The Death Trust

THREE

As I said, I’m not good with flying. Not anymore. Not since Afghanistan. But they’re into it with a passion in the USAF, as you might expect. The C-21 waiting on the apron at Andrews AFB was a small austere aircraft full of naked aluminum, basically a Learjet without the executive leather. It was like riding inside an empty high-speed can of Coca-Cola. Thoughts of plowing into the Atlantic halfway to Europe took my mind off the tooth. While the plane was being fueled, I read through the reports handed over by General Gruyere. They were dry reading, especially the chief crash-investigator’s assessment on the remains of the weapon that killed the general — Scott’s privately owned sailplane. Dry it may have been, but it still caused me to break a sweat.

I wondered what Special Agent Masters was like. If her debrief was anything to go by, she was the unemotional, unimaginative type. I was struck by the feeling that no one seemed to know General Scott. But then, general officers are, as a rule, remote characters to those below them in rank — the burden of command and so on.

The C-21’s pilot, a lieutenant colonel, told me it was time to board and my stomach did a purl and dropped a stitch. I took a sleeping pill, downing it with some water from the cooler. With luck I’d be asleep before he punched the starter button. I walked to the plane and was shown a seat. To take my mind off the impending takeoff, I read through General Abraham Scott’s record. It was impressive. There was lots to read about flying. Skyraider pilot in Vietnam — two tours. A stint in the Pentagon. Back to flying duties after converting to fast jets. Grenada followed. He then took command of a wing of F4 Phantoms. Next was a tour of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow just before the fall of communism. Scott assisted in the development of fighter tactics for the USAF’s new fighter, the F-16 Falcon. It went on like this, each step a few more rungs up the ladder. Back to the Pentagon. Brussels came afterwards — his first NATO gig. He put in some time as Deputy Chief of Staff of the Air Force, then it was off to Ramstein. The guy was being seriously groomed. I wondered whether his marriage to the VP’s daughter had anything to do with this confident rise through the ranks.

I glanced out the small porthole window. We were still on the ground, delayed.

Scott was fifty-five years of age, or would have been. Pretty young to be where he was. He had one child — a sergeant in the marines, deceased. I rummaged through the folder until I found the general’s photograph. He was wearing his dress blues, cap off. The left side of his jacket held so many different colored ribbons it looked like a painter’s drop sheet. The photo made Scott appear like a waxwork in Madame Tussaud’s, but then, don’t all these publicity shots? The smile on his face was forced, like it was going to evaporate an instant after the flash went off. A crease between his dark eyebrows suggested his more natural expression was a frown. He looked somewhat like Gregory Peck’s not-so-good-looking brother — the tanned skin with salt-and-pepper hair. Photos of people who’ve died violently always creep me out a little. Maybe it’s the smile. You know they’ve got nothing to smile about now.

I returned the photo to the folder and slotted it back into my bag. Or at least I think that’s what I did because, almost immediately after, I must have fallen asleep. I dreamed about Special Agent Anna Masters for some reason. I pictured her as looking a lot like Gruyere, although not as attractive. Brenda was in there, too, I think, although how exactly I fail to recall. As the aircraft slipped into its descent, the change in motion, engine pitch, and so on jolted me awake. I was gripping the seat with my fingernails digging into the upholstery. I’m well aware this seems like odd behavior for an air force officer.

We taxied to a refueling point on the ground at some Royal Air Force base in England, and deplaned while the C-21 was juiced for the final leg. It turned into a four-hour layover while the pilots waited for another passenger, an RAF squadron leader returning to Ramstein. It was dark, cold, and wet, wind blowing the rain horizontal under the tarmac lights. I hoped Germany was more welcoming. I’d never been there, but my grandfather had. I remembered him saying that it was not a very friendly place, and that people had shot at him and his tank often. But that was a long time ago.

The run to Ramstein, which is apparently situated in the heart of the Rhineland, wherever that is, took another few hours. I slept — this time dreamlessly — and woke with the copilot, a young lieutenant, giving my shoulder a shake.

“Sir…sir, we’re here.”

“Wha…?”

