Drone Strike: A Dreamland Thriller (Dale Brown's Dreamland)

by Dale Brown

  Half realizing what was happening as the plane tipped, Turk dropped the control unit and reached forward, grabbing the pilot’s shoulders and pulling him back against the seat.

  “Hold him back, hold him back off the stick,” Turk told the Israeli. “Help me.”

  As the other man pushed the pilot back, Turk tried leaning over him to grab the yoke. The plane was still nosing down, though not as dramatically. The ground closed in. This wasn’t going to work.

  “Pull him out of my way,” said Turk, trying to squeeze into the seat as the Israeli pulled the pilot away.

  Taking hold of the control yoke, Turk pulled back against the momentum of the plane as he struggled to get the nose level. The Cessna was not reluctant; she wanted to stay in the air, and finally pulled her chin up to comply with her new master’s commands. But the loss of the engine and closeness of the ground were a problem neither she nor Turk could fully solve. He struggled to keep the wings level as the plane continued. She was steady and tough; if there’d been a runway ahead, the approach would have been near perfect.

  But there wasn’t a runway ahead.

  “Brace!” yelled Turk. “Brace!”

  MISSIONARY

  1

  Iran

  THE CESSNA STAYED LEVEL TO THE LAST SECONDS, HER wheels touching the earth nearly together. A great deal of speed had already bled off with the destruction of the engine and subsequent descent, but she was still moving at a good clip, racing forward with no brakes to help slow her.

  The only piece of luck was the fact that they had cleared the last of the low hills, coming to ground in the desert behind them. Baked by the sun and scraped by the wind, the ground was hard if not perfectly smooth, and they bumped along for a few hundred feet until the right wing found a patch of loose dirt. The plane pitched and turned sharply, skidding along for another hundred feet before tipping back the other way. The left wing snapped; the Cessna dug into the earth for a few yards, then teetered back upright, as if the laws of physics had decided to give the occupants a break.

  By the time the aircraft stopped, Turk had been tossed around like stone in a polishing machine. He was dizzy and his nose felt as if it was broken; his face, neck, and shirt were covered with blood. He’d fallen or been dumped into the narrow space between the rear and front row of seats, wedged sideways against one of Grease’s legs. Unfolding himself upright, he flexed his arms, surprised that though disoriented, he still seemed intact. He coughed, and felt as if he was drowning—the blood from his nose having backed into his sinuses.

  Grease grabbed Turk’s arm and pulled him in his direction, yanking Turk across the folded forward seat and out the passenger side.

  The Israeli stood a few feet away, waving an AK-47. “Come on. We have to get out of here,” he yelled at them.

  Turk turned back to the plane, not quite comprehending where he was or what had happened. He put his hand to his lip, then his nose.

  “Damn!” He cursed with the pain.

  “Your nose,” said Grease, next to him. “You have to stop the bleeding. You have a handkerchief?”

  “I need the control unit,” said Turk.

  He took a step back to the plane but Grease stopped him.

  “I’ll get it,” said the sergeant, handing him a patch of cloth—his shirt sleeve, which he’d cut off with a knife. “Put your head back and stop the bleeding. You’ve already lost a lot of blood.”

  Turk’s nose felt numb until he pushed the wadded cloth against the nostril. The pain ran up the bone ridge and into the space between his eyes, as if he’d taken an ice pick and plunged it there.

  “Let’s go,” said Grease, remerging with the control unit stuffed into Turk’s rucksack.

  “Where’s the pilot?” managed Turk through the wadded cloth.

  “Dead,” said Grease.

  “Aren’t we going to bury him?”

  “No time. They’ll be looking for us.”

  “It’s a mercy he’s dead,” said the Israeli. “I would have had to kill him myself when we landed.”

  THEY DEBATED BRIEFLY WHETHER THEY SHOULD SET the plane on fire, but decided that whatever small advantage it might have in making it harder to get information about them was more than counterbalanced by the fact that it would make it easier to find. Grease squared away the plane as well as he could, hoping to make it less obvious that there had been passengers, but there was nothing he could do about the blood splattered around the interior in blobs both big and small in the back. They set out east, walking along a wide plateau that sat like a ledge above the valley to their right. Had they settled down a few hundred yards in the other direction, or perhaps stayed in the air for another mile, they would have all died in the crash. It was luck or Providence, take your pick, but Grease clearly was awed, giving Turk complete credit for their survival.

  “You did a hell of a job,” he told him. “It was a great job.”

  It was the first time Grease had said anything positive to him, and yet Turk felt he had to be honest: he hadn’t really done much.

  “I just held the nose up, the plane did the rest,” he said, then asked where they were going.

  “Train line runs to Naneen,” Grease told him. “We’ll parallel the road and the train tracks. Our guys will pick us up where and when they can.”

  “You talked to them?” asked the Israeli.

  “They’ll know. I have the GPS. We just have to get there.”

  “We blew it up,” said Turk. “The whole place—I wonder.”

  “What?” demanded the Israeli.

  “The explosion was huge.”

