Drone

by M. L. Buchman

  Harrington gave him the standard “Yeah, right” look that came from overconfidence.

  Drake was running out of humor with this whole situation; he’d been up for two days and his assistant had been burning up the secure comm channel about a devolving situation in Hong Kong and another in Azerbaijan. And he was in Nevada with a pissed off CIA director and his uncontrollable lover.

  “Failure to inform a superior officer of developing situations. Attacking a friendly foreign national—China is still on the friendly list.”

  “I didn’t know what they intended—”

  “Interference with an official crash investigation.”

  “I didn’t blow up the goddamn—”

  “I was referring to the removal and return of the flight recorders, which were not destroyed in the bombing as someone hoped, by the way.” He wondered what Clarissa Reese’s reaction to that bit of news might be. “Confiscation of the NTSB’s data and samples.”

  “Wait, what? That wasn’t me.”

  Then it was the CIA, whom he’d deal with later. “At the moment you should just be glad I don’t want you hung, Harrington. I’d give you three-to-one odds that it wouldn’t be hard to prove treason if I put my mind to it.”

  Winston and Reese came down the plane’s steps.

  “These are CIA Director Clark Winston and Director of Special Projects for him, Clarissa Reese.”

  Harrington didn’t return Reese’s haughty nod. Clearly they already knew each other; only time would tell how well. Maybe Harrington was finally being careful.

  Director Clark Winston did his man-of-the-people thing and made a shot at getting Harrington started on baseball, “Spotted the field as we came in.”

  Drake cut him off. “Where’s the rest of my team?”

  Harrington just pointed aloft.

  The desert sunset was moving fast, but the last of the sunlight aloft illuminated a small cluster of aircraft. A small general aviation plane entered the field’s flight pattern, closely followed by…

  “Is that an F-86 Sabrejet?”

  “That’s what my escort pilot tells me.” An F-18 trailed along, close behind the pair.

  “These are not military combatants. They’re members of the NTSB team.”

  “Who I’ve already met, yes sir. They come onto my base in a fighter jet, I’m going to damn well be ready to shoot them out of the sky.”

  Which Drake had to admit made sense even if the jet was over sixty years old. Air Force thinking rather than his more deeply ingrained Army thinking? He’d have to talk to now-General Gray about that and see if he was shortchanging the other military branches in ways he didn’t even realize.

  He almost laughed. How fast had she earned his trust and respect? “Pretty damn!” as his granddaughter was fond of saying. He was definitely looking forward to that dinner.

  They all stood and waited until the others had joined them. The pilot of the light plane made a respectable if not elegant landing. The Sabrejet smacked down on the numbers as neatly as any seasoned fighter jock nailing a carrier landing—a skill he’d always marveled at whenever he was in a position to witness it. Who on Miranda’s team…

  Then Miranda Chase glided the Sabrejet to a stop close beside them and popped the canopy.

  He stepped over to help her down. “You fly well, Miranda.”

  “Yes, I do. General Harrington, I’m ready to see the drone now.”

  Drake had learned to just go with the flow around Miranda. She was one very focused woman.

  “No you’re not. That’s classified. What drone?”

  “Last warning, Harrington,” Drake was really sick of the man. “We’re not here for a dog-and-pony show about aliens.” The man finally sagged.

  “There are aliens here?” The pilot from the other plane stepped up. Despite having landed first, he was much less adroit at taxiing and had only just parked. “Hi, I’m Mike Munroe. Human operations investigator for Miranda. My dad and I were really hooked on Area 51 stuff.”

  “Get a grip, Mikey. We’re in the real world now.” A lovely blonde with a bright Aussie accent stepped up beside him. She was everything that Clarissa Reese wasn’t. Casual, unstudied, and she radiated an easy confidence. “Holly Harper. Formerly in the Oz SAS, now in the Queen’s service,” she bowed deeply to Miranda. Which earned her a laugh from everyone—except Miranda, who shuffled uncertainly from foot to foot, and Clarissa, who just looked as if she hated everyone.