Relieved to be alive after so long in the air, I ducked to fit through the C-21’s door and took in my new surroundings. It was early morning. The sun was up. It was cold, around forty-five degrees. The place smelled of rain and burnt JP-4 jet fuel. Even at this hour there was a lot of jet noise: planes starting up and shutting down, planes taxiing, planes taking off and landing. The vast apron was a parking lot of USAF C-130 transport planes, more than thirty in all, some painted lowvis gray, others in dark green or desert camouflage. There was a row of Polish F-16 Vipers, as well as a flight of four Vietnam War — vintage F-4 Phantoms operated by the Turkish Air Force. With the exception of these old clunkers, I could have been scoping any air force base anywhere in the world. There was nothing in the least unique about it, nothing particularly “German” about the place, and certainly there were no cheery “Welcome to Deutschland!” banners strung up anywhere. And, thankfully, there didn’t appear to be any tanks running around getting shot at or otherwise.

Suspended in the air over the control tower were the arches of two enormous, crisply defined rainbows, glowing in the morning light. They served as the welcoming committee until a Humvee squealed to a stop nearby. The driver’s door swung open and a woman pushed herself out from behind the steering wheel. “Special Agent Cooper? Special Agent Masters,” she said over the ambient jet noise. Masters saluted and I returned it. “How was your flight?”

“Great,” I said.

“Great,” she replied. I had the impression I could have said, “Like sticking my head in a bucket of octopus shit” and she still would’ve said great.

“I’ll take you to your quarters. I tried to find you accommodation on the base but couldn’t. It’s all booked solid. I thought it would be best if you were in the thick of things.” She shrugged. “You got luggage?”

I reached back into the C-21 and pulled out my bag. It wasn’t a big bag and there wasn’t much in it.

“I hope you’ve got thermals in there,” Masters observed. “It gets pretty cold around here.”

So, I’d just met the woman and already she was thinking about my underwear. Once upon a time I would have grabbed that thought and run with it, but my ego had taken a pounding during the separation and divorce, and so I let it go without comment. Masters was nothing like I imagined her, at least to look at. That she wasn’t a clone of Gruyere was a relief, given we’d be spending a fair bit of time together on this investigation. She was tall, around five eleven, with chocolate-colored hair pulled back in a regulation bun. With heels, we’d be eyeball to eyeball. Hers, by the way, were unusual — a smoky green at the outer edges and a gold-flecked blue that deepened in color around the pupil. They were extraordinary eyes, the kind you see in mascara ads in women’s magazines. And no doubt Masters knew it. Being a cop, I’m pretty good at guessing, but I had no idea what her weight was because she was wearing a loose-fitting, Army Combat Uniform with a bulky green jacket over the top that was maybe a size or two too big. She had good cheekbones, and a few small freckles scattered across the bridge of her small nose. The freckles together with her accent pegged her as Californian. She had an attractive face, except that it was completely devoid of pleasure or happiness. At least, to be seeing me. And if I was imagining the bored hostility aimed right at me, then maybe, in words Brenda might have used, I really did need to do something about reempowering my self-esteem.

“Lieutenant General Wolfgang von Koeppen is a neat freak. You might like to take a shower and use a razor before you meet with him,” she said bluntly.

“Yeah, thanks.” While I didn’t know Masters, I’d seen the disapproval on her face plenty of times before. It was the “you look like shit” expression. I tried not to let it affect our relationship right off the bat.

“Your meeting has been rescheduled for oh-nine-fifteen. Once I take you to your quarters, you’ll have half an hour to freshen up. The general is anxious to meet with you.”

Masters maneuvered the Humvee through a set of low office buildings and turned toward a nest of houses that could have been designed by an unimaginative child — a door with a window on either side, and a simple gable roof over the top. The color scheme was uniformly gray. The Ritz-Carlton it wasn’t.

“That’s the on-base accommodation I couldn’t get you into,” she said.

“My luck’s improving, then,” I replied.

We reached an intersection and Masters turned left, into a large parking lot. “We have to change vehicles,” she said.

That made sense. Being so wide, the Humvee was not road-friendly, especially if the road narrowed and meandered through a town.

Masters pulled up beside a purple midsized Mercedes-Benz. “That’s mine,” she said, with a vague hint of pride, gesturing at the vehicle. “You can pick a Mercedes up here for a song.”

We got out of the Humvee and into the Merc. It was a nice car inside — smelled of leather and wood. “It looks new,” I said.

“Actually, it’s fifteen years old,” she replied. “It was a promotional car for a local printer. The color made it hard to sell. I got it cheap.”

I can do small talk with the best of them, but, for molar reasons, my heart wasn’t in it. “Before we go much further, do I have time to see a dentist?”

