Drone: an NTSB / military technothriller (Miranda Chase Book 1)

by M. L. Buchman

  Game? Harvey had just been hoping that someone was around for a game of catch. He shook his head to clear it and scanned the field. The Fire Heads were just taking the field—the munitions specialists. “Uh, where am I in the order?”

  “Put you at cleanup, just behind me.”

  Harvey nodded and went to pick out a bat and start stretching. Fourth up gave him a couple minutes. He tossed his glove down on the bench and, picking up a thirty-four-inch aluminum, laid it across his shoulders to start working out the kinks from eleven hours wired into the Casper.

  He had to stop and rub the spot behind his right ear.

  Goddamn quack of doctor was right—it felt like a steel plate from the inside, but he couldn’t find it with his fingertips.

  He went back to stretching. Maxwelton was watching him strangely. Maxie kept mostly to himself. He’d been on the Remotes for a while, almost as good a hitter as Harvey but he played deep left field to Harvey’s first base so they didn’t have much to do with each other on the field.

  “Hey,” Harvey acknowledged him, but he kept staring.

  Then he reached up and rubbed behind his own right ear.

  “No shit!”

  “No shit.”

  Harvey couldn’t think of what else to say. Harrington hadn’t introduced him to any other Casper pilots. Had that been on purpose?

  He turned at the crack of a bat followed by a hard slap of a ball striking a glove. Hinkle had just been caught out. Only Smitty had made it on base, standing out at second all alone. So much for the big advantage of batting cleanup. Two outs at the top of the first—not a good start.

  He exchanged a last look with Maxie before stepping up to the plate. Low and outside, why the hell did he fall for the first pitch? He popped it up to right field and they were done.

  It was the fifth inning before he ended up sitting in the dugout by Maxie with no one else close by.

  “Six-one,” he sighed as he sat down with a bottle of water. “The Fire Heads really suck.”

  “Yeah, too bad we suck even worse.”

  “Yeah, too bad,” Harvey agreed. He tried to resist rubbing his ear, but couldn’t.

  “It’s habit forming,” Maxie acknowledged.

  That’s when Harvey noticed Maxie had his own hands tightly clasped in his lap, trying to resist the urge.

  “It’s The Rip, man.”

  “The Rip?”

  Maxie glanced at him quickly. “How long you been plugged in?”

  “First flight.”

  “Shit! Goddamn Harrington.”

  “What’s The Rip?”

  Maxie shrugged it off, but Harvey didn’t want him walking away either so he changed subjects.

  “How many others are there of us?”

  “A couple others, I think. Jefferson lost it two days back.”

  “Lost it?” Harvey hoped that didn’t mean what he thought it meant, but Maxie tapped his temple.

  “Coming back from a run over Brazil, I think, started hotdogging. Rumor is he knocked a couple of small planes out of the sky way down south. Heard the techs whispering about a dozen tourists on an island hopper that went down in the Caribbean off the Yucatan. They started talking about one of ours going down close by,” he nodded to the south, “but they shut up real quick when they noticed me listening. They forget that we can hear them even when we’re flying.”

  “That big explosion yesterday afternoon?” Harvey had been surprised that they were doing bombing tests so close to Groom Lake. That was highly unusual. But if it was a drone—

  “Nah. That wasn’t us. Flew over it last night on my way out to…well…out—to see what was worth seeing. Nothing but shreds. Hercules, maybe a C-17, not enough left to really tell.”

  Jefferson lost it? Harvey didn’t like that idea at all as Hinkle struck out and they returned to the field. He recalled that the guy had been acting pretty weird lately, then stopped showing up for the games.

  Where was he now? Some ugly debrief room? Or a padded cell?

  Or worse?

  Harvey felt a cold shiver despite the morning’s heat.

  52

  Miranda downloaded the files and glanced through them quickly.

  A fifth-generation Shenyang J-31 Gyrfalcon fighter jet.

  She glanced up at Drake, but he merely shook his head so she kept her mouth shut. Perhaps he didn’t want Colonel Elizabeth Gray to know the content. But it would have been easy to send her from the room.

  Perhaps he didn’t want to know what they contained himself.

  It was odd, but that felt right, even if she was less rather than more successful making instinctual conclusions.

  She couldn’t read the labels on the various data streams, but the numbers told her what she was looking at: altitude, air speed, g-force, engine temperatures, and so on.

  Arranging the several feeds about her screen, she synchronized them and hit Play. Satellite imagery, two full screens of data feeds from the aircraft itself, and limited radar coverage. Curiously there was no audio track.

  The flight appeared normal. The pilot was good, but made no maneuvers she couldn’t have duplicated at lower speeds in her own Sabrejet.

  He dove out of sight into a mountain range.

  The pilot who emerged might have been another person entirely. He flew combinations she’d never seen even at the most extreme aerobatic shows. Something had changed back there, out of sight among the mountains.

  There was a very active aerobatic club on just the next island over from her own. She would often fly over to San Juan Island in an unremarkable Beech C23 Sundowner to watch their competitions out of the Friday Harbor Airport.

  Were these extreme maneuvers captured in recordings as exceptional when performed in an advanced military aircraft? She thought so, but wasn’t positive.

