Corsair (Oregon Files 6)

“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.”