“Never felt a thing until they just pulled the plug.”
The general’s expression said there might be something else he was referring to. No, he must mean the mission.
Harvey was already feeling a little better already.
“I was thinking, sir. If I lurked particularly close to the Colombian coast, I should be able to find at least a few subs’ point of departure. The Casper could blow the shit out of the manufacturing sites just as neatly as…”
The general’s shrug stopped him. As if killing those subs was only practice…or a test for him.
Then Harvey remembered refueling a Casper flight over the Bering Sea on its way to China.
He whistled, to himself, in surprise.
With the Casper he could dust targets in Beijing and Moscow in a single night. Then deep-six a sub off Polyarny, Russia’s main Arctic submarine base on the way home over the North Pole with no one the wiser.
Damn but that was an amazing thing.
48
“You’ve had an interesting morning, Ms. Chase.”
“You have a very strange view of my morning then, General Nason.”
He watched Colonel Gray—he really had to learn her first name at some point—assessing Miranda Chase. The two women had done one of those simpatico things women did during the brief moments he’d been on the phone with Zhang Ru.
Curiously, he found himself valuing Colonel Gray’s positive assessment of the curious woman who seemed to be at the center of so much trouble.
He’d been considering asking Gray to help him with Zhang Ru’s assessment, but he didn’t like the idea of putting her military career at risk along with his own.
He could offer Miranda Chase a level of deniability though, not telling her the source of whatever files Zhang had sent. And she had spotted the obscure flare.
For now, he’d hold off.
So, he summarized. “We have an upset CIA director staging a home invasion on domestic soil without involving the FBI. We have a wrecked Air Force C-130, down in a highly secure flight area.”
“Not just downed,” Chase corrected him.
“What do you mean?” Gray leaned forward.
“No reasonable projection explains what occurred. The flight profile doesn’t even match the tail falling off, which it didn’t, and the engines being at full throttle, which they weren’t, and power diving straight into the ground, which it did but with a force all out of proportion to the controllable elements of flight. It didn’t merely crash. As I believe I mentioned before, it was slapped out of the sky.”
“Slapped?” Drake slammed a hand down on a piece of paper on his desk. “Like that?”
“More precisely,” Chase held her left hand above his desk. She studied it for a moment, then stood to place her hand higher above the surface, facing palm down, and stretched out her thumb and pinkie finger. “Here’s the Hercules, at approximately one-two-hundredth scale. My hand is six inches long and my pinkie-to-thumb reach is eight-and-a-quarter inches. Think of my wrist as the nose and my fingertips as the tail.”
Drake looked down at his own hand. He didn’t know what his hand’s dimensions were. He caught Gray making the same consideration of her own hand and they traded quick smiles as Chase continued.
“So we have a reasonable facsimile of the plane’s ninety-seven-foot length with one hundred and thirty-seven-foot wingspan conveniently to an accuracy of one-point-nine percent. At that ratio, the curiously low flight level of five hundred feet would be thirty inches above your desk.”
Drake nodded for her to continue and did his best to keep his smile off his face. Gray didn’t even try.
“If I crash my plane by controlling the elevator angle and driving the tail upward,” Chase bent her fingertips which would cause an airflow change, making her fingers rise up.
She cocked her wrist to illustrate—then accelerated her hand nearly straight downward to thump the heel of her hand on his desk.
“We would see the wings break off, the nose crumple, but the plane would ultimately remain right-side up based on our first estimate of soil-type analysis.”
Drake checked in with Gray, but she was now watching Chase closely.
“However,” she returned her hand to its initial height above his desk. “If we have an outside force acting on the Hercules like a slap from above,” she slapped her left wrist with her right hand.
She didn’t first tip her fingers toward the ceiling, instead she pushed the heel of her hand downward, then paused a third of the way down.
“Note that the nose was pushed down, rather than the tail being raised to cause the descent. An abrupt and severe downward acceleration. Whatever force it was, it acted on the wings of the plane, but not the tail.”
Then, without warming, she finished the gesture, slamming the heel of her hand down hard enough to make him and the picture of his wife jump.
Then she sat down as calmly as if she’d never moved.
“The nose folded under. It broke free as the plane landed on its back.”
She twisted her arm to demonstrate.
“The wings sheared off and fell to either side. My team reports that they flipped one wing over yesterday and the entire upper surface had been drastically deformed inwards with no sign of a nearby explosion. It was just,” she shrugged and folded her hands in her lap, “a slap. The fuselage struck the ground so hard that it bounced up and rolled over so that it only appears to have hit right-side up. I surmise that the tail broke off before ground impact as it appeared to follow too similar a trajectory.”
“The people?” Gray asked softly.
“Any personnel aboard would have died instantaneously upon impact. The downward vertical acceleration was so severe at altitude, they may have been dead well before impact.”
Drake was aghast at how easily she seemed to talk about such things. Those were his men. They might be Air Force, but he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and that transcended military branch.
“Don’t you feel anything, Ms. Chase?”