  Again she almost asked Drake the question, then reconsidered when she saw his flat stare. No squinted eyes, no emotion at all that she could interpret.

  Colonel Gray was watching him with what appeared to be curiosity: the same way she’d looked at Miranda when they first met.

  Miranda returned to the images and readouts.

  There was nothing wrong with the aircraft and the pilot was showing masterful control.

  The aircraft disappeared behind the mountains and didn’t reemerge.

  The data feed ended abruptly. At the last moment, there was a severe downward acceleration.

  As severe as what had hit the Hercules.

  She ran the multi-screen feed again.

  There was something wrong.

  Miranda found it on the third replay. There was a reflection off the Shenyang’s canopy. But the reflection didn’t vary with the angle of the plane’s twisting track to the sun. It hugged the aircraft like a mirror.

  At Mach 1.9.

  Only on two occasions did its position vary by even a few meters from the Shenyang’s side.

  She pulled out her phone and texted Holly, as it was the only number she had for the team.

  Is it possible that a high-speed, close-proximity aircraft knocked down the C-130?

  The answer came back in seconds. We’re just checking that model now. Per recovered CVDR data, we think ~Mach 2 passage above Hercules, crossing at right angles. 3 meters max separation?!?!?!?

  Miranda pictured the Hercules wreckage and made her own conclusions.

  Yes, that force would be sufficient to explain the damage and abrupt directional change of the Hercules.

  “We know why your Hercules crashed.” She spoke without looking up. She ignored the commotion that statement caused in the room. Restarting the Chinese satellite feed, she zoomed in to the resolution limit—significantly lower than Colonel Gray’s KH-11. What if the odd reflection off the Shenyang J-31 was indeed another aircraft?

  What if it was a supersonic aircraft that the J-31 pilot was trying to escape but couldn’t? An ability to fly so close that it had shredded the C-130 Hercules at Groom Lake.

  She closed her laptop
and considered the problem.

  If the J-31 pilot was not working with the “reflection” aircraft, then it was shadowing his every maneuver. The more desperate the flight became, the closer it moved. She could feel his panic as assuredly as she’d always imagined her parents had in their long fall into the ocean. In some ways, it was the one emotion she truly understood.

  “The control maneuvers…”

  “What was that?” Drake barked at her.

  “Sorry, I shouldn’t have spoken aloud.”

  “Speak anyway.”

  Miranda could only blink at him in surprise. “I understood that you specifically didn’t want me to speak about this,” she patted her hand on her laptop.

  “I didn’t. I do. Uh… Perhaps in general terms.”

  “You wish me to discuss specifics in general terms?”

  He offered a chilly smile. “Precisely.”

  She stared down at the laptop. “That’s not something I do well.” There were so many things she didn’t do well.

  “Try.”

  Miranda could feel a little of the pilot’s panic sweat on her own palms.

  “Please,” he asked as softly as when he’d asked her to stay earlier. Or was it yesterday? Everything was blurring together.

  She was still bothered about unintentionally revealing the code word “Amber” and didn’t wish to get caught out again.

  “An…exceptionally maneuverable aircraft flew over your Hercules C-130 at a distance closer than you and I are now seated.”

  “But that—”

  She held up a finger to silence him. “It did this at ninety-degrees to the C-130’s flight path, without impacting the upright vertical stabilizer of the tail’s empennage while traveling at Mach 2. An exceptional display of precise control.”

  “But none of the radar imaging shows a second aircraft,” Colonel Gray leaned in.

  “Don’t forget the flare on the one image,” Miranda decided that if both the flash source and the KH-11 satellite’s recording hardware were taken into consideration, that it formed a reasonable hypothesis. “Perhaps a narrowed exhaust port, blurred by its speed of motion, moving faster than the CCD’s image capture rate. Charge-coupled devices, the photo-reactive part of any digital camera, have an image capture rate of—” Drake’s gesture cut her off. She always hated not being able to complete a sentence. —of one-sixth of a second, she completed for herself.

  “A narrowed…” Drake looked puzzled.

  “Stealth,” Gray whispered in surprise.

  “Precisely,” Miranda agreed. “A narrowed exhaust port on a stealth aircraft would only be visible from a small angle of view, making its track effectively invisible in darkness at all other angles. It’s the only possibility that fits the known data. Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

  “Now you’re quoting Sherlock Holmes at us.”

  “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, actually. But yes.” Miranda had always felt a kinship with Doyle’s mad detective. There were many things wrong with his fictional choices (both in drugs and Irene Adler), but not with his cerebral agility. “Now, in general terms, General Nason, your associate is confronted with a similar dilemma. An aircraft of apparently impossible maneuverability was captured in his images. It flew with a precision and response time that is unlike anything I have ever seen. My first instinct was to dismiss it as no more than a curious reflection.”

  “But if it was a highly maneuverable stealth aircraft…” Drake stared at the ceiling as he drawled out the idea slowly. She glanced up, half expecting to see an aircraft there as if he was studying it.

  “Not merely maneuverable. It’s responsiveness is nearly robotic in perfection.”

  “Nearly?”

