Playing Solitaire
Copyright© 2026 by Jody Daniel
Chapter 13
Dragon Peaks Airfield. North Hangar.
The cold hit me the moment I stepped out of the Lakeside Suites.
It wasn’t the vicious, bone-biting cold we’d experienced higher up on the mountain during the first days of the investigation. This was a cleaner cold, the sort that belonged to a cloudless Drakensberg winter morning. The sun had been up for barely half an hour, but its light was already beginning to spill across the valley, catching the upper edges of the peaks and turning them a pale, almost golden grey.
I zipped my jacket a little higher and started down the walkway towards the North Hangar, my breath hanging briefly in front of me before dissolving into the still morning air.
The resort was only just waking.
Somewhere beyond the chalets, I heard the muted clatter of crockery from the kitchen. A door slammed, followed by the distant cough and growl of a vehicle starting somewhere near the main buildings. Birds were already making up for the silence, their calls carrying remarkably clearly through the cold morning air.
From the direction of the dining room came the faint smell of bacon and wood smoke, riding on a light breeze that whispered through the surrounding trees.
I glanced towards the mountains as I walked.
They looked magnificent in the early light.
After everything that had happened here, there was something almost surreal about seeing them so peaceful. The same peaks that had claimed an aircraft and nearly killed members of my team now stood there as though nothing had happened at all.
By the time I reached the hangar, the first shafts of sunlight were reaching across the apron, turning the dew on the grass into tiny points of light.
The big doors were still closed, but the security detail was changing shifts and moving around the perimeter. One of the men spotted me, straightened and gave me a smart salute as I approached.
I returned it, even though I was in civilian clothes.
I couldn’t help chuckling inwardly.
Somehow, the SAPS members had informally adopted the American habit of saluting while out of uniform. I suppose it was a mixture of Hollywood movies, military influence and plain old informal culture. It certainly wasn’t regulation.
Just adaptation. And in doing so relayed the respect for an officer even though it was completely unheard of on parade-grounds or formal training environments.
Inside the hangar, the familiar smell of aviation greeted me—cold metal, hydraulic fluid, rubber and the faint lingering odour of fuel.
The reconstructed wreck sat in the centre of the floor, section by section, looking almost clinical now that every piece had been cleaned, photographed, catalogued and put back into position.
Misty occupied one corner, secured exactly where I’d left her. The contrast between the two machines was almost jarring.
The King Air looked like a wounded animal frozen in the middle of its final moment.
Misty gleamed at her parking spot in the corner, her polished surfaces catching the early sunlight that filtered through the high windows.
One represented an investigation.
The other represented escape.
My little five-by-five cubicle looked exactly as I’d left it.
A pile of notes occupied one corner of the desk. My preliminary report sat open on the monitor, waiting patiently for me to stop finding excuses not to finish it.
I dropped my notebook onto the desk, shrugged out of my jacket and hung it over the back of the chair.
Then I reached for the coffee maker.
The machine clicked awake.
A small green indicator illuminated, followed by the soft whizzing of the heating element and the first faint gurgle of water moving through the system.
I stood there with my hands resting on the edge of the desk, listening to it.
For some reason, I remember thinking that it was going to be an ordinary morning.
That thought lasted exactly eleven seconds.
Then the coffee maker beeped.
And from somewhere across the hangar, Amanda called my name.
I turned around, mug in hand, just as Amanda leaned out from behind her bank of monitors. Her glasses were pushed up onto her forehead, and for the first time since we’d arrived at Dragon Peaks, the playful grin was completely gone.
“Tim, you need to see this,” she said, her voice lacking its usual cheerful bounce. “And bring your coffee. You’re going to need it.”
I walked over to her workstation, the soles of my boots sounding heavy against the concrete. Across the workbench, Megan was already standing behind Amanda’s left shoulder, still holding her travel mug, her eyes glued to the secondary display.
