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

by M. L. Buchman

  They exchanged pleasantries as the waiters served seaweed- and black sesame seed-encrusted tofu, steamed peanuts in chili sauce, and pork baozi dumplings for an appetizer. Mei-Li served them, not taking a baozi for herself. He made a show of serving her himself, “She really must eat more.” But she didn’t touch it.

  He and Zuocheng may have started flying together but, after the war, Zuocheng’s superior family connections had elevated him more quickly. He was one of two vice chairmen of the Central Military Commission. Not technically in direct line to power but certainly a major voice in the military as one of the President’s two main assistants in his presidential role as chairman of the CMC.

  “Did you hear about Huan?” Zhang broached the central topic of the meal as casually as he could over steamed perch with ginger and spring onion, stuffed with spicy crab.

  “I did. Fuck that useless garbage’s family to the eighteenth generation,” he practically spit out the worst of all ritual insults. “He let us down on the J-31 program by choosing that Wang Fan boy as the test pilot. Nephew of yours, wasn’t he?”

  Zuocheng looked across the table at Mei-Li as he’d been doing much of the meal.

  “Your brother?” He asked in a much kinder tone.

  Ru decided he would keep Mei-Li for himself for now and merely let Zuocheng dream of her.

  “No sir. He is from another side of my uncle’s family.” She ate a tiny flake of the fish with her chopsticks and smiled sadly. “Still, a terrible thing. My uncle was most upset about the loss of such an important aircraft to the incompetence of such an opportunist; one who had married into his family in hopes of getting unwarranted advancement.”

  A nice touch. The girl definitely had a mind, which he’d have to make more use of in the future. She performed exceptionally with Wang Fan and was now charming Zuocheng.

  “That wasn’t you who promoted him, Ru?”

  “Oh no. I recused myself from his career. I think that former General Huan advanced the boy so quickly in hopes of currying favor with me. He knows that I work very hard on developing our next-generation aircraft. He so often strove to cut corners in order to report cost savings to his superiors that I feared he would place our pilots at risk. Or perhaps he was going to claim credit for my work before his corruption was discovered.”

  It was a risky speech.

  To claim one’s own importance was baizuo—arrogant as a Western liberal elitist. But a fighter pilot had a certain bravura, a justified ego because he knew he was better than those around him. A trait that he and Zuocheng shared.

  Ru decided he was safe to have spoken so.

  But would Zuocheng?

  In for a little, in for a full measure of rice.

  “Huan wasn’t even a pilot. He was an administrator,” yet another reason Ru hadn’t liked him and he let his disgust enter his tone. That it hadn’t been Huan’s choice, a bad inner ear from a childhood infection had kept him out of the air, was a fact that few other than Ru had ever unearthed.

  “Yes, he must be replaced with someone who was a pilot,” Zuocheng agreed.

  It was within reach! Ru kept his pleasure from his face and struggled to not get his hopes too high. Perhaps, just perhaps he would be chosen to lead in General Huan’s place.

  67

  “What’s his mission?”

  Miranda felt uncomfortable looking at the pilot strapped into the chair. Their party stood in an observation room, looking at the strapped-down pilot and the operations team through a one-way window.

  She’d lost her own team at the second drone sitting on the hangar floor.

  Holly had tried to follow her to the observation room, but Drake had waved her off. Now it was just her, CIA Director Clark Winston, and the two generals.

  With the pilot on the other side of the window, three technicians were in the space: a med tech who looked bored out of her skull, a guy slouched in front of a set of flight controls reading a novel supposedly ready to take over if anything went wrong with the neural connection, and a commander who was observing the tactical screens.

  “Major Carl Maxwelton is patrolling boat drug-traffic routes out of South America into Southern Mexico. Most of what makes it into the US is via land routes over the Mexican border. Tonight we’re trying to move upstream, patrolling the Venezuelan coast,” Harrington announced.

  “What was the planned mission prior to our arrival?” Drake asked with an insight that Miranda knew she lacked. Mike might well have asked the same question. He saw when people were hiding things—a very valuable skill.

  Harrington stood stiffly. “We were going to shred some of Syria’s front lines.”

  “Waging war without—”

  “Ease up, Drake,” Clark spoke up. “We don’t report to the same people you do. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has stamped Syria as a go-to proposition for application of CIA forces.”

  “Does the committee know what it is that you’re flying or even what you had planned?” Nason turned back to stare into the room.

  “Only in the most general terms,” Clark stuffed his hands in his pockets, even though the room wasn’t cold. “We told them that we weren’t putting our people at risk due to remote operations.”

  “Not putting—” General Harrington finally sputtered to life, shedding his carefully stiff demeanor. “Do you know what that thing is doing to him right now? It’s ripping out his mind. Just like it did to a lot of good pilots before him.”

  Harrington spun to face Miranda. She’d have taken a step back, but bumped into the closed door when she tried.

  “You want to know what happened to your precious C-130 Hercules and the five good people who flew on her? I’ll fucking tell you. I’m so goddamn sick of the lies. One of your precious pilots…”

  He spun back to Clark and jabbed a finger inches from the director’s face so closely that he stumbled back and fell into a chair.

