Free Fly by Night by Ward Larsen Page B

distance, these two specimens looked in decent shape. They were dressed in a generic paint scheme, a coat of eggshell white that had been faded by dust from the Sahara and rain from the Amazon andsoot from China. There were no corporate marks or logos, no gaudy fin flashes to establish ownership. For a company like FBN Aviation, that was probably the idea—anonymity. From where Davis stood, the only way to tell the two airplanes apart was by their registration numbers, this an unavoidable acquiescence to international law. X85BG and NH33L. Big airlines often paid a little extra to get sequential registration numbers, which helped to keep a fleet organized. These two numbers looked like they’d been chosen using Ping Pong balls from a wire tumbler. As random as you could get. Once again, maybe by design.
    When Davis got closer to the airplanes, he started to see differences. Dents on cargo doors and fuselages, hail damage on the wing leading edges. The front aircraft’s radome was pocked, and the paint looked like it had been sandblasted off, probably from flying through a sandstorm. Such minor damage was inevitable on two aircraft that had over a hundred years of service between them. All the same, given their far-flung histories, these DC-3s were about as much alike as any two could be.
    The airplane to the rear had already been unloaded, and a flatbed truck parked next to it was piled high with boxes and shrink-wrapped supplies. It looked like a legitimate load, some of the boxes having red crosses, others bearing the caduceus emblem, two snakes around a winged staff, to signify medical supplies. The loading crew was walking away, leaving two people near the truck, a teenage boy and a woman. The woman was securing the load with tie-down straps while the boy buttoned up the cargo door on the airplane.
    Davis went the other way, toward the lead airplane, where a guy was sitting on a forklift with his thick arms crossed over the steering wheel. He was watching closely, giving a few directions, as a large wooden crate was being eased out through the cargo door. The box’s length was longer than its width, and with a little tapering at the sides might have passed for a coffin. It was obviously heavy, and the three guys struggling to move it had one edge jutting out into the air. The side panel was covered in Cyrillic writing, which was a mystery to Davis. The translation could have been MEDICAL EQUIPMENT or MOSQUITO NETTING . More likely ROCKET PROPELLED GRENADES OR SURFACE-TO-AIR MISSILES . He hoped they didn’t drop it.
    The three guys in the loading crew looked local. The forklift driver didn’t. He was straight from central casting—burly, two-day growth of black beard, brown watch cap, cigar in his mouth—a longshoreman from the docks of Jersey.
    Davis walked up to him, and said, “Need any help?”
    The guy looked at him, up and down. “Don’t worry yourself, buddy.”
    Davis thought, Yep, definitely Jersey . He pointed to the cigar, and said, “That thing’s not lit, is it?” He jabbed a thumb toward a fuel truck parked fifty feet away. The side of the truck had a warning stenciled in bright red letters: NO SMOKING WITHIN 100 FEET .
    The guy reached down and turned the key, and the machine went from a rattling diesel idle to silence. He took the cigar out of his mouth. It wasn’t lit. He looked at Davis again, up and down.
    “And who the hell are you?” he asked.
    “Me? I’m an inspector.” Davis left it at that, glancing at the big crate hanging two feet over the lip of the cargo door. The loading crew had stopped shoving and were looking back and forth between Davis and the driver.
    “What the hell kind of inspector?” the man asked.
    “You know—safety.”
    The guy crossed his thick forearms, chomped back down on his half-cut stogie. He was wondering why an American dressed for a round of golf was wandering around his cargo ramp. He probably had Davis pegged as being with the United Nations, or