Thunderbolt: an NTSB / military technothriller (Miranda Chase Book 2)

by M. L. Buchman

  He headed for one of the few labeled A-10 Thunderbolt II—America’s oldest fighter jet. No one else headed for those.

  The upper story of the training center was blacked out—no windows to look out, which was a good thing. He’d always loved watching the jets at his prior bases. Just sitting and watching the active runways for hours was one of his favorite pastimes.

  Maybe someday he’d find a girl pilot who felt the same way. There was only one in his cadre, but she was engaged to some guy back in Wyoming. That’s okay. He was patient and would find one like that someday. Until then, there were plenty of fine women available to an Air Force pilot.

  He pulled on the headset goggles that were the only common element with the Pilot Next simulators—these rigs were very different than the ones he’d flown in San Antonio.

  The headset would project all of the data, targeting, and threat information that would normally be projected on the inside of a helmet’s visor. It would also track his eye movement and where his attention was focused.

  Jittery equals bad, Billy reminded himself. Steady, focused, scanning smoothly equals good.

  At San Antonio, he’d sat in a chair with flight controls and four television screens—three for the view out of the cockpit and one for the instrument panel.

  Here the seats faced into clamshells of four tall, curving panels. During yesterday’s orientation, he’d been amazed at the clarity of the projections.

  “These are 8K resolution,” the head of simulations had happily announced. “Four times the pixel density of a 4k home television. All global terrains are accurate to a minimum of five meters, most within one meter.” The instructor had added terrain-following radar overlays onto their views. “Now look left, right, and up.”

  Billy had been able to see the whole flight. Toucan’s A-10, the four Lightnings, a pair of F-22 Raptors, even the two guys who’d been dumb enough to opt for the F-18s that were on their way out of service—the Air Force needed pilots until they retired those aircraft, but it was happening soon.

  The A-10 would be around for a long while yet thanks to Congress forcing common sense down Command’s throats. That, and the fact that nothing else could do the job half as well or at anywhere near the cost. An F-35 Lightning II, the proposed replacement, cost ten times as much as an A-10. And the hourly operational cost was stratospheric by comparison.

  In yesterday’s sim, he’d waggled his wings and Toucan had waggled his back. They were going to totally kick ass together.

  But now it was just him and five superior officers—all in F-35 Lightning IIs.

  “Today’s simulated sortie,” Kiley announced over their headsets, “will be over Syria. There is suspected Russian activity against anti-government rebels. You will not allow them to engage.”

  Billy took a deep breath to keep his hands and his gaze calm. He didn’t want the eye sensors picking up on his nerves.

  Incoming Russians. Perfect.

  Lightnings against any fast movers. The Ruskies had about twenty fighter jets placed in Syria. Mostly the older aircraft, but the supersonic Sukhoi Su-34 “Fullbacks” were among them.

  Not his worry. One of those came after him and his ass was toast.

  But the Su-25 “Frogfoot”? That was his main game.

  The Frogfoot was the fighter get you got if you started with an A-10 and then asked a bunch of drunk Russian engineers to redesign it from scratch. Take away the central cannon, because that was too tricky to design around. Next, make it smaller. Finally, mount the engines where you really wanted to put a couple racks of missiles instead.

  Still dangerous as hell, but he couldn’t wait to take one on.

  And the best part was that the Syrians didn’t have any Su-25s—they were all Russian. If he met a Frogfoot in battle, even simulated battle, it would have a Russian pilot and a Russian pilot’s skill index setting.

  The sim started.

  They were launching out of Ramat David Airbase in northern Israel. With the deep chill going on in Turkey’s psychotic government, the Incirlik Air Base must be falling out of favor.

  The US had always been careful to not show that it was stationing aircraft in Israel.

  If the sim was anything to judge by, that was going to change.

  Cool to be in the know that command was even willing to test the idea.

  He’d have to decide later whether or not to tell the other guys from his cadre about this. Of course, he’d lord over them that he was flying with a whole bunch of superior officers first, just to rub it in.

