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

by M. L. Buchman

  A new packet arrived for insertion into the AFAMS computer.

  Only after he watched it slip in did he connect the two.

  The packets that had been dropping through the backdoor must be part of whatever the hell Reese had hired Daemon to do.

  “Oh shit.”

  61

  Jeremy had been delving into the XC50 from one of the sys admin consoles since the moment Miranda had rushed out of the room.

  Lt. Colonel Kiley had called in the lead programmer and together they’d taken apart each event Miranda had initially identified.

  Jeremy’s stomach clenched hard. And then it started to really tighten up.

  It was a world he used to live in. And one he’d almost ruined his parents’ careers in.

  He’d played a lot of shooter-games for Mom. He’d been the first beta-tester on a lot of versions of Halo. Because he knew the code, he could even usually tell her roughly where the problem was.

  But on Dad’s Flight Simulator, he didn’t play—that’s where he learned how to code. All the way down. And he’d leveraged that for hacks—and his dad’s secure login—out into some strange chunks of cyberspace that were very, very classified. Today wasn’t his first time in a top-secret supercomputer.

  But at eighteen, he’d been cocky and stupid—and triggered a whole series of alarms. The only thing that had saved him was all of the Air Force’s anti-attack code at that time was outward facing. It had all gone looking outward for the origin of the attack rather than sitting right there inside the firewall.

  He’d come from inside, right up the developer’s pipeline from Microsoft down to the Air Force Combat Command’s main computer.

  If he’d been caught, Dad’s top secret clearance would have been stripped. Guaranteed that he and Mom would have been fired and Sis’ first internship would have been canceled.

  He’d just turned eighteen and would have been tried as an adult.

  Thank God no one had caught him.

  When they’d installed the XC50, had anything been preserved from…

  Oh man! There it was. He’d left a hidden folder of code, thinking he’d come back for it someday.

  Right there!

  Like a grenade waiting to land at his feet before it exploded his life, then his entire family’s lives.

  Jeremy didn’t want anything to do with any of it.

  Shut it down.

  Erase it.

  Set a real grenade off inside the computer.

  But it would be backed up.

  Maybe he could excise it without anyone noticing.

  There’d been a worm in that toolkit. It wouldn’t take much to make it hunt itself and its brethren that Jeremy had dropped in there so long ago.

  If he could burn it out here, then find where the backups were… He had access to at least one, the cache where he’d found the deleted simulator logs.

  He’d wipe it from in there as well. Then maybe he could poke around and—

  A hand grabbed his shoulder and Jeremy’s nerves did everything in their power to leap out of his skin.

  62

  “What’s going on?”

  “Shit, Holly! Don’t do that!” Jeremy looked around, but no one else was paying any attention to them.

  “You’re looking mighty freaked, young Padawan.”

  Great! Now he was a junior Jedi knight. But he’d watched Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. Anakin Skywalker consumed by the dark side of the Force until he’d become Darth Vader destroying friends, family, everyone who mattered, then—

  “Hey! Jeremy!” Holly shook his shoulder. “Breathe, goddamn it. Breathe!”

  “I don’t want to go back to the dark side.” He’d been there. Gone there voluntarily. Gleefully disregarding all consequences. Almost been ensnared and almost ruined his family.

  “What?”

  “The light side. I chose the light side of the Force. Years ago.” He was babbling but couldn’t stop it.

  “Yeah, and the Force is powerful. Now what the hell are you talking about?” She kept her hand firmly on his shoulder, but more as if to keep him from exploding than anything else. Keeping the pin in the grenade—barely.

  He looked back at the screen. It was there. He could see it. Hundreds, thousands of hours of work. Powerful hacker code. Probably massively outdated now, but there. Staring at him.

  Highlighting the whole folder, he tapped in the command for a complete scrub delete. And hit Execute.

  No alarms went off.

  “Jeremy.” Holly’s voice was an irritated growl.

  “I don’t want to mess up Miranda.”

  “Good thing or I might have to beat on you. What did you just do?”

  “Erased my past. I hope.” Or at least the evidence of it.

  “What are—”

  He faced her and whispered quickly. “I was Anakin becoming Darth. Years ago. Black Hat hacker. That’s some of my code. If anyone ever finds it, traces it back to Dad, or to me and links me to Miranda… I’ll just… I’ll just die.”

  Holly didn’t look away. She didn’t look angry.

  “Is it really in your past, Jeremy? Are you truly done with it?” Holly leaned in so close that all he could see was the intense blue of her narrowed eyes.

  He could only nod.

  “Is that all of it?”

  He forced himself to look at the screen.

  Supercomputer data was typically too big to store to any fixed media anymore. Now it was simply stored on another, slower computer.

  Slowly, feeling his way through the darkness, he found a second local backup, one in Orlando, and one more in an archive in Fort Knox—where there was a lot less gold than there used to be, but a lot more computers.

  “Wipe it all.”

  He did. “You’re not going to tell? Please don’t tell Miranda.”

  “Cross my throat and hope to die,” she made a severe chopping motion at her throat.

  So over dramatic that it almost made him laugh, but he didn’t because he was afraid he might cry instead.