“No,” said Masters without missing a beat, pulling out of the parking lot and joining the queue exiting the base via the security gate. “Why?”

“Toothache.”

“Aside from the fact that we’ve got to get you cleaned up before you meet with the general, it’s oh-seven-thirty. Dentistry’s a nine-to-five gig. I’ve got some Tylenols in the glove compartment if you need them.”

“No, thanks,” I said. Given the number I’d eaten over the past twenty-four hours, I was vaguely concerned about my liver. I folded my arms and buried my tongue in the hole. The cold was finding its way through my cheek and into the root. The pain was making me short-tempered, and I’m usually such a lovely, placid soul.

“I’ve got you a room in K-town. It’s small, but it’s clean.”

“K-town?”

“Kaiserslautern. Everyone calls it K-town. Back in ’55, it was the biggest community of U.S. citizens outside of America. At the moment, there are around forty-five thousand of us living there. We’ve got American football, American hot dogs, American cinemas, American shopping malls—”

“America,” I said. “Don’t leave home without it.”

Masters responded with cool silence.

My new, temporary partner was young and possessed a perfect set of teeth. Her bio, thoughtfully included in my briefing notes, said she was twenty-six and held the rank of major. Twenty-six was too young to be a major. Masters was either very good at her job, or very good on the job. She came across as efficient, officious, and no doubt had several volumes of air force articles surgically inserted up her ass for round-the-clock reference.

I turned my attention to the world zipping by. The countryside was flat and rural, a bit like the area around Brandywine, only the German landscape was neater, more orderly, almost manicured. The small, immaculate farms were separated by stands of towering pines. Intermittent showers sprinkled from fluffy, toylike clouds pasted against a pale blue watercolor sky, and I counted one, two, three, four rainbows this time. The street signs we passed bore long, unpronounceable names for towns and cities up ahead, and any moment I expected to see a gingerbread house and maybe a witch chasing two kids around it on her broom. But then I saw a sign with the familiar golden butt that told me I was only four kilometers away from the world’s favorite hamburger, and I felt less like I’d been hijacked by a Grimm’s fairy tale.

K-town — Kaiserslautern — seemed to appear out of nowhere. The outskirts of the town were devoid of the usual three-mile strip of auto-body repairers and retailers and fast-food restaurants selling more or less the same stack of pancakes. This was America done the way the U.S. military likes it, probably not that far from how Germany likes it: anal.

We drove through the town, past American-style malls. There were joggers everywhere wearing Nike, Russell Athletic, and Everlast. All the street signs were in English. The only clue that I wasn’t in some U.S. town, maybe somewhere north on the east coast, were all the Mercedes running around — even Mercedes cabs. K-town was bigger than I expected, not that I had spent much time speculating on its dimensions.

We skirted the city center, which had the usual collection of midsized glass office towers, and drove through an area populated by huge U.S.-military warehouses. I tried to think about where to get this investigation started but couldn’t. Eventually, Masters slowed. We turned into a tree-lined street and began looking for a place to park. “This is it,” she said, pulling against the curb.

I got out and grabbed my bag from the backseat. Masters crossed the road and walked up to a sign that said, Pensione Freedom. U.S. Servicemen Serviced with a Smile. I wondered how many U.S. servicemen had been amused by the quaint, unintentional turn of phrase. I followed the major and took the flight of four stairs up into the foyer. The place smelled of disinfectant and sausage, a not entirely unpleasant combination. A tall square-shaped frau with blond hair turning to gray at the roots came through a door behind the counter. Her shoulders were broad and barely cleared the doorjamb. She was not particularly pleased to see us, or even displeased. Indifferent, I’d say, nailed her attitude. If she were ever asked to describe me, I don’t think she’d be able to. That suited me fine. If I were anonymous, I could come and go as I pleased, unobserved, no questions asked.

“Morgen,” said Masters. “There should be a booking under the name of Cooper.”

The frau consulted her PC screen and said, “Ja.” She slid a card across the counter with all my details already filled in. “Sign, bitte,” she said. I did as asked and received a key in return, along with half a dozen of the pensione’s business cards.

“No smoking in zer rooms. Vee haff detectors. Room zree-oh-zree, level zree, turn right,” the frau said with sausage breath, nodding at the narrow fifties-style elevator opposite the counter.

