The Venetian Judgment (22 page)

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Authors: David Stone

BOOK: The Venetian Judgment
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Then he pressed CHAFF/FLARE.
A spray of shredded aluminum foil and four red Very lights popped out of the flare pod and rocketed backward into the vapor cloud of fuel that was still drifting in the atmosphere behind them. In a moment, another blue-white light blossomed, illuminating the sky, followed by a dimly felt concussive boom. They heard a burst of panicky Turkish from Little Bird 2 on the com-set, a brief, terrified shout cut off abruptly.
Mandy, twisting to look through the side window, saw Little Bird 2, a thousand feet above them, watched it veer sharply up and to the south, trying to avoid flying into the second fireball burning in the cold night sky.
Dalton, knowing that the pilot of Little Bird 2 would get his nerve and his bearings back in a moment, kept the Blackhawk in a steep descent, right at the operational limits. The altimeter display was winding backward, the two RPM indicators were well into the red zone, and the PARAMETER alert was going off, a deafening klaxon wail.
Mandy watched the surface of the Sea of Marmara coming at them, glanced over at Dalton, whose tight face was locked and grim as he fought the collective and watched the control indicators. The rotor vibration was intense, shaking the airframe brutally, with things rattling around the floor of the cockpit, and the engines were shrieking.
At a thousand feet, Dalton pulled back on the stick, finally leveling the laboring chopper out at less than two hundred feet above the surface of the sea. They were still running dark, although the glow of her twin turbines would have been faintly visible against the water. The rotor wash was kicking up spray, and the windshield was streaming.
Dalton slowed the shuddering old machine to a near hover, looked out his side window, then through the glass overhead. He saw a faint strobe blinking far above them, the other Little Bird, circling aimlessly, probably on the radio calling in his position and scrambling a rescue chopper.
Mandy broke the short silence.
“Did you know that was going to happen?”
Dalton looked over at her.
“Yes, Mandy, I did.”
Mandy looked away.
“Those poor kids.”
“Yes,” said Dalton. “And that’s what we do. You understand that?”
She flared back at him.
“Yes. I started this, didn’t I? I shot a dead man in the back of the head a few hours ago, so I imagine I can handle this.”
Dalton held her look for a moment, and then got on the CREW net.
“Levka, you okay?”
Levka had lost his bottle of ouzo in the dive. It was rolling around the floor of the cabin, and he was trying to retrieve it. He jerked back in his straps and hit the squawk button.
“Yeah, boss. Okeydokey.”
“I’m going to hover here for sixty seconds. I want you to open the bay door, pop that life raft into the water, and dump everything we have back there into the raft. You copy that?”
“Everything? Also luggage of miss?”
Dear Saint Boris, not the ouzo!
“No. Not the damned luggage. And not the camouflage tarp. But everything else!”
Dalton held the machine in hover. Through the boards, they could feel Levka dragging cargo to the open bay, and they could hear the splash as matériel hit the waves. The open door let in a cold, wet wind and the smell of diesel oil and dead fish. Dalton and Mandy spent the minute trying to see where Little Bird 2 was—so far, still circling at six thousand feet, judging from the position of the blinking strobe on its belly.
Down at this level, they could make out the hulls of freighters crowding the entrance to the Bosphorus, a constellation of navigation lights blinking on the horizon, their black masts silhouetted against the low-mounded glimmering of Istanbul. Levka was back on the headset radio.
“All okay, boss. Now what?”
“You keep one of the flares?”
Levka swore to himself.
“No, boss, sorry. You say dump everything!”
“Got a match?”
“Yes, boss.”
“Still got some of that ouzo left?”
“Ouzo, boss?”
“I can smell it up here. Grab a bottle, stick a rag in it, light the rag, and toss it into the raft. Do it!”
