Fly by Night (3 page)

Davis settled back into the plush chair. “Was he one of the pilots in the crash?” he asked.

“No. There’s not that much justice in the world.”

Davis nodded, and the sorry Air Force career of Bob Schmitt came back like brown water over a failed levee.

The training process for military aviators is brutally efficient. Even so, a handful of misfits slip through, people who earn their wings yet have no place in the profession. Bob Schmitt was one of them. Technically, he was proficient enough. In truth, he’d been one of the best sticks in the squadron, always at the top of the bombing competitions, always a challenge in the air-to-air tangles. But what he lacked was
far more critical. Integrity and trustworthiness. With Schmitt on your wing, you never knew what to expect. He regularly flew too low or too loose. Worst of all, he didn’t see any problem with that. Davis had endured his share of terse debriefings with Bob Schmitt. After two tumultuous years, Schmitt had been transferred to a unit in South Carolina. Soon after, there was a crash, a midair collision. Schmitt was involved but ejected safely. His flight lead, Walt Deemer, hadn’t been so lucky. Davis had known Deemer from the Academy. He was a good shit, which, in the parlance of the squadron, was the best you ever said about anybody.

Davis had seen his chance. He’d lobbied hard to be put on the investigation team and got his wish. The inquiry was short and quick, the evidence clear. Schmitt went to a Flying Evaluation Board and lost his wings. He was out of the Air Force a month later, lucky to have not ended up doing time in Leavenworth. That had been ten years ago; Davis hadn’t heard the name since. Not until today.

“So Schmitthead is flying in Sudan.”

“With a stain like he’s got on his record—you can only fly the darker corners of the world. But it gets worse. Schmitt’s not just a line pilot. He’s the boss, FBN’s chief pilot.”

“You gotta be yankin’ me. Bob Schmitt runs this circus?” Davis shook his head in disbelief.

“Jammer, when Walt went down …” Green hesitated, “I know you wanted to make sure Schmitt never flew again.”

“And he didn’t. At least not in the Air Force. That final report was rock solid. I nailed his ass to the wall, got everything I wanted except ten minutes in the alley behind the officer’s club.”

“So,” Green said, “here’s your ten minutes.”

Davis eyed his old boss for a long moment, then turned his attention to the scene outside. Rain was falling again from a hard gray sky, and the coffeeshop window was peppered with mirror-like silver dots. People on the sidewalk were moving briskly against the foul weather, the typical leisurely pace of a Sunday accelerated by the elements. It was a day that should have kindled thoughts of fireplaces and cups of hot chocolate. But Davis had another picture in mind—Walt Deemer
sitting in the living room of his military base house. They’d all gotten together for a Super Bowl or some equally vital event. It was funny how you remembered people when they were gone. No matter how vivid their personality, how encompassing the relationship, it all ended up as one or two snapshot visions. The exception for Davis was his wife, but he knew why—he had Jen, a living vestige, full of Diane’s DNA-inspired mannerisms and features. But a buddy like Walt, he was forever a guy on a Barcalounger with a Budweiser, fist in the air as he cheered on his Packers. A good picture to remember.

Green read him perfectly. “Walt was my friend, too, Jammer. One of my guys, way back when.”

“So you want me to take a look at FBN Aviation—as a pretext to see what’s in the hangar.”

“Something like that. And if Bob Schmitt gets caught in your crossfire—”

Jammer Davis nodded, completing that thought on his own.

“So are you in?” Green asked.

Davis sank lower in his chair. He twirled what was left in his cup, the dregs thick and silty and brown. He found himself wondering if they drank coffee in Sudan. Davis tried to divine a way out of it, some practical impediment. He couldn’t think of one. Jen wouldn’t be home until the end of the semester. He didn’t have any other job right now. There wasn’t even rugby practice for the next three weeks. No way out. But what really stuck in his mind was Bob Schmitt. The man had landed on his feet, even if it was in an African backwater. And now people’s lives rested on his decisions. That was what clinched it.

“You know, Larry, you’re a real piece of work.”

“Coming from you, Jammer, I take that as a compliment.”

“So whose payroll will I be on? NTSB or CIA?”

“Does it matter?”

“The way I see it, one makes me a consultant, the other a mercenary.”

