Skyhook (23 page)

Slowly the image changed, the camera rotating left imperfectly, but with enough clarity to see a twisted mass of metal where the right engine would normally be mounted, and large gashes in the wing beyond.

“My God, number-two engine dropped to one side on the mounts and the prop blades ate into the wing!” she said.

“April, we’ve got to get that videotape out of there. They may confiscate it.”

“Can you … can you wait? I’m getting a better shot every second.”

Scott scrambled out of the seat and into the back, positioning himself at the small portable mini-cartridge VCR.

A voice amplified by a bullhorn could be heard clearly now in the cabin, ordering them to stand by for two crewmen to come over by raft and inspect the aircraft.

“Come ahead, lad. We’re not doing anything illicit over here,”

Jim was bellowing back.

“What are you doing out here?” the officer asked.

“Testing a new underwater video system. I’m getting ready to pull it up now.”

April was watching the right wing slowly come closer. The engine had somehow dislodged, or shaken itself free from its mountings, but rather than drop off the Albatross entirely, it had lurched to the right and let at least two of the propeller blades eat into the leading edge of the wing and the fuel tank like some sort of bizarre buzz saw. The sight of it was both fascinating and sickening.

How on earth did they get out of there alive? she wondered. They couldn’t have been more than seconds away from exploding in midair.

“April! Tear yourself away and record the latitude and longitude coordinates on the small GPS. Precisely! Every decimal place, and triple-check your work.”

She grabbed a pen and did so, folding the resulting piece of paper and putting it in her parka, then thinking better of it and stuffing it down her bra.

There was a boat in the water now with an officer and a crewman aboard, and they threw off the lines and began motoring toward the Widgeon.

“April, if there’s something restricted around here, they may want to confiscate this tape. I need to end this now.”

“Okay,” she said. There were other scrambling sounds in the back before she heard the generator die and saw the picture go dark.

“Tell Jim, as quietly as possible, to pull the camera up.”

She relayed the word and watched with admiration as he seemed to be merely shifting position while actually winding in the line with the camera on the other end.

“What does he mean, restricted area?” April asked as Scott came back forward.

“I don’t know. There was nothing on the charts. I doubt there’s anything he can do legally, but I’d say that other boat was watching the area for them. So something’s going on.”

The small boat pulled alongside the bow, and Jim helped the young officer aboard and down to the interior of the cramped cabin.

“Who’s the master … or pilot in command?”

“That’s me, Scott McDermott,” Scott said as he shook his hand.

“That’s Jim Dobler who helped you in, and this is April.”

The Coast Guard lieutenant nodded in response. “I don’t understand the problem here, Lieutenant,” Scott said. “I checked all the notices to airmen and my charts are current, and there are no notices about steering clear of this area.”

The Coast Guardsman held his palm up. “Look, this is not an arrest or anything, but we’ve got an unannounced military operation going on out here, and the word didn’t get out, but it’s our job to spread it anyway. So we’re going to have to run you off.”

“But, what’s going on out here? I’m ex-Navy. You can tell me . .

. or not. I guess that doesn’t cut any mustard.”

“Well…” The officer smiled. “Since you’re Navy, you know I can’t tell you unless you have both a current clearance and a need to know, and I’m not even sure I have a need to know.”

“Okay,” Scott said. “I’ll pretend to understand that.”

“Look, since you had a camera in the water, I’ve got to ask you whether you were videotaping anything, and whether you saw anything but fish.”

“One gigantic halibut we’d all like to eat, a lot offish, a shark, and crabs were what we were seeing. We did have a tape in there about the time you showed up, but we had only started to run it. I doubt there’s anything there.”

“Then I’m sorry, but…”

“You need the tape, right?”

The officer nodded. “You’ll get it back in some form. Let me get your address.”

“Look, where else should we be avoiding you guys? I mean, are there any other unmarked areas we should stay out of? It would be better to tell me. I’m not great on intuiting these things.”

The lieutenant chuckled as he glanced at April, letting his eyes linger on her a bit before turning back to Scott.

