Playing Solitaire
Copyright© 2026 by Jody Daniel
Chapter 10
Dragon Peaks Airfield, North Hangar.
Lunch had done all of us good. Not because any of us had really been hungry. It simply forced everyone to step away from the investigation for half an hour and remember that life still carried on beyond a broken aeroplane and unanswered questions. The winter sun had climbed high enough to take the sting out of the mountain air, and as I walked back across the apron towards the hangar, I found myself breathing a little easier than I had that morning.
The great sliding hangar doors stood wide open.
Beyond them, the familiar organised chaos of an aircraft accident investigation was quietly unfolding.
Unlike the first few days after the wreck had arrived, there was very little shouting now. No forklifts darting back and forth. No heavy lifting. The investigation had entered a different phase—one requiring patience rather than muscle.
I paused just inside the doorway.
The Beechcraft King Air 350i had, in a strange sort of way, been brought back to life. Not as an aeroplane. As a story.
The skeletal steel reconstruction frame stood in the centre of the hangar like the ribs of some enormous prehistoric animal. Every major section of ZS-BEE had found its place upon it. The twisted cockpit sat exactly where it had once belonged, although its roof remained peeled back like the lid of an opened tin. Behind it stretched the fuselage, scarred and buckled but unmistakably whole again, allowing the eye to follow the aircraft’s original lines all the way back to the T-tail towering almost seven metres above the concrete floor.
It wasn’t beautiful. It wasn’t even particularly recognisable to the casual observer.
But to an accident investigator ... It spoke volumes. Every tear in the aluminium skin. Every wrinkle. Every compression buckle. Every missing rivet.
Each one was another sentence in the aircraft’s final conversation with the mountain.
The left wing had been secured to its support jig, its leading edge showing only moderate crushing where it had clipped the first outcrop. The right wing lay beside it on a separate frame, its outer third almost completely destroyed, the torn spar exposed like fractured bone.
Nearby, the left Pratt & Whitney PT6A engine sat proudly on its transport stand, looking almost offended to have survived so well. The right engine was another matter entirely. Hundreds of carefully labelled components occupied half a dozen heavy worktables, every compressor blade, gearbox housing and turbine disc arranged with almost surgical precision, waiting for Jean-Luc to continue coaxing answers from the battered metal.
I smiled faintly.
Engineers had a peculiar habit of treating shattered machinery with more tenderness than some people afforded the living.
Above me, one of the overhead gantry cranes creaked softly as it settled against its stops, disturbed only by the gentle movement of the building in the afternoon breeze.
The smell inside the hangar had changed too. The sharp scent of hydraulic oil and scorched aviation fuel that had greeted us during those first days had faded. Now it smelled predominantly of clean aluminium, fresh timber from the reconstruction frames, camera equipment warming under powerful LED lighting, and the faint aroma of coffee drifting from somewhere near the temporary offices.
I wandered slowly around the aircraft. There was no hurry. For the first time since arriving at Dragon Peaks, the wreck no longer looked like wreckage. It looked like evidence.
A photographer crouched near the crushed nose section, adjusting the position of a calibrated scale before taking another series of high-resolution images. Every click of the shutter echoed gently through the cavernous building.
A few metres farther on, another member of the documentation team operated what looked almost like an oversized video camera fitted with an array of lenses, and attached to an electric operated gantry, filming in slow increments the entire wreckage inside and outside. A 3D scanner.
He moved with extraordinary patience, sweeping the instrument backwards and forwards over the damaged fuselage in slow, overlapping passes. Thin blue laser lines danced silently across the torn aluminium skin while the attached tablet rendered the aircraft in real time. Every dent, every crack, every torn rivet hole appeared on the screen as millions upon millions of tiny digital reference points merged into an astonishingly detailed three-dimensional model. Nothing would ever be lost.
I stopped to watch. Long after the real aircraft had been dismantled and carted away, investigators would still be able to walk around it virtually, measure it to fractions of a millimetre, even step inside the cabin from a computer thousands of kilometres away.
