thirty-four

“It’s an old place built in the fifties,” Janice put in. “Something to do with the Cold War that never came to anything, thank the Lord. They built it along with a hangar and runway and stuff, but it was never listed and never went—what do you call it?—operational. My father said it was a big secret that got forgotten. Nobody uses it for anything now. Leastways, nothing good, if my sense of smell tells me anything.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, last night the wind was coming from over there and I swear I could smell smoke. You get kids or young people finding a place like that and they like to think it doesn’t belong to anybody so they start fooling around. Could be nothing, of course, but something was burning.”

“Do you know if the fire department came out?”

“I doubt that, frankly. Our local department’s had some serious budget cuts and they don’t go anywhere they don’t have to unless there’s a threat to life or livestock. And I doubt an abandoned airfield meets either of those, if you know what I mean. All told, the place was a huge waste of money and it’s better if they let it burn down if you ask me.” She gave Clay a fierce look that made him shrink in his seat. “I told my kids to stay right away from there—the place is already falling-down dangerous. You don’t know what else they built down there. Could be underground chambers and shafts or silos and the Good Lord knows what. It didn’t need a fire to make it any more dangerous.”

“Mom, I never went inside—” Clay protested, but her look silenced him.

“I think we should take a look at this place,” said Ruth, and she looked at Janice. “Would you mind Clay showing us where he saw the men?”

Clay’s eyes went big at the prospect, but Janice’s went bigger. “Will it be safe over there?”

“Safe as houses,” Dave assured her. “We’ll take a look overhead first, just to make sure. Then we’ll go in on the ground.” He looked at Clay. “You okay with flying, son?”

He might as well have handed Clay the keys to Disney. The teen nodded with enthusiasm and jumped to his feet.

“I’ve got stuff to show you first,” he said. “I brought back some pieces of the machine. They’re in the barn.”

Ruth caught the surprised look from Janice and forestalled another lecture. “That was clever thinking, Clay. Let’s have a look, shall we?”

They all trooped outside and into the barn, which smelled of warm hay and horses. A few chickens were pecking at the ground and shafts of sunlight coming through gaps in the wooden planking lent the interior of the building a comfortable atmosphere.

Clay went over to one corner and pulled aside a tarp, then stood back so they could see what he’d found. It looked like so much junk plastic that had been hit with a large hammer, but Dave Proust squatted down and immediately plucked one object out from the pile and held it in the air.

“Far as I know,” he said, “UFOs don’t have propellers.”

Ruth and Vaslik inspected it. It was small, no more than a few inches, but made of a durable plastic.

“I’d say this was a quad-copter,” Dave continued. “I’ve seen them before. Most are small—like the kind kids would play with, even indoors. But I’d say this model was quite a bit bigger.” He sorted through the pile and picked up a section of gleaming white plastic with stylised letters emblazoned across it: Eur. A jagged edge had cut off any further lettering, but Ruth and Vaslik could see what it was immediately.

“EuroVol,” Ruth murmured. “It’s one of their stolen drones.”

With Janice’s agreement, they went back to the helicopter and climbed aboard. It was a squeeze, but they were only going a short distance. Following an ecstatic Clay’s directions, they took off and flew for about two miles until they saw an unnaturally straight line in the ground below. It was a runway.

Then they saw the smoke.

It was hanging in the atmosphere over the field and barely moving, a long pall of dark smoke spread out in a tail where the turgid movement of air had gathered it up and pushed it slowly away from its source—a large square of blackened and crumpled steelwork that had once been a hangar. Beyond it was another shape, this one much smaller but also smoking, although still standing.

Dave took them in on a curving course around the area and away from the smoke. There were no signs of vehicles or life, nothing to indicate what might have happened here. The airfield appeared to have been substantial in size, but if there had been any real intent about its development during the Cold War era, it would have possibly been for remote operations to be sited here in the event that known military fields were put out of action.

“Let’s go see the place where you found the crashed drone first,” said Dave and followed the boy’s directions to the edge of a gulley nearby, where there was a safe spot of flat ground to land.

Once the rotor stopped turning, they climbed out and Clay led them to a jumble of rocks and bushes, and pointed to a collection of plastic, electronics, and wiring scattered on the ground.

“See? Right here.”

Closer inspection of the remains and the rest of some lettering on the side confirmed that the drone—or quad-copter—was a EuroVol machine. The casing had shattered on impact, revealing the interior with its wiring and circuits, and underneath, between broken skids, was a battered camera with a broken lens. There was also a tubular section of clear plastic with wiring soldered to one end, and mounts that had clearly been ripped away from the body of the drone on impact.

“We’d better take this in,” Ruth suggested quietly, so that Clay wouldn’t hear. “This was obviously a practice run that didn’t end well. But if they stole six machines in all, they’ve got spares enough to play with.”

“But will it be enough to convince Kraski that it’s serious?” said Vaslik.

“Kraski?” Dave looked up from a section of motherboard. “John Kraski?”

“You know him?”

“Yes, I do.” His expression could have curdled milk. “I thought he’d have been retired by now. We crossed swords a couple of times before he moved into the Internal Investigations Section, which would’ve suited him like a second skin. Sounds like he’s found himself another new home, though.”

“Can he really block any reports made through Tom Brasher?”

“I doubt that. He probably thinks he can because he’s a self-important asshole. But if Tom Brasher’s as convinced about this stuff as you two, he’ll make sure it doesn’t get stamped on. The one thing nobody’s going to take a chance on is the president’s life.”

Using a bag from the helicopter’s stowage rack, they collected as many of the pieces of the drone as they could find, then scouted the rest of the area in a widening circle to make sure they had missed nothing.