  But the incredible detail and the visual surround let him almost believe he was in a plane. About the only thing missing was the motion of the large mechanical simulators. But as those cost over a hundred times this setup, he’d get a hundredth of the simulator hours.

  The only other thing he wanted was his own bird.

  A flight of six jet fighters was pretty spectacular. Real world they rarely flew in more than pairs. That meant the simulator training planners were beefing up a major scenario for them.

  It was crazy that he was doing this during only his second day at Elgin. If this is the kind of thing they were going to keep doing, he’d bless Mom for naming him William Blake and driving him into the military.

  For an hour they patrolled high along the border: north along the coast, then east just a few kilometers into Turkey. It was mostly high-level flight working on team coordination.

  He tried not to think about what would happen if there was real trouble, as his was the only non-supersonic jet in the flight. In a battle, the Lightnings could all climb ten thousand feet higher and still be at a stroll as they left the area at twice his best speed.

  It was as they were turning south along the Syrian-Iraq border that trouble first showed up on their radars.

  8

  Miranda and the rest of the team sat with their backs against the sunny side of the downed Thunderbolt’s fuselage and conferred over club sandwiches. None of them had had breakfast, so they’d decided on brunch after they’d spent a couple hours at the site.

  The colonel had made a point of taking their orders, then shuttling back to base in the Huey helicopter to fetch it himself.

  “Feels good,” Mike lay back against the A-10 with his hat brim pulled down far enough to hide his eyes.

  “The desert down in Oz doesn’t get this kind of cold,” Holly’s hat was tipped back and her eyes were closed as her face turned to follow the sun.

  Colonel Campos kept his silence.

  Miranda slipped the weather meter out of her vest pocket. Sixty-nine degrees Fahrenheit against an average midday high of sixty-five for November. She shifted the meter as far from the protection of the fuselage as she could without getting up. A seven-degree temperature drop. Was that a typical gradient from a protected environment or was the gradient unique to desert conditions? Perhaps…

  “I’ve been thinking about—” Jeremy paused, and glanced at Holly, who looked as if she couldn’t be bothered to move. Besides, her eyes were closed.

  Miranda watched carefully, but couldn’t see what he was waiting for.

  A glance at the silent colonel startled him. He’d been watching her intently and was now suddenly interested in the A-10’s starboard engine.

  She inspected it carefully, but couldn’t see anything of interest. It appeared wholly undamaged by the crash.

  “What have you been thinking?” Holly prompted Jeremy without opening her eyes.

  “Well… The condition of the aircraft’s systems implies that while well maintained, the last major service wasn’t recent.”

  “Fifty-seven flight hours ago,” Campos confirmed.

  “Exactly,” Jeremy tried to lean forward, but was slightly mired by the sand. He planted his hands to push himself upright, forgetting that he still had half of a turkey sandwich in one hand. “Long enough since any major service that it’s unlikely to be an error made in that process. But also, not long enough for it to be a parts failure.”


  “Sometimes parts just fail, Jeremy.” Miranda had wondered if Mike was asleep in the sun, but he wasn’t if he was answering.

  “What if they didn’t?”

  Miranda hated “What if?” questions.

  What if her parents hadn’t been aboard TWA 800 when an electrical fault blew it from the sky shortly after takeoff from New York?

  What if she’d been on the plane with them instead of attending the final week of horse-riding summer camp—the last of her naive childhood tossed aside at thirteen as if launched away by an ejection seat?

  What if this broke or that failed?

  She far preferred the application of her reverse scientific method: what are the facts, what sole solution explains those facts, and no extraneous “what if” conjectures or wild hypotheses along the way.

  However, as Jeremy enjoyed this exercise more than anyone else she’d ever observed, she’d become inclined not to stop the team whenever he began such conversations.

  “You mean what if I’m right and haven’t been making it up this whole time?” The colonel didn’t look amused. Odd, she could read his emotions more easily than most even though they’d only spent the morning together.

