Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [121]
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 the binder.
“I don’t have that here. It would be in the main hangar.”
“Let’s go there, then.”
The kid picked up the phone.
The on-duty flight mechanic, Harold, was barely older than the desk clerk and even more unsettled by their appearance. Insurance investigator, missing aircraft, and maintenance records was a trio of phrases no flight mechanic wanted to hear, especially when combined with Lloyd’s of London, which had for nearly three hundred years enjoyed and wielded cachet like few other companies in the world.
Harold showed them into the maintenance office, and in short order Dominic and Brian had before them the records they’d requested and two cups of coffee. Harold loitered in the doorway until Brian gave him a you’re dismissed stare that only a Marine officer can generate.
The flight plan Hlasek Air filed listed the Falcon’s destination as Madrid, Spain, but flight plans were just that: plans. Once outside Söderhamn’s airspace, the Falcon could have gone anywhere. There were complications to this, of course, but nothing insurmountable. The maintenance records seemed similarly routine until they got past the summary and read the details. In addition to a topping off of the Falcon’s fuel tanks, the on-duty flight mechanic had performed a diagnostics scan of the aircraft