Flat Spin (29 page)

“Nobody says gooks anymore, Buzz, unless they’re wearing robes and burning crosses.”

“Hey, I don’t need you schooling me on political correctness, Logan. I get all I need from the wife. She’s so liberal, she wears progressive lenses. That thing you asked me about, former co-workers checking out prematurely? You want the skinny or not?”

“Ready to copy.”

“I checked open-source databases on every name I could think of,” Buzz said. “You remember a guy named Rob Emerson, joined the group in early 2003?”

“Who?”

“Robbie Emerson. Went by ‘Herman Munster.’ Looked like he free-fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.”

Robbie Emerson. Herman Munster.
A face floated faintly up from the swampy reaches of my prefrontal lobes. He’d left Alpha less than a month after I rotated in. The story I remembered was that he’d been cashiered for flunking a polygraph.

“He was a Ranger. Got the Silver Star in Mogadishu.”

“Not bad, Logan. At least we know you don’t got the Alzheimer’s. Anyway, the weekend before Echevarria gets it, Emerson drives into the desert outside Phoenix and eats his gun. That’s according to local law enforcement. His wife told some newspaper out there he had no reason to kill himself.”

His fall from grace, according to Buzz, began after Emerson and some Navy SEALs he’d been training with in Little Creek, Virginia, stopped off after work at a dive bar popular among the frogmen. He’d had a few beers and gotten cozy with a woman who worked as a receptionist in the Washington office of a European trade group that brokered international arms deals. The SEALs suspected that the woman, a Bulgarian, was a “floater,” someone used sporadically for intelligence gathering. Emerson had failed to report this contact during a later polygraph exam (those of us in Alpha were routinely polygraphed every six months). Echevarria, who’d been instrumental in bringing him into the group, defended Emerson, arguing that he was being railroaded—Emerson claimed he’d simply forgotten having met the woman. Moreover, there was no evidence he’d passed along any sensitive information of any kind to her—but the command staff didn’t want to hear it. He was stripped of his security clearance, relieved of duty and ultimately forced to retire. He’d bounced between civilian jobs, construction mostly, boasting to acquaintances that he didn’t have to work because he was secretly wealthy, before landing a part-time gig at a Home Depot in the Phoenix suburb of Glendale.

“Maybe it wasn’t suicide, like his wife says, but you sure as hell gotta wonder about his timing,” Buzz said. “Let’s say Robbie Emerson did get whacked. Then Echevarria gets whacked. Maybe we all should be watching our asses. I mean, it’s true what Goldfinger said: Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action.”

“It’s a sad day when lazy, butt-ugly, over-paid civil servants start quoting lines from movies and calling it operational doctrine, Buzz.”

“Who you calling over-paid?”

I told him about the murder of Gennady Bondarenko, and about being chased by the white Honda. I told him about the repeated hang-ups on my answering machine, and about the angry, dark-complected man who, according to Larry, had come looking for me at the airport.

“If it was me and I was dealing with all that shit, I’d be packing heavy,” Buzz said. “One primary weapon, one backup, some frags, and an AT-4, because nothing says I love you like a man-portable missile.”

“You should be writing your own advice column, Buzz. Call it, ‘Dear Miss Armed to the Teeth.’”

“Probably make more money than I’m making now.”

He’d already emailed me two news stories on the death of Robbie Emerson by the time we hung up.

Both stories had run in the online edition of the
Arizona Republic
. Neither mentioned Emerson’s record of military service. The first article described how police were investigating the discovery of an unidentified body found shot to death in the desert outside Scottsdale. The second article, posted two days later, offered more detail: A utility crew stringing digital cable line on a dirt road had discovered Emerson’s body slumped behind the wheel of his Chevy Silverado. Authorities believed he’d been dead less than twenty-four hours. A brief suicide note was recovered from the scene. The manager at the Home Depot where Emerson worked said he’d seemed upset the day before his death. Yet his widow insisted that he hadn’t killed himself. “He was about to be a grandfather,” Emma Emerson was quoted as saying.

