“It was a single combined unit.”
“We call it CVDR—Cockpit Voice and Data Recorder,” Miranda explained for General Nason’s benefit. “Occasionally an FVDR—Flight Voice and Data Recorder.”
“I can’t begin to tell you how little I care about that. Where the hell is it?”
“It was returned to the crash site, sir. I fear it would have been destroyed in the bombing if that actually occurred.”
Holly hadn’t mentioned finding a recorder, so it probably was gone. At least that explained why they hadn’t been able to find it the prior day.
“Did you listen to them? Did anyone listen to them?” General Nason’s voice had turned low and dangerous just as Harrington’s had yesterday when she photographed the wreck. Perhaps it was a good thing that Nason didn’t have a sidearm at the moment even if Harrington was so far away.
“No sir. They were locked securely in my safe from shortly after the crash until I returned them to the site this morning.”
“And the bombing. You don’t know if a crash that was your responsibility was bombed within ten kilometers of an airbase that is also your responsibility?” Nason roared.
“It’s been a busy day, sir.”
“Well get your ass unbusy, get out to that site personally, and see if by some miracle that recorder survived along with your career, or if they both just went to hell! And find out who ordered that damn plane. Start with how it got cleared through NTTR airspace. I expect a full report every thirty minutes until this is resolved.”
It was an impressive statement of engineering that General Nason didn’t destroy the phone with how hard he cut off the connection.
34
General Zhang Ru sat in his private office in Chen Mei-Li’s apartment. It was one of the few places he could think without interference. He’d even given the girl a thousand yuan to go out—shopping or a movie with girlfriends or whatever girls her age did in the mornings.
Here there was no swarm of investigators pursuing irrelevant and inconsequential information about what had happened to the valuable asset of the Shenyang J-31.
Also no scapegoat hunter asking what had his nephew done wrong. Thankfully, he’d had a substitute personnel file already prepared for Wang Fan. It now reflected that he had recused himself from any promotion decisions concerning the boy from the very beginning.
Even so, the brush with the CDI gave him chills. Thankfully he’d managed to focus the Commission for Discipline Investigation on three-star General Liu Huan, not so much the “fortunate destroyer” as his name had promised. His record of service had already been erased as thoroughly as every other sign of his existence in the Army Air Force. Good! He’d never liked Huan, and no one was better placed for the promotion to replace Huan than himself.
But to cement it, he must understand what had happened to his plane.
If he could be the one to unravel the solution, then he would become untouchable and his climb toward a seat on the Central Military Commission come one step closer. And when he finally achieved that, he could order the CDI investigations rather than nearly falling to one.
For the hundredth time, he ran the telemetry and satellite images he had smuggled off the base. At first he’d done it for what he feared they’d reveal—by taking them off base, he could study them even as he prepared to run.
When flight had proven unnecessary, he studied them in hopes of understanding, but no grand illumination shone from the heavens like the Buddhists promised. The girl had latched onto the current cultural permissiveness and several Buddhist icons and images had appeared in her apartment. If she wanted to claim that meditation and studying tantric yoga were the secrets to her prowess in bed, he certainly wouldn’t be reporting her.
He’d seen the tapes of the flight so many times that he could feel each motion. His nephew had been a highly skilled pilot. His escalating series of maneuvers during the first portion of the flight were very good—unimaginative, but so precise that they could still stir his own desire to climb back in a cockpit and pit himself against the air and the g-forces once again.
But what Wang Fan had achieved in the final minutes of his flight had been nearly miraculous.
At first it had appeared to be chaos.
But the more Ru watched the images as the boy dodged in and out of view among the mountain peaks before his final disappearance, the more Ru became convinced that every movement was deliberate.
There!
No failure of the jet that he could conceive would cause a barrel-roll to snap into a flat-spin and recover with a broken loop. It was more as if Hēidì, the Black Dragon God of Winter, had been chasing his nephew across the sky. Could even the Black Dragon drive Wang Fan to such perfection in flight?
The girl had hinted at Wang Fan’s fears about the final day’s flight before breaking down in tears while she curled up in his lap. What if Fan’s fears hadn’t been about the Shenyang J-31 as his words to the girl had implied, but instead been about some imagined meeting with an invisible god? There had been no doubting the girl’s sincerity—she’d been nearly broken by Wang Fan’s death.
Had a madness descended over his nephew as the analysts had surmised?
If so, it was a madness with an intense brilliance.
Again Ru watched the flight tapes on the screen. But what if Fan’s mind hadn’t collapsed? What if this was the flight of a pilot discovering his true mastery as his final act?
The g-forces of the loop seemed to drive Ru through the bottom of the chair. The barrel roll slammed his ribcage painfully into the arm before he almost knocked his chair over backward with the weightlessness at the top of an Immelmann loop—entering fast at the bottom and climbing, past straight up, until flying upside down.
But Fan hadn’t corrected by rolling right-side up. Instead, he’d cross-controlled so sharply into a vicious, and notoriously hazardous, inverted flat spin that Ru’s bones ached in empathy. Eight g’s pulling out of the flat spin before disappearing for six achingly long seconds deep into the chasm cut by the Dadu River.