  “Nuclear explosions usually are. Even underground.”

  “It was a bomb?” asked Turk incredulously. He’d been told they were blowing up machinery.

  “Why else would they send you on such a suicide mission?” asked the Israeli, trudging onward.

  2

  CIA campus, Virginia

  BREANNA STOCKARD RUBBED THE TEARS AWAY FROM her cheeks. They were tears of relief, if not outright joy—the indicator on the map was moving in a way that what the computer declared meant Turk was still alive.

  She pushed her hand away quickly; she didn’t want the others to notice her emotion.

  “I’ve transmitted the information to the ground team,” said Danny Freah. “Gorud just acknowledged.”

  “Good.” Breanna glanced away for a moment, collecting herself. “How long before they get there?”

  “Hard to say. They were already up near the original rendezvous point.” Danny looked at the three-dimensional holographic display in front of him, tracing the area. “It’s a couple of hundred miles back east. And they’ll have to go south to avoid patrols and whatever else the Iranians put out there.”

  “Will they make it in time for tomorrow night?” Breanna asked.

  “I can’t even guess. Not at this point.”

  “I have preliminary numbers,” said Jonathon Reid from his station. “Just under four megatons. On par with Chagai Two, roughly, at least. Given that the device wasn’t completely ready. It was a close call. A good, good mission.”

  Reid rose. Chagai II was an early Pakistani atomic test. Though Western experts continued to debate the matter, it was generally regarded as something of a failure, since it didn’t yield anywhere near the explosion that was intended, which was at least eighteen megatons. (The blast yield of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima measured between thirteen and eighteen megatons.) The final measure would take some time to determine, using instruments that would provide different data sets, including the magnetic distortion—while the underground explosion did not yield an electromagnetic pulse effect like a high-altitude bomb would, even the extremely slight disruption it produced could be analyzed. In any event, while the yield of the bomb was relatively small, it was still large enough to do considerable damage, and contaminat
e the area where it was used for decades to come.

  “I told the President we would give her a more complete update at the half hour,” Reid told Breanna. “We won’t have visual imagery for another few hours, but the seismic data should be quite enough.”

  “We can take some of the video from the WB-57,” Breanna said. “It’s quite impressive.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Have the Iranians said anything yet?”

  “They know something is up—the communication lines went down with the explosion. But it should take them a while to realize the extent of it. They may fear the worst. We’re monitoring the local communications with ferret satellites, so we’ll know pretty much as soon as they do.”

  “Mr. Reid, you better look at this,” said Lanny Fu, a CIA analyst tasked to monitor current intelligence from sources outside the operation. “The Iranians just made a status request for all facilities under the Qom directorate.”

  “Right on time,” said Reid as he turned back to Breanna. “They fear there’s been an accident or an attack. Their procedure now will be to ask each one to check in, and in the meantime they’ll send someone to the targeted facility.”

  “Sir,” interrupted Fu. “The significance here—there’s a code number for a facility on the list that we have no record of.”

  “What?”

  “I believe there may be another bunker somewhere.”

  “I’m sure you’re mistaken,” said Reid. “They have been well calculated. Double-check.”

  “I already have,” said Fu. “The analysts have been alerted. We’re working on it.”

  “Another lab?” said Breanna.

  “I doubt that,” insisted Reid. “I strongly doubt it.”

  3

  Omidiyeh, Iran

  IN THE FIRST FEW MOMENTS AFTER HIS AIRCRAFT WAS struck, Captain Parsa Vahid thought for sure he would have to bail.

  Rather than setting off a panic, the knowledge calmed him. It also saved the plane.

  Vahid, like many well-trained pilots, became in the crisis a logical, methodical engineer. He worked through a long list of procedures and directions necessary to save the aircraft. If one thing didn’t work—if too much fuel was leaking from one tank, if a control surface didn’t precisely respond—he switched to another, then another, and another, moving on down the checklist as calmly as an accountant tallying the numbers of a sale.

  Even when he landed the plane, he confined his thinking to a very narrow checklist. He taxied to the maintenance area, trundling past the white skeleton of a transport that had been battered by an Iraqi attack some twenty-five years before. He shut down the plane and then, finally freed of his life-or-death lists, rose in the cockpit and took the deepest breath of fresh, desert air that he had ever managed.

  He was met on the tarmac by the base commander, who asked with a grave face how many of the American B-2s he had seen.

  “There were no B-2s,” said Vahid. “There was a small plane, a light plane. My missiles shot it down.”

  “There must have been B-2s,” said the general. “They have blown up Natanz.”

  “What?”

  “There is no contact with one of the plants. We were asked to try, and failed.”

  “There was no B-2. I shot down the only plane.”

  The commander shook his head. Stunned, Vahid walked slowly to the nearby transport vehicle. Rather than taking him to his squadron room, where he ordinarily would debrief, he was driven to a bunker at the far end of the military complex. The colonel in charge of intelligence met him outside the entrance and led him downstairs to his office.

  “I’d like to change from my gear,” Vahid objected when they arrived.