  “One thing.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said cautiously.

  “Now you’ve got to go in and use those same skills to help Miranda.”

  She was right. He hated it. It was like his Dark Force palm prints were all over the insides of this computer just waiting to be found. And if they were… If somehow they were traced back to him, it would bring disaster.

  “So, let’s go through the remaining events.”

  “Okay, I can do this.” He could do this.

  It was hard to put his fingers back on the keyboard, but he slowly found the rhythm again. He began with the simulation playback file that Miranda had skipped over before her departure.

  They watched it together.

  When Holly shook her head, he struck it from the list. Yeah, something about the feel of it was wrong. The next was obviously just a pure simulation…an uneventful one at that. With Holly’s approval, they were soon down to a core of six events.

  There was a footprint to them—well, to five of them. A footprint he recognized from the Black Box code he’d copied from the CH-47F Chinook helicopter seconds before it blew up.

  The sixth one hadn’t involved a crash.

  Instead, it was a solo simulated flight by a Lieutenant William Blake. He was in the simulator even now reworking the Syrian scenario over and over again.

  Jeremy had finally moved it into the “unlikely” pile.

  He glanced at the clock.

  Fifty-six minutes had passed. Scrubbing his old codes and analyzing the rest of the scenarios had taken a lot of time. Miranda would be in DC soon.

  He began delving into how the Gulf of Mexico scenario had been run through the computer using real aircraft and a compilation of real and simulator piloting. The code to that was far beyond anything he’d ever done.

  He was showing it to the lead programmer. It was way out of that guy’s league and Jeremy had to do a lot of explaining, which helped him get the full s
tructure of it in his head.

  It was truly an elegant hac—

  Jeremy spotted a new item just entering the Command stack.

  63

  The filter for A-10 simulations wouldn’t have grabbed it.

  But the system administrator for the Cray XC50 had placed an alarm on any new data coming through the firewall from a non-US Air Force source.

  This program had tripped that alarm.

  Jeremy grabbed a copy and plugged it into an isolated simulation environment so that he could run it without interfering with the computer’s normal operations.

  The XC50 loaded up the scenario on his station.

  No unusual weather settings.

  Clear air space—busy but nothing dangerously close.

  Just like Miranda approaching a wreck, he approached the simulation in spheres from outer to inner layers. Following her methodologies had been a big part of his climb to the light side of the Force.

  The simulation environment—a brightly lit airport not far ahead.

  Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in DC.

  Then he glanced down and saw the simulated aircraft console.

  He knew it right away.

  It was—

  “Holly!”

  His scream made everyone in the room jump.

  “I need a radio. Now!”

  Too late! He was too late!

  The dark side was here!

  64

  Guiding the Sabrejet into a long final at DC’s Reagan National airport was easy. But after her third long flight on an already very full day, Miranda focused on being particularly careful.

  The approach path was sandwiched in between Arlington, Virginia, and the P-56A Prohibited Airspace over downtown Washington, DC. All traffic slithered along—flying southeast directly over the Potomac—making it one of the busiest aircraft corridors in the nation.

  General Drake had arranged a landing window at Reagan National for her, despite the late notice of her flight, as the airport was just a mile from the Pentagon.

  She was on a three-mile final, second in line to land after a United Express Embraer ERJ145 fifty-passenger jet.

  The Pentagon was two miles straight ahead. The National Mall of downtown DC stretched off to her left, marked at this end by the prominently lit Lincoln Memorial.

  She dropped from twelve hundred feet to nine hundred at the Georgetown Reservoir. At Key Bridge from nine hundred to five hundred.

  And then everything went haywire.

  Her radios and NAV computer scrolled random frequencies.

  Then they all turned off.

  The Fuel Pressure gauge dropped to zero.

  Miranda switched on the emergency fuel system, but nothing changed.

  Her instincts had her attempting to transmit to the tower, but her radios were out.

  She tried turning the radios on again.

  Nothing.

  Breakers were all in.

  She drew parallel with the northern edge of the P-56A Prohibited Airspace zone.

  Entering there was asking to be shot down.

  Even as she watched, the temperature of her fuel-starved engine plummeted.

  The altimeter showed her falling through four hundred feet.

  Her ejection seat was good only above a thousand.

  Time slowed strangely.

  For an endless moment she was seated beside her parents in Flight TWA 800.

  It was after the fuel-tank explosion had ripped the plane in two and their nose section was tumbling in its long, eighty-three-second fall toward the Atlantic Ocean off the Long Island Shore.

  Mom in Seat 2A. Perhaps holding hands with Dad in 2B just as they had so often in life.

  It felt as if she could look across the aisle and see them to her left from Seat 2D—not from the cockpit of a fighter jet built twenty years before the 747 that had killed her parents.

  She didn’t have the glide to reach Reagan Airport.

  Even as her hands worked to restore the fuel system and restart the engine, she knew it was futile. As futile as yanking the ejection handles at the end of her chair’s arms.

  She really should have gotten the upgrade.

  Her father smiled at her in that way he always did after hours of code work had proved to be yet another futile attempt to break a cipher.

