Raider

by M. L. Buchman

  Again, the first thing she saw was Andi’s silhouette as she sat up and turned to look at her.

  Miranda answered the phone, and again Mike and Holly were soon seated to either side.

  “Hello, Drake.”

  This time she noticed when Andi also came close.

  Jeremy hadn’t so much as wiggled.

  The clock said she’d slept seven hours. Or at least had been lying down that long. It felt as if she hadn’t slept more than two.

  “Good morning, Miranda.”

  Was it morning? At least wherever Drake was.

  No, it hadn’t been seven hours of sleep. Because she’d synchronized her phone to the plane’s wi-fi, it was updating its clock as they flew. They were several time zones from Clarissa’s phone call. And because they were above the Arctic Circle, the time zones were significantly narrower and the plane passed through them faster.

  She decided that her inability to calculate precisely what that implied meant that she’d had far closer to two hours sleep than seven.

  “Are you alone?”

  Miranda considered.

  Only her team sat around her: Mike, Holly, and Andi.

  She’d spent so much of her life alone. Sometimes, even with her parents and Tante Daniels close by, she’d still been very alone in one sense.

  Inside herself.

  Closed in.

  “You still there, Miranda?”

  “Yes.”

  Was she alone, despite the team sitting around her?

  In the worst way. Actually, that wasn’t accurate. She’d been in the worst way enough times in her life to know that this wasn’t the worst. But to have three unresolved crashes—

  And then to be told by Clarissa that they weren’t really crashes and she had to solve a future crash? Before it happened!

  An unsolved crash that didn’t actually exist yet?

  It was worse than sitting and watching the S-97 Raider test flight before it impacted the Eureka Quartzite stone pillar.

  “Are you alone?”

  “Yes…” a whisper was all she could manage.

  There was an audible click of her teeth as Holly, on the verge of speaking, snapped her jaw shut.

  Mike looked at her a little strangely.

  “We’ve detected an internal security breach here at the Pentagon.”

  “I’m busy now, Drake. You know that. You are the one who sent us to Turkey to investigate the crash of Air Force Two. I can’t come to the Pentagon. What do I know about security? I don’t even know where we are. Besides, we have reason to believe that it’s unsafe to fly.”

  “But you’re flying now, aren’t you?”

  Jeremy came hurrying over, “You know, if you look out the starboard windows right now, you can just glimpse Iceland. I’ve never been to Iceland.”

  “I thought you said you were alone,” Drake sounded…

  “Angry?” she whispered to Mike, who nodded.

  “I am alone. There’s only me inside me, Drake, and that’s a very lonely place to be sometimes. Mike says you sound angry. Why is that?”

  There was a long pause, then a deep sigh. “I should really know better.”

  “Better than what?”

  “Never mind.”

  “You know I’m not very good at that, Drake.”

  Again, another sigh.

  62

  “You’ve got to fight for what you believe in.”

  “It’s not that simple, Asli.”

  Metin had needed to get away from General Firat, Siberkume, and even Onur. Asli had replied to his text to please meet him in Tepe Prime Mall with a: Love to!

  It gave him both hope and dismay. They were so screwed and it was his fault. Instead of his options expanding, they were shrinking at an alarming rate.

  The open-air mall curved around the base of three towering buildings. The ground floors were pharmacy, bank, dry cleaners, and a dozen restaurants, all opening beneath broad awnings that blocked the summer sun or trapped its warmth in the winter.

  Because he couldn’t think of anything else, he texted back to meet at Waffle In Love. It was a food truck separate from the buildings. Permanently parked at one side of a brilliant orange canopy covering fifteen small tables, it always looked like a good place for a cool date.

  It might have been.

  Except at the peak of an overly hot August afternoon, it was more like being hung out to dry.

  Great move, Metin. Worst date place ever. Which fit perfectly, because seeing Asli, letting Firat and his spies know that he cared about her, only put her in more danger. That made he himself the worst date ever.

  Even with the tent’s floppy plastic windows rolled up, no breeze wound between the buildings. In a few hours, the evening would be lovely. And when night arrived, the windows would be lowered, making it cozy; then they’d slap occasionally and perhaps it would have made it harder to monitor their conversation.

  Now it mostly just sucked.

  Nobody else except the cook was here at the moment, but he didn’t fool himself that they were unmonitored. Two blocks from Siberkume was only three blocks from the main government offices—every restaurant in the area would be heavily monitored. Perhaps even looking up into the tent’s structure to see if he could spot the bugs would be bad.

  He did look up anyway, but the strings of twinkle lights, which were always on day and night, were a little too bright to see past. Not that it mattered anymore. He was in it too deep and he’d now dragged her down with him.

  “You have to be more careful, Asli.”

  She dug her fingers deep into that liquid brown hair he longed to touch, then leaned onto her elbow, propping her head as she slouched across from him. She continued to eat her waffle with her right hand, but she was paying attention to him.

  “You get more beautiful every day.” Even in the sullen midday glare reflecting off the grocer’s windows, she was the most amazing woman he’d ever seen. If it was evening and there were just the twinkle lights, she’d be… He didn’t know what, but it would be really, really nice if he was the one sitting across from her when it happened.

