Raider

by M. L. Buchman

  “Goddamn it, Miranda! Focus! I’m telling you that I may have a rogue two-star general here who might be in cahoots with the Turks. We don’t know how, but until we do, you’d better be goddamn careful.”

  “Oh. Careful of what exactly?”

  Drake either didn’t hear her or didn’t know as he continued right on speaking.

  “And Harper? Anything happens to Miranda, it’s your goddamn ass.”

  Miranda looked at Holly. “What does your ass have to do with anything?”

  “Well,” Mike tapped a finger on the Ace of Clubs, “it’s a very nice ass.”

  “Clubs?” Holly looked at him.

  Mike just rubbed his throat.

  Holly shrugged a maybe.

  Miranda had no idea what was going on.

  At least that much was familiar.

  64

  Andi had flown through Incirlik any number of times. In the past her layovers had been brief and always happened in the middle of the night.

  Which it might as well be. Ten p.m. local on minimal sleep certainly felt like the middle of the night. The entire team had spent the last four hours and thirty-six minutes of the flight modeling, in precise detail, exactly what GPS aberrations would have been necessary to cause the collision of the two planes in Alaska.

  Miranda wasn’t merely thorough; she was practically terrifying. By the time they were done, Andi felt as if she’d flown every inch of both flights herself.

  Once they’d done the first round of calcs, they’d settled in the plane’s luxurious movie theater. Keeping the windows dark as they flew through the rest of the day and into night, it felt as if they were in a cocoon formed by deep leather lounge chairs and a screen nearly as big as the cabin itself.

  Between Jeremy and Miranda, they worked miracles on the computer that she could barely follow. They flew simulated planes with simulated cockpits beyond anything she’d ever seen outside of a military training center.

  When they shifted from the Alaskan plane crash to analyzing the S-97’s impact with the rock pillar, they’d asked her to take over the helo simulation’s controls.

  Mike had asked if she was okay with that when Miranda simply handed her the control elements. The first was a simple fat wand that would detect any shifts in her hand motion to simulate the movement of the cyclic joystick control that normally came up between her knees—Miranda and Jeremy had been using it to simulate the control column of the two airplanes.

  The plastic’s surface was rippled enough that it felt coarse and grainy, yet kept nearly falling from her uncertain grasp. Another wand would be the collective for controlling the bite of the rotor blades. The Velcro of a pair of motion detectors were stuck to her boot laces to allow her to simulate rudder pedal motion. A few controls were put on the tablet in her lap.

  At her uncertain response, Mike had offered sympathy.

  But, much to Andi’s surprise, Holly simply looked around Miranda at her…and nodded. As if she trusted Andi to have this.

  Oh. To have this—and not let Miranda down.

  No pressure. It was a damn good thing she was a Night Stalker. Had been.

  So she flew the simulation against the rock pillar until she knew, simply…knew, that she’d precisely recreated Morales’ final flight. Every detail right down to the amount of GPS aberration that would have made him speak precisely when he did, as he did.

  When she was finished, the exhaustion had slammed into her. She hadn’t even been able to raise a hand or lift a foot to help Jeremy retrieve the simulation gear.

  As they disembarked from the 787 onto the runway at Incirlik, the night air was fresh and helped wake her up. Andi hadn’t been through here in two years, but the look and smell of Incirlik Air Base hadn’t changed.

  The south side was held by the Turkish Air Force, which still boasted mostly American aircraft. The control tower stood tall at midfield on that side.

  To the north was the American compound. Inside the heavy perimeter fence were small hangars, each just big enough for a pair of F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jets. Outside the fence were base housing, and the main American compound to the west.

  Back then, she’d still been Captain Andrea Wu, newly named to the S-97 program. Little knowing she had less than eighteen months of clear flying left ahead of her. Two years ago it had felt like a lifetime.

  Now?

  She was just Andi.

  But she still knew that smell.

  Heavy metal.

