Raider

by M. L. Buchman

  “Once he pokes his nose out again, can you really shut down this bloody Turk?”

  “Shut him down soft or shut him down hard?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  The twins exchanged a glance, and oddly enough it was Harry who set aside his pizza, before leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.

  “We drive a worm so far up his system that it eats everything. Their entire Siberkume will know its been hit. Nothing will boot or work after that. They’ll probably have to reload every single thing from scratch like their fancy supercomputer is a piece of scrap iron.”

  “Okay, so what does soft look like?”

  “That was soft.” Harry smiled and tipped his head to Heidi. “If you want hard, we unleash—her.”

  Heidi didn’t look happy, but acknowledged that she could do much worse with a grim nod.

  “Now that I like the sound of.”

  58

  “Have there been any plane crashes lately?”

  Miranda had clawed her way up out of a dream of planes turning into numeric arrays of failure probability curves before raining down out of the sky and landing like tumbling dice on perfectly geometric fields of glacier and desert. Squares, triangles, heptagons, all mating together seamlessly on an infinitely flat plane worthy of Edwin Abbott Abbott’s seminal work Flatland.

  She pulled the phone away from her ear to stare at it groggily. The plane had excellent wi-fi. She supposed that it was a good thing that she’d logged in, so that the call came through. Though at the moment, sleep still tempted.

  Andi was an upright silhouette in the dark.

  In moments, Holly and Mike hurried up from somewhere.

  Where was—

  The soft hum of the 787’s two Rolls Royce Trent 1000 engines gave her place.

  The windows were pitch black. She pressed the controls on one to reduce the electrical flow through the sandwiched gel between the two glass panes. Just enough to turn it from blackout to a semi-transparent dark blue. There was a hint of dawn dusting the far horizon off the right wing. Astern was an icy landscape. Ahead a darkness dotted with white, not of city lights, but of moonlight reflected off the ocean.

  They’d left Groom Lake at midnight local time. They’d eaten and played around with the cards until two a.m. by which time it was three a.m. in Mountain Time.

  Now?

  The trans-polar route from Nevada to Turkey would take them over Hudson Bay, Greenland, and southern Scandinavia.

  She peeked again out the window before darkening it.

  Another line of white lay ahead. Hudson Bay.

  They were now three hours into the eleven-hour flight, which meant she’d had less than an hour’s sleep.

  At least now she knew where she was.

  A tinny voice sounded from the phone.

  She’d forgotten about the phone.

  The display listed it as Clarissa Reese.

  “Clarissa?” she held the phone back up to her ear.

  Mike and Holly both twitched as if they’d been electrocuted. They crowded close to either side of her as soon as she sat up.

  Miranda set the phone to speaker. Clarissa wasn’t the most comfortable person to speak with, maybe Mike could help with that.

  “Could you just answer the question, Miranda?”

  Miranda had to think a moment, but couldn’t quite be sure what the question was. She made a guess.

  “The probability of a C-17 Globemaster III suffering a GEnx engine failure at sixty thousand feet…” No, that didn’t seem likely. For one thing, that was fifteen thousand feet over the aircraft’s service ceiling. For another, the C-17 flew with a Pratt & Whitney PW-100 turbofan, not the GE. That was the alternate engine choice for the 787 they were on right now.

  “What?”

  “What?” Miranda definitely no longer knew what the question was.

  “Miranda!”

  The three of them were huddled in the dark over the phone like it was a campfire. Was that an appropriate metaphor?

  “Are we three huddled together like the phone is a campfire?” Miranda turned to Mike.

  “What?” Clarissa sounded less daunting coming from a phone’s speaker than she did in person.

  Miranda ignored her and looked up at Mike’s phone-lit features.

  “Yes. Good one.”

  “Despite the fact that the light is electronic rather than a heat release caused by the rapid consumption of organic combustibles? And the light’s intensity is invariant by any human senses?”

  “It still works,” he reassured her.

