Thunderbolt

by M. L. Buchman

  “What did you find?”

  Jeremy stopped and squinted up at him. He realized that the sun was coming from directly behind him, a technique he sometimes used when questioning an out-of-line subordinate. This time he moved aside and Jeremy stopped squinting.

  “Well, we’re not sure yet. A mechanical device that would have been positioned along the third joint of the right elevator. Dragging through the desert wasn’t kind to it, but I’m thinking it might have been—”

  Jeremy didn’t appear to notice as the blonde Holly huffed out an exasperated sigh and began digging the device clear with her hands, tossing aside great swaths of dirt.

  “—an auxiliary elevator tab trim motor. I’m hoping to find an indicator of how it was controlled. A line of hydraulic fluid in the sand might give me a clue to—” He looked down and screamed.

  Holly was holding what was indeed an elevator trim motor.

  “What have you done?”

  Holly just shrugged as she inspected the motor.

  It would normally be used to tune the plane so that no control pressure was required for level flight—and trimmed differently for a sustained climb or descent. A plane’s neutral point shifted constantly as fuel was burned or armaments fired. The little trim tab could be set to neutralize these shifts.

  “As they lifted the plane away,” Miranda had moved up to stand beside him, again without his noticing.

  That was changing from troubling to a little spooky.

  “I looked at the underside of the tail. I could see a black mark along the joint between the tail and the rear elevator.”

  “But that makes no sense,” Jeremy had once again turned away from Holly as if he couldn’t help himself. “An elevator trim control motor should be internal to the tail structure, not stuck on from the outside. What kind of black mark?”

  “This kind,” Holly held up the small motor and pointed to a line of black glue. “Bondo. High-strength epoxy. And hydraulic fluid.”

  “But that makes no sense,” Jeremy repeated. “The trim tab motor is electrically controlled.”

  “This one wasn’t, Jeremy.”

  “But that makes no sense.”

  Holly rolled her eyes at him as he continued.

  Arturo started to laugh, but noticed no change in Miranda’s expression as if it wasn’t funny, or rude, or anything. It sort of killed the joke.

  “I checked all of the hydraulic systems. They were filled precisely to capacity.”

  “Then there was some additional system installed.”

  “But that doesn’t—”

  Holly pushed Jeremy over so that he collapsed backward onto the sand. Then, perhaps thinking he had a point, she dug deeper into the sand.

  She held up a small device. “A one-way hydraulic valve. The more you used the system, the more pressure was pushed into this device and held there. Probably until you couldn’t counteract the forces.”

  “Right,” Jeremy was nodding. “And on your plane, I’ll bet there was a leak stopper valve so that once this was ripped off, you didn’t lose any system pressure. That fits.”

  “Colonel,” Mike moved up from his other side. “I’d suggest contacting your base security regarding who was the last person to inspect your plane prior to flight. I would wager that whoever entered the last preflight record is either suspect—”

  “That would be me,” Arturo turned to face him toe-to-toe.

  Mike didn’t even blanch. “Or perhaps a distraction occurred allowing someone else to access your aircraft for a moment prior to your flight.”

  This wasn’t happening.

  His job meant that he was constantly in demand and that the only peace he ever found was in flight. That’s why he’d been aloft at four in the morning before his day began.

  Despite the early hour, he’d been halfway up the cockpit ladder when there’d been a call for him. Landline. In the hangar. Some trivial detail that he shouldn’t have been bothered with, but it had placed his plane out of sight for perhaps ninety seconds.

  “Shit!” He had a saboteur on base at Davis-Monthan.

  He radioed the base and ordered his assistant to pull up his plane’s records.

  “Flight control monitor device installation is the final entry, sir. The signature is Moynihan’s.”

  “Pull him in for questioning.” Moynihan had been on the flight line at Davis-Monthan for two decades. An ace mechanic.

  “I’d like to, sir. But he was just sent to the hospital with a massive coronary. Not expected to… Please hold, sir.”

