Best of all, he and Christianson would forever be the first pilots to fly this wave of the military future into the battlefield—delivered courtesy of the US military. Even when the other countries inevitably stole the plans, they still wouldn’t have the key factor, Night Stalker pilots.
Yet all of those differences were easily ignored. The ride was so smooth it was hard to believe he was even aloft.
Everything had been done to reduce distractions so that all of his attention was focused on the feel of the controls and what the helmet showed him. Yes, it had engine data, course plans, even radio frequencies.
But the helmet’s magic was in the terrain that rolled by him in a three-layered view.
First was the pre-programmed map of the terrain. It was generally accurate to within one meter—worldwide. He could safely slalom through the concrete canyons of New York City, the heart of the Kremlin, or the Khyber Pass without looking out the windshield once.
The second was the radar image of the terrain ahead.
And the trippy one, the one that always chapped his ass, was the DAS. The Distributed Aperture System was fed by an array of six external cameras mounted on the outside of the Raider. The seamless day- or night-vision image it produced let him see the world outside the helo as if the bird wasn’t even there.
As long as he kept his flight profile above all three layers of the terrain display inside his helmet, he’d be safe.
“Take it down to three meters, one-zero feet?” On a mission, even a practice one, Night Stalkers of the 160th SOAR didn’t waste words, but Morales wanted to be absolutely clear with his commanding officer.
“Cleared to three,” Christianson confirmed from the right seat.
Morales slashed south away from Groom Lake.
At three meters, he had to climb to avoid rocks and the rare struggling tree. Hugging the valley floor, he swooped through the Pintwater Range around the south flank of Quartz Peak’s two-thousand-meter pinnacle.
As they slid out of the mountain pass, the threat sensors auto-recognized a vehicle’s profile parked at the head of Dog Bone Lake—tank—and flashed a warning.
Without hesitating, Christianson swung his helmet to center the target on his visor’s crosshairs. Magnetic sensors in the seatback read the exact position of his helmet and fed that information into the selected warhead when Christianson hit the fire button.
After three seconds of supersonic flight, forty-two inches of Hydra 70 missile punched into the old M60A1 “Patton” tank that had been left in the desert as a practice target. The Hydra had a low-charge head, just enough to show up as a clean hit without shattering the remains of the tank.
They raced past and plunged into the rough terrain of the Desert Range on their way to Tikaboo Valley, where three more targets were waiting—though he wasn’t supposed to know that. Morales had flown there during a massive Red Flag war game two years before. He remembered that trio of old Sheridan tanks clearly because he’d nearly been burned by one of them.
The Raider was light on the controls. Her ride was roller-coaster wild mixed with Corvette smooth.
She weighed three times more than his Little Bird (or his Vette), but she was only two feet longer and her rotors just seven feet wider. All the rest of the weight was speed and capability.
“Can you imagine what we could have done with this bird back in Mosul?” Major Christianson was feeling it enough to speak.
“Roger that.” Morales was debating whether to take them down to two meters when the digital terrain overlay didn’t line up with the imaging—the cliff suddenly flickering two meters closer to their starboard side.
That never happened.
Sometimes there was a truck parked somewhere that the pre-programmed map didn’t know about, then it was time to watch the other two systems.
But there was probably no better-mapped—or less likely to change—terrain anywhere than the Nevada Test and Training Range.
“Did you see that?”
17
Much to Metin’s surprise, when he’d suggested accessing the SVR supercomputer at the Yildiz Technopark, General Firat had made it happen within minutes.
“It is time we stop fooling around with Greece,” Firat had declared. “NATO is no threat; we know how to manage them. Some argue that it is the Americans we must learn to manage now. They are wrong. It is they who must learn to survive us.”
The SVR might not be anywhere near the power of the TOP500 supercomputers; in fact, it was barely a tenth as powerful as the five-hundredth ranked machine. Despite being five years older, it was still over a thousand times faster than even his overclocked desktop—terraflops instead of gigaflops of speed.
Metin had asked Onur for help. He would have preferred to own this triumph himself, but there was too much information to manage.
By recruiting Onur he’d not only grabbed the second-best programmer at Siberkume (he’d already proven who was best, at least for today), he’d also secured his inside track to Asli. This might be the twenty-first century, but it was still Turkey.
Not that he’d seen her even once this week.
After they’d been moved into their own office, it had taken them three days and nights to figure out how to port his programs onto a secure sector of the SVR. It wasn’t perfect; even with the SVR, it still took twenty-three minutes to grind his way into the satellite’s code. A lot of that time was lost due to uplink / downlink speeds, but some was non-optimized code that they didn’t have time to fix.
Once aboard, he’d found the next hurdle, cracking the M-Code. The “military code” was locked down tight on the latest-generation American GPS satellites—supposedly unhackable.
It was Onur who’d suggested the trick, though Metin still had bragging rights because he was the one who figured out how to use Onur’s idea.
