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From the comfort of his apartment in the Washington DC metro-area, Jimmy Letson watched the feed from Uma’s camera. He allowed the video to play through completely before winding it back to what he thought was the best shot of the wrecked airplanes and froze the playback there. With a couple of mouse-clicks he was easily able to isolate the airframe and create a three-dimensional model, which he then compared against the Jane’s aircraft identification database.
“Easy peasy,” he announced just thirty seconds later. “Your wreck is a Boeing 314, sometimes called a Clipper.”
It took a few seconds for the Skype transmission to bounce through Jimmy’s extensive proxy-chain network to reach Maddock’s computer on the far side of the world, and then for Maddock’s reply to return. “Clipper? One of the old flying boats from the 1930’s?”
“Like the plane in Raiders of the Lost Ark?” Bones chimed in. “The red line express.”
Jimmy grinned. “Right. Although that scene is a bit anachronistic. The 314 wasn’t produced until 1938, which was two years after Raiders supposedly took place.”
“What can you tell us about this specific plane?” Maddock asked.
“Without tail numbers or some other identifier, not much.” Jimmy tapped in a few keystrokes. “Oh. That’s strange.” He reread the data on the screen, wondering if he had overlooked something.
“What’s strange?”
“Well, it turns out that only twelve Clippers were ever produced, which would ordinarily make this a pretty simple process of elimination. But it looks like all twelve are accounted for. Only two of them crashed—neither one anywhere close to where you are—and both were scuttled in place. All the rest were scrapped for parts.”
“Could those records be wrong?”
“Possibly,” Jimmy admitted. “The Clipper fleet was pressed into war time service. Maybe one of the planes was requisitioned for a secret mission and to cover it up, they listed it as scrapped. I’ll have to do a little more digging into that.”
“What about the smaller plane?”
“Not enough left of it for me to work my magic. I’m good, but not that good.”
“Sounds like he’s holding out on us,” Bones said after a moment.
“I wish I were,” Jimmy said. “But even if I could narrow it down to a specific airframe design, we’d still be looking at hundreds of possibilities, and unlike a big passenger plane, a lot of those old biplanes ended up in private hands. Some are probably still flying today.”
“Fair enough,” Maddock said. “Okay, switching gears. I’m sending you pics of the tomahawk we found.”
While he waited for the image file to arrive, Jimmy played with various search strings that included terms like: Clipper; Africa; crash; missing. One of the crashed 314’s had been originally called the Cape Town Clipper, but its demise had occurred off the coast of Portugal, thousands of miles from where Maddock had discovered the sunken aircraft. After a few minutes, he tabled the effort. Identifying the wreck was going to take some real digging which oddly pleased him. He liked a challenge.
A chime sounded to alert him to the arrival of a file attachment. He opened it and saw a photograph of an axe head with a sharp spike on the back end. The metal was dark, almost black, without any signs of corrosion. A second photograph was a close-up of the engraving on the flared blade.
Steven Thorne
28, April 1758
“President Monroe was born that day,” Maddock supplied. “I doubt that’s relevant.”
Jimmy knew that Maddock wouldn’t have enlisted his help without first trying his own hand at the Google game, but Maddock wasn’t a professional researcher. “That would have been smack in the middle of the French and Indian War. Tomahawks were issued to colonial militia. They weren’t just used by Indians, you know.”
“No kidding,” Bones rumbled, with just a hint of sarcasm. “So that Mel Gibson movie wasn’t total crap after all?”
Jimmy let the comment slide. “I’d guess this Thorne was a militia officer. There are records of that stuff believe it or not, but most of them haven’t been digitized.”
“Our working theory is that the tomahawk was a family heirloom that belonged to a member of the plane’s crew,” Maddock said. “One of Steven Thorne’s descendants. If you can trace his genealogy, we might be able to figure out who it was, and from there, figure out what he was doing on that plane.”
“Not bad, Maddock. I can definitely try that.” Jimmy scrolled through the results of his cursory search. “Thorne was already a very common surname in colonial America. Particularly in New York.” He drummed his fingers on the desktop. “I might be able to whittle the list down a bit, but I’m limited to what’s actually been put into the online databases, and that may only be a fraction of what’s available. Your best bet would be to talk to a historian, someone who specializes in the colonial period. Show them that tomahawk, and they’ll probably talk your ear off.”
The silence went on too long to merely be the result of signal lag. Maddock had clearly and simply hit the disconnect button, eager to get started on what had the makings of an honest-to-goodness historical mystery.