  Arturo could feel the blood draining out of his head and sinking into the sandy soil along with the spilled hydraulic fluid.

  His assistant came back on the air. “Didn’t even survive the ambulance ride, sir. Sorry, sir.”

  “Trace everyone who had contact with him in the last forty-eight hours. If you find no anomalies, go back another forty-eight. Then another. Bank accounts. Medical records. Gambling debts. Mistresses. All of it.”

  “Order a full autopsy,” Mike had rested a hand on Arturo’s shoulder that, goddamn it, was comforting.

  He made the call because Mike was right.

  Miranda looked at them as if they were speaking in a foreign language.

  “To determine if he was poisoned,” he explained to her.

  “Why would he be poisoned?”

  He opened his mouth to explain, then closed it again. It was too obvious.

  Mike again proved his mettle. “In case he was deliberately killed to cut the back trail of possible reasons for his perpetrating an air crash of the base commander’s plane.”

  For five long beats as the approaching helicopter grew louder, Miranda stared at Mike. Then she turned very slowly in a circle to inspect the desert: his ejection seat, the ditch his jet had dug into the sand, the scattering of flags that had marked where the munitions had been scraped off the wings, Holly still holding the control motor, and finally the settling helicopter.

  Then she nodded to herself and walked straight toward the helicopter, ducking under Mike’s arm as he hadn’t yet removed his hand from Arturo’s shoulder as if they weren’t even there.

  Whatever she used for a brain inside that head of hers had apparently assimilated the concept—and finished with it.

  Mike shook his shoulder in a friendly fashion, then let go and turned to follow his boss.

  22

  Miranda paced the distance across the fine sand of the Sonoran desert to the Chinook CH-47F. At ninety-seven meters she reached the cargo bay door. Told to land a hundred meters from the A-10’s initial crash site, the pilot had been very precise, placing the helicopter’s center at exactly a hundred.

  She was tempted to run a tape measure to see just how accurate that assessment was.

  Unlikely for such a pilot to commit an error in releasing the cargo hook.

  The cargo hook lay beside the aircraft—the pilot had left the cable dangling long rather than reeling it in, and set the hook down in plain view before shifting to one side to land so precisely.

  Or had the pilot intended to place the hook at a hundred meters and was therefore three meters out of place?

  Either way: careful.

  The manual release lever on the cargo hook had not been turned.

  The Chinook stood high enough on its four wheels for her to duck down and look up into the hatch at the center of the cargo bay. The I-beam supporting the hook had been placed in the hatch opening at the center of the cargo deck and the hook assembly attached to it. She could just make out the emergency manual release lever at the side of the opening.

  If it had been used, it had been returned to the closed position.

  “We didn’t touch anything,” a female voice spoke from close beside her. “Val Munson, Captain, US Air Force,” the Chinook’s pilot held out a hand. She must be the pilot as she’d descended from the right-hand door.

  Assuming that the Captain was not mistaking Miranda for a Val Munson, she shook the offered hand and
offered the same terse introduction. “Miranda Chase, NTSB.”

  Val nodded and pulled off her helmet. “And no, neither I nor my copilot pressed the cargo release at our stations.”

  Miranda knew that it would be very difficult to do by accident. The release button on the pilots’ joystick cyclic was intentionally low from the rest of the controls and had a raised perimeter shield to specifically avoid accidental bumps.

  “Jeremy, check the recorders.”

  “Who’s Jeremy?” Val asked.

  Miranda looked around to see him jogging over from the crash site with his full site pack, still too far away to have heard her. He always carried twice the gear everyone else did. That included an interface for the recorder. While it was technically illegal—all black box flight recorders were supposed to be returned to NTSB’s labs for downloading—she knew the military was not likely to release this recorder to a civilian agency.

  He trotted up to her, glanced once at the hook on the ground, bent forward and down to look in the cargo hatch just as she had.

  Without the pack’s waistband hooked, it slid up to hit him on the back of the head and send him sprawling into the sand.

