Airwolf and all associated characters (except mine) are owned by Belisarius Productions, NBC Universal Television, Atlantis Communications. All persons described herein are fictional and any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental. Copyright infringement is not intended.

Chapter 3: Search Grid

13 May 2013

Lucas left for work at his usual time in the morning, after not saying a word to her at all. Nadine hadn't expected any, because he frequently gave her the silent treatment when he was angry. He didn't offer to drive her to the airport either, since it would've meant taking time off work, which he rarely did anyway.

She called her own workplace and arranged for a temporary leave of absence. Then she spent an hour gathering documents that she thought might be needed later – tax information, certificates and such – and hiding them in her long-unused duffel bag that had once served as her "Plan B" for times when she'd had to vacate. Her final act before leaving was to secure the house, a long-ingrained habit from her Firm days. It paid off to be vigilant.

A white Learjet 40 awaited her at the airport when she arrived. She was welcomed aboard as if she was a VIP, by a brown-haired, white-suited agent who introduced herself as Christina. "Thank you, but I'm surprised," Nadine protested. "I'm hardly deserving of all this."

"You were personally invited by Principia," the woman said, "and that's sufficient."

It took Nadine a moment to realize that the appellation referred to Marella. "Why isn't she called Archangel?" she blurted before she could stop herself.

Christina smiled in understanding and showed her to a seat. "There was only ever one Archangel as far as she was concerned, and she didn't feel right with taking the code name. Fasten your seatbelt please. The estimated flight time is two hours and forty minutes, and when we're airborne I'll serve lunch."

Nadine spent the balance of the flight talking to Christina and refreshing her memory on the Firm's policies. Much hadn't changed since 1987 but a few crucial points caught her attention. The special orders concerning any situation where suspicion fell upon the office of the Deputy Director had been rescinded. The Committee members were now elected instead of being appointed. Affiliate programs such as the one she'd once been enrolled in had been discontinued, and employee background checks were much more thorough. In such an interconnected world that they lived in now, little could be taken for granted.

As the flight approached Los Angeles, she spared a thought for her husband, wondering what he might do when he arrived from work that evening and found her gone. Knowing his temper, he might decide to destroy anything of hers that he could get his hands on. But, she decided, at this point it didn't matter. It was only stuff anyway, and the few items that were the most precious to her were either hidden or locked in a safety deposit box that he had no access to.

Nadine put the issue firmly out of her mind.

The plane was met on the tarmac by a white limousine. The driver was another woman in white, who exchanged small pouches with Christina before nodding and walking toward the plane.

"Standard handoff," Christina explained as she opened the limo's rear door and indicated that Nadine should sit. "It makes a breach of security less likely if the same agents accompany an employee or guest for the entire trip. I'll drive us to Knightsbridge and escort you to Principia's office, after which I'll probably be getting new orders."

"Why are you telling me this?" Nadine asked as she settled herself. "Come to think of it, you said a lot on the plane as well. I never knew agents to be this chatty."

Christina shut the car door and made her way to the driver's seat. "Normally we aren't. I'd been briefed quite thoroughly this morning, and Principia stressed that there were certain things that you should know before you arrived. Efficient use of time."

"Thank you for that," Nadine said sincerely.

"It's my job, Mrs. Redmond."

From the outside, the magnificent building in Thousand Oaks that housed the Firm's main operations had hardly changed. The Deputy Director of Intelligence's spacious office with the floor-to-ceiling windows was also very like the way it had been, other than with newer carpets and more modern décor. Marella herself sat at the desk; her brown hair was now streaked with grey, but her eyes were as keen as ever. "Agent Jophiel reporting," Nadine said deferentially.

"Welcome," Marella said with a smile, and stood up to offer a hand. "Michael has told me about you."

Nadine smiled as she noticed Michael sitting in a chair to one side. His posture appeared to be casual, but the set of his shoulders showed that he was ill at ease. She walked forward and shook Marella's hand warmly. "Thank you. I never expected to be back here, after everything that happened."