There was no need to actually unravel the M-Code signal, it was merely a matter of retiming it. He couldn’t alter the onboard atomic clock. But he had looped its output through extra cycles within the transmitter’s main processor before its delivery as a GPS signal.
Rather than breaking the signal, it simply delayed it for a few crucial milliseconds.
By the time General Firat said they must be ready, he could alter the signal within a very specific locale for up to a hundred-and-ten seconds.
He and Onur might not command the American’s GPS satellite network, but locally warping it? They had that down.
It was now five in the morning.
They’d been up all night, but they’d been ready when the general had walked in.
18
“What?” Christianson had missed the terrain anomaly, though he had other duties for the flight than following Morales’ incoming data flow: course, systems status, weapons, to name just a few. He was the flight commander; all Morales had to do was fly.
They were still solid at three meters and full-on hustle.
Maybe he’d imagined—
Again!
The programmed terrain map didn’t match radar or the DAS. A rock was two feet north on the map of where the other two systems showed it. Landslide? But it was just two meters on a flat section of the canyon’s floor.
“Saw that,” Christianson reported.
Not his imagination.
Staying barely above all three layers of the map and superimposed views was always a challenge. That task was made doubly difficult by the sheer speed the S-97 Raider was delivering. Change happened faster than his reflexes had been used to, though they’d mostly shifted over now. If he ever had to fly it again, his MH-6 Little Bird was going to feel as ungainly as a VW Beetle—an old one.
A Night Stalkers pilot of the 160th flew as much by instinct as conscious control—thousands of flight hours honing it to a perfect melding with the machine.
But when there was a disjunct, it was like a slap in the face.
He could feel himself slam out of the instinctual zone.
No longer part of the machine, he was in hi
s seat and back to the much slower process of thinking about his flying. Please don’t let it be some glitch that was going to delay aircraft acceptance.
They were in a sixty-degree bank around the base of some no-name mountain when he decided he’d better gain more altitude. Had to be a software glitch, but he’d been trained that arriving intact—to infiltrate or extract his Special Operations customers—was far more important than the ego boost of a hot flight.
19
“What did they see?”
Miranda didn’t know how to answer Mike’s question.
She’d spotted no anomalies on any of the readouts. The cameras showed nothing unusual ahead. The pilot-focused cameras showed nothing either.
“Something they saw inside their helmets?” Andi reached the obvious conclusion at the same moment she did.
It was the only remaining possibility as that information wasn’t on any of their display screens.
Whatever it was didn’t matter.
It was already too late.
20
Neither the S-97 Raider’s radar nor the view from the DAS cameras could show what lay hidden around the last jagged abutment to the mountain. The automated map, if still correctly aligned with the GPS, would have. It wasn’t.
Chief Warrant Roberto Morales rounded the final steep cliff, which dropped from the flanks of the easternmost mountain of the Desert Range. The twisting canyon cut between a resistant knob of Eureka Quartzite and the comparatively softer stone of the Ely Springs Dolomite.
Except for a lone pillar of the quartzite sandstone that remained close by the dolomite cliff.
According to the GPS-driven terrain map, Morales would be over ten meters clear of the tall, wind-carved pinnacle as he rounded the cliff’s final abutment.
He wasn’t.
It lay barely fifty meters—zero point four-three seconds—ahead.
The right-side gap between the pillar and the cliff—too narrow.
The open space to the left of the pinnacle—wrong bank angle.
The S-97 Raider achieved straight-and-level flight before it rammed into the face of the sandstone pillar, seven meters above the terrain at two hundred and forty-nine miles per hour.
The dual sets of counter-rotating rigid rotor blades shattered against the rock.
The composite shell of the airframe accordioned like an empty aluminum beer can being stomped on by an Army boot.
The crash-proof fuel tanks were shattered, spraying fountains of fuel to either side of the pillar like firehoses. At least the helicopter wouldn’t burn—much.
The six-bladed rear pusher propeller, driving the helicopter hard into the cliff face, was the last thing to slam into the rock.
The Raider didn’t have far to fall to reach the canyon floor, not that there was much recognizable left to fall.
Neither Morales nor Christianson had sufficient time for any final thoughts.
21
Six hundred and eighty-six kilometers above the Nevada desert, the Göktürk-2 earth observation satellite captured images of the flight’s final moments and complete destruction.
The signal was delayed by over three hundred milliseconds as it was relayed through two RASAT communications satellites before being beamed to the ground, eleven thousand kilometers away.
There was an additional hundred-and-twenty-millisecond delay as the signal was processed at the Gölbaşi Ground Station south of Ankara, Turkey, rerouted, delivered, and finally decrypted.
Nineteen milliseconds later, the image reached an office in subbasement two of the Siberkume building.
22
It had happened so fast that Metin could only stare at the image on the screen.
Onur, beside him, didn’t appear to even be breathing.
“Excellent! Excellent!” General Firat was not at a loss for words. “That is simply exceptional, gentlemen. Bravo!”
