Deep Black

20

By the time Dean heard the truck coming, Karr had already begun walking toward the road. Dean trotted up to him, A-2 rifle parallel to the ground. Karr put his hand out to lower it. “Ours,” he said.

Maybe it was, but it looked like a Russian Ural-375, the ubiquitous 6X6 that was to the Russian Army what the M35 series once was to the U.S. It had rather garish red stars on its dull white cabin, and a canvas top flapped loosely over the slatted sides. The truck stopped on the road, then backed off toward Karr, stopping when the muck reached halfway up the deep treads of the tire.

“Gotta load it on the highway,” said Karr.

The truck whined and groaned as the driver ground the gears and shoved it forward to the drier ground, stopping on what passed for a shoulder to the narrow two-lane road. The cab door opened and Lia jumped out.

“Find anything?” she said, going to the back.

“One hit, up near the edge of the swamp,” said Karr. “A little metal there. Nothing beyond that.”

“They must’ve been fried. The sniffers aren’t that sensitive.”

“Hmmph. Maybe. One definitely. Maybe two.”

“You’re getting too paranoid. You’re going to be like Rubens soon. Show me where it is.”

Karr pointed to the area where the sniffer had registered something. Lia climbed onto the tail end of the truck and hauled back the canvas, disappearing inside. When she returned, she had a large boxy device that looked a little like the leaf blower a parks maintenance worker might use.

“High-tech vacuum,” Karr explained to Dean. He held him back. “Damn thing’s louder than hell. Just let her do her thing. When she’s done, we’ll load the pieces into the truck. Then you take them back for analysis.”

“Back where?”

“The farm,” said Karr. “Home.”

“Home being the States?”

“Who says you’re slow, Charlie Dean?”

The vacuum revved up. Dean’s eardrums rattled so badly he put his hands over them. Karr, meanwhile, went around to the front of the truck. He returned with a brown paper bag, from which he took out a pair of sandwiches. Before Dean could unwrap his, Karr had swallowed the other whole.

A metallic oily smell filled Dean’s nose as he opened it.

“Some kind of sturgeon they stick in oil,” explained Karr. “Goes good with the egg. Beer, too, but we don’t have any.”

Dean looked at the sandwich doubtfully. He brought it up to take a bite, then thought better of it. Just the smell was enough to wrench his stomach.

“It’s good,” insisted Karr, even as he took the sandwich back.

When Lia finished her vacuuming, Dean helped Karr cut the long pieces of blackened metal so they could be easily piled into the truck. The metal had obviously been burned by a serious fire; pieces of plastic and other material had adhered to it, and in sections were thicker than a phone book. This, along with scattered clumps of congealed plastic and metal, was all that remained of a top-secret elint-gathering section that had been part of the aircraft.

Karr, though he professed to know nothing of the mission, said that the high-tech gear would have been rigged to self-destruct if anything went wrong, incinerating itself. There would have been no way out for the pilots and operators.

“You don’t think they could get around that?” said Dean.

Karr shrugged.

“If it were me, I’d find a way,” Dean told him.

“Good thing it wasn’t you, then,” said Karr.

“Maybe your gear doesn’t work right.”

“Hey, look around. Definitely. I’m not thrilled with the results myself. Like I told Lia, I doubt there were more than two bodies fried into the mush there.”

“Maybe they were there and left.”

“Nah. Doesn’t work that way. The sniffer—” Karr jerked his head around midsentence. Lia was already running across the road, taking a position on a knoll that overlooked the wreckage.

“Just a car,” Karr said. “Keep working. She’ll cover us.”

The vehicle, which looked as if it dated from the end of the Soviet Union, slowed but did not stop. Dean stripped off his shirt as it passed. This might be Siberia, but the afternoon had turned remarkably warm. Karr had given him an ointment to ward off the flies; it had an overly sweet citrus smell but was infinitely better than having to swat the things away.

“Jesus, put your shirt back on,” squealed Lia from her vantage across the road.

“Hey, I like his pecs,” laughed Karr.

“Why don’t you take off yours, Lia?” said Dean.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“I wouldn’t,” said Karr. “My stomach’s not strong enough.”

They finished removing the blackened classified section of the aircraft around three o’clock. Lia, meanwhile, had been looking at a piece of the tailplane that had been left behind. As Karr tied up the rear of the truck, she announced that the plane had been taken down by a radar-guided missile.

“How do you know?” Dean asked.