  23

  Billy “Poet” Blake landed and parked the A-10. He didn’t see the point as it was just a simulation, but over the comm circuit Lt. Colonel Kiley had insisted he take it all the way back to base. Maybe part of the new training here at Eglin.

  When he dumped his helmet and harness, Kiley was standing next to his simulator.

  And right behind him…

  “You fucking bastard!” He shoved out of his seat and dove for Major Ass-face.

  Kiley wrapped an arm around his chest and Billy couldn’t do anything but squirm. Man was a crossbreed between a boulder and a serious layer of titanium armor.

  “Why did you try to shoot me down?” Billy shouted at the bastard’s face—impotent to do more at the moment.

  Ashton. Billy could see his name on his shirt. He’d been close. Major Ass-face Ashton.

  “What the fuck are you yabberin’ ’bout, Rook?”

  “You fired an AIM-9M Sidewinder at me after I fought off a pair of Su-25 Frogfoots.” Okay, he shouldn’t have said that last bit. “Frogfeet!” Worse.

  “We lost your ass at the Lebanon border. Figured you chickened. Never heard a goddamn squawk out of you.”

  Billy rocked back on his heels. After making sure he’d eased up, Kiley released him.

  He took a deep breath but didn’t feel even a little bit calmer.

  “I don’t chicken. You don’t survive the Bronx if you chicken.”

  “The Bronx?” Major Ass-face’s accent placed him solidly there. “Shit man, where’s your talk?”

  “Mom’s an English Lit professor at Fordham. Nothing but the Queen’s English.”

  “The what?”

  “Never mind. Where you from?” Because Major Ass-face’s accent was as thick as his head.

  “Allerton.”

  “My family live on the other side of the Bronx Zoo in Fordham Heights.”

  “Close enough. Rest of these guys are from those weird southern states.”

  “Like Jersey,” said a Captain Bell, the guy who offered the friendly smirk before the flight.

  “Shut your face, Tinker. That’s south of the Bronx, ain’t it?”

  The rest of the guys relaxed as they bantered back and forth. But Billy glanced over his shoulder at the simulator.

  “Well, if you didn’t try to shoot me down, who the hell did? Who was I even talking to?”

  They all turned to Lt. Colonel Kiley, who raised his hands palms out in clear denial.

  24

  “I have a theory.” Jeremy sat on the cool metal deck of the CH-47F helicopter’s ramp as he scrolled through the data on his laptop. Wide and long enough to drive aboard a pair of Humvees, everyone else had gathered here out of the sun.

  He always felt a little like the Asian James Bond when he was reviewing Cockpit Voice and Data Recorder records outside the lab. Only a little, because while Bond had cool toys, Q was the ultra-cool geek. Jeremy just liked the idea of being Mr. Ultra-cool Bond who got the girls better than being the geek, even if that’s what he was. Because the geek never got—

  “Which is?” Holly could pack an entire C-5 Galaxy’s cargo hold of sarcasm into two words. It had hurt for a long time, but now he was starting to realize that she couldn’t help herself. Everyone except Miranda caught the edge of her tongue, not just him.

  “That you’re a major pain in the behind.” Jeremy couldn’t believe he’d just said that and could feel the heat rushing to his face.

  Holly smiled hugely, “As sure as a shark has teeth.”

  Mike thumped him on the shoulder. “Just ignore her. What have you got?” Since Mike couldn’t seem to ignore Holly for even a second, it was a funny statement. Not ha-ha funny, but…funny.

  “You wish you could, mate.” Holly was tall, blonde, athletic, and alarmingly pretty. It was hard to imagine any male ignoring her.

  “The theory,” Miranda spoke up, “that it was remotely triggered.”

  “But how?” the Chinook’s captain asked.

  “Jeremy?” Miranda said it so simply. As if she trusted him to have the answer. Which was both cool and unnerving. That she felt he would—

  And almost on cue, there it was.

  “Databus 4 command. It came in embedded in the satellite telemetry.” Everyone huddled around him.