  “…had his brains scrambled by ‘The Rip’—that’s what the pilots call it. Cal Jefferson was a good man and a better pilot. The Rip fried him, burned him out, just like the other basket cases I’ve got in lockup.”

  He began pacing up and down the cramped space.

  Harrington became more and more agitated until he began speaking as he paced. “On the flight home from destabilizing a Brazilian dam project, he downed a tourist flight crossing from Cancún to Cozumel—killed a dozen people just for the hell of it. Then—almost home safe but before we realized what was happening—he strafed that C-130 just to see how close he could get at supercruise speeds.”

  “Exactly as you surmised, Miranda,” Drake nodded.

  “Less than three meters,” Miranda agreed. “And he must have avoided clipping the tail section by less than that.”

  There were some things she didn’t like being right about.

  Miranda imagined she could feel Holly’s firm grasp squeezing one of her shoulders and took strength from it. Her last team, who’d been with her for five years, had never understood her as effortlessly as Holly did.

  “Poor bastard,” Harrington was muttering. “Didn’t think about the consequences until he circled back around and saw the destruction. If his mind had still been functioning, he would have known better, but he was too deep in The Rip by then. The C-130’s copilot had been his lover. He almost succeeded in committing suicide by drone, ramming it into this building, before we were able to wrest control from him. Unless we drug the shit out of him, he does nothing but cry the whole time. We haven’t gotten a coherent word out of him in three days.”

  Harrington waved helplessly toward the main section of the base.

  “There,” he again stepped toe-to-toe with her. “Now you know what really happened to your damned plane, Ms. Chase. Hope you can live with it. Don’t know if I can.”

  He finally turned away from her to face General Drake Nason.

  “The whole program is fucked. Nothing we do can protect the pilot. It’s like normal drone pilot burnout, but it is hugely a
ccelerated—months instead of years. Good men. Just gone,” he snapped his fingers.

  Drake rested a hand on Harrington’s shoulder until he calmed and once again stood upright. “Recall the pilot while you still can.”

  Harrington nodded once, twice, then stepped through the door out of the observation room and into the flight control space.

  68

  “Major Maxwelton. We have a technical issue and need to cancel this mission. Please return to base immediately.” Harrington appeared to be speaking in a normal tone in the room.

  The pilot made no acknowledgement from where he was strapped into the padded chair.

  “Maxie? That’s an order.”

  Still no response.

  Harrington shook his shoulder.

  “I don’t think he can hear you,” the med tech was studying her instruments. “According to my instruments, his own hearing is no longer registering in his auditory cortex. Maybe he’s become so bonded with his machine that he can no longer hear us.”

  “Radio him. Call the drone.” Drake snapped out the order.

  “Uh, sir.” The backup pilot had dumped his novel on the floor and jolted up to stand at attention on the general’s entry. “It’s a drone, sir. There’s no radio on the aircraft. Not directly. There’s frequency monitoring equipment, but that’s routed back to here. We always just speak to the pilot.”

  Miranda stepped through the door and Director Winston followed her in.

  She pointed to the pilot’s console.

  “Then do what you’re here for. Take control of the flight and return it here.” No one else should die. If she had her way, not a single person would ever die in an aircraft ever again.

  “I can…try.” The pilot sat down at his console and flicked a switch, which lit up a Controls Active sign above his station, but he didn’t put his hands on the controls.

  “Do it!” Harrington shouted while glaring at her, but whether it was anger at her or at the situation, she couldn’t tell. Then he turned back to the displays.

  They watched the emergency pilot “try.” They all did.

  “He’s fighting me. He doesn’t want to release control.”

  “Cut the goddamn connection,” Drake suggested.

  “Sir, you can’t—”

  Harrington took the two steps to the chair and pulled the plug.

  Major Maxwelton screamed.

  Not some cry of rage.

  Not fear.

  It was the unholy scream of a doomed man, knowing he was going to hell.

  Miranda had heard it most nights in her dreams for over twenty years.

  It was the cry of her parents as they fell from the sky.

  Her nerves knew every note of that sound, cut straight from her own soul.

  Her father’s name ripped at her throat. Unable to contain it, Miranda echoed the major’s scream—as she lost her parents all over again.

  69

  “Miranda? Come on, mate. It’s okay. Come on back.”

  Miranda opened her eyes and looked up into Holly’s. She lay in a sterile, uninviting office on a hard sofa.

  “You still with us?”

  “I seem to be. What happened?” And then she remembered, all too clearly. “The pilot. Did we…” Holly’s expression said they hadn’t.

  “They sedated him,” Mike leaned over Holly’s shoulder.

  “Never heard a sound like that in my life,” Jeremy sat perched on the sofa arm by her feet. “One of you was bad, but the two of you together? It was like some kind of psycho harmony. We could hear you both right out on the hangar floor. You screamed your dad Sam’s name before you fainted. Was it because they died in that crash?”

  “Your parents went down in a plane?” Holly looked her. “Harsh. No wonder you’re such a smashing NTSB investigator.”

  “TWA 800,” Jeremy answered for her before she could speak.

  Miranda sat up to see Clark Winston sitting in one of the office chairs. Neither of the generals were around.