She ignored him, repeating the information for Karr, who only shrugged and went to sit in the shade next to the truck. Sweat had soaked his shirt, and the skin exposed at his neck and arms was beet-red from the sun.

“How do you know it was a radar missile?” Dean asked. “Are you an expert?”

She made a face and tapped her ear. Obviously the people in the Art Room had been feeding her data.

“How do they know?”

“Number one, because the engines were intact,” Lia told him. She went to the driver’s side of the truck, returning with a large bottle of Gatorade. She gave it to Karr, who polished off about half before handing it to Dean. To Dean’s surprise the liquid was so cold it hurt his back teeth.

“Don’t drink it all,” said Lia.

Dean glanced at her and realized she was trying not to be caught staring at him. He held the bottle over toward her, then started to jerk it away, but she was too quick, grabbing it from his tired grip.

“If it had been a heat-seeker, it would have hit one of them. There also would have been burn marks on the tail,” she said. “And there weren’t, at least not that we saw. That confirms that the shootdown was done from a reasonable distance.”

“And?”

“No visual ID. They knew what they were firing at.”

“Or maybe they didn’t,” said Dean. “Maybe they were too far away to see but assumed they were right.”

“True.”

“Or maybe the mission was compromised,” said Dean. “So they were targeting it all along.”

“Then why is it still here?” said Karr. “If we shot down a spy plane in Nebraska, would we leave it sitting on the ground until someone else came and picked it up?”

“Another car,” said Lia. She grabbed her gun and ran back across the road.

“Art Room warns us,” said Karr. “They sowed small detection units along the approaches before we got here.”

“They’re not watching us from space?” said Dean.

“Not in real time. We’re too low a priority,” said Karr, who could dish out sarcasm but obviously had trouble detecting it, at least from Dean. “Besides, you can only get stills every sixty or ninety seconds, and they tend to lag even further. Real-time video from space doesn’t really work too well.”

Dean wanted to ask why they weren’t high-priority, but Karr had taken one of the A-2s and surreptitiously crouched behind the truck in case it was needed. A small Fiat approached from the north, slowing as it came close. Two men, both so large they seemed comical in the small car, stared at him. They were wearing suits and ties.

Dean glanced toward the ground, making sure his own rifle was nearby. For a moment he thought the Fiat would stop, but the driver downshifted and it picked up speed.

“Not good,” said Karr. “But we’re leaving anyway.”

By the time they got to the small airport where Fashona was waiting with the helicopter, it was close to 6:00 P.M. Karr and Dean had changed into military fatigues that bore no insignias, and sat in the cab of the truck. Lia had managed to wedge herself among the wreckage and curled beneath a tarp in the back. Their weapons were hidden beneath the seat of the truck, with the exception of a miniature pistol that Karr passed to Dean as they pulled up to a post guarding access to the cargo section of the airport.

Karr took some papers from the dash and spoke to the police officer in a tired voice. Dean had no idea how fluent his Russian was, but undoubtedly the stack of euros he’d passed with the papers spoke eloquently enough. Cleared through, they rounded a dusty access road past a row of military transports, then headed across weed-strewn concrete to a row of hangars that looked big enough to house a Saturn rocket. Their Hind sat in front of one, so dwarfed it appeared almost forlorn.

“Everybody’s corrupt here,” said Dean.

“Everybody’s hungry,” said Karr. His face was serious for a second, as if contemplating that fact; then it shifted back to its usual bright smile. “This used to be a big military base. They had IL-76s in the hangars, along with some weird-looking planes with their engines on top of their wings. Big mo-fos. When they decided to rent out the hangars, they took the planes and pushed them off into the field over there. We’re thinking of buying one. Apparently they’re real dogs, though. Pilots don’t want to fly them. Don’t even mention them to Fashona. He’ll bite your ear off, no shit.”

Karr backed the truck around to the helicopter, whose cargo doors were open. While Lia went to find Fashona, Karr and Dean loaded the chopper.

“College education,” said Karr as they hauled the piece in, “and I end up a schlepper anyway. My father always told me, you can’t do much with math.”

The salvaged wreckage formed a pile about five feet high and almost eight feet square. They strung a large heavy-duty net in front of it to secure it, though Dean was dubious.

Lia returned with Fashona, who in the space of a few hours had managed to grow what looked like a three-day-old beard. They’d been introduced before, but the pilot didn’t seem to remember. He stuck his hand out.

“Fashona,” he said.

“Dean.”

“Don’t call me Fashone. Or none of that shit.”