“What’s happened?” I asked, setting my mug down beside her keyboard. “Did the Tor nodes fail?”
“No,” Amanda said, tapping a rapid sequence on her mechanical keyboard. The screen flickered, replacing the stock ticker with a split-view network diagnostic log and a regional map overlaid with red vectors. “The payload went off like clockwork at 02:00 SAST. That box didn’t just deliver the file—it detonated a digital fuel-air explosive right in the middle of Jinlong’s executive boardroom.”
She hit Enter, bringing up a split display. On the left was the real-time stock ticker for Jinlong Heavy Industries on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. A jagged, crimson line plunged downward like an aircraft in a graveyard spiral. On the right was an automated news feed translated from Mandarin.
“At 02:00 SAST—08:00 Shanghai time—the market opened,” Amanda explained, using her pencil as a pointer.
“What’s the damage?” I asked.
“The stock opened at eighty-four yuan,” Amanda said, her grin widening. “By 08:22 AM local time, it had plunged fourteen percent. At nine o’clock, when the board couldn’t produce a coherent statement, it dropped another eleven percent. The Shanghai Exchange hit the emergency circuit breaker and halted trading on Jinlong entirely.”
Megan let out a low, breathy whistle. “A twenty-five percent wipe-out in under an hour.”
“Equating to roughly four hundred million US dollars in market capitalisation gone,” Amanda added cheerfully. “Vaporised into thin air. But wait, it gets better.”
She clicked a secondary window, opening a network traffic monitor centered on Shanghai. Bright yellow nodes were lighting up like a Christmas tree.
“Chen Wei-Liang’s private server at Jinlong headquarters has been running hot for three hours,” Amanda said. “Our ghost-routing relay in Gordon’s Bay logged twenty-seven urgent, encrypted outgoing calls from Chen’s office starting at three in the morning our time.”
“Who was he calling?” I asked, my eyes fixed on the tracer map.
“His offshore bankers in Macao first, trying to freeze liquid assets,” Amanda replied. “And then ... four direct, high-priority satellite calls to a private line registered in the Western Cape and Steinhoff back in Pretoria. Chen is panicking. He knows the device wasn’t a random leak—it was a targeted execution. And because our fake routing trace leaves the digital footprint sitting right on a server block in Gordon’s Bay ... Chen thinks Karl Steinhoff double-crossed him.”
Amanda straightened up, her expression hardening instantly. “But this part isn’t.”
“At 04:14 this morning someone executed a passive scan on the Drakensberg regional cellular repeater,” Amanda said, pointing a fingernail at a red ping on the map. “It wasn’t a brute-force cyberattack. It was an RF sweep—a direction-finding sweep targeting encrypted satellite and high-bandwidth telemetry signals in this grid sector.”
Megan frowned, looking from the screen to me. “A sweep? You mean someone is physically in the area using radio direction-finding gear?”
“Worse,” Amanda replied softly. “They didn’t break my multi-hop VPN. They didn’t need to. Whoever set up that sweep knew the green box was operating in South Africa before we even turned it on. They were sweeping the Drakensberg airwaves for anomalous high-frequency data bursts.”
A cold knot formed in my stomach. The law enforcement officer in me immediately shifted gears from digital tradecraft to physical security.
“How close is the signal source?” I asked, my voice dropping into that flat, quiet tone I used whenever a scene turned sour.
Amanda tapped the map, expanding a radial ring centered three kilometres south of the airfield, near the pass road.
“The sweep originated from a mobile unit moving along the R600,” she said, looking up at me through her glasses. “They were pinging the local towers to triangulate any encrypted uplink. They haven’t located the hangar yet, Tim ... but they know the device, or someone with the device in these mountains is transmitting.”
Megan set her mug down with a sharp click. “Steinhoff?”
“Or Chen’s local assets,” I said, turning toward the hangar doors where the security team was finishing their shift change. “Mandy, kill the power to the green box now. Disconnect the uplink and purge the local cache.”