“I’m going to get a cup of coffee down the road,” said Masters. “Oh, before I forget, you’ll need these.” She handed me a large envelope. “Your common access card — your CAC — will get you in and out of Ramstein. You’ll find a cell phone and pager in there, too, as well as a swipe card to get you into OSI on the base. See you in, say, twenty.”

She turned and walked out before I could offer an alternate plan. The receptionist had slipped away too, gone back to her bratwurst. I was alone in the foyer with a bag that contained four pairs of underwear and socks, a spare shirt, and a toothbrush I was too afraid to use. To be honest, I don’t like being told what to do, which might be an odd thing for someone in the military to say. But I especially don’t like it when I’m being ordered around by an officer of the same rank. So I walked out.

Okay, I needed a shower, but what I needed more than anything else was that dentist, or at least some serious painkillers. Deodorant would’ve been good, too, and some mouthwash. I was thinking that maybe I could rinse my teeth clean. I also needed a car. It occurred to me that General Scott’s second-in-command wasn’t the person I should interview first. That honor went to the chief crash investigator. And I also wanted to talk to the person everyone seemed most concerned about, not, it seemed, because her husband had been killed, but because of who her father was.

I found a tourist office and took a map of K-town. I asked the woman behind the counter for the nearest tooth doctor and was told that he didn’t open till 0900, confirming what Masters had said. That was still half an hour away. I found a pharmacy and bought the strongest analgesic available without a prescription.

Next stop, Hertz. I rented a Mercedes — what else? — and a map of the Rhineland-Palatinate, the province I found myself in. By the time I got back behind the wheel, the painkillers were working — mercifully — and I found myself able to at last concentrate on the job.

I drove back down the highway, retracing my steps to Ramstein, fumbling with Masters’s report, holding it against the steering wheel as I read. Two miles beyond the Kaiserslautern city limit, the pager beeped. WHERE ARE YOU? it said. I turned it off. A handful of seconds later, the cell began ringing. I was about to turn that off, too, but decided to see what was up.

“Major, what are you doing?” said the voice on the other end.

“Driving. Do they do it on the left side of the road here, or the right?”

“What?”

“I’m on the road to Ramstein, which I know sounds like a song title or an old Bob Hope movie, but—”

“Special Agent Cooper, we agreed that you were going to meet me in the foyer.”

“No, you agreed on that, but I’m not sure who with. Hey, I hired a Mercedes, like yours only newer. I think I prefer Chevrolet.” I can be infuriating, especially when I want to be, and this was one of those times. It was obvious that Masters didn’t want me here, probably because she thought she was more than capable. She was treating me like I was a pain in the ass, and I objected to that because she didn’t even know me. And, apart from these interpersonal observations, as far as I could see from her report, her investigation had gotten precisely nowhere. It was all typed out neat and tidy and all her verbs were conjugated correctly, but the whole was utterly devoid of any imagination or intuition. She didn’t get it. Scott had been killed, but the big question on everyone’s lips was whether someone had helped him along, even though no one was prepared to even voice that option, except for Gruyere, and her only admission on that point was the fact that she’d sent me here. Masters had asked questions and people had answered them, but she didn’t appear to have questioned the answers.

“You’ve got a meeting with Lieutenant General von Koeppen in fifteen minutes,” Masters said.

“But I haven’t had a shower or a shave and I’m still wearing yesterday’s nonthermal underwear.”

Silence.

I wondered whether she was the type who uses silence as a weapon to keep her partner in line. Not my kind of woman. “Okay, then,” I said, keeping it light and cheery. “I’ll catch up with you later.” I didn’t wait for an answer. I ended the call and turned off the cell. That was against the rules, of course. In this business, people get nervous if they can’t contact you 24/7. I opened the glove compartment and threw the phone in, closing the hatch after it.

A short time later, I turned off the highway and into the security post. The guard scanned my CAC card with a portable gizmo and checked that I looked as handsome in real life as I did in the photo. Satisfied, he then said, “Thank you, sir,” and waved me through. Before moving off, I asked for directions to Hangar B3. Ramstein, as I said, is a huge facility, and the soldier had to go back inside and consult a map. He returned moments later with a photocopy of the base layout. A line drawn in blue ink meandered across the page to the hangar.

Ten minutes later, I pulled up outside my destination. B3 was at least the size of two, possibly three, football fields. It was so big, it was impossible to tell how big. I walked to a side door feeling dwarfed by the structure. Huge overhead lights illuminated the interior. There were several C-5 Galaxies parked inside — transport planes roughly the size of 747s. I stopped an airman and asked for further directions. He pointed down the far corner of the hangar.