Each time he watched; Ru was unable to breathe until…
The gyrfalcon jet reappeared under full afterburners, punching straight up into the sky, driving all the blood from his head down into one of the most powerful arousals Ru had ever had.
He heard the girl come in through the front door of the apartment and tentatively call his name.
“In here. Come.”
She looked in at the door tentatively. She was never invited into this room; he had the only key to this office and kept it locked at all times. It had little more than a desk, a chair, a computer, and the quiet in which to think. The girl would have called it Zen or something. There were few secrets here, but he didn’t want her prettying it up as she seemed to so enjoy doing to the rest of the apartment.
“Here. Now!” Ru managed to bark it out against his desperate need.
“I brought you a gift,” she began reaching into one of her bags.
“Later!” He undid his pants and lifted himself enough from the chair to shove them down. “Now!” He couldn’t even recall her name through the haze that surrounded him.
When she was close enough, he snagged her wrist and dragged her to her knees. A fistful of hair, so thick and lush, and she had her mouth upon him.
He watched the screen as she did her work.
From the desperate climb, a full-throttle plunge back down to the mountains. The girl’s sharp teeth and wise tongue followed every beat of his racing pulse as he rode the jet with his nephew, down, down toward the waiting earth.
“Did you do this for him?” He didn’t release her enough that she could speak; instead he felt her nod as he watched his nephew perform a triple barrel roll with such force that it was amazing the wings didn’t snap and fly away on their own.
“Good. More! Harder! More than you did for him.” He steered her with her hair just as his nephew had steered the jet, slaloming deeper into the mountains until Ru actually
believed the Black Dragon just might have been after Fan in truth—could feel the dragon watching over his own shoulder.
A final satellite image. A final flicker of shadow and light.
Then Wang Fan and the Shenyang J-31 were gone. Gone to whatever fate had awaited him in the mountains, out of sight of satellites and sensors. A fate from which he’d never returned.
Ru let the release hammer through him. His body wasn’t so old that it had forgotten how it felt to fly. The girl was worth every yuan he’d paid for her: the apartment, her allowance, using her as a tool to control Wang Fan and others—all of it. He kept her pinned there until the very last of the flight had drained from him and he once again sat in the chair in his private office.
The best analysts in the PLAAF had reviewed this tape and been unable to tell him what had gone wrong with the plane.
What if nothing had?
And what if his nephew had really been as good a pilot as he’d been a lover? Ru held no illusions that the girl would ever cry over his own death, yet she’d wept over Fan’s after a single night together.
Ru had to find someone who could see past the failures they were expecting and find the actual solution. Was it worth using a great favor?
Perhaps it was. Perhaps it was.
He rubbed a soothing hand over the girl’s hair, smoothing it back into place, down her back, as she continued to kneel in place and keep him warm with her soft breath and clever fingers.
35
“I hate dentist’s chairs,” Harvey grumbled as he lay back in the control seat for the MQ-45 Casper UAV. It looked disconcertingly like one…that had mated with a well-padded Barcalounger.
Helen had never shown him a picture of her family. Did her kids look like her? Did they wear the same shy smile that shone in their intelligent eyes? Was their hair the same liquid brown of flowing dark chocolate like hers or did they take after their father with his imagined Teutonic blond good looks and too many teeth when he smiled?
“How do you feel about electric chairs?” Helen teased him as the technician strapped him to the contraption: ankles, wrists, and forehead.
“Never met one, but I’m wagering that I’d like it better than a dentist’s chair.”
“The mighty pilot afraid of a little man with a drill. My fantasy is ruined.” It wasn’t like Helen to tease him in front of others.
A simulator was not a hundred-million-dollar bird of prey and he was so mortified that he might screw up and never get to fly again. But he’d never show that, so he gave her the laugh she’d earned.
The techs ran broad Velcro bands around his thighs as well.
“Hey!”
“The actual UAV connection is far more visceral than we can achieve in the simulator. We’d rather you didn’t come back from your flight all black-and-blue.”
He looked at the thick padding all around him and wondered just what he’d be putting his body through while he was aloft.
“Take it easy at first,” she got serious, just a little too serious for him to joke that’s how they’d started out making love earlier today. “We have a standby pilot at the manual console who can recover the craft from most circumstances. If you need to, just stop trying and he’ll try to take over.”
“Try.” Harvey considered the word. He considered quoting Yoda from Star Wars, “Do or do not. There is no try.” Instead he saw that the techs were busy checking readouts just out of earshot and offered her a hungry leer. “Try is not what I just did to you in your bed. I do—a hundred percent.”
Her blush only served to confirm that he’d absolutely done a hundred percent for her.
“Tell your backup pilot to go home, I won’t be needing him.”
One of the techs returned and smeared a small patch of salve behind his right ear—a salve that he now knew would rapidly harden into a sticky glue. They pressed the pickup sensor into the glue and began running him through alignment tests.
