Playing Solitaire
Copyright© 2026 by Jody Daniel
Chapter 7
North Hangar Dragon Peaks Airfield.
The following morning the hangar was already alive long before most people would have considered the day properly started.
The enormous sliding doors stood wide open, allowing the crisp mountain air to drift inside. Beyond them, the sun was steadily climbing above the eastern ridges, its rays reaching across the apron until they spilled onto the polished concrete floor. Dust motes floated lazily through the shafts of golden light, rising and falling in the wake of every passing technician.
Inside, organised chaos had taken over.
The shattered remains of ZS-BEE - what had once been a beautiful Beechcraft King Air 350i - now occupied almost the entire centre of the hangar.
Walking through the doors felt strangely like entering the scene of an enormous three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.
Only this puzzle had exploded before someone had swept the pieces into neat piles.
A rectangular steel framework had been erected overnight, its dimensions matching the fuselage as accurately as the manufacturer’s drawings allowed. It looked almost skeletal, nothing more than welded tubing and adjustable supports, yet it provided a reference around which the aircraft could slowly be rebuilt. Not repaired. Reconstructed. There was an important difference.
Nobody here cared whether the King Air would ever fly again. By just looking at the pieces, even a five-year-old could see that it would never fly again.
Our only objective was to make her tell us why she hadn’t completed her flight.
Every recovered component had been tagged, photographed and cross-referenced before being moved from its storage pallet. Bright yellow evidence labels fluttered gently whenever somebody walked past, each carrying a catalogue number that corresponded to Bobby Jacobson’s survey maps and thousands of high-resolution photographs taken on the mountainside.
The nose section already occupied its approximate position on the framework.
Or what remained of it.
The cockpit resembled something that had lost an argument with a giant’s fist. The instrument panel had been ripped apart, wiring loomed from torn aluminium like exposed veins, and the glare-shield had folded in on itself. Both control columns had survived, bent at unnatural angles, silently marking the point where two pilots were frozen and shattered in death.
I paused there for a moment. Five seconds. That was all they’d had between the first terrain warning and impact. Five seconds wasn’t enough to diagnose a problem. It was barely enough to realise one existed.
Around me, the reconstruction continued with quiet professionalism. Nobody shouted. Nobody rushed. Every movement was deliberate.
One team carefully suspended the fractured left wing from an overhead chain block while another measured attachment points with laser levels, comparing every dimension against the engineering drawings spread across a nearby workbench. Across the hangar, two technicians gently cleaned mountain soil from sections of fuselage before photographing fresh fracture surfaces beneath powerful LED lights.
Even the sound inside the hangar seemed subdued. The occasional clink of a spanner. The soft whirr of a cordless screwdriver. The metallic click of a tape measure retracting.
Muted conversations floated through the air, punctuated by the scratching of pencils as measurements found their way onto clipboards. It reminded me less of an aircraft workshop and more of an archaeological dig. Everyone knew that the smallest fragment could answer the biggest question.
The left engine rested on a purpose-built stand near the rear wall, its propeller blades curled backwards like petals after a firestorm. Nearby, the right engine’s remains were packed out in line component by component as if it were to be assembled again. Twisted and ripped apart, it did not survive the impact like the left engine did. Both waiting on the power-plant specialist to arrive from Pratt & Whitney in Canada.
The tail assembly had fared surprisingly well.
Compared with the violence that had consumed the cockpit and centre fuselage, the vertical stabiliser stood almost proudly against its support frame, battered but largely intact. It served as a stark reminder that impact forces are seldom distributed equally. One end of an aircraft can remain recognisable while the other is reduced to little more than twisted memories.
Near the centre of the hangar Bobby Jacobson studied the reconstruction map spread across a large table, occasionally glancing up before pointing a technician half a metre to the left or right. Bobby had stayed behind to assist in the final part of the investigation while his team had left.
“No ... that’s where Frame Thirty-One belongs.”
The technician shifted the damaged fuselage section another few centimetres.
“There,” Bobby nodded once. “Perfect.”
Standing beside him, Ruan Fourie folded his arms. He also has stayed to help in the final part of the investigation.
“Funny, isn’t it?”
I looked at him. “What is?”
He gestured towards the growing reconstruction. “Yesterday this was just a mountain slope full of broken aeroplane.” He paused. “Today ... it’s becoming an accident again,” he finished quietly.
I nodded. “Exactly.” I looked across the hangar once more.
Slowly ... Almost imperceptibly ... The King Air was beginning to take shape again. Not to fly. Not even to look beautiful. But piece by painstaking piece, she was beginning to tell her story.
I looked over my notes. The new team would be made up of myself as Investigator-in-charge. Coordinate the investigation, assign tasks to members of the team, conduct interviews and ultimately write the report that would bring closure to the grieving families, but also stir up some dust with parties that would like to see the words “Pilot Error” in the final conclusion of the report. But that is their problem they have to deal with.