I eventually found what I was looking for, an area sealed off by walls of plastic and tape. Signs warned that this was a restricted area and that access was for authorized personnel only. I did what any investigator worth his pay would do and figured the signs weren’t talking to me. I parted the plastic and looked inside. On the floor were the remains of what I assumed was General Scott’s glider — pretty much every little piece — laid out for examination. The plane had hit the ground with such force that it appeared to have literally exploded. At least a dozen personnel were picking through these remains, cataloguing them. It was a mammoth task. There weren’t many whole sections left intact.

I made my way to what would have been the cockpit. There was a lot of dried blood on the pieces. That figured. The human body is really just a big bag of water. When it hits the ground at over one hundred and fifty miles per hour, it bursts.

“You right there, mate?” said a voice behind me. The man wore the uniform of a Royal Air Force squadron leader, except his accent was about as English as mine. Australian. I’d come to recognize the accent after a stint in Afghanistan, where Australia’s Special Forces, the Special Air Service, were deployed. Those boys were smart and very tough. I owed my life to half a dozen of them.

“Special Agent Vin Cooper,” I said, flashing him my OSI creds.

“Wayne Roach.”

I recognized the name. Roach was heading the crash team investigating the wreckage. He was looking for cause. His was the signature on the report I’d read.

“OSI. Not the local branch, I take it?” he asked.

“Flew in this morning.”

“You working with that Masters chick on this?”

“Yeah.”

“Lucky man. She’s a spunkrat. Young to be a major, too. Rumor has it she can suck-start an F-16.”

That gave me an interesting perspective on Masters. She had a reputation. Also, this guy thought her meteoric rise through the ranks had something to do with qualities other than those for which officers usually received promotion. I didn’t add to the conversation, which might have made the squadron leader nervous. Parts of the services are, in some ways, even more PC than private enterprises.

He cleared his throat and said, “You read the preliminary?”

I nodded. “You’ve had a couple more days with this since you and your team did the initial write-up. Got anything to add?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact.”

I followed the squadron leader to a bench covered with various items of metal and fiberglass. Roach was short and bald, and the crotch of his pants appeared to get sucked up his butt as he walked, springing off his toes with each step. His uniform was a size too small for his frame, which didn’t help. Maybe he was getting fat and didn’t realize it. Or couldn’t accept it.

Hanging on the wall behind the bench was a large photograph of the smiling, relaxed General Scott standing next to his sailplane. The aircraft’s wingspan was a tad under sixty feet. The nose where the pilot sat was small and bulbous, with a large Perspex bubble canopy. Now, only shards of the glider remained — slightly more than what remained of the general, according to Masters’s report. I ran my eyes over the individual pieces spread out across the floor and found it difficult to imagine that this was the aircraft in the picture. Roach picked up an aluminum bracket.

“I can tell you now that General Scott’s plane was sabotaged.” He held up a piece of metal. “Check this out.”

Sabotage meant murder. I didn’t bat an eyelid at the news, though once the folks Stateside heard it, the shit would definitely fly. “What is it?” I asked.

“The wings of the glider slide off and on to make transporting it from field to field possible. That makes this piece crucial. It’s the bracket that clamps the main wing spar to the fuselage.” Roach pulled the clamp apart and the top section split into two separate pieces across a fine, ragged crack. “That’s not supposed to happen, by the way,” he said. “This is seven-oh-seven-five — aircraft-grade aluminum alloy. It’s light and, as you might expect, extremely strong. At least, it’s supposed to be.”

He passed me a black-and-white photo. “What’s this?” I asked.

“A photo,” he said, being a wiseass. “Well, actually, it’s called a macrograph — makes it easy to see the metal’s crystal structure. This is what seven-oh-seven-five should look like.” He passed me another black-and-white print. “Compare them.”

I put the two prints side by side. On one, the crystals were big; on the other, they were small. Easy to see the difference, sure, but I still didn’t know squat.

“Basic metallurgy lesson number one: When the crystals are small, the metal is good and strong,” Roach said. “The bigger those crystals get, the weaker the metal becomes. Milled nonferrous metals like aluminum don’t take kindly to stress. They have almost zero elasticity. Put too much stress on them and they don’t bend or deform, they just crack. Pah-ting,” he said, musically.

