by Ward Larsen
Davis grabbed the hammer and got the old man’s attention. He leaned toward the transom and banged the hammer three times on the engine’s lower housing. He handed over the hammer, held up three fingers, and jabbed his thumb in an upward motion. Three bangs, I come up.
The skipper nodded like he got it.
Davis put on his mask and stood in the gear, his legs bending in rhythm with the rocking boat. He reached down and picked up the coral he’d taken from the beach and wedged the rocks into his pockets. This would act as his weight belt, to be discarded in the event of negative buoyancy. He put the screwdriver in a back pocket, but decided to leave the hacksaw and bottles here. He’d come back later if he needed them. That was it. Davis was breaking pretty much every rule in the dive book. He didn’t have fins or decompression tables or a wrist computer. His divemaster was a hundred-year-old Sudanese fisherman who didn’t speak the same language. Davis didn’t even have a diver’s most critical safety instrument—a buddy.
He nodded toward the old man.
The old man nodded back and leaned to the port side of the boat to act as a counterweight. He was smiling again.
Davis turned to starboard. One giant step later, he splashed into the crystalline blue water.
“Have you seen Davis today?” Khoury asked, already knowing the answer. His chief pilot was on the other end of the phone.
“No,” Schmitt said, “the last time I saw him was Friday, when he got back from the Congo.”
“Very well,” said Khoury. “But if you should see him, tell him to contact me. I wish to speak to him.”
Schmitt remained silent, not inquiring about the subject. Khoury’s doubts about the man were fed once again.
“Tell me about tomorrow’s flight,” he continued. “Are you prepared?”
There was a long pause. “Yeah, I’ll be ready. But I don’t like it. It’d be nice to know what the hell is going on. First all my pilots are either deported or disappear, and now we’re flying again?”
“I have told you, the flight tomorrow involves a joint military project between Sudan and Egypt. You will be delivering a specially instrumented airplane to an airfield near Cairo.”
“The airfield you showed me on the map?” Schmitt asked.
“Yes. After arriving, transportation has been arranged to take you to Cairo. All your exit papers are in order.”
“And the rest of my money?”
“Did you not receive the first installment?”
“I called the bank. It’s there.”
“Good. And once you have completed your contract, the rest of your severance will follow.”
“Three days ago you told me we’d be hiring soon. Now FBN is shutting down?”
“Enough!” Khoury barked. “I do not answer to you. We have been more than generous. If you would rather, I can send Hassan right now. He has matchless talents when it comes to escorting malcontents to the door.”
“All right,” Schmitt said. “I’ll be there bright and early. What am I going to do for a copilot?”
“Achmed has returned, praise be to Allah.”
“Achmed?” Another long silence, then, “Yeah, what a blessing.”
Khoury hung up and sighed deeply. He wished he did not have to rely on Schmitt, but there was simply no other way. None of his more loyal pilots were up to the task. Achmed would at least take the copilot’s seat to monitor Schmitt and make sure he did nothing destructive.
A knock from the inner hangar door startled Khoury. Muhammad had gone home for the day, so it could only be one person.
“Come, Fadi.”
The engineer entered. Khoury thought he looked tired and haggard, even more so than usual. He felt a pang of concern.
“I have finished, sheik. All is ready.”
Khoury rose and embraced the young man, a gesture of goodwill that was truly heartfelt. “One day to spare. You have done well, Fadi. Allah smiles upon us.”
“Yes, sheik.”
Khoury kept an arm around Jibril’s shoulder and led him to a chair.
“There is something I must ask you,” Jibril said, taking a seat.
“Anything.”
“My part here will soon be done.”
“Yes, and you have performed brilliantly.”
“Afterward …” Jibril hesitated, “Yasmin worries where I will find work.”
“Fadi, a man of you talents will never be wasted.”
“But you see, my wife wishes to return to the West. I know I can find work there, yet—”
“You worry that what happens tomorrow will be tied to us,” Khoury suggested. “Do not be concerned, my son. We know how unforgiving the Israelis can be, so we have gone to great lengths to ensure that this strike can never be brought back to us. The Mossad may buzz with anger, but nothing can ever be proven. That is the beauty of using American hardware, don’t you see?”
