“But that wouldn’t explain the radio silence,” the Chairman pointed out. “The crew would have radioed an emergency.”
“We know that,” Mark said a little defensively. “Still, we have to investigate every possible theory to winnow—good word, eh?—to winnow down our target area. It’s unlikely the radios would die the same moment as the engines, but stranger things have happened. Hey, that reminds me, have the feds talked to the ground people who serviced that plane last? You know, it could have been sabotaged.”
“Lang said the FBI is conducting interviews as we speak.”
“They should check out the flight crew, too. One of them could be Al-Qaeda or something.”
“The crew’s all Air Force personnel,” Juan replied. “I doubt they are a security threat.”
“The CIA said the same thing about Aldridge Ames, and I’m sure the FBI had vetted Robert Hanssen.” Despite his genius intellect, or maybe because of it, Murph delighted in pointing out the mistakes of others. “There’s no reason some Air Force guy couldn’t be bought. He could have flown the plane to some remote Libyan base, where they’re torturing the Secretary of State right at this moment.” He looked to Eric, his eyes a little glassy with inspiration. “What do you bet they’re waterboarding her? Good enough for the guys we have at Gitmo, right? Or they’ve attached electrodes to her—”
“Gentlemen, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Juan interrupted before they started coming up with more lurid torture techniques.
“Oh sure, sorry,” Eric muttered, even though he had remained silent during Mark’s excited outburst. “Um, well, if both engines failed, we factored speed, altitude, and estimated a fifteen-hundred-foot-per-minute descent rate. That gives us a target area of roughly eighty nautical miles.”
“So that’s what you have on the screen?” Cabrillo asked.
“Not exactly,” Eric said.
Mark overrode his friend’s next words, “Yes, we had to consider the engine failure-radio dying scenario, but we discounted it pretty quickly and came up with something better.”
Juan was losing patience with his brain trust, but he kept it to himself. He knew Murph and Eric delighted at showing off their intellect, and he wouldn’t rob them of their fun.
“So what’s the answer?”
“The plane’s tail came off.”
“Or at least part of it,” Eric amended.
“A structural failure in the tail could very likely damage the radio antennas, which would explain the blackout.” Mark said. “It could also knock out the plane’s transponder at the same time.”
“Depending on the extent of the damage,” Eric went on, “the aircraft could still fly for some distance. It would be highly unstable, and the pilot would have minimal control. He could only steer the plane by alternating thrust to each of its engines.”
“The danger comes from the fact the 737 doesn’t have fuel-dump capabilities. He would have had to fly in circles to burn off avgas or risk coming in too heavy.” Juan made to ask a question, but Mark anticipated him. “They refueled in London when they stopped for a quick meeting with England’s Foreign Secretary. By my calculations, they had enough to keep going for at least an hour after the plane went dark.”
Cabrillo nodded. “Even throttled back, she could have cruised for a couple hundred miles.”
“But they didn’t,” Eric said, “or they would have tried an emergency landing in Tripoli.”
“Good point. So where the hell are they?”
“We combined two of our scenarios. Engine failure and the tail coming apart,” Mark said proudly. “It’s plausible. Highly unlikely, but it could happen. That narrowed our area to about a hundred square miles. We found one potential spot, but it turned out to be a vaguely airplane-shaped geologic formation.” He pointed to the center screen. “And there, we found that.”
Juan stepped forward. The screen showed a mountainous area, nearly inaccessible to anything other than a chopper or a serious four-wheel drive. Mark hit a button on the panel’s control and the shot zoomed in. “There it is,” the Chairman whispered.
Near the top of one of the mountains was the plane. Or what was left of it. The wreckage stretched for a half mile or more up the slope. He could see marks on the ground where it first impacted, rose up again, and then belly flopped, tearing itself apart as it decelerated. Fire had scorched the ground about halfway between the second impact and the main debris site. The fuselage, at least the two-thirds of it that had stayed together, was a charred tube surrounded by the shredded remains of the wings. One engine lay a hundred feet from the aircraft. Juan couldn’t spot the second.
