Raider

by M. L. Buchman

  “Which is why I want you on FARA.”

  Wanted. But she knew that’s what he meant. “I just can’t sit by and watch others fly in my place, like I’m some broken toy. ‘Oh, didn’t she used to be good?’ I could never stand that, sir.”

  “So, you’re going to become an expert in other things that are broken?”

  A shrug was the best that she could manage. Once she was out of the Army, she’d searched online for rotorcraft jobs. She wasn’t a mechanic or crew chief; she was a pilot who couldn’t be trusted to fly.

  Only one opportunity had matched that, the NTSB. Her watch had voted a very tentative forty-five seconds, but she’d applied anyway. If it had been on the downswing from fifteen, she probably wouldn’t have.

  “Well, Captain Wu, why do you think this one broke?”

  “Not the pilots, sir.”

  At his raised eyebrows, she took another bite of her sandwich to buy a moment and check her watch, but she already knew the answer.

  “I’ve flown over fifty missions beside Morales and Christianson. They were both meticulous and exceptional to the highest Night Stalkers’ standard.”

  “I don’t need past loyalties clouding—”

  “They’re not. If I’d have been…functioning,” God help her, “at the time, I certainly would have recommended them to take over the S-97 testing. Whatever happened, sir, I can guarantee that it wasn’t the pilots.”

  “That’s jumping to conclusions before we’ve completed an investigation,” Miranda sat on the sand opposite them, clutching a small bag of chips. Right, Major Sandy Hair Swift had said “she doesn’t like it when we conjecture.”

  “Don’t you ever cross factors off the list as you proceed through an investigation?”

  Miranda actually looked as if that was a new concept. She considered it, then shook her head. “No, I don’t.”

  “Well, you can cross the pilots off your list this time. And remember the audio feed, they saw something. Something surprising to both men.”

  “I don’t know how we’ll ever figure out what,” Jeremy set down the shattered remains of a pair of bright-orange black boxes.

  Holly and Mike soon joined their circle. None of the industry specialists had willingly come near either Miranda or Colonel Stimson since he’d told them that he’d make them walk back to base if they touched a single thing without asking Miranda’s team first—Groom Lake lay twenty miles away across rough hills and arid desert.

  “When the propeller’s driveshaft sheared, it pithed the flight data recorder. The data module didn’t survive. No record of what the instruments were displaying.” He pulled a baggie from his vest pocket. A few carbonized scraps of electronics were all that remained. Then he held up a second baggie that looked only marginally better. “I checked it out. The core from the voice data recorder is fully recoverable.”

  During the NTSB Academy orientation tour, she’d been informed that CVR and FDR—cockpit voice and flight data recorders—were never opened outside of the NTSB lab. A rule that Jeremy had clearly ignored.

  No one commented. Apparently Miranda’s team ran by other rules.

  This was a military crash, but the labbies had all had high security clearances so that they could handle such things. That meant Miranda’s entire team must have top secret or better clearance. They’d need it to be at Groom Lake. This team became stranger the longer she looked at it.

  “Okay, Captain,” Stimson was looking at her again, “then what caused this crash?”

  Miranda started to speak, but Mike rested a hand lightly on her arm to stop her. Then he nodded for Andi to proceed. Miranda’s breathing was accelerating as she stared at Mike’s hand.

  He glanced down, then wrapped his hand firmly around her arm. “Sorry, Miranda. I wasn’t thinking.”

  Were autistics touch sensitive? Light-touch sensitive? Andi had no idea.

  Mike nodded for her to continue without removing his hand. He was one of those touchy-feely guys, but again it didn’t appear to be offensive. Like he used that bit of connection.

  “I…” Andi looked at Miranda again. How had she created those amazing reports that she’d read so many of in class? By assuming nothing.

  But she couldn’t ignore that Colonel Stimson was still awaiting her response, as was everyone else. The colonel wanted an answer, but she suspected that the rest of the team was waiting to see how she answered.

  This team had unwritten rules and she had no idea what they were. There were a thousand rules drilled into a Night Stalkers’ head, after the thousand drilled in by being a pilot, and the thousand more by joining the military to begin with.