It struck me how much accident investigation had changed since my early days in uniform. Back then we relied on tape measures, sketch pads and rolls of film. Today we preserved entire crime scenes inside computers.
I found myself standing beneath the rebuilt cabin section, looking through what had once been the passenger door.
It was strangely haunting. Only a few days earlier, seven people had boarded this aircraft expecting to be in Margate before dinner.
Now all that remained of their journey was twisted aluminium suspended on a steel frame beneath fluorescent lights.
Every investigation eventually reached this point. The excitement faded. The noise disappeared. What remained was quiet determination ... and the obligation to speak for people who no longer could.
I drew a slow breath, letting my eyes travel once more from the battered cockpit to the towering T-tail.
“We’re getting there,” I murmured to myself.
“Colonel!” Amanda’s voice carried clearly across the hangar.
I turned.
She was standing in the entrance to her little cubicle, one hand resting on the doorframe, the other holding a steaming mug of coffee. There was an unmistakable spark in her eyes.
Not excitement. Discovery. “I think you’d better come and have a look at this.”
Stepping into Amanda’s little domain always felt like crossing an invisible border into another world. Three laptops sat open across her workbench, their screens alive with scrolling code, packet traces and network diagrams that looked like pure gibberish to anyone without a degree in computer science. A fourth monitor displayed nothing but rows of white text marching steadily down a black background. Empty coffee mugs, memory sticks, and a spiral notebook were scattered between the keyboards in what only Amanda could possibly describe as organised.
She spun around on her high stool the moment she saw me. The grin on her face could only be described as Cheshire Cat that ate the canary. If she’d had a tail, it would’ve been wagging.
“I got him!” she announced triumphantly.
“Well,” I smiled, “that’s usually a good sign. What have you got?”
Amanda rotated one of the monitors towards me.
“The mail server belongs to Jinlong Strategic Capital Holdings.”
She let that hang in the air for a moment before adding,
“But that’s not where the email originated.”
I folded my arms.
“Explain.”
Amanda leaned forward, tapping a section of the routing log with the blunt end of a pencil.
“Look here. The SMTP server accepted the message from an authenticated client.”
“Meaning?” I frowned.
“Meaning somebody logged into Jinlong’s mail server remotely.”
She highlighted another line.
“This IP right here...”
Authenticated Client: 10.74.xxx.xxx (internal) Gateway Exit: 203.xxx.xxx.xxx Physical Endpoint: Suite 2105 Meridian Financial Centre 88 Yincheng Middle Road Lujiazui Pudong New Area Shanghai.
I studied the screen for several seconds before looking back at her.
Amanda must have recognised the expression on my face because she laughed softly. “Okay ... plain English.”
“That would help.”
“Think of it like posting a letter.”
I nodded.
“The envelope says it came from the Johannesburg General Post Office.”
“Right.”
“But CCTV footage shows the person actually walked into the Sandton branch to post it.”
The penny finally dropped. “So Jinlong Strategic Capital owns the mail server...”
“ ... but whoever sent the email was sitting in an entirely different office,” Amanda finished with a satisfied grin.
“Exactly.”
She nodded enthusiastically. “They’re hiding behind somebody else’s infrastructure.”
“Can we prove it?”
Amanda’s smile widened. “Better than that.” She tapped the highlighted IP address again.
“We can prove they authenticated against Jinlong’s enterprise mail server from Suite 2105.”
I looked back at the address.
“Okay...”
Amanda wasn’t finished. “One more thing.”
“What?”
“The Meridian Financial Centre specialises in serviced executive suites.”
I looked at her. “So?”
“So Suite 2105 doesn’t necessarily belong to anybody.”
She paused deliberately.
“It could have been rented for a week. Paid for in cash. Then used as a temporary operations room, and be standing empty by tomorrow morning.”
For a long moment I simply stared at the address glowing on the screen.
The investigation had just acquired something infinitely more valuable than another clue. It had acquired a deadline.
“Wait!” Mandy exclaimed.
Amanda’s fingers clicked twice on her trackpad, snapping the fourth monitor into a high-contrast terminal split screen.