  “You will change when we are done.”

  The room smelled of fresh concrete. It was much larger than the squadron offices upstairs. Two long tables, twice the size of normal conference tables, sat at the middle of the room. There were only chairs, but each was a well-padded armchair.

  The interview began as soon as he sat down.

  “How long after takeoff did you encounter the enemy bombers?” asked the colonel. He was tall and thin, with glasses, a beak nose, and a brush moustache above a thin and close beard. In the harsh light he looked as if he were a cartoon character, a caricature of an officer created as a foil for a popular hero.

  “I never encountered enemy bombers, or any bombers,” said Vahid. “I will tell you what happened.”

  “First answer my questions,” said the colonel. He lifted his glasses higher on his nose. “How many bombers did you encounter?”

  “You keep talking about bombers. There was one aircraft, a light plane. Maybe a Cessna. A small trainer at most.”

  “It was more likely an American Predator,” suggested the colonel.

  “I—”

  “You shot it down.”

  “I believe I shot something down,” answered the pilot. He had never encountered the American UAV known as the Predator, but he was naturally familiar with the profile, and the plane he had encountered bore little resemblance to the drone. “But I think it was—”

  “I think that is what you encountered,” insisted the colonel. “A Predator.”

  “You’ll see when you recover it, then,” said Vahid. He was trying to keep his temper in check, but couldn’t help the note of sarcasm that crept into his voice.

  “How many other planes were there?”

  “None. I saw none. Check my video record.”

  “Sometimes those are not complete.”

  “Yes, at times there are things not recorded,” said Vahid, finally surrendering. It was foolish to resist; the man was trying to help him. His goal was probably to spare the commander and the air force in general, but to do that most effectively, he had to help Vahid as well.

  There would soon be other interviews, much more difficult.

  “Men in the heat of battle do not know everything that is going around them,” said the colonel. “They cannot fly that way. They have to focus on the immediate threat.”

  Vahid nodded. “What happened at Natanz?” he asked.

  The colonel stared at him.

  “The Americans attacked it?” the pilot prompted. “But the facilities are many miles beneath the ground. No one could attack them. Unless they used a nuclear bomb. Did they use a nuclear bomb on us?”

  “You are not the one to be asking questions. You know absolutely nothing, beyond the fact that you did your duty. You shot down a plane.”

  “Yes.”

  The colonel folded his hands in a tight cluster in front of him, pressing them down on the tabletop as if he might try and bend it toward the floor. Finally, he took a small tape recorder from his pocket and put it on the table.

  “We will start from the beginning of your flight,” he said. “Recount everything from your takeoff. Leave nothing unmentioned, however trivial. Remember what the end result is.”

  4

  White House situation room

  “THEIR RESPONSE INDICATES THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT happened, not yet, anyway.” National Security Advisor Blitz frowned as he assessed the situation for President Todd. The operation had gone extremely well—a good thing, since the Iranian bomb program appeared to have been much further ahead than anyone had believed. “It’s been three hours now and they’re only just starting to seal off the site. Or what’s left of it.”

  “Was it totally destroyed?” Todd asked. She and Blitz were sitting alone in the room. The President had decided she would have no witnesses to the discussion; even her Secret Service bodyguards were in the hall, none too happy at having been summarily ordered to stay outside the door, a rare Todd decree.

  “Our satellite won’t be passing overhead for another two hours, and we don’t want to risk a plane,” Blitz told her. “But the images of the explosion and its aftermath from
the NASA aircraft show the tunnels and entire underground complex were completely wiped out. It’s history.”

  Several hundred workers had died along with it. Regrettable, but necessary.

  Blitz’s phone vibrated in his hand. He glanced quickly at the face.

  “Ms. Stockard and Mr. Reid are ready for the video conference,” he said.

  The President turned to the console as Blitz flipped it on. Breanna and Reid appeared on a split screen, their faces projected from the Whiplash command center at the CIA complex.

  “I understand congratulations are in order,” she said. “Job well done.”

  “Thank you, Madam President,” said Reid.

  “Have we recovered our team yet?”

  “We’re working on it,” said Breanna. “But there has been—there is a complication.” She turned to her right, evidently looking toward Reid in the center.

  “There’s new information,” added Reid. “We’re still compiling it. But there appears to be another facility that we haven’t known about until now. And it’s possible—very possible, I’m afraid—that there is another nuclear device there, waiting to be tested.”

  “How is this possible?” Todd felt her chest catch.

  Her lungs acting up? She ignored the pain and continued.

  “The facilities were examined in great detail before I approved the mission,” she said. “Well before.”

  “I know, Madam President,” said Reid. “I can’t make any excuses. There does seem to be another facility. We have a code name, a radio address, really. We’re trying to match it up to a physical plant. At the moment, we have two different possibilities. Both were closed two years ago. At that time we believed one was completely shut down because of an accidental explosion there; the other housed centrifuges that were no longer needed. Our best theory is that one or both may actually have been kept open and developed—it’s the same pattern they used for the lab we targeted.”

  “Which we found.”