Fly by Night

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.”

“But why would Rafiq Khoury do this?”

“I don’t know.” Davis hesitated, then added, “But that other airplane, the control ship, is probably sitting in Khoury’s magic hangar right now. And I think there might be something else parked next to it — a CIA drone that crashed last winter.”

“An American drone? You mean like the ones that are always in the news?”

Davis nodded. “I think Khoury is trying to get it into the air. I think this old DC-3 I found in the sea was put together as a test airframe to make sure everything worked.”

“This sounds so complicated. Why would anyone go to such trouble?”

“That’s the big question. It doesn’t make sense, does it? If Khoury only wanted to crash an airplane into something valuable, he could do that with a suicide bomber. A cleric like him must have plenty of loyal followers who’d be willing. In fact, I’ve already met one of them. But whatever the end game is, it’s got to be big to justify so much planning and expense. Looking back, I’ll bet FBN Aviation was established from the beginning for no other reason than to fly this drone. The timing is too much of a coincidence — FBN was set up right after the CIA lost its drone. The rest of their business, shipping cargo and gun-running to the subcontinent, that was only eyewash. This is a well funded, well thought out operation that’s leading to something serious. And it’s going to happen soon.”

Davis heard noise outside, men laughing. They weren’t close, but the mere fact that he could hear them meant the wind was howling less. The storm was losing its punch. Antonelli noticed too, and they exchanged a cautious glance.

“Do you think the government is part of it?” she asked. “These soldiers here now?”

“I don’t know.”

“But what can we do?” she wondered aloud.

“Right now, two things. I need to get you safe. And I have to get back to Khartoum.”

“How? Our truck is not even here.”

“Where is it?”

“Raheem took it to another village east of here. He won’t be back until tomorrow.”

“Great. Are there any other vehicles in town?”

“Only the two the soldiers brought.”

Davis smiled.

He’d assumed that the squad looking for him now would be sharper than Scarface’s bunch. He was wrong. The two vehicles parked at the perimeter of the village had been left unguarded.

His first job had been to get Antonelli safe. She was hunkered near a storage shed just outside the village, ready for a rendezvous that he hoped would come sooner rather than later. On returning to the village, Davis watched the soldiers long enough to establish that they were indeed together in one building near the center. He gave the circumstances some thought, the enemy’s position and objectives and capabilities. Then he considered his relative standing, and a plan came together. The hornet’s nest was right there in front of him. All Davis had to do was kick it at the right time.

The storm was ebbing, and a few drops of rain began to fall in the gusty aftermath. Big globules splattered to the ground and disappeared immediately into parched, dust-laden earth. Like they’d landed on a sponge. Davis had the diving mask strung on an arm now as he skirted the edge of the village — he could get by with just squinting, and didn’t want to sacrifice any peripheral vision. He had to work fast, because soon the soldiers would be coming out to pick up their search.

The big truck was a three-and-a-half-ton Dong Feng, a People’s Republic of China knock-off troop carrier. It looked heavy and slow. The jeep was an ancient BJ-212, the kind of thing China had been selling on the cheap to Third World countries for decades. It looked by far the more nimble of the two, and carried two jerry cans for gas, hopefully full. The jeep also had the only radio, so it was the obvious choice. Davis moved fast, angling first toward the big truck. He found what he wanted in the troop bed, a lug wrench secured to one side-wall with a wingnut. He removed it and went to work on the truck.

When he was done, Davis kept the wrench and climbed into the jeep. He hit the start button and the engine churned, but didn’t start.

“Damn it!”

Davis checked the hornet’s nest, just in view around a mud-brick wall. No response. He cranked the engine again, and this time it caught. He put the jeep in gear and turned south toward the desert. He paused when he had a hundred yards of separation, waiting for the swarm. Nothing happened. He revved the engine. Still nothing.

Christ these guys are stupid.

He leaned on the horn, and finally three men stumbled outside. The wind was still strong enough to flatten their uniforms against their bodies. Davis was about to wave when one man shouldered a rifle. Davis revved the engine and the jeep lunged forward — as much as a Chinese jeep could.

He was steering toward the open desert when the first bullet pinged off the frame of his windshield.