  So, she was supposed to sit here, with no goddamned flight plan telling her where to turn, and answer anyway.

  Perfect!

  No pressure.

  She used to thrive on pressure, but was less sure now. The pressure felt like the need to fly perfectly while her best friend was blown up close beside her.

  Did she care what they all thought of her?

  Her watch said she did. Huh! That was a surprise.

  “Okay,” she closed her eyes and pictured the flight.

  35

  Mike watched Andi closely. He had no measure of her flexibility of thinking.

  Major Jon Swift was a good guy. Nice to Miranda. Even good for her. But he wasn’t the most flexible of thinkers.

  Andi was… He wasn’t sure what she was yet.

  “They were coming down the canyon’s curve in a hard bank, wrapping close to the cliff.” Andi wasn’t pointing.

  Instead, she’d propped her feet in the sand in front of her as if working the flight controls with those and both hands.

  “Early in the run, Morales requested permission to fly lower—”

  “Take it down to three meters, one-zero feet?” Jeremy spoke up, repeating the transmission they’d heard during the flight. “Cleared to three.” He even had the timing and intonation down.

  “Morales was being very careful in his communication with Christianson. But it also illustrates a great confidence in the aircraft. Christianson shared that confidence or he wouldn’t have authorized the descent.”

  “But they blasted into the pillar two stories up the rock. That’s seven meters up,” Mike had measured it himself.

  Andi’s hands moved through a series of motions. Then she repeated them. No. They were slightly different. And again. And again.

  “At what angle did they strike the wall?”

  Because of his argument with Holly, that had also been Mike’s to estimate when he’d topped out the climb. “Hard to tell exactly, but the rotor blades were roughly parallel to the ground. Not banked.”

  Andi manipulated the phantom controls again.

  Then her eyes snapped open and she stared straight at Miranda.

  Damn it! Mike hadn’t been ready for Andi to push an agenda on Miranda.

  “I—” was all he got out before Andi overran him.

  “We need to look at the pillar again,” Andi pointed.

  Mike relaxed. She wasn’t pulling a Jon. Major Swift always jumped to conclusions, then set out to disprove them. Completely anathema to the way Miranda functioned. There were whole stages of the investigations they shared where Mike made sure to stay close to translate between the two of them.

  Andi made slicing motions with the edge of her hand. “Scratches will show a climb and rollout. He had half a second max, but Morales rolled from a sixty-degree bank at three meters to straight-and-climbing flight at seven meters.” Andi swung her hand around her body as if carving a turn with her fingertips in the lead. Then she rolled it flat and tipped it upward as she jabbed it toward the pillar’s face.

  “Actually,” Miranda didn’t even blink. “That is unlikely.”

  “What? No, Miranda. It’s the only flight path that fits the pilot’s abilities and reaction time.”

  “The problem,” Miranda spoke calmly, “isn’t your suggestion. The challenge is that the Eureka Quartzite imp
acted by the Raider is a very hard stone, a seven of ten on the Mohs hardness scale. Much of the S-97 Raider is built up from composites that have a hardness near two. Even the aluminum frame is only two-point-seven-five. Neither would leave much of a mark. We’re more likely to see a shift in how fragments of the crash were back-scattered after the event in order to judge the precise angle of impact.”

  Andi looked down. “Oh. I didn’t think of that.”

  “We’ll look for both,” Miranda nodded, “but the evidence will be on the ground.”

  “So, he saw the pillar?” Colonel Stimson asked.

  “Yes,” Andi confirmed. “But too late.”

  “But—” then the colonel glanced at the rest of them and snapped his mouth shut.

  Well, she was no longer a Night Stalker.

  And the smile that Mike was giving her said she’d done good. She hadn’t seen that in a long time, not even from Ken. He’d been a Night Stalker—the height of praise among the teams was a firm nod at the end of a mission.

  “The problem…Jeremy—”

  Mike shared a smile with Holly when Jeremy twitched in surprise as Andi singled him out.