“We had boats out to bar entry to this area, but apparently the brass didn’t think about a seaplane.”

“Apparently.” Scott reached back and started the generator, turned on the VCR, and ejected the tape from the machine before turning it all off again and handing the tape over. April felt her heart sink as she saw the transfer.

“That’s the only one?” the officer asked.

“Only one in there,” Scott replied. “It’s a new toy for Jim, and we were helping him try it out.”

The lieutenant looked Scott in the eye for a few seconds, gauging his answer and whether there was any reason to probe further, then nodded. “Okay. Mr. Dobler, Mr. McDermott, Ms. Rosen? You’re all free to go.” He turned and squeezed his way out of the plane and back into his boat.

Jim had the camera hauled in and secured, and Scott fired the engines before the cutter crew had finished hauling out their boat. The takeoff was made in relative silence, the long rays of the setting sun just disappearing as they flew up the channel.

Forty minutes later, Scott opted for a landing on the hard surface of the Valdez airport rather than risk the water in the dark.

^^hey were waiting for a taxi back into town when Scott sat down on a log by the edge of the tarmac and handed something small and plastic to April.

“What’s this?”

“The VCR tape.”

“What? I thought you gave it to—”

“I gave him the one that was in the machine. This was the one I ejected from the machine before he came aboard.” She could see an almost ear-to-ear grin in the subdued light of a nearby sodium vapor lamp.

“I don’t believe this! Thank you!”

“So … that make up for the cigar?”

“Yes,” she said without hesitation.

“And… . maybe I could take you to dinner?”

“Let’s not get carried away.”

“The mind boggles at the possible replies to that statement, April.”

“Seriously, thank you!”

“Think that’s enough?”

“Sorry?”

“To help your dad? Is the tape enough?”

Jim was seating himself on the same log, having listened to the exchange.

“I don’t know,” April replied, “but something besides negligence knocked that engine off its mounts, and I think this tape will show that. I can’t tell you how relieved I am.”

“We can take a better look at the tape when we get back to my place,” Jim said. “Also, there’s a small hotel in town, April. I mean, I’d be honored to have you stay at my house, in my so-called guest room, and I’d even kick Junior here out on the streets to accommodate you, but it’s really not fit for a lady.”

“Hell, Jim,” Scott laughed, “it’s not fit for a pig, though I’m not complaining. But I’ll be happy to share my space.” Scott winked at her and waited for a response.

“Now that you mention it, the hotel sounds nice,” April said with an even expression. “Wouldn’t want to crowd you, or see you sleeping in the street.” April opened her cell phone and started to dial

Grade’s number, but a beeping noise greeted her when she pressed the “send” button.

“Damn. No signal.”

A pair of headlights cut through the twilight and turned toward the airport road in the distance.

“Here comes our taxi,” Jim said. “Probably the only fare he’s had all day.”

“I may still need to raise the wreckage,” April said suddenly.

Both men looked around at her, but Jim spoke first, shaking his head. “You know, the honor of a boarding party from the Coast Guard usually leads to courtrooms and big, ruinous fines. I’d say we were pretty lucky today, but we stumbled onto something. With all due respect and apologies, April, I don’t think raising that bird’s going to be possible until they get through with their war games and clear the area and give the okay. I’m sorry.”

The silence grew as the cab moved closer, and April heard Scott McDermott sigh deeply.

“What?” she asked.

“It’s not war games,” Scott said.

“No? What, then?”

“They’re trying to keep us, and everyone else, away from what we just found.”

She sat in silence for a few seconds looking at him. “My dad’s plane?”

Scott nodded.

“No, that can’t be it. It took political pressure just to get my folks rescued, and the Coast Guard already told me they weren’t interested in raising the wreckage or having anything to do with it.”

“They knew you were out there with us,” he said flatly.

“Why … why on earth do you say that?” April asked.

The car was turning the last corner before reaching them as Scott sighed again.

“When that lieutenant left, he told Mr. Dobler and Mr. McDermott, and one Ms. Rosen that we could all go.”

