Raider

by M. L. Buchman

  At that, he called out, “Belay!” and didn’t wait for an answer, instead leading the final section himself.

  He could inspect a few scrapes in the rock pillar’s hard exterior just as well as the next person. And maybe somewhere in there, he’d figure out why, of all craziness, he himself actually wanted to be with Holly Harper.

  28

  The debris perimeter itself was less than a hundred meters across; it felt as if Andi could wrap her arms around it. It was hard to imagine that such a small space of rough stone and sand could contain the remains of an entire helicopter and two lives.

  Yet despite the clear outline, she, Jeremy, and Miranda walked it in a well-spaced perpendicular line to make sure they didn’t miss a thing. From the cliff face ahead of the crash, through the canyon, and back to the cliff face.

  The practice launches that Andi and her classmates had made at the academy hadn’t followed this methodology. Yet now that she was doing it, she could see how neatly it mirrored the style of Miranda’s reports. Or rather the reports mirrored her method.

  Also, if Miranda was actually as Mike had described her, the method fit the woman herself.

  Neat, thorough, and a laser focus on one element at a time.

  No need to think of the crash. Yet.

  Instead…

  Three steps.

  Stop.

  Scan the ground.

  Turn and scan behind for anything that might have been hidden by a twisted tuft of creosote bush or withered clump of grass.

  Mark the outer extent of the debris with a little green flag.

  Three more steps.

  She wondered what Mike and Holly were discussing. They were doing as much talking as climbing on the rock face.

  Andi herself was the obvious topic.

  Holly’s occasional laser-glares left little question about that.

  Yet she knew Mike was somehow to be trusted with what she’d told him in confidence.

  Her watch concurred with a hard yes at straight-up twelve.

  They were both tall, beautiful, and athletic—a seriously striking couple. So why had Holly throttled Mike for kissing her awake? Be nice to have someone do that for her.

  All the way around the debris field, she managed not to look even once at the crash itself. Ignoring the flight path was harder because it was plenty obvious, but she managed.

  “Hey!” Andi spun to look back up the canyon where she and Mike had walked.

  “Hey?” Miranda answered. She was standing close beside her as they waited for Jeremy to photograph the complete flag-marked debris perimeter from several angles.

  “There’s more.”

  “You mean the crash,” Miranda turned to face it for the first time.

  “No,” Andi still wasn’t ready for that. She took Miranda’s shoulders and turned her the other way. “This way.”

  Miranda didn’t question, she simply waited.

  Andi flexed her hands. Miranda, the Miranda Chase, had felt surprisingly normal. Andi didn’t know what she’d been expecting: Batman’s crazy body armor or something. Instead Miranda’s normalcy itself was unexpected. Did autistic people feel different than…what had Mike called them…neurotypicals? Stupid idea. Just like her, their challenges were inside their heads, not out in the world for all to see.

  She hoped her idea didn’t break Mike’s rules about not distracting Miranda with trivial matters.

  Andi led back along her own earlier tracks with Mike, careful to place her feet where she’d walked before.

  Mike must have matched his stride to her own as Miranda was able to follow her in his footsteps. Instead of two women of an age, they were two women of a size—short.

  As they rounded the curve of the cliff, Andi pointed down at the sand.

  Before she could even say what she was thinking, Miranda was squatting down and inspecting their footprints.

  No hints required. Mike was right, Miranda was that sharp.

  When Andi had looked down at the tracks she and Mike had made leaving and then returning to the crash site—the sand ripples on the surface lined up with their feet.

  They ran in long, sinuous lines along the canyon’s floor. They should have flowed longitudinally across the canyon, perpendicular to the wind’s natural path sluicing through the narrow gap. No rain ripples in these achingly dry hills.

  Is that what had killed the helo? A crosswind between two steep cliff faces? It shouldn’t be possible. In fact, in ten years aloft, she never flown into or heard of a canyon crosswind. Eddy currents when someone flew too close to canyon walls? Yes. Helo killing ones? No.

  “This had to be created by the downwash from the rotor.” It had blasted the sand sideways.

  Even as Andi reached her conclusion, Miranda was already pulling out rulers and a notebook. The page wasn’t ruled, but was rather graph paper.

  In a matter of minutes they had staked and measured the varying sizes of the ripples across the width of the canyon, Miranda recording all of the data with a draftsman’s precision. They tracked down three other sandy patches around the curve of the cliff face from beyond the sitting rocks and the crash site, and staked those as well.

  By the time they were done, they had an audience. The others were gathered and watching them.

  “What does this tell you about the helicopter’s flight path?” Miranda asked her.

  Great! No pressure! Just her first test by the boss in front of the entire team.

  Andi let her eyes follow the line of stakes, not just side to side, but also linearly along the canyon.

  There was no sand build-up or rippling along the inside of the curve around the cliff. The ripples began well out from the cliff as mere centimeter-high suggestions. By the far side of the canyon—some forty meters away, they were roughly hand high.

  The line of flow was consistent.

  She scooped up a handful of the lame excuse for soil out here. Fine and powdery, it would blow easily, and a coarse under-grain that had held the overall form across the width.

