‘It might be tough for you,’ Ethan said. ‘I’m not saying you’re stupid or anything, but your English isn’t fantastic and you’d probably be behind the other kids because US11 isn’t exactly an elite school.’
‘My dad wouldn’t have it anyway,’ Andre said sadly. ‘I wish my life wasn’t so boring.’
There was a porter from the airfield waiting in the lobby. He glanced at his watch to indicate that Ethan was late, but even the youngest members of the Aramov family commanded respect around the Kremlin, so he didn’t complain.
The porter loaded the luggage into the back of a tiny truck which had originally been designed for loading bombs. Andre came along for the ride as they clattered away from the Kremlin, shuddering over gravel until reaching a much smoother taxiway at the edge of the airfield.
They had to hang back while a big Ilyushin cargo plane blasted off, then they drove through a haze of jet fumes and along the main runway towards a little Yak 40 jet.
In standard configuration the Yak could seat twenty-two, but after a quick high five and a goodbye to Cousin Andre, Ethan walked up ten steps into a cabin with just seven large armchairs and a bar fitted with crystal decanters.
The plane had been built in Russia in the early 1970s, as VIP transport for the Soviet communist party. The aircraft’s yellowed interior panels and noisy air vents gave its vintage away, but the carpets seemed new and the smart leather chairs had DVD players in the armrests, along with iPod sockets and noise-cancelling headphones.
The cockpit door was open and Ethan leaned in to look at a short grey-haired pilot running through pre-flight checks with his much younger assistant.
‘Just so you know I’m on board,’ Ethan said warmly, as he gave a little wave. ‘What’s our flying time to Sharjah?’
The co-pilot tapped one of the charts on his clipboard. ‘We’re looking at the weather patterns. I’ll let you know when I’ve worked it out.’
‘Are we expecting any other passengers?’ Ethan asked.
‘Looks like he’s arriving now,’ the co-pilot said.
Ethan looked out the front of the cockpit and gulped as he saw Leonid Aramov lifting a small case out the back of his Mercedes.
15. DIVERSION
Alfie sat in the meet and greet area in Sharjah International Airport, with a half-drunk Coke bottle in hand and his baggage sprawled in front of him. He’d been through plenty of airports, but this was the first one where the departure board offered flights to Chebalynsk, Krasnodar, Turbat, Dushanbe and a whole bunch of other places he’d never heard of.
After waiting around for more than two hours the haggard DESA Chemistry teacher who’d been sent to pick Alfie and Ethan up had gone off, hoping to find an airport official who might know why Ethan’s flight hadn’t arrived.
As soon as the teacher was out of sight, Alfie pulled his iPhone and called Amy.
‘Where the hell is he?’ Alfie asked. ‘Ethan should have been here at least two hours ago.’
Amy sounded flustered. ‘We tracked the flight transponder. The aircraft left the Kremlin on time. It stuck to the filed flight plan for forty-five minutes before deviating.’
‘Deviating?’ Alfie asked, sounding frustrated as he glanced back to make sure that the teacher was still out of sight.
‘Changing course,’ Amy explained. ‘It moved briefly into an air corridor used by the Russian military, then the transponder got switched off.’
‘What, it disappeared from radar?’
‘Not radar,’ Amy explained. ‘Civilian aircraft have transponders that transmit an identity signal. It makes it easy for air traffic control and other pilots to know exactly where they are. You can even download apps to track civilian aircraft movements on your mobile. I’ve called my head office in Dallas and they’re trying to work out what has happened.’
‘Could the plane have crashed?’ Alfie asked. ‘Or made an emergency landing?’
‘That’s not impossible,’ Amy said. ‘But we know that the Aramovs have powerful connections inside the Russian Air Force and we suspect that the aircraft deliberately diverted into Russian military airspace. I’ve asked the United States Air Force to try and find out where the plane went using their radar or satellite logs, but the bottom line is, Ethan Aramov won’t be arriving in Sharjah any time soon.’
‘So where does that leave me?’ Alfie asked.