“Any signs there were survivors?” he asked, knowing the answer.
“Sorry, boss man,” Eric said. “If there were, they haven’t done anything to signal for help. Mr. Overholt said we should be getting another set of satellite images in about ten hours. We’ll compare the two and see if anything at the site has changed. But look for yourself. It doesn’t appear likely that anyone could have survived a crash like that, not with the fire and all.”
“You’re right. I know. I just don’t like it. Fiona Katamora was one of the good ones. It’s a damned shame for her to die like this. Especially on the eve of the Tripoli Accords.” The certainty that she was dead was like a heavy stone in the pit of Cabrillo’s stomach. “Listen, guys, good work finding the wreckage. Zap a quick note to my computer with the exact coordinates so I can pass them on. No sense wasting the government’s imaging specialists’ time searching if we’ve already found her. I’m sure Lang’s going to want us to investigate the site before reporting it to the Libyans. By the way, where are they searching?”
“They’re off by a few hundred miles,” Mark said. “If you want my opinion, I think they’re just going through the motions. They know we’ve got the satellites, so they’re fumbling around until our government tells them where to look.”
“Probably right,” Juan agreed. “Anyway, we’ve got to be able to get up there and we can’t use our chopper covertly, so map a route in for the Pig.”
“Max doesn’t like when you call it that,” Eric reminded.
“He gave it the ridiculous name Powered Investigator Ground, so we’d call it the Pig. He just grumbles about the nickname because he likes to grumble.” Juan tried to say this lightly, but his thoughts were on the victims of the plane crash.
If he closed his eyes, he could imagine the terror they must have all felt as the plane was about to barrel into the side of the mountain. He wondered what Fiona Katamora’s last thoughts were.
An hour later, he was alone in his cabin, sitting with his feet propped up on his desk, a Cuban cigar between his index and middle fingers. He watched the smoke pool lazily along the coffered ceiling. Everything was set for their arrival in Tripoli the following night. He had gotten hold of a shadowy facilitator in Nicosia, Cyprus, who went by the name L’Enfant, the Baby, a man Juan had never met but who had contacts all over the Mediterranean. For a fee, the Baby had made all the customs arrangements for unloading the Pig. He had also gotten together the proper visas for the team Cabrillo would take with him into the mountains. Langston had been adamant that they verify that the Secretary of State was dead.
Juan didn’t relish combing the wreckage, but he knew they had to be certain.
He again glanced at the hard copy of the satellite image sitting on his blotter. Something about the wreckage pattern bothered him, but he couldn’t say what. He’d pulled up pictures of plane crashes from the Internet and saw no obvious discrepancies. Not that any two crashes were identical, but there was nothing glaringly out of place. Still, there was something.
With Cabrillo’s fluency in Arabic, it was no surprise he had spent time in Libya during his years with the CIA. The two missions he’d been assigned hadn’t been that dramatic. One had been helping a general and his family to defect. The other had been a secret meeting with a scientist who claimed he worked on Qaddafi’s nuclear weapons program. It
turned out the guy had virtually no useful information, so nothing came of it. Juan had liked the people he’d met and sensed that they weren’t too keen on their government but were too frightened to do anything about it. Such was life in a police state.
He wondered if that had changed. Was Libya really opening up to the West or did they still see us as enemies? For all he knew, both factions coexisted within the halls of power. He made a decision anyway. He wasn’t going to trust that what happened to Katamora’s plane was an accident until he heard the flight voice recorder for himself. And he wasn’t going to believe she was dead until he saw the DNA result from the samples Langston wanted them to gather.
He had been a success as a CIA agent because he had good instincts and knew to trust them. He’d done even better with the Corporation for the same reasons.
Something wasn’t right, and he was determined to find out what.