“I won’t.”

“Nice helicopter, huh?”

“Looks OK.”

“Want to sit up front?”

“Up front where?” asked Dean.

“Gunner’s compartment,” said the pilot. “No gun on this flight, though. Our weapons are packed away until we need them. We look like we’re civilians. Well, almost.”

Even without weapons strapped to its hard points and no chin gun, the helicopter hardly looked innocent, but Dean didn’t argue.

“But the front is the best seat. Great view,” added Fash-ona.

Dean shrugged but then remembered the rough landing at the field. How well could they possibly tie down the jagged metal in the back?

He walked with the pilot to the nose cabin, which looked a little like an upside-down fishbowl. A sensor boom protruded from the top of the cabin like a spear, its four winglets looking like knives.

“They took the cannon out before they sold it,” said Fashona, pointing to the underside of the nose.

“Bummer,” said Dean.

“Yeah, big-time. There’s something about a nose gun, you know what I mean? We have podded cannons we can slap on if the going gets tough, but they just don’t have the same, the same something, you know—”

“Savoir-faire?”

“Yeah. I mean, they are thirty-millimeter Gats, so don’t get me wrong, plenty of firepower. More than the Commies had. But still… suave. It’s lacking.”

“Sure.”

“I’m lobbying to get it back. Plus, some of these have shark’s teeth, you know? Right here?” He swung his hand up the front of the fuselage. “That would be intense.”

“Very,” said Dean.

“OK.” Fashona pulled open the door. Dean climbed up and then slipped in, feeling a little as if he were climbing down a sewer hole. The seat restraints were so thick, donning them felt like putting on a quilted vest.

“Headphones,” said Fashona. “They work.”

He pointed to a headset at the side, then slammed down the canopy, which failed to latch. He slammed it again — apparently the pneumatic prop was broken, since it bounded up. Dean managed to grab it from the pilot and close it gently, latching it shut. He pulled on the headphones just in time to hear Lia ask, “So what are you going to tell them when you get home, baby-sitter?”

“I don’t know that I’m going to tell them anything,” said Dean.

“Just tell the truth,” said Karr. “They’ll have you on a lie detector anyway.”

“Probably right.”

“Probably ask if the Princess put out,” said Karr. “In that case, you probably want to lie.”

The blades started to whirl. Dean felt the helicopter shaking back and forth and heard the engine whine — it seemed only slightly more distant here. Just like before, the engines revved, coughed, and died.

“Stinking fuel,” grumbled Fashona. “They piss in it, I swear.”

The rotors spun again. The blades seemed awfully close to the canopy, and Dean found himself staring down at the ground as the helicopter began to move forward, rocking up and down. There was a cough from the engines, but they kept running, the Hind moving steadily down an access ramp that led to the runway. Dean listened as Fashona exchanged barbs with the controller — in English.

“I’m a contract pilot,” he told Dean over the interphone circuit, which could not be heard by the tower. “Part of my cover. Work for Petro-UK. That’s why I talk English.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s obvious I’m an American. And the aircraft, you know, it’s traceable. So it’s not a security breach or anything.”

“Don’t be so paranoid, Fashona,” said Lia. “They’re not after your ass.”

“I’m not paranoid,” said the pilot. “I just want the guy to know what’s going on, that’s all. For his report.”

“We’ll all get raises; don’t worry,” said Karr.

Dean could see that there were no planes in front of them. Nor did it appear that they were waiting for any to land. Nonetheless, the controller kept them waiting more than fifteen minutes before finally clearing them to take off. By then the sun had set and everything was turning gray.

As the engines revved and the helo began to skip quickly along the pockmarked pavement, Dean realized that sitting in the front seat was a mistake. Whether it was because of the physical location or just the clear bubble, every move the chopper made seemed amplified up here, ten times worse than it had been in the back. The helo pitched forward sharply as it came off the ground; Dean felt as if they were going to do a somersault right into the tarmac. It turned sideways into a bank and he swore he’d fall out. A sharp rise and then another bank and Dean wondered if his internal organs had rearranged themselves.

“Quite a ride, huh?” asked Fashona.

“Oh, yeah,” said Dean. “The best.”

His stomach was still unsettled ten minutes later when he heard the pilot curse and call Karr.

“What?”

“MiG-29s, hot, on our tail,” said the pilot tersely. “RWR says they’re scanning. Shit — we’re spiked!”

Before Karr could answer, the helo pitched hard toward the ground.