by Ward Larsen
That’s where Davis was right now. Only this time he didn’t have a panel of levers to slap and start a fresh flow of air. This time it was all in reverse. Deep in the Red Sea, coherent to begin, but knowing he would fade fast. The regulator in his mouth was useless, which meant the only air available was fifty feet over his head. His lungs were already heaving, pushing the wrong way to rid themselves of the quart of sea water he’d just sucked in.
Control was everything. He kicked toward the surface, wishing to hell he had fins.
Not fast enough.
Reaching down, Davis dumped the two lumps of coral he’d been using as ballast.
Not fast enough.
Control.
The tank and harness were slowing him down, dragging through the water like a giant sea anchor. He unsnapped one buckle, then a second, and the rig sank to the bottom. Free of the drag, Davis kicked for all he was worth. He was wearing only the mask now, and he looked up to find the surface. It looked like it was a mile away. His old scuba training kicked in. Exhale as you rise in an emergency ascent. Easy for the instructor to say in class. Even easy to practice in a swimming pool. Not so easy to do in open ocean when you hadn’t taken a breath in over a minute. When you were burning through oxygen as every muscle in your body strained for speed.
The surface was getting closer. The surface was fading to gray. He kept trying to exhale, but there was nothing left. Gray turned to black.
Then, finally, light.
Davis broke the surface, gasping and coughing up water. Sweet air filled his chest, hot and dry and wonderful. His vision came back and he fell still. Davis looked up and saw nothing but sky. Then the boat twenty yards away. He didn’t start swimming right away, only stayed where he was, treading water and breathing. Just breathing. The old man was standing in the boat and gesticulating wildly. The hammer was still in his hand. Davis remembered. Clang, clang, clang. What had that been all about? He looked out to sea, expecting to see a freighter or a battleship bearing down. He didn’t see anything.
The old man yelled something, but Davis couldn’t make it out. Not that he would understand anyway. He swam closer and soon had a hand hanging over the starboard gunnel.
“Haboob!” The skipper yelled, clearly concerned.
“What?”
“Haboob!”
He started gesturing for Davis to get in the boat. When he didn’t right away, the old guy pointed up at the sky and made wild motions, spinning and twirling. Like a whirling dervish. Davis wondered if a tornado was about to hit, but when looked up he saw a perfect dome of blue above, liquid and aqueous in its own right.
He tossed his mask into the boat and heaved himself aboard. That was when he saw it. To the south, a wall of brown that blocked out the horizon. Blocked out everything. It had to go up five thousand feet, maybe ten, the top edge boiling and churning like some massive oncoming wave. Davis had experienced desert storms before, north of here on the Saudi peninsula. He knew they were mostly wind, occasionally a trace of rain thrown in to torment the woeful, arid world below. He also knew that such storms could cover half a continent and last for days or even weeks.
The old man was already cranking the motor.
“Yeah,” Davis said, “maybe we should head home.”
Seconds later, their concrete block anchor had been hoisted aboard and they were doing exactly that.
The old man kept his eyes locked on the sky as the boat plowed through waves. There was concern in his eyes, so Davis was concerned too—men who spent their lives on the sea weren’t prone to idle worry. The wind had definitely picked up, maybe twenty knots, and three-foot seas slapped the bow, casting rhythmic sheets of salt spray over everything. The mountain of roiling brown was getting closer, almost blotting out the coastline.
Davis hadn’t made any gesture like he’d wanted to go back down and retrieve the scuba gear, and the old man didn’t seemed concerned about the loss. By leaving it there, Davis figured he was saving the owner a terrible death by drowning. And for his own purposes, Davis had no need to go back down on Shark Reef. The wreckage had told him all he needed to know. He knew why the airplane had crashed. And he had a pretty good idea of what was now sitting in FBN Aviation’s hangar. One look in the cockpit had made everything clear.
