He recalled the scene just a few months ago. A team of Rangers carting Clarissa off the Georgetown streets with her wrists locked in plastic zip ties. It had been nationally televised—he’d kept it on the DVR for quite a while for whenever he needed a laugh.
He didn’t feel like laughing right now.
Hunter was now in bed with Clarissa in every way except physically, far too deep to back out cleanly if she went down for something.
“Where’s this meeting?” Her voice had none of the smoothing tones that Rose could use to calm down any situation.
“At the White House, ma’am.”
“Oh, well that’s fine then.”
Hunter could only look at her in surprise.
“Clark mentioned something but didn’t know the specifics yet.”
Hunter inspected the two US 75th Rangers standing outside the Presidential Suite’s door at the Kimpton George and guessed that this had nothing to do with CIA Director Clark Winston.
67
“Are you sure that we need her?”
Drake drummed his fingers on the console folded down between their seats as the driver crossed the Arlington Bridge. He’d left the Sit Room shortly after the DMZ-Japan fiasco this evening to work from the Pentagon. Now, past ten p.m. he was headed back to the White House.
“Yes, Lizzy. I’m sure. If Reese isn’t involved, she’ll know how to get us the answers.”
“And if she’s already involved?”
“Then she’ll already have the answers and we just need to beat them out of her stubborn hide.”
“I love when you get all stern and soldierly.” Her tone was definitely mocking him.
“Hey, they didn’t make me CJCS just because I look good in a uniform.”
“You do look very good in a uniform, Drake.”
“So do you, Lizzy.”
“What do you say, once this is over, we see how we look out of our uniforms?”
Drake struggled for his next breath. They had taught him a lot of things during his forty years serving in the military. But they’d taught him nothing about how to field such a question.
His driver was watching him in the rearview.
“Eyes front, Lamont.”
“Yes sir. Can’t help having ears though, sir. Just saying. Lady says something like that, a man oughta answer right quick.”
“Go to hell, Sergeant Lamont.”
“Quite likely, sir.”
Drake turned to Lizzy, who was watching him with that patient thing she did: eyebrows slightly raised, no readable expression.
“I’d like that a lot.”
“Good for you, sir.”
“You’re still here, Lamont.” But he didn’t look away from Lizzy’s smile either.
“Sorry, sir. Hell didn’t have no openings for a sweet guy like me.”
Drake ignored him.
Then just over Lizzy’s shoulder, he saw a flash of silver.
A small jet, descending fast between the Arlington Bridge off-ramp into DC and the Lincoln Memorial.
Not following the river, but headed straight into DC where no jet should ever be.
It was unique.
“Lamont! Follow that jet!”
Lizzy twisted around, but missed it as it slipped below the trees.
Lamont hadn’t.
Though he’d already taken the right-hand off-ramp that would take them under the bridge and north toward the White House, Lamont turned sharply left.
He shot through a narrow crosswalk under the trees.
A hundred feet later he twisted right onto 23rd Street Southwest and, with a hard squeal of tires, managed to miss a late-night bus by half a car-length.
At Independence Avenue he turned sharply east and put the accelerator to the floor.
The jet was out of sight behind a line of trees but Lamont drove like he was in a race with it.
Drake was glad that he hadn’t gone to hell. He was the best driver Drake had ever had.
68
Miranda recalled that the Reflecting Pool was only two thousand feet long—the same length that her runway on Spieden Island had been.
Had been, because she’d had to extend it by half again to safely land the F-86 Sabrejet once it was given to her. Then more than that, in order to take off again.
Nothing was working right.
Time to trade maximum glide slope for minimum landing speed.
At a hundred and eighty knots, she extended the speed brakes and the flaps.
Then the battery failed.
Or switched out of the circuit.
She tried the Alternate Power switch with no luck.
Lowering the gear wasn’t happening.
She could try for a belly landing. But just this morning, Colonel Campos—with far more experience than she had—had chosen to eject a second time rather than ride his plane all the way down.
Miranda yanked on the Gear Emergency Release lever and held it for several seconds.
She heard the two clunks as gravity pulled down the main gear.
Unable to hear or feel the nose gear lock, fired down by a one-time hydraulic pressure accumulator, she could only hope that it was in place.
The Reflecting Pool was now a stretch of darkness off to her left. The row of trees to either side were lit from below. The lights beneath the southern trees illuminated the grass field she was targeting.
Empty.
That had been her one fear, but there was no event there tonight so the field was all hers.
Think like a space shuttle.
Think like a space shuttle.
They do their atmospheric braking by putting their belly into the wind, using most of the surface area as an air brake.
There was no peep from a stall indicator as she raised the nose higher and higher for air braking. No electricity to make it peep.
The F-86 Sabrejet was very unforgiving in a stall, but she held it on the edge of the buffet zone for as long as she dared.
Lincoln Memorial on her left.
A flash of asphalt and upturned faces of late-night tourists along Lincoln Memorial Circle where thousands had gathered for so many different events.