  “Only has to work once, sweetheart,” he always told her. “Start again.”

  No engine restart so no airport.

  No safe ejection.

  Landing in the Potomac wasn’t going to be survivable, even if she could miss all of the bridges.

  Through her father’s imagined visage, Miranda saw Lincoln sitting there, much as Sam Chase would have been. Calm. Upright. The rock of her childhood—shattered when she was thirteen.

  She passed him by. The back of Lincoln’s memorial. A long row of columns shining in the night.

  Two-fifty and falling.

  And right there…

  A chance…

  A chance to start again.

  65

  Very quietly, so quietly that Harry didn’t even dare speak aloud to tell Heidi what he was doing, he watched the auto-launch of the tracer he’d built years ago. The same tracer that a young Wizard Boy had used to locate Witchy Lady as the attacker on the Shanghai Stock Exchange.

  He’d never brought it inside the CIA firewall. It was as if that was the one true proof of who he was before the wild jungle of national security had swept him up. His one proof that Wizard Boy still existed in some form.

  It was the finest block of code he’d ever written. It sucked to know that in some ways he’d peaked when he was seventeen, but he’d always loved it. It had taken him a year to build his “Missile In Cool Kode Extra Yowza!” Another year waiting for the right test.

  He probably could have come up with a cooler name: Super Hydra, Multi-fanged Terror…something.

  Seventeen-year-old Harry Tallman had called it Mickey and the mouse’s name had stuck for him.

  No one knew about it.

  Partly because he’d only used it that one time to find Heidi. But even she never knew what had caught her.

  Mickey wasn’t just fast, it was also extremely stealthy.

  It launched where he’d tucked it away, a low-security Netflix server. He’d chosen a frame used for storing old Jimmy Stewart movies, as it had pretty low traffic, which meant that most of the server’s bandwidth was his.

  Mickey would only need it for less than a minute, but every Jimmy Stewart movie streaming south of the Mason-Dixon line was going to be hit with the spinning loading symbol. In a race where milliseconds counted, Jimmy’s “Well, I don’t rightly know about that” drawl was going to take even longer than usual.

  It fired out from the IXP’s server farm in Atlanta, GA. As it flew, it called other elements of itself from nineteen other servers within the US alone—thirty-three more worldwide. That’s what made it impossible to trace, and so fast. It went from nothing to everywhere as part of its launch.

  Mickey punched through the gap he’d pre-built in the CIA’s firewall—precisely one Mickey wide—without even slowing.

  High-bandwidth fiber from here to Eglin and in through that gap that he’d pried open for Reese.

  Latching onto the object that had just dropped into the Air Force Cray XC50, the trace started running backward along the object’s load path.

  Like a MIRV—a multiple independent reentry vehicle nuclear warhead that could bomb twenty cities at once—Mickey appeared from every direction at once, and attacked.

  66

  “Won’t you get that, dear?”

  Hunter headed for the suite’s door. Dinner was finally here. He didn’t want any more surprises tonight and maybe food would stop the flow of unnerving revelations.

  Clarissa Reese might be insanely dangerous.

  She might even be insane.

  But if so, she was brilliantly insane.

  Hashing out a mutual trust between the three of them had been tric
ky. Clarissa and Rose had appeared to like each other—and appeared ready to fight just to see who won.

  That was Hunter’s strength in committee. He could always get different groups aligned and he thought they were close now.

  Opening the door, he started with, “You can just use the…” But he never got to mentioning the table. Didn’t even complete the gesture toward the suite’s mahogany dining set.

  Two US Army sergeants were standing at the door. At least they were in dress uniform rather than battle fatigues, but they were definitely both armed.

  Not just sergeants. Sergeants with 75th Ranger Regiment badges above their stripes, tan berets, and an impressive array of combat metal on their chests.

  Oh god. I’m screwed.

  The A-10 replacement operation was the riskiest undertaking he’d ever made in thirty years in office.

  Now it was blown.

  They found me.

  They were going to string him out to dry in front of the whole senate. Trials. Jail. Media!

  Maybe he could—somehow—just put on a brave face and get through this?

  “Can I,” Hunter had to swallow hard…twice against a scratchily dry throat, “assist you gentlemen?”

  Clarissa and Rose were out of sight behind the half-open door.

  “We’re looking for CIA Director of Special Projects Clarissa Reese,” one of them announced formally.

  Oh, thank God!

  This wasn’t about him.

  “It’s for you, Clar—” time for a little distance, “Ms. Reese.”

  She rose from her seat and came to the door. Clarissa wore austere like a second skin. It was the one look that Rose could never pull off. Sexy, powerful, friendly, charming…but his sweet Rose didn’t have austere anywhere in her system.

  “Yes?” Her voice was less steady than she’d like to pretend.

  “We’ve been asked to escort you to a meeting. We would appreciate it if you’d come with us.”

  “Well, that’s a fair amount more civil than last time,” her voice had a mean edge.

  The two sergeants didn’t look at each other and their tone matched their words, “We wouldn’t know anything about that, ma’am.” But Hunter was close enough to see that they were hard pressed not to laugh.