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

by M. L. Buchman

  If this was a CIA attack?

  Because they knew about the passenger?

  Then the nation was on the verge of an interagency war.

  56

  Drake was amused to see that CIA Director Clark Winston had brought along the blonde woman from this morning’s fiasco.

  His Rangers had definitely enjoyed telling him of Clarissa Reese’s poor attitude about being treated as a prisoner of war. When he’d shredded Clark Winston’s receipt made out to General Fitzgerald Patrick, they hadn’t said a word.

  “Rangers lead the way, boys.” He’d shaken both their hands and offered them friendly slaps on the back. The 75th Rangers were brutally tough and it was a hard slog meant for younger men, but a part of him still missed the camaraderie. Didn’t get much of that at his level. They’d stridden out of his office with the well-deserved pride of the fine soldiers they were.

  General Fitzgerald Patrick had brought Colonel Gray. Probably as protection against the bad publicity from the news reporting that he’d declared war on Georgetown.

  Drake did his best to restrain his friendly greeting so as not to get her in trouble with her boss. As he shook hands with her, she slipped him a note.

  He couldn’t help smiling when he glanced at it.

  Drake had provided the Chase woman transport to wherever she wanted to go—a flight home. He’d like to have kept her, or even brought her here to the Situation Room in the White House’s ground floor, but couldn’t justify either one so he’d let her go. He had routed her on a military flight that was headed out of Andrews Air Force Base to JBLM in Tacoma, Washington, to keep her name off the passenger manifests until he’d had a chance to deal with the CIA.

  No time like the present.

  While people were still settling at the Sit Room conference table, he went over to Clark Winston and Clarissa Reese at the coffee station.

  “Call your dogs off the NTSB woman. We’ve already got the information on your drone project.”

  “You don’t know shit.” She was smart enough to keep her voice down, but didn’t yet know that smart and ruthless didn’t win every battle.

  “Fine.” He handed over the note that Gray had given him. “I know the President loves a good movie.”

  The woman’s skin went sharply whiter than her white-blonde hair as she read it.

  CIA attempted erasure of NRO satellite feed. All conclusions of MC confirmed.

  “Who’s MC?” Clark read the note over Reese’s shoulder.

  “The woman that your Assistant Director Clarissa Reese here attempted to kidnap in Georgetown this morning. Kidnap attempt, and made national news for blowing up a portion of a civilian’s house.”

  “The CIA attacked Georgetown? No shit?” Clark did his best to look surprised, but didn’t quite pull it off.

  He would have—all those years in the field, he could lie with a dead straight face.

  But not the blonde.

  Reese cast a quick sideways glance of surprise at her boss.

  It was obvious that Miranda Chase had been right; they were definitely sleeping together. And Reese had shown Drake that Clark knew about the attack anyway.

  Drake considered. He’d never understood the man, but liked him despite that. CIA directors were a notoriously humorless breed and Clark Winston was a breath of fresh air. But he was apparently very good at hiding things with that sense of humor.

  He decided against trying to knock Clarissa Reese out of place just so that he could maintain some window into Clark’s thinking. If he wanted to play with someone barely half his age, let him.

  “Just let Chase alone. She’s already told us all she knows.” Drake addressed this to Reese, who watched him steadily with her dazzling blue eyes for a long moment before nodding her assent. He had a daughter and hoped his assessment of Reese’s actual agreement was accurate. There was more in her look, as if she was assessing his own viability for something.

  He was definitely getting too old for this shit and took his coffee to the table. He selected a chair across from Gray. Her dark eyes held none of the cold calculation of Reese’s. Caffeine-boosted alertness shone, just as his probably did after the long night, but no games. Definitely needed her first name; he already had her phone number.

  “So, what the hell have you been up to, Patrick?” President Roy Cole breezed into the room, flanked by his Chief of Staff and the Secretary of Defense, with his usual no-nonsense attitude. They all jolted to their feet even as the President made his usual patting motion. Cole took his chair at the head of the table.

