Drone

by M. L. Buchman

  “American football,” Holly corrected him. “Football is either soccer, rugby, or maybe Australian rules football if you’re a neo from—”

  “A sports reference,” Mike wasn’t to be outdone. “After scoring a touchdown, a football player may throw the ball at the ground.”

  “Why? No, never mind.” Miranda narrowed her eyes at the model—which didn’t help at all. She set it to loop, less than five seconds from the beginning of the plummet until the last major piece of the wreckage settled in its final resting place. It took so little time to destroy a seventy-thousand-pound aircraft.

  “The pilot never stood a chance,” Mike sounded grim. Which meant he’d been a pilot, or was one. Or perhaps he just had empathy. Whatever the reason, he was correct. They could definitely cross pilot error off the list. A decision that always made site investigations much more difficult.

  “Your analogy has merit, Mike. Some force did indeed throw the plane down very hard. As this Hercules was indeed powered by four T56s and not four GE90s, we need to find that force.”

  “So, you’re saying that it didn’t stall?”

  The others laughed at Holly’s wry tone.

  She couldn’t find any humor in it herself. All she could see was the plane falling out of the sky. It was so different from what had happened to her parents’ plane, but she couldn’t look away from the cycling image.

  TWA Flight 800 had departed JFK for Paris on the evening of July 17, 1996. Twelve minutes and twelve seconds from wheels-up to the plane-killing explosion eight miles out to sea from East Moriches, Long Island, New York. The detonation had shattered the plane at the leading edge of the wing—so forcibly that the seven hundred and thirty-six confirmed witnesses ashore had reported a sonic boom despite the distance.

  A spark from faulty wiring in an overheated and near-empty section of fuel tank had destroyed the 747 in midair.

  The nose, including First Class where her parents would have been, broke off from the rest of the plane. While the headless fuselage had burned and climbed another three thousand feet on uncontrolled, runaway engines before stalling and plunging downward, the nose of the 747 had tumbled thirteen thousand feet down to the ocean. The best simulations said it had taken them eighty-three to ninety-seven seconds to fall.

  Had they died instantly or survived only to die on impact? Or perhaps they drowned in their seats as the nose sank?

  Unlike the 747’s occupants, the C-130 pilots plunged to their deaths with too little time to even panic. They’d been dead less than two seconds after LOC-I—loss of control in-flight. They’d been beyond ever feeling pain again within the first tenth of a second after impact.

  There. The nose of the C-130 hit top first and crumpled under the thirty-five tons of aircraft that had made certain of their fate. Safely dead.

  No question of whether they’d burned on the way down or had time to take each other’s hands. Maybe one of her parents had died and the other survived long enough to know.

  To understand.

  Long enough for regrets?

  She knew all about regrets.

  Why hadn’t she been on that flight?

  Because horse riding camp wasn’t out. She and her governess, Tanya Daniels, were to fly over to Paris the next week. Horse camp had kept her from dying as she was supposed to. Instead Tanya had become Tante (Yiddish for ‘aunt’) and raised the grieving child Miranda had become.

  Jeremy shut down the looping projection, but still Miranda could only see the broken fuselage of the 747, tumbling from the sky over twenty years ago. End-over-end or nose-first all the way down? All the medical examiner’s report had told her was that the initial whiplash of the explosion, which had mercifully broken the necks of all except nineteen of the passengers, hadn’t killed her parents. Nor had fire. No other conclusions were possible.

  A hand rested on her shoulder and squeezed firmly. She forced herself to shake off the image. Only Tante Daniels knew about her past. Only she…

  Except Tante wasn’t here at Creech Air Force Base.

  Miranda followed the hand on her shoulder up an arm to a face.

  “Holly,” she managed to breathe it out on a whisper.

  “You okay, boss?”

  She managed a nod—which was a complete lie.

  “Okay,” Holly covered for her by breaking up Jeremy’s explanations to Mike about force dynamics. “We know what we’re looking for now. Mike, start with the general. See if you can cajole the flight data recorder out of him.”

