by Ward Larsen
But the doctor didn’t allow it. She worked herself into a lather, hands jabbing and hair flying. Davis wished she was in a hospital somewhere, setting a broken bone, giving an immunization, shining a light in somebody’s yellow eyes. There, if she felt the need to come unglued, she could vent at a nurse or another doctor. Maybe a difficult patient. That was the kind of conflict doctors were used to dealing with. Not squads of armed soldiers.
“Shut up,” Davis muttered.
The commander only stared at her, and Davis had a bad feeling. Every country has its indigenous equations of culture and morality. This woman was pressing hard against the local standard deviation. But there was another variable, something Davis had served long enough in uniform to understand. The dynamics of command. Discipline, particularly in a ragtag outfit like this, was a precarious thing. No officer could allow himself to be dressed down in front of his men by a civilian. Let alone a foreigner. Let alone a woman.
Davis had a very bad feeling.
Johnson must have sensed what he was thinking. “I’m telling you, don’t get in the middle of that. The military here doesn’t play by our rules. They don’t worry about judges or court-appointed lawyers, and it won’t matter if you’re an American or a pilot—whatever. That bunch will make you disappear.”
Davis didn’t respond. He was watching the officer’s hand. When he saw it edge toward his sidearm, Davis moved.
“Jammer!” Johnson whispered harshly.
Davis ignored it.
“That’s enough!” Davis yelled. He said it at maximum volume. Intonation, command. He might have been calling a formation of Academy cadets to attention. Only these weren’t cadets. Still, it had the desired effect.
Everyone looked.
Larry Green got Davis’ message just before lunch. It came via secure courier, forwarded by the CIA after they’d done their magic—unscrambled, cleansed, filtered. The flow of communications was something Green didn’t like, but he figured he had to choose his battles.
The message read:
NEED ALL AVAILABLE BACKGROUND ON TWO DC-3S. TAIL NUMBERS N2012L AND X85BG. FULL BACKGROUND, INCIDENT REPORTS, OWNERSHIP HISTORY. ALSO NEED RADAR DATA AND 121.5 RECORDS FOR NIGHT OF CRASH. CHECK WITH U.S. NAVY/AIR FORCE.
Green read it again, and thought, You don’t ask for much, do you Jammer?
He wondered about the tail numbers. N2012L was the accident aircraft, but the second registration number meant nothing to Green. He dialed Darlene Graham’s number and was immediately put on hold. She had told him all requests were to go directly through her office. The director had been pleased when he’d told her that Davis had accepted the assignment. She had a lot of faith in the man, as did Green. The fact that there was nothing in the message about Black-star meant Davis hadn’t gotten into the hangar yet. But he’d find a way.
Green had been working with Davis for a long time. He had dressed him down more than once, and also put him up for commendations. There was a strange asymmetry to Jammer Davis. Investigating aircraft accidents could be delicate work. Intricate forensics, technical know-how, sensitive interviews with the next of kin. In that kind of environment, a blunderbuss like Davis would seem a surefire liability. Indeed, every time Green put Davis on an investigation he felt like he was pulling up a deck chair to a dangerous intersection, just waiting for the crash. On one occasion, Davis had blown up a mothballed airplane to see how a pressure bulkhead would fail. He hadn’t gotten any kind of permission or permit—he’d just packed a jet with explosives and blown it up. Green had once seen Davis climb into a bulldozer and push around sections of wreckage until he found the defective engine fan blade he was after. Then there was the full-bird colonel who had ended up in the hospital with a broken jaw because he’d tried to order a lieutenant to fly a jet that Davis was convinced wasn’t safe. That had gotten Davis busted from lieutenant colonel to major, the rank at which he’d retired. It had also saved the taxpayers an F-16 and probably the lieutenant’s life.