As he eyed the storm, Davis noticed the old man chewing khat again. When the skipper saw Davis looking, he held out a small plastic bag full of the dried leaves, a gesture not unlike a good ol’ boy from South Carolina offering up a pinch of chewing tobacco. What the heck? he thought. He took a small pinch, but the old man made a bigger gesture with his hands. Davis took some more. He put it in his mouth and started chewing. It was slightly on the bitter side, but not bad.
Davis looked at the sky again and wished there wasn’t a storm on the horizon. He was already fighting enough heavy weather. Rafiq Khoury’s dubious corporation. Bob Schmitt’s suspect airplanes. A squad of Sudanese soldiers. For all he knew, the whole Sudanese army. Davis needed help. But what were the chances of that? Even if he could get in touch with Larry Green, what could the general do? Send in the Marines? Special Forces? Order an air strike on FBN Aviation’s hangar? Davis knew, in a general sense, what Rafiq Khoury was up to. And there wasn’t much time to stop it, not given what Johnson had told him about the flight schedule. Yet the scenario Davis had was no more than a hunch, and nobody in Washington, D.C., was going to authorize an attack on foreign soil based on Jammer Davis’ best guess. Certainly not in time to make a difference.
So Davis was flying solo—again. And there was only one way he could stop whatever was happening. He had to pay another visit to Rafiq Khoury’s hangar.
The little boat struggled for headway. The seas were serious now, bigger waves that came spilling over the side. The old man handed Davis a bucket, something that didn’t need any translation, and he started to bail. The wind was coming from onshore as the storm pushed air forward to announce its arrival. The huge wall of brown seemed to hover right over them, clouds at the leading edge rolling and curling in a wild transfer of energy.
Davis could just see the beach as the gust front rolled over the village. They were two hundred yards from shore, but his exposed skin was already getting sandblasted by wind-driven particles. Davis squinted against the dust and watched the world turn shades of khaki as clouds blocked the sun.
The old man said something. Probably, “Look,” because he was pointing toward shore.
When Davis saw it, his heart skipped a beat. Soldiers.
The old man eased off the throttle, and they both watched two uniformed men walking across the beach, their heads bowed into the wind, their uniforms pressed to their bodies by blasts of molten air. One of them stopped and pointed, noticing the little boat offshore. The whole world seemed to pause as they all stared at one another. Everyone wondering what to do. Wondering what the other guys would do. One of the soldiers broke the impasse. He pulled the rifle from his shoulder and trained it on the boat.
The old man said something else. Probably, “Shit!”
“Yeah! Go!” Davis responded, waving toward open water.
With the wind blowing toward them, Davis easily heard the first shot over the whine of the little outboard. He had no idea where the round hit, but wasn’t waiting for the next. He ducked down behind the stout hull of the boat. The old man had the same idea, his hand the only part of him exposed as he kept a grip on the motor’s steering arm. It wouldn’t take long to get out of range, particularly since the visibility was going down fast. A minute, maybe two, and they’d be safe. But then what? Davis wondered.
He had one big problem. If the army had found him here, they’d probably tracked him through the clinic in Khartoum. So if he was at the top of their post office wall, Antonelli’s picture was likely right underneath. It wouldn’t matter that she’d done nothing but get slapped around by some thugs. She would be guilty by association. And Antonelli was in the village right now. She could already be in custody, something Davis didn
’t want to think about. He made his decision.
Davis shuffled aft. He pointed down at the boat, then north toward Saudi Arabia. He made a shooing motion to the old man. Take the boat out to sea.
The old man nodded.
Then Davis made more gestures. Slow down, followed by, Me into the ocean. Not for the first time, the old guy looked at him like he was crazy. Davis stole a look toward shore, squinting against the wind-driven mist of quartz and mica. He couldn’t see a thing, and so neither could the soldiers on shore. He reached for the diving mask, and as he did Davis felt a strange sensation. He was lightheaded, even a little euphoric. Perfect. He realized he was still chewing absentmindedly on the khat. Davis spit it into the sea. He put on the mask, straddled the seaward rail, and gave the skipper a little wave.