“Yes. I’m glad that they were spared the possible question of whether they survived the eighty-three to ninety-seven second fall that my parents suffered during the destruction of TWA Flight 800.” She said it with a near robotic self-control but Drake could see the pain, the real pain in her eyes. She might not admit to feelings, but he could see that, despite his initial assessment, she had them.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”
“How would you? You said it was your assistant who would have reviewed my file. And it wasn’t your fault so there is no reason to apologize.”
Drake had no answer to that.
“They were in First Class. So it was unlikely that they were killed in the initial explosion. Possible, but unlikely. Were they conscious? I’ll never know. At the time I was in Washington State taking a horse-riding lesson.”
“Were you able to estimate the downward force necessary to cause such a course change?” Gray changed the subject back to the C-130, which Chase seemed to accept easily.
“It would require approximately seventy thousand pounds of thrust. Roughly the weight of an additional Hercules C-130 striking against it.”
“But there was only the one plane involved in the crash.”
“Yes, there was. The source of that force is what we’re seeking. A force that leaves a one-meter halo of light that lasts under the length of two frames of the KH-11’s camera.”
Gray glanced quickly at Drake, but he shook his head. “I didn’t tell her what took the images.”
“It wasn’t difficult to surmise,” Miranda stated flatly. She’d apparently re-compartmentalized her parents’ loss.
Gray might be trying to hide it, but Drake could see that she was impressed.
Miranda Chase continued as if they hadn’t spoken, as if she couldn’t stop until she completed her thought. “At an apparent frame-rate of six frames per second based on the speed of the C-130 over ground, that means that the effect in qu
estion was visible for less than a third of a second—the frame it was visible in and the time between the frame back and the next one forward.”
Drake studied his desk for a long moment before making his decision.
“Do you have your computer with you, Ms. Chase?”
At her nod, he showed her his phone with the message from Zhang Ru.
“Copy down this address.”
“I don’t need to.”
He looked at it himself. It was a complex mix of some fifteen letters and characters. Drake hating feeling outclassed, but at the moment…
“The password is AliHaydar,” he spelled it out.
He almost told her the restrictions about what she saw, but changed his mind at the last moment. He knew that if he instructed her to never reveal the file’s contents, he’d probably never be able to convince her to ignore that instruction.
“Please view it without showing it to either of us. I have an…associate who is interested in your conclusions.”
49
“This is new, Clarissa,” CIA Director Clark Winston grinned down at her.
“Go to hell, Clark.” The US Army 75th Rangers had been kind, courteous, and handled her with steel-strong hands as if she was a Taliban terrorist.
A pair of utterly imposing Rangers fully dressed in battle gear had marched her into the CIA lobby with her wrists zip-tied together—perhaps she shouldn’t have tried to scratch out the master sergeant’s eyes. They refused to release her without a hand-written receipt from the director.
He wasn’t laughing anymore, “Who do I make the receipt out to?”
“I’ve been instructed to request the receipt be made to the name of General Fitzgerald Patrick,” the sergeant stated.
“Fitz?” Clark sounded surprised.
“That’s what I was told to ask for, sir,” that perfectly polite Ranger thing still firmly in place. Now she wished she had gotten his eyes.
But Clarissa didn’t say a word. She didn’t care if Clark and Fitz were old drinking buddies. She was going to find the most sensitive information on any project from the NRO—that wasn’t one of hers—and leak it earmarked from his office. Or perhaps have him leak the details of the prior President’s most flagrant affairs—he’d had a taste in women as low as his taste in fast food. Whatever, she had a personal hacker in her department who would just love to hack an e-mail server at the NRO for her. General Fitzgerald Patrick was going down for this.
It was so demeaning to be traded in like a piece of lost luggage. And then, after the Rangers took their bit of paper and strode away like the Special Operations soldiers they were, she had to ask the security desk to cut her bonds because Clark didn’t even carry a penknife. The woman in charge of the shift was definitely smirking as she cut the ties.
Bitch!
Though Clarissa kept the thought to herself this time.
Clark took her by the arm and escorted her out of the lobby and through the courtyard to Kryptos.
“I’d rather go clean up,” she tried to walk off, but he merely tightened his grip. She was so sick of being manhandled, but before she could retaliate, he pushed her down on one of the stone benches in front of the cryptographic sculpture.
“You look perfect as always.”
Men were so blind. She could feel that her skirt was askew. She had a long run in her stockings, and her hair was spread across her shoulders—her scrunchie had been a fatality of the failed operation to grab and silence that NTSB woman.
“Now tell me why I woke up alone this morning.” He remained standing, which left his crotch at nearly face height. He was lucky that she didn’t carry a penknife. A glance down revealed a deep slice in the toe of her favorite Rejina Pyo high heels. Would Clark feel the damage on her shoe if she kicked him in the balls with it?
“You didn’t wake alone. I fucked your brains out before breakfast. You’re the one who fell back asleep.” Men loved sex first thing in the morning, she knew that, and Clark was no exception. Was it her fault if he fell back asleep when there were things to be done? She’d also let him have her after the steak dinner they’d shared—and yes, been photographed at—exactly according to plan. Remember the plan. She managed a deep breath but it did little to calm her.
