Condor

by M. L. Buchman

  Holly pointed at the hole; she understood, of course. “The tanks used to be right there. Notice which way the metal’s bent—outward. I’d estimate…”

  Miranda watched as Holly stared at the blackened ceiling, which had once been the deck, for less than five seconds.

  “I’d estimate two kilos, four-to-five pounds of C-4 or Semtex might do this if it was a shaped charge. That’s probably what happened to Mr. Bones over there. The charge would have been directly under his bunk.”

  “This is the point of origin,” Miranda repeated. Holly smiled, somehow understanding that Miranda had meant it as a compliment and a conclusion at the same time.

  “I’ll be damned.” Jon looked at his watch. “That’s incredible.”

  Miranda was fairly sure that he didn’t mean his watch was incredible as he had been wearing it since the moment she’d first seen him.

  “Not quite there yet, mate,” Holly corrected him.

  Miranda couldn’t think of what was missing.

  Holly put on a pair of blue nitrile gloves and began sorting through the debris piled around the bones. She plucked a small clump of charred paper from the remains of a clenched hand. Holly riffled to the middle of it, revealing a few unburnt images. It took Miranda a moment to realize that it was a photograph of a naked pair of woman’s breasts and just enough of her torso to show how outsized they were.

  “Catching up on his technical reading,” Holly said in an extra-thick Australian tone that Miranda had learned meant she was joking.

  She appreciated the clear, tonal indicator and decided that it was also a better joke than the one-handed pilot’s. Perhaps not worth a laugh, but funnier.

  Holly continued her sorting through the detritus, then held up a small twist of wire attached to a bit of electronics. She made a “hmm” sound as she placed it in a small evidence bag.

  “A Bluetooth or Wi-Fi receiver, maybe. Which poses the question—what total dingus set and triggered it? Unless Mr. Bones piled in the corner there was a suicide bomber, it was triggered to happen precisely on landing.”

  Right. Miranda was always forgetting about the people part. Holly was right; it was now time to move to the last sphere.

  21

  “You’re kidding?” General Drake Nason, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff stopped what he was doing and looked over his desk at General Elizabeth Gray.

  He’d learned about her sense of humor over the last few months. In private, “Lizzy” displayed a deep sense of humor. Her idea of a belly laugh was a bright smile—quickly covered with a hand. It was a quiet sense of humor, but it was definitely there.

  But at work? There, “Elizabeth” had the sense of humor of a rock—a very serious rock. He supposed that it was appropriate for the head of the National Reconnaissance Office. Still, it was sometimes hard to reconcile the woman who shared his bed these last three months with the one who occasionally met him at his Pentagon office or in the White House Situation Room.

  “You’re not kidding.” He hit the Do Not Disturb signal on his phone. His secretary would see that and stop all but the most urgent interruptions.

  Elizabeth settled stiffly in the leather chair across his desk—neat, almost prim.

  “You want me to steal a billion or so of Russian state hardware?”

  She nodded. “Personally, I’d be happy with simply a full set of the specifications, but no one has been able to acquire those. Now we have a chance to possibly acquire the finished satellite itself. By the way, if it’s similar to ours, it would be closer to three-point-five billion.”

  “We’re talking dollars, not rubles? That’s more than a Virginia-class nuclear missile submarine. Hell, we can buy a quarter of a brand-new aircraft carrier for that much. The Russians are going to notice that someone took it.”

  “Then make it so that no one notices.”

  Generally Drake liked when someone brought out-of-the-box ideas to his desk. This was a first from Elizabeth, and it was so far outside the norm that he didn’t know what to do with it.

  Slipping away with six helicopters delivered to the West by defectors was one thing. However…

  The idea was starting to grow on him. Persona satellites weren’t built cheaply or overnight. Removing a major spy satellite from Russia’s lineup would be a significant setback both financially and in the ever-escalating intelligence wars.

