Fly By Night - a review

Jammer Davis is just an investigator with the NTSB, but you wouldn’t know it. Once again, he finds himself up to his eyeballs in another fine mess somewhere remote, the Sudanese desert. When the call comes from a two-star general at the Pentagon, he finds himself  on a mission sponsored by the CIA in an attempt to recover a UAV, the unmanned drone Blackstar that is believed to have fallen into the hands of unscrupulous, private parties at an airport in Khartoum. A Moslem cleric, Rafiq Khoury supposedly has the drone squirreled away in a hangar belonging to his recently formed transportation airline FBN Aviation.

Under the guise of investigating a plane belonging to FBN Aviation reported to have gone down in a recent flight over the Red Sea, Davis is sent to find out the truth. The chief pilot at this airline is an old nemesis from his military days, a fellow pilot he helped drum out of the air force on corruption charges, Bob Schmitt. On his arrival in Sudan, Davis is greeted with threats of death from the get go, almost as if his cover has been blown before he even starts. By the time he discovers the two pilots from the ‘crashed’ plane in a shallow grave with bullet holes in their skulls, he knows he is up against the odds.

He’s surprised with help from three, unlikely sources: the cleric’s own followers, a ‘mystery’ CIA contact, and the beautiful Italian doctor, Regina Antonelli who is on a volunteer mercy mission in the desert region. Davis is able to unearth the dastardly plans to assassinate an Arab leader at a national conference and deflect all blame being fabricated against the US government meanwhile ridding the world of another set of bad guys.

In a James Bondesque performance Davis charges on ahead, no cavalry in sight, on a thrilling journey of espionage at its finest—where the guy in the white hat wins again.