He shook both their hands as if they were his contemporaries and peers rather than a pair of kid hackers he wouldn’t have deigned to wipe his boots on two weeks before. Then he hurried off to effuse about his great personal success to some military or government leader who would elevate his career.
“Think we’ll get an invitation to Ak Saray, the White Palace?” Onur was the first to recover the power of speech.
“Kaç-Ak Saray,” Metin barely managed to whisper. The “Illegal Palace” had been built by the President at incredible expense despite the nation’s highest court forbidding its construction. The thousand-room complex had cost four trillion Turkish lira, a half trillion US—nearly a year of the entire country’s GDP.
Metin couldn’t look away from the screen.
He wouldn’t turn nineteen for another week and he’d just killed two Americans on the other side of the world.
Onur’s sister Asli was a staunch progressive and spoke vehemently, and dangerously, against Turkey’s “heinous dictatorship.” She spoke English often, wore modern clothes, and had strong opinions.
He loved the rebel in her, the passion that took no prisoners.
“We can never tell Asli we did this,” he whispered to Onur.
Onur agreed quickly, “Never.”
23
“Now we have a crash.”
Andi couldn’t believe that Miranda actually looked pleased as she rose to her feet and tucked away the notebook she’d had open.
Though considering how angry Miranda had sounded when she’d found out it was just a test flight, Andi supposed that it made a certain amount of sense.
“It could just be a loss of signal,” Jeremy suggested.
She ignored him and turned to General Thomas. “I’m Miranda Chase. Investigator-in-Charge for the NTSB. We’re ready to begin.”
“Wait, Miranda. Your Jeremy could be right.”
“Didn’t you hear their words?” Miranda spoke to a brigadier general as if she was a schoolgirl who needed help to learn their next lesson.
Andi had heard.
Did you see that?
What?
I saw that.
And the words sent a chill up her spine.
Miranda turned away, as if she was done making her point, and faced Mike.
A moment before she’d been an insignificant woman watching the screen with the rest of them. Now she commanded the room and didn’t need to speak her question—her demand for concurrence—aloud.
Only some military officers could do that—she herself certainly never had.
They simply commanded a room with their presence. Perhaps their presence and their rank, but even the air seemed to snap to attention around them.
Suddenly Miranda had that. With her simple statement, she’d taken absolute command of the room.
And her team had shifted from a random group of experts. Each, even Holly, was now sitting upright and turning their full attention to Miranda. No side remarks. Nothing now except the business at hand.
Mike was nodding slowly. “The timing of the gaps in their conversation implies that they are facing something unexpected. Their tone doesn’t indicate any sense of panic, nor does it indicate any problem, but I do find it indicative that they spoke only two other times since the start of the test. That would imply something going very wrong.”
Mike turned to her.
Andi then glanced to Miranda, but despite her suddenly formidable demeanor, she was waiting patiently for Andi to collect her thoughts.
Her years of training and flying with the 160th SOAR had drilled in that the mission was the only priority. Feelings came later.
She’d been “flying with them,” imagining each moment of the flight as if it was hers. Morales’ hand on the flight controls was as smooth as she’d expect from a pilot of such high caliber.
There’d been a “bump.” Nothing big, but the moment before he’d spoken the first time he’d—
“Please, give us the process aloud,” Mike prompted her.
Andi nodded and repeated what she’d been thinking.
“The m
oment before he spoke, there was an unexpected control correction on the cyclic,” she indicated the minute motion with her hand. “A tiny shift to the right. Not up, but to the right. Perhaps surprised by an unexpected obstacle. Then they had to wait an additional two seconds to both see it, whatever it was. Whatever they saw was at least seven hundred feet apart at the speed they were traveling. This implies that what they were seeing was onboard, not external.”
Nobody was stopping her, so she kept following the only logical chain.
“Flying at three meters NOE, they were only a few tenths of a second from impact with the ground. Far too fast to recover.”
“Actually two-point-seven hundredths of a second,” Miranda said in a dead flat voice.
Andi had flown NOE missions for years. There was so little margin for error that they were the ultimate challenge for any helo pilot. She’d never actually done the math to understand that the margin for error was effectively nonexistent. She had faster than average reaction time to visual stimuli, barely a tenth of a second compared with the quarter-second average person. But three thousandths? Not a chance. She felt nerves all over again even though she’d never fly another mission like that one.
Miranda continued, “Helen, you will want to scramble your search-and-rescue team to their last known position. Be sure to keep everyone else away from the site; I don’t want any evidence moved by Sikorsky, GE, or any of the others. Arrange transport for my team at dawn.”
While Helen did as she had been told, Miranda turned to face the rest of them.
“First light here is at 6:01 a.m. Be ready to board at 0530 hours.”
24
Mike stayed close by her side as they were escorted to a visitors’ dorm.
“You okay?”
Andi nodded. She was still on internal lockdown, and the safety pin on her “inner grenade” was holding.
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