“Already done,” Amanda said. “The box has been dark since 02:00.”
I looked back at the open doors, where the crisp morning sunlight was streaming across the apron, illuminating Misty’s polished fuselage. The peaceful morning was officially over.
“They’re sweeping the valley,” I murmured. “Which means we’re not just waiting for Shanghai to react anymore. They’re already on the ground. But while we are not transmitting, they have no signal to follow or trace...”
“They suspect the device is still here in the valley,” Amanda replied. “They just don’t know where.”
“So if we don’t transmit again, they won’t find us?” Megan asked.
“Yes,” Amanda replied. “They can only trace the signal if we transmit.”
“Okay, then we don’t transmit. We’ve done enough damage already,” I instructed, taking a sip of my rapidly cooling coffee.
“I can see when they scan,” Amanda giggled. “They have been quiet since 06:00...”
“So, you can transmit if their scanners are off?”
“In thirty second intervals, yes.”
“Okay but leave it for the time being. No transmissions.”
“Aye-aye, Colonel!” Amanda chuckled. “Or ... I can switch to fibre...”
“What does that mean?”
“The fibre connection goes out on a server in Durban...” She replied.
“No leave it for a day or two.”
The elite suburb of Waterkloof, Pretoria. Steinhoff residence.
The air inside Karl Steinhoff’s glass-fronted study in Waterkloof was crisp, cool, and scented with dark espresso and polished mahogany.
Through the floor-to-ceiling glass, the early morning sun was just beginning to crest over the northern Pretoria ridge, bathing the manicured gardens in a cold, golden light. Off to the distant horizon, the purple-grey line of the Magaliesberg mountains stood out sharp against a cloudless Highveld sky. Steinhoff stood by the window, wrapped in a heavy charcoal silk dressing gown, a gold Montblanc pen balanced between his fingers.
He liked the quiet isolation of Waterkloof before the administrative noise of the city took over.
Then, the high-security satellite phone on his desk didn’t just ring—it violently buzzed against the polished wood, its high-encryption LED flashing a steady, angry red.
Steinhoff didn’t rush. He took a deliberate, slow sip of his coffee, set the porcelain cup onto its saucer, and walked to the desk. He checked the display.
ORIGIN: SHANGHAI - DIRECT VIP LINE.
He pressed the answer key and lifted the receiver. “Chen. It’s early.”
“You treacherous son of a bitch!”
The voice exploded through the speaker in a rapid, gravelly burst of Mandarin-accented English, distorted slightly by the satellite delay. Chen Wei-Liang wasn’t just angry; he was breathing in harsh, ragged rasps, the background noise of his Shanghai office filled with shouting aides and slamming doors.
Steinhoff’s brow furrowed, his cool posture instantly rigid. “Watch your tongue, Chen. I don’t respond to temper tantrums.”
“My stock is down twenty-five percent!” Chen slammed a heavy hand onto his desk across six thousand miles of ocean. “Four hundred million US dollars wiped off the market value in under an hour! The Exchange Regulator has frozen trading on Jinlong! Do you hear me? Frozen!”
Steinhoff stayed motionless, his mind instantly calculating the variables. “What leakers could possibly hit equity prices that hard?”
“The proprietary telemetry and the hardware schematics from the prototype!” Chen hissed, his voice dropping into a venomous whisper.
An icy chill settled behind Steinhoff’s ribs. “That’s impossible. The physical device was on that plane. The drive was encrypted, and the secondary logs were isolated—”
“Which means someone recovered the device from the wreckage!” Chen roared. “Or you double-crossed me and extracted the unit before the SACAA team secured the valley! My IT team traced the data dumps exit bounce to a relay block sitting in Gordon’s Bay! In your country!”
Steinhoff turned slowly, looking out toward the distant Magaliesberg ridge. The gold pen in his hand snapped with a sharp crack.