The scrolling lines of raw network text froze, replaced by a dark grey window with a pulsing green status indicator in the top-left corner.
SOCKET ESTABLISHED: 203.xxx.xxx.xxx [PORT 443]
PAYLOAD EXECUTION: SUCCESSFUL (ENCRYPTED TUNNEL ACTIVE)
“The password went through,” Amanda said, her voice dropping from triumphant chatter into a quiet, intense focus. “Someone in Suite 2105 opened ZS-BEEAirworthinessAssessmentDraftv3.pdf, entered BEE_Draft2026!, and navigated to page four.”
“They’re reading it?” I asked, leaning in over her shoulder.
“They were reading it,” Amanda corrected, her eyes scanning the incoming telemetry stream. “The moment the PDF viewer decrypted the file structure in RAM, my wrapper dropped the payload into a temporary memory thread. It just executed a lightweight system inventory and established its heartbeat back to us.”
She tapped a shortcut key, opening a secondary window on the main screen.
“Host system identified,” she read off. “ThinkPad X1 Carbon running an English-language version of Windows 11 Enterprise. Local system time... 17:32 Shanghai time.”
“Five-thirty in the afternoon,” I mused. “Just before knock-off.”
“Not for this guy,” Amanda said. “Look at the active processes.”
Rows of system descriptors began mapping out across her display as the snoop-ware completed its silent diagnostic scan.
ACTIVE SESSION: admin_ops
RUNNING PROCESSES: WireGuard VPN (Tunnelling to RSA Relay), Thunderbird (Mail Client), WeChat Work, Tor Browser (Idle), Acrobat Reader Pro
“He’s using a dedicated VPN tunnel routing out of South Africa to access Jinlong’s Shanghai mail server,” Amanda pointed out, tracing a blue vector line on her screen. “That’s why the header looked like it hit Jinlong directly. But underneath ... he’s running a local mail client.”
“Can your bug see his screen?”
“Screen capture packet incoming now,” Amanda replied, clicking a thumbnail that popped up on her secondary monitor. “Every fifteen seconds, my code grabs an uncompressed frame of his primary desktop and sends it back in a burst transmission disguised as HTTPS handshake noise.”
The image expanded onto the screen, razor-sharp.
It was a screenshot of the target’s desktop. In the centre sat Megan’s fake draft PDF, scrolled to page seven with the highlighted text on control surface telemetry visible on the screen.
To the left of the PDF viewer was an open file explorer window showing a local folder directory labelled “PROJECTBEEOPERATION WILLOW TREE”.
I stiffened. Willow tree?
“Zoom in on that directory,” I said quietly.
Amanda pinched and expanded the image. The file list inside PROJECTBEEOPERATION WILLOW TREE was organised with clinical, military-style precision:
01FLIGHTMANIFEST_ZS-BEE.pdf
02LOGGERFREQUENCY_MOD.bin
03STEINHOFFRETAINER_AGREEMENT.pdf
04CONFLUENCEMAPSSECTOR4.dwg
05MEGANFORSYTH_CREDENTIALS.png
06ZS-BEEAirworthinessAssessmentDraft_v3.pdf
“Steinhoff,” I muttered, staring at file number three. “He’s on their payroll.”
“It gets better,” Amanda said, pointing her pen at the bottom right corner of the target’s desktop screen. “Look at his system tray. He’s got an external high-speed storage drive plugged into USB Port 2, and he’s currently running a script to sync those local project files to an off-site cloud server.”
“He’s packing up,” I realised instantly. “That’s why Suite 2105 is a burn office. He’s verifying Megan’s capitulation, syncing his files to a remote server, and wiping his local station before checking out of the Meridian Financial Centre.”
Amanda’s face turned deadly serious. “If he unplugs that flash drive or hits the master wipe script, we lose the direct line into his local memory.”
“How fast can your snoop-ware pull copies of those files?”