Levka, sighing, did what he was told. The bottle, fire flickering at its neck, tumbled into the raft, shattering into licking blue flames just as Dalton put the chopper into a forward glide, skimming the top of the waves. They were a hundred feet away when the flare box went up. And then the ammunition belts cooked off, a fireworks display that could be seen on the shoreline a mile behind them. It lasted a few moments, and then, as the raft burned and deflated, winked out, there was nothing but darkness.
Dalton was hoping that brief flare-up against the black plain of open water would be taken as the UN Medevac chopper crashing. The water depth off the coast of Bandirma was over six hundred feet, and the bottom was littered with iron wrecks from Gallipoli and two world wars, so any sonar scan would be pretty inconclusive.
Dalton lined the nose of the Blackhawk up on the misty lights of Istanbul and pushed the collective forward. The chopper picked up speed, its wheels just brushing the waves.
“Levka?”
“Yes, boss?”
“You know Istanbul?”
“Pretty okay. I know good whorehouse in Aksaray—”
“I need to put this machine down somewhere out of sight. If the military don’t buy the idea that we crashed off Bandirma, they’ll tear the town up looking for this chopper. And they’ll find it sooner or later. On the GPS charts, there’s open land on the east side of Atatürk Field—”
“Yes. Is soccer stadium. Across from airport parking lot. Next to that is sewage place. Big open field, but no good to hide chopper. Too much people all around.”
“Okay, I’m open to suggestions.”
Levka gave it some thought while they swooped in toward the lights of the city. The mist on the water coated the windshield. Freighters and tankers and container hulks were all around them now, some of them close enough for the rows of porthole lights and the rust on the hulls to be seen as they ghosted past them, most of them moored in the shallow waters, showing only navigation lights. The rotors churned up the water as they drifted over it, sending a large circular fan of ripples outward, dragging it along behind them like a white lace net on a black velvet tablecloth.
“Micah,” said Mandy during the pause, “there’s only one place where a helicopter won’t stand out and that’s at an airport. Is there another one around, maybe a small private one?”
Dalton hit a few buttons on the GPS chart screen and a list came up, along with lats and longs and bearings from their position.
“There’s another big public one on the Asian side, at Sabiha Gökçen . . . There’s a little one, Samandira, looks like mainly private planes. Not used much, according to the data file, but it’s a long way east of our position—twenty miles, anyway—and it’s seven miles inland. Over a lot of towns and villages. Levka, you copying?”
“Yes, boss?”
“You know a private airport on the Arab side of Istanbul east of the Bosphorus, seven miles inland, called Samandira?”
“No, boss. But is
private
field? On Asia side of Bosphorus? Not on Europe side?”
“Yes, looks like it.”
“We have money?”
“We have money.”
“Then Asia Istanbullus have good word for this.
Vermek
is word.”
“
Vermek?
What does it mean?”
“Means ‘bribe.’ ”
“Would a straight bribe be enough to get them to take a risk like that? If they got caught with a chopper involved in the deaths of Turkish military personnel, they’d be lucky to just get shot.”
“Asia side hate Europe-side Turk soldiers. Arab side lie to Turk soldiers for free. With big smile on.
Vermek
is for them honey on top of pretty girl’s belly.”
“I’m not sure I get that, but
vermek
works for me,” said Dalton.
“
Vermek
work for
everybody,
” said Levka. “Is proof God love us.”
NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY
FORT MEADE, MARYLAND
THE BLUE BOX, CRYPTO CITY
The AD of RA’s office, in the large blue-glass cube in the center of Crypto City, was a stripped-down corner suite with a view out over the barren ochre forests of Maryland in winter. The office interior echoed this wintry austerity: wooden floors, a long wooden desk of no particular style, a sideboard from Crate and Barrel. The only impressive fixture was a Sony plasma screen hanging on the wall facing the desk, on which were running several simultaneous feeds from news operations and intelligence services inside the American security matrix.