ELEVEN
IT TURNED OUT THAT THE HARBOR PILOT ASSIGNED TO TAKE the Oregon into the Port of Tripoli was their contact. He was an affable man of medium height, with thick curly hair just beginning to gray. His eyebrows stretched across his forehead in an unbroken line, and one of his incisors was badly chipped. He worried at the tooth with his tongue whenever he wasn’t talking, which led Juan to think it was a recent break. There was a little bruising at the corner of the man’s mouth to bolster Cabrillo’s assumption.
The man explained that he did what he did because he needed the extra money to take care of his extended family. His brother-in-law had recently lost his construction job in Dubai, so his family had moved into the man’s house. His parents were both alive, blessings to Allah, but they ate him out of house and home. And he had two upcoming weddings to pay for. On top of that, he claimed he made regular contributions to an assortment of aunts, uncles, and cousins.
All this information had come in the time it took them to walk from the boarding ladder to Juan’s topside cabin.
“You are indeed an honorable man, Mr. Assad,” Juan said with a straight face. He didn’t believe a word of it. He suspected that the proceeds from Assad’s corruption went to maintaining a mistress, and either she or the wife had recently hit him hard enough to crack the tooth.
The pilot waved a dismissive hand, the cigarette clutched between his fingers moving like a meteorite in the dim cabin. The sun was well beyond the horizon, and the Oregon was far enough from the harbor that little light from the city filtered through the salt-rimed porthole. Juan had only turned on the anemic desk lamp. Although he had disguised himself a bit—a dark wig, glasses, and gauze in his cheeks to puff up his face—he didn’t want Assad getting a good look at him, though he knew from experience that men like Assad didn’t want to take a good look anyway.
“We do what we must to get by,” Assad pontificated. He laid a well-used leather briefcase on Cabrillo’s desk and popped the lid. “Our mutual friend in Cyprus said you wished to off-load a truck and needed visas and passport stamps for three men and a woman.” He withdrew a handful of papers as well as a customs stamp. Juan knew the routine and gave him four passports. They had come from Kevin Nixon’s Magic Shop and with the exception of the photographs bore no accurate information about the crew accompanying Cabrillo into the desert.
It took the harbor pilot a few minutes to record names, numbers, and other information before he stamped a fresh page in each of the passports and handed them back.
He then gave Juan some more papers. “Give these to the customs inspectors for your truck. And these”—he pulled out a pair of license plates and set them on the desk—“will make it much easier traveling in my country.”
That saved Cabrillo the hassle of stealing a set from a vehicle in town. “Very thoughtful. Thank you.”
The Libyan smiled. “All business is customer service, yes?”
“True enough,” Juan agreed.
“How good are you at remembering numbers?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Numbers. I want to give you a cell phone number, but I do not want you to write it down.”
“Oh. Fine. Go ahead.”
Assad rattled off a string of digits. “Give the person who answers a number where you can be reached, and I will call it within the hour.” Assad chuckled. “Provided I am not with my wife, eh?”
Juan smiled dutifully at the joke. “I’m sure we won’t need your services, but, again, thank you.”
Assad’s bonhomie suddenly faded and his eyes narrowed under his unibrow. “I don’t see how three men and a woman in a truck can be any great danger to my country, but if I become suspicious about anything I hear in the news I will not hesitate to contact the authorities. I have ways that keep me out of it, understand?”
Juan wasn’t angry at the warning. He’d been expecting it and had heard it from dozens of such men over the years. Some might actually have had the juice to back it up. Assad could be one of them. He had that look. And Juan knew that next on the agenda, if Assad held true to form, would be a little fishing expedition.
“The American government must be very upset about the death of their Secretary of State,” Assad remarked.
How Juan loved a cliché. “I’m sure they are. But, as you saw from my passport, I am a Canadian citizen. I have no control over what happens with our neighbor to the south.”
“Still, they must be anxious to locate the wreckage.”
“I’m sure they are.” Cabrillo was as stone-faced as a professional poker player.
“Where exactly are you from?” Assad asked suddenly.
“Saint John’s.”
“That is in Nova Scotia.”