  “Exactly! What if some force did indeed take control of your aircraft?”

  “Some force, Jeremy? What force? Aliens?” Mike kept up the conversation with Jeremy, as Holly now appeared to have fallen asleep in the sun.

  “Well, that could certainly be one hypothesis, but I think it unlikely. If alien life was looking to make its presence known on Earth, I think landing a flying saucer in Central Park would be much more effective.”

  “Or blowing up the White House.”

  “Right. Independence Day. Though I’m more inclined to believe that any aliens would be benevolent and are simply waiting to see if we survive our self-destructive tendencies like climate change, runaway population, and technological advances in warfighting. Any which way, I can’t see them tinkering with the flight controls of a forty-year old fighter jet.”

  “If not aliens, then maybe some tractor beam.”

  Miranda tried to decide if Mike was kidding around or not, but possessed insufficient evidence to reach a conclusion one way or the other.

  Jeremy, on the other hand, didn’t even blink. “It would be a repulser beam. Something pushing it toward the ground from above. It would be far more likely.”

  “Likely?” That actually got Mike’s attention. He shoved his hat up enough to look at Jeremy across Holly.

  “Sure,” Jeremy bit into his sand-coated sandwich for emphasis, then went through a whole episode of coughing it back out and trying to wipe sand off his tongue—first with gritty fingers, then with a napkin.

  Miranda checked to make sure the remains of her own sandwich were safely nestled in the exact center of her unfolded napkin, placed carefully in her lap. The sun had moved to align precisely with the diagonal slice, producing no shadow along the cut surface. She liked the connection of caloric consumption aligning with the solar maximum on a winter’s day.

  Except they weren’t eating at 12:07, so it wasn’t solar maximum. Still, she liked the alignment.

  Jeremy rinsed his mouth with a swallow of soda. “Yes. I saw no signs of any vast equipment array in the desert, though I did walk well astern of where the aircraft impacted.”

  “You went looking for a tractor beam.”

  “No. I went looking for any stray parts or spills of hydraulic fluid. But while doing so, I didn’t find any unexpected large arrays of equipment. So, if it was a mythical beam weapon, a repulser from above is far more likely than a tractor from below.”

  “He’s got you there, Mike,” Holly scoffed, proving that she was still awake.

  “As much as is possible in the field, you’ve checked for mechanical actuators, unidentified cams on the ailerons control wires, and the like, right?”

  Holly nodded and then opened one eye to watch Jeremy as he continued.

  “The A-10 Thunderbolt II isn’t fly-by-wire. You know, manipulate the control in the cockpit,” he pointed forward, “and a signal travels down a wire to engage a motor to wiggle the aileron here.” He grabbed the trailing edge of the wing and wiggled it. “It’s all mechanical connections, by hydraulics and a backup of actual wires. Which makes much more sense for fly-by-wire—the mechanical rather than the electronic meaning, I mean.”

  “Yes, Jeremy, we all know what fly-by-wire is,” Holly’s glare had Jeremy stuttering for a long moment.

  “Because the colonel experienced an apparent remote control of his aircraft—”

  “Remote control?” Miranda sat up at that. It shifted the sun onto the face of her sandwich. With the breaking of the incidental solar alignment to the cut edge, she picked up the second half and continued eating.

  “We’ve been proceeding on the concept that there is some system fault. What if there wasn’t? What if the problem is that someone—”

  “Or something,” Mike pointed up toward the sky.

  “Or something,” Jeremy conceded, “did indeed take control?”

  9

  Billy was looking the wrong way when the flight leader called in the report over the radio that connected the simulators.

  “I have a pair of unidentified bogies inbound from Tiyas Military Airbase.” Tiyas lay almost exactly in the center of Syria—excellent strategically, a hideous posting in a burned-out desert hell.

  But he found them fast enough. They were coming in high and fast on the radar, though he could only see one of them. Maybe his older radar couldn’t isolate them as two separate aircraft.

  The flight leader, Major Ass-face, began calling out tactics—none of which included him.

