Unpopular Science

“Nothing, Pop, not with my weather-proofing. You could take the roof off this place in a sandstorm and you wouldn’t so much as short a power supply.”

The kid never stopped grinning and his father never stopped scowling, but the old man reached out and scrubbed the kid’s crew cut with his knuckles.

“Hey! You nut! Cut it out!” The kid scrambled away and made for the tiny kitchen at the far end of the low building, where he bent at the waist with his head inside the refrigerator as if he intended to remain there for the duration.

The older man peered at his screen until he felt the cool breeze reach him, more than forty feet away. “Trying to cool zee whole building?”

The kid emerged with a bag of bread covered in a rainbow of dots, a package of bologna and a half-gallon squeeze bottle of bright yellow mustard. He set it up next to his father’s monitor and watched the screen as he laid out five bread slices, squeezed a thick puddle of mustard on the first four, then layered them with slices of pale meat from the package. He stacked them atop one another, putting the fifth slice of doughy white bread on top, and carefully compressed the sandwich until the mustard just barely began oozing out the sides. He took a huge bite and noticed his father watching him with unconcealed distaste.

“Train wreck,” the kid said, and opened his mouth wide to display the half-chewed contents.

“Disgusting.” The older man turned back to his display.

“Casablanca?” the kid asked.

“Yes.”

“Find the right plane?”

“Perhaps. How was school?”

“I got a B on a science quiz.”

“You are joking?”

“Nope.”

The older man waited for the punch line. It was impossible for his son to get a B on a science exam. “Teacher error?”

“Yeah. I set her straight. She was cool about it.”

“Cool as in not perturbed.”

“Yeah. You know. Not ticked off or anything because I was right and she was wrong. She changed it to an A.”

“Cool,” the older man said, his concentration on the screen.

The kid chewed loudly in his ear for a full minute as they watched the stark, high-contrast video images displaying in three small windows.

“Your possibles?” the kid asked.

‘Yes. This is the only aircraft I have traced so far.” He tapped the small window showing the looming profile of a sleek jet. The image, like the other two, seemed to be shot from extremely low to the ground, as if someone had dropped a video camera a few paces from the aircraft and it was looking up. The legend beneath the video feed identified the aircraft as originating in the State of Florida in the United States.

The kid rubbed the tip of this freckled nose contemplatively, then tapped another window. “Let me see this one.”

The older man expanded the window with the next aircraft, also videotaped from very low to the ground but from farther away. The long sweep of tarmac that dominated the image moved slightly as the camera seemed to creep slowly toward the aircraft.

“Nah. Forget that one.”

“Why?” the older man asked. ‘You don’t even know its origin.”

“I think it’s a Saudi jet. See this?” He tapped the blur of green on the tail. “Saudi flag, I bet. Plus, that’s a Cessna Citation X, no special retrofits apparent, which means it’ll cruise 1,500 nautical miles on a full tank. Not what you’d use for crossing the Atlantic.”

The father nodded and used the mouse to adjust the camera, zooming in on the blurry image of the flag and tapping out a command that made the window freeze. A moment later a high-resolution digital photo of the blur of color resolved itself laboriously on the screen until it was a square of green with white Arabic letters underscored with a white sword. The image next to it was a logo or family insignia of some kind.

“Yeah. Forget ’em,” the kid said.

“I agree.” The older man punched out commands, then moved on to the third screen. “Not much larger than the other Saudi jet.”

“It’s bigger than it looks and there’s a big difference in the specs, too. Pop. It’s a Raytheon business jet. Hawker Horizon. It’ll fly at least twice as far, for one thing, as the Cessna. Could have come from the U.S. easy.”

The aircraft in the image was closer than the others. The camera seemed to be inching ever so slowly up on the right rear wheel.

“Who’s the uniforms?” the kid asked.

“Airport security. Morocco is a dangerous place to leave a valuable aircraft unattended.”

“There’s like five of them. Seems excessive.”

“That in itself means nothing,” the older man said in his German-heavy speech. “It costs little to hire a small army to guard a jet for a few hours.” After ten minutes, the camera appeared to have crept only a few yards closer to the wheels of the aircraft and the older man said, “Don’t you have homework?”

“Done.”

“When?”

“I dictated the answers into the phone on the way home,” the kid explained, and stretched to one of the printers that were scattered among the vast array of electronics equipment in the big, low room. He snatched up a small stack of papers and fanned them. “See?”

“Humph.”

“Gonna have another sandwich. Want one?”