  “Oh good.”

  “Mir-an-da!”

  She hated that tone. It always made her ears buzz like the hard beat of mismatched engine speeds on one of the old De Havilland Dash 8 regional turboprops before they were replaced by the Bombardier Q400 series. Actually, the beat of mismatched speeds was little better in that class either.

  “Could you repeat the question?” Thankfully Mike took over.

  “Have. There. Been. Any. Plane. Crashes. Lately?”

  “Yes.” Mike was smiling at his one-word answer.

  “What were they?”

  “Several of them are still classified and it isn’t in the habit of the NTSB to discuss on-going investigations.”

  “Goddamn it, Mike. That’s who this is, isn’t it? Get the fuck off the phone. I’m talking to Miranda.”

  Mike reached for the hang-up button, but Holly blocked him.

  “Hello, Clarissa.”

  “Shit.” Clarissa’s groan was deeply resigned. “Hello, Holly.”

  “So, why don’t you lay out what you’ve got, and we’ll tell you if you’re even playing footy.”

  “Footy? Never mind. Forget I asked.”

  “Football, mate. And we’re not talking Australian Rules here; we’re talking Association Football. No, wait, you’re a crass Yank, so soccer to you. I’ll send you a Matildas’ ball cap—they’re the very best women’s footy teams in all Oz. You’ll be a better woman just for wearing it atop your head thatch. Seriously, Clarissa, what’s chapping your ass?”

  “Other than you?”

  “Other than me.” Holly was smiling as she leaned toward the phone. She looked like some kind of hunting animal ready to pounce. Would that be a metaphor if she could think of which one? Maybe.

  Miranda studied Holly, even tried squinting her eyes. But she just looked…like Holly.

  That still didn’t tell her what was going on in this conversation.

  “Have you had any crashes recently? Incidents? Events? Whatever you people call them. North Pacific area. Or Western US.”

  “Or Turkey?” Miranda finally knew where she was in the conversation.

  “Fuck!” Was Clarissa’s sole comment.

  Because neither Mike nor Holly hung up the phone on her behalf, Miranda felt safe assuming that it was a generalized curse rather than one targeting her.

  Miranda saw no reason to withhold details from the CIA Director as none of the three crashes had been classified as secret.

  “We have an unexplained civilian collision in Alaska nine days ago. A military crash during testing in Nevada less than thirty hours ago. And now the incident with your husband’s plane in Turkey. Is that why you’re calling? I would think you would know more about Vice President Winston’s condition than we would. We were assured that he was alive.”

  “He’s fine. Grounded at Incirlik.” Clarissa didn’t sound interested in dwelling on that, which was a relief.

  Miranda would far prefer to talk about planes.

  “We have a trace on a possible hack of the third generation of GPS satellites.”

  “Including the M-Code? They would have to hack that in order to affect two of those three incidents.” Miranda knew that it had been touted as “hack proof” not that there was such a thing.

  A new voice came on the phone. “Is Jeremy there?”

  “He—”

  “Hey, Harry.” Miranda jumped in surprise. Jerem
y had come up behind her couch.

  “How did they override the encryption?”

  “They didn’t. Never actually touched the core code. Instead they forced each satellite’s clock to loop a couple extra million or so cycles through the transmitter’s processer before it was sent. Still encrypted, just differentially delayed at each satellite’s transmitter, based on how many backloops they pushed it through. That’s how they did the first two. They got a little more sophisticated on the third one, but same effect.”

  Jeremy circled around the couch to get nearer the phone. “Kind of brute force, but smart for all of that.”

  “Wait,” Mike held up his hands.

  Miranda looked at him.

  “Am I getting this right? There was a GPS interference event in the north Pacific region ten days ago?”

  “Yes.”

  Mike jabbed a finger toward Holly, then Jeremy. “Hot damn! I don’t want to say I told you so but, ‘Nyah! Nyah! Nyah! I told you so!’ There. Now I feel better.”