I will also double as Operations Investigator. Examine the flight planning, pilot decision-making, ATC communications, Standard Operating Procedures, weather and operational issues.
Then there will be the Airworthiness Investigator. An aircraft engineer who will examine the airframe, engines, propellers, systems, maintenance history and determine whether any mechanical failures occurred. That would be Dr. Megan Forsyth. She will be working closely with the structural engineer, power-plant specialist, and avionics specialist.
In fact, all those specialists will be conducting their tasks under Doctor Forsyth’s supervision and report directly to her. All those sections will be termed under “Airworthiness.”
I chuckled under my breath and thought; “Lucky them. I am glad she is my 2IC and reports to me, and it’s not vice versa!”
Doctor Linda will oversee the weather part of the investigation. So I will be working directly with her or just leave that part of the operations investigator duties to her.
And somewhere inside that broken skeleton ... was the truth we’d come all this way to find.
Megan had claimed a little corner of the hangar as her temporary office.
It couldn’t have occupied more than five square metres of floor space, yet somehow she’d made it entirely her own. Three free-standing partition panels, each about head height, enclosed the space on three sides, muting the constant movement and chatter inside the hangar without shutting her away completely. The front remained open except for a waist-high divider that marked the entrance. Just enough privacy. Not enough isolation. It suited her perfectly.
Her laptop sat open beside neatly stacked folders and engineering drawings, while a growing collection of labelled evidence bags occupied one corner of the desk. A mug of coffee, already forgotten and growing cold, stood beside her notebook.
I smiled to myself. Another brick in the wall. Not a wall designed to keep people out completely. Just enough to create a comfortable distance. For Megan, that counted as progress. I expected nothing less from her. There were still a few more bricks in her wall.
She was studying a magnified photograph of one of the engine control units as I stepped over to her just as a new face entered through the hangar doors.
A lean man stepped inside and he paused at the edge of the hangar floor, adjusting his rimless glasses as his eyes swept over the shattered remains of ZS-BEE.
For a second, his gaze lingered on the left PT6 powerplant sitting on its stand. Then his gaze went to the pile of debris of the right engine before he looked out the wide hangar doors toward the towering basalt cliffs of the Drakensberg.
He looked every bit the Pratt & Whitney field specialist—wearing a crisp, dark navy softshell jacket with the understated P&W Canada crest on his chest, charcoal work trousers, and heavy boots. In his hand, he carried a fitted black Pelican case that probably contained enough high-tech optical borescopes and measuring tools to strip an engine down to its sub-atomic level.
“Un bel endroit, ” he murmured under his breath with a soft Quebecois cadence, stepping over to where Megan and I stood. “A lovely spot. Reminds me of Les Laurentides back home in Quebec. Beautiful mountains ... but dangerous ones if you don’t respect the air.”
“Tim Duncan, lead Investigator,” I introduced myself and stuck out my hand. He gripped it firmly.
“I’m glad to meet you, Colonel. Jean-Luc Cormier, Pratt and Whitney, Longueuil, Quebec, Canada. How can I help?”
I half turned to Megan. “Doctor Megan Forsyth, Airworthiness specialist from the South African Civil Aviation Authority.” I introduced Megan to Jean-Luc.
Jean-Luc shifted his Pelican case to his left hand, removed his right leather-work glove, and extended a firm, measured handshake.
“Enchanté, Doctor Forsyth,” he said, giving a brief, polite nod of his head. “It is a pleasure. I have reviewed the preliminary airframe data on my way from OR Tambo. You have quite the puzzle on your hands with ZS-BEE, but Pratt and Whitney is at your complete disposal.”
Megan stood up from behind her desk, accepting his handshake with a firm, practised grip.
“Mister Cormier,” she said, her tone professional and direct. “Thank you for making the trip to here so quickly. We’ve managed to reconstruct most of the airframe, but the powerplants are where our narrative breaks down.”
She gestured past me toward the far side of the hangar, where the engine components were laid out on heavy wooden pallets.
“The left PT6A is remarkably intact,” Megan continued, her eyes locking onto Jean-Luc’s behind his glasses. “Minimal rotational distortion on the compressor stage. But the right unit ... well, as you can see, it looks like it went through an industrial shredder on impact. I’m eager to see if your borescopes agree with my theory on power-at-impact.”
Jean-Luc’s mouth curved into a faint, approving smile. “A classic asymmetric power delivery puzzle. Lead the way, Doctor. Let’s see what the metal has to say.”
“Are you settled in to your suite, Mister Cormier?” I asked.
“Yes, thank you,” he replied, “but please, just call me Jean...”
“No Mister Cormier?”
He laughed. “My mother used that whenever I was in trouble.”
I grinned. “In that case...” I offered my hand once more. “Welcome to the team, Jean. And please call me Tim.”
He nodded in return. “Thank you.”
I looked between the two engineers.
“Well...” I stepped backwards. “You’ve both got engines to interrogate. I’ve got an aeroplane to rebuild.”
