Flat Spin

by David Freed

  “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 whee
l 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.

  By 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.

  “What about my student?”

  “You were pilot in command. As far as we’re concerned, the student was just along for the ride,” Fargas said. “We released him two hours ago.”

  The news media was gone by the time I was let go. I walked to Larry’s hangar, unlocked the door, and dropped off my flight bag inside my office, suddenly feeling very exhausted. The light was flashing on my answering machine. There were three messages: one from some attorney representing Savannah’s father who asked that I return his call at my earliest convenience; one from Eugen Dragomir saying he still wanted to go flying with me, assuming neither one of us went to prison; and one from my landlady.

  “I just wanted to let you know,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said, “that somebody threw a bomb in your apartment. But don’t worry, Bubeleh. We’re still having brisket Monday night.”

  EIGHTEEN

  My first thoughts when notified that my apartment had been torched were of Kiddiot’s welfare. OK, that’s not entirely correct.

  In truth, my first thoughts were, “Gee, I hope all my stuff didn’t burn up because I really can’t afford to buy all new stuff right now,” followed by, “Gee, I wonder who did it?” Not that I didn’t concern myself with the safety of my ungrateful, indifferent feline roommate. But I figured that if anybody could survive a firebombing, like a cockroach, it was him. He’d probably slept through the whole thing up in his tree.

  I pulled up and parked Savannah’s Jaguar in front of Mrs. Schmulowitz’s house. “Your kitty’s A-OK,” she said as she met me outside. “I made some tuna noodle casserole for him. Does he eat any of it? Not a bite. He’s on the divan, taking a nap. He was exhausted.”

  “You’d be exhausted, too, Mrs. Schmulowitz, if you slept twenty-two hours a day.”

  I asked Mrs. Schmulowitz if she was A-OK. She assured me she was. She’d been down at the beach, going for a run, she said, when the fire apparently broke out. An eighty-nine-year-old woman jogging along the sand in Lycra shorts and a sports bra. I wondered how many tourists took pictures.

  I followed her through the side gate and into her backyard. Yellow “Do Not Cross” police tape encircled what little was left of the garage Kiddiot and I once called home. All four walls, though scorched, were still standing. The roof was caved in. What was left of the rafters jutted skyward at crazy angles like spars from some giant broken umbrella. Fortunately, the firefighters had kept the flames from spreading to Mrs. Schmulowitz’s house.

  “A feier zol im trefen,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said. “He should burn up, whoever did this, the Nazi gonif .”

  From the alley, I looked in through the shattered window of the garage door, through which a makeshift bomb had obviously been tossed. There was nothing I could see inside that the fire hadn’t blackened. The stench of burnt wet wood crawled into my head and for a moment I was transported back to a dank Central American jungle. In a monsoonal rain, we’d chased a high-level cocaine kingpin into a small village. He’d taken refuge in the village church and refused to come out. Echevarria pumped in an incendiary rifle grenade, hoping to get him to rethink his position. The church went up like a tiki torch and the kingpin came out firing. I shot him in the neck. He was the first man I ever killed close enough to see his face.

  Mrs. Schmulowitz handed me the business card of a Detective Ostrow from the Rancho Bonita PD.

  “He wanted you to call him as soon as you came home,” she said. “They think it was arson.”

  “You haven’t asked me who I think did it,” I said.

  Mrs. Schmulowitz shrugged. “If I thought it was any of my business, Bubeleh, I would’ve asked. What’s important is, nobody got hurt.”

  I put my arm around her bony shoulder. I told her I was sorry for bringing trouble into her life. Not to worry, she said. Insurance would replace the garage. My personal possessions were another matter.

  “Please tell me you didn’t have anything valuable in there.”

  “It’s only stuff, Mrs. Schmulowitz.” I gave her a wink to let her know that stuff really didn’t matter.

  If you’re a Buddhist, you believe greed and dependence on material possessions are the basis for most human suffering. The more simply you live, the more enlightened you become. I felt very enlightened at that moment. My home was gone along with all my clothes except those I was wearing. What few sentimental touchstones I’d kept over the years—a photo of my biological parents, my degree from the Air Force Academy, the first pilot wings I ever pinned on my uniform, my marriage certificate to Savannah— were all gone. All I had left was the Duck, a truck with 176,000 miles on it, and a cat that showed me about as much loyalty as a hooker at a Shriners’ convention. Mrs. Schmulowitz offered to let me stay rent-free in her house for as long as I wanted, but the thought of spending even one night on her mohair sofa gave me hives. I thanked her for her kindness and said I’d make other arrangements.

  A news van from one of the local TV stations turned down the alley as we were talking and stopped in front of us. An on-air reporter less than half my age hopped out in a suit coat and tie, cargo shorts and running shoes. The top half of him looked like he was on Wall Str
eet; the bottom half, like he was heading off to play beach volleyball. He spewed his words like a high-velocity assault weapon.

  “What’s up folks Chip Pfeiffer Action News can you tell us what happened do you live here we’re doing a story for the five o’clock broadcast we heard it might be arson do you know why anybody would want to burn down this garage you mind if we get a few shots Heather do me a favor and start us off over there with a two-shot of me interviewing these people.”

  Chip’s videographer, Heather, was already roaming the backyard like she owned the place. She had close-cropped brown hair and thighs like a short-track speed skater. The firefighters had somehow managed to avoid Mrs. Schmulowitz’s precious geraniums while dousing her burning garage; peering through her viewfinder, Heather seemed to trample every one of them. Mrs. Schmulowitz seemed not to notice or care, dazzled as she was by the sudden presence of the news media.

  I was less than dazzled.

  “You’re on private property,” I said.

  “We’re just doing our job trying to report the news, sir,” Chip said.

  “What you’re doing is invading this nice lady’s privacy. And I’m about to invade your rectum with my foot because a) I don’t care for your attitude and b) you presume that microphone gives you the right to do whatever you want. I’ve got news for you. This just in: it doesn’t.”

  “It’s OK, Cordell,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said, making goo-goo eyes at Chip. “These sweet young people can film all they want.”

  “The first thing these sweet young people are going to do is apologize for nuking your flowers,” I said. “Then they’re going to courteously ask your permission to access your property.”

  Heather looked at me indignantly. Chip tried to stare me down, then realized I wasn’t screwing around. He swallowed down the lump in his throat, sufficiently cowed, and said deferentially to Mrs. Schmulowitz, “We’re very sorry for messing up your flowers, ma’am. My station will be happy to replace them. Would it be possible for us to get a few shots of your garage from inside your yard? We’d also like to interview you on-camera—if that’s OK with you.”