The woman nodded. "Both Michael and Christina told you what they could, but the truth goes far deeper. Not even I know the whole story." She sat back down and indicated that Nadine should do the same. "As you might know, I was reassigned at the end of April 1985. The Committee believed that I was becoming too close to Archangel to retain an objective viewpoint. Agents' loyalties are supposed to be to the country, not to one man. The aides he had subsequently were rotated on a regular basis, to avoid such connections forming. When the Committee discovered that Archangel was spending a great deal of time working with certain members of the intern program, they scrubbed the program for the same reason."

Nadine scowled. "I thought it was all because of a security breach."

"That was the excuse they used," said Marella, "but the real causes for the shutdown and restructure were budgetary concerns, too much interpersonal loyalty in the ranks, and the simple fact that Chairman Zeus didn't like Archangel and wanted him out of the way."

Michael shifted in his chair. "I'd become too good at my job, and too influential in Washington. To this day, I believe that he packed me off for two reasons: he knew that I was the most likely one to get his job when he retired, and he didn't want me involved in the investigation into the explosion at Santini Air. I was convinced that it was no accident, but by the time I finally came back, the case was closed and nobody was talking."

"Which brings us to Airwolf," Marella continued. "After Mr. Santini's death and Stringfellow Hawke's disappearance, the relationship between the remaining family members and what became known as the Company was… problematic."

"That's putting it mildly," Michael commented.

"I was informed of that, but why bring me into this at all?" Nadine asked. "I never had any contact with them, or with the helicopter, except in flying a few simulations."

The Deputy Director gave her a pointed look. "Because you were the only person from that program that we were able to find who met the criteria that we need. During the restructuring, all the personnel in that division were reassigned, discharged, or in a few cases, terminated. All data was either destroyed or stored in a place that only the Committee could access."

Nadine glanced over at Michael as anger began to creep in. "And here I was thinking that you wanted me to help you as a personal favour."

"That's still true," he assured her, holding one hand out as if in supplication. "For something this sensitive, there are few people whom I would trust if I were the one sitting behind that desk. You included."

Somewhat mollified, Nadine sighed. "I've already done some research, but what I found was stuff that most people would be able to find anyway if they knew where to look. I doubt I could tell you anything that you don't already know."

"Any insight is better than nothing," Marella said. "What do you have?"

She began by mentioning the anecdotes from the Native American peoples as well as the few sightings in the Valley of the Gods. "Much of that is obviously circumstantial," she pointed out. "The first real piece of evidence I came across was a record from Kingman Airfield in Arizona. A helicopter of the same type and shape, but not the same colour as Airwolf, was discovered there in October of 1987 and soon afterwards was scrapped." Michael straightened up in alarm, but she held up a hand to forestall him. "That's what that record indicated, but that's not what really happened. The chopper was supposed to have been scrapped, but for a reason that I wasn't able to find out, maybe a records mix-up, it was repainted instead and sold to a private medical courier service in Europe."

Michael said thoughtfully, "I suspected something of that sort. Hawke once tried to hide Airwolf from a satellite flyby by pushing her under the wing of a C-133 in a boneyard. It almost worked."

"So they thought that doing it again might actually work?" Marella asked in surprise. "Could they have planned to retrieve it at some point?"

Nadine theorized, "Either that, or they expected that the helicopter would actually be scrapped. If they really didn't want anything more to do with it, maybe they decided to ensure that it would be destroyed. Returning it would only cause more headaches, because from what I heard, nobody else was able to fly it."

"That's right," Michael confirmed. "The Hawke brothers were the best helicopter pilots there were, hands down."

"I don't understand," Marella put in. "Why not destroy it themselves if they didn't want it?"

"Guilt, perhaps," said Nadine. "If I was attached to something, I wouldn't want to have the memory of trashing it when it outlived its usefulness. I'd either give it to someone who could use it, or have someone else do the dirty work for me." After pausing to gather her thoughts, she continued, "So, the chopper ended up in Germany. But the company that bought it would've discovered that it got a raw deal because nobody would've been able to operate it to its full capacity. That likely contributed to the craft's going down in bad weather in 1992 – or that's what supposedly happened, according to the news reports at the time."

Michael said, "When I heard about that, I couldn't believe it. Airwolf had the most accurate detection and control systems in existence. Hawke and Santini flew her through a hurricane with little difficulty. There's no way that a bit of fog would've caused her to crash."