Leaving them to their work, I crossed the hangar towards the reconstruction frame.
Behind me I could already hear the unmistakable click of the Pelican case latches opening.
Another specialist. Another piece of the puzzle. And hopefully ... one step closer to making the King Air tell us why she’d flown perfectly serviceable engines straight into a mountain.
I wandered towards the aft end of the fuselage where two of our SACAA airframe technicians were working beneath the towering T-tail.
The tail section had escaped the violence that had obliterated the cockpit. It was twisted and scarred, certainly, but enough of its internal structure remained intact for the control runs to be traced from one end to the other.
Johan de Villiers, one of our most experienced airframe inspectors, was kneeling beside an open inspection panel just forward of the fin. An LED work light illuminated the inside of the tail cone while his head and shoulders disappeared into the opening.
He heard my footsteps.
“Colonel.” He didn’t look up. “Would you mind having a look at something?”
That immediately caught my attention. Johan wasn’t the sort of technician who called somebody over unless he had exhausted his own explanations first.
I crouched beside him. “What have you found?”
He shifted the work light deeper into the fuselage. “We’ve been tracing the rudder trim cables.” His gloved finger disappeared into the darkness. “And then ... I noticed that.”
At first I saw nothing. Only frames. Stringers. Control rods. Bundles of factory wiring disappearing neatly through grommeted lightening holes exactly where Beechcraft intended them to be.
Then ... I saw it. Something ... Wrong.
It wasn’t large. It was perhaps thirty centimetres long, twenty wide, and fifteen high—olive green in colour. Almost military in colour.
It sat tucked tightly against a structural rib immediately behind the aft pressure bulkhead, hidden so well that nobody looking through the inspection panel during routine maintenance would notice it unless they knew exactly where to look.
Two heavy-duty black cable ties held it firmly against the structure. Not aircraft lacing. Not Adel clamps. Not approved mounting brackets. But cable ties.
I felt the tiny hairs rise on the back of my neck.
“That,” I said quietly, “didn’t leave Wichita with the aircraft.”
Johan gave a slow shake of his head.
“Not a chance.”
“You checked the Illustrated Parts Catalogue?”
“First thing.”
“And?”
“It doesn’t exist.”
He pointed again. “There’s no installation drawing. No modification paperwork. No STC. No SACAA approval. No maintenance entry.”
I leaned further into the opening.
“What about wiring?”
“That’s the interesting part.” He adjusted the work light. “There isn’t any.”
No power cables. No earth strap. No connection to the aircraft electrical system. Nothing.
The box simply ... existed. Like somebody had hidden it there and expected nobody ever to find it.
I sat back on my heels. “Pass me the cordless screwdriver.”
Johan handed it over without a word.
The quiet hum of the electric driver echoed softly through the hangar as I removed the three quarter-turn fasteners securing the inspection panel. Once it came free, I reached inside.
The space was surprisingly tight. Cold aluminium brushed against my forearm as I worked my hand around the control cables.
The two cable ties weren’t factory issue. Heavy-duty. UV resistant. Industrial quality. Whoever had installed the box hadn’t expected vibration to loosen it.
I cut the first tie.
Then the second.
The little olive-green unit came away easily, fitting comfortably into both hands.
It was heavier than it looked. Much heavier. I turned it over slowly.
Nothing. No manufacturer’s plate. No serial number. No engraved identification. No certification label. No inspection markings. No indication whatsoever that it belonged inside an aircraft.
Only a smooth, weather-sealed polymer casing with rounded edges, obviously designed to survive moisture, vibration and impact.
I frowned. “This thing was built to disappear.”
Johan nodded. “And to stay disappeared.”
By now Bobby, Ruan and two more technicians had wandered over, curiosity getting the better of them.
“What’ve you got?” Bobby asked.
I didn’t answer immediately. My thumbnail released the first retaining clip. Then the second. The lid lifted with a faint rubbery crack as the waterproof seal broke.
Everyone leaned in.
Inside sat a densely populated printed circuit board unlike anything I’d ever seen in certified aircraft equipment. Every component looked purpose-built.
The board itself had no commercial markings. No manufacturer. No revision number. No logo. Only tiny laser-etched reference numbers beside the soldered components.
One corner contained a compact lithium battery pack. Another housed what appeared to be a miniature signal TX/RX receiver. Bluetooth or WiFi. Beside it sat a tiny glass-encapsulated antenna assembly no larger than my little finger.
There were no connectors intended to plug into an aircraft. No interface ports. No maintenance socket. It had clearly been designed to operate entirely independently.
I looked up slowly. Nobody spoke.
The hangar, moments earlier alive with the sounds of reconstruction, suddenly seemed unnaturally quiet.
Finally Ruan broke the silence. “What the hell is it?”
I gently turned the circuit board over in my hands.
“I don’t know.” I paused. “But I know exactly what it isn’t.”
Everyone looked at me.
“It isn’t part of a Beechcraft King Air.” I replied softly, still mystified at the box and its contents.
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