  “Local airport radar information as well,” Miranda managed to find part of her way back from where she’d slid.

  “Right,” Holly still kept the anchoring comfort of her hand on Miranda’s shoulder. “Jeremy, you and I will start on structural evidence to corroborate the model. Miranda—”

  “I’m going to Washington.”

  Jeremy looked surprised, then terribly disappointed that she was leaving so soon.

  Miranda should stay and oversee the investigation, but she suspected that Holly could handle it from here as well as she could.

  Besides, there were some things this team wasn’t cleared for.

  Miranda wanted to retreat to her home north of Seattle. She wanted the peace of the quiet island where she could be alone with the eagles who nested there and the reminders of her parents.

  But Miranda feared that it was the other Washington where she would have to visit first to find some answers—like what had happened to the flight data recorder, because it was practically guaranteed that Mike wouldn’t be able to get it no matter how charming he was.

  She wondered what she herself wasn’t cleared for.

  14

  “We started with an fMRI helmet,” the doctor told him.

  He hadn’t offered his name and Harvey hadn’t asked.

  “But were unable to achieve the minimum response times required. Scalp-mounted EEG electrodes lacked the necessary accuracy. Directly implanted electrodes proved to be the solution.”

  Harvey tried not to squirm. He was sitting in a chair not all that different from an electric chair and he had to hope that he wasn’t about to be executed. His arms and legs were fully immobilized in padded clamps. His head was secured against movement in a rig that would be claustrophobic to anyone not used to a modern Air Force pilot’s helmet. And the back of his head was bare for the surgeon to access.

  He wanted to tell the doc to just shut the hell up and do it before he lost his nerve. But that might disqualify him. He had no idea what the rules were here, and twenty years in the Air Force had taught him that most basic rule: When in doubt, keep your trap shut.

  Because they needed him conscious for the procedure, he’d thought having Helen present would help—it didn’t. She was in her professional Colonel Hard-ass mode—making it hard to lose himself in stray thoughts about her body.

  Last night had been different. It hadn’t been hot sex or even just an amazing snuggle—Colonel Helen Thomas was the queen of the sexy snuggle.

  And it wasn’t just sating their bodies either.

  Helen had talked, for the first time she’d really talked about herself. Even as she teased him with those fine fingers and quick tongue or settled against him in postcoital bliss, she’d spoken of dreams. Of honoring her father by joining the military. Of the woman who’d been denied combat pilot flight because of her gender and how that had destroyed the girl’s dream of becoming an astronaut pilot—they were all former jet jocks.

  Her interest in going aloft as a female mission specialist?

  Even less than his.

  They were both pilots first in their blood; she’d been denied even that.

  He hadn’t known that space was one of their shared dreams. He’d allowed himself a brief fantasy about meeting her in the astronaut program and getting to be the first couple to do it in space. Not so much. Besides, it had already been done plenty.

  Harvey wanted to take her aloft in one of the T-38 trainers and give her that supersonic fli
ght. Maybe even have some hot intercom sex at Mach speeds and a dozen miles up. Except he couldn’t do that either because of his ear.

  She talked through most of the night as if in a hurry to tell him everything. That worried him some…more than some. But he sure wasn’t going to ask what she knew that made her that way.

  Harrington had said she was cleared for all aspects of the program.

  He rather suspected that he himself wasn’t, and he really didn’t want to know what that shit was. He just wanted to fly.

  Helen had even talked about how her husband was a good, reliable man who’d provided her with a teenage son and daughter and been a good father to both. He was also a jock type with little imagination who thought that the physical act was all there was to sex. Last night there’d been so much more that they’d barely slept. Until last night, maybe he hadn’t really known either.

  But there’d been no wake-up sex this morning. She’d simply held him in silence for a long time before going to the shower alone. The bird colonel had been the woman who’d stepped out of the bathroom. He could respect that, even if he didn’t like the thoroughness of the transition—not so much as a good morning kiss.