"I don't think it actually crashed either," Nadine agreed. "The debris that was recovered was of an ordinary Bell 222, which was exactly what was expected. Someone in that entire chain of events must have realized what that helicopter really was and concocted an elaborate ruse to make it appear that it had been destroyed. The next piece of information that I found was a story about a helicopter matching Airwolf's description being built on the roof of a restored castle on the western outskirts of Dresden."

"We know about that," said the Deputy Director. "There's one here in Los Angeles too, believe it or not. Both were confirmed to be non-flying replicas that were built by rich men with far too much money and time on their hands."

"But do you know who owns that German castle?" Nadine pressed.

"Of course," Marella said grumpily. "Dr. Stefan Vogel, a pharmaceutical researcher. His company has been in the industry for decades, and is entirely aboveboard."

She took her cellphone out and loaded up a photo that she'd downloaded as part of her research. "This man?" There were two people in the photo: a happy, well-dressed, middle-aged couple who were standing in front of a heavy wooden double door. The man was tall, burly, and dark-haired, while the woman had long blonde hair and sharp features.

Michael's jaw dropped and the hand that held his cane quivered. "I recognize her," he rasped. "I don't know her name, but she was Krüger's senior assistant. I'd assumed she was in prison or dead, along with the rest of them."

"Krüger?" Marella asked, horrified.

Nadine glanced from one to the other in confusion. "The woman is Olga Fokichna, Dr. Vogel's wife. Are either of you allowed to enlighten me further?"

Michael's eye closed and he bowed his head, seemingly unwilling to speak. Marella cleared her throat and said, "In the fall of 1984, Michael went into what was then East Germany to extract an informant who was known to him. She betrayed him to Dr. Karl Krüger, who along with a Russian agent named Vladimir Kinskov, used a serum they'd developed to brainwash him into killing Zeus and the Committee members."

"My God…" Nadine whispered.

"Hawke saved me," Michael said flatly. "He got me out of there. But he suspected something and put blanks in my gun, so the Committee survived."

After looking at the photo again, Nadine mused, "If Olga was helping Krüger then, she should've been imprisoned. But I can't help wondering if she could've seen or heard of Airwolf during that time. Why else would her husband build a replica of it, decades after the fact?"

Both Michael and Marella shot fiery glances in her direction, and then the Deputy Director began to type furiously at the computer on her desk. "The official investigation of that incident turned up little, other than the confiscation of weapons and medical equipment. Krüger was found dead, along with the informant. Kinskov was believed to have survived and fled back to Russia, so there's a likelihood that Olga did as well."

"Call it intuition," Nadine said, "but I smell a rat."

Marella's lips flattened as she stared at the computer screen. "I agree. There's too much of a coincidence here, but if that's supposed to be a statement or a trap of some kind, it's far too obvious."

Taking a sharp breath, Michael stood. "There were too many loose ends left from certain Airwolf missions, any one of which had the potential to come back and bite us," he declared. "We've been lucky up until now. If this is a trap, the only way to get more information is to spring it."

The Deputy Director stared at her former boss in astonishment.

"You can't be serious!" Nadine blurted as she saw the determined look in Michael's eye. "How can you even think about going into the field at your age? Besides, we're supposed to be looking for Airwolf, not chasing down ghosts."

"And when you start chasing ghosts, you usually end up almost getting killed," said Marella somewhat bitterly. "Besides, Mr. Hawke's not around any more to bail you out."

"No," Michael admitted, "But Dina is."

Nadine swallowed hard, unable to speak for a moment. When she'd come here, she'd expected to assist with an operation in some capacity, but not like what Michael was proposing. It was incomprehensible that she would actually go back into the game, particularly since she hadn't used those skills for many years. She looked Michael straight in the eye and growled, "You're certifiable, you know that?"

Michael only smirked. "Yes, but it's not nice work."

"Don't make me hit you," she responded.

Marella shot to her feet. "You will cease this insubordination, Agent Jophiel."

"Stop, Marella," Michael said easily. "I'm not her boss any more, so it doesn't surprise me that she's been saving up for all these years to be able to chew me out anyway. I'm not offended." He limped over to Nadine and put his free hand on her shoulder. "I understand your concern, and I'm glad that you can still be forthcoming with me. Take some time to think about this, all right? Marella and I should discuss what to do with this new information."