Fly by Night

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

There are reasons armies attack at four in the morning. It has to do with sleep cycles and circadian rhythms. Jammer Davis wasn’t quite so calculating — that was when he arrived.

He was dog tired after the eight-hour drive. He and Antonelli had taken turns at the wheel, and Davis had used the time to plan. His first idea was to go to the terminal or the FBN building and find a phone, but if he did that they might be seen. And even if he could get through to Larry Green, any help would be a long time in coming. In the end, Davis decided his best weapon was invisibility. They hadn’t run across any patrols during the night. Four hundred miles north, the authorities would be scouring the coast for a man and a woman in a Chinese jeep. Nobody would expect them here.

Davis was at the wheel now, and he turned off the airport perimeter road a mile from FBN Aviation’s hangar. He guided the jeep into the brush and covered a quarter mile before a wheel got hung up in a dry gulch. They dismounted and surveyed the problem.

“We can get it out,” she said. “A little digging, then you can push and I’ll drive.”

“No. It’s not worth the time or the noise. We leave it here.”

The jeep still had a quarter tank of fuel — they’d gone through both the jerry cans — and Antonelli watched Davis drop the key in his pocket.

“Never discard a possible asset,” he said. “An old Marine gunny told me that once.”

It dawned on Davis that a weapon might be useful. Two days ago he’d had access to a whole tree of rifles and a semiautomatic handgun. Unfortunately, at the time there had been other things on his mind — retaliating against a band of thugs and retrieving what they’d stolen. Just one more screwup, he thought. Davis searched the jeep, expecting to find a Beretta or a Glock. Hoping for a hand grenade or two. All he found was an old pair of field glasses under the seat. Undaunted, he picked them up and trained them on the hangar a mile away.

“I don’t see much,” he said.

“We’ll have to get closer,” she replied.

“No. This is where we split.”

“But I can—”

“No,” he broke in. “I should have gotten you safe already.”

“I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “you are. And right now I need you to do just that. Walk to the passenger terminal and find a taxi, take it to the embassy.”

“I don’t have any money.”

“The driver won’t know that. Somebody at the embassy can take care of it.”

Antonelli looked anxious, but in a way that had nothing to do with paying for cabs. Davis walked closer and put a hand on her cheek. “I need you safe, Contessa.”

“I’m safe right now.”

He shook his head. “No, everything I’ve done has been wrong.”

Her lips parted to argue, but he put his index finger to them. “We’ll talk about it some other day.”

She leaned in and kissed him. He pulled her closer and held tight.

As soon as their lips parted, Davis said, “You know — those twins had terrible timing.”

“Yes, they did. Perhaps another time we—”

The dawn silence was suddenly broken by the whine of a turbine engine. Davis pulled away.

“I’ve got to go,” he said, already backpedaling. “Be careful.”

“You too.”

Davis turned and began jogging toward the hangar. “And by the way,” he called over his shoulder, “when you get a cab, make sure you take one from the stand.”

Antonelli stood still until Davis disappeared. She turned toward the distant terminal, but paused after only a few strides. For a very long time she stood stockstill, poised on the balls of her feet. To anyone watching she would have looked like a climber wavering at the crest of a perilous summit. Then she tipped off the mountain.

She went after Davis.

A thin glow was just showing in the east as he closed in on the hangar. Davis slowed his approach, much as he had four days ago. The compound’s floodlights were bright, their intensity washing out the breaking dawn. Davis’ angle of approach was such that the main hangar doors weren’t in view, but the backside of the building looked exactly as it had before. The sound of the turbine was still there. It was nothing big, and certainly not throttled to full power, but now that he was closer Davis could pinpoint the source. A jet was idling in the hangar.

He had been moving slowly out of caution — and if he was honest, weariness — but the implications of a jet engine in FBN’s hangar shifted his stride to a higher gear. He began jogging, weaving though gullies and around vegetation. When he finally achieved line of sight to the front of the hangar, the first thing he saw was an antenna-encrusted DC-3. The tail number was N55US, a number that meant nothing to him. A number that wasn’t even in the files in Schmitt’s cabinet. From an official, regulatory point of view, the “US” at the end meant nothing. As a matter of symbolism, it gave Davis yet another mental chill.

