepped out. Dark glasses, bird’s nest beard, slender limbs. Just like the photo Davis had seen. The cleric walked toward them — no, he flowed toward them, an apparition of white cotton fluttering in the torrid breeze.
“What has happened?” Khoury asked, addressing Schmitt.
Davis wondered how Khoury knew that anything had happened.
Schmitt looked cautious — like any American who worked for a fundamentalist Muslim cleric would. He said, “There was trouble on our delivery to Congo today. Some gunfire broke out while the airplane was on the ground, right as they were finishing the unload. The airplane took a few hits.”
Khoury looked over the aircraft — even a nonflier couldn’t miss the damage — and then swiped a fleeting glance at Davis who was standing away from the rest.
“And the crew?” the imam asked.
Boudreau said, “Achmed is still down there. We don’t know what happened to him.”
Ever so slightly, Khoury’s head cocked to one side. Davis would have given anything to see the expression hidden behind his knock-off Serengetis. As if to accommodate, Khoury walked toward him. He stopped right in front of Davis and very slowly pulled his glasses away from his eyes. Davis was taken aback, struck by the intense, mismatched gaze. That hadn’t been in the file, hadn’t been in the lone photo in which Khoury’s eyes were masked behind dark glasses. Davis almost felt as if he was looking at two different souls. Yet it struck him, aside from the eyes, that there was nothing special about the rest of the man. Take those away, put Khoury in a suit and tie, add a decent haircut and a shave, and he might have been a fastener salesman at a convention. Which somehow put even more emphasis on his gaze.
“I am Imam Rafiq Khoury. I manage FBN Aviation. You are the investigator who has come to help us?” The cleric’s English was good, if a little deliberate.