It was Clay who found something, but without realising what until Ruth saw his fingers and the soles of his trainers. They carried traces of something bright red, and she thought he’d cut himself scrabbling about in the rocks.

“It won’t come off,” he said after trying to wipe the colour away. “Jeez—Mom’s going to ground me forever!”

“Don’t worry about that,” Ruth told him. “Show us where you’ve just been.”

Clay led them over to the edge of the runway about eighty yards away, and a large rock. Both the rock and the ground around it were stained red.

Vaslik inspected the colour without touching it. “It looks to me like a powdered dye,” he said quietly. “But we should get Brasher’s people to test it, just in case. Isn’t that what Paget said the drones had been ordered and modified to carry?”

Ruth nodded. “He did. Maybe they were using powdered dye to make their test runs.”

“Could be. Let’s just hope that’s all it was.”

Dave flew them all back to Clay’s home. On the way, he gave the boy a stern warning.

“Now we know you’ve been telling your pals at school that you’ve got a UFO tucked away, and that you hope to sell the idea to a newspaper. Am I right?”

Clay looked horrified. “Shit. How do you know that?”

Dave put his finger alongside his nose. “Trust me, son. We know a lot of shit. And don’t swear—it ain’t nice.”

Clay didn’t say anything but stared out of the window. As they dropped towards the house they could see a pickup in the yard and a man talking to Janice. “That’s my dad,” Clay murmured. “Am I in trouble?”

Dave shook his head. “No, son. We’ll square everything away with him and tell him how helpful you’ve been. But hear me out: no kidding anybody about UFOs, understand? Tell them what you saw was part of a weather balloon. We don’t want good decent folks like your mom getting scared about aliens, do we?”

Clay nodded. “Okay. Do I get a reward?”

“Well, I’m not sure we can give you any money, but how about a note of thanks from the FBI? Of course, we’ll have to run it past your parents first.”

Twenty minutes later they took off again and headed back to the airfield, leaving a proud boy with his parents and a promise that Special Agent Tom Brasher would be sending him a letter of thanks.

As the rotors came to a stop and they sat looking at the remains of what had once been an enormous hangar, Ruth’s phone buzzed. It was Brasher. She turned on the loudspeaker so they could all hear what he had to say.

“We just got a call from the Oklahoma State Police,” he announced. “They picked up a kid not far from Alva, Oklahoma. He got stupid drunk in a bar and started mouthing off about—and I quote loosely—‘kuffars and insects delivering the sting of death from the sky … your own toys of death spraying our message of destruction on the head of your leader and ending his tyranny. Allah be praised.’ And more stuff like that. He was lucky that two of the guys he was screaming at were state troopers. They hauled him out of there ‘before he got himself lynched.’ It took a while for us to hear about it until his name got through the system and they checked into his background. Then they called it in.”

“Is he for real?” said Vaslik.

“Sounds like it to me, even without looking at his personal details. That stuff about spraying destruction and toys of death … that sounds like he was talking drones to me. When we ran his name it lit up a few lights. It turns out he’s called Donny Bashir, and he’s a known associate of Bilal Ammar, the bodybuilder who was seen talking to Chadwick’s mystery man in Newark. They even attended the same mosque.”

“That figures.”

“Yeah. We also have him listed as being present during the Boston Marathon bombing. A cop saw him laughing with a bunch of others and pulled him in for questioning. There was no proof he was involved, although he couldn’t come up with a half-valid reason for being there, so they had to let him go. He was posted as a name to watch but then dropped out of sight.”

“So what makes him a likely extremist?”

“Because of knowing Ammar—and being a tech graduate from NYU where he studied engineering, IT, and—get this—chemistry.”

“Ouch. Was Ammar with him at the bar?”

“No. The local cops checked out a nearby motel and found the room they’d been using, but Ammar had gone. The owner gave a good description of him, muscles and all, but he couldn’t recall the vehicle they’d used and they don’t have CCTV.”

“Well, at least that’s one person off the board,” Vaslik muttered.

“We’re not close enough yet to get this put on the front burner, but we’ll be working on him. In the meantime there are other threats coming in from New York, San Francisco, Washington, and Chicago, all concerning imminent and convincing bombing campaigns. They’re currently being investigated. We figure some if not most are simply phone and Internet chatter tied in in some way to cause maximum disruption, but they’re taking a lot of time and effort to check out thoroughly.”

“Could it be part of a wider campaign?” Ruth asked.

“My opinion? Yes. If they throw up enough noise and get our attention focussed on what seems like genuine threats in other cities, it disguises their real intentions. We’re hoping to break this Bashir guy down to see if he’s got the ability to make a dirty bomb, or if he’s just mouthing off to distract us further, but the Staties aren’t having much luck. They didn’t know what to do with him so I persuaded them to hold him in the Woods County jail in Alva until I get down there. What we need is some hard evidence that makes it a real and genuine danger. Have you guys found anything?”

Ruth gave him a summary of their findings, but she could tell by his muted reaction that bits of a machine by themselves weren’t sufficient to provide the kind of hard evidence he and his superiors wanted.

Then Dave Proust stepped in. “Tom, we’re about to go look at the airfield buildings to see if we can pick up any useful details. But it looks to me like somebody torched the place on purpose. If you want my gut instinct, this is for real. Nobody would dump a busted-up machine in the remote kind of place we found it in the hopes that somebody might stumble across it and tell the authorities. And the kid saw it flying at night, miles from anywhere. These guys, whoever they were, are for real, too.”

“I hear you, Tom. Give me a call as soon as you get back, okay? Oh, and don’t go in cold.”

“Will do. Speak later.” He nodded at Ruth to cut the connection.