The mess the raccoons had left beside my Escalade was still there. The Walkers must’ve missed it when they pulled out. I cleaned it up as best I could while Major Kilgore trimmed his hedges across the street with electric clippers, pausing periodically to check his work with a carpenter’s level. Backing out of the driveway, I gave him a thumbs-up, but he appeared not to appreciate the gesture. I could see him in my rearview as I drove away, getting smaller and smaller, glaring after me.
I called my insurance broker, Vincent Moretti, on the way to the airport and left a message, letting him know he’d be receiving a claim on my policy. A big claim. In all my years of flying, even in combat, I’d never once dinged an airplane. And of all the planes I’d ever flown, none was more reliable than the Ruptured Duck. I hoped to get him back in the air, but given his age and the damage done, I had my doubts that my old airplane was even salvageable.
Paul Horvath was waiting for me in the parking lot outside the terminal building at Montgomery Field, a professorial, gray-haired man in his late fifties with bifocals and a wispy, Wolf Blitzer-style beard. A laminated FAA photo ID card hung from a lanyard around his neck. He wore a peach-colored, short-sleeve dress shirt, pleated khakis, and black, soft-soled oxfords. His left eye twitched with a pronounced tic.
“Your aircraft’s been relocated to an enclosed hangar for closer inspection,” he said, shaking my hand. “We can take my car.”
“Lead on.”
We climbed into a white government sedan, unmarked but for its FAA license plates. Horvath drove fifty feet to a chain link gate, swiping his ID card on the computerized badge reader and punching in a security code. The gate lurched open, beeping. After we drove onto the tarmac, he waited until the gate automatically slid closed behind us, then continued on toward a line of corrugated aluminum hangars that fronted the runway, not far from where the Duck and I had gone down.
“Your plane’s in there,” Horvath said, pointing to the westernmost hangar. “What’s left of it.”
I’d sat through more than a few postmortem examinations when I was with Alpha. You get used to them after awhile, even the stench, when you realize that the body on the autopsy table is there because you’d helped put it there, and because the individual it once belonged to posed a threat to national security. Dispassion comes easy when you watch a genuine bad guy being sliced and diced. But the Ruptured Duck was no bad guy. Inanimate object or otherwise, he was one of my best friends, who’d gotten me out of more scrapes than I cared to remember. Having to observe a clinical assessment of his remains by some federal paper-pusher like Horvath was hardly something I was looking forward to. Neither of us said another word as Horvath drove toward the hangar and stopped in front of it.
A padlock secured a side door. The FAA man dialed in the combination, then stepped inside to undo a couple of hinged bolts holding down the hangar’s bifold door. He pushed a button, engaging an overhead motor, and the big door slowly began to lift, like a metal curtain on a stage.
There sat the Duck, scraped and streaked with oil, his right wing crumpled, tail assembly smashed, miscellaneous pieces strewn about the hangar floor. They’d turned him right side up, back on his landing gear, but it only made my dead plane look even deader. Something caught in my throat and I could feel my eyes getting moist.
“I’ve seen far worse,” Horvath said, resting a hand on my shoulder.
“Me, too. At the glue factory.”
“This is what I thought you might want to see.” He strode toward the engine compartment. The cowling cover had been removed. “Your engine breather line was plugged,” Horvath said, holding up a short length of black rubber hose. “You applied full throttle, as you normally would at takeoff. But with the line plugged, pressure inside the engine built up, the crankcase seal blew, and there went all your oil. No oil, no engine. Simple as that.”
“You’re implying that I should’ve checked the breather line during my preflight inspection. Which means I’m at fault.”
Horvath smiled reassuringly. “No pilot would be expected to check his breather line on a preflight inspection, Mr. Logan. It’s too deep inside the engine compartment to get at readily. Besides, you’d have to open up the tube itself to check for obstructions. The only person who’s going to do that is your mechanic when the plane goes in for its annual inspection.”
“So, you’re saying it wasn’t my fault?”
“That would be my supposition at this point.”
I exhaled. “Then what caused the obstruction? That engine was overhauled a month ago. I’ve logged fifty hours since then without so much as a hiccup.”
Horvath’s eye twitched. He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a plastic baggie. Inside was a small wad of duct tape.
“I found this inside the line,” he said, stuffing the oily gray wad into one end of the hose to show me how snugly it fit. “Whoever put it in there must’ve done it intentionally.”
“You’re telling me that somebody tried to sabotage my plane?”
“Not tried, Mr. Logan, did. That’s off the record, of course. We’re not allowed to discuss any findings until our investigation is completed. But I did think you’d want to know at least preliminarily.”
My eye began to twitch like Horvath’s, and I don’t have any tics. It was one thing to come after me by trying to bring down my airplane. It was quite another to do so without regard for the safety of my passengers, or for innocent people on the ground who also could’ve died. A rage burned through me like magma.
“Any idea who might’ve wanted to do something like this?” Horvath asked.
“I’ll have to get back to you on that one.”
You don’t spend as many years as I did hunting rabid humans without rankling more than a few bent on payback. No names or faces, however, came readily to mind. Was there a link between that wad of duct tape jammed inside my engine and the execution of Dorian Munz? Had somebody tried to kill me because I’d somehow stuck my nose where it didn’t belong in the employ of Hub Walker? My gut told me as much. There were a couple of things I knew with certainty at that moment, staring at the pathetic wreck of my airplane. One was that I intended to find whoever was responsible. The other was that I intended to hurt them. Granted, not a very Zen-like sentiment, but had the Buddha ever flown a plane like the Ruptured Duck, I’m sure he would’ve understood.
Horvath noticed my right hand. I had unconsciously balled my fingers into a fist.
“Looks to me,” he said, “like somebody’s spoiling for a dogfight.”
There’s an expression among fighter jocks that described what I was feeling, the adrenaline-fueled determination to close with the enemy and destroy him. They call it, “Fangs out.”
“You’re aware, Mr. Logan,” Horvath cautioned, “that this may well be a matter for law enforcement.”
“Whatever you say, Mr. Horvath.”
He nodded as if he understood the vengeful thoughts bouncing around inside my head, then turned away to survey the Ruptured Duck. I could see he was anxious to get back to his postmortem. I didn’t much feel like watching, and started to go. Horvath offered me a lift back to the parking lot, but I declined. The stroll would help calm me.
“You can’t just walk around an airport you’re not based at without an escort or proper credentials,” Horvath said. “There are security considerations, Mr. Logan. You’re a certified flight instructor. You should know that.”