A man Davis had never seen before, dressed in mechanic’s coveralls, was closing the DC-3’s side entry door. He secured the latches and gave them a slap. There were only two reasons a ground crewman buttoned up an airplane — it was either going to bed or being prepped for flight. That fifty-fifty was answered when the port propeller began to turn. The big radial coughed, spit black smoke, and chugged into a rhythm. As Davis kept moving his angles changed, and moments later he got a glimpse of what else was in the hangar. It brought him skidding to a stop on the hardpan earth.

The interior of the hangar was lit up like a museum display, and parked under the bright fluorescents was the exact thing Davis had hoped not to see. The Blackstar drone with its engine running.

Sitting motionless on the concrete, Blackstar resembled a massive ebony arrowhead, lethal and sharp. One landing gear strut didn’t look quite symmetrical, and even at this distance Davis could see rough patches on Blackstar’s radar-absorbent skin. Rudimentary repairs, probably no more than aluminum tape, or if they were really creative, fiberglass from a bucket, slapped and wrapped. Simple adaptations. Simple like roadside bombs made from fertilizer, triggered by garage door openers. That was how war was conducted in this part of the world. Indeed, Davis realized this was exactly what he was looking at. A machine of war about to be deployed. Blackstar had crashed and been damaged, but now it was reconstituted. Rebuilt with obsolete parts from old QF-4 drones. The CIA’s wreck had been claimed, taken from Africa’s junkyard, and restored.

Davis threw stealth out the window. On a dead run, he aimed for the clear area that bordered the connecting taxiway a quarter mile ahead. Through breaks in the vegetation, he studied the DC-3. The airplane was covered with antennae, a bristling array of fittings and appendages. If he were an engineer who specialized in electronic signals, he might have been able to guess the purpose of each accessory by its size and shape and location on the airframe. But Davis didn’t need any of that. All he needed was situational awareness, the big picture right in front of him. Two aircraft — a drone and a control ship. Rafiq Khoury had no capability to bounce signals through satellites, as was Blackstar’s original design, so he had gone old school — a line of sight radio channel, probably VHF. Simple adaptations.

The DC-3’s starboard engine began to crank. Davis watched the ground crewman pull chocks from under the wheels, then scurry over and stand next to Blackstar. But he didn’t touch those chocks. Black-star stayed where it was as the DC-3 began to move, taxiing to one side of the concrete apron.

Davis kept running, his feet pounding sand while his brain cranked logistics. How would it work? How could they get both aircraft aloft? Which would take off first? He didn’t see how Blackstar could even reach the active runway — the machine would have to negotiate over a mile of connecting taxiways. A normal airplane was guided to the runway by pilots. Getting a drone into the air was different. You had to tow it to the end of the runway with a utility tug, point it in the right direction, and then light the fuse like you would a rocket, maybe a few gentle directional inputs once the airflow was sufficient over the flight controls. So a drone parked in a hangar with its engine running made no sense at all.

Yet Davis was sure of one thing — if he could get close enough to Blackstar, he could stop it. He could throw something under the lopsided landing gear while it was moving. No, toss a wrench or a rock into the engine inlet. Something big and dense to get sucked in and act like a bomb, turbine blades chewing themselves to bits, the engine trashed in a matter of seconds. He could make that happen.

But he had to get closer.

With two hundred meters to go, he tripped over a bush and went sprawling through the scrub. Davis scrambled to his feet and kept moving, faster now, his eyes locked on the black dart at the mouth of the hangar. He saw the ground crewman pull the chocks from under Blackstar’s wheels, heard the engine wind up to a higher power setting. Much higher.

The machine began to shriek. It jumped out of the hangar and began rolling down the long taxiway. Davis saw the flight controls flexing at the trailing edge, moving up and down as the aircraft picked up speed. Right then, he realized his mistake. Blackstar wasn’t going to use the primary runway for takeoff. A mile-long stretch of reinforced taxiway would do just as well.

Davis watched helplessly as the drone accelerated, watched it pass by on the taxiway at eighty knots, then a hundred. The nosewheel rotated slowly upward, and the craft began to fly. The landing gear retracted, including the wheel that was crooked, and the drone began a smooth climb. Soon Blackstar faded from sight, just as it was designed to do.

A black weapon disappearing into a black sky.

Rafiq Khoury’s heart had nearly jumped out of his chest when the DC-3’s big engines exploded to life, popping and backfiring. The noise and vibration were much greater than he’d expected, although not as worrisome as General Ali’s cursed helicopter. It was peculiar, Khoury imagined, that he had never before flown in one of these craft — he was the de facto owner of the airline. But then, this would be a day of many firsts.