  “Where…”

  “They’re debriefing Clarissa. Finding out what missions she’s done,” Clark answered. “Nason has grounded the program. Permanently, I expect.”

  “And you don’t know what she did?”

  “I find it works for me to surround myself with the very best people and then trust them.”

  Miranda assimilated that as she inspected Mike, Holly, and Jeremy. How to know who to trust? She had no information to go on; perhaps because she’d asked no questions.

  “How were you all assigned to my team?”

  Holly shrugged. “I’m guessing I was the closest structural specialist with sufficient clearance.”

  “It just came through as a standard call-up for me, too,” Mike held up his phone.

  “Because dreams can come true,” Jeremy said completely seriously.

  “Aww! I knew you were sweet on me,” Holly hugged him sideways.

  “No, I meant…” but he was blushing too brightly to speak further.

  Clark was leaning forward to study her intently. “TWA 800 was a major loss,” he spoke as if testing the words.

  “A 747’s worth of loss,” Miranda managed and gratefully took the cold can of Coke that Mike offered her. She cooled her forehead against the chill metal before opening it to drink.

  “Damn. You’re Sam Chase’s kid? I never connected that you were their daughter. The major loss I’m referring to was your parents.”

  She bobbled the can and only Holly’s quick grab kept her from pouring it all over herself.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Most of this,” Clark waved a hand about them, “is their doing.”

  Miranda could usually collate and organize disparate facts quickly and accurately in her mind; it was a survival mechanism. At the moment she was having trouble classifying what Clark was saying as individual words.

  “Were they able to save the drone?” It was the most relevant question she could formulate.

  Holly shook her head. “Apparently, when the local pilot attempted to grab control, there was a struggle. Broke something at high Mach speeds. The remote setup on this is pretty dicey anyway as they didn’t load it up with a lot of the autonomous controls. They really depended on the wired-in pilot’s autonomic nervous system. The remote pilot was able to dump it in the Cayman Trough. Water’s about five klicks deep there and he was still supersonic when he punched the water, so not much left to find even if anyone ever went down there to look.”

  “Oh. Okay.” She filed that piece of information to the side. There was still one other drone, but it was parked safely in the hangar. She could see it out the office window.

  Mike was looking at her strangely, but she ignored him.

  “My parents?” Miranda turned back to Clark, finally able to face the words.

  “Fine agents. They—”

  “No. Not agents. They were consultants for…” except she didn’t know who for. “Some university…like MIT?” Why didn’t she know this?

  “That would be MITRE Corporation. It was formed out of Lincoln Laboratory at MIT. They’re one of the top consulting firms on military safety technologies. MITRE designed and built the nation’s air traffic control system. A bunch of other projects. Your parents ultimately came over to the CIA. They were part of the team working with Abraham Karem.”

  “The father of drone technology,” Jeremy said with awe. “The Predator was his. It grew right out of Amber. The first reliably functional drone.”

  “Her parents,” Clark nodded to Jeremy, “were running field tests for him on developing the Predator. I did a rotation through there, but never had a chance to really know them. I was just security then, whereas they were the heart of a CIA team that had been running the Gnat-750—”

  “The successor to the Amber,” Jeremy shoehorned in.

  “—over Bosnia,” Clark continued unflappably. “By the time your parents went down, I was embedded in the Middle East as a ground scout for the drone te
ams. They were flying over to review possible Israeli secure launch facilities for deploying the Predators into the area, and I was supposed to meet up with them.”

  “No,” the word came out. It was a short, simple word. Two letters and she no longer understood its meaning even though she’d spoken it herself.

  “No,” she tried it again.

  Miranda could feel the scream building inside her once more, but fought it back down by pure willpower.

  She was losing her parents all over again.

  Not to some memory dredged up by the pilot’s scream.

  This time, to them not being who she’d always thought, always known they were.

  “My parents were going to Paris early to wait for me,” her voice hurt as she spoke.

  “To spend a week scouting in Israel with me before you flew in to join them,” Clark added.

  “Israel? No.” There was that word again that didn’t seem to have as much power as she’d always thought it had. “Paris.”

  But had there been a through-ticket to Tel Aviv? Why would she know? Tante Daniels, her governess, would have handled those kinds of details. We’ll fly over to join your parents, she’d said. First stop, Paris.

  Miranda had always assumed that had meant they’d all meet up there. Stay in France. Apparently not. With her parents dead off the shores of Long Island, there was no need for Tante Daniels to say more. With her parents dead on TWA 800, there’d been no need to ask.

  “MITRE?”

  “Originally. We all three ended up in the CIA.”

  “Kryptos.” No wonder her father had been so fascinated by Kryptos. He’d seen it. He’d worked there. As had Mother. Her mother didn’t have the head for codes, so that had been something her father shared with his daughter.

  “Yes. First thing he talked about when I met him. Guess he spent a lot of his spare time trying to solve it.”

  “No, we did. It was a constant game for us.” And Miranda missed it now more than ever. “I still work on the unsolved fourth panel when I have time.”

  “Ms. Chase. I’ll see that you get a security pass to study the original anytime you wish.”