Raider

by M. L. Buchman

  “Jeremy’s role.”

  “Yeah, it’s where I got the idea—the four Aces you lined up below the Miranda Queen. I sooo don’t belong in your row, but Ace of Diamonds, that was me, wasn’t it?”

  He nodded even though she didn’t stop for a breath.

  “Weird. I don’t get it, but if you do…” she shrugged like his opinion actually meant something. “Anyway, Spec Ops plus nerd plus NTSB plus you playing the top secret card meant they’d talk to me. The tech those guys have on tap aboard a big airliner, instead of a tiny helo where I have to account for the weight of an extra hundred rounds of ammo, is simply awesome. The stuff we were talking about toward the end was just pilot chatter shit. Nothing to do with the crash. I’ve missed that sooo much since I was thrown out.” She did a little shuffle dance of unbridled happiness.

  Mike couldn’t doubt the sincerity of it.

  Until this moment, no, until this interview, he’d only seen Eggshell Andi. Walking so carefully and gently around herself that it was a surprise she didn’t crack or explode with each step. Now her face was lit by far more than the base’s security lights.

  That she was effusing right in front of an Air Force blue semi-truck trailer with full-height yellow letters down the whole side, “Crash Recovery,” was pretty appropriate.

  Could she see in this moment that she had found even a brief glimpse back to who she’d once been? He didn’t point it out because he didn’t want to spoil it for her by making her think.

  “What’s next?”

  Like he had a clue.

  “Maybe the Control Tower?”

  He looked across the field. The square tower rose ten stories directly opposite the main gate.

  67

  “Metin, my dear boy. It’s a pleasure to meet you at last.”

  “Hello, sir.” Firat, as usual, had given him no warning. At least this time he’d been led up to an above-ground office for the midnight meeting, not down into a subbasement interrogation room.

  Two-star General Kaan didn’t face him across the big desk. Instead, he led them to a deep, leather sectional sofa. Even perching on the edge of it, Metin felt he was slouching. Kaan leaned back and draped a casual arm over the back cushion. At least Firat looked as uncomfortable—also perched as if on a precipice—as he felt.

  They were high in the curving facade of the AFAD Emergency Services Headquarters. AFAD was supposed to be about preparing for disasters like earthquakes and floods.

  Yet it was clearly more than that—Firat had been sweating in the elevator that took them from the underground Siberkume location up to General Kaan’s office.

  The building was creepily quiet at this hour.

  He’d sent Onur home hours ago, hoping Asli would feel a little safer with her favorite brother around.

  But he hadn’t been able to walk away himself. He’d needed to think, but the more he thought, the less he could find a way out.

  If he refused to act, Asli’s freedom would end—permanently.

  Sabotaging his software program, even undetectably, would make him suddenly useless to them. He and Onur would probably be permanently disappeared as security risks for what they already knew.

  …and he hadn’t come up with a third option by the time General Firat had come by and said, “Oh good. You’re still here. Let’s go.” And led him into the vast stillness of the AFAD building in the middle of the night.

  Metin tried focusing on the bright-lit parade ground at the center of the government complex. But all he could see was Asli standing there in front of a firing squad, about to die in terror over trumped-up charges all because he liked her. Because he liked her and worked for a couple of ruthless bastards.

  “Yes, a lovely view, isn’t it?”

  “Yes sir.” Metin managed against a dry throat. He resisted fussing with his tie and blue jacket. Next to the generals’ sharp uniforms, his jacket probably looked as cheap as it actually was.

  “If I can have your full attention…”

  “Yes sir. Sorry, sir.”

  Metin cursed himself eight different ways and focused on Kaan’s face. It was the “benevolent father” face. The face his own father wore like a mask when everything wasn’t exactly as he wanted. A face that barely approved of Onur and would never approve of Asli as a reasonable prospect for his eldest son.

  Kaan’s gentle smile didn’t fool him for a second.

  Unlike Father’s smile—which never signaled more than the onset of pleasure or, more typically, displeasure—Kaan’s, he suspected, could wield undreamed of rewards or death without varying in the slightest.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to…fully disable the plane as you requested.” Thank God for the pilot.

  “No, my boy. I’m pleased. Very pleased. That you were able to fool the very best of the American planes at all was the purpose of that test. You exceeded expectations.”

  Which by his tone meant that, if the plane had escaped with one tiny bit less damage, this would be a very different meeting in a very deep basement.

  “The tests are now behind you.”

  No matter what Asli told him to do, to deny General Kaan would be a death sentence.

  “I’m glad that you’re pleased, General.”

  “I am, Metin. I truly am.” And his smile agreed with his words. “From this point forward, we need you to be ready to act on short notice.”

  “Even using the SVR computer, I still need over fifteen minutes’ warning before I can act, sir.”

  “That should be more than sufficient. Yes, very good.” This time the smile and nod said if he didn’t halve that time within a week, the punishment could be severe.

  “Yes sir,” he gave his word to achieving the impossible.

  “Your task will be simple. Syria is a problem.”

