Chapter 4 - The Nicosia Trail
The office of the executive director of Titan Tactical Systems sat on the eleventh floor of a concrete-and-glass tower overlooking the Savannah River. It was a room designed by her father—spare, functional, with gray industrial carpeting and wide windows that let in the flat, gray light of the southern autumn.
Sarah sat behind the desk, her coat off, her shirt sleeves rolled up to her elbows. The burn scar on her forearm was visible now—a pale, puckered patch where the aviation fuel had caught her sleeve before Carney could pull her through the hatch.
Across the desk sat Marcus Vance. The prosecutor looked different without his team of assistants and his polished courtroom air. He looked like a man who had spent three days reading bank statements from Cyprus and wished he had chosen a different career path.
“The federal grand jury returned the indictments at two o'clock this afternoon,” Vance said, placing a thin blue folder on the desk. He didn't look at her eyes; he looked at the small bronze model of an MH-60 Black Hawk helicopter that served as her paperweight. “Your brother is being held without bail at the detention center in Atlanta. Flight risk. He bought a first-class ticket to Dubai under an alias three hours after Judge Harrison dismissed your case.”
“And Elaine?” Sarah asked.
“House arrest at the estate in Savannah,” Vance said. “Electronic monitoring. Her attorneys are arguing that her health is too fragile for a federal facility, but the medical evaluation shows nothing but high blood pressure and an over-reliance on Valium. She’s cooperative, Sarah. She’s giving up the names of the distributors in Beirut to save herself from the mandatory minimums.”
Sarah reached out and touched the bronze helicopter, her finger tracing the main rotor blade. “She always knew how to negotiate a retreat. When I was ten, she spent six months pretending she didn't know my father was using the company’s logistics lines to assist the State Department with the extraction of local nationals from Sarajevo. Then she used that knowledge to get the house in Palm Beach during their first separation.”
“The company’s stock dropped twelve points when the news broke,” Vance said, leaning forward. “The board is panicking. They want to know if you're going to liquidate the proprietary contracts or if you're going to let the Department of Defense take over the operations under a receivership.”
“The board can do whatever they like,” Sarah said, her voice dropping into that flat, hard rhythm that had terrified her mother in the courtroom. “The voting shares stay with me. The contracts stay with the unit. We have three teams in the field right now near Erbil who are relying on Titan’s transponders to keep their birds from being targeted by our own batteries. I’m not turning those keys over to a bunch of suits who think a tactical network is just a line item on a quarterly report.”
The door to the office opened without a knock. General Carney stepped inside, carrying two paper cups of coffee from the machine down the hall. He handed one to Sarah and didn't offer one to Vance.
“The logistics element at Fort Bragg just cleared the manifests,” Carney said, sitting on the corner of the desk. “The hardware Curtis was trying to move out of the Savannah port wasn't just old stock. It was the encryption modules for the Link 16 tactical data exchange. If that gear had landed in Nicosia, every air defense radar between Nicosia and Tehran would have had our codes by the end of the week.”
Vance let out a long, slow breath. “That’s treason. Capital offense.”
“It’s a business model if you don't get caught,” Carney said, his gray eye fixed on the window. “Curtis wasn't smart enough to come up with this on his own. He was working with a man named Kassar. A local national with an old French passport who spent the nineties selling surplus Soviet small arms to the militias in the Sudan. He was using Elaine’s personal accounts to clear the customs declarations at the port.”
Sarah stood up, walking to the window. The river below was muddy, the tugboats moving slowly against the current, dragging heavy barges of timber toward the sea.
“My father knew,” she said, her back to the two men. “Before he lost the ability to write, he gave me a notebook. Just six pages of numbers and dates. I thought they were coordinate sets for the old drop zones in Kandahar. But they weren't. They were the container numbers for the shipments that went out through the Savannah terminal while I was in the hospital.”
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She turned around, looking at Carney. “He didn't tell me because he wanted to protect the company, Duane. He told me because he knew that if I didn't take the helm, Curtis and Elaine would end up in a ditch or a cage. He wanted me to be the executioner so the state wouldn't have to be.”
“He was an old soldier, Sarah,” Carney said, his voice softer than usual. “He knew that sometimes you have to burn the perimeter to save the blockhouse.”