“Yes, of course. I understand that.”
There was more than a trace of guilt in Jibril’s tone, the kind of emotion Khoury was expert at recognizing. “So what more could there be?” Khoury asked. “You will be able to find work anywhere.”
Jibril shook his head. “My concern is not for my work, sheik. You see, Yasmin and I are expecting our first child soon. How will I … how will I raise him to be a good Muslim in America or England?”
A relieved Khoury said, “Fadi, Fadi. I am acquainted with many other imams. Indeed, you were recommended to me by the imam in Virginia, were you not?”
Jibril nodded.
“Then trust that I can put you in contact with followers of the faith wherever you go. They will guide you, make your path to a new life smooth. Allah has no limitations, Fadi. He does not exist only in certain corners of the world. He is everywhere. Even those in America can be His children.”
Khoury saw his words hit home. This was what Jibril wanted to hear. He looked truly relieved, and his tiredness was gone in an instant.
“Yes, you are right. I must go tell Yasmin.” He jumped up from his chair, but Khoury put a firm hand to his shoulder and eased him back down.
“You cannot go to your apartment, Fadi. Not today.”
“But I have not seen Yasmin in three days.”
“Fadi! You know the importance of what we are doing. For every-one’s sake, it is better that you sleep here tonight. There can be no distractions whatsoever.”
Jibril sighed aloud.
“Tomorrow we will celebrate a great victory. Then you can go to Yasmin, tell her of our success. The two of you will plan a great future for your child, and I promise to do everything in my power to help.”
“Yes, sheik. Thank you.” Jibril retreated to the work area.
When he was gone, Khoury took a deep breath. He eyed the cabinet that held his stash of whiskey, but for once ignored it. Instead he crossed the room and pulled back one slat on the window blind. Hassan’s shoulder was there by the door. Khoury felt a strange coldness, and he let the slat fall.
In the beginning, General Ali’s man had been a comfort. Now Khoury was less sure. Yesterday he’d seen Hassan’s work. The two Americans, Johnson and Boudreau, had been rounded up and brought in. Hassan had taken charge and beaten the men severely before handing them over to General Ali’s men.
Schmitt and Jibril, the other links to America, still had parts to play for another day. Four Americans, altogether—two pilots, a mechanic, and an engineer. Soon, the general’s men might round up Davis as a fifth. Then all would be situated for the photographers, posthumously if necessary, amid the remnants of FBN Aviation—a hangar and the wrecked shell of an airplane. The standard of proof, as presented by the new Sudanese government, would be incontrovertible. Everything was going as planned for the big show. Indeed, that was how Khoury viewed it—as if it were a major Hollywood production.
He eyed his cabinet again, and this time succumbed. Opening the bottle, Khoury poured a generous bracer to quell his nerves. He took a liberal sip, allowing the drink to swirl in his mouth, and clo
sed his eyes. Unfortunately, the vision that came to mind did nothing to soothe his frayed edges—Hassan looming ominously at his threshold. Khoury had always thought himself a shrewd man, one who retained command of situations. But he now feared that he had lost a degree of control. For all the potential ahead, he remained at General Ali’s mercy. The man had made a great many promises. He had supported the concept of an “Imam of State,” a position that, leveraged properly, would enhance Khoury’s following overnight by a factor of a hundred. Alternately, Khoury had been offered the ministry of his choice. But for all the general’s assurances, there was one outstanding dilemma, one quirk of fate that left Khoury hanging on a precipice. It involved his mother.
By her blood, Rafiq Khoury, director and CEO of FBN Aviation, was himself half American.
Davis decided the reef was aptly named, because as soon as the bubbles cleared away the first thing he saw was a shark. And not just any shark, but a full-grown tiger with its blunt body and lateral stripes. Cruising twenty feet below, the fish was bigger than Davis by a factor of two. It swam with an undulating side-to-side motion, slow and arrogant, as creatures at the top of the food chain tended to move.
