Free Fly by Night by Ward Larsen Page A

if the time and date made sense. They did. Then he checked the signature, saw the mechanic’s name, along with his Airframe and Powerplant certificate number. Muhammed al-Fahad. The Jordanian, no doubt.
    Then something hit him.
    Davis shuffled back to the crew profile sheet and compared it to the logbook write-up. Gregor Anatoli . The captain’s signature was right there on the logbook page, clear and legible. Maybe a little too legible. Anatoli , with one “i.”The captain had spelled his name wrong.
    Davis looked closer. He was no expert in handwriting analysis—it wasn’t the kind of thing that usually came up in aircraft accident investigations—but this one didn’t look right. A pilot like Anatolii would have a signature that was smooth and quick, like he’d done it before fifty thousand times. Which he certainly had. A captain was always signing for something—a flight plan, cargo paperwork, crewaccommodations, fuel slips. But the signature on this logbook page had perfect lettering, slow and deliberate. Not like any pilot Davis had ever known. He went back over some old pages in the logbook, and a week before the crash found another write-up by Captain Gregor Anatolii. Correct spelling, two i’s, different signature. Completely different. Barely legible from the speed. Probably whipped out in a second, two at the most.
    Davis leaned back in the tiny chair and rubbed his temples. The more he found, the less sense everything made. The write-up for the ailerons—the purported reason for the accident—was almost certainly bogus. Which meant that the corrective action by the Jordanian mechanic had to be equally bogus. But why? An excuse for the crash, inserted into the records after the fact?
    The elevator rumbled past, and his little pile of papers vibrated. Frustrated, Davis stuffed them back in the folder, put the folder on the nightstand. He got up and stretched, thought about sleeping but knew he couldn’t. He was restless. It was the same feeling he got when he took a spell on the bench in a rugby match. There was a lot you could learn from sitting back and watching a game flow. You could study and theorize. See who was fast and who was slow. Who held formation and who didn’t. But after a time, sitting and watching was a pursuit of diminishing returns. There came a time to lace up, trot back out on the pitch, and start throwing yourself around.
    So Davis switched to his work boots and laced them up. Grabbed his room key and headed for the flight line.

CHAPTER NINE
    The heat was everywhere as Davis walked across the tarmac, as if the world had a fever. It radiated down from the sky, up from the earth, into everything. His shoes, his clothes, his lungs. And there was probably no worse place in all Sudan than right where he was standing—on a busy flight line. Superheated exhaust from big turboprops, jet engines at takeoff power, brake assemblies smoking after high-energy landings. It was all there, seared into the breeze.
    He saw two FBN airplanes in the process of being unloaded, men pushing cargo out of the openings, stacking crates on the concrete ramp. Davis adjusted his vector in that direction. Just as Schmitt had said, there was no security in sight. Just two DC-3s parked on a broiling ramp, their cargo doors open wide like a pair of mouths straining for air.
    It was for aircraft like the DC-3 that the word venerable had been created. Davis knew they’d been around since before the Second World War, and that tens of thousands had been built. Three quarters of a century later, hundreds were still in the air, plowing through equatorial thunderstorms and landing on Arctic tundra. Davis hadn’t seen one in a long time, and he figured there were more in museums than in the air.
    Different airplanes had different looks. Some, like the F-22, looked fast. Some were pretty, like the Boeing-757. The DC-3 in front of him wasn’t any of those things. It was all business, functional and boring. From a