Add to that the statements of the rest of your team—”
“Which you haven’t officially taken yet, right?”
“Not yet, no.”
“Because you know this is a load of crap, and you’d prefer it if I lay my head on the block nice and gentle and not make a fuss. Why’re you doing this? I was doing my job. Do your home-work. What we did up there is standard procedure. You don’t give gomers a chance to draw down on you.”
“And apparently you didn’t give them a chance to surrender, did you?”
“God almighty . . . Gentlemen, these idiots don’t surrender. When it comes to fanaticism, they make kamikaze pilots look downright spineless. What you’re talking about doing would’ve gotten some of my men killed, and that I won’t have.”
“Sergeant, are you now admitting you preemptively executed the men inside that cave?”
“What I’m saying is we’re done talking until I see a TDS lawyer.”
35
GOOSE CHASE,” Brian Caruso said, staring out the car’s passenger window at the scenery. “Worse places to do it, though, I guess.” Sweden was damned pretty, with lots of green and, as far as they’d seen since leaving Stockholm, spotless highways. Not a scrap of trash to be seen. They were ninety miles north of the Swedish capital; twelve miles to the northeast, the waters of the Gulf of Bothnia sparkled under a partially overcast sky. “Where do you suppose they keep the bikini team?” the Marine asked now.
Dominic laughed. “They’re all computer-generated, bro. Nobody’s ever seen them in person.”
“Bullshit; they’re real. How far is this place? What’s it called? Söderhamn?”
“Yeah. About a hundred fifty miles.”
Jack and Sam Granger had given them the briefing, and while the Caruso Brothers agreed with the chief of ops’s “long shot” assessment of the job, they also liked the idea of beating the bushes. Plus, it was a good way to sharpen their tradecraft. So far most of their work at The Campus had been in Europe, and the more time one got to train in a real operating environment, the better. They both felt more than a little naked without guns, but this, too, was an operational reality: More often than not, when overseas, they would find themselves unarmed.
How exactly Jack had found Hlasek Air’s connection to Söderhamn’s tiny airport neither of them knew, but wherever the missing Dassault Falcon had ended up, its last known touchdown had been there. It was, Dominic explained, a lot like tracking down a missing person: Where were they last seen, and by whom? How exactly they’d go about answering those questions once they reached Söderhamn was another matter altogether. Jack’s suggestion, which had been offered with a sheepish grin, would probably turn out to be prescient: Improvise. To that end, The Campus’s documents people, who lived in some cubbyhole office in the bowels of the building, had provided them with letterheads, business cards, and credentials from the claims-investigation division of Lloyd’s of London, XL Insurance Switzerland’s parent company.
It was early afternoon when they reached the southern outskirts of Söderhamn, population 12,000, and Dominic turned east off the E4, following aircraft pictograph signs for five miles before pulling into the mostly empty airport parking lot. They counted three cars. Through the eight-foot hurricane fence they saw a line of four white-roofed hangar buildings. A lone fuel bowser tooled across the cracked tarmac.
“Good idea to come on a weekend, I guess,” Brian observed. The theory was that the airport would be lightly manned on a Saturday afternoon, which meant, they hoped, less chance of them coming across anyone with real authority. With greater luck they’d find the office staffed by a part-time minimum-wager who just wanted to pass the afternoon with a commensurate minimum of fuss. “Score another one for cuz.”
They got out, walked over to the office, and went inside. An early-twenties blond kid sat behind the counter, his feet propped on a filing cabinet. In the background a boom box blasted the latest version of Swedish techno-pop. The kid stood up and turned down the music.
“God middag,” the kid said.
Dominic laid his credentials out on the counter. “God middag.”
It took but five minutes of cajoling and oblique threats to talk their way into the airport’s daily flight logs, which showed only two arrivals of Dassault Falcons in the last eight weeks, one from Moscow a month and a half ago and one from Zurich-based Hlasek Air three weeks ago. “We’ll need to see the manifest, flight plan, and maintenance record for this aircraft,” Dominic said, tapping