Davis had been fascinated by sharks as a young boy, and had read every book he could get his hands on to learn about them. He knew that sharks possessed excellent receptors for motion, able to detect the slightest thrash or vibration from a wounded fish. Davis wondered if the big beast could sense his elevated heart rate and respiration right now. If so, it wasn’t making an impression. Sharks preparing to feed exhibit a distinct, agitated swimming motion—hunched spine, pectoral fins down, sharp spasms in the stroke. The huge fish lumbering by showed none of that. He—Davis could only think of it as a he—simply looked on with disinterest at the puny six-and-a-half-foot creature that had just fallen into its reef. The tiger glided by no more than ten feet away, its dead starboard eye both uninterested and unafraid. Even so, Davis watched closely as the big fish moved away, watched until it faded to nothing in the hazy submarine horizon.
He turned his attention to the wreckage and started down. His regulator had a minor leak, and so with each breath he sucked in a trace of salt water. As he descended, Davis couldn’t help but be mesmerized by the reef’s beauty, an endless array of color and movement. Schools of brightly colored fish swirled over coral heads while sea fans swayed back and forth in rhythm with the currents. The reef also had its sounds, a constant chatter of clicks and grunts, backed at the moment by the far-off pulse of a big engine, probably a freighter miles in the distance.
Davis approached the wreckage from behind, where the relatively unblemished tail section loomed up with its inverted T shape. The aircraft skin was clean, only a slight dusting of algae and silt. In a year’s time, barring any salvage, the transformation would be well under way. The ship’s metal skin would become encrusted with coral polyps and sponges. Crabs would nestle in the throttle quadrant, worms would take up residence in the pitot tubes, and a dizzying array of fish would find refuge in the hull. In ten years, Neptune’s claim would be complete—X85BG would be no more than substrate, an unrecognizable base for a new section of reef.
His regulator was still leaking as he neared the bottom. Without a depth gauge Davis couldn’t be exact, but he reckoned that his earlier estimate of fifty feet was accurate. He stopped at the tail section for a closer look. There was no obvious damage to the elevator or rudder surfaces, no popped rivets or warping that would indicate stress failure due to an aerodynamic overload. Davis saw a sizable dent on the starboard leading edge of the horizontal stabilizer, but this was most likely impact damage. When an aircraft hit the ocean at a hundred and fifty miles an hour, things got bent. He glided forward along the hull of the airplane, and detoured to the port side to inspect the engine. The propeller tips were uniformly bent back, which meant the engine was likely running on impact. There was no damage to the exhaust manifold to indicate an infrared missile strike. No apparent fire damage. The flight controls on the trailing edge of the wing—the subject of the bogus logbook write-up—showed no overt evidence of failure. Davis floated over the spine of the airplane to the starboard side, and looked it over with equal diligence, found all the same things. No smoking gun.
He moved forward toward the cockpit, gliding above what looked like a perfectly good airplane that had just flown into the sea. It did happen. Pilots could get disoriented by visual illusions. They could get distracted. Davis had once studied a case in which a perfectly airworthy wide-body airliner had flown into a swamp because the crew had gotten preoccupied by a failed twenty-cent lightbulb. Unfortunately, things like that were difficult to prove without flight data and voice recorders. Even then there was no guarantee. If Davis was going to find the cause of this crash with one brief inspection, it would have to be a slam dunk, something that stuck out like a full moon in a night sky.
Ten feet ahead of the wing joint, the airplane’s fuselage had buckled, another probable result of impact forces. At the top of the spine he saw a failure in the skin, a meter-long tear that allowed a clear look into the cargo bay. The light was sufficient to confirm that there had been no cargo, but Davis did notice a rack of electronic gear that was unlike anything he’d seen on the other FBN airplanes. He figured it might have to do with this particular airplane’s past life as an avionics testbed. But even that didn’t make complete sense. Normally any deadweight was stripped from airplanes, and old, unused avionics would certainly fall into that category.