  She’d left while he was in the shower.

  As he sat strapped into the chair with his back toward the doctor, Harvey liked Helen’s worried look even less.

  “Hey,” he called out. “It’s not like it’s brain surgery.”

  It earned him a half laugh from her. It would have been encouraging if the other half hadn’t sounded like a choke of worry.

  “Oh, but it is,” the doc destroyed the moment. “While I have developed techniques that allow us to implant the probes without opening your skull, nonetheless, I shall be planting the electrodes directly upon the surface of your cranial folds in such a manner—”

  “Just shut the fuck up and do it, okay, doc? I’m not the kind of guy who wants the details.”

  The man harrumphed at not being allowed to fully explain his brilliant techniques to the nth degree. Pissing off the dude about to fish around inside his brain wasn’t smart, but no one had ever accused Harvey of that.

  All he knew how to do was fly and that had always been enough.

  He’d been told that the brain didn’t have the pain-sensing kind of nerves and that they’d given him a local anesthetic for the point of entry at the base of his skull, but he swore that he could feel the hair-thin wires and tiny sensing electrodes being guided into place—scraping along in the inside curve of his skull in arcing trajectories to land all over his brain like one of those nuclear warheads slamming down all over the earth. It was a good thing they had his head clamped into place so that he couldn’t twitch and accidentally lobotomize himself.

  “Think about turning left. No! Don’t move your hands. Just think about the sensation of the turn itself. Good. Good. Now right. Excellent! Up… Down… This is very good; you catch on quickly. The other pilots have not proven so rapidly adaptable.”

  Other pilots? The general had hurried him along fast enough that he’d given no thought to the other pilots. He probably should have asked to meet them first, not that it would’ve changed his mind. He had been introduced to the two people maintaining the returned MQ-45 that he’d refueled less than twelve hours ago over the Bering Sea. Their knowledge, and security clearances, were limited to aircraft maintenance.

  The moment he’d touched the Casper’s skin, Harvey just knew that they were made for each other. The texture was smooth, but it wasn’t. It was like very fine sandpaper, the surface broken into a thousand, a million tiny reflective surfaces—none of which lined up. Any radar signal wasn’t just deflected by the skin, it scattered with no strong return to the receiver. The hangar lights hadn’t been visible as even a brighter spot on the hull, never mind a reflection. It seemed to eat the light as easily as it ate the sky.

  The doc kept giving him commands and he continued thinking them until he could feel himself once more in his F-15E Strike Eagle. Not “left rudder” but rather that slightly sickly sliding sensation of uncorrected yaw. Not just “down,” but down with that high-in-the-nose fullness like when pulling a negative-g dive that increased the blood pressure to the head.

  Helen left as they started working on his optic nerves—bright, dark, spectrum of color, …—and Harvey could simply give himself to the process.

  In between each instruction, while the doc was doing Harvey-didn’t-want-to-know-what, he lectured Harvey on the details of his “brilliant” techniques anyway. Polysyllabic nightmares like electrocorticography and intracranial extraoperative electroencephalography swirled together with skin heat (a critical awareness factor in supersonic operations where hull temperatures could easily exceed a thousand degrees Fahrenheit) and “reach down with your toes like when you can’t see the next step in a wide-spaced ladder” (for lowering the landing gear).

  The last and largest piece that the doc inserted was a one-inch subdermal disk tucked through the tiny incision—“Like a model ship unfolding inside a bottle. Have you ever seen it done? No? A fascinating procedure.” He tucked it in the area behind Harvey’s right ear.

  “This has the same material density and pliability as your skin. You will be convinced that you can feel it like a piece of iron, but you will be wrong. Once the cut heals,” he flapped a small Band-Aid in front of Harvey’s eyes to make a point of just how fine his work was, “even a lover can press on your skin and won’t be able to feel it.”

  Harvey wondered if the doc knew about Helen and him, and whether or not he’d just earned a sharp punch in that arrogant nose.