Maybe Robbie Emerson died at his own hand, or not. Maybe his death had nothing to do with the murders of Echevarria and Bondarenko, or maybe it had everything to do with them. Yogi Berra once said that some things in life are too coincidental to be coincidence. Perhaps Robbie Emerson’s demise was one of those things. Or perhaps not. All I knew was that my afternoon, as usual, was free—plenty of time to make a few calls and play connect the dots.

I was about to contact Detective Czarnek and tell him what I’d learned when Eugen Dragomir showed up on his skateboard with a $5,000 check and said, “Let’s go flying.”

The check was drawn on an account from Zurich-based Massio Trust, Ltd. Among banks catering to the international uber-wealthy, Massio’s impeccable reputation for asset security and client confidentiality was nonpareil. Which, as any intelligence analyst worth his or her salt will tell you, made Massio Trust a financial institution of choice among certain organized crime operations, including several Russian mafia subsets. But I didn’t think much about it at that moment. Only rich men and fools look a gift horse in the mouth. I left my revolver in my desk.

After walking Eugin through our preflight inspection, we climbed into the
Duck
, got the engine going, and listened to the ATIS. The recording indicated that there was a TFR in effect with a thirty-mile radius just north of Rancho Bonita. I told the controller that we would be conducting training maneuvers well to the west, out over the ocean.

“What’s a TFR?” Eugin said.

“Temporary no-fly zone. It means the Vice President’s in town for the weekend.”

The veep and his wife were regulars to the Rancho Bonita area. An old friend of his from graduate school days who’d made good as a hedge fund manager owned a ranch up the coast with horses and a stocked bass pond, and the Second Family visited there often, accompanied by the press, Secret Service, and fully armed Air Force fighter jets that maintained a round-the-clock combat air patrol high overhead, ready to vaporize anything manmade that penetrated the restricted, thirty-mile zone accidentally or otherwise.

I had him taxi to the run-up area, then do an engine run-up to make sure everything was working properly. The tower cleared us for takeoff and we launched. Three minutes later, the controller said, “Resume own navigation, maintain appropriate VFR altitude.”

“Own nav, own altitude,” I radioed.

We were headed out to sea. Once we got up to 3,000 feet, I leveled off and showed Dragomir how to induce a stall, pulling the nose up, bleeding off the airspeed, until the
Duck
buffeted, pitched over and plummeted toward the waves below. I showed him how to push the yoke forward to break the stall while leveling the wings and adding power, then how to raise the nose to recover lost altitude. We climbed back up to 3,000 feet and did a couple of clearing turns. I said to Dragomir, “Your turn.”

Most students tense up when practicing how to recover from stalls. As the warning horn moans in their ears and the plane suddenly drops out from under them, many grit their teeth and close their eyes in terror. Some even barf. Not this kid. He was Right Stuff incarnate. Perfect recovery every time. We practiced slow flight and standard-rate turns. Again, his technique was perfect. I couldn’t help but be impressed.

“Cessna Four Charlie Lima, traffic, three moving to your four o’clock, three miles northwest bound, altitude indicates 3,000 feet unverified, type unknown. I’m not talking to him.”

Off the
Duck
’s starboard wingtip, I caught the glint of sunlight reflecting from the twin propellers of what looked to be a Beech Baron, far enough away that there seemed little chance of the two of us scraping paint.

“Four Charlie Lima has the traffic in sight, no factor,” I said.

“Four Charlie Lima, thank you. Maintain visual separation from that traffic.”

“Roger.”

Just to be on the safe side, I had Dragomir turn left twenty degrees. The Baron appeared to parallel our turn. I told Dragomir to turn twenty degrees more. The Baron turned as well. He was now less than two miles away and closing.

“You’ll need to schedule a flight physical with an FAA examiner before you can solo,” I said, keeping one eye on the twin. “Every licensed private pilot has to pass a medical exam at least every two years.”