‘It’s possible the plane could be dropping cargo at a Russian airport and will turn up in Sharjah a few hours late,’ Amy said. ‘Right now, you just have to sit and wait. Ning’s already at DESA and I expect your teacher will get fed up of waiting for Ethan’s flight and take you back to the school on your own.’
‘This mission better not be a bust,’ Alfie said. ‘After I spent so many hours reading about chess.’
*
Leonid had smacked Ethan out of his seat as soon as the little jet took off from the Kremlin. He’d then stripped out his pockets, snatched his watch and left him on the floor with a swollen eye, a squash ball rammed in his mouth and no explanation.
Ethan reckoned they’d flown for about three hours as he clanked down aircraft steps with his mouth still taped and Leonid wrenching his arm behind his back. The windswept landing strip had nothing but a long-dead radar dish, a hut with the door missing and a gravel road that vanished over the horizon. A second Aramov-owned Yak 40 jet stood a couple of hundred metres away, its fuselage stained with dirt and hastily repaired bullet holes.
When they reached the bottom step, Leonid let Ethan go and the thirteen-year-old immediately pulled down the front of his jeans and boxers and moaned with relief as he started pissing in the reddish dirt.
‘Should have told me if you wanted to pee,’ Leonid said, as he smirked at Ethan’s discomfort.
There was a man striding across the dirt from another plane. He was very large, and black-skinned in the truest sense. He wore a shabby pale blue suit and gold sunglasses.
‘This your sister’s boy?’ he asked, shouting over the sound of idling jet engines as he shook hands with Leonid. The tone and body language indicated that the two men were close.
‘Good to see you again, Kessie,’ Leonid said, speaking poor English as they bumped fists. ‘Are my instructions clear?’
‘Clear as a bell,’ Kessie said, as Ethan looked around at nothing but dirt and a couple of knobbly hills. ‘I look after the boy and make sure he says the right things if his grandmother calls to ask about his school.’
‘And keep him out of sight,’ Leonid added. ‘My mother’s been in this game a long time. She has eyes and ears all over. If she finds out too soon, we’re both dead men.’
‘How long do you reckon?’ Kessie asked.
‘It’ll take a while to get control of all my mother’s financial assets,’ Leonid said. ‘The boy might make a useful bargaining chip if things go wrong, but once all the Aramov bank accounts are under my control . . .’
Leonid ended the sentence by sweeping his hand across his own throat and making a gurgling sound.
‘You want a video?’ Kessie asked.
Leonid looked at Ethan and smiled. ‘Not that I don’t trust you, but videos can be faked.’
‘Lower jaw?’ Kessie suggested.
Leonid nodded. ‘Yeah, hack off his lower jaw and send it to Kuban at the Sharjah office. I’ll wire the other half of your money as soon as we receive it.’
Ethan had been scared before, but never like this, trapped in the middle of nowhere with two guys talking about his corpse as if his death was just a formality.
‘Always a pleasure doing business,’ Kessie said as he grabbed Ethan by the back of his neck. ‘You’re not gonna give me trouble, are you, boy?’
Ethan couldn’t speak with the squash ball wedging his tongue to the bottom his mouth, but he was shaking with fear and had tears welling in his eyes. Leonid gave a little salute as he started walking backwards towards his plane.
‘Nice knowing you, nephew,’ Leonid said. ‘And when you get to heaven
, tell your ma to go screw herself.’
*
As an employee of American intelligence, Amy had access to the world’s best radar and satellite networks. But there was no single resource she could use to track the path of an aircraft.
While Alfie and Ning spent a first uncertain night at DESA just in case Ethan turned up, Amy and Ryan sat up studying a US Air Force radar plot of everything that had moved over Central Asia that day.
There were too many aircraft movements for it to be of any use, but an hour later an updated version came through with the tracks of planes with registered flight plans removed. After paying the hotel’s night manager two nights’ wages to have a printer brought up to her room, Amy printed a hard copy and Ryan highlighted a couple of dozen flight paths.
Amy overlaid the flight paths with coordinates of known airfields and sent in a request for the most up-to-date satellite images. It took less than fifteen minutes for two dozen high-resolution images to come through. Some airfields had cloud cover, some had no images at all because the spy satellite scheduled to fly over that afternoon had malfunctioned, but the odds worked in their favour.