  “—we need to find out what they were seeing. A nap-of-Earth flight has nothing to do with looking out the windscreen, even in broad daylight. I guarantee that whatever they saw was inside the cockpit. And it was a recurring problem because there was a long pause before Christianson confirmed seeing it, whatever it was.”

  “There was a six-point-two second gap between Morales’ Did you see that? Christianson saying, What? And Christianson finally saying, Saw that.” Jeremy should be nodding in agreement, but he was more abrupt than the usual Jeremy.

  Mike hadn’t a clue why.

  “Exactly,” Andi agreed, but Jeremy didn’t appear mollified. “There’s a system installed on our helos—”

  “Captain,” Colonel Stimson’s voice was a warning growl.

  “Sorry, sir, but do you want a solution or not? I mean, we’re all sitting in the dirt at Groom freakin’ Lake, sir.”

  Mike hadn’t been wrong when he figured she had a spine of steel. Maybe it was more like adamantine.

  Which was more tactful than what Holly would have—

  “She’s normal people now, mate,” Holly could never resist baiting people, and the colonel was her newest target. “No longer under your orders. Dag it up, Andi.”

  “Dag?”

  “You’re nerding it, girl. On a roll. Don’t stop now.”

  The colonel grumbled, but didn’t stop her.

  “When we’re terrain following, we have a four-layer display. A look-ahead / look-down radar. Also a new direct-vision system called DAS—Direct Aperture System—which is an all-around seamless day-or-night view of the outside world. There’s an inertial guidance system, but it has a significant drift rate, so we don’t watch it much unless someone starts spoofing GPS signals, which gets pretty obvious pretty fast. We also have a world map accurate to one meter underlaying it all. Except for little aberrations like a truck or a cow, the four are always in sync unless…”

  Her gasp of horror was the last sound she made.

  Captain Andi Wu’s eyes shot wide open, but whatever she was seeing, it wasn’t local.

  Then she went fetal.

  Mike was barely in time to catch her before she face-planted in the colonel’s lap.

  36

  “Drake.”

  “Barry. Kick your entourage out.” Three-star generals went nowhere without a buffering entourage, prefiltering everything that stood a rat’s-ass chance of coming up the line. Every little pipsqueak with their own agenda regarding what made it through.

  One of the reasons he tended to run lean himself. He didn’t want all of the noise filtered out. He was the only four-star general he knew with no flag-rank staffers other than the vice-chairman.

  “Then why’s he here?” Barry pointed at Campos still seated beside Arkin Kavanaugh.

  Drake sighed and decided to grab the bull by the horns, “Do you want me to discuss a possible court-martial in front of your people?” The three generals and assorted colonels Barry had dragged in with him all flinched before covering their shock. Most of the lower echelons remembered enough of their past to snap to attention.

  “Of who?”

  “You, for starters.”

  Barry was too old a hand to do more than offer a wry smile at the tactic. “You’re just enough of a hard-ass to try that, Drake. Okay, I’ll play along and hear the pitch.”

  He waved a hand dismissing his team. They filtered back into the waiting room doing their best to look stoic and unconcerned. Not a chance.

  Barry had come up under Tadman as well, and selected the empty right-hand chair just as Drake would have.

  He tapped the intercom to his assistant, “No one in. And, Ray?”

  “Sir?”

  “Just to keep all those jackals at bay, tell them that for the moment my reception area is a no-talking zone, and no, they don’t have General Sizemore’s permission to depart or use their phones.”

  “Sir.”

  Drake cut the connection, then he rocked back, kicked open the drawer, and propped his feet on it.

  Barry nodded, laced his fingers over his gut, and just smiled.

  Despite his own coming up through the 75th Rangers and Barry out of the USAF fighters, he’d always liked the man. He had the double arrogance of being a former jet jockey and a Texan, but it suited his competence.

  “That,” Drake hooked a thumb at Campos, “states that you had him issue an order in Arkin’s name regarding the S-97 Raider crash site.”

  Barry simply steepled his fingers and tapped them a few times on his chin.