The old man waved right back. As if it was the most normal thing in the world.
Davis vaulted into the sea.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Spend a career flying jets, and you learn how to make decisions fast. In combat that was how you survived. New lieutenants learned rule number one right away when they got their asses waxed in mock dogfights—he who hesitates dies. It was like a chunk of your brain got overdeveloped, bathed in some sort of neural steroid. Of course, fast decisions weren’t always the right ones. You acted first, then lived with your choices. As time went by, your choices got better, an almost evolutionary process. Which was why you trained. A good system, all in all, but the bottom line never wavered. If things look overwhelming, never dither. Do something. Anything.
So Jammer Davis had thrown himself into the sea.
He’d done it with the fuzziness of a man drugged. How stupid had that been? Now he had to live with it.
It took twenty minutes to swim to shore. Davis could have covered it more quickly, but once he was close he eased his pace, allowing time for reconnaissance. The storm had arrived at strength, a meteorological buzz saw with winds whipping over the village at fifty, maybe sixty miles an hour. Davis didn’t see any activity, but the visibility was marginal. He decided the soldiers had hunkered down in one of the houses to wait out the storm. They might still be looking out a window, waiting for a small fishing boat to come out of the churning sea and seek refuge. But nobody would notice a diving mask-encased head bobbing in the surf. Davis briefly wondered where the villagers would throw their allegiance. He remembered seeing a Sudanese flag on a pole in the middle of the settlement, but he hadn’t seen a single photo of the president. He decided the people here would be loyal to the same things they’d always been loyal to—family, tribe, God. In that order. They’d been fishing and living and praying here for a million years. Soldiers with rifles going from house to house wouldn’t be thought of as highly as their regular doctor, or even the big American who was hiring people for bizarre fishing expeditions.
The entire coastline had disappeared, everything overtaken by a massive, Sahara-sized wall of dust. The sea was in pitched battle with itself, hip-high waves slamming ashore with venom. In a maelstrom like that, the soldiers would never see Davis as long as he stayed in the water. But as long as he stayed in the water, he wasn’t going to do Regina Antonelli any good. None at all.
As he crept ashore, Davis could see one jeep and one truck, both Chinese. Both parked at the edge of the village. The truck was green and bulky, with a bed for carrying troops. Together, he guessed they had brought eight, possibly ten men to al-Asmat for the search. Plenty to take one big guy into custody. Unfortunately, these troops were likely more competent that the ones he’d already met. They wouldn’t be drunk or casual, because they were here on a mission. And because they already knew what Davis was capable of.
He crawled from the surf and instantly appreciated the protection it had afforded. He was still wearing tattered shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, so his arms and legs got peppered by granules of high-speed sand. He left his diving mask on, which must have looked ridiculous. Many years ago, on Davis’ first deployment to the desert, the Air Force had issued him a pair of sand goggles. He’d thought that was ridiculous too—until the first sand storm.
Davis kept low and used all the available cover. A fishing boat, a stack of lobster traps. He made it to the courtyard wall of the first house, the place Antonelli had been staying. He stopped and listened, heard nothing but storm-driven sand lashing over buildings and whipping through fishing nets. He spotted two soldiers in the doorway of a house a hundred feet away. The door was lee to the wind, and they were staring outside indifferently—more to marvel at the haboob than to look for him. Davis was hoping they were all in the same place, mingling and bantering as they waited for the storm to pass.
He moved closer to the courtyard entrance of the house where he hoped to find Antonelli. He crouched behind a potted palm that was getting thrashed by the wind, and tried to see if anyone was inside. Unable to tell, Davis waited. When a particularly nasty gust stirred up a cloud of brown, he took his chance. He ran fast across the stone surface, tiny dust explosions marking each step. When he burst inside, he saw the same old woman who’d been working the kitchen counter when he’d arrived. She stared at him oddly. Davis took off the diving mask and a look of relief washed across her face. She tapped twice on what looked like the door to a pantry, and it swung open. Antonelli emerged.