  “Wow! A compliment from the silent Metin,” her smile just added to her dazzle. “Something must be really bothering you for you to finally ask me out without Onur hovering. We’ve been wondering how long that was going to take you.”

  “We? Onur, too?”

  “Uh-huh. Though I told him I’d beat him up if he mentioned it.”

  Onur was twice her size, but he didn’t think that would stop someone like Asli.

  “But you’re nearly as traditional as your parents. I kind of like that about you, so I told him not to push. I was willing to wait a while longer for you to notice me.”

  “Why do you think I come to your house with Onur every chance I get? Even if he is my best friend.” Metin mushed a tiny square of waffle into syrupy oblivion on his plate.

  Her smile said she knew that. “So, I’m betting that you can’t talk about work.”

  Metin could only shake his head. General Firat, rather than being upset about the Vice President’s survival, had been ecstatic. Very unnerving and he didn’t begin to understand what was happening.

  “And…you probably wouldn’t have gotten up the nerve to call me unless something at work was really stressing you.”

  “How do you figure that?” It was dangerously accurate. Firat had said all of this, even the Vice President’s plane, had only been a test. So what could possibly come next? Whatever it was, it was going to be bad. He never should have involved her even this tiny amount.

  “You mean other than my not seeing you or my brother for the last week or so? Or what you’re doing to that poor waffle?”

  Metin stopped himself halfway through mushing the latest tiny waffle square that he’d segmented off. “That obvious?”

  “Duh.”

  “We’ve been…busy. It’s a big project.”

  “Meaning more governmental top secret madness. You know that all
that crap you do is another tool of suppression by The Regime.”

  Never the President or the Government with Asli, it was always The Regime, complete with capital letters. As if they were suddenly becoming the Turkish Reich in Germany’s image instead of having sided with the Allies in World War II. Asli knew way more than he did about those kinds of things. So maybe Turkey was becoming what she said.

  “Don’t you ever think about what you and Onur do in there?”

  “All the time.” Now. That was the problem.

  When he’d signed on, there’d been no need to think. He’d been recruited straight out of the university computer lab with promises of the world—and they’d delivered. Souped-up machines. Access to the real Internet, not just the slice of it authorized to mere civilians and governmental grunts. Code like he’d never get to work with anywhere else. And now a general, an actual general, had jumped to get him a slot on the most powerful computer in the country. And a private office for him and Onur.

  But just last night he’d started thinking about who might have had that office before he came along.

  And who might have it after, if he screwed this up.

  Then this morning, mere thoughts had turned to raw terror when General Firat had threatened to have Asli disappeared and tortured until she’d confess to anything they asked of her. That image had sent him from that meeting to the toilet, where he’d barfed his guts out.

  The agony had built throughout the day until he didn’t know what to do.

  Somehow he’d thought that calling Asli was a good idea. Too late for it to be either good or bad now. Her fate was— Metin couldn’t bear to think it.

  “I don’t know what to do. If I try to stop…” he shrugged and began killing off more waffle squares.

  “They’ve really got something over you, haven’t they?”

  He tried not to look up at her. Tried to stay focused on his waffle. But he couldn’t.

  As he watched her, Asli sat up very slowly and set her fork down.

  “What do they have on you?”

  But he could see that she already knew the answer.

  She reached across the table and took his hand. Her fingers were just as warm and her touch just as kind as he’d always thought it would be.

  For a long time he stared down at her fine fingers. So much more graceful than his own. He finally brushed a thumb over them.

  “What are you going to do?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t think I have a lot of choice.” Maybe if he memorized the shape of her fingers, the sharp curve of her narrow nails, the sticky spot where she’d splotted a bit of honey without noticing. Maybe if he could hold that image perfectly, it would somehow be okay.

  “Isn’t there any way through this, that— Ow!”

  A colonel he didn’t recognize had come into the tent, and he’d crushed down on her fingers.

  Wings.

  The colonel had wings.

  A pilot.

  A wife came in close behind him with two excited children. An early dinner with his family.

  That was too elaborate a setup to just watch him and Asli hold hands over cold, mushed waffles.

  Metin forced himself to relax slowly.

  Asli didn’t miss where his attention had gone.

  “Okay, Metin. Are you listening?”

  He managed a nod.

  “The answer is that you must do what’s right or you’ll become just like whoever threatened you.” She didn’t add “with hurting me” but she did swallow hard.

  “But how will I know what is right?”

  “Simple,” Asli clamped down on his hand hard enough to hurt. Maybe she actually could beat up Onur. “Ask yourself, if you were allowed to tell me what you did, would you be willing to?”

  The answer right now was a big fat no. I just came within meters of killing the American Vice President and I have no idea why. All he really knew about the man was that he’d gotten to marry a tall blonde built like a one-woman porn movie. And that the thirty-year-old governmental plane he flew in was three times older and far less luxurious than any plane in the Turkish executive fleet.

