Chapter 30

The sun spilled over the horizon. A few hours earlier, the blue-black waters had given way to a turquoise sea blushed with the reflection of the orange morning sky. It had been twenty-four hours since anyone had last slept. The adrenaline and Kimo Wu’s caffeine pills had worn off long ago. Every team member was exhausted, with a full day ahead of them before their rendezvous with the North Koreans.

Egan asked Viktor to relieve Irina in the comm center. It was her turn to catch a short four-hour nap. She and Viktor alternated with one another on the communications watch. Simon, Valentine, and Kimo rested, relieved by Andrew and Philip. Egan caught a catnap, leaving James in command of Rapunzel. There was no one to relieve James; he was the only one who could communicate with the Russians on the bridge. Viktor announced to Rapunzel’s crew the visitors were part of the deal and to respect their presence.

****

Fay was up by 07:00, showered, dressed in her uniform, and ate breakfast in her room. Then, she placed a call to Gifford Champion. They agreed to meet in her room at noon.

Gifford proved to be a patient and understanding listener when Fay told him she had second thoughts about continuing her investigation.

Gifford asked, “What does your heart tell you to do?”

Fay thought for a moment and then said, “The citizens of the United States of America employ me to do a job. I am to defend their homeland and their families from tyranny and aggression. I have a sworn duty to defend and protect the rights and privileges given to them by the United States Constitution. And I do my duty to my death, if necessary. And I will serve my superior officers without question.”

“Then, you go on.”

“Yes.” Fay grabbed her investigation notes from a nearby table and dropped the neatly stacked pages into Champion’s lap. “Where do we start?”

“Galaxy Friendship Association.”

“Galaxy Friendship Association? Who are they? I have not heard of them,” Fay questioned.

“You won’t either, unless the GFA are caught at what they are doing. The GFA is a group of some of the nation’s largest defense subcontractors—those companies who routinely bid on the defense contracts awarded by the government to major defense contractors,” Gifford explained.

“The major defense contractors would be the aviation and aerospace defense companies of the world?” Fay asked.

“Correct,” Gifford confirmed. “But understand, only the subcontractors are a party to this activity, not the prime contractors. When a major contract is put out for bid, the GFA meets. As a group, they decide who will win the bid and the bid price. Each GFA member submits a bid higher than the agreed-on bid. Once the contract is awarded, the winning subcontractor splits up the work, giving a slice of the pie to the losing companies.”

“Illegal,” she said. “No wonder forty-nine-cent wing-nuts cost the taxpayers that and another thirty-nine dollars.”

Gifford laughed. “By that time, your wing-nut has been renamed a feathered appendage clamp or something similar.”

Fay chuckled and said, “Why hasn’t something been done about this?”

“It’s going to take one of the GFA insiders to come forward with an offer to expose the Association. So far, none have.”

“How did you find out about the GFA?” Fay asked.

“I was approached by one of the Association members who agreed to expose the scam. She died after our first series of meetings.”

“Mercy.”

“An accident. The woman was canoeing on a lake in front of her home,” Gifford said. “The canoe overturned, and she drowned.”

“More like a mechanic in scuba accidentally grabbed her and held her under until she drowned.”

“Your version is probably correct. The woman died, and her story died with her.”

Fay slowly shook her head. “Should one of those black budget projects go sideways, the result would be a massive freeze in the lucrative defense-spending process. The defense subcontractors would lose money. The black budget money would stop flowing, and the campaign funds to the Senator de la Croixs of the world would cease and desist.”

“Exactly,” Gifford replied.

“The black budget projects, such as the spy ship Nalon Vet and Jimmy Carter, and aircraft like the Aurora would disappear. Much to the chagrin of the Navy, Air Force, NSA, NRO, CIA, politicians, and the list goes on and on,” Fay stated.

Gifford shook his head. “The power behind this is awesome.”

“The crashes of the EPA airliner and Aurora,” Fay said, “occurred at approximately the same time. You knew it.”

“Well, not right away. But, yes, eventually I did piece it together,” Gifford asserted.

“When you saw David Rodman, whom you also knew as Paul Charma, you suspected the military was interested in the two airline crashes,” Fay went on.

“Right again,” he replied.