How many would see her die if she couldn’t make this work?
Past the last walkway and out of time—her airspeed down to a minimal hundred and twenty knots—she sank toward the grass field along the south side of the Reflecting Pool…
Impact!
She fought her instincts to reach for the ejection handles. That was a near certain death warrant.
The main gear held.
No time for more air braking.
She nudged the joystick forward and the nose dropped.
The nose gear clanged loudly against the piston stop on the oleo strut. The hard impact slammed her against her harness.
But the strut didn’t fold.
The wheel didn’t catch in the rough ground.
Brakes.
Brakes.
More brakes.
She was down under a hundred knots when she reached the JFK Hockey Fields. She’d seen one of the last major Field Hockey Tournaments there in 2003 while training at the NTSB Training Center.
No war or presidential memorials had been built over the three fields yet—still just swathes of grass, hard with the chilly November.
Three field lengths and she was down under fifty.
But the grass strip was running out.
The tall spire of the Washington Monument towered ahead like a beacon, but a long line of trees that would tear her plane apart was coming up much faster.
At the last moment, she saw an out and veered right, still going forty knots.
She cleared the tree on the left, but clipped off the right wing-tip navigation light on the corner of the concrete restroom.
Across a sidewalk, off a curb with a hard bounce, and she was rolling the wrong way along a bus parking area that thankfully had no busses.
The F-86 Sabrejet finally ground to a halt less than ten
feet from a pair of trees even her small, thirty-seven-foot wingspan wouldn’t have fit between.
69
Drake had never seen anything quite like it.
He was first to arrive at the downed Sabrejet, by only seconds.
It was eerie.
He was leaping out of the car even as the jet stopped, but it was completely silent. No noise of a winding-down engine. No noise of any kind.
Then, with a loud bang that made him duck for cover, the canopy slammed backward on its rails. Emergency canopy release.
There was nothing else, so he moved up closer to the plane.
He was pretty sure who the pilot was.
“Miranda?”
The pilot pulled off her helmet and looked down at him.
“Are you okay?”
“I need to order a new ejection seat.”
“What happened that you landed here?”
As she climbed down, eight or ten police cars raced up with their lights and sirens going.
Officers piled out of their cars, weapons out and aimed.
Close behind them, four black Chevy Suburbans rolled up and disgorged black-suited Secret Service agents.
Drake stepped forward to calm them down—and all of the guns twitched to aim at him.
He froze.
Shouting out his name and rank didn’t do any good, because no one could hear him as a pair of F-18 Hornet alert fighters flew by less than a hundred feet overhead.
By the time of their second pass—after a hard turn around the Washington Monument—a trio of Black Hawks arrived and out poured US Army Rangers and National Guard.
While the fire trucks, ambulance, and SWAT team arrived, he gave up and waited to see who would take charge so that Drake could talk to him.
Miranda looked around them. “Apparently they take Prohibited Airspace P-56A very seriously here.” Drake could barely hear her over all the shouted orders and the hovering gunships.
“Yes, they do. So, why did you violate it?”
“Oh. Someone sabotaged my plane. In flight. Let’s go find out who.” And she just walked away from all of the armed personnel, headed for his car.
“But,” he waved a hand at her plane straddling the bus lanes.
“Oh, I’m sorry I couldn’t park it any better. They can move it to the side, but it will need a mechanic to reset all systems and rearm the canopy release. I’ll also need more fuel before I can take off again. I believe Independence Avenue doesn’t have the runway length that I’ll require, but Constitution Avenue from the Lincoln Memorial to the Ellipse should do nicely.”
“That’s not gonna happen.”
She looked up at him as if he was the one not making any sense.
The head of the Secret Service team had apparently decided he was the one in charge. He made it halfway to Drake before recognizing him and calling for everyone to stand down.
Meanwhile, Miranda slipped into his car. In the slowly descending silence, he could hear her say, “Oh, hi, Lizzy. What do you think about the technology necessary to cause an F-86 Sabrejet to—”
Within minutes, he had organized everyone and come up with a plan to deal with Miranda’s jet—at least for now.
Drake stood outside his car and watched over a hundred servicemen and women, First Responders, gunships, Secret Service, and a fully activated SWAT team, trying to shift gears away from terrorist attack.
He waited to make sure they got it.
But what to actually do about Miranda’s jet?
Take off along Constitution Avenue? Fly right past the White House in a fighter jet? Not a chance that was going to happen.
He’d be damned if he knew how to explain it to her or everyone now facing him.
A pair of television vans rolled up. Reporters jumped out and the vans began extending those big rebroadcast roof antennas that the major setups carried. Time for him to get out of there.
“I’m betting,” Lamont said by his elbow, “that telling them all to go to hell wouldn’t be the best choice?”
70
“Told you she’d be fine.”
Holly had said no such thing, but Jeremy was too relieved to complain. If she hadn’t been sitting there, he might have broken down and wept with relief.