  “I don’t know what you’re—” Patrick sputtered.

  “You know. I’ve always felt that you saw the NRO as your own personal fiefdom. Disinformation leading to military action in Georgetown? Really? Now there’s a new leak of classified surveillance of the Russian President’s private compound that I’m informed just hit the Washington Post from your own e-mail account.”

  “I never—”

  He waved a hand at his Chief of Staff who’d come in with him. Nora Farber pulled out a sheet of paper and began speaking, “The Post sent us your e-mail as a courtesy heads-up. We’ve confirmed that the IP address matches your latest e-mail to the President this morning regarding the imagery for the takedown of the head of Iranian intelligence.”

  “Please tell me you didn’t leak that as well,” Cole sat bolt upright like the ex-Green Beret he was.

  “I never leaked any of it,” Patrick thumped a fist on the table.

  Drake spotted a flicker of a smile on Clarissa Reese’s face. Definitely a dangerous woman to keep an eye on. Maybe Clark was playing with fire, or maybe he didn’t even realize what the woman was doing.

  Still, better the shark he knew about than the one he didn’t.

  “I’ll bet it was this asshole’s doing.” Patrick jabbed a finger in his direction and Drake could only laugh.

  “Wish I’d thought of it,” though he had thought of the first parts. Patrick had also clearly aggravated the CIA because they had to be behind the e-mail leak. It didn’t matter; Drake had fought on too many battlefields and played far too much politics over the years to be caught out so easily.

  “And you need a broader vocabulary of insults, General Patrick. The two passwords you so reluctantly gave me, for data that I legitimately requested—UpYoursAsshole and FuckYouTwiceAsshole!—have a repeated common text string, which cryptanalysts tell me is bad form.”

  Cole scowled down the table for a moment before speaking. “I’ve never liked you, Patrick. You’ve always been an arrogant prick. And I now realize that I’ve never trusted you either. You,” he aimed a finger at Gray. “Who are you?”

  “Colonel Elizabeth Gray, sir.”

  Score. Drake finally had her first name. Well, perhaps that thought was more suitable for a fifteen-year-old, but when this was over, he was definitely asking her out to dinner.

  “I’m head of domestic imaging. Though I assist Director Patrick on numerous other projects, both foreign and in space.”

  Patrick sent her a bitter look of betrayal. Hard to blame him, even if he deserved whatever was coming to him.

  Cole glanced at him. “Drake, you worked with her?”

  “Just the last twenty hours, but almost all of those. Exceptionally competent, sir.”

  “Patrick, you’re hereby relieved pending investigations.”

  “But you can’t! I’m not appointed by you. I’m—”

  “Appointed by me and I can dismiss you,” Secretary of Defense McCann spoke for the first time. “And I’m glad to finally do it. I can also state that Gray has been an exceptional asset, one I use myself rather than Director Patrick whenever possible.”

  “Get out of my house,” President Cole commanded. “And leave your NRO security pass with McCann right now. If you’d rather retire quietly, we’ll take that into consideration. No promises. Gray, you’re Acting Director until McCann and I figure out what is going on over there. McCann, see that I get a recommendation for a
rank bump to general for her before you announce her new role by end of day. Can’t have her overseeing people who outrank her; that place is enough of a nightmare without that burden.”

  Drake watched Elizabeth Gray swallow hard, one of her few tells about the state of her nerves. That and her occasional electric smile. Nobody was watching Patrick as he slinked out of the room.

  “Sir, either of the deputy directors—” Gray started.

  “They don’t have the imagination necessary to run the NRO in the way it must be going into the future,” McCann spoke up, but not unkindly. “I’ve worked with both of them since back when you were still a line officer flying combat. They’re highly competent in their roles, but unimaginative. She’s the best recommendation I have, sir.” He addressed the last to the President.

  Cole stared at her in silence until Drake was impressed that she didn’t simply melt under his gaze.