  “Guys,” the young Vietnamese man practically shouted. “Do you realize the kind of gear they’ve prototyped and based here? Not just nuclear bombs, but the U-2, the SR-71 Blackbird. Can you imagine the sound of those rolling right down this runway on their way to go spy on Russia? Pow! Right over the North Pole at a hundred thousand feet going Mach 3. And that’s before planes went Mach 3 like it was something normal. The F-117 Nighthawk, the first-ever stealth bird, and—”

  “You have to forgive him. Jeremy’s our local genius,” Holly cut him off. “He’s cute, so we keep him around and feed him doggie biscuits and pat him on the head.” She then did just that, though Jeremy didn’t appear to notice.

  “Is that the new Ultra-wide Band Synthetic-aperture radar I saw at the head of the dry lake? Have you gotten around the power limitations compared to multi-baseline interferometry? Oh, an acoustic weapons testing platform, sweet. I’d love to check that out if you’d let me. Acoustics is fascinating from a weather dynamics perspective. I’ve read all of the available public information on those and I think that you guys are really missing some tricks.”

  At first, Drake had let him and the others prattle on because he wanted to get a feel for Miranda’s team. Reese and Winston’s eyes were glazing over with frustration, another bonus. But he suddenly had the feeling that he should be taking notes.

  “It’s not just directed sonics. There’s untapped capacity in phase manipulation. You guys should really get into that; I wrote a couple papers on it in college. Do you have a railgun out here? Always wanted to see one fire. Did you know the air around the projectiles actually burns from the heat of passage? I’ve forgotten where you’re testing those. Oh wait, that’s the Navy in Virginia. Never mind.”

  “Down, boy. Down,” Holly made as if to reach for his arm.

  For some reason, Jeremy snatched it to his chest protectively.

  “See? He can learn.”

  Jeremy started to speak again, but Holly reached toward him once more.

  “Cut that out, will you?”

  Again she made a show of patting him on the head as he clutched his arm protectively.

  Drake found it easy to like Miranda’s people.

  Then they went silent as Miranda repeated her first words from before all the merry mayhem.

  “General Harrington, I’m ready to see the drone now.”

  64

  Miranda sat in the back of the van with Holly as they drove down the empty stretch of the field.

  They’d parked their jets and the Mooney by one of the hangars near the main base that ran from midfield, then north along the west side of the runway. Even as they were driving away, the aircraft were being rolled out of sight into a big hangar despite the descending darkness.

  The van was currently driving their group over a mile to a lone hangar at the far south end of the field.

  “Here,” Holly pulled out her tablet and began whispering to her quickly. “Here’s the data they loaded onto the CVDR.”

  “They tampered with—” Miranda couldn’t even speak. Nobody tampered with black boxes. That defeated the whole purpose of gathering the information in the first place. The displayed profile was the already disproven Stall Scenario.

  “Jeremy was a good boy and found this deleted profile.” Holly flicked to the next screen.

  Miranda didn’t even need to scan it. She could see by the pattern of the numbers that it was almost exactly as she’d predicted and witnessed on the tapes. She nodded for Holly to keep moving; they were already halfway to th
e remote hangar.

  Mike was making a point of having a loud conversation about aliens with Jeremy, who sat immediately ahead of her and Holly. An eighty-decibel noise masker. Well done.

  “And this,” Holly flashed to the next screen.

  The route out of Mexico was of no consequence to her.

  “Before the stop on a Mexico beach, there were only three voices aboard.”

  Miranda wondered why Holly was bringing it up. No amount of sand ingestion could have resulted in the flight profile caused by the passage of the drone.

  “After the pickup, there were five voices, two of whom spoke in Mandarin.”

  She hadn’t told Holly anything about the Chinese flight imagery that she still had on her own computer.