‘Here,’ Ryan said, scrambling across Amy’s crumpled bed and shoving a colour printout between her face and the laptop.
The image was hazy, but unmistakably showed the outlines of two Yak 40 jets parked a few hundred metres apart.
‘It’s a remote region of southern Russia. The nearest city is called Klsvodsk,’ Ryan explained. ‘The photo was taken late afternoon, which fits in perfectly with the time that the transponder dropped off Ethan’s plane.’
Amy nodded. ‘Has to be. You can even see a smudge of the Clanair livery on the tail. I can’t see any refuelling gear or even a car in the photograph, so I’d guess that these planes just landed, switched cargo or passengers and then took off again.’
‘Exactly,’ Ryan said. ‘How often is the area imaged?’
‘Since it’s Russia and close to the border with Georgia, we’re probably in luck.’
The frequency with which US spy satellites photograph an area depends on how politically sensitive it is. And since Russia had invaded Georgia in 2008, Amy was able to download high-resolution images of the airstrip taken at ninety-second interludes.
The hotel Internet connection wasn’t the fastest, but Amy had over twenty images which she could click through on her laptop like a flip book.
It seemed that the plane had landed and waited for twelve minutes for the second Yak to arrive. The resolution from the satellite pictures wasn’t high enough to identify faces, but the sequence showed two smudges coming out of one plane, meeting a smudge from another plane, and then two smudges getting on the plane that landed first.
‘I’d bet my right boob that that’s Ethan being transferred to the other plane,’ Amy said.
‘One of Leonid Aramov’s goons must have kidnapped him,’ Ryan said, shaking his head sadly.
‘But why transfer him to another plane?’ Amy asked. ‘Why not just kill him?’
‘Good question,’ Ryan said. ‘Maybe we’ll get the answer when we see where the two planes flew next.’
It only took a few moments to look at the radar traces and see that the plane that had taken Ethan from the Kremlin made a short-hop flight to another Russian airfield, then turned on a transponder identifying the aircraft as a different call sign and flew to a resort town near the Black Sea.
‘Leonid Aramov has been known to gamble there,’ Amy said.
‘So you think it might be Leonid who boarded the plane with Ethan?’ Ryan asked.
Amy shrugged. ‘Maybe. If the CIA has an agent in that area I can get them to try and find out if Leonid’s around.’
‘OK, let’s try and track the other plane.’
Amy quickly found that an Aramov-owned Yak 40 had left Bulgaria early that morning. Ryan traced the aircraft registration and found a couple of photographs on the CIA database.
‘It says it’s a long-range variant,’ Ryan said, as he showed Amy the photos on his laptop. ‘See the bulge under the fuselage? That’s extra fuel tanks.’
‘Pity,’ Amy said. ‘It widens the area to which Ethan could have flown. And I think the pilot diddled us in the mountains.’
‘You can’t find it?’
Amy shook her head. ‘It’s mountainous between Georgia and Russia. I can track the plane south from the airfield, but once it gets into the mountains it vanishes. If it flew low enough, radar won’t have picked it up and there’ll be nothing in the radar logs.’
‘Shit,’ Ryan said as Amy zoomed out the map on her laptop screen and drew a big circle with her fingertips.
‘As the Yak has the extra fuel tanks, Ethan might end up anywhere from Siberia in the north, to central Africa in the south. Europe’s within reach but unlikely, or he might even have flown back towards Kyrgyzstan.’
‘Is there anything we can do?’ Ryan asked.
‘The CIA has analysts who specialise in tracking the paths of aircraft, but it’s not an exact science. I once asked them to try tracking a couple of Aramov drug-smuggling flights. It took them days to analyse the data and all they came back with was a range of twenty possible destinations.’
Ryan slumped backwards on to the edge of Amy’s bed and kicked out at a floor lamp. ‘We’ve lost Ethan,’ he spluttered. ‘And if Leonid kills him this is all our fault. We never should have let Irena’s people get hold of him after his mum was murdered.’
