And now she’d sent him out to distract three armed men.
Shit! There’s the real issue, Mike. You’re allergic to dying.
Forcing his attention to the task, he marked twelve radial lines around the aircraft diagram. Then tagging and numbering points at fifty and a hundred feet past the green-flag perimeter had him all set up. The tablet’s GPS would now guide him to the correct position no matter what his paces said.
The moment he’d stepped past the perimeter flags, all three Camo Dudes attention had focused on him like a human magnet for malevolence. Rifles that had been lazily slung over shoulders were swung down into their hands. Stances shifted from bored-shitless to ready-for-action. And despite their sunglasses, they were clearly now tracking him like a target as if he was a bomb-carrying terrorist.
It meant he’d be a good distraction for Holly; he just hoped to hell that her comment about not getting shot had been a joke.
It had surprised him just how wide an area he was covering by circling a hundred feet beyond the debris field. Apparently it surprised the Camo Dudes as well and he soon had a shadow—a six-foot-three shadow in a bulletproof vest and carrying a lot of things that Holly would know what they were, but he’d just call guns.
The CD wore camo pants, a black t-shirt, and camo baseball hat with no logo. His enviable heavy leather boots reached well up his calves and looked decidedly snake proof.
Mike didn’t offer him any sunscreen.
“Hi. I’m Mike. Mike Munroe.” He’d held out his hand to as little avail as not shaking Miranda’s. Not a good start, as no manly handshake ensued. Which was probably just as well; the guy looked as if he could crush bricks with his.
After about five more samples taken and flags left, the guy had finally grunted out, “Shit, man. You do this for a living?” The fast speech, softened vowels, and even the “Shit, man” almost rising like a question at the end pinned him as being from Southern California. A home boy, not that Mike would ever admit to being from there himself.
“Kinda weird, huh?” It still surprised Mike as well that this could somehow be part of his job.
“Fuckin’ A.”
“I didn’t start out with the National Transportation Safety Board.”
“You dudes are with the NTSB?”
“What did you think we were?”
“CIA. That’s Groom Lake right over there, so we figured you had to be spooks. Kinda freaking us out to be assigned to watch you.”
“That’s what we thought you were.” And Mike would keep how freaked out he was to himself.
“Nah. Just security. Didn’t sign on to spend all day standing around in the fucking desert, but the pay is good. Good pay in the NTSB?”
“Better’n I was getting,” Mike had learned early on to ease his language halfway from its carefully studied region-neutral state to match however the person he was speaking with spoke. It was that fine line between being accessible and being patronizing. He’d suffered more than a few poundings in high school before he’d figured that out. Besides, it was only half a lie. At least this time.
He was followed in silence for two more pairs of samples and flags.
“What were you before?” Silence worked wonders when used right.
“Advertising.” He kept the answers short, which seemed to fit the guard’s patterns.
“Thought there was buttloads of cash there.”
“Can be. Wasn’t.” Had been until the FBI had come in and screwed it all up.
Turned out his little company’s best two clients—his only two clients at first: a grocery store and a dog groomer—were both fronts for a minor Syrian money laundering scheme. They’d used him to extract information from the clients and, with the success of the ensuing takedown, they’d wiped out his entire client base. But they’d directed him toward new clients: fronts for Chinese gangs, Mexican human smugglers…
Soon he’d been their plug-and-play guy for all those actions.
He’d go in and do the whole advertising-schmooze thing. Gain their confidence, run some good ads, get in deeper, until he stumbled on some actionable intelligence. He’d report it to the FBI as “a private citizen” and they’d swoop in to clean out some rat’s nest. It had been a very profitable and mutually beneficial arrangement—he got paid twice, FBI and for the ads—for almost two years.
They’d vetted him and increased his security clearance over time…until a military secrets smuggling bust—run through a French pastry chain—had gone way south through no fault of his own.
One day he’d had a steady stream of work and some very nice cash flow. The next, the FBI had stopped returning his calls and he was the proud owner of an advertising firm with no clients. No backlist. Not even a portfolio of work he could admit to.
However, they had left him with his security clearance.
He’d always liked flying, so he’d signed up for the NTSB to kill some time. Somehow that had equaled a free trip to the NTTR and being faced by paranoid Camo Dudes.
“I’m Don, by the way.” Ding! Faceless Camo Dude suddenly has a name. Major progress.
“Hey, Don. So what did you do before this?”
“Couple tours in Afghanistan. Nothing big, mostly base security down at Bagram. Got a taste for not being dead up in the Korangal Valley. I watched a lot of stretchers and body bags come outta there.”
“Not being dead really improves the outlook on your day, doesn’t it?”
“Fuckin’ A,” Don chuckled. Second ding!
“What’s it like? I mean, you must be good at what you do or they wouldn’t put you here at a place as important as this.” Butter him up. “What makes someone good at doing a job like this one?”
“Well…”
25
“And for the next hour, Don told me more about all the nasty situations he’d faced on base patrol than I ever wanted to know. Apparently drunk Marines are the biggest problem because they’re always looking for a fight. Even on a dry base they’d get it shipped in. Once an attack helicopter, I think he said it was a Viper.”