  “No matter the cost,” Asli squeezed even a little harder, forcing his attention back to her face.

  “No matter the cost?” Like your torture and death? “But—”

  She raised a hand to silence him.

  “You must do what you know is right. No. Matter. The. Cost.”

  She knew exactly what she was saying.

  He held on for all he was worth, sticky spot and all.

  “You’re the bravest woman there ever was.”

  “You can tell me that afterward.” Then she retrieved her hand and began eating again with a smile that he almost believed. “Until then I plan on hiding under the covers and shaking like a leaf.”

  He ate his own first bite as the owner delivered the colonel’s meals.

  The tent still felt brutally hot and exposed.

  63

  “We have no concrete evidence yet but—”

  “Drake, that isn’t how I learned to conduct investigations,” Miranda felt bad about cutting him off, but this was one thing she simply couldn’t give ground on. “We start with evidence of the crash, tracking and tower records, and eyewitness accounts. We gather evidence to—”

  “I don’t need all of the details.”

  She couldn’t read his emotion over the phone. And being on speakerphone made that even harder.

  A glance at Mike, and he made a circling sign that she took to mean she should keep going, which she was going to do anyway.

  “—identify potential and likely issues. We base our investigations on evidence, not hearsay.”

  Mike’s grimace said he might have meant something else.

  Oh, like she should wrap up what she’d been saying? But that’s exactly what she’d done. Wasn’t it?

  “Well,” Drake jumped back in. “This hearsay is coming to you from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, so please don’t think that I’m saying any of this lightly. Think of it as just another goddamn piece of evidence if you—”

  “But you said it wasn’t evidence.”

  “And now who is interrupting who?” Drake actually sounded like a snarling dog.

  But he did have a point, so she remained silent and waited.

  The pause stretched long enough for her to push to her feet and return to the poker table. The others followed and sat in the same seats they had last…night?

  Earlier this morning?

  What was it they said of the Pony Express riders? It was a new day when you saw the dawn whether you’d slept twelve hours or none of the last twenty-four.

  Ever since her father had told her that story, dawn had made significantly more sense than the arbitrariness of starting a new day when the sun shone directly on the opposite side of the planet.

  Besides, midnight was only solar midnight for a half of a degree within each time zone that encompassed fifteen degrees. Or if one used the centerline of the sun, as would be more appropriate, then it was only true for a theoretically infinitely thin line on the opposite side of the Earth.

  Besides that, time zones were such a senseless hodgepodge. How likely was it that Western Canada, Greenland, and China each claimed a single time zone though they geographically spanned four of them. Russia spanned twelve time zones yet only used eight, one of those completely overlapped by another. Yes, dawn was a much more sensible metric for measuring a new day.

  It was midafternoon where the airplane presently flew, which meant the sun was rising over Groom Lake soon. By either measure it was a new day.

  She hung up her phone and tucked it in her pocket.

  “Did you just hang up on Drake?” Mike’s eyes were wide.

  “Did I? I suppose I did.” She pulled out the phone and called him back.

  “What’s going on, Miranda?”

  She recognized anger again.

  Holly spoke first. “We’ve slept two hours of the l
ast twenty-four, mate. Chill a piece.”

  “Technically, two of the last twenty-seven hours. Personally, with the five hours I slept at Groom Lake, their guest beds are not very comfortable by the way, I’ve slept seven hours since our last night in Alaska, so I’ve slept seven of the last seventy-nine hours. Why is any of that relevant?”

  No one offered her a good answer.

  “I don’t sleep well when there’s an unsolved plane crash.”

  “Oh,” Andi nodded vigorously. “That makes perfect sense to me. Even when I’m not on the mission, I can’t sleep until the others of my company are safely back and debriefed.”

  Miranda agreed. That too made perfect sense.

  “Look, all of you. Gods,” Drake groaned, “how many am I talking to? No, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. Just know that this is top secret. In fact, Miranda, code word classified Androcles.”

  “Understood, Drake. Androcles who pulled the thorn from the lion’s paw.”

  “Actually, the name one of my grandnieces gave to a stuffed lion she bought for me. He wears a terrycloth bathrobe.”

  There was laughter around the table, so she joined in. Though the earliest versions of the tale stated the hero’s name as Androclus, and in no version had he given his own name to the lion. In fact, she couldn’t recall any name ever being attributed to the lion, which was rather stingy.

  “It was kind of Drake’s grandniece to rectify the oversight.”

  “What oversight?”

  By the time she was done explaining it, she finally understood the old aphorism, “if you must explain a joke, it’s no longer funny.” She had to consult the index to locate that in her personal notebook—it had been an outstanding issue for years—but she was finally able to cross it out as understood.

  Drake was speaking again. “A former commander of Incirlik Air Base, where you’ll be landing in a few hours—”

  “Four hours and thirty-six minutes based on our current flight speed.”

  Mike had begun fiddling with a queen, four aces, and a nine, as if he too was working on the new game.

  She wanted to ask him about that but—

  “I’m sorry, Drake. What were you saying? I didn’t mean to interrupt you again.”