  To hell with them! He knew his role and kept scanning the desert.

  Even after six months in San Antonio—which just wasn’t sensible to a New York boy—he didn’t get how people lived in places like the Syrian landscape simulated around him.

  He supposed even San Antone was better than this, which was a really extreme statement. Except for thirty kilometers along the Mediterranean and the narrow valley of the Tigris River, Syria was just a vast expanses of brown rock and lifeless dirt.

  How could people be fighting over this for a nine-year civil war? Or the ten thousand years since the first settlements and agriculture had begun here?

  The pair of fast movers were still arrowing in on their five Lightnings who had split into a pair and a trio.

  Two on five and they were still coming hard.

  That didn’t make sense. They’d be badly outnumbered.

  That’s when he finally caught a clue.

  The F-35 Lightning IIs were fifth-generation stealth fighters. There were only four fifth-gen fighter jet types in the world. The American F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Lightning II had been first. The Chinese were still having issues with their Shenyang J-31 Gyrfalcon.

  But intelligence had reported two of Russia’s brand-new Su-57 Felons were in Syria for testing in a live combat zone.

  Fifth-generation stealth.

  Just like the rest of his flight—except for him. An A-10 Thunderbolt II was old tech and would have the radar signature of a brick—a very large, very reflective brick.

  He drifted his A-10 back from the pack by just a few kilometers. No more than fifteen seconds away.

  Sure enough, the incoming blips shifted to remain vectored on his lone jet.

  He hustled to catch back up as he radioed Major Ass-face.

  “Flight lead, this is Alpha-one,” he was the only A-10 in the flight after all. “I’m the one on their radar. Also recall, a pair of Su-57s are known to be in-country.”

  No response.

  He tried again.

  Some kind of damn game. The bastards had jumped frequencies without telling him.

  Complain to Lt. Colonel Kiley?

  No points for whining.

  He’d just fly his damn flight better than anyone else.

  10

  Colonel Arturo Camp
os couldn’t make sense of this Miranda Chase.

  If the source of her recommendation hadn’t been the unimpeachable Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Drake Nason, he’d have already booted her off the site.

  Her people were leaning back against his crashed A-10 Thunderbolt, talking of aliens and repulser beams, and ignoring him as if he didn’t know shit about his own aircraft.

  The guy who talked the most—a slender Vietnamese kid, though with no accent—looked like he was about twelve.

  The lovely blonde didn’t say much, but when she did, it ruined everything.

  His ex had been a New Zealander. Their accents were just similar enough to really piss him off—he so didn’t need the reminder.

  Shara had Dear Arturo’d him during his fourth tour in Iraq and then tried to take his entire pension into her orthodontist-boss’ bed. Thank Jesus, Mary, and Joseph that the courts had seen her infidelity the same way he had. Or thank his insanely expensive lawyer: brutal, but worth every damn dime. It had also helped his case that her new fiancé made five times the money he did. Hence the Dear Arturo.

  For two hours Mike Munroe had questioned him in detail about the stupidest trivia. Every time Arturo was on the verge of dismissing him, Mike would somehow turn it around and keep him talking. He wasn’t used to people who could manipulate him.

  In fact, it was high time he got rid of these people. Too bad, as he found himself liking Miranda Chase despite her peculiarities. Or perhaps because of them. But her people were intolera—

  “The colonel said—”

  Mike’s voice snapped his attention back to the rambling conversation.

  “—that he saw no surge in the hydraulic pressure on either gauge. He tried popping the breakers on both, but he didn’t regain control. Jeremy?”

  “Yes, I can confirm that both hydraulic system breakers were pulled. I inspected the lines and reservoirs. The proper amount of fluids were in the lines and, as far as I can tell in the field, the right grade of oil—though I’ve taken samples to run back to the lab. If there’s a mechanism, such as a hidden auxiliary pump or valving system, I was unable to locate it. The directional flow valves, in case of a system rupture, were intact and properly oriented.”