“Listen to me very carefully, Chen,” Steinhoff said, his voice dropping into a low, deadly register. “I do not have the device. If SAPS or the SACAA team got their hands on that unit, I’d have arrest warrants served on me right now.”
“You think I am blind, Karl?” Chen spat back. “You wanted full control of the joint venture! You hold short positions on Jinlong equity through your European proxies! You used the prototype to crash my valuation, and force a hostile buyout while I face corporate espionage charges in Beijing!”
“I am telling you, neither of us has it!” Steinhoff snapped, his composure finally breaking. “Whoever took that device from the Drakensberg site is playing both of us! They are using the unit’s own transmitter to bleed us out! Besides, I don’t know how to program the damn thing!”
“Then you better recover that device, Karl, ” Chen growled, his voice trembling with rage. “Because if Beijing steps in to audit Jinlong’s books, I will not take the fall alone. I will hand the SAPS elite division every contract, every wire, and every signature with your name on it.”
The line went dead with a harsh dial tone.
Steinhoff stood frozen in the quiet study, the receiver still pressed to his ear. The Highveld morning suddenly felt suffocating. He slowly set the phone back into its cradle, his knuckles white against the desk.
He picked up a secondary, unlisted cellular device, punched in a ten-digit private number, and waited.
“Speak,” a rough, Afrikaans-accented voice answered on the third ring.
“The mobile unit on the R600,” Steinhoff said, his voice tight and flat. “Forget finding signals. The prototype device is somewhere in that valley, and whoever is operating it is transmitting out of Dragon Peaks. Find that unit and bring it to me.”
“And the ones that have it?”
“Use your brain, dummkopf! Eliminate all traces of evidence,” Steinhoff hissed and closed the connection.
For a long moment he remained beside the window, watching the sunlight climb across the Pretoria skyline.
Then he looked down at the broken Montblanc pen.
For the first time since the King Air had disappeared into the Drakensberg, Karl Steinhoff was no longer playing defence.
He was hunting.
Back at Dragon Peaks.
At 09:00 I called a meeting of all the investigation team on site. The investigation was drawing to a close and all concerned would have their final analysis reports completed.
“I take it we are all done with our reports?” I asked. A chorus of muttered confirmation went up.
“I just need to merge the schematics and figures with my written report, and I’ll be done,” Linda spoke up.
“Yes, your report is one of the main parts of the final report, Doctor,” I replied.
“You’ll have it by 15:00 today, Colonel.”
“Thank you, Doctor Linda. It is appreciated.” I replied. “We will be releasing the wreck to the insurer. As soon as they signed for the items it will be done and dusted. You will all be released from this physical investigation with the understanding that you will be available for further consultation until the final report is published.”
“Are we getting a farewell braai?” A voice sounded up and a ripple of chuckles and laughter sounded up.
“I plan a closing function for tomorrow afternoon at 15:00,” I chuckled.
With that the meeting was concluded and we all stepped out of the conference room.
Megan sided up to me as I was leaving.
“I’m going to miss our evening tea...” She said.
“Me too...” I sighed.
“So, will it be back to the salt-mines for you?”
“Not for another week,” I replied. “I need to get the report done and present it to the CAA.”
“Yeah ... I have to report in and see whatever there is for me to do.”
“If not investigating incidents, what do you keep yourself busy with, Mags?”
She chuckled. “I sit around all day eating doughnuts and drinking coffee, polish my nails and gossip with the rest of the office...” She stopped speaking and cast a teasing look at me. Her hair slightly fell over her face.
“Be serious, Megan!” I replied. “I can’t see you sitting around idling...”
“Besides report writing and technical analysis, safety recommendations, trend analysis and safety intelligence, regulatory reviews and audits, I also have to keep my CPD current.”
“Continuous Professional Development?”
“Yeah, continuous training and simulator time to keep my type ratings current...” Megan replied and then sighed. “Then there’s still the inter-agency liaison and exercises...”
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