Wherever he went, Davis managed to piss somebody off. But he got away with it, because he was right. At least, every time Green had seen him in action. In some Neanderthal-savant way, Jammer Davis knew where to stick his big nose. And once he had a scent, there was no shaking him. You might as well light off an Atlas V rocket, then try to keep it on the pad.
Green wished he was there to watch. Right now there was probably only one person in all Sudan who even knew Davis, and Bob Schmitt hadn’t known he was coming. So a little airline had readied its books for inspection, stacked manuals on desks, and double-checked logbooks. All the procedural ducks were lined up in a nice neat row, everyone standing at attention with belt buckles polished. Ready for the usual ICAO inspector, a button-down overseer of standards and protocols. A stiff professional in a stiff suit. What they’d get was Jammer Davis.
With the phone still clenched between his ear and shoulder, Larry Green smiled. It’ll be like a meteor strike on Walden Pond.
His long strides gave Davis presence, a sense of purpose. It also gave him no more than twenty seconds to figure out what the hell to do.
Option 1: Get in the commander’s face, tell him to take his boys and shove off. That might work. More likely he’d get arrested. Worst case, shot. Davis kept up his pace as he struggled for Option 2. His trajectory was taking him to the tiny gap between the officer and the doctor. The soldiers were all frozen in place, watching Davis with the same regard they might give to an oncoming steamroller.
He noticed that much of the cargo was stenciled with U.N. logos. When he was two steps away, Davis yanked out his NTSB ID and quickly fanned it in front of him. Nobody looked at the credentials because they were busy watching him. Jammer Davis knew how to intimidate. He had the size and the stare. He also had the perfect voice, a bass reverberation that passed right through soft tissue and lodged in people’s spines.
“Davis, with the U.N. Inspector General’s office,” he said. “Whatever the hell is going on here, it stops right now.” He put out an arm and barged in between the two like a referee separating a pair of prize-fighters. Once established, Davis made his choice. He half turned to face the doctor.
“You,” he said stridently, “will back off and let these men finish their work!”
Her eyes went wide with surprise. She’d been expecting an ally, a knight in shining armor.
“Who are you to tell me this?” she responded in English.
Good, Davis thought, she speaks English.
He turned to the officer and got his first close look. A gaunt man, he was leering at Davis with reddened, dopey eyes. The eyes of an addict. There was no name over his breast pocket, no embroidered block letters or acetate tag. The boss-man did, however, have a distinguishing mark—a scar on one cheek. He seemed to hold his chin at an angle to put it on display, probably hoping Davis would think he’d gotten it in a knife fight or some kind of duel to the death. It might have been that. But more likely it was a vestige of something less dramatic. A car wreck or a drunken father.
If the man was worried about Davis being less than a yard away, it didn’t show. He was confident. He was also stupid. Jammer Davis had joined the United States Marines right out of high school, had boxed at the Academy. He’d learned a lot about close-in combat from some of the most skilled practitioners in a very nasty business. Right now, Davis was close enough to render the man’s sidearm useless. He figured he could break this doped-up loser’s neck in about two seconds, and based on what he’d seen so far, tomorrow he wouldn’t feel particularly bad about it. But there was more to consider. To be exact, seven considerations, all with rifles and machine pistols. The other men here might be soldiers in the loosest sense, but a disciplined fighting unit they were not. If Davis took out their leader, the guy with the quickest trigger finger would have the inside track to becoming the new alpha dog.
Having figured all that out, Davis addressed the woman again.
“You have no authority here,” he said. Which implied that perha
ps he did. “These men should finish their work. I’m sure the supplies will be put to good use.”
Scarface appeared to contemplate this, which suggested that he too spoke at least some English. His hand was still near the handle of his revolver, but more relaxed now. Davis looked right at the guy, then rolled his eyes in the direction of the doctor and shook his head, the way guys did to say, Women! Two clouded eyes came alight, like searchlights out of a mist. The boss man smiled and said something to his men. It was probably an off-color joke, something sexist and demeaning. Scarface chuckled, and when he did, everyone seemed to lighten up.