  “What is that?” several of them asked at once.

  “Data,” Miranda answered.

  Because of course she could read raw CVDR data.

  Wait. She’d once said that she couldn’t. Had she lied to him? Maybe like a superpower she wanted to keep hidden and had just accidentally revealed. Or…

  Oh. It was data. She’d need him to interpret it, but she knew enough to know it was data. Actual fact.

  “Search for anything else that was sent with similar addressing.” Which was a pretty insightful thing to say for someone who couldn’t read raw command code.

  Jeremy started to search…except there wasn’t any addressing. “It reads as if the helo sent the instruction to itself, yet it came in externally.”

  “What else was addressed that way?”

  Right. Of course. He should have thought of that.

  It would only make sense that—

  There. It…

  He froze.

  Reading the instruction a second and third time didn’t change a thing.

  Reading the next instruction only made matters worse.

  Very carefully, he looked at his watch.

  He double checked the two instructions.

  Then his watch.

  The bolts on the CVDR would take two to three minutes to remove.

  They didn’t have two to three minutes.

  They didn’t have even one.

  He hit Save—and waited three painful seconds while the data downloaded to his laptop—dumped the cable to the CVDR, then grabbed his laptop and site pack.

  “Run!” he shouted and pointed out into the desert.

  Everyone looked at him for a moment in surprise except for Holly.

  Without hesitation, as he’d expect from a former Australian SAS operator, Holly had Miranda and Mike by the arm and was sprinting down the ramp.

  Jeremy gave the startled colonel a shove.

  Campos almost tumbled down the ramp before regaining his balance and his composure. “Let’s move it, people.”

  Jeremy really hoped he was wrong and checked his watch again.

  He wasn’t.

  Praying that the helo was synchronized to atomic GPS time like his watch—a Citizen Promaster Navihawk that Mom and Dad had given him for graduation.

  He raced faster.

  And counted seconds.

  He’d wasted nine full seconds from reading the instruction to starting everyone in motion. He could have shouted for them to run during the three seconds it took him to save the files.


  No way to forgive or fix that.

  If that hesitation got Miranda hurt, he’d never be able to live with it. If he survived.

  No free hand to check his watch, he kept running—five or six more seconds.

  About…now.

  The emergency fuel dump opened on both tanks. He could hear the splashing fuel puddling on the sand.

  The sharp bite of kerosene from the JP-8 jet fuel seemed to burn in his lungs—that stuff really had striking power even at a distance. He wished it was the Navy’s JP-5, which had a flash point twenty degrees higher than the Air Force’s JP-8, not that it would make a difference. They weren’t being extra cautious about highly flammable fuels aboard aircraft carriers here; they were in the desert.

  The dumping fuel told him they had ten more seconds. Seven really, because of human reaction time.

  He counted to six-one-thousand as evenly as he could against his pounding heart.

  “Everyone get down…”

  He gave them all another second of sprinting.

  “Now!” Jeremy shouted and dove for the sand.

  He’d been close behind Holly.

  She tripped Mike, then threw Miranda to the ground and lay on top of her.

  Jeremy got even more sand down his shirt than when he’d fallen over beside the cargo hook.

  Maybe he was wrong. Maybe—

  He’d miscounted.

  Two seconds after he hit the sand—again his pack sliding up to knock him down hard—a sharp crackling noise sounded behind them.

  It was easy to follow the command sequence in his head.

  Fuel release at minus ten seconds.

  Gravity fed. Hard to estimate volume of the dump into the sand.

  Didn’t matter.

  At zero, a belly flare—used for distracting a heat-seeking missile attack—released.

  It sounded like a whole cluster of fireworks and sparklers.

  The Fourth of July had been four months ago.

  Microsoft threw one hell of a bash, and even though he was the black sheep for not following his parents and over-tall little sister there, they’d brought him along. Even that felt wrong because of that one unforgivable sin that had made him turn down all their attempts to recruit him.