  She looked up at the flight path, or rather where the flight path would have been—less than two meters over her head.

  “They were hugging the inside of the turn in the canyon. They didn’t vary their distance from the cliff face throughout the turn. To create this sand pattern…” she held up a hand palm down. Tilting it sideways, Andi kept one eye on the angle of her palm and the other on the sand. It felt…right, when she reached an angle of about forty-five degrees. She tried raising and lowering her hand, picturing the aircraft’s height.

  “Forty, maybe forty-five degrees bank angle and flying at— Oh, wait. It was an S-97 Raider.” The pair of four-bladed coaxial rotors had a decreased downdraft compared to the six-bladed single rotor of the MH-6M, which would have been nice in the Southwest Asia dustbowl wars of Iraq and Afghanistan. Dust brownouts had caused a lot of hard landings even among the Night Stalkers.

  She tilted her hand a little more to compensate for the coaxial rotor. “Fifty-five, maybe even sixty degrees of bank. Under twenty feet AGL. They were carving this corner hard.”

  Then it sank in.

  If Ken hadn’t been killed—and her brain hadn’t turned into total shit—this could have been their flight.

  Whatever had surprised Morales and Christianson could have killed them just as dead.

  Her life over in this crash?

  In some parallel reality, that was her smeared against the rock face.

  Snuffed out just like—

  Miranda didn’t say a word about Andi’s estimation of the flight.

  Instead, she silently pulled out her notebook and made a notation. When she was done, she turned to Jeremy, “Make sure you photograph this. Plus a set of half-kilo soil samples taken every two meters laterally across the canyon. We’ll want to create a wind-tunnel simulation to confirm Andi’s estimation.”

  Which told Andi the level of precision that Miranda brought to her investigations.

  Jeremy scowled at he
r. Not Miranda, but her.

  S-97 Raider had been the complete extent of their communication—oh, and his comment about the Eye of Sauron.

  “What?” she whispered to him.

  “Huh?” The expression cleared from his face as if he’d been unaware of it. He didn’t seem like the cliched inscrutable Asian.

  “Never mind.”

  “Okay.” Jeremy offered an easy shrug that maybe wasn’t so casual, then began recording the lines of stakes with close-ups of the sand ripples next to a ruler for scale. He might appear to be the overeager-puppy-dog type but there was something else going on there. She just hoped it wasn’t malicious.

  Her Chinese family was all about appearances, a lesson she knew by the time she was three, and being the perfect daughter. Major laugh. If she’d been a perfect daughter, she’d be a partner in the family law firm instead of a half-trained, one-quarter-functional NTSB investigator.

  Miranda headed back to the crash without another word.

  “What was that? Did I fuck up?”

  Holly punched her arm.

  “Ow! Hey!” Andi punched her back—harder.

  Holly merely grinned as if she’d barely been brushed by a feather.

  “That’s top marks from our Miranda. When she doesn’t say anything, you either aren’t worth noticing or you nailed it. You can bet fair barter on the second one…this time,” she then followed in Miranda’s wake.

  Andi didn’t want to move.

  The only thing left around the corner was the wreck itself.

  Morales and Christianson had never had a chance.

  Which felt all too familiar.

  29

  “The GPS system was hacked,” Wizard Boy spoke first, which didn’t happen often. Harry Tallman was far more likely to let Heidi the Witchy Lady do his talking for him.

  “And the reason I could possibly give a damn?” CIA Director Clarissa Reese continued studying the latest analysis of the unfolding situation in Mali.

  Couldn’t those people hold their country together for ten minutes in a row? Not so much.

  Briefing this to the President wasn’t going to be any fun. The human rights violations were fast headed for the category of “atrocity,” which meant “genocide” wouldn’t be far off. It wasn’t the sort of word that any president wanted in the news on his watch.

  “We depend on those satellites for far more than positioning. They’re used all over the world for precision timing of any number of services,” Witchy Lady kept pushing.

  “Fine. Fix it. That’s why I brought you two aboard anyway.” She tried waving them away without looking up.

  “The system already did. It auto-annealed the breach after each hack.”

  At their continued silence but continued presence, she forced herself to switch her attention away from the Mali report.

  Neither one had sat down.

  She left them hanging. It was best to remind people just who had outmaneuvered everyone else to become CIA Director.

  They stood in front of her glass desk. She’d finally dumped Clark’s cherrywood monstrosity, all of the dark leather, and the matching bookcases thick with citations, awards, and pictures with presidents past. She’d had enough of taking on the predominantly male division directors on their own level. Instead of an old boy’s club feel, the glass-and-chrome CIA Director’s office now said only one thing: Here lies the power.

  Everything was muted. Even her brushed-silver laptop blended in.

  She wore strong colors herself, the only color in the room.

  They waited stock-still, like the Tweedle Twins—might as well be twins for her purposes.

  Actually, it was very unusual for them to leave their basement cloister. Wizard Boy headed the Cyber Attack Division and Witchy Lady led Cyber Security. Out and inbound. She wondered if that’s what they thought about when they had geek sex.

  Clarissa rocked back in her chair.

  There was little point in playing power games with these two.

