“UAVs? They’ve become big business. As an ex-fighter pilot it breaks my heart, but the reality is that thirty years from now the Air Force won’t have pilots flying tactical missions. It’ll all be drones.”
“I fear you may be right, that’s where things are going. And I’m sure you know it’s not just the military flying them. The CIA operates a big fleet. Intelligence, surveillance, even strike missions. Most of the airframes they use are common to Air Force versions, but the CIA has also undertaken a handful of black projects. One of the most recent is a vehicle known as Blackstar.”
“Never heard of it,” Davis said.
“That’s good, because it’s classified. They’ve been operating a handful of these airframes for about a year, based out of airfields in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan.”
“Okay. Good for them. Why are we talking about it?”
Green looked around the room. Davis noticed that the seats Green had chosen were as far as possible from the rest of the quietly chattering patrons. It broke a lot of rules to talk about classified information in a public place, and Larry Green was typically a by-the-book guy. But with a little discretion and a dash of common sense — it happened every day.
“I got a call from Darlene Graham yesterday.”
This got Davis’ attention. Darlene Graham was the director of national intelligence, a sharp woman who’d taken over a post that had been little more than symbolic for many years, and turned it into a powerful overseer of the old-school intelligence agencies. And while the NTSB didn’t typically overlap with the D.C. intelligence community, a year earlier Davis had blurred the lines between the two when a crash investigation he’d been working on had blossomed into a full-blown global crisis. Working with Graham and the CIA, Davis had averted a disaster. Since then, he’d been on leave of absence to concentrate on his daughter.
Green continued, “The CIA had a Blackstar go Magellan on them last winter, just wandered off and started exploring after the uplinks and data feed stopped. Eventually, they lost it.”
“Serves them right for not having a pilot on board.”
Green smiled.
Davis asked, “Could it have been shot down?”
“Doubtful. The operators would have seen something. A fighter in the area, radar activity from a surface-to-air missile site. And it was flying too high to be hit by small arms fire. Since Blackstar is a brand-new design, the odds are it was just a technical glitch.”
“But what does that have to do with us?” Davis asked. “We’ve never been in the UAV business. Those are exclusively military toys, including collecting the smithereens when one hits the dirt. If the CIA needs help investigating this crash, they should talk to the Air Force.”
“It’s not that simple. Blackstar was operating in the Horn of Africa, right on the border of Somalia and Ethiopia. After contact was lost, there was an intense search. Every imaging device we have scoured the area, but couldn’t find a thing. In the end, the CIA decided it must have gone ballistic, ended up in the Red Sea or maybe the Indian Ocean.”
“That sounds a little hopeful.”
“You and I see it that way. We investigate stuff like this. But the CIA is just getting their feet wet when it comes to aircraft. They decided to write the whole thing off — that is, until last week.”
“What? Did some fisherman pull up a piece of Blackstar in his net?”
“Worse. The CIA got an intel report that an advanced UAV of some kind was squirreled away in a hangar at the new airport outside Khartoum.”
“But you said it went down east of there, in Somalia.”
“Khartoum isn’t that far away from the crash box. Certainly plausible. And when you consider the number of places you could stash aircraft wreckage in that part of the world — well, you get the idea.”
“What was the source of this information?”
“Darlene Graham would only tell me that it was a reliable human source.”
“Reliable,” Davis repeated.
Green shrugged.
“So is this a government-owned hangar?” Davis asked.
“That’s the funny thing. It’s owned by a private party, an outfit called FBN Aviation.”
“What do they do?”
“On paper they fly cargo, but in reality it looks like your standard shell company. It was set up in the Bahamas by a law firm that does that kind of work exclusively — Franklin, Banks, and Noble.”
“FBN,” Davis said.
Green nodded. “The company directors are three lawyers who probably couldn’t tell a DC-3 from a salad shooter.”
“DC-3s? People still fly those?”
“Apparently this company does. They work about a half dozen airplanes around Africa and the Middle East.”
Davis had seen companies like it before. The corporate office in a place with loose regulatory oversight, the operations end set up in a dark corner of the world. From a distance, FBN Aviation would look a lot like UPS, a company designed to move air cargo. But up close it would look very different. There would be legitimate shipments, but mixed in you’d find arms and drugs and diamonds. You’d find record-keeping that looked like it was done in a mirror.
Green said, “The guy in charge is named Rafiq Khoury. He’s some kind of cleric. Other than that, we don’t know much about him.”
“A cleric needs a cargo airline?”
“I didn’t like the sound of that either.”
Davis heaved a sigh. “Okay. So Darlene Graham lost one of her toys. And it might be sitting in a hangar owned by some kind of arms merchant. That doesn’t explain why a cheapskate like you just bought me a cup of coffee. You said you had work for me, Larry, a crash. Are we talking about something besides this drone?”
“We are,” Green said. “A DC-3 went down two weeks ago off the coast of Sudan, in the Red Sea. The exact location is a little fuzzy, but the crash site is clearly inside their territorial waters. Sudan has jurisdiction.”
“Let me guess — FBN Aviation.”
Green nodded.
“Doesn’t Sudan have people who can run an investigation?”
“There’s a Sudanese Civil Aviation Authority, and on paper they have a guy in charge of flight safety. But he’s just somebody’s cousin, no formal training. Remember, we’re talking about a country where over seventy percent of the national budget goes to the military.”
“But if Sudan needed outside help, we’d be the last ones they’d ask. We were bombing them back in the nineties.”
“True, but Sudan is in a tight spot right now. As you know, air carriers aren’t allowed to fly international routes without ICAO’s seal of approval.”
Davis did know this. The International Civil Aviation Organization was the U.N. agency tasked to set worldwide standards for aviation. For developing countries, the bar wasn’t set particularly high, but they had to go through the motions. Otherwise, they risked losing their certification and could find themselves without air service.
Green continued, “Sudan is in the middle of an ICAO safety audit. It’s an inspection that comes around every five years or so. Teams go in and check out airline operations, air traffic control, safety programs.”
“And suddenly they have a hull loss right in the middle of their paperwork party.”
“Exactly. Sudan has to play this by the book, and the book says that when a nation doesn’t have the expertise for full-up crash investigation, it has to bring in help.”
“And the NTSB is their helper of record?”
“No, they actually use France. But the French are a little shorthanded right now, and they suggested we might be able to help.”
“How convenient,” Davis said.
“Yeah, I thought so too.”
“You think Director Graham had a hand in that?”
“Probably,” said Green.
Davis surmised, “She thinks the crash of this jalopy DC-3 will give her a ticket to look inside that hangar. Or should I say, gives me a ticket.”