There was a U.S. flag with military-style gold fringe in one corner next to a framed photo of a platoon of U.S. Marines moving carefully through a jungle clearing. Judging from the style of their BDUs, it was sometime in the mid-eighties. The jungle could have been anywhere from Central America to Malaysia. The young Marine LT on point, in itself unusual for an LT, was a large-bodied artillery shell of a man with clear-cut features, deep-set eyes, and a wild piratical look about him.
A few years later, an older version of this young Marine would have an Iranian-made shape charge detonate against the side of his armored Humvee during the taking of Fallujah, rocking it onto its side, mortally wounding the driver and setting the interior on fire. The hatch gunner on the .50 got his sleeve tangled up in the gun-mount swivel as the ammo started to cook off, and he would have either been burned alive or riddled with .50 caliber rounds if the third Marine in the Humvee, a lieutenant colonel by then, hadn’t gone back into the flaming vehicle to drag the boy free, getting a faceful of fire for his efforts.
The .50 gunner lived to fight again, the driver DOA at the TOC, and the lieutenant colonel—a brigade-level G2—got a Silver Star and a mandatory early out due to facial disfigurement and the loss of one eye.
The man now sitting at the unremarkable desk in this Zen room was that same man, Hank Brocius, ex-USMC, and now the AD of RA for the National Security Agency, dressed in a fine gray pinstripe, the jacket neatly stowed on a hanger on the back of the door.
Brocius, one side of his face covered with a masklike burn scar from temple to chin, and the other side, an older and more battered version of the same Marine in the framed jungle photo, was leaning back in an armless wooden swivel chair with his back to the window, his hands folded behind his neck, as he directed his one-eyed but highly approving consideration upon the lovely young woman sitting in the rail-back chair on the far side of his desk, a classic, full-bodied Italian heart attack in the style of Isabella Rossellini, whose name was Nikki Turrin.
Ms. Turrin was reading from a decrypted communication sent by the London field team investigating the torture killing of Mildred Durant, once a mainstay of the Venona Project and, up until her death, a kind of unofficial adviser to an NAS decryption team, known generally as the Glass Cutters.
The work of the London investigation team was complete, and Nikki Turrin, chief assistant to the AD of RA, was relaying the summary of their findings in a flat, toneless voice, much unlike her normal speech, which was bright, quick, lively, and delivered in a soft soprano lilt. Nikki’s tone now was unvarying, Brocius was well aware, because she thought the field team’s report was, from title to appendices, a load of utter horseshit.
“. . . and the toxicology report came back with nothing other than some alcohol traces in her blood—”
“Millie loved her gin and tonic,” said the AD of RA.
“And of course the meds she was on were all represented. But nothing in that was, they say here, ‘indicative,’ whatever that means. Why can’t Audrey simply say they didn’t find anything useful? Never mind. She goes on here about the state of Mrs. Durant’s health, several paras of that—”
“Does she ever cut to the chase?”
Nikki looked up, tossing her long brown hair as she did so, her dark eyes full of the winter light streaming in through the blinds behind Brocius.
“As far as I can see, sir, Audrey and her people have no actual ‘chase’ in them. Her conclusions are laid out in the summary page. Do you want me to read the rest or just go there?”
“Just give me the summary.”
Nikki put the documents into a lockbox on the AD of RA’s desk with a Post-it on it reading REDDIT? SHREDDIT!, sat back in the uncompromising chair, crossed her legs demurely at her ankles like a good Italian girl, and gave Brocius a smile that was completely devoid of humor.
“Sir, to be brief, she concurs . . . God, I’m starting to talk like her . . . She
agrees
with the findings of the First Response forensic unit when they got on scene, namely, that the intruder was male, possibly in his mid- to late forties, based on the results of the witness canvass, quite strong, that he must have presented an appearance to Mrs. Durant that was acceptable to her or she would never have unlocked her door to him—no sign of forced entry—that he took control of Mrs. Durant immediately upon gaining entry—she had a medic-alert alarm on a chain around her neck and it was never used—”

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