There were, as he saw it, three possible solutions.
The first, was that his preliminary identification might have been wrong. He had initially rejected that possibility since there were no other planes that matched both the dimensions and shape of the airframe. The closest similar aircraft, the Martin M-130, had a similar profile, but was nearly twenty feet shorter than the Boeing 314. As aviation technology improved during the war years, the need for large aircraft with water-landing abilities diminished, and designers began favoring a more streamlined cylindrical fuselage design, as compared to the Clipper, which was almost square in profile.
The second possible solution—and the likeliest—was what he had suggested to Maddock: an error—intentional or accidental—in the historical record. He started by verifying the accuracy of reports concerning the fate of the twelve Clippers, which he was able to do up to a point. The records did exist, but not in such detail that he could rule out a falsification or cover-up. When he felt he had exhausted that line of research, he turned to the third possibility: the existence of an unrecorded thirteenth Clipper.
Figuring he could kill two birds with one stone, he surreptitiously probed—Maddock would have said ‘hacked,’ but Jimmy disliked the term—Boeing’s archives looking for more detailed records of the 314 aircraft project. He spent a good half-hour browsing the logs of the twelve known aircraft, before expanding the search parameters to look for unlucky number thirteen. He noted that the Clipper tail numbers ranged from NC18601 to NC18612, with three exceptions—the seventh, eighth and tenth planes—had been sold to Great Britain and issued new tail numbers. On a whim, he tried looking for NC18613, and then NC18600, but neither search yielded anything meaningful. He tried several different approaches to no better effect, before deciding to take a break from the search. There were other avenues available to him. If nothing else panned out, he could probably find some answers, or at least some better questions, on an aircraft history forum. He clicked on the X to close the browser window and stood up to stretch his legs.
When he looked down again, he saw that the browser was still open. Frowning, he moved the cursor over the X again, and clicked on it, but the screen refused to wink out. He tried the shortcut keys, and saw a message appear on the header: (Not responding).
Jimmy Letson felt a sudden chill. He quickly entered the shortcut to bring up the task manager, but the computer seemed to be ignoring him.
To an ordinary computer user, that would be an annoyance, but to Jimmy, it felt like staring into the abyss.
Somebody had taken note of his intrusion.
“Not possible,” he whispered. But what other explanation could there be?
Without a moment’s hesitation, he threw the master power switch, killing the flow of electricity not only to the computer, but also to the network of router-repeaters he used to hide his physical location from the World Wide Web.
The risk of getting caught had long ago ceased to be a source of thrills for Jimmy. He kept his hacks very low profile, and utilized redundant proxy chains to reduce the chances of anyone back-tracing his IP address. The repeater network, which stretched across two suburban Virginia neighborhoods, was his last line of defense—removing him from the physical location associated with the IP address. That system was bombproof, he was sure of it....
Mostly sure of it.
He waited ninety seconds before restoring power and booting up the system, one subroutine at a time, running diagnostics as he went to see if anything had been compromised. Lastly, he started up the repeater network and accessed the Web.
Despite the fact that he kept his apartment a mild sixty-eight degrees, Jimmy was sweating. “It’s nothing,” he told himself. “You’re just jumping at shadows, ace.”
He brought up the connection logs for the chain of IP proxy servers, but that was as far as he got. When he tried to edit the logs, he received an error message informing him to contact the system administrator.
“Locked out,” he whispered.
He hit the power switch again and stood up quickly, backing away from the computer as if it were red hot.
Hollywood depictions notwithstanding, tracing someone’s IP address, particularly when the connection was routed through multiple international proxies, was a challenging and time-consuming process. The fact that someone had blocked his access to the connection logs of servers in six different countries, to effectively prevent him from wiping away his digital fingerprints, indicated that he had just woken up one hell of a big sleeping giant.
He couldn’t erase the source IP address, that much was certain. The unknown hunter would trace it back to a trendy coffee shop that Jimmy had never once visited, and that would be the end of that, provided he never tried logging in with that IP address ever again.
At least he hoped that was the case.
What if they find the repeaters?
He shook his head. No. He was a needle in a haystack. As long as he kept his head down, he would be fine.
But maybe it was time for a nice vacation. A road trip.
As he headed out the door, he wondered exactly what it was he had blundered into. He couldn’t believe that an eighty-year old plane crash was a secret big enough to necessitate such a swift and decisive response, but what other explanation was there?
He would have to get word to Maddock somehow. Warn him to back off, lay low.
If it wasn’t already too late.