  “Syria?” He knew there was a war there, not that he’d paid it much attention. Now he wished he’d listened more when Asli was on one of her rants about it. Instead, he typically sat near the back of the group and simply marveled at the way she’d convince others of the rightness of what she was saying. Barely nineteen, her intelligence and passion made her a natural leader in any group.

  Syria?

  He really should have listened more.

  68

  “General Tomas Yazar, thank you for joining us.”

  “My pleasure, General Sizemore, General Nason,” his salute was sharp. More correct than most two-stars bothered with anymore. “How may I be of service?”

  Barry waved the man to a seat across his Pentagon desk, beside Drake.

  He wasn’t sure if he’d met Yazar before, though he now knew a great deal about him from the file Barry had provided about his assistant.

  Drake had never been in Barry’s office.

  This end of it wasn’t all that different from his own: big desk, a few chairs, and little adornment other than the USAF and US flags behind him. Rather than a conference table and a lounge area, he had a vast, waist-high worksurface. It was divided into areas by branches of the military, and each of those were subdivided into sections regarding types of weapon systems.

  Clearly most of General Barry Sizemore’s meetings were done on your feet.

  Drake barely had time to glance at it before Yazar’s arrival. A person could walk to that table, choose a topic, and immediately have everything at their fingertips. He’d glanced at Army / Future Vertical Lift and it already had an initial one-sheet report from Colonel Stimson on the S-97 Raider’s crash atop one stack. It had already included an initial assessment from Miranda that it had been neither an aircraft fault nor pilot error.

  Damn but he liked having her around.

  He’d have to come by and spend some time going over that table with Barry.

  “You served at Incirlik,” Barry opened the conversation with Yazar. Well, he’d never been known for his subtlety.

  “Yes sir. Two tours. The first was two years as the Wing Vice Commander, the second pair as Wing Commander.”

&nbs
p; “And you worked closely with your Turkish counterparts at the time.”

  “Yes sir. We’re guests at their Air Base, each of us running roughly half the field. We worked very closely together—a much more cooperative environment than now exists. At times we had ten or fifteen thousand personnel on hand, not the twenty-five hundred of today. I was there for the initial planning of the nuclear perimeter upgrade, though it was implemented after my time.”

  “The nuclear perimeter upgrade?” Drake didn’t know about the upgrade. He just knew there were fifty B61 bombs there that he really wished weren’t. They were causing a great deal of concern with the rapidly deteriorating American-Turkey relations.

  “New perimeter road, no-man’s-land between double fences, full lighting, cameras, dogs, the whole nine yards, sir.”

  They were still stuck in the ground because the Turkish President didn’t want to lose face with NATO by having the nukes removed from his territory. He’d already blocked three separate attempts to extract them.

  Drake nodded to Barry to keep it moving.

  The bombs were still stuck on the ground.

  69

  “Nukes?” Mike’s skin crawled as if he could feel it being bombarded by radiation this instant.

  “Sure,” Andi said it matter-of-factly, like a nuke was an old friend. Was that the way Holly would react? Probably. Military people were so incomprehensible at times.

  All he’d done was ask why so much of the American part of the base was outside the security perimeter.

  “This fenced area is mostly just to keep the nukes safe. They sit in underground vaults beneath all these hangars you see. Each one is about seven hundred pounds, a foot across, and a dozen feet long. They don’t need a B-29 like the Enola Gay to deliver them anymore. They can jack them up out of the vaults, bolt them in pairs onto the F-16s in the hangars, and zoom! They’re in play in minutes.” Her smile and tone said that she was teasing him a bit, but he couldn’t help his reaction.

  “Nukes?” Was all Mike could manage as he stared aghast at the hangars scattered across the grassy area in humps.

  “Three- to four-hundred-kiloton yield—twenty or so Hiroshimas—neatly packed in a much more convenient to-go package.”

  “Shit!”

  “You don’t swear much,” Andi sounded perfectly calm.

  “Only when I’m about to crap my pants.”

  “Need a bathroom?”

  “Go take a flying leap, Captain Wu.”

  Her smile faded a little. “Sorry, Mike. I wasn’t trying to spook you. It’s just part of the reality of what we do. These nukes, being here at Incirlik, are a real problem.” She began leading them through the main gate and over to the crashed 757.

  “Why?”

  “Well, despite all of these pretty C-5M Galaxies lined up here, we actually don’t dare evacuate this base. Aside from the fact that this is a really useful base that we don’t want to lose, the Turks don’t want the nukes to go away. They’d love it if we all fell over dead, but not the nukes.”

  “So that they can use them?”

  “They can’t. We can permanently disable them all in minutes. Even if we don’t, without the right codes, they aren’t doing anything. But being one of the six places in the whole world, off US soil and ships, that we have a nuclear sharing program—meaning we store weapons there—has a lot of political pull. Turkey doesn’t want to give up that pull. Once when we tried to evac some of the nukes, they shut down the airfield and wouldn’t let us fly.”

  They passed through the gate and reached the 757.

  The guards were as twitchy as ever.

  Under the wing, the only sign of the team was a pair of boots hanging down from inside the head of the wheel well. They were too big to be attached to Miranda or Jeremy.

  “What did you find, Holly?” He called up to warn her they were there.