“Up. Down. Left. Right. Level flight…” As they said each one, he pictured the accompanying sensations. Covering his eyes with soft pads, then blackout goggles, they soon moved to visual cues. As they calibrated the alignment of the patches both under and on top of his skin, the drone’s visuals began coming online.
“Brightness. Focus. Near. Far. Look up. Look left…” A bright target had been carefully aligned exactly in front of the drone sitting in the hangar, just the other side of the thin wall beyond his feet. He was just finishing the calibration of the spectrum when an object as large as an unexpected moon shifted into his range of view. He shifted to the nearest focus he could, but it wasn’t enough. Still, the outline was familiar. The curve of Helen’s chin, blurry, but well known.
He reached out to touch her, but the restraints kept his hand in place. Instead, the drone jolted forward an uncertain foot as he twisted the front wheel and it dropped out of its chock. The image of Helen greeting him through the drone’s camera jumped aside.
“Sorry.” Some voice half remembered echoed back to him through the open hangar door. Then he blocked her out.
All that existed now was the drone. He could feel their connection through the patch behind his ear as if it was a hole. No, not a hole. The doc had it wrong, life didn’t drain out through the connection. Nor was it pumped in. It was a wide-open conduit to a new world.
“Engine start,” he thought of the heat in his gut and let the warmth build. A heads-up display of data screened across his optic nerves. Temperature rising in the engine. He could almost feel the last disconnections of fuel and electrical umbilicals.
The visual alignment target split in two down the middle when the hangar bay doors rolled aside to reveal the night.
There was so much data overlay that he could barely see the stars. It was like a night out in New York City: you knew the stars were there, but spotting more than a few dozen beyond the streetlights, restaurant neon, and towering apartment buildings was a rarity. Night had fallen over the Nevada desert and it was time to prowl.
36
Miranda jolted awake. “Where am I?”
“Exactly where you requested, ma’am.”
She could only blink uncertainly. It was an inconspicuous house in the backwaters of Georgetown. It was familiar, even if how she came to be here wasn’t.
General Nason had finally called a car for her. For hours they’d puzzled over what little she knew of the crash.
It wouldn’t have taken nearly as long if he wasn’t constantly interrupted by a whole series of calls and people coming in to discuss some global crisis she wasn’t cleared for. Her legs ached from how often she’d had to rise and go to the outer office, only to be called back in minutes later.
She showed him the crash profile that she’d calculated and then, as he wasn’t a flier, had to explain why it was so anomalous. At her request, he’d showed her the NRO images from the crash site again and again but she’d gained little more insight.
They had both studied the single image that included the stray flicker of unfocused light where none should be.
It had made no sense that it was present in neither the preceding nor following frame.
Only that one tiny flicker, then gone.
All she could compare it to was the Challenger Space Shuttle crash. Inconspicuous little puffs of smoke leaking past a frozen O-ring at launch—that fifty-seven seconds later became a massive flare that had shredded the shuttle.
In the visible-spectrum footage of the C-130’s crash, there had been the tiniest flare of light, but what did it indicate? It had appeared well past the outer edge of the Hercules’ wingtip and couldn’t have originated from the plane.
She’d reiterated that they’d been shown too little—a surveillance area covered barely twice the size of the Hercules aircraft itself. “A KH-11’s imaging capabilities wouldn’t have been tracking just the plane, it would have been surveilling an area of a dozen square miles or more. We need the wider view, not just the tiny section they’ve given you.”
Finally exhaustion had triumphed and she’d nearly fallen asleep with her head on the general’s desk while he called the NRO for new images.
A car.
He’d had her escorted to a car to take her wherever she wanted to go.
She’d mumbled an address, this address, and passed out in the back seat.
Pulling herself together, she managed to climb out of the back seat with some semblance of dignity. The orderly handed her knapsack over, which almost took her to the ground. The porch light was on and she followed it like a plane following glide slope indicator lights on short final. Up the path beneath rose arbors, thick with leaves and buds but yet to show the first bloom. Terence’s wife had always loved roses and had planted them shortly before she left him. Now they made great lush arches, each of which seemed to peel off a layer of her worries and exhaustion.
She raised the brass door knocker just as the door opened. Unable to release her grip soon enough, it pulled her stumbling forward. Terence caught her before she face-planted on the hall rug.
37
“Colonel Gray, we really must stop meeting like this,” he unintentionally punctuated it with a large yawn. “Syria is being a royal pain in the ass tonight.” Regrettably, the C-130 crash wasn’t the greatest of his worries at the moment—but it was close.
“Yes sir.”
“I apologize for the hour, Gray.”
She shrugged, “It’s past midnight. Just the start to another fine day at the NRO. And apparently at the office of the CJCS.” Her flicker of a smile offered a touch of commiseration and a surprising amount of humanity.
Drake decided that he could get to like her. He was so sick of the people who cowered before his desk or tried to curry favor. Gray was apparently simply herself.
He waved her to a seat and, somewhat to his surprise, she actually took it this time.
“Why are you here again and not some shift officer?”
Drone: an NTSB / military technothriller (Miranda Chase Book 1) Page 15