  “You’ll be convinced that you can, but you’ll be wrong. This will pass in a few days. Except post-mission sensitivity. It isn’t real, it’s psychosomatic. The other pilots say that after a flight it feels like there’s a ‘hole in your body.’ I believe that is their crass term. Load of poppycock.”

  As if the doc would actually know. Harvey would trust his unknown fellow pilots on this one, but even if they were right, anything was worth the price as long as he could again feel like he was flying.

  “When you interface with the craft, we will place a small adhesive disk directly over this subdermal implant. It will read your brain pulses accurately through the skin without any pain or sensation.”

  “When can I fly?”

  “The Band-Aid is off to one side and won’t interfere,” General Harrington circled into view while they unstrapped him from the chair.

  Had he been there long enough to see the fear that Helen had been so poor at hiding? Perhaps the general had signaled her to leave without Harvey noticing. It made him feel more kindly toward the man.

  “Let’s go try the simulator before I give you a hundred-million-dollar aircraft,” the general’s words wiped away all other concerns.

  Harvey shoved out of the surgeon’s chair. He forced himself to turn and thank the doc, rather than clock him a good one, just in case he needed any more work done on his brain.

  A second basic Air Force rule: Never fuck with The Man, no matter how much of an ass he was.

  15

  Las Vegas to DC. It had taken Miranda almost exactly twenty-four hours to reach the same place in the sky where the first plane had been turned around—just north of Santa Fe.

  This time she was aboard a 737-800 in a standard 162-seat two-class configuration. In seat 2A as she preferred. It was directly in line with the pilot and also the same seat her mother had sat in on TWA 800. Mother had always enjoyed the window seat and it had been a merry game between them about whose turn it was to sit there.

  Miranda also liked the idea of riding close behind the captain of the aircraft who would be the one doing everything possible to save the aircraft if there was a problem. And, if she was going to die, she liked the symmetry of doing so in the same seat as her mother.

  Miranda struggled to keep her hands calm when the flight attendant approached her seat, but thankfully all she wanted this time was to know if Miranda would like
a mimosa with breakfast service. Knowing that it was very unlikely she’d be flying as pilot in the next eight hours, she accepted a glass.

  Her seatmate was a slouchy teen in shredded three-hundred-dollar jeans and practically hardwired into her phone. That left Miranda in blessed silence. The clean sound of the engines’ roar was her primary accompaniment.

  Could a cracked fan blade be heard before it broke free and shredded one of the engines?

  How was the creak of the fuselage passing through a temperature gradient or even an air pocket distinct from the squeak-and-squeal of a failing skin seam?

  At least with the 787 Dreamliner, Boeing had started working with single-piece-composite fuselage-barrel construction, which vastly reduced the number of possible failure points—though that introduced the new concern of possible delamination of the composite.

  But the Dreamliners were mainly deployed on long-range transoceanic routes, which had other issues for her ever since TWA 800 had gone down in the Atlantic.

  She resisted the urge to make a decision tree of the dangers versus flight selection in her notebook. Instead, she accepted the orange juice and champagne drink and used that to keep her hands still while she considered her options.

  In DC she couldn’t approach the Chairman of the NTSB. Like the rest of the five-member board, he was a political appointee and not cleared for military flight investigations. He could know that she was assigned to one, and even where, but Clarence Duffy didn’t have sufficient security clearance to know what she did or discovered.

  Only two lead investigators had sufficient clearance for her to speak to.

  Even though he was ten years her junior, every time she saw Rafe Zachmann, he joked that she must marry him so that they could have little Top Secret Investigator-in-Charge children. At least she assumed it was a tease. Unable to be certain, she did her best not to be in DC at the same time as Rafe.

  Terence Graham was old guard. Rafe was always teasing him in meetings to remind them again which of the Ancient Greek wars he’d fought in. Back in the day, he’d probably been the first black IIC, but he never confirmed that any more than his service in the Peloponnesian or Trojan wars. Forty years in, he knew more about how aircraft flew and how they died than most people knew about their own clothes closet.