“I’ll let you pick your job title. Meet me in my office tomorrow morning. I’ll brief you on everything we’ve got. Then you can go to TMD and make your arrangements.”

Davis was about to ask,
What the hell is TMD?
when it hit him. “Traffic Management Desk?”

“Yep. That’s what they call the travel office now.”

“Jesus, Larry. I’m beginning to think like the government.”

Green chuckled. “Don’t take it too hard. I’ll see you in the morning.” The general got up and walked off briskly, like he always did, and soon disappeared into the heavy gloom outside.

Davis tipped his cup and drained it. It might be his last good cuppa for some time. Which seemed like a really good excuse to go back to the counter and order a refill.

Davis woke early the next morning and started his day by scalding a cup of “Colombia’s Best” in his three-cup maker. Soon after that he was standing over an open suitcase.

In the military they called it mobilization. The United States armed forces are a global fighting force, which means that any soldier can be ordered on a moment’s notice to deploy anywhere in the world. The orders might be for a week, or they might be for a year, so the military has a hard-and-fast process to make sure everyone is prepared. You stand in line in a warehouse to be issued the necessities of your new life. Mobilization is not a happy process to begin with because you know you’re heading far from home. Then you see what they’re handing out. Gas masks, ammunition, Arctic sleeping bags, nerve agent antidotes, immunizations against rare infectious diseases. The JAG is there to make sure your will is up to date. The chaplain is there just in case you needed to talk. Davis had been mobilized many times, and he’d always thought it seemed like some large-scale, institutionalized omen. Bad things to come. Now that he was a civilian, the process was different. Davis was standing in his bedroom throwing clean socks into an old Samsonite roller bag with a broken wheel. He could have been going on a cruise. Even so, he was shadowed by that same ill feeling.

As he stood next to his bed wondering what he’d forgotten to pack, Davis picked up the cordless phone and dialed Jen’s number for the third time this morning. He cradled the receiver between his ear
and shoulder as he stuffed shaving gear into a pouch. On the fifth ring Jen’s message came.

“Hey, it’s Jen. You know the deal.”
A beep.

“It’s Dad. I’m heading to Africa for an investigation. Call me.”

He hung up and tossed the phone on the bed. That had been happening a lot lately, even before she’d gone off to Europe. He had two years left with his daughter, a tiny window that was shrinking every day.
And then what the hell will I do?
Davis grabbed a pair of work boots and threw them into the suitcase.

Probably what I’m doing right now.

Only after she’d gone had Davis realized how closely he was moored to his daughter. Jen had been away five weeks, and he was already starting to drift. He’d been lifting more iron at the gym, swimming a thousand laps in the pool, hitting harder in the rugby matches. But none of that was enough. When Larry Green had come calling yesterday, Davis hadn’t been looking for crash work. He hadn’t been looking for any kind of work. But here he was, throwing shirts in a suitcase, getting ready to fly off to one of the least developed countries in the world to look for a lost drone. Larry Green might say he was going because he had unfinished business with Bob Schmitt. But deep down, Davis knew the real reason he’d taken the job.

He’d realized it last year, in France, when an assassin had tried to gun him down. He needed the adrenaline rush, the thing that used to get satisfied when he flew an F-16 on the deck at six hundred miles an hour. Maybe Larry Green knew it. Maybe he had tried to make the job sound challenging, even impossible, just to lure Davis into it. A smart guy, the general.

Davis stood looking at the open suitcase, wondering if there was anything he’d forgottten. That, too, was something you learned in the military. No matter how well you prepared, there was always something missing, and you wouldn’t realize what it was until you stepped off an airplane and into some godforsaken hellhole halfway around the world. But then, that was part of the challenge.

Davis zipped up his bag. Mobilization complete.

CHAPTER FOUR

Six thousand five hundred and fifty miles. That was the direct distance between Washington, D.C., and Khartoum. Davis had covered a lot more.