“AH-1Z,” Holly said, as if that illuminated anything for him. He’d kept an eye out, but never once spotted Holly around the rear of the plane.
“Yes, one of those,” Mike covered. “They shipped it into Afghanistan with a fuel tank full of Southern Comfort whiskey.”
“Three hundred and seven gallons,” Jeremy observed. “Let’s see. Whiskey weighs about 7.411 pounds per gallon, so that’s one ton, two hundred and seventy-fiv—”
“That’s a lot of whiskey. Maybe he wasn’t telling tall tales about his dealings with drunken Marines.”
“Did you find out anything else?” He and Holly had met up in the shade of the upright jet engine, as if it couldn’t just fall over and squash them at any second. She actually leaned with her back against what had to be the only uncrumpled bit of sheet metal on the whole site. Mike sat where he’d see if it started to fall.
“Yeah, he likes his pizza with just Canadian bacon and pineapple, but doesn’t want to look like a wuss to the other guys, so he eats it loaded just like they do. Gives him heartburn.”
“Last week,” Jeremy leaned up against the engine next to Holly. Mike edged back another half step to the very edge of the shade. “I had this garlicky chicken with white sauce pizza. I’m not even sure that it’s technically pizza without a tomato sauce and cheese, but man it was tasty.”
“Holly?”
“What?” As if she didn’t know that he was asking about what she’d found in the rear of the wreck. At least if the engine fell on them, it would crush her first before putting him out of his misery.
Fine, two could play that game. He wouldn’t be the first to ask what she’d learned while he’d been sweating out his distraction across the Nevada desert. “Favorite pizza?”
“Weren’t you paying attention? I ate pizza just last night.”
“A loaded, a vegetarian, and two pepperonis.”
She only blinked once in surpr
ise that he had noticed, then recovered with, “Well there’s your answer, mate.”
“No. It either means that pepperoni is your favorite with two votes or that if I was to spread refried beans and chocolate mole sauce on a pizza crust and bake it, you’d eat it.”
“You should really learn to listen better. I told you, ‘There’s your answer’.”
“All of the above,” he sighed. Another round to Holly.
“Mushroom-artichoke-prosciutto for me,” Jeremy looked thoughtful for a moment. “Or maybe triple-cheese and mushroom. Thankfully I got Mom’s digestive genes; she’s Canadian, so I’m not lactose intolerant. Like a lot of Vietnamese, Dad can’t eat cheese pizza at all.” He fished out an energy bar.
Mike considered throttling Jeremy for being as obtuse as Holly. Jeremy he could deal with.
“What? Do you guys want one?” Jeremy held out the bar. All innocence.
Holly took it and began to unwrap it. Couldn’t the woman focus on something other than food for a second, just one lousy… Then Mike sighed as Holly grinned at him. Maybe he understood better why the nuns of Catholic school always threatened to wash out his mouth with soap. He’d try that on Holly if he thought he had a chance of surviving the attempt. Preciseness of language might be the only worthwhile thing he’d learned from the nuns.
“Holly,” he finally gave in to his curiosity.
She looked at him with wide-eyed innocence. At least she didn’t bat her “baby blues” at him.
“What did you find?”
“Didn’t find dingo shit,” her humor evaporated. “I crawled all over that section. Nothing stood out. I photographed everything in hopes that Miranda can spot something we didn’t. Nothing even half as cool as what you found.”
“Wow, Holly! Major concession there. You feeling okay?”
“Kinda nauseous, but only when I look at you.” But they all turned to look at the section of wing.
It had broken off from the engine nacelle and flopped to the ground bottom-up. He’d had an idea as he completed gathering his soil samples and recruited Don and his Chevy Suburban to flip over a twenty-foot section of it. The entire top of the wing looked like it had folded inward. The empty fuel tanks had been shattered just as Jeremy had hypothesized. Then Mike and Don had flipped the rest of the fifty-foot wing that stuck out this side. Sure enough, the entire thing had been punched in.
“Not a scratch, scrape, or burn. It can’t be an explosion from above or we’d see the scorch marks,” Holly glared at it.
“Miranda’s unknown force,” Mike tried to imagine what could do this, but wasn’t having any luck.
They’d already photographed it and talked it over for half an hour without getting any wiser.
“Whatever it was, the C-130 got slapped hard. You learn anything, Jeremy?”
“Well, I kinda did,” Jeremy announced as he chewed. “Out under the right horizontal stabilizer, where it broke off from the tail.” He took a slug of water and then another bite of his energy bar. “It was—”
Don came running around the engine nacelle, sweat dripping from his forehead. He looked more than a little bit panicked.
26
“I have some images to show you.”
Miranda liked the introduction.
The escort through Pentagon security had informed her that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—the highest-ranking officer in the US military—was waiting for her. The sign on his office door stated that he was General Drake Nason. So any repeat of that information would have been a waste of time.
It was said that every office in the Pentagon’s vast complex was within a ten-minute walk of every other, and she now believed it. The walk up the ramps and long hallways to his office had indeed taken just seven minutes and nineteen seconds. The concept of five nested pentagons of decreasing size, cross-connected by frequent corridors, was an ingenious feat of architectural engineering.