She walked hurriedly to Davis and went straight into his arms.
“You’ve seen the soldiers?” she asked.
“Yeah. How long have they been here?”
“Not long. They were just beginning to search when the storm hit.”
“All right. We need to get you out of here.”
Antonelli didn’t ask why, so she’d already come to the same troubling conclusion he had. By helping him, she had put herself at risk.
“Did you complete your dive?” she asked.
Davis thought, All except the last two minutes when I almost drowned. He said, “Yes, and I figured out who was flying that airplane when it crashed.”
“Who?”
“Nobody.”
She looked at him quizzically.
“At least not anybody on board. The whole flight deck had been modified—the pilot’s seats were gone, part of the instrument panel ripped out. There was a big box mounted directly over the spot where the captain’s control column used to be. I’m sure it was hooked into the flight controls.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “How can an airplane fly without pilots?”
“Happens all the time these days. This particular airplane used to be an experimental model, a flying testbed. A long time ago it was modified to be controlled by computers. I think somebody working for Rafiq Khoury modified it further. I think they put in new flight control servos, a little telemetry, and turned it into a full-scale remote controlled airplane.”
“You mean it was flown by radio commands?”
“Exactly. There was another airplane out flying that night, right alongside the one that crashed. A ship to control the one they modified. They both took off from Khartoum and flew all the way to the Red Sea before something went wrong.”
“But why would Rafiq Khoury do this?”
“I don’t know.” Davis hesitated, then added, “But that other airplane, the control ship, is probably sitting in Khoury’s magic hangar right now. And I think there might be something else parked next to it—a CIA drone that crashed last winter.”
“An American drone? You mean like the ones that are always in the news?”
Davis nodded. “I think Khoury is trying to get it into the air. I think this old DC-3 I found in the sea was put together as a test airframe to make sure everything worked.”
“This sounds so complicated. Why would anyone go to such trouble?”
“That’s the big question. It doesn’t make sense, does it? If Khoury only wanted to crash an airplane into something valuable, he could do that with a suicide bomber. A cleric like him must have plenty of loyal followers who’d be willing. In fact, I’ve already met one of the
m. But whatever the end game is, it’s got to be big to justify so much planning and expense. Looking back, I’ll bet FBN Aviation was established from the beginning for no other reason than to fly this drone. The timing is too much of a coincidence—FBN was set up right after the CIA lost its drone. The rest of their business, shipping cargo and gun-running to the subcontinent, that was only eyewash. This is a well funded, well thought out operation that’s leading to something serious. And it’s going to happen soon.”
Davis heard noise outside, men laughing. They weren’t close, but the mere fact that he could hear them meant the wind was howling less. The storm was losing its punch. Antonelli noticed too, and they exchanged a cautious glance.
“Do you think the government is part of it?” she asked. “These soldiers here now?”
“I don’t know.”
“But what can we do?” she wondered aloud.
“Right now, two things. I need to get you safe. And I have to get back to Khartoum.”
“How? Our truck is not even here.”
“Where is it?”
“Raheem took it to another village east of here. He won’t be back until tomorrow.”
“Great. Are there any other vehicles in town?”
“Only the two the soldiers brought.”
Davis smiled.
He’d assumed that the squad looking for him now would be sharper than Scarface’s bunch. He was wrong. The two vehicles parked at the perimeter of the village had been left unguarded.
His first job had been to get Antonelli safe. She was hunkered near a storage shed just outside the village, ready for a rendezvous that he hoped would come sooner rather than later. On returning to the village, Davis watched the soldiers long enough to establish that they were indeed together in one building near the center. He gave the circumstances some thought, the enemy’s position and objectives and capabilities. Then he considered his relative standing, and a plan came together. The hornet’s nest was right there in front of him. All Davis had to do was kick it at the right time.