  Eight C-5M Super Galaxy transport jets were lined up outside of the US fence line.

  That many big planes meant a lot of support. Thousands of flights through here, a lot of them seriously hot fighter jets, had left their permanent mark on the air: scorched rubber of a hundred thousand tires screeched a black line down either end of the runway on landing. The sting of kerosene from the jet fuel. The stench of tens of thousands of grunts who had spent their entire tour here—the long hours of sweat, boredom, and blood. A lot of wounded had come through here on their way to the hospitals at Ramstein in Germany.

  Eight C-5s implied an immense amount about everything else that had to also be here. An aircraft carrier didn’t move alone, it moved with a massive support team of destroyers, supply ships, submarines, and aircraft.

  A C-5M Super Galaxy did not exist in a vacuum either.

  And eight of them?

  The brass was expecting some serious shit for that many to be parked here at once.

  It was more Galaxies than she’d ever seen gathered together other than Travis Air Force Base in California. More than Dover or Lackland. More than Bagram for certain, even at the height of the war, because you didn’t leave the largest airplane in the entire fleet sitting in a hostile zone for one second longer than necessary.

  There were only fifty-two of them still in service, and one seventh of all the ones in the world were lined up right here. That spoke clearly of just one thing: the ability to empty the entire base fast.

  Send in a flight of fighters from a handy aircraft carrier—and she’d bet there always was one nearby—and launch every fighter that was in the thirty-odd hardened hangars inside the American compound. Then even the twenty-five hundred personnel here could be evacuated in just a single flight of the eight monstrous Galaxies. A second flight for all of the essential equipment, and a base dating back to when the US Army Corps of Engineers built it in the 1950s could be abandoned in under twenty-four hours. Probably under twelve.

  Since 9/11, massive amounts of personnel had moved in and out of Southwest Asia through Incirlik. It was a place for a warm cot, food, and entertainment—all without getting shot at. The warm cot being about all she’d seen of it in her late-night passages.

  Of course, that was before 2016. Post the Turkish coup attempt in 2016, Incirlik had become a veritable ghost town. Instead of ten thousand personnel poised at a far-forward staging area, it had become an “unknown”—a dangerous place to be on foreign soil. Even the Germans, specialists in not giving a shit about what others thought, had pulled their troops and gear in 2017.

  The British were no longer giving the US permission to use their sovereign rights bases in Cyprus; they were barely hanging on there themselves. They only had a few hundred personnel here at Incirlik with the Americans.

  The base in southern Syria, as Ken’s death had only emphasized, was a barely defensible stretch of desert.

  If Incirlik really went down hard, there wouldn’t be any bases worth mentioning between Italy and Qatar on the far side of the Arabian Peninsula.

  This time, instead of landing in the darkness and feeling as if she’d escaped a war zone, Andi felt as if she was flying into one.

  The pilots of their borrowed 787 poker plane had certainly felt it. They’d taken on the minimum required fuel and boosted aloft practically before the team’s feet touched the ground. They sure hadn’t waited around long enough for a custom’s official to catch up with them.

  Then she looked at the other four who had depla
ned with her.

  A nerd. A Mr. Nice Guy who felt as if he was maybe just a bit of con man as well. An autistic air-crash genius. And one other soldier—a twitchy ex-SASR operator. Just what you wanted close beside you. Being with a twitchy SASR operator was like carrying around a grenade that tended to shed its pin without any notice.

  And then, speaking of detonating without any notice, there was her.

  She turned to look at the blue-and-white 757 that had been dragged onto the marginally grassy median. What the hell did she know about Vice Presidential aircraft?

  Not only did this mission feel dangerous, her being here was going to be so utterly pointless.

  65

  “Why are they so on edge?” Mike followed the others to the screwed-up Air Force Two. Miranda, Holly, and Jeremy were practically racing each other. He and Andi brought up the laggard rear echelon.

  The guards around the plane were very twitchy.

