Juan climbed up into the fuselage. What once had been an opulent cabin befitting a cabinet secretary was now nothing but ruin. Puddles of melted plastic pooled all along the floor. Seats were identifiable only because of their metal frames.
He did a quick count and totaled up eleven corpses. Like the Secret Service agent’s hand, they were burned beyond recognition. They were just genderless piles of charred flesh. No clothing remained, and because of the violence of the crash they lay scattered haphazardly. The stench of cooked meat and putrefaction was strong enough to overpower the smell of aviation fuel. The drone of flies rose and fell as they scattered and resettled when Juan moved from body to body.
The sudden jet of nausea-induced saliva forced him to swallow hard.
Mark Murphy was on his hands and knees peering under one of the burned-up club chairs with a miniature flashlight clamped between his teeth. Despite the grisly surroundings—or maybe because of them—he was humming to himself.
“Mr. Murphy,” Juan said, “if you don’t mind . . .”
The Chairman’s voice startled Mark up from where he was working. He pulled the flashlight from his mouth. “This has got to be the best con job I have ever seen.”
“Beg pardon?”
“The crash site is bogus, Juan. Someone’s been here before us and tampered with the evidence.”
“Are you sure? It looks about how I’d expect.”
“Oh, the crash is legit all right. This is Fiona Katamora’s plane, but someone has been fooling around with it.”
Juan settled down on his haunches so he was eye level with Murphy. “Convince me.”
Instead of addressing the Chairman, Mark called over to Linc. “You notice it yet?”
“What are you talking about?” Linc replied. “I notice a seriously messed-up airplane and some bodies that I’ll be seeing in my night-mares for the rest of my life.”
Mark said, “Take that rag off your face and sniff.”
“No way, man.”
“Do it.”
“You are one squirrelly dude,” Linc said, but lowered his bandanna and took a tentative breath. Detecting something, he breathed in deeper. A spark of recognition widened his eyes. “I’ll be damned. You’re right.”
“What is it?” Juan asked.
“You wouldn’t recognize it because I doubt very much you ever came across it during your CIA days, and neither would Linda because the Navy doesn’t use it.”
“Use what?”
“Jellied gasoline.”
“Huh?”
“Like napalm,” Linc said.
Mark nodded at the former SEAL. “Most likely, a good old-fashioned flamethrower. Here’s the scenario as I see it. They somehow forced the plane to land somewhere inside Libyan territory and took the Secretary off. Then they flew it here and intentionally crashed it into this mountain, using either a retrofitted remote-controlled system or, more likely, a suicide pilot.
“When they came up here to make sure everything’s okay and remove any trace of said pilot, they discovered the cabin hadn’t burned as much as they’d like, so they squirted it with a flamethrower. If we hadn’t come along the smell would have dissipated and would have been undetectable. The anomaly would only have shown up when the guys from the NTSB analyzed their samples under a gas chromatograph and discovered traces other than aviation fuel.”
“You’re both sure?” Juan asked, looking from one man to the other.
Linc nodded. “It’s like the perfume of your first girlfriend.”
“She must have been something,” Linda quipped.
“Nah, it’s one of those smells you never forget.”
Juan felt like he was being given a second chance. His earlier pessimism sloughed off, and he felt a charge of energy surging through his body. And then he had another thought, and his mood soured. “Wait a second. What evidence do you have that the plane landed before the crash?”
“That should be in the landing gear. Follow me.”
As a group, they climbed down out of the fuselage and clambered into the dim cargo area below the passenger cabin. It reeked of burned fuel, but they didn’t have to contend with the smell of what a couple days in the desert did to the bodies. Mark went unerringly to an access panel set into the floor. He popped the toggles and heaved the hatch open on its long piano hinge. Below lay the large tires and truck of the 737’s portside landing strut. Everything looked remarkably well, considering.
Murph jumped down into the well and played his flashlight beam on one of the tires. He crawled all the way around it, his eyes inches from the rubber.
“Nothing,” he muttered, and hunkered even lower to check the other wheel.
He popped up a minute later, holding up a small piece of rock as if it were the Hope Diamond. “Here’s your proof.”
“A stone?” Linda queried.
“A piece of sandstone wedged into the tread. And there’s sand on the bottom of the lower hatch.” When he saw the look of confusion on the faces peering down at him, he added, “This plane supposedly took off from Andrews Air Force Base, flew to London, and then crashed, right? Where in the heck could it have picked up a lump of sandstone that looks exactly like every lump of rock for a thousand miles around us?”
“It landed in the desert,” Juan said. “Murph, you did it. That is the proof.”
Juan slipped the stone into his breast pocket. “In case the NTSB guys miss it, this needs to be analyzed to be certain, but I’d call it a smoking gun.”
The sound came out of nowhere, and all four ducked instinctively as a large helicopter roared directly overhead. It was so low that its rotor wash kicked up a maelstrom of dust.
It had come in from the northeast, most likely a Libyan military base outside of Tripoli, and had to have flown nap-of-the-earth to avoid detection by the Navy’s AWACS planes. That was why no one had called in a warning. As it began to slow into a landing hover, they could see it was a big Russian-built Mi-8 cargo chopper, capable of carrying nearly five tons. Its turbines changed pitch as it neared the top of the hill about five hundred yards from the truncated fuselage.
“You want further proof they know about this crash site?” Mark asked, and pointed at the khaki-painted helo. “That sucker knew right where he was headed.”
“Come on.” Juan started toward the rear of the cargo hold. “Let’s find cover before the dust settles around their chopper.”
They crawled through the fuselage and jumped to the ground on the far side. There was little natural cover near the remnants of the aircraft, so they ran down the slope until they came across a narrow dry wash that had served to drain rainwater off the mountain aeons ago. When everyone was settled, Juan buried them under a thin layer of sand and heaped as much onto himself as possible. Their view wasn’t the best, but they were far enough away he doubted anyone from the chopper would wander by.
“What do you think’s going on?” Mark asked in a whisper.
“I haven’t the foggiest,” Juan replied. “Linda? Linc?”
“No clue,” Linc rumbled.
“Maybe someone realized their little stage setting isn’t as good as they thought,” Linda said, “and they’ve come back to tweak it.”
Up at the summit, the turbines spooled into silence and the big rotor began to slow. In moments it was beating the air no harder than a ceiling fan. The large clamshell doors under the tail boom split open and men began to emerge. They wore matching desert-camouflage uniforms, and their heads were covered in red-and-white kaffiyehs, the wraparound scarves favored by Islamic militants throughout the Middle East.
“Regular army or guerillas?” Linc asked.
Juan watched for nearly a minute before answering. “Judging by how they’re milling around, I’d say irregulars. Real soldiers would have been ordered into a parade formation by now. Just don’t ask me what they’re doing in a chopper with Libyan military markings.”