  “I spoke most carefully, Drake.”

  53

  He wanted the world to slow down for a minute. Drake was due to report to the President in under an hour about what had been lost in the desert out at Groom Lake aboard the Hercules.

  A stealth aircraft that could reach into Groom Lake and somewhere in China? That had to be the Russians, but his intelligence reports hinted at no such craft. How was he supposed to—

  “Do you think it was the same aircraft?”

  Drake knew there was a reason he liked Colonel Gray. Woman kept her head in a crisis.

  Chase tipped her head one way and then the other. “At least the same conceptual design—I cannot speak to the likelihood of it being the same frame number with the evidence I have. It’s a reasonable supposition as both observed maneuvers were of such exceptional caliber that it would seem unlikely that such finesse of technological advance would be achieved simultaneously in two distinct aircraft. This is definitely something very new. At least in my experience.”

  Definitely Russian.

  Drake rubbed at his forehead. They’d been done with the Cold War thirty years ago. He’d been there, a fresh-minted major in the 75th Ranger Regiment and so proud of his oak leaves, on the ground in Berlin the day the Wall came down.

  War was done.

  Over.

  Except there’d been Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and enough other hellholes to make him retire if the President hadn’t personally asked him to stay. And now the Cold War was back with phrases that had never even existed when his career had begun: cyberattack, social media disinformation campaigns, drones, the Internet itself…

  Hell!

  …JSOC, The Night Stalkers, even stealth aircraft had been less than five years old when he’d joined. And Delta Force less than ten.

  “Could I see the wider area imaging at Groom Lake?” Miranda asked in that strangely passionless way of hers.

  Colonel Gray took care of setting it up for Chase while Drake contemplated how bad it would be to show up blind drunk for a White House meeting.

  Chase kept asking for different views and replays.

  He began gathering what he’d need by the dim light from the screen that mostly glowed with nighttime darkness.

  “There it is.”

  54

  “What?” Gray said at the same moment he did. So at least he wasn’t the only one in the dark.

  “Run it back. Here,” Chase reached out and took the keyboard from Gray. “Watch the upper right quadrant.” Her control of the imaging easily matched Gray’s. The runway lights of Groom Lake, along with some spill from the other buildings, marked the base. The clock in the lower right corner showed time flowing ahead.

  “What are we looking for…” his voice petered out as the runway lights blinked off. The base was still visible, so it wasn’t the camera. Something was landing on the runway that no one wanted to be seen, not even in the middle of the Nevada desert in the hour before dawn at a base manned only by personnel with top secret or better clearance. Something that didn’t care about the lack of runway lights.

  “Now watch the lower right quadrant,” Miranda zoomed in rapidly.

  A vague outline of a hangar stood at the south end of the runway. Suddenly a light spilled out into the night. A long sleek delta-winged aircraft slipped off the end of the darkened runway, then turned gracefully into the light spilling out of the hangar’s doors. For a brief instant, it was perfectly lit.

  Chase stopped the video and zoomed in until the aircraft filled the screen.

  “No markings,” Chase noted. “Just camouflage coloring.”

  “No cockpit,” Gray added. “A drone.”

  That’s what it was. What it had to be. A drone that had downed a C-130 Hercules and whatever had upset Zhang Ru enough to call for his help interpreting his images. That had implications he’d have to think about later.

  “Shit! It’s ours.”

  55

  It was probably even a worse conclusion than it being Russian.

  The US services weren’t hiding things from one another; they were creating secret aircraft and carrying out secret missions against foreign assets without informing each other. He was the Chai
rman of the Joint Chiefs and should know about anything the President or the National Security Advisor knew.

  But what if he didn’t? Maybe they had shut him out of the loop, in which case it was definitely time to retire.

  Or worse yet, what if the President and even the NSA didn’t know?

  That would leave…the CIA.

  “Gray. Find out where that F-35 Lightning II that bombed our Hercules came from.”

  “I already did. Luke Air Force Base in Glendale, Arizona is missing one.”

  “Let me guess. The plane went missing, but all of the pilots are accounted for.”

  Gray nodded. “But who outside the Air Force is trained to fly the F-35?”

  “A few pilots in the Air National Guard and…”

  Her gasp was quite satisfying.

  “My team postulates the CIA,” Miranda spoke up before Gray could.

  “Yes, their Special Operations Group has three pilots who’ve been through our training programs.”

  Our. Drake liked that Gray still honored the service she’d come from rather than using their as if the Air Force’s problems were now someone else’s. There was an awful lot to like about Colonel Gray. Nothing wrong with her mind either.

  “The same people who tried to kidnap me this morning,” Chase observed quietly.

  “They didn’t want you to solve this. You’ll be safe as soon as we let them know that you already have. Then it will be out of your hands.”

  “Why would the CIA bomb a wrecked Air Force plane on a secret military base?”

  “To hide the damage that they did to that US military airplane.”

  “Perhaps…” He didn’t want to argue with Gray’s conclusion. He wanted that to be all that there was to this. But what if it was more?

  What if the CIA had decided to declare war on the US military? There had been two people undercover on that flight. And the loss of one of those people could be potentially devastating.