Once past the lobby, most corridors and ramps were utilitarian with white walls and colored concrete flooring. As they’d reached more important areas, wooden wainscoting had indicated the change. At the general’s office, the wainscoting had given away to floor-to-ceiling paneling and finally plush gray carpeting in the general’s reception area.
The size of his office—half office-conference room and half comfortable sitting area with couches and wingback armchairs—spoke of his importance as thoroughly as his title. That and the pair of Navy captains and a vice admiral who’d been hustling out of his office just as she’d arrived.
The man himself was lean. His hair almost too short to see its gray color. Any assessment he must be making about her own person was so brief that the color of his eyes remained an unknown. It had been easy to guess what Clarissa thought of her, but not General Drake Nason.
The doors clicked shut behind her.
“I don’t need to remind you that these images are top secret.”
He didn’t, so she didn’t comment on it. Her bag was out at the receptionist’s desk, so she simply sat and waited.
“I’ve been over these images several times myself, but I don’t see anything unusual. Perhaps as an expert in the field, you can see something. After that I have some questions for you.”
From a control at his desk, he dimmed the room lights. Then he turned to a large computer screen hung behind his desk.
She sat unmoving through the ten minutes of video clips.
“Again,” her first words seemed to echo strangely in the room as she rose and moved closer to the screen.
Without a word, he restarted the loop.
Radar tracking: she was right about the west-to-east flight. And the speed: three hundred and thirty-one miles per hour, just four below her projection. Altitude she’d been off by over twenty meters, but well within her estimate’s confidence interval.
Then as abruptly as if it had been moving across the page screen, it disappeared.
Infrared tracking showed normal flight until the aircraft was directly over the crash coordinates.
“See here, the sudden bright flare of all four engines in the infrared?”
She didn’t bother to look to see if the general nodded in the dark.
“That’s caused by the plane nosing abruptly downward so that the camera could see the additional heat signature of the engine’s exhaust ports. They’re typically masked from above because they’re under the wings. To get this view implies a down angle over seventy-five degrees. An unrecoverable angle for the one-point-two seconds the pilot had—even if his plane had been fully functioning.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Do you have any other views of this aircraft?”
“Visible light, but there’s nothing to see.”
“Play it.” She waited while the general queued the file.
“Can’t say I’m used to being ordered about,” he muttered with what sounded like a chuckle. Without the room lights, she couldn’t see if that assessment matched his facial expression. She doubted he’d be squinting his eyes in the darkened room.
“It wasn’t an order, sir. Simply the next logical step in the investigation.”
“Yes ma’am.” Again it sounded like humor.
And then the visible-light sequence played back.
Almost perfectly black.
Even though she knew where they must be, she had difficulty spotting the wingtip and taillights as they were only the merest suggestions. There was also a sliver of visible light glowing out the back of the four turboprop engines. The flight continued for several seconds, then the engine glows brightened for an instant as expected before blinking out. She’d anticipated a brighter rear view flare, but not enough so that it surprised her. A second later, there was nothing—just darkness.
“Again.”
“There’s nothing there, lady.”
“Again.”
He didn’t sound as amused as he reran it.
“Stop! Back up a tenth of second. Another. That’s good.” Mir
anda wasn’t sure what she’d seen, but it was on the screen—somewhere. “Zoom in.”
As soon as he did so, the pixels bloomed to life.
“No good, zoom further out.”
“It is zoomed all the way out.” He returned it to the initial view.
“That makes no sense. Lights.”
“What makes no sense?” He brought them up and she returned to her chair.
“You have a highly segmented view of the terrain. The severe pixilation upon magnification indicates that you are viewing an extremely small segment of a KH-11 Crystal satellite image.”
“I never said it was a KH-11.”
“Unless you are in cooperation with the Russian or Chinese governments, I can only assume that you contacted the National Reconnaissance Office for these images. The only craft type I’m aware of that has that degree of resolution—able to clarify the heat variations of the pilot’s high, side windows as six separate panels rather than a single section—are the KH-11 telescopes. They’re directly based on the Hubble Telescope design and have a putative six-centimeter resolution.”
“Can’t say as I put that together myself, but I reckon you’re right. Is this going to happen every time I show something to the NTSB?”
“Exposing national asset capabilities?”
At his nod, she considered his question.
“No. I know of only one other person who could reach that conclusion. He also has the clearance to see these images, the man who trained me. But I don’t think he followed optical systems much beyond the SR-71 Blackbird’s Hycon TEOC camera. He always preferred film to photo-optical sensors. He calls them ‘modern mysticism’.”
“So our secrets are safe.”
“I have clearance, sir. I assumed you knew that before you brought me here.”
“I’m sure my assistant did before you entered the Pentagon. I actually just asked to speak to the lead investigator, but you were already en route from Nevada. Now, what can you tell me?”
Miranda sighed. It seemed that she was going to just keep having this same conversation all day.
“Not a thing, sir.”
Drone: an NTSB / military technothriller (Miranda Chase Book 1) Page 12