  “Where did you come up with this one?”

  Her quick glance aside was all she needed to say.

  President Cole had taken three months to choose a replacement for the disgraced Vice President. His choice of CIA Director Clark Winston had been readily approved by the Senate. He was an obvious choice; an old school traditionalist who’d managed to change with the times without getting his hands dirty. At least not in any way picked up by the Senate or the media. He was actually a bit of a media darling.

  Winston’s replacement at the CIA, on the other hand, was unbelievable.

  Clarissa Reese had been the Director of Special Projects—one of the smallest and most shadowy departments of a very shadowy agency.

  Not a chance she’d be approved.

  At least not until surprisingly strong support arrived from the new head of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The two of them never agreed on anything—their mutual animosity was the stuff of legend—until suddenly they both agreed to make Clarissa Reese the youngest-ever Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

  Drake had to wonder what dirt she had on the two of them.

  The D/CIA was usually a career spy in their sixties, not their thirties.

  And they weren’t usually a viper with the morals of…

  “Wait a minute. Reese gave you a Persona satellite’s location but didn’t offer to steal it for you?”

  Elizabeth nodded. “She said it was beyond their scope, but if there was any way in which they could be of assistance to please let her know.”

  “From anyone else in the world, I might even trust that. Do you think it’s a trap of some sort?” Drake wouldn’t put it past Clarissa. Of course, she had to have learned by now that if she harmed so much as a single hair on Elizabeth’s head that Drake would kill her with his own bare hands.

  Elizabeth merely shrugged.

  “You want me to steal Russia’s newest spy satellite so that you can look at it?”

  “Drake,” Elizabeth suddenly came to life, perched up on the edge of her seat. “We know that the Russians have made massive strides forward in their technology, and that it’s not all by copying our KH-11 EECS birds. Our modern Enhanced Evolved Crystal System has as much relation to the design’s origins that we gave to NASA for the Hubble as an Accuracy International MK 13 sniper rifle system has to the M1 that Marines carried onto the beaches at Normandy. The last intel we have about the Russian surveillance satellite capabilities are practically prehistoric. The Persona craft is their absolute cutting edge.”

  “Why is this one different?”

  “Because, for the first time, we know where it is before they launch it into space. Once it’s launched, we can’t just sneak up and grab it without everyone, including the Russians, noticing. Right now they’re in the final packaging stage at the Progress Rocket Space Centre in Samara in the west. It’s scheduled to launch in five days from Vostochny Cosmodrome in the east. Their recent shift from Baikonur in Kazakhstan to their own Vostochny for their space launches means that they can’t just throw it on a truck. They have to fly it.”

  Drake had to admit, that was interesting.

  “How many people know about this?”

  “You’re number four. Clarissa, her agent on the ground, and the two of us.”

  “And you think the intel is reliable?”

  “I retasked a pair of our satellites and got pictures of both ends of the route.” She pulled up a pair of images on her tablet. “They definitely have something very busy going on in their final-assembly building at the factory. This i
s the building. Compare it to the rest of the plant.”

  There were ten times more vehicles around that particular structure.

  “And they are setting up a launch at Vostochny.” She pulled up an image that meant almost nothing to him.

  He’d trust her interpretation as the boss of the National Reconnaissance Office.

  “Back on the first image, look at that plane parked on their runway.”

  Drake squinted at it, then tried to suppress the chill he felt. It was very familiar; he’d been looking at the imagery of an utterly shattered one just six hours ago—strewn across the Fort Campbell runway.

  “An AN-124 Antonov Condor.” He could barely breathe as he whispered it.

  “Yes,” Elizabeth charged ahead. “The Russian Air Force has twelve in service as heavy lifters. They’re launching something big, something that won’t fit into your average transport.”

  “Satellite’s aren’t that big.”

  “It’s almost fifty feet long and ten across. And that’s before you count the protective fairing, which is almost double that. There’s a surprising amount of hardware associated with launching a sat even on an otherwise assembled rocket.”