Everyone except the doctor.
Davis saw her reaching a boil, so before her lid came off he reached out and grabbed her by the arm. Grabbed hard, his fingers clamping like a vise. The doctor winced, and again Davis thought, Good. She had gotten so wrapped up in her objective that she’d lost her situational awareness. Pilots simply referred to it as SA. Knowing what was going on all around you. In aerial combat, you had to do a lot more than just fly your own jet. You had to know where your adversaries were, where your wingman was, the height of the mountains below and the clouds above. Sometimes it was a lot of information, a big picture that had to be whittled down and prioritized. That was what this passionate Italian doctor had lost. The big picture. She’d been so incensed by the hijacking, all she’d wanted to do was challenge it, not study the odds. But now her arm hurt, and that made her forget about her precious truckload of supplies. Made her consider a lower level on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Davis leaned closer to her, and twisted his head so no one else could quite see. He whispered, “Faites-confiancemoi. Laissez lui allez.”
The doctor stared at him. She was certainly educated. And Italy was right next to France, so there was an excellent chance that she would understand the French phrase. Trust me. Let it go.
She did. Or at least she calmed down. Davis eased his grip on her arm. Let her go.
The soldiers switched the load from one truck to the other with quick efficiency, like they’d done it all before. Davis took note of what they were stealing. Blankets, medicine, bulk food. Most would probably still make its way to those in need. There was just another middleman now. That’s what Davis told himself, again and again.
The doctor backed away, clearly not wanting to watch. She went to the driver’s side of her truck, still seething, but quiet. She had her SA back. When the thieves were done with the transfer, the officer looked at Davis and gave him a knowing grin, along with a two-fingered salute. Davis returned it, rather subtly, with a one-fingered variant. The little convoy drove off at a more leisurely pace than it had arrived. Sitting in the passenger seat of the jeep, the commander looked smug. Davis wondered briefly if he had made the wrong choice, wondered if he should have broken the guy’s neck after all. The other men might have cheered. Might even have made Davis the new squad leader. Yeah, he thought, that’s just what I need. My own private army.
Once the trucks were out of sight, he turned to the doctor. She was at the running board going over a clipboard with a pencil, probably checking off what she’d lost, item by item. Damage control. When she was done, she set the clipboard on the front fender, came over, and stood right in front of Davis. With a big windmill swing, she slapped his face hard.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Six hours.
That was how long Davis had been in-country, and he already had five confirmed enemies. Three Arab thieves, Schmitthead, and now an overwrought Italian physician. At that rate, by the end of next week—No, he decided, no need to go there.
The doctor’s slap hadn’t mitigated anything—she still looked furious. He found himself wondering what she’d look like if she smiled.
He said, “You’re welcome.”
Way too early for a smile. Just anger. Or, best case, maybe quizzical anger now.
“I will not thank you. You have done me no favors,” she said. Her English was decent, albeit laced with a hard accent.
He said, “You were digging a pretty deep hole for yourself. I got you out.”
She didn’t reply, only stood there. Impassive. Defiant. Pretty. He caught her scent, and she didn’t smell like any doctor he’d ever known. No olfactory assault of iodine or antiseptic soap or latex gloves. She smelled sweet, like rain on jasmine.
“Look,” he said, “I’m sorry you lost that shipment, but I’m sure there will be others.”
“Not for weeks. In that time, do you know how many of my patients will suffer? How many could die?”
Davis took this for a rhetorical question. Still, he had a good reply. “And how many would suffer or die if those thugs had taken you away? I haven’t been here long, but I’d bet that losing a good doctor is a lot worse than losing a few crates of supplies.”
He thought that might hit home, the idea that she could have been taken away by the South Khartoum Crew. If so, it didn’t show. She was still frosty, even in this heat.
“So who were those guys?” he asked.
“I have never seen them, but other aid workers have warned me about them. They have a warehouse and come here occasionally to keep it full.”