  She slithered down and landed lightly before moving out from under the plane’s wing. “Hey, you two. Been having fun?”

  “You know they have nukes here?”

  “Fifty B61s. Yeah, helluva bang, mate.”

  Mike sighed.

  Holly looked back toward the wing. “I just know that someone needs to write a majorly nice goodonya to Boeing. The degree of metal deformation caused by the gear impact should have snapped off any self-respecting wing. Not only did they hang on, but they didn’t even break while dragging the jet engines down a thousand meters of concrete. Damned sweet!”

  “Can it be fixed?”

  “Sure, with a cutting torch,” she made a slicing motion at the base of the wing. “Fuselage might fly again, but with different wings and tail. Easy-peasy, right chaps?” she called over to the two bored bomb techs.

  “Sure Holly. Just tell us when.” “Anything to get this mother out of here.” And then they went back to looking bored.

  “Where are Jeremy and Miranda?”

  Holly pointed up at the fuselage.

  “Let’s see what Miranda wants to do next.” He led the way up the metal stairs. Inside, he circled around the heavily guarded communication room and the Vice President’s office. Downslope, they found Jeremy and Miranda sitting at the six-person conference table with their laptops open.

  Mike knew what they were like in this mode. Without preamble, he told them everything he’d learned from the pilots.

  When he signaled Andi to continue, she just shrugged. “Only a few minor details to add.”

  Much to his surprise, the details were indeed minor. Nuances that he’d heard, but not really registered. He really had understood everything that wasn’t “pilot chatter,” which was something of a shock.

  “It all fits,” Miranda acknowledged. “The Turkish hacker altered the GPS-supplied reading drastically, this time vertically rather than horizontally. Remember, that the GPS gives us positioning in three dimensional space, height as well as location. I couldn’t make sense of why the pilot didn’t notice, but the glaring sunrise shining directly into the cockpit was the missing element. With the airport’s ILS on the blink—”

  “Or intentionally switched off?” Mike wondered who had ordered that.

  “Wow! Would people do that?” Young naive Jeremy was firmly back in place.

  Mike nodded.

  Holly and Andi voiced their agreement.

  “That’s nasty!”

  Miranda fooled around with her pen for a moment. “There are only two outstanding questions. First, should he have noticed the discrepancy between the altimeter and the GPS-driven readout? And, second, should he have noticed the radar terrain indication sooner?”

  “The fact that he did notice one, and saved the plane when he saw the other—despite all of the instrumentation telling him he was on the proper glidepath—counts strongly in his favor.”

  “And this.” Jeremy twisted his screen around for everyone to see.

  The critical part of the flight in the moments before impact with the mountain ridge were playing out. Even Mike could see what an incredible maneuver that was to save the plane.

  “That’s sooo good,” Andi moaned. “This guy deserves a medal, not censure. Just for that move alone.”

  Miranda made some notes and Jeremy saved the file and closed his machine.

  “So,” Mike finally noticed the soft luxury of the seat. Maybe not quite like the 787’s poker table seats, but deep, cushy, business class felt awfully good. His body was thrumming with lack of sleep.

  “What’s next?”

  70

  “Syria?” Metin still didn’t know what to make of that.

  Kaan finally leaned forward.

  Now he felt pinned between Kaan and Firat.

  “Our President is getting very tired of our longest border being under constant threat. ISIS, the Kurds, the Syrian government, refugees, and now the Americans and Russians sparring in the skies.”

  “Okay.”

  “And we’re going to fix it for him.”

  “How?”

  “The Americans h
ave been playing their own cautious game there. ‘As long as you don’t make us too angry, we’ll let our diplomatic corps do all the complaining.’ It’s time we forced their hand and you now allow us to do that.”

  “How?” Metin felt a little like a parrot repeating himself. Actually, in this room, more like a parakeet sitting between two very hungry cats. Metin the Coyote had long since run away to hide.

  “Two ways. Every time the American jets are coming close to the border, you will spoof them over the border into Syrian airspace. And every time the American jets get too close to the Russian jets, you will drive them closer by altering their GPS. We don’t expect it to work often, but a few close calls leading to a shootdown, or an actual collision…”

  Kaan clapped his hands together as if crushing the aircraft himself.

  “Those will drive the Americans crazy. And while they spend their fury driving out the Russians and finally taking down the Syrians, we can once again capture and properly cleanse Syria. It will be ours again, just as it was for over four centuries until it was ripped from our grasp after World War I.”

  Kaan sat back, very pleased with himself.

  “You, Metin, will have the honor of restoring a major piece of the Ottoman Empire to modern-day Turkey. You will be very well rewarded.”

  “Yes sir. Thank you, sir.” Metin hoped he was keeping a straight face. Screaming in abject fear didn’t seem like the right way to show his patriotic acceptance of his new role.

  They wanted him to start a war. A war that would kill hundreds of thousands by the time Turkey had wrested Syria under control.

  He definitely couldn’t tell Asli such a thing.

  And he finally understood what she’d meant.

  Neither could Metin ever do such a thing.

  Even if he had no choice.

  71

  “You’re working with Turkey to drive us into a war with Russia over Syrian soil?”