Dragomir said he disliked physicians. “I had my appendix out two months ago. It still hurts,” he said, lifting his T-shirt to show me the scar. “Sometimes, I swear, it feels like there’s something still in there.”

I’m not paranoid. But let’s say for the sake of argument that you’re an ex-government operative and that your former co-worker, a fellow operative, has been savagely murdered. Let’s say individuals unknown are leaving hang-up calls on your answering machine and, by all indications, stalking you. Let’s say that your former contact in Russian intelligence has turned up on the coroner’s slab, implanted with a radio-controlled explosive device that can be detonated from as far away as a half-mile. And let’s say that some college kid who hails from a former Soviet republic shows up out of seemingly nowhere with oddly innate piloting skills, and hands you a check issued by a financial institution that caters to the very individuals you once hunted. Let’s say he discloses that he was recently operated on, and that, sometimes,
it feels like there’s something still in there.
Let’s also say that a twin-engine aircraft easily fifty knots an hour faster than your plane is angling directly toward you, and that you’ve suddenly convinced yourself that the kid sitting beside you with the surgical scar on his belly has been unwittingly implanted with a bomb identical to the one they found inside your Russian friend, and that if that other airplane gets within a half-mile of you, that bomb will detonate.

Under similar circumstances, any prudent pilot would’ve done exactly what I did: initiate air combat maneuvers.

“I have the plane,” I said.

“You don’t want me to fly?”

“Eugen, take your hands off the fucking yoke!”

Eugen Dragomir relinquished the control wheel like it was diseased.

In a Cessna 172, a roll is ordinarily something you eat, not do. But this was no ordinary situation. I rolled the
Duck
inverted and executed a descending half-loop, reversing course before rolling out wings level on a 180-degree divergent bearing. Your standard split-S Dog Fighting 101. The Baron pilot was having none of it. When I looked back over my right shoulder, he was banking steeply, still a couple of miles off, angling once more toward the
Duck
’s tail.

I dialed up the emergency frequency, 121.5, on my numberone radio and called air traffic control.

“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. Cessna Four Charlie Lima is under attack.”

The only response was static. I smacked the audio panel and tried it again. This time, there was no static. There was no nothing. The radio was dead.

Dragomir was looking over at me wide-eyed, like it was all way more than he’d bargained for.

“
Under attack
? What the fuck, dude!”

I was too preoccupied to offer any immediate explanations.

We were never going to outrun a twin-engine Baron. That much I knew. The
Duck
literally was a sitting duck. There was only one way out: threaten the safety of the Vice President of the United States.

B
y the time the two F-16’s intercepted us and ordered me to land via the rocking of their missile-laden wings, the Baron had vanished. Secret Service agents in suits and armed with Belgium-made submachine-pistols were waiting on the tarmac at the Rancho Bonita Airport as we touched down. They handcuffed Dragomir and me, searched the
Duck
for weapons, then drove us in a black Chevy Suburban with darkly tinted windows past a burgeoning phalanx of news crews to the airport’s security office. The agents seemed little interested in hearing how I had no choice but to violate the Vice President’s temporary no-fly zone or risk getting blown out of the sky by the mysterious Beech Baron. I was accused of having imagined the threat. They laughed when I shared with them my fanciful work history, just as Czarnek and his partner had done.

Radar tracks confirmed that, in fact, there had been another private plane flying in my vicinity, but at no time had it posed a hazard significant enough to warrant my intentionally busting a TFR, the agents insisted. The Baron was traced to a Camarillobased cardiologist who’d become distracted while trying to familiarize himself with a state-of-the-art GPS navigation system newly installed on his airplane, which explained his erratic flying.

It was well past sundown before the lead agent, an energetic African-American woman named Rachel Fargas, grew weary of grilling me and let me go—but only after I surrendered my pilot’s license to her. She told me that officials from the FAA and U.S. Attorney’s office would be in touch to discuss possible criminal actions. The good news, Fargas said, was that the Secret Service would not divulge my name to the press as a matter of fairness until such time as any actual charges were filed.