He noticed the pitch of the engine change as the Qatar Airways A-320 began its final descent into Khartoum International Airport. It was the final leg of an odyssey that would have given Homer pause. Altogether, four flights and two airport lounges, thirty-nine hours since leaving Larry Green’s office. Adding the time zones, two calendar days. But Davis hadn’t wasted the time. Much he’d dedicated to sleep, which was something he had a talent for. In his military days, Davis had spent two weeks in the desert sleeping under a poncho strung between a pair of cacti. He’d snoozed soundly in the crotch of a gumbo-limbo tree during jungle survival training. So a thirty-four-inch pitch seat in coach didn’t bother him one bit, even if it was three inches shy of his own personal pitch.

He looked out the window and saw the city of Khartoum. Every shade of brown ever coined was there—taupe, tan, beige, coffee—all blended and fused, brewed into an angular urban landscape. In these last few minutes above the fray, Davis prepared himself. He mentally reviewed the information Larry Green had presented two mornings ago. It didn’t take long. There had been almost nothing on Imam Rafiq Khoury, enigmatic cleric and head of FBN Aviation. Davis had seen one grainy photo of a slight man with an angular build, his limbs jutting out at awkward angles like he’d been snapped together using some kind of child’s building set. The rest of him had been hidden behind a white turban, bird’s nest beard, and dark glasses. Khoury’s background
held an even poorer resolution. He had appeared on the scene less than a year ago—nobody knew from where—to build FBN Aviation from scratch. That was all. Khoury and his company were like a holograph, something that changed its appearance depending on the angle from which it was viewed. Davis was not pleased. He liked to go into an investigation with knowledge, because knowledge begat clout. Ten minutes from now, and five thousand feet down, he was going to have precious little of either.

On final approach, the airplane rocked as it was buffeted by thermal turbulence, the same bumps you got anywhere in the world where the temperature changed by fifty degrees from day to night. The pilot handled it well, though, and brought the jet in to a nice touchdown. Davis appreciated a smooth landing. A gust of wind, turbulence from a departing heavy jet—it didn’t take much to screw one up.

As the airplane taxied to the terminal, it struck Davis that there wasn’t going to be anyone here to meet him. Nobody waving from a balcony or parked in a cell phone waiting lot. He didn’t have a single friend in Khartoum, or for that matter, in all of North Africa. Possibly five hundred miles north, in a command post in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Davis might know somebody there, an old Academy classmate or a buddy from flight school. That was the best he could hope for. That was how alone he was.

Jammer Davis got off the airplane five minutes later. It felt like he was stepping into hell.

From the cool cabin of the A-320, the stairs delivered him to a blazing hot tarmac. It was a desert heat, languid air stirred by a choppy breeze. The sun was at its apex, pounding down from the dead center of a faultless blue sky.

Davis fell in with a crowd that was moving slowly toward the terminal, probably dazed by the heat. He was limping slightly from the weekend’s rugby match. He had tried to ignore the injury, but it was undeniable, written in black and blue all over his ankle. The terminal was new, glistening concrete and polished metal shimmering in the sun. Attached to it were two new jetways sagging flaccidly to the
ground, clearly broken. That was what happened in places like this. The Transportation Ministry had probably purchased the newest equipment, only to later discover that the airport authority didn’t know how to operate jetways with laser sensors. So the jet bridges were abandoned, left there like a pair of dinosaurs with hangovers, and a fifty-year-old set of rusted stairs was wheeled up to every arriving flight. It served as a reminder to Davis of the world he was entering, a sovereign moshpit of corrupt bureaucrats and tribal strongmen and baseline incompetence.

When he entered the terminal, it felt like he’d stepped into a walk-in cooler. It was the kind of massive carbon footprint only a net exporter of oil could love. He saw too much space, saw too few passengers. The brand-new marble floors were already dirty and scuffed, and stacks of unclaimed luggage sat behind empty check-in counters. Airports were showcase facilities, commissioned by governments, so when this terminal had been designed, the efficient transport of passengers was likely a secondary concern to visual impressiveness. It was only here to upstage whatever was in Addis Ababa or Damascus. Bigger and better.

Davis made his way through customs and took a hard stare from a pair of guards at the exit. He was traveling on his real passport. Larry Green had forwarded an offer from the CIA to provide something else, but that had only struck Davis as a get-into-jail-free card. He retrieved his bag from a conveyor belt that worked, then went outside to find a cab. Davis spotted a sign that said
taxi
at the far end of the terminal. He started walking.