“You doubt the National Transportation Safety Board’s explanation that a fuel tank explosion brought down the TGA 787, do you?” Fay asked him.

“I think, in both the TGA and the EPA crashes, something else brought those airliners down,” Gifford responded.

“A missile, perhaps?” She thought for a moment. “Or an Aurora.”

“What do you need me for, Fay? I think you know what’s going on here.”

“With your prompting, I think I do. The public learns an errant and out-of-control spy plane, a plane driven by a pilot high on drugs, brings down two commercial airliners. The plane, traveling at something over four thousand miles per hour, clips a wing or horizontal stabilizer, perhaps, and down comes the liner. Hundreds are killed. The public outrage, spawned by the mishap, exposes and kills the Aurora program. All of the parties mentioned would lose big money,” Fay theorized.

“And in Senator de la Croix’s case, a shot at the White House,” Gifford elaborated.

“The Rodman brothers knew this,” Fay said. “David, the SEAL, knew because he was at both crash sites. He was involved in recovering the airliners’ black boxes; the boxes would indicate the collision with another aircraft. The top-secret Aurora project risked exposure. Someone not willing to take a risk replaced the black boxes with ones indicating a mechanical failure.”

“Greg Rodman knew because he was one of the Aurora pilots who flew into the EPA jet which went down in the Yellow Sea,” Gifford said.

“What about the Carr’s captain, Matt Nevada?” Fay wondered.

“I don’t know about him. It’s possible Greg Rodman confided in him or gave him something for safekeeping. I suppose we’ll never know for sure why Nevada was assassinated.”

“Nevada took a couple of unanswered questions with him to his grave,” she said. “Which leaves us with who actually killed these men.”

“Any ideas?” Gifford asked.

“The federales often come off as being the ones unfairly accused of blowing people away in their attempts to cover up their various conspiracies. Although my hunch is one or more mechanics employed by the Galaxy Friendship Association were responsible for the deaths,” Fay remarked.

“The GFA members had much to lose,” Gifford said. “They would be my guess, too.”

“Which means the second person in the alley on the night of Paul Charma’s death was the assassin. A GFA hitman.” Fay sank back into her chair. No sooner had she done so when the sweet scent of aftershave filled her nostrils. She bolted upright. “Rodman!” she said. “Dr. Henry told me Greg Rodman’s system was clear. No trace of any substances. But if he was an Aurora pilot, according to what Bart Hay told JP, then he would have a trace of a narcotic in his bloodstream.”

“The Aurora’s systems officer was Greg Rodman.”

“That’s right. Greg was Aurora’s SO. He was a crewmember and a pilot,” Fay replied. “Hay said the Aurora pilots need to keep themselves in top physical condition. Like pro athletes. What business does Rodman have smoking cigarettes? There wasn’t any trace of nicotine in his bloodstream. The missing cigarettes from the pack found on his body would indicate he had smoked several of them. And yet…and yet, as I recall, no matches were missing from the matchbook. So how did he light those cigarettes he didn’t smoke?”

Fay leaped across the room to where she had left the Rodman evidence bag. She withdrew the pack of cigarettes and tossed them to Gifford. As the box flipped end over end through the air, she said, “See if I’m right.”

He caught the pack. Grasping it firmly in his left hand, he carefully tore off the pack’s open end, exposing the remaining cigarettes. He studied the pack contents for a moment and then inverted the box, allowing the cigarettes to spill out onto the table in front of him. “Seven cigarettes and a piece of paper rolled to imitate the size and shape of a cigarette,” he said.

“See?” Fay said, pointing at the jumbled pile of cigarettes.

Gifford picked up the small tube of paper and unrolled it. “I see.” He studied it for a moment, frowned, and then handed it to her.

Fay examined the paper. “Is it a code?”

“It could be.”

Fay turned the paper upside down and held it up to a nearby light. “I don’t really know.” She read the inscriptions out loud, “PE0304111F, PE0207248F, and PE927424.” She thought for a moment.

She stood up again and walked to the computer. “I’m going to have Winslow take a look at this. Winslow is excellent with research. Let’s see what he comes up with,” Fay decided.

She typed out a short e-mail to Winslow. “There,” Fay said as she clicked the “send” icon on the screen. She consulted her wristwatch. “Want to buy me lunch, Champion?”