  “Drake? She fit in with what you were talking about right after I took office?” Cole asked without looking at him.

  “Interagency cooperation rather than competition? Absolutely.” Rather than looking at the President, he turned to face the pair from the CIA. No, the woman. Clark might have the personality to draw the spotlight and his share of savvy and secrets, but Drake expected that Clarissa Reese had the power, or soon would. “It’s the essential element we must have going forward.”

  He held her gaze until she offered an infinitesimal nod of acknowledgement.

  Not that he’d trust her. But it was a start.

  57

  “So, are we done?” Mike prayed they were.

  The three of them sat on high stools around a stainless-steel table. The deck of The Hub restaurant overlooked the Tacoma Narrows Airport runway. Every five or ten minutes some small plane flitted along the single runway.

  The number of them increased significantly around lunchtime and were all parked just beyond the windbreak of glass that ringed the deck. Soon The Hub was half full of people who apparently just flew in for lunch. He liked the familiar feeling of seeing so much iced tea and lemonade.

  The three of them were still technically at work, but any pilots also had to follow the FAA’s eight-hours-from-bottle-to-throttle rule. Only passengers were lucky enough to have a beer at lunch.

  It was frustrating, because he could see that it was a local microbrew, and they’d looked good when he read over the beer menu.

  The Hub had a good feel. And it wasn’t just the logo of a silhouetted naked lady with long billowing hair, seeming to fly from her handhold on a bicycle’s handlebars. People appeared to be glad to be here.

  It took him back to the “Good Old Days,” which weren’t so old and hadn’t been so good, but had included lunchtime flying. When the FBI’s and the thug-clients’ advertising dollars had really been flowing, he’d gotten licensed and picked up a zippy little Beech Bonanza.

  With its distinctive v-tail and Mike’s leopard logo, it had been a hit with the clients. He’d taken any number of them out on a flight to a rural airport on a “pie quest”—a common excuse among pilots to go flying to various airport diners like this place—and do the business deals with ad campaign sketches rolled out right on the wing of the plane.

  Seeing Miranda’s Mooney sitting in the hangar made him itch to fly again. However strange she might be, the woman had taste in her planes. The Mooney was sweet, going seventy-five miles an hour faster than his Bonanza—the very last sliver of his business assets that he’d sold.

  He kept marginally current in a rental plane, but it wasn’t the same.

  The Reuben sandwich was better than average, though Mike didn’t know why he kept ordering them wherever he went. Nothing would ever match Katz’s Delicatessen in lower Manhattan, but he kept trying.

  Holly had opted for something called a Kona pizza that boasted porter BBQ sauce, roast chicken, caramelized onion, and grilled pineapple. Next time, if there was a next time in this rinky-dink corner of civilization, that’s what he’d get. He’d tried to get a taste of it and almost gotten a fork through the back of his hand for his trouble.

  Jeremy had a bacon, mushroom, cheese Hangar Smashed Burger with a massive pile of tater tots, but wasn’t looking up at all from his computer.

  “I don’t know,” Holly had ordered a large pizza, but was still making strong headway through it. Of course they’d all missed breakfast because of the fighter jet parked out at Crest. “Boss hasn’t called us off. Her text did say she was coming into JBLM in about five hours. I figure that we can wait that long.”

  “I suppose,” Mike surveyed the bar, but there weren’t a lot of single women here. Mostly it was couples or guys with planes. A low-target environment. Maybe it livened up in the evenings. Though at this point he’d be glad to just chat about planes.

  Small, general aviation planes. He’d had enough of exploding C-130 military transports and plummeting helicopters to last him for quite a while.

  “We’re not done,” Jeremy said without looking up.

  “Why not?”

  “There was a lot more on that flight recorder.”

  “Such as?” Holly lounged back after snagging the second-to-last slice of her pizza. Her light blonde hair, freed from her Australian Matildas ball cap, fluttered about in the afternoon sunlight. He could see that it was just killing the guy pilots who were trying to focus on their lunches with a low success rate.