“Do you mind putting it together for me like I was a five-year-old, Squadron Leader?”

Roach swapped the photos for a couple of bits of aluminum he’d recovered from his bench. “We’ve duplicated what we believe happened to the failed clamp that held on the general’s wings. We heated and cooled it rapidly a couple of dozen times. Doing that to a metal — just about any metal — changes its crystal structure, making it weaker. The seven-oh-seven-five in your left hand failed at one-tenth the load of the seven-oh-seven-five in your right. Take a closer look.”

I did as I was asked and examined the metals. On the outside, they appeared identical. In cross-section where they’d cracked, though, one piece had broken clean while the other had a porous honeycomb appearance.

“Nothing like this could happen by accident?” I asked. I knew the answer to that before I asked the question, but I’ve found it sometimes pays to ask the obvious.

“No bloody way,” the squadron leader said, shaking his head. “Someone got to the general’s plane, removed the clamp, and then went to work on it, or exchanged it for this one, knowing full well what the consequences of that would be.”

“Don’t stop now, Squadron Leader. You’ve got a captive audience here. What happened when that clamp failed?”

“You read about it in the report,” he said.

“I’ve read an eyewitness account. Tell me in your own words what you think happened.”

He shrugged. “On the morning of the crash, the general and another pilot were chasing thermals, maybe ten miles from the base. The weather was good and the conditions were ideal for soaring. The general, like the pilot in the other plane, was climbing to around twelve thousand feet and then doing aerobatics — loops, rolls, and spins — down to around five thousand feet. They’d apparently done that twice — gone up and then come down — before the general’s day flew into the crapper. When he reached altitude for the third time, he put the glider into a flat spin. I reckon the clamp was probably already broken by then, but it’s impossible to say. According to the witness, the right-hand wing on the general’s plane appeared to fold. The airflow ripped it clean away a second or two later as what was left of the aircraft began a spiral dive.

“It dove like that, spinning, for several thousand feet before the g-forces tore the other wing off. Within moments, gravity accelerated the wreckage to around two hundred and fifty miles per hour. General Scott would’ve had plenty of time to contemplate his end before it came. From the clamp letting go to impact took around thirty seconds. That’s a lot of time for your life to flash before your eyes.” Roach paused. Maybe he was picturing the man trapped inside his fiberglass coffin heading for the ground. I certainly could. Roach snapped out of it and cleared his throat. “The tail broke off at about two thousand feet of altitude. The nose of the aircraft hit a tree, which is why so little of it was left intact. Not much of the tree left, either. The general’s remains — what they could find, at any rate — were scooped into buckets with a ladle. Shooting the bugger with a twelve-gauge at close range wouldn’t have been nearly as effective, or messy. Not a great way to get your card punched.” Roach paused for another moment of consideration before asking, “Anything else, Special Agent?”

“Yes,” I managed to say. The saliva glands in my mouth were working overtime and my skin was clammy. I knew what was coming. I made it to a basin against the wall before my stomach let go. I’d be lying if I said my reaction to Roach’s re-creation had nothing to do with my own experiences in the air. The Australian had just brought it all back — the fear, the helplessness, the feeling in your guts when the hard floor beneath drops away revealing an abyss. And you just…fall…My stomach heaved again.

“You okay, mate?”

“Yeah, I’m on one of those weird fad diets,” I said. I cupped my hands under the water and splashed my face.

Roach continued, “I didn’t know him — the general — but, for what it’s worth, those who did, say he was a pretty cool CO. A workaholic, apparently. First in, last out.” That phrase struck a chord with me. First in, last out—the motto of the combat air controllers, the lunatic squadron of which I was once a member.

“How long would it have taken the clamp to fail?” I asked, wiping my face on a hand towel.

“Yeah, well, I guess that’s the problem — from your point of view, anyway,” Roach observed. “Pinpointing when the clamp was tampered with would be a guess. Could’ve been a couple of days ago; could’ve been months.”

Given the number of people at Ramstein and the fact that anyone could have had access to the glider, that gave me roughly forty thousand suspects. In other words, I had a trail to the murderer that was as dead as the victim. “Doesn’t anyone kill with a nine-millimeter anymore, preferably with their prints all over it?”

“Pardon?”

“Never mind. Just thinking aloud.” I didn’t bother asking him if he knew why Scott had been killed, or by whom. Coming up with answers to those questions was why OSI paid me so much money. Yeah, right. I cleared my throat and asked the tough question. “What about the people who maintained the plane? You got a signed maintenance schedule anywhere?”