  “The guards became very itchy whenever any of us explored the rear of the aircraft just forward of the loading ramp hinge point. Here are a series of images I took there.”

  Miranda flicked through them quickly. The damage was remarkable. It was so severe that she’d lost a clear impression of it in just the last thirty-six hours. Holly’s records brought it back with stark clarity.

  “I can’t take all the credit. Jeremy did a bunch of this.”

  “And what did Mike do?”

  “He kept the guards off our backs. Even made friends with one of them, which may have saved our lives. Wouldn’t have been too surprised if they would have just cleared out and left us there to be blown to shit otherwise. He also helped us figure out what was going on in the recording.”

  Miranda pulled up the Chinese image sequence and started the playback, holding the tablet so that only Holly could see it. Miranda traced the drone’s path until Holly whistled softly in surprise.

  “They thought it was a reflection.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “It doesn’t shift with the sun.”

  Holly watched a while longer, then nudged her shoulder into Miranda’s. “Serious fair dinkum, girlfriend. Serious.”

  Miranda already knew she was right, but Holly didn’t seem to be stating the obvious either. A compliment perhaps?

  “So, this drone can do some serious shit,” Holly shut down and stowed her tablet as they pulled up to the massive hangar. “Can’t wait to see the little bugger.”

  Miranda didn’t share her enthusiasm.

  She’d seen the faulty wiring harness that had killed TWA 800, both the rebuilt shreds and the new one Boeing had supplied as part of the investigation. Seeing the final thing that killed planes always brought up a deep churn of sadness that she only held back with a hard struggle.

  As the van drove up to the hangar, the massive doors parted sideways like a set of shark jaws preparing to eat them alive.

  65

  “You’re just in time to see this.” Rather than rolling into the hangar, Harrington stopped the van.

  A long thin needle of an aircraft slipped out into the night—at the first moment it could take off unobserved.

  Miranda, along with the others, pressed her face to the window, trying to see it better as it rolled by.

  “That’s seriously next-level,” Jeremy was the first to recover his voice.

  “Yes,” Clarissa Reese sounded pleased. “Mach 2.9 capable. Supercruise at 2.1. Ten-thousand-mile range and that includes fifty percent of the flight at supercruise. Up to twenty-four hour loiter time on site at subsonic speeds. We can—”

  “Shut up, Clarissa.” Director Clark Winston’s tone was flat and harsh.

  Miranda glanced at Holly, who, with a barely visible shrug, suggested she didn’t know what to make of it either. Again, Mike would, but she couldn’t ask with everyone right there in the van.

  “And the reason that I don’t know about this?” General Nason snapped out.

  Clarissa started to speak, but Clark cut her off again.

  Harrington finally spoke as they watched the drone disappear into the dark. There was only the softest rumble as it took off. “Compartmentalized need-to-know. It’s DARPA work.”

  “And because I’m just the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I don’t need to know what the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is up to. Internet, stealth, killer drones, and now stealth killer drones. One step closer to the edge, Harrington.”

  From the back, Miranda couldn’t see Drake’s face but, silhouetted by the light spilling from the still open hangar door, she could tell he was facing the CIA people. “You two have a great deal to answer for.”

  “Not to you, we don’t!” Clarissa snapped out.

  Clark’s sigh was audible.

  “No, Clark,” Clarissa rounded on him. “We don’t reveal our sources when we have a spy undercover. Not to the press and not to Army generals with delusions of grandeur.”

  “Clark,” Drake said calmly. “Tell your division director that if she speaks to me again without a specific instruction, I’ll have her rendered into one of the torture centers she used to run and see how she enjoys what they hand out.”

  He paused for a long moment, but no one else spoke.

  “Clark, your undercover spies don’t cost a hundred million dollars of military assets and threaten to destabilize global peace.”

  “Peace? You call this peace? This isn’t even détente anymore,” Clarissa refused to be silenced, raising her voice until it rang in the van. “This is asymmetric technologic warfare. If we aren’t at the cutting edge, we’re dead. Why do you think DARPA was founded?”