He’d followed every step of the simulation on the screen as it took over Miranda’s jet and he’d been helpless to stop it.
But she’d done it. Miranda was so amazing that she’d saved the Sabrejet despite no fuel and a complete systems failure.
Besides, Holly had switched into full-on soldier mode, ordering Kiley and the others to get information out of DC. Once Colonel Campos ordered the others to do what she said, chaos became a smooth chain of command…from Holly Harper.
“You’d have made a good officer,” Mike teased her.
“Couldn’t pay me enough, mate. I work for a living,” Holly had answered before issuing a new slew of directions.
They’d started with radar, flight path tracking.
When the area P-56A perimeter alert was triggered, they soon had the alert fighter camera feeds going.
Moments later, the display screens had filled with feeds from DC police car cams, SWAT team shoulder cams, and ultimately several Black Hawk helicopter infrared feeds.
“See?” Holly’s hand rested on his shoulder, but it didn’t set off his alarm flags.
It was comforting.
With her other hand, she tapped the screen showing a heat image of someone climbing out of the Sabrejet’s cockpit. “That’s her. She’s fine.”
After reassuring himself that she was indeed okay, Jeremy reran the radar feed that show her landing.
Mike whistled an impressed sound.
Lt. Colonel Kiley harrumphed, “Whatever assholes were keeping women out of combat flight for so long never saw that kind of a landing. Textbook says that wouldn’t work.”
“Now,” Holly sat down beside him and Jeremy felt he could finally think again. “What alerted you and how do we find out what happened?”
71
Daemon considered kicking the shit out of her television.
What it was showing was just so damn wrong!
Hi-res, full-color, with running commentary—it was breaking news on a dozen different channels.
“Korean War fighter jet attacks White House” was far from the most lurid or inaccurate.
Some enterprising producer tapped the EarthCam at the top of the Washington Monument, then highlighted the Sabrejet from the moment it came into view.
Daemon could see it stumble in the sky.
It lost altitude abruptly as the engine power had failed.
It wavered as the pilot fought to restart all the things Daemon had made sure wouldn’t restart.
Then, less than a hundred feet left to fall before it plummeted into the Potomac, it carved a hard turn straight toward the camera high atop the Washington Monument.
For an instant, Daemon thought it might plow into the back of the Lincoln Memorial, which would have been cool.
Or maybe plunge into the Reflecting Pool, which had a certain awesomeness.
No such luck.
Instead, it flared and straightened out at the last second and landed on the grass.
What was up with that?
The plane was too old. It hadn’t had enough electronics for her to sabotage. No fly-by-wire. No munitions aboard. Nothing.
Still, she’d taken out enough systems through the lame radio and targeting computers that it should have gone down.
Whoever the pilot was, they would definitely be a problem.
One of her alarms beeped. Something had probed her outer defenses.
She checked, but it was just some search engine’s robot spider indexing the Internet.
Nothing here, junior.
Her defenses automatically delivered some nonsense about a law firm promising you top dollar for your accident claim, “Just call 1-202-456-1414.” She hoped the White House switchboard enjoyed fielding those calls.
Daemon replayed the code that had triggered the alarm, but still didn’t see anything strange in it.
Still, the itch told her it was time to get moving.
Had Mum listened to that itch and just been too slow? Or had she not heard it at all?
Didn’t matter, she’d been too late.
All Daemon knew at first was that Mum’s superuser password had suddenly popped up on her phone. A final gift from hacker-mom to hacker-daughter.
Turned out Mum’s Delta flight out of Tel Aviv had been delayed at the gate. Mossad tried to grab her. Very bad people to be grabbed by.
Emergency exit had been a good play, Mum always sat right over the wing for that reason. Sliding down the front of the wing instead of the back had been a bad choice, as the engine was already spun up. She’d dodged around a baggage handler and gotten too close to the engine.
No more Mum, except a bloody splatter out the back.
Daemon wouldn’t be caught loafing around.
She’d deliver this one last thing for Client F, then climb on the plane he’d left at her disposal and get the hell out of OK City, the US, maybe even the Western Hemisphere. She hadn’t done anything in Macau for a while. That could be fun.
72
Harry had finally called over Heidi to watch what Mickey was doing.
“Oh my god, Wizard Boy,” Heidi had whispered once she understood what it was doing. “That is sooo sexy! Is that how you found me?”
He could only nod.
She grabbed his face, turned him from the screen, and kissed him really, really hard.
Then, as she rested her head on his shoulder and held his hand, they turned to watch Mickey sneak along as quiet as a mouse.
Its work had only begun.
Now it called up his MiNi code—Miniature Nibbler. MiNi was designed to map the edges of influence by a programmer independent of IP addresses (because they were too easy to spoof or mask), multi-terminals (because of course you’d do that), or any of a dozen other masking techniques.
Thunderbolt: an NTSB / military technothriller (Miranda Chase Book 2) Page 20