Lockout

CHAPTER FOUR

Mojave Aircraft Storage, Mojave Airport, California (8:10 a.m. PST / 1610 Zulu)

The manager of Mojave Air Storage looked up from his battered old desk trying his damndest to figure out how his most uncommunicative employee could have acquired a sense of humor in twenty-four hours. But the perennially taciturn man just stood there in his dirty coveralls as if he’d walked out of a Grant Wood painting without his pitchfork, expressionless except for the slight look of alarm in his eyes, his voice as humorless as a funeral director.

“Not there, huh,” the manager repeated, mocking the same Eeyore-class monotone his employee had used.

“No-pah,” the man replied, stretching the single word into two syllables.

The wind was whining around the cracks in the old desert line office, coating everything with the fine grit the rows of airliners outside were sealed against.

“Look,” the manager began, “I appreciate that you probably stayed up all night figuring out this little joke, but… see… it really isn’t funny to suggest we might have misplaced a $200 million airplane.”

“Not a joke, sir. I can’t find that serial number. That company in Colorado we thought was probably a front for the military? It was their airplane. One of the A330s we got out there. They need it by next Thursday. I thought you had seen the order.”

“How many A330s do we have out there?” the manager asked, a cold knot of apprehension beginning to make its presence known in the pit of his stomach.

“Nine. There were nine. Now we have eight, and that serial number… the one belonging to the Colorado group… isn’t one of them.”

“Okay,” the manager replied, “get the team and inventory the A330s, one by one, by serial numbers and placement, and come back and we’ll get this figured out.”

“Pad 79, where the Colorado A330 should have been, is empty. I think we sent the wrong one away,” the man said, leaving the shaken manager to reflect on the possibility that he might not have a job a week from now. The phone on his desk was mocking him, challenging him to call the hotheaded owner of Mojave Aircraft Storage who lived several miles away, but that was the last thing he intended to do until they were certain Mojave Aircraft Storage had actually delivered the wrong airplane to the wrong client.