  “Planning how to call him a liar and throw him under the bus?” Drake tried second guessing him.

  “Trying to think of what the hell you’re talking about. Care to reel that one back in a bit?”

  “You know we lost an S-97 in final testing?”

  “Heard,” Barry’s grunt wasn’t a happy one. “Who do you think rousted Stimson and got him on a flight at two a.m. this morning? I love what those pilots can do at night. Even you must, despite the handicap of being Chairborne Ranger.”

  Of all his achievements, Drake was still most proud of his 75th Ranger scroll and the Airborne tab that he’d earned along with it. None of the other chest candy—plenty of which was for combat as Barry damn well knew—could equal the scroll and tab on his jacket’s arm. Chairborne Rangers might have made the grade, but no one in their right mind let them fight anything more dangerous than a desk’s inbox.

  It was tough, but Drake just let that one go by. He’d be making Barry pay for it later though.

  “Just might wish some that they didn’t do it when I was fast asleep.” Barry’s grunt said that was his idea of high humor.

  Well, that was something. “Then why did you order the best investigation team we’ve got off the site?”

  “Can’t say as I much recall doing that.”

  Drake sighed and tapped a key to bring the order in question back up on the screen.

  Barry shrugged his three-starred shoulders after he read it—all of it, unlike Arkin. He was a very thorough man.

  “So what’s the catch?”

  “The catch is that this one,” Drake pointed at Campos again, “issued it under Arkin’s name without Arkin ever seeing it.”

  “So, it’s not my court-martial you’re talking about, it’s his,” he offered his own sideways nod.

  “He said you ordered him to.”

  Barry didn’t even look at Campos. “Came up through my people. Noise about some one-star pipsqueak blocking the site.”

  “General Helen Thomas. I put her in place at Groom Lake after removing Harrington.”

  Barry only raised an eyebrow at how unusual that had been, without a single word ever surfacing as to why. Or why Harrison had voluntarily retired the next week, and moved to some godforsaken Arizona ranch and disappeared.

&n
bsp; Drake used his flat, four-star stare to tell him he wasn’t going to be finding out either.

  Again, a three-star shrug. “I told them to pass down word to fix it on my authority, and not wait for anyone’s fuckin’ red tape. Damn S-97’s a high-priority item for me. That was a final-approval flight. Still, signing your name, Arkin, gotta rein your people in. I keep them pulled in damn tight.”

  General Arkin Kavanaugh started to protest, but Drake cut him off and kept his attention on Barry.

  “You didn’t do it because you’re in bed with Bell?” Bell Helicopter’s 360 Invictus had been the other primary contender in the competition to replace the military’s aging small-helicopter fleet. A lot of manufacturers threw serious wine-and-dine treats at generals to favor their bids and contracts…and ignore their fuckups. From hookers to gratis custom-built luxury homes. Plus the promise of a lucrative consulting slot once mandatory retirement finally swung around.

  Barry snorted and held up four fingers.

  “Let’s see, the Raider is twenty percent faster than Invictus,” he pushed down a finger with his other forefinger.

  “It’s already a proven technology with the X-2 demonstrator flights,” another finger.

  Drake half expected him to skip one and tick down his forefinger so that his last point would be telling Drake to go fuck himself.

  But he didn’t.

  Though a mere flicker in his eyes said that he’d considered it.

  “It flew four years ahead of the Invictus, not counting the X-2 flights. That’s a lot of lessons already learned.”

  Last one.

  “And it’s about time we got the coaxial rotor running. Our technology is finally catching up with our real-world needs. It lets chaps like the Night Stalkers run SOCOM’s special teams into those really tricky spots. Oh,” he popped out a thumb, “and it shares engines and technology with the new SB-1 Defiant to replace Black Hawks, Hueys, Apaches, and maybe even those goddamn Marine Cobras. Save us scads on getting a common platform for training and parts. Even the fucking idiots in Congress should like that one.”

  Drake glared at the three men. He was missing something here, but he’d be damned if he knew what. For the moment, he’d learned all he was likely to.