  If only she could browbeat her division directors into equal submission. Even the ones she had hard-and-fast blackmail over still felt the urge in their jockey shorts to try and fuck her out of the CIA’s directorship. Not a chance of one of those dweebs getting it up outside their mistress’ boudoir. Yet somehow they didn’t get that if they tried, she’d cut their balls off at the throat.

  The three female directors were at least subtle in their machinations to displace her. Being Senate-approved and married to the country’s new Vice President was going to make that damned difficult but she wished one would try—she needed a good sacrificial slaughter demonstration to make the others behave.

  The twins were among the few she didn’t understand. At least they had skills that were useful enough even if they hated her with a consuming passion. She couldn’t give a rat’s ass about that.

  Yet they had left their underground hideaway…

  “Okay. Explain it to me.” This time they took the chairs when she waved at them.

  Clarissa tossed her twenty-five-hundred-dollar Louis Vuitton fountain pen on top of the report she’d been reading. Clark was very good at selecting unexpected presents. Of course, it had cost her some money too—when she’d seen the new Gucci platform boots that went so well with the pen’s alligator leather barrel. She propped her boots on the corner of the desk.

  For Clark’s “birthday week” she’d purchased a set of La Perla bodysuits and camisoles in all of the colors of the rainbow—all but one. For the last night, she opted for a red silk floor-length nightgown that actually felt as amazing as it looked. The collection had set her back over five grand, but he’d been most appreciative when she’d revealed them on the seven successive nights.

  She’d made herself his obvious successor to the CIA directorship through hard work—and enough background dirt on the Senate committee to bury all of them. But it never hurt to remind the former director, who she’d made Vice President though he’d never know that, exactly why he’d married her.

  The Tweedle Twins, on the other hand, were both wearing t-shirts of something called Babylon 5, which was apparently about fin-headed bald female aliens. All the fashion sense of a pair of toads. But very smart toads, she reminded herself.

  “Our GPS satellite system is what’s called a single point of failure,” Heidi started out.

  “I thought there were fifteen of them up there. Or was it twenty?”

  “Thirty-one. Twenty-seven active and four spares. More spares if you count some of the older birds.”

  “How hard are they to hack?” She wasn’t going to fall into some trap by asking how so many satellites could be called a single point of failure.

  Actually she could have. It wouldn’t have mattered to these two. It was hard to remember that they didn’t think about one-upmanship the way everyone else at the top levels of the CIA did.

  “Not very.”

  Clarissa sighed. “Again, why do I care?” Getting either of them to come to the point was never easy. Both of them together? It was a fast trip to the mental ward.

  “Because they didn’t hack or spoof the easy, civilian part of the GPS system,” Harry this time. She wasn’t sure if it mattered which one spoke. Maybe their new wedding rings were neurotransmitters that linked their brains. She wouldn’t be surprised if they were.

  Heidi continued without a missed breath. “There’s a layer in the new series III satellites called the M-Code, short for Military Code.”

  “Which just might be the first time that the military had ever made a sensible acronym,” Harry just couldn’t seem to help inserting that utterly useless factoid. True though.

  “It’s high security, deeply protected, and is supposed to be unhackable.”

  “So, tell the Air Force to fix it.”

  “Actually, the GPS satellites are run by the US Space Force now,” Harry blushed at correcting her. Christ, she hadn’t been that innocent at twelve. Well, maybe she had. By the time she was thirteen her father had cu
red that.

  The US Space Force definitely snagged her attention. The newest branch of the military had been launched with a paltry forty-million-dollar budget, probably what the Air Force spent on paperclips. But in their first full year of operation, they’d been given fifteen billion—matching the CIA’s entire hard-won budget. Their first year!

  That was incredibly annoying.

  “So, tell the Space Force. Who did it? Some fourteen-year-old in mom’s Kansas basement?” She picked up her pen, unscrewed the cap, and dragged the Mali report from her desk to her lap to keep marking it up. It definitely needed a redraft before she could take it to the White House, including a trending that should have been there to begin with. It was following the same buildup patterns as the Hutu slaughter in Rwanda, the Rohingya by Myanmar, and the Uyghurs incarcerations in China. She definitely had to put one of her Gucci boots up the Africa Desk’s ass for missing that.

  The Tweedle Twins glanced at each other, so maybe they weren’t wired together and just had some weird mental powers.

  In unison, they said, “Turkey.”

  Heidi continued, “At least that was the first satellite we traced it to before we lost track of the signal.”

  Clarissa dropped her pen to the pewter-gray wool carpet where it blurted out a blot of blue ink that would never come out. The Mali report fluttered out of her lap and covered it.

  “I thought they spent all their time attacking Greece, like a child with a smartphone couldn’t do that. It must have been Russia, merely using their satellite.”

  “The core code didn’t look Russian.”

  “It looked…Turkish?”

  At her hesitation, they both nodded uncertainly.

  “Since when did Turkey have a hacker capable of attacking our military assets?”

  Again the double look, though only Heidi spoke this time.

  “Since now.”

  30

  If General Helen Thomas was here, Miranda might have taken her sidearm herself and started shooting people. Or at least asked her to do so.