He was standing next to Jibril, who was focused intently on the computer screen at his workstation. A map display was selected, and Khoury could see Blackstar drifting slowly to the north, represented by a capital letter C. In a rare idle moment, Jibril had earlier explained that he’d chosen this symbol as an insult to Cal Tech, an American university that had denied him admission. An academic’s sense of humor, Khoury supposed.

“We have good signal strength,” Jibril announced. “All channels are active.”

Khoury assumed this was good news. “What distance can we allow?” he asked.

“With our aircraft on the ground, and the drone at ten thousand feet, we should stay within twenty miles. Once we are airborne, this distance increases.”

Khoury felt the big airplane begin to move under his feet. He looked to the rear of the cabin and saw his two guards situated on fold-down seats. They were his best men, fully committed, armed, and very capable. Khoury doubted they would be necessary, but he could not deny the comfort of their presence. In the other direction, he saw two familiar shoulders at the threshold of the flight deck — Schmitt in the captain’s seat and Achmed to the right. The American was the weakest link in the chain, Khoury knew, but there was simply no other way. Achmed was not enough of an aviator to make the plan work — he had admitted as much — and so Schmitt was a necessary evil. But as Schmitt watched the airplane, Achmed would watch him. Khoury had promised the American a substantial payday for this last mission, along with safe passage after their landing in Egypt. But he had also offered no alternatives to the arrangement, an omission that certainly spoke volumes. The imam was an expert at sizing men up, and he was sure that his chief pilot was no more than an opportunist. Bob Schmitt would do what was best for Bob Schmitt. The other two, Boudreau and Johnson, Khoury would never have trusted on a mere bribe. They were now in the custody of General Ali’s men, and in a matter of hours all would rendezvous at the abandoned airfield in northern Sudan. There, the last act would be staged, this very airplane set ablaze. A fiery finale, meticulously documented for the world.

“How fast is it going?” Khoury asked, eyeing Blackstar on the screen.

Jibril pointed to numbers at the bottom of his display. “One hundred knots.”

“That seems rather slow.”

“Unmanned aircraft are not designed for speed. They are meant to stay aloft for long periods of time. Anyway, our own aircraft will struggle to keep that pace. The flight to the staging point in Egypt will take a full three hours.”

Khoury checked his watch. So far, all was on schedule. The engines roared to a crescendo, and as the DC-3 began to accelerate Khoury felt a surge of confidence.

Davis sprinted toward the taxiway, his lungs straining. He had miscalculated and missed his chance with Blackstar. All that was left now was the DC-3. But what could he do? Rocks and wrenches? He could throw them all day and not stop the old tank. They don’t build ’em like this anymore. Davis imagined someone inside the airplane’s cabin hunched over a workstation, watching a rudimentary instrument display. They’d be pushing and pulling a joystick like a teenager at a gaming console. Flying Blackstar. But the DC-3 had to get airborne because Blackstar was moving. If the drone got out of range and lost its controlling signals, it would cease to be a drone. It would become a ballistic projectile — exactly what had happened eight months ago when Blackstar crashed into the African desert.

He was running hard, harder than he ever had in the Rugby Union Over-30s. The taxiway was still a hundred meters in front of him. An Olympic sprinter on a good track could get there in ten seconds. An oversized prop forward stumbling through the desert in the dark? A lot more. The DC-3’s massive radial engines were rumbling at full power. He guessed the airplane would use the same procedure Blackstar had — a takeoff run on the taxiway. At this hour there wouldn’t be air traffic to avoid on the other runways. Chances were, the control tower wasn’t even manned. So in a matter of seconds the airplane would barrel past on the strip of asphalt ahead.

Davis’ chest was heaving, pulling massive gulps of air. He tripped again, but didn’t go down. Breaking out of the brush, he slid to a stop on the taxiway’s dirt and rock shoulder. The DC-3 was approaching fast, gaining speed. The fuselage was a shadow now, no longer washed in the bright lights of the compound. Davis saw a white glow from the cockpit, reflections from the flight instruments and perhaps a dome light. Enough to see a familiar silhouette. A thick round face topped by a mop of black Brillo.

Right then, Bob Schmitt looked out his side window and spotted Davis. His eyes bulged wide.