He gazed around the courtyard as if considering. It was midmorning and, thankfully, the foot traffic through the courtyard was minimal and here by Kryptos it was nonexistent.
“I like your hair down,” he refocused on her.
“Fine. Whatever.” At least he knew better than to try and grab her father’s favorite handhold when they were in bed together. He was a considerate lover if not a skilled one. She’d definitely need to work on the latter if she was going to choose him for the rest of her life—she’d seen too many careers ended due to wandering libidos so she’d have to be true to him. And Clark was definitely a one-woman man.
He finally sat, just where Miranda Chase had perched yesterday on the granite bench. “Now, explain to me what was going on this morning.”
“That Miranda Chase is on the verge of exposing the Casper drone project.”
“How is that possible? I thought she was investigating a downed C-130?”
Clarissa felt ill. “She was.”
“But how are the two tied together?”
50
Jeremy had hunched over the flight recorders for an hour before calling the team in.
They’d both offered to help, but it wasn’t even clear if Jeremy had heard them while he worked.
Instead, Mike had spent the time sitting shoulder to shoulder with Holly, going through the photos she’d saved in her boot heel…and learning nothing new.
“The voice recorder is surprisingly uninformative,” Jeremy pointed at the squiggling lines of an audio file on his computer screen. “There’s what sounds like a whoosh of a door opening in flight and letting the wind in, then a loud bang that I interpret as shredding metal, but all in an instant. There was a single, incomplete curse from the copilot, and then the sound of the plane’s crash itself just a second later.”
It had all happened so fast that Mike wasn’t surprised at the lack of information. “So the pilots can’t tell us anything from their graves.”
“What about the data?” Holly leaned over to peer at Jeremy’s screen. Mike didn’t even bother because it wouldn’t mean much to him.
“That’s where it gets interesting. This data set shows a low-speed stall and a crash.”
“Bullshit!” Even Mike knew that was wrong.
“It’s good, even well done, but it’s not internally consistent.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means,” Holly studied it more closely. “That someone faked the data on this recorder.”
“Why would they— Oh, so what did they want to hide?”
“Thankfully, they’re also not very smart,” Jeremy tapped a few keys and all of the numbers changed. “A CVDR is intended to record thirty minutes of voice and two hours of data, overwriting itself in a loop. But what they did here was paste in their crash scenario before deleting the other data. Then they went back and deleted the actual crash data, without scrubbing it.”
“So you just what…undeleted it?”
“Yep!” Jeremy said that as if such things were normal. “I had to rebuild the disk file system mapping table, which is what took so long, but I got it.”
“You just outsmarted the programmers at Groom Lake?”
Jeremy shrugged, but Holly pulled him into a sideways hug. “We’re so proud!” She kissed him on the temple and he practically glowed with delight. A delight he instantly buried by turning to the screen.
“See here? The transition from level flight to an off-the-scale rate of descent was a matter of a few hundredths of a second. Most of the data ended at that time. I’m guessing the tail was snapped off when the main fuselage transitioned from horizontal flight to vertical descent so abruptly. One data cable, which runs along the main beam at the bottom of the hull, surv
ived another three hundredths of a second and recorded an airspeed of almost Mach 2.”
“No way!” Holly stopped glaring at the screen to glare at Jeremy. “A C-130 can’t go Mach 2. It’s not aerodynamically possible.”
“It’s right there,” Jeremy redirected her attention back to the screen.
“What if whatever struck it was going Mach 2?” Mike suggested.
They both turned to look at him.
“There was only the one wreck…” Jeremy pointed out.
“You know those wings that I had to circle around to collect the soil samples?” Mike could still see them stretched out, shimmering in the midday heat. “Remember that wing I flipped over. The tops were punched in and peeled open like an orange zester had been run over the surface. What if that zester was something supersonic and very, very close?”
Now surprise showed on their faces.
“I have a brain, goddamn it.”
“So does an emu. It weighs almost a whole ounce. Way outta your league.” But Holly didn’t really put her heart into the insult. She was clearly thinking about his idea and she looked as if she’d bit down on a lemon.
“That would explain the whoosh-and-bang sound on the cockpit voice recorder.”
Holly was nodding her agreement…and he’d bet she hated that.
“To cause that kind of structural damage, it would have to pass within…” Jeremy pulled up some modeling software on his computer and quickly tapped in some numbers before whistling softly. “It would have to pass within three meters at Mach 2. It would be well below the height of the C-130’s tail. Now that’s some flying.”
51
Unable to shake off the feeling that his body was still parked in the Groom Lake hangar, perched on its wheels, Harvey decided to try doing something normal.
Helen was busy doing her job and he couldn’t sleep.
Not thinking particularly clearly, he wandered out to the ball field.
“There he is!” Hinkle called out as he came around the corner of the DFC—Harvey hadn’t felt hungry. “Took your time, buddy. Game’s just about to start.”
Drone: an NTSB / military technothriller (Miranda Chase Book 1) Page 20
