Fly by Night (35 page)

“Possibly. But they won’t find you.”

Antonelli said nothing.

“Listen, I’m sorry. Sorry to have dragged you into this mess. I have to get you away from al-Asmat. You can’t stay here any more than I can.”

“It’s not your fault. I—”

“No,” he broke in, “it
is
my fault. If I’d been thinking more clearly two nights ago you’d be back in the village working right now and not speeding around in this stupid contraption.”

“True. But if you had not come here, you would never have discovered the truth about the crash. I am no expert in such things, but it is clear that Imam Khoury is planning something awful. So I am glad to be here. Glad that I could help you.”

Davis didn’t respond.

He knew he ought to say something deep and philosophical, but his mind-set was purely tactical.

“We have two overriding concerns. First, we have to get you safe, and the only way to do that is to go back to Khartoum and hand you over to the Italian Embassy.”

She seemed to ignore that, and said, “What is the second concern?”

“Whether or not those goons back in the village have communications.” He pointed to the bullet hole in the dash. “I think that was their only hard-wired radio, but they might have a satellite phone. If not, they’ll try to find one in the village.”

“They could find mine,” she said.

He shot her a pained look.

“You pulled me away in such a hurry—I didn’t have time to retrieve anything.”

“I know,” he admitted, “my mistake. We could use it right now, but there’s no going back.”

She nodded.

With a jolt, the jeep bounded up off the primitive road onto a strip of asphalt. The ride improved considerably. Antonelli eased the death grip she’d had on the dash and settled back into her seat. She fell silent and seemed to relax. Davis didn’t. He drove hard and fast, pushing
the rickety jeep for all it was worth. It was late afternoon, and the approach of night seemed to have accelerated under the red, dust-laden sky. It had been a tumultuous day, but the night wasn’t going to be serene or restful. Khartoum was four hundred miles south, and Davis calculated that if they drove straight through they’d arrive just before sunrise. And they
would
drive straight through.

Davis was feeling it again, the same compelling impulse he’d had three nights ago. People had been shooting at him. People were hunting Antonelli. They had an excuse for coming after him, of course. He had banged up some thieves at a poker game, thieves who happened to be soldiers. But Davis suspected the real reason for putting a target on his back involved something more troubling. More substantial. He saw it now like he had seen it so many times before. He was getting close, nearing a solution, and people were getting nervous. Rafiq Khoury, or whoever controlled that hangar, had killed the two Ukrainians. That was for sure. Buried them twice, deeper the second time. Two good guys, by all accounts, executed and stuffed into the hot earth.

Somebody was going to a lot of trouble. They’d guarded a secret hangar for months. Started an entire airline from scratch. Turned an ancient airplane into a drone. Performed a test flight and crashed it.

A hell of a lot of trouble.

Jammer Davis didn’t know the end game, didn’t know what they were aiming at. But he did have one advantage. They didn’t know he was aiming at them.

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.