“Are they really soldiers?”
“Technically, yes. Men like that have been terrorizing this country for years. Lately, however, killing, rape, and mutilation have become unfashionable, so they have turned to more practical endeavors.”
“Like stealing shipments of medicine to sell on the black market?”
“Yes. And they will keep doing it until someone stands up to them.”
Davis said nothing
“Who are you?” she asked. “You are clearly American, but you are not with the U.N.—I know all the U.N. people here.”
“I’m here to investigate an aircraft accident.” He gestured to the DC-3 parked nearby. “One of those went down two weeks ago.”
She glanced at the airplane and seemed to thaw. “Yes, I heard. It was a terrible tragedy. I knew one of the pilots.”
“Really?”
“He helped at our clinic once or twice.”
“Tell me, doctor, does FBN Aviation bring in all your shipments?”
“Most of them. But we sometimes use other carriers.”
Davis eyed the clipboard sitting on the front fender. He walked over and picked it up. It was interesting, not some standard-issue aid agency request form, but an actual load manifest from the airplane, or at least a copy of it.
Looking over the list, Davis asked, “Would you have had an ohmmeter in that shipment?”
“A what?”
“It says here there was an ohmmeter. You know, for measuring electrical resistance.”
“No, that would not have been ours. We receive only part of each shipment. FBN is too lazy to create separate manifests, so they make copies and highlight our portion of each delivery in yellow.” She stepped over and pulled a finger down the list. “See? The rest goes elsewhere.”
“Really? Like where?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, when you unload your cargo and there’s a secondary load on these FBN flights, where does it go?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Sometimes the airplanes stay here when we leave. Other times they are towed away.”
Davis could just see the FBN Aviation hangar from where they were standing. “Have you ever seen one of these airplanes towed over there? To that hangar in the distance?”
“Once or twice, perhaps.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve ever been over there? Inside?”
“No. Why are you so concerned with this? Has it to do with your investigation?”
“I don’t know. Tell me, do you keep these load sheets on file?”
“We keep a permanent record, yes.”
“At the clinic?”
She nodded.
“You know,” Davis said, “it might help my investigation if I could see them.”
Her mouth parted immediately, about to say no, but the
n she hesitated. “You want my help? After the damage you have done?”
“Maybe I can make it up to you. You told me another pilot helped at your clinic.”
“The other pilot was a decent man.”
Davis said nothing.
The doctor stared at him, made some kind of survey. “However,” she said, “you might be useful.”
“I can be very useful.”
“If you come, will you come to work?”
Davis considered that. He had an airplane crash to solve, a lost drone to find. “I have a lot on my plate right now,” he said, “but I could make some time. Let’s call it a trade—I help you at the clinic, and you let me take a look at those records.”
“Very well. Tomorrow morning.” She gave him directions to the camp.
“Twenty miles,” he remarked. “I don’t have a car.”
“You seem resourceful.”
“When I need to be.”
For the first time he saw something different in her eyes, a glimmer that wasn’t sharp or accusing. There was a crease at the corner of her mouth. Light, even playful. The lady was stunning. Even better, she didn’t give a damn. Davis liked that. He watched her climb up to the driver’s seat of her empty truck. Watched her sidle into the cab and pull the door shut hard. Harder than she needed to.
He called through the open window. “By the way, my name’s Davis. Jammer Davis.”
She looked down, paused to make him wait. Like women did.
“Antonelli,” she finally said. “Dr. Regina Antonelli.”
With that, the truck jerked into gear and was gone. A thin cloud of blue smoke trailed behind, and that soon dissipated into a brilliant red sky as the horizon split the sun.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Davis woke at seven in the morning, sunlight streaming through cracks at the covered window. He heard the same noises you’d hear at any airport hotel in the world. Outside, the dawn patrol taxiing out for take-off. Inside, bumps and grinds from the plumbing as his neighbors showered and shaved.