“Newfoundland.”
“Ah, part of the Gaspe.”
“It’s an island.”
Assad nodded. Test administered and passed. Perhaps the captain really was Canadian.
“Maybe your government is willing to help their southern friends in this matter,” he probed.
Juan understood that Assad needed reassuring they were here about the plane crash and not something else. It was the only logical assumption Assad could make, given the timing of their arrival, and the Chairman saw no reason not to give the Libyan some peace of mind. “I am sure they would be more than willing to lend any assistance they could.”
Assad’s smile returned. “Foreign Minister Ghami was on television last night, calling for people with information about the crash to come forward immediately. It is in everyone’s best interest the plane be found, yes?”
“I guess so,” Juan replied. He was growing tired of Assad’s questions. He opened a desk drawer. Assad leaned forward as Cabrillo pulled out a bulging envelope. “I think this takes care of our transaction.”
He handed it across. Assad stuffed it into his briefcase without opening it. “Our mutual friend in Cyprus told me that you are an honorable man. I will take his word and not count the money.”
It took all of Juan’s self-control not to smirk. He knew full well that before Assad brought the Oregon into its berth, he would have counted the cash at least twice. “You said earlier that business is all about customer service. I will add, it’s also about reputation.”
“Too true.” Both men got to their feet and shook hands. “Now, Captain, if you will kindly lead me to your bridge I will not delay you further.”
“My pleasure.”
CABRILLO HAD ALWAYS HELD the belief that organized crime had begun on the docks and quaysides of the ancient Phoenician seafarers when a couple of stevedores pilfered an amphora of wine. He imagined they had given a cup or two to the guards for looking the other way, and he also thought that someone saw them and extorted them to steal more. In that one simple act were the three things necessary for a crime racket—thieves, corrupt guards, and a boss demanding tribute. And the only thing that had changed in the thousands of years since was the scale of the theft. Ports were worlds unto themselves, and no matter how authoritarian the local rule they maintained levels of autonomy that only the corrupt could fully exploit.<
br />
He had seen it over and over in his years at sea, and had used the ingrained corruption of harbors as an entrée into the criminal underground in several cities during his tenure with the CIA. With so many goods entering and leaving, harbors were ripe for the picking. It was little wonder the Mafia was so heavily invested with the Teamsters Union back in its heyday.
Containerization of general cargo had temporarily quelled petty thievery because the goods were locked up in bonded boxes. But soon the bosses figured they might as well just steal entire containers.
Juan was standing on the wing bridge, overlooking the dock, with Max Hanley at his side. Fragrant smoke curled from Max’s pipe and helped mask the smell of bunker fuel and rotting fish that permeated the port. Across from their berth, a mobile crane on crawler treads was swinging a container from a coastal freighter. There were no lights on the crane, and the overhead gantry lamps were shut off. The tractor trailer waiting to take the load didn’t even have its headlights on. Only a single flashlight carried by a crewman standing near the container gave the scene any illumination. Mr. Assad had gone straight from the Oregon to oversee the unloading. Cabrillo could just make out his silhouette, standing with the ship’s captain, on the dock. It was too dark to see the envelope exchange, but Eric had reported the act after watching with the Oregon’s low-light camera.
“Looks like L’Enfant knows his men,” Max said. “Our Mr. Asssad is a busy boy.”
“What was it Claude Rains said in Casablanca, ‘I am only a poor corrupt official’?”
Cabrillo’s walkie-talkie squawked. “Chairman, we have the hatch cover off. We’re ready.”
“Roger that, Eddie. Assad said we can use our own crane to unload the Pig, so get it fired up and ready.”
“You got it.”
Like the mysterious ship tied to the opposite dock, the Oregon was completely dark. On the other side of the harbor, tall cranes mounted on rails were off-loading a massive containership under the brutal glare of sodium-vapor lights. Beyond it stretched a field of stacked containers, and past that was a security fence and a series of warehouses and towering oil-storage tanks.
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