“I remember. So?”

“So, I introduced Jim and me by our first and last names. I never mentioned your last name.”

The sound of tires crushing gravel and bright headlights prompted Jim and Scott to get to their feet. April remained sitting, thoroughly stunned, as Scott reached out to help her up. There was the sound of a car door opening.

“That you, Jerry?” Jim called to the driver as he squinted into the headlights. “What took you so long? And get those damned lights out of our eyes!”

The passenger door opened, and someone stepped around the front of the car.

“This isn’t Jerry, Jim. This is Trooper Joe Harris of the state police. Coast Guard says you folks may have a tape that belongs to them.”

Notification that the final acceptance test flight had been postponed one more time came in the form of a note Lindsey White left on Ben’s office computer.

At first Ben didn’t see it when he returned from Dan Jerrod’s office. It was a folded piece of paper literally taped to the upper right side of his computer monitor, and it was a measure of his current state of distraction that he could miss it for more than an hour. That hour had consisted of stressing out over ways to deny the would-be saboteurs a means of recontaminating the master program on the test flight.

The delay note, when he found it, was tantamount to a stay of execution. All of which meant that Schroedmger would get fed in person for at least one more evening.

The team was growing exasperated with him, Ben could tell, though no one had been bold enough to say anything. His extreme distraction, moodmess, fatigue, and otherwise un-Ben-like behavior was prompting equally uncharacteristic group behavior in response. The room fell silent now when he walked in, and he could feel their eyes following him. Where normally he was a full member of his

own team, suddenly he was an oddity, and more of an annoyance than a team leader. That recognition, however, was doing little to cure the underlying malady of frustration and fear.

Ben reread Lindsey’s message, wondering what had prompted this new postponement.

Am I somehow out of the loop and don’t know it? he wondered. It depended on who had made the decision, and that almost certainly would have come from above Joe Davis.

The basic fact remained, of course, that he did not know who fit the description of enemy. Lindsey and Joe had lied about fitting the emergency disconnect to the Gulfstream. “Hey, Ben,” they could have said, “there’s some major problem in getting that installed in time. Would you agree to fly without it?”

Ben snorted, startling himself, as he wondered what his answer would have been. He was too compliant, too cooperative to have said no. But they should have asked, because now they, too, looked like the unseen enemy.

He wandered out to talk to his team members and listen to their exasperated admission that after three days of feverish work they’d failed to find a single glitch in the main program. He refrained, of course, from revealing what the Cray had helped him find. Dan Jer rod’s admonition wasn’t the only reason. It came down to the lonely reality that no one was beyond suspicion.

When all the research team members had left, Ben sat in silence trying to order his thoughts. Perhaps Jerrod could protect them tomorrow when the test flight finally occurred. Sharing his suspicions with Jerrod had lifted his spirits, but there were too many unanswered questions to feel comfortable.

A wave of fatigue rolled over him, and he sat at his desk and put his head down to rest for a few minutes, drifting off into a troubled jumble of dreams.

Will Martin had been alternately pacing his office and staring out the window for the better part of the morning as he fielded phone calls and tried to stay focused. The dekys in Anchorage had passed critical, but pressing Joe Davis any more was certain to be counterproductive. There was little he could do now but wait and hope and watch the clock before the day began with a security briefing from Todd Jenkins, his corporate security chief. The possibility, however remote, of a major security breach at the most critical moment in Uniwave’s history had easily captured his undivided attention, but with the daughter of a grounded airline pilot asking too many questions and the pilot himself hiring lawyers, the threat of a breach was real.

“The name is Rosen?”

Todd Jenkins, the head of Uniwave’s corporate security department, nodded.

“Yes, and it’s getting more complicated by the hour, with the man’s daughter pushing at the Coast Guard and the FAA for answers.”

“What does she know?”

Jenkins had shrugged. “Dan Jerrods people are watching,” Todd had replied, referring to the Anchorage-based security chief for Skyhook.

Will had leaned forward and leveled a piercing stare at Jenkins.