Ben smiled. “Yes sir, you’re right. It’s been eating at me very actively, to the point that I’d begun to suspect everyone.”
“That includes me as well, I assume?”
Ben smiled sheepishly. “Really hadn’t gotten around to you yet, General. But I was becoming suspicious of friends and even my cat. Or his collar, at least.”
“I’m sorry?”
Ben laughed and waved it off. “Not important. Just something Dan Jerrod said.”
“Okay. Well, you can cut out the worry now. The responsible parties are contained.”
“Great.”
Mac got to his feet carefully and pushed the flimsy gray chair out of the way.
“Go on home, Ben. Get some well-deserved rest. Oh, and if no one’s told you, the start of the post-development program for Boomerang to maintain the system will be announced next week, and we very much want you to stay on for at least another year.”
“That’s good to hear, sir.”
Mac shook Ben Cole’s hand and walked him to the door of the hangar office, holding it open. He watched him go, before turning back into the room to get his coat. He would need to call Jerrod immediately to let him know what had been said. The security chief would be nervous, of course. Saying anything to Cole and keeping him on was a calculated risk, but it had apparently worked. Ben Cole was more than likely neutralized.
At least, for his sake, Mac thought, I certainly hope so.
He tried Dan Jerrod’s cell phone and home numbers with no luck. The office extension rang uselessly as well. Mac sighed and punched in another number, assigning to Jon Anderson the task of tracking Jerrod down.
Mac focused on the door, well aware there was work to do, but the lure of the beautifully designed Gulfstream sitting like a crouching tiger on the hangar floor a few dozen yards away was too powerful for a lifelong pilot to ignore. He turned away from the outside door and entered the hangar, intent on strolling around the Gulfstream for a few minutes, contemplating her sleek shape and how she looked suspended in flight.
There was no one else in sight as Mac shoved his hands in his pockets and forced himself to relax, breathing deeply, his nose catching a hint of kerosene and other aviation solvents, aromas that painted an olfactory picture of the hangar’s interior.
The absence of anyone else in the hangar was comforting. A general officer poking around was, by definition, suspicious, his mere presence threatening to spark an alert among subordinates, who would instantly assume that the big man was searching for something to criticize. It helped to be anonymous every now and then, escaping the inevitable bow wave of recognition that the stars on his shoulders brought.
Mac stopped thirty feet in front of the nose of the Gulfstream, admiring its lithe appearance. Gulfstreams were the gold standard for executive jets, a $43-million luxury liner. He chuckled at having the audacity even to daydream what it would be like to own one on a general’s salary.
Not yet, at least, Mac thought, his mind poking into fantasy images of his post-military life to come.
He began at the nose and walked beneath the fuselage to the tail, reaching up to touch the aircraft every twenty feet or so, letting his fingertips merely brush the cool metal as he passed. There was something mystical about an aircraft in a quiet hangar at night, Mac thought. Air museums had always intrigued him as a result. Walking around a silent, powerful airplane inside a huge building always inspired feelings of awe, which contrasted with his technical knowledge the way that logic and emotion always clash. “I could put you to sleep explaining how a 747 flies,” he’d told a high-school class as a career-day speaker once, many years back, “but I will be forever emotionally mystified at the fact that so much metal can be supported by the wind and actually fly as a thing of beauty.” Airplanes were merely collections of man-made parts capable of using wing shape and power to suck themselves into the air, and yet they could stir the heart of even the most jaded pilot. Every time he’d visited the Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio, or the Air and Space Museum in Washington, a planned hour had become an afternoon with the doors closing behind him.
He stopped for a second beneath the Gulfstream’s tail and then walked to the right wingtip, enjoying the changing perspective of the jet as he moved. The wings were turned up at the end in an appendage known as a winglet. He stopped for a second to admire the right one, the bold rake of its shape shifting the horizontal wing to a vertical fin, a design that lessened the aerodynamic drag of the aircraft and made it more fuel efficient. The winglet was painted blue to match part of the body paint, but there was a patch at the very front of the winglet, on its leading edge, that seemed darker.
Why is it that way?
Aircraft as big and expensive as a Gulfstream were painted or repainted all at once in special facilities. Yet, in the orangish light of the hangar’s sodium-vapor lamps, a foot-long expanse of the winglet’s leading edge appeared darker.
Must have been a bird strike or some other repair, Mac thought casually as he began walking away. But he stopped suddenly and walked back under the winglet, studying it intently, though unable to touch it because of the height.
There was a stepladder in one recess of the hangar and Mac retrieved it to climb up for a closer look. The difference in the paint shade was very subtle. It was no wonder they’d missed it when they’d looked at the aircraft for damage a few days earlier. But whether it was the telltale aftereffects of a repair, or just an inconsistency in the original paint, he couldn’t be sure.
Mac ran his fingertips lightly over the area, feeling for a sharp edge where someone might have masked off a section before repainting. He could feel nothing unusual, but his eyes detected a small irregularity, as if a dent had been repaired imperfectly.
He looked around, relieved that apparently no one had been watching him, and returned the ladder to the spot it had occupied.
Suppose they’d come back Monday evening with damage from hitting that Albatross. Is it possible they could have repaired it secretly and said nothing? Our contract requires a report. Mac climbed inside the Gulfstream and searched the maintenance log, but there were no indications of a wingtip repair.
He thought about the Uniwave manager who ran the test aircraft program. He was, Mac concluded, perfectly capable of trying to cover up something that would have seemed insignificant, in order to avoid the paperwork that even a bird strike would trigger, especially if the discovery had been made after news of the Albatross crash reached his ears.
But we didn’t even suspect the possibility of a collision ourselves until we looked at the radar tapes, Mac reminded himself. Why would he? No, he concluded. If a damaged winglet had been discovered, they might or might not have asked the pilots about it, but afterward the aircraft would have been quietly repaired and the damage marked off to impact with an unseen object.
Mac left the Gulfstream cockpit and stood again on the hangar floor, studying the aircraft. He winced at the memories of his own involvement as a young officer in helping commanders minimize and hide major aircraft damage. It didn’t matter that cover-ups were a widespread practice carried out in order to avoid hurting the Air Force safety record or embarrassing a particular command; he’d always known it was wrong — if not criminal. Sometimes it was nothing more sinister than the maintenance staff working a few nights to repair a small dent in a wingtip rather than formally reporting it, but at other times an entire squadron would labor in secret for months to keep the cost of an accident from exceeding a million dollars and becoming a so-called “Class A,” which was the most embarrassing level. The possibility that Uniwave might have done the same thing to avoid contract problems chilled him. Even worse was the thought that the beautiful twin jet sitting before him might have caused the loss of a civilian amphibian, and not even he was being told the truth.