  “The C-130’s prior stop was on a beach in Baja California, Mexico. No record of any contact with Mexican authorities.”

  “But that doesn’t involve us.”

  “No, but the other voices do.”

  “Other voices?”

  “Normal crew is five people: two pilots, flight engineer, loadmaster, and navigator. Right? That’s even what that General Harrington told Mike they had removed from the plane.”

  Mike nodded to confirm that. Then he took another bite of his Reuben to curtail his ability to make any statement that Holly might want to attack.

  “Except this C-130 received the AMP upgrade through the Avionics Modernization Program, meaning it had been upgraded to a glass cockpit. So, their minimum crew is two pilots and a loadmaster. That’s three people.”

  “Even I can count that high, Jeremy,” Mike set down his sandwich. “Minimum crew doesn’t mean that’s all that were there.”

  “No, except I only get those three voices in the cockpit—two guys and a female copilot. The fourth audio channel was a general pickup in the cargo bay. It’s intended to record any crash-relevant atypical airframe noises, shouts by passengers, and the like. Instead, it picked up snatches of a conversation.”

  “Why is that a big deal?”

  Mike was happy to let Holly fall on the sword of one of Jeremy’s winding explanations for a change.

  “Because they weren’t Air Force crew members. They may have been dressed like them so that the general would think that’s what he unloaded into the Groom Lake morgue, but they weren’t on board before that Mexico beach landing and I can filter enough snippets out of the background noise to know that they’re talking about meetings at Groom Lake.”

  “I’m sure lots of people have meetings at Groom Lake,” Mike would take the fall on this one.

  “Probably not ones speaking in Mandarin.”

  Mike considered. Probably not.

  58

  “Now, what about our other little problem?”

  President Cole had chased everyone else out to the waiting room.

  Now it was just him and the President. Even the CIA and the Secretary of Defense had been sent away.

  Drake sighed.

  “Two things about that, sir. First, we’ve learned what happened to the Hercules C-130 transport as it approached Groom Lake. It was downed by a CIA drone for reasons that are still unclear.”

  The President scowled but held his peace, awaiting more information.

  “Also, a second drone, probably from the same series, downed a Chinese aircraft at roughly the same time thr
ee days ago. Though I only heard about it today.”

  “Shit! Where did this happen?” There was no faking his surprise. Drake felt better about feeling bad. It wasn’t only him that the CIA had kept out of the loop.

  “Central China.”

  Cole opened his mouth…then shut it again.

  “The Chinese have not figured this out, but they know something’s wrong.”

  Cole grunted, “And you know all of this for reasons that I don’t want to know the details about.”

  He didn’t make it a question, so Drake didn’t bother answering.

  Drake still hadn’t figured out what to tell Zhang Ru about Miranda’s conclusion that his jet had been attacked by an American CIA drone.

  And he hoped to God that who he thought were on that Hercules when it crashed weren’t on that Hercules.

  Even if he knew they were.

  “Are the Chinese going to be a problem?”

  “I’m not sure yet, Mr. President.”

  “Don’t let them become one.”

  “Yes sir, Mr. President.”

  Once Miranda had provided longitude, latitude, and time from Zhang Ru’s videos, Gray had looked at the NRO’s satellite recordings of the area.

  So he hadn’t quite broken his word to Zhang; Miranda was the only analyst to look at the imagery Zhang had provided. And he himself had inspected neither.

  The CIA drone now parked at Groom Lake had mounted an attack against a foreign power deep in the heart of China. What in the world had the CIA built out in the middle of his military reserve?

  Even worse, what the hell had those crackers been thinking?

  The only way to stop an interagency war, if that’s what they were brewing, was to see it for himself.

  “The second thing—you know I was within minutes of departure for Groom Lake when the C-130 went down.”

  The President nodded.

  “There is no clear reporting on this, but the flight had a crew of three when it departed Edwards Air Force Base, yet five were reported as deceased at Groom Lake.”