A large moray eel had taken up residence in a crevice where an antenna had been ripped out, and Davis gave the creature a wide berth as he moved forward. A look at the cockpit was his best chance to nail down a cause, so the investigator in him was eager to keep moving. The human in him, however, wasn’t in such a hurry. In a crash like this, relatively gentle and intact, he might well find two pilots still strapped into their seats. The sea is never kind to flesh, human or otherwise. Over the last weeks, bacteria and scavengers had likely made substantial headway, so whatever he was about to see would be gruesome.
Then, five feet from the cockpit, he heard it.
Clang, clang, clang.
The signal from the boat. Davis had arranged it with the old man as a precaution, not imagining what it could really be used for. He looked fifty feet over his head and saw the bottom side of the old wooden boat. It wasn’t capsized or sinking or listing on a tsunami. Davis listened closely, but didn’t hear an approaching engine from a Sudanese naval patrol boat. If there even was a Sudanese navy.
Clang, clang, clang.
Davis took a deep breath, and that highlighted his second problem. His lungs had been working harder in the last few minutes, and he realized he was pulling air from the tank, sucking in the last hundred pounds of pressure. His air supply was down to a matter of minutes—three, maybe five. He would be heading up to the boat very soon, but Davis had to get one look at the flight deck before he surfaced.
Clang, clang, clang. Quicker and more insistent. Not good. The old man wasn’t the excitable type.
Davis approached the starboard side of the cockpit, which had taken the brunt of the impact. The copilot’s window was ripped away, leaving a hole large enough to swim through. But he didn’t have to swim through. The scene inside couldn’t have been more clear. Davis stopped breathing as he tried to comprehend what he was looking at. When he finally inhaled, the old regulator stole his breath in a decidedly more literal fashion.
In one gulp, his flow of air stopped, and the Red Sea came flooding into Davis’ lungs.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
He was flying an F-16 at 31,000 feet, an easy cross-country leg dodging cotton ball clouds and sightseeing. It was the annual deployment to an excercise called Red Flag, at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, and Davis was enjoying the day at five hundred knots. Fat, dumb, and happy.
He was the number four airplane in a flight of four, bringing up the rear as tail-end Charlie. That being the case, nobody was watching him
very closely. Not that they would have noticed anything had they been looking. The malfunction in his oxygen diluter had likely been there a long time, a tiny valve that had failed and wasn’t metering enough pure aviator-grade oxygen to the pilot’s mask. On your typical day, on a typical mission, not a big deal. Unnoticeable, really. But the second malfunction was another story, a fatal catalyst for the first. That was how most aircraft accidents happened. Not a single catastrophe, but a chain of small misfortunes that turn into something bigger. The pressurization leak in Davis’ cockpit that day was slow and insidious. If he had looked at the cabin pressure gauge at just the right time, he’d have seen it clear as day. But nobody looks at a cabin pressure gauge. Not without a reason. So, on that day so many years ago, Jammer Davis had become hypoxic.
For a victim, hypoxia is a hard thing to recognize because your brain gets fuzzy. You might notice tingling in your fingers, or get light-headed. But more often than not, you just fall asleep. In a single-seat fighter, five miles in the air, you snooze like a baby for the last two minutes of your life while your jet dives to the hard desert floor below. Your last landing, and not your best.
On that day so many years ago, it had all happened before anybody even knew there was a problem. Least of all Jammer Davis. But he hadn’t ended up as a hole in the caliche, hadn’t ended up as a statistic, because just as he was fading, just as his brain was shutting down, he’d heard a faint voice. It wasn’t the volume that had gotten his attention, or even the familiarity of Larry Green’s tone. What registered was the urgency.
“Jammer, go emergency oxygen! Emergency now, Corvet 4! Jammer, oxygen! Do it now, God dammit!”
A four-alarm bell in his brain.
On that beautiful summer day, a long time ago, Jammer Davis had learned about the deprivation of oxygen. He had snapped out of the deadly haze just long enough to slap the three levers on his oxygen controller to the emergency position: 100 percent O2 under positive pressure. When he did that, the world came back. But in the next seconds there was a moment he would never forget, a brief interlude of fear, of helplessness. He was hanging in limbo, coherent enough to know he was on the edge of death, yet knowing he might not be able to do anything about it.