  “What are you yabbering about, mate?”

  “If their GPS got mangled, it wasn’t the Alaskan pilots’ fault. Just like I said.”

  “Oh,” Jeremy had the decency to look chagrined.

  Holly nodded as if conceding a minor defeat. “I still think you were guessing and just got lucky.”

  Though Miranda had kept her silence during the debate in the Tacoma Narrows Airport Office yesterday, she’d been inclined to agree with Holly and Jeremy. In her experience with midair collisions, pilot error was a significantly common factor—sufficient to be commonly deemed a most-likely cause. She would have to be vigilant to avoid accepting that bias in the future.

  “Am I the only one who’s lost here?” Andi came to stand beside Holly. “What crash are you talking about and who is that on the phone?”

  “The CIA Director and one of her top IT folks.”

  “I’m here too,” a female voice sounded from the phone.

  “Oh, hi there, Heidi.” Jeremy was happy-smiling.

  As far as Miranda knew, Jeremy had never been to the CIA.

  “How’s the honeymoon?”

  “Three months in and I still haven’t had to kill Harry. So, I’m thinking we’re good to go for the long haul.”

  “That’s great. Though I didn’t have any doubts about you two. I mean—”

  “Will you four shut the fuck up?” Clarissa snarled. “Adults are speaking here.”

  “Jeremy is an adult,” Miranda pointed out, “as is Mike. And by the sound of their voices and the fact that they work with you and were recently married, I suspect that neither Harry nor Heidi are adolescents.”

  “You have no idea, Miranda. No idea at all. Trust me on that.”

  Mike tapped her knee to get her attention, then mouthed, “Metaphor.”

  Oh, no wonder she didn’t understand. Too bad. After last night, she’d thought she might finally be getting better at those.

  59

  Clarissa looked at the twins.

  So goddamn smug.

  How did they know Miranda’s little geek?

  Because he’d helped them utterly destroy her project to discredit the A-10 Thunderbolt fighter jet. It had taken her months to be sure that she wasn’t caught up by the aftermath of that train wreck. It had also required more drastic personal action in the field than she’d taken in a long, long time.

  Perhaps Jeremy had also been instrumental in the twins’ cracking the security on her own past.

  That, at least, made sense.

  Nothing she could do about it now. The twins had made it clear that if anything untoward happened to them, her past would be splashed out for all to see.

  Was Jeremy their safety? The one holding that information just in case?

  Maybe, but only maybe. Not sure enough to bet on.

  She sighed and refocused on the fact that Miranda’s team once again knew more than she did.

  “Where are you people now?”

  There was a pause. Miranda was probably going to reel off some GPS coordinates along with temperature, elevation, humidi—

  “It’s difficult to be precise, but I’d estimate we’re just north of Southampton.”

  “What are you doing in England?”

  “Southampton Island, Nunavut Territory, Canada. We’ll be crossing into the Arctic in the next twenty minutes.”

  Harry brought up a map on his display and pointed to somewhere white with ice.

  “What the hell are you doing up there?”

  “We were escalated to proceed to Turkey to investigate your husband’s plane crash. We’re on a polar circle route.”

  “Oh. Let me know what you find. Clark’s pilot said something had gone wonky.”

  “Is that the technical term for it, Clarissa?” Holly snickered.

  “Eat hot shit, Holly.”

  “You first, mate,” she offered in her sweetest tone.

  “Just tell your goddamn pilot to be sure to make a visual landing, not an instrument one.”

  “Oh, right. I’ll go tell the pilots not to trust their instruments,” Jeremy’s voice faded as he rushed away from the phone.

  “And Holly?”

  “Yeah?”

  God she hated being nice to them when she’d rather see the whole planeload of them plummet into the Arctic Ocean. No, too fast. Crash land on the Greenland ice sheet with no hope of rescue, that sounded much better.

  “The CIA has reason to believe that the first three events were tests. That they’re building up to a separate major event.”