16. FUEL
Irena Aramov built her smuggling operation by buying ex-Soviet Air Force planes on the cheap. But maintaining these old birds could be expensive and she’d shrewdly calculated that it was more profitable to skimp on maintenance, forge airworthiness documents and suffer an occasional crash than to pay top dollar for spare parts and maintenance.
Even by Aramov standards, Ethan found himself flying in a piece of junk. While the bullet holes on the outside had been patched, the interior of the small jet looked like someone had used it to film the final sequence of an action movie, with the trim shredded and bloody fingermarks on the interior panels.
A dozen seats had been ripped out to create a cargo bay. There were boxes of junk and cartridge shells that clattered about every time the plane shuddered and to make Ethan’s in-flight experience absolutely perfect, he’d been handcuffed to a seat that stank of urine and whose broken plastic frame jarred his lower back.
After three hours in the air the jet made a rapid descent and a night landing at a tarmac strip lit by a ground crew holding phosphorous flares. Kessie stepped out and began a noisy conversation with men Ethan couldn’t see, while a refuelling crew attached a hose under the wing.
The air blowing through the open cabin door was tropical hot and men began running up and down the steps bringing on overstuffed sports bags and big plastic tubs marked as bovine antibiotics, but which Ethan suspected contained something far less legal.
After this came a more gruesome cargo – and an explanation for the blood smeared over the plane’s interior. First came a clear sack filled with curved Ibex horns, then uncured grey pelts from a wolf-like creature, followed by unmistakable spotted skins peeled from cheetahs. Lastly, a fresh lion pelt with gory head attached came aboard.
Even though the goods were loaded, Kessie was still out on the dirt strip, engaged in bitter haggling with a posse of men and doling out bricks of some obscure currency.
‘Onwards!’ Kessie told the two-man crew. He looked pleased with himself as he pulled up the door.
Each pelt was loosely wrapped in clear plastic, but the air in the small plane now had a strong gamey smell and dozens of flies whizzed about. With his hands cuffed to the armrest, Ethan had no way to flick off the bugs crawling over his neck and a huge metallic-green blowfly that was determined to drink from the corner of his eye.
Kessie found Ethan’s discomfort amusing, but as the plane accelerated for take-off he whipped a can of fly-spray from the pouch in front of his seat and gave it a blast.
‘You know you’re in Africa when you’ve got flies on your face,’ Kessie said, as he cracked one of his enormous white-toothed smiles.
*
They landed again after another two hours in the air and parked on an uneven strip with Kalashnikov-toting guards surrounding the plane. From what Ethan overheard, there was some kind of civil war in the area and it was better to make the last leg of the journey in daylight when the Aramov plane wouldn’t be mistaken for an enemy fighter.
Ethan wondered how deep into Africa he’d travelled. Breathing was hard with the strong smell and the squash ball wedged in his mouth and he was too scared to sleep. He tried to work out where he was, but while he knew the names of most African countries he had no clue how they all fitted together on a map.
The final leg of the journey began at sunrise and lasted less than an hour. As the jet dropped below morning cloud, Ethan stared out the window at a medium-sized town with lines of copper-roofed houses radiating out of the town centre on dirt roads.
This built-up area thinned out as they made their final approach towards a tarmac strip with proper runway lights and neat yellow markings.
The airstrip was surrounded by metal-fenced enclosures containing different species, from mundane herds of deer-like animals to more exotic beasts such as rhinos, zebras and giraffes. Besides a selection of corrugated metal barns there was a colonial-style ranch house which bristled with aerials and satellite dishes.
‘How do you like my ranch?’ Kessie said proudly, as he leaned across the aisle and ripped the tape from Ethan’s mouth.
Ethan immediately began coughing. He’d not drunk since Leonid wedged in the squash ball more than twelve hours earlier and as Kessie helped Ethan spit it out his tongue felt like a scouring pad scratching bone-dry cheeks.
‘This is mine, as far as you can see,’ Kessie explained. ‘You’ll just be another animal in a cage.’
CHERUB: Guardian Angel Page 10