  “The launch could be anything. A weather sat. Or the ongoing expansion of GLONASS. Hell, we just upgraded half of our own GPS system, why can’t they be doing the same?” Drake went for Devil’s Advocate, but he wanted to believe.

  “Unannounced. They haven’t even put out air traffic control routing cautions for the launch yet, but the launch is already in pre-fueling. The only time they do that is for secret military payloads.”

  Drake wanted to believe, a lot.

  He pulled up a map and tagged Samara and Vostochny.

  “Six thousand kilometers.” Then he zoomed back and felt a little ill. For half a moment he’d thought that perhaps the plane could be somehow hijacked as it crossed over the Arctic Ocean.

  But Samara and Vostochny were far enough south that, even with the arc of the Great Circle route included, their best path for the entire flight ran through the very heart of Russia.

  Inaccessible.

  22

  Elayne’s favorite Saint Laurent jeans were dirty. Not just with dirt, but with soot and a grease stain she’d probably never get out. Even if she did, she’d know the stain was there.

  Getting down and dirty in her fatigues and army boots wouldn’t bother her for a second.

  But she hadn’t prepared properly for this role. Zaslon allowed her nice clothes, but they wouldn’t be happy about replacing an eight-hundred-dollar pair of jeans because she hadn’t planned ahead properly. They’d see it as a reflection on her mission planning abilities.

  She shrugged it off.

  The collapse of the Condor’s tail had made the extraction of the black boxes a long and tedious process.

  Jeremy Trahn had fussed and fussed about photographing and documenting everything properly before he’d given the fire crews permission to use the big crane to remove the collapsed tail section. Once aside, the crews had gathered to mourn over their crushed fire engines.

  But Jeremy and Mike had burrowed into the exposed wreckage until they’d reached the black boxes. It always made her laugh that they were bright orange.

  “Does the Antonov have a QAR?” Jeremy popped up in front of her like a Bouncing Betty landmine—like he was always about to explode in her face.

  “A QAR?” Elayne knew it was a mistake as soon as she said it. Mike looked at her askance.

  “A Quick Access Recorder,” Jeremy didn’t notice a thing, of course. “Not all planes have them, but it would certainly make our lives easier if this one does.”

  “I know…” Elayne thought fast, “…that some of our planes have them, but not all.” She had no idea how to determine if this one did, or if any AN-124 Condor did. She knew how to sabotage a plane, not put one back together.

  “Now that I have these,” he hefted the bright orange flight data and cockpit voice recorders, each the size of a large lunchbox, “we can go look.”

  When she didn’t move, Jeremy waved a hand toward the front of the plane. Oh, she was blocking the only cleared path out of the depths of the mangled tail section. Whatever a QAR was, it must be in the cockpit.

  Good. She’d been trying to steer Mike there for the last two hours, completely unsuccessfully. Usually men were pushovers for her, but she wouldn’t think about why Mike wasn’t.

  Only five bodies. That’s what she needed to think about.

  How was it possible?

  No one should have survived…especially not Voskov. Please not Voskov.

  She was careful not to look at Mike as she picked her way out.

  This time almost earning a tear in her thousand-dollar ZILVER jacket.

  23

  “So it was sabotage,” Jon asked as he helped her up from her squat.

  Miranda nodded. “It is the only conclusion that fits the facts. I think it very unlikely that someone accidentally triggered two kilos of plastique aboard a cargo plane.”

  “Why here?”

  “Where else would it be?”

  “Over the mid-Atlantic where we’d never find anything?”

  Miranda considered. She understood mechanics, not motivations. Why anyone would intentionally blow up a perfectly fine cargo plane was something she’d never, ever understand. Well, she could, but it was so horrible that she tried never to think about it.

  “I can think of a handful of why.” Holly was always good at that sort of thing.

  Miranda would listen and try to learn.