  While she wasn’t wrong, Miranda would never have said it in so antagonistic a way to a four-star general.

  Drake opened the passenger door and stepped out. Sliding open the side door, he grabbed Clarissa’s arm and yanked her from the van. She struggled, but was ineffective as he marched her over to the two armed guards standing by the hangar door, watching the night.

  Through the open van door, she could hear Drake’s instructions.

  “Take Ms. Reese to a secure conference room. Do not speak to her. Do not let her make any phone calls or speak to anyone else. If she won’t behave, you have my permission to tie her to a chair and gag her.” He pushed her into their arms and turned his back on her.

  As they dragged her off, he waved the van into the hangar. The big door-jaws closed behind them and they climbed out onto the hangar floor.

  He snapped at Harrington, “Show us this damn thing.”

  66

  Zhang Ru sat with Chen Mei-Li in the Chrysanthemum courtyard of the Mei Fu restaurant in Beijing. As it was one of the finest restaurants in the entire capital, he’d told her to purchase a dress of classic elegance.

  She had exceeded his expectations.

  Ru found his eyes returning to her time after time.

  A high-necked black dress was elegantly embroidered with scenes of imperial-era serenity. Her long hair, up in a simple swirled bun pinned in place by meticulously inlaid chopsticks. The teardrop of skin exposed just below her clavicle made him want to grab there and tear the dress from her body to take her.

  Yet in another way, she was so sophisticated that she almost looked untouchable.

  Seated here in the converted royal home of a Qing Dynasty prince’s wife, she…belonged. The home was decorated throughout with the art and belongings of the greatest opera dan singer of them all, Mei Lanfang. The man had portrayed women for over forty years, refused to perform for the Japanese despite their harsh punishments during the WWII occupation, then ultimately became master of the Beijing Opera itself. Waterfalls and fluttering velvet drapes separated the four courtyards.

  All the elegance of a time that had not survived Mao’s Great Leap Forward was embodied in the girl in this place.

  “You are perfect.”

  She tipped her head in a regal nod.

  “The man who is joining us for lunch, you must impress him, Mei-Li. It’s important.”

  “Yes, Uncle Ru.” She even said the title dutifully as if she truly was his kin. The barest flicker of her eyes warned him of Zuocheng’s approach.

  �
�And how are your computer studies going?” He’d let her enroll in university as long as it didn’t interfere with his schedule.

  “I am at the top of my class, Uncle Ru,” she replied loudly enough to be overheard, but with a humbleness that was indeed admirable.

  “As you should be. As you should be. Ah,” he turned to Zuocheng as he reached the table. “Greetings, my old friend. It’s been too long. I’m so glad you could join me. I hope you don’t mind that I asked my niece along. She works hard at school and I fear my second cousin does too little to reward her efforts. Perhaps because she is the youngest.”

  He’d risen to shake Zuocheng’s hand like an equal, but kept his words about the girl.

  “Mei-Li, this is the great General Li Zuocheng of whom I have told you so much.”

  He’d told her every detail he could recall through the night, starting with him and Zuocheng bunking together during in-flight training and both flying in the Sino-Vietnamese War. It had created a bond that had lasted through the four decades since.

  The girl had asked many probing questions, indicating that she was as thoughtful as she was beautiful.

  Mei-Li had risen from her chair and, keeping her hands clasped low in front of her, a position that emphasized her form and the beauty of her dress, she bowed her head in a greeting that flowed from her natural grace.

  Her trainers at the national gymnastics center had taught her well.

  He hadn’t decided yet whether to let Zuocheng have her or to withhold her services as a tantalizing toy to dangle in front of him. That was but one thing of the many that would depend on how the lunch went.

  Zuocheng bowed respectfully in greeting rather than merely nodding before taking his seat at the table.

  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.