  Now Mike was glad he’d hung back. The vanguard had been surrounded by an imposing number of guards.

  “Five military. I don’t know who they guys in black suits are,” Andi spoke up.

  “Secret Service. I recognize the type.”

  “Oh. I never had anything to do with those guys. What are they like?”

  Mike had to think about the few he’d met. “Quieter and steadier than most military. And probably just about as lethal. Think Special Operations without all the armor.”

  Even the base commander, a Colonel West, coming to smooth the way didn’t help much. At least it kept them from being arrested, but every guard stood with their rifle unslung and their finger alongside the trigger guard. Mike wasn’t going to guess on the position of their safeties because he didn’t want to know.

  “Man, they’re in a bad mood.”

  “That’s not just any 757,” Andi reminded him.

  “Yeah, it’s a symbol of the American leadership.”

  “No, Mike. Look at it again.”

  The 757 looked both cheerful and very sad.

  Because its tail rested on the ground but the forward landing gear was still intact, it looked as if it was soaring aloft free as, well, a very powerful jet.

  That’s where the illusion broke.

  The tail rested on the ground, perhaps “sat” was more appropriate; the back of the plane had clearly been reshaped to the angle of the ground.

  The lower third of the engines must have been ground off as they were scraped down the long runway. It looked as if the plane was trying to fly up from underground, with the lower parts of the engines and the tail yet to emerge from the soil.

  He let his eyes follow the heavy tracks in the dirt where they’d dragged the plane off the runway. The pilot had held the centerline the entire way. By how far they were down the long field, that must have been some fine landing of an unflyable aircraft.

  “Okay,” he sighed, “what am I not seeing?”

  “Two things,” Andi pointed up at the open cabin door.

  An aircraft stair was roughly lined up with the canted opening. On the exposed inside of the door itself was the Vice President’s seal of office.

  “The seal?”

  “There’s a communications room in that aircraft that can be used to control the entire government in case something has happened to the President. It may be smaller than Air Force One, but anything from negotiating peace to launching everything we’ve got can be done from a small comm center right there.”

  “Okay, I get the guards now. What else am I missing?”

  This time she didn’t point. “Notice the two guys standing just in the shadow of the nose wheels?”

  “They, uh, look different.” They still wore camo gear, helmet and all. But their rifles were slung, and two large packs sat on the ground close beside them. They were the only ones who didn’t look as if they were seeking a target.

  “EOD—Explosive Ordnance Disposal. They’re also very, very good at blowing things up.”

  Mike looked at the rest of the team now ducked under the wing to inspect where the main landing gear should be, but for some reason wasn’t. Then he looked at the plane hanging over their heads.

  Then back at the team.

  “Uh, at blowing up things like 757s?”

  “Well, they aren’t acting like its something unfamiliar to them, are they? You can’t have any of the technology aboard be captured.”

  She was right. They looked bored out of their skulls. Just as he would be if he had to spend an entire night staring at broken landing gear parts.

  “Let’s go find the pilots.”

  66

  It was eleven p.m. local time when they tracked the 757’s pilots down.

  The crash had been at seven a.m., while Andi had been flying the test of the second S-97 Raider last night in Nevada. Except now it was noon there.

  No wonder she was too tired to stand.

  The two pilots looked little better than Andi felt herself. They weren’t bunked down; they were sitting in the back corner of the mostly shuttered DFAC. Only one cook was needed to serve all the needs of the overnight shifts, and none of them were in the dining facility at the moment.

  The poor airman who’d pulled the graveyard line duty was thrilled to make them a quick sandwich. Mike split his turkey on rye with her but he got them both their own oatmeal cookies and hot chocolates.

  At their introduction, the two pilots barely blinked. They each had coffee mugs that had been empty long enough to have dried rings at the bottom. No sign of having eaten, not even a crumpled napkin.

  “Not the AIB?”

  “NTSB.”

