Day of Wrath

Part of that was her fault, Helen knew. She’d allowed herself to be swept up in the excitement of her new assignment. Tracking illegal drugs, money laundering, arms smuggling, and the other booming ventures of Russia’s organized crime syndicates was often a twenty-four-hour-a-day job — one that made maintaining a relationship across eight time zones and thousands of miles immensely difficult.

Of course, the time they’d spent together here hadn’t been very conducive to romance, Helen thought ruefully. She and Peter were two birds of a feather. Neither of them found it particularly easy to open their hearts to another person — even under the best of circumstances.

Being dead-tired most of the time made that more difficult still. And the lack of privacy only compounded their woes. It was tough to rekindle physical and emotional intimacy when you were liable to be walked in on at any moment. So far, they were exactly.000 for two on that score, Helen realized, blushing as she remembered the knowing leer on Mcdowell’s face.

“Have you seen enough, Miss Gray?” Robert Nielsen’s dry, precise voice broke in on her thoughts, tugging her back to the case at hand.

Helen refocused he, r attention on the wreckage heaped in front of her.

She turned to the head of the NTSB investigative team. “So what exactly am I looking at here, Mr. Nielsen?”

“Part of the An-3”-s port engine.” The tall, gaunt man nodded toward the table. “One of the recovery crews found it at the bottom of a pond last night.”

“And the starboard engine?” she asked.

Nielsen shook his head. “They haven’t recovered it yet.”

“But you’ve learned something about what caused this engine to seize up?” Helen prodded.

“Yes.” Nielsen pulled a length of gnarled, threaded sleeve off the table. “This is the housing for the engine fuel filter. Now take a look at what we found inside it.”

Straining slightly, the NTSB man unscrewed the sleeve — exposing another, smaller sleeve inside. Then he reached inside and extracted a blackened cylinder.

“That’s the filter itself?” Peter asked quietly.

Nielsen nodded. He held it up for closer inspection. “See that?”

“See what?” Helen peered intently at the filter. It looked pitchblack against the light. “I can’t see anything.”

“That’s exactly my point,” Nielsen replied. “You should be able to see the light shining through the mesh screens on this filter.”’

He tapped the cylinder with one gloved finger. “But this filter is clogged, Miss Gray. It’s choked with so many contaminants that I’m not surprised this engine seized up.”

Alexei Koniev raised an eyebrow. “Contaminants? What kind of contaminants?”

“Dirt. Metal shavings. Rust particles.” The NTSB man ticked them off on his fingers. “It’s all the kind of crap you expect to find in most aviation fuel — just multiplied about a thousand times over the normal levels.”

Helen framed her next question carefully, conscious that she was treading on touchy ground. Like most people in his profession, Nielsen hated being asked to arrive at hard-and-fast conclusions ahead of the evidence. “This fuel contamination. do you think it could have happened accidentally? Or does it look deliberate?”

“Was it sabotage, you mean?” Nielsen pursed his lips, looking down at the dirty filter he still held in his hand. Then he shook his head.

“I don’t know, Miss Gray. Not with any degree of certainty.”’

“So speculate, then,” Helen said sharply, momentarily losing patience.

With effort, she reined her irritation in and tried a winning smile instead. “Please.”

“Damn it, it’s not that simple,” Nielsen grumbled. “We’ve had bad fuel bring down planes in the U.S. And it’s an endemic problem here in Russia. What’s more, both engines would draw from the same fuel source. So when one engine died of fuel starvation, the second would follow in short order.”

“All of which is consistent with the last radio transmissions from the aircraft,” Helen reflected.

“Right.” Nielsen held the filter up again. “What we’re seeing here could just be sloppy maintenance. Contaminants like these always settle out over time. So we may have a case where somebody really screwed up. Maybe they didn’t replace an old, used filter when they should have. Or maybe they fueled the plane using aviation gas from the bottom of a tank …”

“Or maybe somebody did the same things — on purpose,” Peter finished for him.

“That is possible, Colonel,” Nielsen confirmed reluctantly.

“The mechanics are the same either way. And the equation’s the same, too: The more contaminants flow through the filter, the more clogged it gets. Eventually, there’s not enough fuel getting through to feed the engine.”

Koniev frowned. “Is there any way you will ever know the truth?” ‘ The NTSB investigator sighed. “Maybe. At least I hope so.”

He nodded at the tangled pile of engine components. “We’re shipping all this off to Moscow this evening for more detailed forensic analysis.”