  “Like Twin Towers major?” No smarm in Holly’s voice now.

  “We…just don’t know.”

  She nearly hung up, an awkward place to leave the conversation.

  “Uh, when you see Clark, tell him I said, ‘Hi’. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Miranda assured her. Then she hung up.

  Apparently the conversation was over from her view.

  Clarissa toyed with her now silent phone as she contemplated Holly’s last question.

  It was 9/11 that had vastly increased the CIA’s need for agents willing to do whatever was needed. Afghanistan black sites had opened a lot of doors for her, ones she’d leveraged all the way to the directorship in under twenty years.

  Was this going to be some equally significant opportunity?

  Perhaps this was her shot at the White House.

  Now wasn’t that an interesting idea.

  60

  “Morning, Barry.”

  Barry just grunted.

  When a three-star like Barry Sizemore was playing it cagey, Drake knew it meant bad news. Worse, he was being cagey right at the crack of dawn.

  The August weather hadn’t yet broken the back of the DC summer. The five-acre park that was the center of the Pentagon would soon be baking like an oven. Despite the trees, by ten a.m. the air trapped inside the four-story pentagon that surrounded the park would be stultifying.

  At this early hour, it was still pleasant under the maple trees.

  They met at the Dunkin’ Donuts in the center of the courtyard.

  “I still miss when you could get a goddamn hotdog here,” Barry growled in greeting.

  “Christ you must be old.” Drake remembered the Cafe Ground Zero fondly. As far as he was concerned, everything since the old hotdog stand closed back in 2006 had been a downhill slide: Au Bon Pain, Sbarro, and now Dunkin’ Donuts.

  They both ordered black coffee and a bagel with cream cheese before going to sit at a table under one of the trees.

  Within moments of sitting, the tables to either side cleared.

  “Privilege of rank,” Barry slathered his bagel and crunched down.

  “You found something.” The ginkgo tree they sat under was the loudest tree in the park. The post-dawn breeze shuffling the leaves loudly together would mask their conversation even if anyone still sat near them.

  “I found a fucking shitstorm. There’s so much CYA going on that we should install adhesive toilet
paper in the bathroom, because they sure aren’t wiping any of their shit off.”

  Drake tipped his coffee toward Barry in a toast before drinking. He couldn’t agree more on that point.

  “Okay,” Barry looked down, rubbing his forehead.

  Bad sign.

  “I’ve got a pair of two stars in cahoots with your Campos…except Campos is probably too much raw meat to know he’s being used. Though going after your girl, Chase whatever, was his idea alone. As you guessed, one of my generals is deep in bed with Bell. And Airbus. And anyone else who’d buy him.” Then Barry waved a hand to indicate a table off to his left.

  About a minute later, a pair of JAG officers, accompanied by two massive sergeants, approached a table under a nearby maple. By the time the scene had played out, the general there was in cuffs and being escorted out.

  A distant circle of majors and colonels watched the show. Any flag officer who’d been in the park for their early morning caffeine fix had long since bolted for the moderate security of being non es in loco. By getting themselves gone, they’d think they had plausible deniability about one of their own being taken down, achieved by hiding in their Pentagon offices. Probably under their damned desks.

  “Judge Advocate General’s office has enough shit on him to send him to Leavenworth for life. Bet you a twenty he gets minimum security for two and then a consulting gig that nets him his salary times ten for life.”

  “No bet.” Drake didn’t like the odds.

  “You tell your buddy Roy Cole that if he pardons that piece of pig-fodder, I just might send him a B-52, fully loaded. I hate this. I groomed that bastard. Thank God I didn’t listen to him as much as he’d have liked.”

  Drake’s coffee was suddenly bitter.

  “Too bad he’s not the real problem.”

  Drake looked around the nearly empty park. Even the lower ranks had cleared out for the moment.

  One look at Barry’s expression and Drake wished he hadn’t even had what little coffee he’d managed to swallow.

  61

  The phone ripped her awake again.