He had one big problem. If the army had found him here, they’d probably tracked him through the clinic in Khartoum. So if he was at the top of their post office wall, Antonelli’s picture was likely right underneath. It wouldn’t matter that she’d done nothing but get slapped around by some thugs. She would be guilty by association. And Antonelli was in the village right now. She could already be in custody, something Davis didn’t want to think about. He made his decision.
Davis shuffled aft. He pointed down at the boat, then north toward Saudi Arabia. He made a shooing motion to the old man. Take the boat out to sea.
The old man nodded.
Then Davis made more gestures. Slow down, followed by, Me into the ocean. Not for the first time, the old guy looked at him like he was crazy. Davis stole a look toward shore, squinting against the wind-driven mist of quartz and mica. He couldn’t see a thing, and so neither could the soldiers on shore. He reached for the diving mask, and as he did Davis felt a strange sensation. He was lightheaded, even a little euphoric. Perfect. He realized he was still chewing absentmindedly on the khat. Davis spit it into the sea. He put on the mask, straddled the seaward rail, and gave the skipper a little wave.
The old man waved right back. As if it was the most normal thing in the world.
Davis vaulted into the sea.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Spend a career flying jets, and you learn how to make decisions fast. In combat that was how you survived. New lieutenants learned rule number one right away when they got their asses waxed in mock dogfights — he who hesitates dies. It was like a chunk of your brain got overdeveloped, bathed in some sort of neural steroid. Of course, fast decisions weren’t always the right ones. You acted first, then lived with your choices. As time went by, your choices got better, an almost evolutionary process. Which was why you trained. A good system, all in all, but the bottom line never wavered. If things look overwhelming, never dither. Do something. Anything.
So Jammer Davis had thrown himself into the sea.
He’d done it with the fuzziness of a man drugged. How stupid had that been? Now he had to live with it.
It took twenty minutes to swim to shore. Davis could have covered it more quickly, but once he was close he eased his pace, allowing time for reconnaissance. The storm had arrived at strength, a meteorological buzz saw with winds whipping over the village at fifty, maybe sixty miles an hour. Davis didn’t see any activity, but the visibility was marginal. He decided the soldiers had hunkered down in one of the houses to wait out the storm. They might still be looking out a window, waiting for a small fishing boat to come out of the churning sea and seek refuge. But nobody would notice a diving mask-encased head bobbing in the surf. Davis briefly wondered where the villagers would throw their allegiance. He remembered seeing a Sudanese flag on a pole in the middle of the settlement, but he hadn’t seen a single photo of the president. He decided the people here would be loyal to the same things they’d always been loyal to — family, tribe, God. In that order. They’d been fishing and living and praying here for a million years. Soldiers with rifles going from house to house wouldn’t be thought of as highly as their regular doctor, or even the big American who was hiring people for bizarre fishing expeditions.
The entire coastline had disappeared, everything overtaken by a massive, Sahara-sized wall of dust. The sea was in pitched battle with itself, hip-high waves slamming ashore with venom. In a maelstrom like that, the soldiers would never see Davis as long as he stayed in the water. But as long as he stayed in the water, he wasn’t going to do Regina Antonelli any good. None at all.
As he crept ashore, Davis could see one jeep and one truck, both Chinese. Both parked at the edge of the village. The truck was green and bulky, with a bed for carrying troops. Together, he guessed they had brought eight, possibly ten men to al-Asmat for the search. Plenty to take one big guy into custody. Unfortunately, these troops were likely more competent that the ones he’d already met. They wouldn’t be drunk or casual, because they were here on a mission. And because they already knew what Davis was capable of.
He crawled from the surf and instantly appreciated the protection it had afforded. He was still wearing tattered shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, so his arms and legs got peppered by granules of high-speed sand. He left his diving mask on, which must have looked ridiculous. Many years ago, on Davis’ first deployment to the desert, the Air Force had issued him a pair of sand goggles. He’d thought that was ridiculous too — until the first sand storm.
Davis kept low and used all the available cover. A fishing boat, a stack of lobster traps. He made it to the courtyard wall of the first house, the place Antonelli had been staying. He stopped and listened, heard nothing but storm-driven sand lashing over buildings and whipping through fishing nets. He spotted two soldiers in the doorway of a house a hundred feet away. The door was lee to the wind, and they were staring outside indifferently — more to marvel at the haboob than to look for him. Davis was hoping they were all in the same place, mingling and bantering as they waited for the storm to pass.
He moved closer to the courtyard entrance of the house where he hoped to find Antonelli. He crouched behind a potted palm that was getting thrashed by the wind, and tried to see if anyone was inside. Unable to tell, Davis waited. When a particularly nasty gust stirred up a cloud of brown, he took his chance. He ran fast across the stone surface, tiny dust explosions marking each step. When he burst inside, he saw the same old woman who’d been working the kitchen counter when he’d arrived. She stared at him oddly. Davis took off the diving mask and a look of relief washed across her face. She tapped twice on what looked like the door to a pantry, and it swung open. Antonelli emerged.
She walked hurriedly to Davis and went straight into his arms.
“You’ve seen the soldiers?” she asked.
“Yeah. How long have they been here?”
“Not long. They were just beginning to search when the storm hit.”
“All right. We need to get you out of here.”
Antonelli didn’t ask why, so she’d already come to the same troubling conclusion he had. By helping him, she had put herself at risk.
“Did you complete your dive?” she asked.
Davis thought, All except the last two minutes when I almost drowned. He said, “Yes, and I figured out who was flying that airplane when it crashed.”
“Who?”
“Nobody.”
She looked at him quizzically.
“At least not anybody on board. The whole flight deck had been modified — the pilot’s seats were gone, part of the instrument panel ripped out. There was a big box mounted directly over the spot where the captain’s control column used to be. I’m sure it was hooked into the flight controls.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “How can an airplane fly without pilots?”
“Happens all the time these days. This particular airplane used to be an experimental model, a flying testbed. A long time ago it was modified to be controlled by computers. I think somebody working for Rafiq Khoury modified it further. I think they put in new flight control servos, a little telemetry, and turned it into a full-scale remote controlled airplane.”
“You mean it was flown by radio commands?”
“Exactly. There was another airplane out flying that night, right alongside the one that crashed. A ship to control the one they modified. They both took off from Khartoum and flew all the way to the Red Sea before something went wrong.”