Roach smiled and snorted at the same time. “Take your pick from over two thousand engineering personnel — Americans, Dutch, English, German, French. The general didn’t have a crew chief on his plane. If he needed something done, he’d just ask someone to do it. The reality is that just about everyone and anyone on this base had access. And, as for a maintenance schedule, this was a glider, not a military aircraft — or even a powered private plane. It’s really no more than a snag sheet and there are no signatures.”

“Great.”

“Yeah, well…” said the Australian, fiddling with the clamp.

Okay, so my list of suspects had shrunk from forty thousand to two thousand, but it might as well have been a million. I had one dead general, one sabotaged plane, no maintenance schedule, and no leads. I comforted myself with the knowledge that killing a general is a big deal. Someone on this base had to know something. I just had to find that person. “So, the glider pilot who witnessed the crash—” I glanced at my notebook. His name was Captain Reinoud Aleveldt, Royal Netherlands Air Force. “You got anything more from him?”

“No,” said Roach.

“How about a number for him here on the base?”

Roach nodded and walked over to the phone on the wall. On a bench beside it was a base directory, a book the size and thickness of the average novel. Another reminder of the size of Ramstein. “How long have you been here, Squadron Leader?”

“Coming up for six weeks now. Why do you ask?”

“Because if there was someone wandering around here, someone who wasn’t NATO, you haven’t been here long enough to know whether they were out of place.”

“Yeah, but bases like this…” he shook his head, “…with people coming and going all the time, wearing different uniforms, speaking different languages, you’ve got Buckley’s chance of keeping tabs on people. You just assume if they’ve got through the front gate, or come in on an aircraft, they’re okay. If you didn’t operate on that assumption, you’d never get your job done.”

I wondered who “Buckley” was and assumed he was probably one very unlucky guy. I also thought about the security check I’d experienced at the front gate. It was pretty thorough, though hardly a retina scan. I had to show my CAC card, the identity card issued to every serving member of U.S. forces, and my name was probably also on some kind of database. As far as the CAC card went, an intruder would need to steal one and have a vague similarity to the photo on it. The reality was that, for a determined adversary, it wouldn’t have been impossible to slip through the net, certainly not for one with a premeditated plan to kill the base’s commander.

“Anything else, Special Agent?” asked the Australian, butting in on my speculation.

“Yeah, can you recommend a good dentist?”

“Wouldn’t get anything done here, mate. These blokes are butchers. You need an Aussie dentist — best in the world.”

Australia was a long way to go to get a tooth filled. I was hoping I’d find one a bit closer, but I wasn’t having much luck on that front. “Thanks for your time,” I said.

“The full revised report is in the process of being written up. Should have it done by this evening.”

“Send a copy to me care of OSI here. We’re in the phone book.” At least, I assumed OSI was in it.

“No worries, mate,” he said as I turned and walked out. So, Scott had been murdered. This had suddenly become a very serious deal, no matter who his old lady’s daddy was. Generals generally do not get murdered for the reasons the rest of us do. In fact, when you’re a general and you get killed violently by persons unknown, the motive that leads to that kind of demise could possibly have implications for national security. That’s what I was thinking as I walked toward the hangar’s exit, a rectangle of bright light in the dark corrugated wall.

Outside, I noted it was still cold, although the sun was doing its best to rectify that situation. The clouds and rainbows had gone, chased away by a breeze that went straight through my ACU as if I wasn’t wearing one. Three C-130s taxied past, making a hell of a racket. Beyond was the distant roar of a fast jet accelerating down one of the runways in full afterburner. I flipped open my pad and checked the copious notes I’d made interviewing Squadron Leader Roach. They amounted to one solitary line on the page, the name and phone number of the Dutch air force captain, Aleveldt. I wondered if he’d be able to make things any clearer for me, but I could definitely pass on a repeat of the account of Scott plunging to his death from twelve thousand feet.

The screech of tires caught my attention and lifted my eyes from the notebook. It was a purple Mercedes. Little puffs of dust and burnt rubber boiled around the tires as they shuddered, locked up solid. The door flew open. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Masters demanded to know as she stomped toward me, hands jammed deep in her jacket pockets.

“Investigating an assassination,” I said, which had the gratifying effect of stopping her dead in her tracks.