  “It’s in the report.”

  “We haven’t seen it. Care to fill us in? We’re both cleared to top secret, if that’s of any concern.”

  Mike started them out but Andi took it out of his hands pretty smoothly and began asking all the pertinent questions. They opened up more quickly to her. Maybe it was Air Force colonels to Army captain. Or they were just too relieved to be alive and wanted to talk it out. Even if they were just Neanderthals trying to impress a seriously cute woman, it didn’t matter. They were talking more easily to her than they typically would have to him, so he settled in to listen.

  One thing that quickly became clear was that piloting the Vice President’s plane was yet another step on the pilot spectrum.

  There were plenty of private pilots everywhere tooling around in their little Cessnas and Pipers. Flying IFR in the Mooney, he was at the heavy side of that tier of pilots.

  The next tier were all of the commercial aviation group, from the two poor shmucks in Alaska who’d just been going about their flight-tour and salmon-delivery days, right through to the cargo and passenger airliner fliers. Miranda flew somewhere in that group. Well, she did fly a Sabrejet, so perhaps she too was on the heavy side of her tier.

  Then there were the military fliers, trained to combat. Combat in aircraft over enemy territory when he was barely comfortable flying Alaska to Washington at night along a civilian flight corridor. Andi was the heavy end of that crowd in Special Operations Forces like the Night Stalkers.

  Then way out there in a country of their own were these two guys. Top Air Force pilots who then trained to fly the President and Vice President of the United States of America.

  He might not have calibration on what that really meant, but he saw that Andi quickly did. The more at ease they became talking with her, the more impressive she became—and the less he understood.

  Shit! Was he even replaceable on his one identified skill, that he was good with interviewing people?

  Any part of the conversation he could have followed was soon dusted off the table, onto the linoleum floors, and ground under all of their military boot heels.

  Unable to tolerate it anymore, he pushed to his feet, “If you’ll excuse me? I don’t want to interrupt, but I did want to thank both of you for your help. And I just pray that I never need that nose-over maneuver you pulled off, Brad. Not a chance I’d get it even
close to that right. Andi, I’ll catch up with you later.”

  And he turned and left.

  Nowhere to go.

  He might as well go back to his normal role of being a Jeremy-and-Holly servant.

  Can you fetch that tool for me, Mike?

  You’re not doing anything, Mike, go walk the debris perimeter.

  Go suck an egg, Mike.

  He was as useful as a Handi Wipe.

  Maybe.

  He stopped just inside the main gate and watched the team going over the 757. Small floodlights were focused up under the aircraft—carefully aimed so that they wouldn’t be visible to an aircraft on the runway or taxiways.

  It was clear that he might need Miranda’s team but that they sure didn’t need him.

  “Sorry about that.”

  Mike nearly leapt out of his skin. He’d made it all the way back to the main gate of the American compound and never heard Andi come up behind him.

  “Why did you leave them? Was the interview done?” He wished he had a jacket. He wasn’t cold, but it would be nice to have something to wrap around himself like…protective armor or something.

  “Weren’t you listening?” The excitement was bubbling off Andi as she looked up at him, so he stared steadfastly at the gate.

  “Sure. Doesn’t mean I understood a single thing.”

  “That’s why I was apologizing.”

  “Still don’t get it.” Mike forced himself to look at her. So that’s what his replacement looked like? Miranda had certainly taken her PTSD right in stride. He liked the fighter in Andi. Too bad he wouldn’t be around to enjoy even that.

  “I didn’t mean to take over your interview.”

  “Like I said. Didn’t understand the tech stuff anyway.” He went to walk away to nowhere, but she stopped him with a hand on his arm.

  “We’re looping here, Mike. The reason you didn’t get that stuff is because guys at that level just don’t talk to people like me under normal conditions. Under any conditions. I might have been a Night Stalker, but I would have been just an Army captain to them without you. You set me up to play the NTSB-nerd card.”