Still, it was worth checking out.
“Two, follow me.”
“Got something?”
“Just hang with me.”
“On your butt, boss. Smells like aftershave — now
Howe pushed down in the direction of the glint. There was a peak there, a mountain 6,570 meters high — just under twenty-thousand feet above sea level. That was a decent altitude in an airplane, and beyond the rated ceiling of many helicopters — an important factor if a rescue mission was launched.
“Got something?” asked Timmy as they crisscrossed around the peak and the nearby ridges.
“Negative.” Howe looked at the ground through the canopy and then back at the tactical screen, back and forth.
The AWACS working with them back near the Afghan border reported that an unknown aircraft was taking off from Lop, a small airfield in the Xinjiang Uygur region to the north. The contact, probably a small commercial transport, headed east.
Howe checked his fuel state, deciding that a brief break from the search would help. And it did — sort of. As he looked back at the large display, he saw a double triangle in yellow at the right. Magnification made it look like a rock with a hatchet on it.
He tracked back, practically climbing out of the cockpit to get a better view. It was just a pile of rocks.
But there was something dark about a half-mile away, on the side of the slope facing India.
Dark and gray — the color of Cyclops One.
The computer bleeped a target tone.
“Two, I think I’ve found it,” he said, changing his course.
Chapter 7
Special Forces Captain Dale “Duke” Wallace didn’t know exactly what to make of Fisher. The first thing the FBI agent had done on boarding the C-17A in Bahrain was to ask if there was a smoking section. The next thing he’d done was ask if they were jumping out.
He seemed equally disappointed to hear that the answer was no on both counts.
The C-17A Globemaster III had been designed as a combat-area transport, able to move people and gear great distances at a moment’s notice. Its interior measured two inches beyond sixty-eight feet (counting the ramp); six Marine Corps LAVs could be loaded inside with room left over for a company mascot or two. In this case, Duke and his team of SF troopers from the Army’s 56th SFG (A) were the only cargo. They sat along fold-down seats at the side of the aircraft, Alice packs and mission gear nearby, mostly dozing. Two of the men had stretched mats on the steel floor and were sleeping there.
Fisher, on the other hand, was alternating slugs between two massive thermoses of coffee, which he’d somehow managed to obtain on the tarmac as he walked — walked, not ran — from the E-3 that had delivered him from the States.
Fisher glanced up and saw him staring. “Want some?” he asked.
Duke shook his head, then went over and sat next to him.
“We’ll be landing in Afghanistan in an hour or so,” Duke told him.
“Sounds good.”
“We want to take right off.”
“Makes sense,” said Fisher.
“We have a transport en route, an MV-22. It’s going to meet us on the tarmac and fly us right to the wreckage they’ve spotted. Assuming that’s the wreckage. But I guess that’s why you’re here, right? You’re the expert.”
“MV-22,” said Fisher. He took a long sip from the thermos bottle. “That’s the airplane that thinks it’s a helicopter, right?”
“The Osprey, yes, sir. The MV-22 is a Special Forces version. Equipped with a chain gun in the nose, ports for mini-guns and additional weapons. Whatever we need we can get. We’ll get you in and out, no sweat.”
“I investigated a crash of one of those three years ago, looking for sabotage,” said Fisher. “Wasn’t sabotage.”
“Uh-huh?”
“I investigated another one of those two years ago. That wasn’t sabotage, either.”
“Are you making a point, Mr. Fisher?”
“You sure I can’t smoke in here?”
Some hours later, Andy Fisher stepped out of the MV-22 into six inches of snow, surveying the wreckage of what had until very recently been a 767. He’d seen one of the engines as they’d flown in, and that would be enough to definitively ID the plane. Which was a good thing, because the rest of the aircraft had disintegrated beyond recognition.
Airplanes could do funny things when they crashed, but usually what they did fell into general patterns. Fisher wasn’t a crash expert per se: The real experts got off on analyzing the way metal twisted, and could look at a burn pattern on a piece of cloth and tell you what the pilot had for lunch. Still, Fisher had seen enough to know that this plane had been wracked by something more than an anti-air missile before it exploded.
Interestingly enough, the revolving turret where the laser had fired from was only beaten to shit as opposed to disintegrated beyond recognition. So it was easy to cinch the identification.
“Our plane?” asked Duke.
“Not a doubt,” said Fisher. “When do we get the forensics team in?”
“We’re in China, Mr. Fisher. You aren’t getting any forensics people in here. There’s bound to be some sort of Chinese army patrol sooner or later. My orders are to assist you making an ID, then blow the remains up into little pieces.”
“Be a hell of a lot better if we had a forensics team.”
“Be a hell of a lot better if we were sitting on a beach, catchin’ rays,” said the SF captain.
“Good point,” said Fisher. “We want to take samples so we can check for explosives. Something helped the plane go boom besides a bad attitude.”
“Hey, down here!” shouted one of the soldiers from a ravine about fifty feet away.
Fisher tagged after Duke, sliding down the rocks to a relatively flat plain about twenty feet wide. The soldier was standing over a twisted black blob of gear that looked as if it were covered with tar.
“It’s a boot,” said Fisher.
“How the hell can you tell?”
Fisher knelt down near it. “Believe me. That’s what it is.” He picked it up and looked at it. The bottom half had been burned by high heat; Fisher guessed it would help the lab people recreate the fire and explosion. A bit of sock was evident in the mass, so even if there wasn’t any flesh in the blob there, they’d have a shot at DNA.
Maybe. Of course, if the blob included bones or even just burnt flesh, that’d be even better.
The FBI agent held it out to one of the soldiers, who suddenly looked a little pale. “Evidence.”
“Don’t you want to, uh, put it in a bag or something?”
“Nah,” said Fisher. “By the way, the foot’s not in it.”
“How do you know?”
“Just guessing,” Fisher admitted. “But if I told you it was, you wouldn’t take it, right?”
“How can it be empty?” said the trooper, still hesitating.
“Boot probably got blown right off while the foot and leg were burning to a crisp along with the rest of the body. Lab guys’ll get off on this.”
The soldier took the boot without further comment.