  “This was a load of Russian helicopters, presumably from Russian defectors.”

  Miranda hadn’t noticed the make of the helos as it wasn’t relevant. But now that Holly mentioned it, she considered the remains of airframes and configurations that she’d observed. “A Havoc, two Alligators, a Helix, and an Mi-17 gunship. And there was one I didn’t recognize.” Which worried her.

  Jon shook his head. “No reason you would. The last bird on the manifest is a brand-new design called the Kazan Ansat.”

  “Multi-role, light helicopter. Mostly transport or medevac; the same role as a Bell 212. I’ll have to look at that more carefully. I wish I could have seen it intact.”

  “Me too,” Jon squeezed her arm in either sympathy or shared loss before removing his hand. She could still feel the tactile-echo of it.

  Holly nodded. “So, I’d place a fair wager that Russia wasn’t too pleased and sent someone to destroy the delivery before the Americans could get their hands on it.”

  “Again, why not destroy it in the mid-Atlantic?” Jon, like most people, seemed to find some comfort in repeating things.

  Maybe Miranda should try that. “So, you, Holly. You’re not sleeping with Mike because he’s a jerk about women.”

  “Miranda! Pinkie swear! There’s a guy present.”

  She looked at Jon. “Oh right. Sorry. I forgot.” Maybe she wouldn’t start repeating things she already knew.

  Holly glared at Miranda, waiting for…something.

  Oh, to see if she was going to repeat something else she shouldn’t be. She shook her head.

  Holly nodded carefully before continuing. “If I was the Russians—and don’t anyone be saying this in front of that Antonov woman, I don’t trust her more’n a starving dingo—I’d have done it on landing just to thumb my nose at the Yanks. You got this close, then we took it away. Right on American soil.”

  Jon nodded, “That fits. So something rigged to the gear or flaps?”

  Holly tipped her head sideways as if thinking hard.

  Miranda could hear her neck crack.

  “No. The explosion was after touchdown. Mike did talk to the tower and rescue crews despite escorting Ms. Antonov around. The pilot never declared an emergency or any such. Landed clean. This explosion sequence: shaped charge, central tank rupture, fire, and explosion of the helicopter’s armament would have happened quickly. All except the last within the first half second o
r so. No. It was…”

  Then Holly walked away from them.

  Miranda had to hurry to keep up with Holly’s long legs and how easily she stepped over the deep debris. If she ever envied Holly of anything, it was having long legs.

  Holly was standing on the cockpit ceiling when Miranda caught up with her. She was inspecting the control cluster, hanging from the now-overhead deck.

  The throttles for the four CF-6 engines were pulled back and switched over to thrust reversers, which would slow the plane using the force of the engines themselves. It was an expected and appropriate maneuver for a pilot, but it also meant that he had died before the plane had fully slowed or the controls would have been back to the idle position.

  Holly reached up, appeared to pluck something away with a quick pinch, and slipped it into a plastic bag.

  “Hey, there you all are.” Jeremy called in through the missing windshield. “Does this plane have a QAR?”

  While he was looking up at the console, Holly immediately thrust whatever she’d found into a vest pocket.

  “Not on this model, Jeremy.” Miranda had to answer Jeremy’s question first so that it didn’t get in the way of asking Holly what she’d found.

  The moment she turned back, Holly leaned close enough to whisper in Miranda’s ear, “You didn’t just see me do that. It’s a top-secret-category pinkie swear.”

  Miranda didn’t understand why, but she nodded.

  Outside the missing windshield, Mike and Elayne came up beside Jeremy. At the same moment, Jon came in from the crew area.

  “Ixnay,” Holly said to Jon and waved a hand at the back of the plane.

  He nodded.

  Miranda nodded toward Holly’s pocket.

  “Not even him,” she whispered.

  Miranda nodded to show that she understood, but she didn’t like keeping secrets from a fellow investigator.