“I can command the payload to execute a background mirror of those six specific documents,” Amanda said, her hands already flying across the mechanical keyboard, setting up the extraction command. “It won’t trigger a single prompt on his screen. It’ll siphon them through our encrypted tunnel in small, fragmented packets so it doesn’t cause a bandwidth spike.”
“Do it,” I ordered. “Pull STEINHOFFRETAINERAGREEMENT and LOGGERFREQUENCYMOD first.”
“Command sent,” Amanda whispered, watching the progress bar initialise at the bottom of her screen.
EXTRACTING: 03STEINHOFFRETAINER_AGREEMENT.pdf (1.2 MB)... 14%... 48%... 100% [COMPLETE]
EXTRACTING: 02LOGGERFREQUENCY_MOD.bin (450 KB)... 22%... 81%... 100% [COMPLETE]
“Got them!” she breathed.
At that exact second, the live screen capture on Amanda’s secondary monitor refreshed.
On the target’s desktop in Shanghai, the PDF viewer containing Megan’s report suddenly closed. The mouse cursor hovered over the USB icon in the taskbar, right-clicking to eject the external drive.
“He’s logging off,” Amanda said, her voice tense.
“Did we get all six files?”
“Pulled the manifest and the sector maps too,” Amanda confirmed, slapping the edge of her desk with an open palm. “I’ve got the local copies saved directly to your encrypted drive, Tim. He can throw that ThinkPad into the Huangpu River for all I care—we’ve got his entire operation sitting right here on our bench. Just one thing ... don’t open file 06, just delete it. I don’t want to see the porn on your laptop.” Giggle.
“MANDY! I don’t have porn on my laptop!”
“Yeah, yeah...” She smirked.
Amanda stared at the screen for a moment, her eyes widening as the logic played out in her mind. Slowly, a wicked, brilliant smile spread across her face.
“Tim...” she whispered, turning her chair around to face me. “Do you realise what we just did?”
I raised an eyebrow, gesturing toward her terminal. “We pulled five critical files off a burn-suite laptop in Shanghai before the guy could pull the plug.”
“No,” Amanda said, shaking her head, her voice rising with sudden realisation. “That’s just what we did ten seconds ago. Think about where that PDF is right now.”
I frowned, tracing the sequence. “It’s in his local directory. And according to your screen capture, he just finished syncing that entire directory up to his cloud server.”
“Right,” Amanda said, leaning forward and tapping her desk with her index finger for emphasis. “And because the snoop-ware isn’t sitting on his local hard drive—because it’s embedded directly into the encrypted memory structure of the PDF file itself—that payload went straight up to the cloud with it.”
The implication hit me like a sudden drop in altitude. I held her gaze. “The PDF is the carrier.”
“The PDF is an infectious digital landmine,” Amanda corrected, her eyes dancing with excitement. “It doesn’t matter that he unplugs his USB drive. It doesn’t matter if he throws that ThinkPad off the Bund into the Huangpu River and checks into a hotel across town. The second he logs into a new machine, downloads that draft from his cloud drive, and types in BEE_Draft2026!...”
She clapped her hands together once, the sharp sound echoing off the hangar’s metal walls. “ ... the payload executes all over again. A brand-new socket opens up, and my listening server gets a fresh IP address, a new hardware ID, and a new physical location.”
“What if he doesn’t open it himself?” I asked, the tactical possibilities opening up like a military map. “What if he forwards it?”
Amanda leaned back in her stool, folding her arms with absolute satisfaction. “Then it gets even better. Say this guy in Suite 2105 is just a mid-level contractor or a technical handler. What’s his first move when he thinks he’s successfully blackmailed a SACAA inspector?”
“He sends proof to his boss,” I said flatly. “He forwards the report up the chain to show he got the job done.”
“Exactly,” Amanda said, pointing her pen at me. “He forwards ZS-BEEAirworthinessAssessmentDraftv3.pdf to his handler, or his legal team, or the corporate board paying his retainer. He includes the password so they can review Megan’s ‘capitulation’ for themselves.”
She turned back to her four monitors, gesturing toward the dark terminal screens waiting quietly in the background.
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.