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

by M. L. Buchman

  Billy swallowed hard and looked back at his own screen.

  Then a woman’s high voice spoke. “Uh, hi.”

  There was a weird pause, so Billy said “Hi” back.

  A couple of the guys chuckled.

  What kind of a clusterfuck was this going to be?

  When she spoke again, it was pure business. “There have been five primary intrusions into the Air Force’s simulation system over the last thirty-six hours. We are working on the root cause, but have not yet secured the source. There have been nine airframe losses and eight deaths not counting the F-35 Lightning destroyed over Syria.”

  “Wait, what?” Billy couldn’t stop himself. “The debris I saw wasn’t simulated?”

  “Neither was the flight over the Gulf of Mexico. You were flying actual US drones against A-10 instructor pilots who lost their lives in—”

  “That’s classified, lady,” Kiley’s voice cut across hers.

  “The pilots need to understand the stakes, Colonel Kiley.”

  “But—”

  “Shut up, Kiley. Or get off the circuit.” Again that deep voice of General Nason.

  Billy didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t breathe. “I— We— I shot down…real people? Our people?”

  “Yes,” the woman said it like it was simple fact—dead flat.

  “Son,” General Nason’s voice was soft. “There’s a time for straightening all this out. There’s a time for thinking and feeling. That time is not now. Right now your duty is to fly to the best of your abilities. This is the real test of any pilot.”

  “Yes sir.” Oh great, no pressure to get his shit together. Just the CJCS watching over his shoulder. He closed his eyes for a moment and all he could see was the rounds he’d sent pounding through the back of the A-10’s canopy to kill the pilot.

  A guy who was expecting to be his trainer someday. Maybe next week, maybe tomorrow…now never.

  He opened his eyes and shoved the image aside. How long would it be before he dared to close them again? How many years until he stopped seeing that image every time he did?

  “In three minutes,” the woman resumed in that Iceman chill voice of hers, “either nothing will happen, or we’ll be in a major air battle. We don’t know where in the world it will be happening. We won’t know if it is real, simulated, or more likely both.”

  This time Billy leaned back and looked around of the simulator’s screen in the other direction. Major “Ass-Face” Ashton’s face was as white, well, an untanned ass.

  82

  “There it is,” Jeremy announced. “The code just hit.”

  Miranda checked her watch as she sat in the Pentagon simulator feeling more out of place than anywhere in the last decade. Or two.

  Midnight.

  Exactly six hours from the start of the Gulf of Mexico operation. Usually she liked being right. There was a comforting symmetry when she understood how at least some part of her world worked.

  This time she hated being right.

  “Holy wow,” Jeremy breathed out. “I’ve never seen anything like that. It just hit the firewall and splintered like a fireworks. We stopped some of it, a little anyway. There’s code spreading throughout the system faster than we can do anything about.”

  Jeremy must have done something. The screen of her simulator went from a night view from a simulated F-35 to a tactical map of the world. It looked strange above the banks of her simulated F-35’s flight instruments.

  “Can’t you just shut off the computer?”

  “This isn’t a PC, Miranda. It’s one of the world’s largest supercomputers. Even if there was a single master switch, which there isn’t, it would shut down whole sections of Eglin Air Force Base. It could well kill more people that we could possibly save.”

  “We should have grounded all the A-10s. They’re the targets.”

  “I don’t think so anymore. Here,” Jeremy’s keys rattled in the background. “We have a flight of F-35’s taking off out of Australia, except there aren’t any F-35s in Australia yet—they’re still on order. Maybe it’s just to distract us. There are a hundred or more new events coming in and we don’t know what’s real.”

  “Are all of Colonel Campos’ A-10s at Davis-Monthan still grounded?”

  A brief pause while Jeremy asked.

  “He says yes. Including everything at Nellis in Nevada. And Eglin’s 96th Test Wing is still grounded pending the investigation of the three lost pilots.”

  “Good,” Miranda wondered whether she should knock on her head or cross her fingers before she gave the next order. Unsure, she did both before speaking to Jeremy. “Delete all events involving A-10s over US soil and territorial waters.”

  “Okay, that’s a lot of them cleared off.”

  “What’s left?”

  A map appeared across her simulation.

  Israel, Britain, Vietnam…

  “Jeremy?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You said you were a gamer as well as a programmer.”

  “Uh-huh,” his voice was so soft she could barely hear it.

  “As a gamer, would you repeat a good play or go for a new one?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “What if out of all of this, only one piece is real. Which one would it be?”

  83

  Jeremy stared at the screen with no idea. This was real world. Real conflict. Not…

  “What happens if I guess wrong?”

  Miranda’s silence told him what he really, really didn’t want to know.

  He was supposed to save people. That was his talisman as he sought the light side of the Force. That’s how he’d gotten himself out of hacking.

  And ultimately, that’s why he’d gotten out of gaming, too. For the most part it removed him from society. Every hour of gaming was like a drug—going to an easy escape.

  Online, he was faceless and he belonged.

  In school, he was the outsider frequently pissing people off as he skipped grades and aced tests. You’re blowin’ the curve, man. Guess we’re gonna beat the shit out of you ’til you learn.

  He’d liked that social aspect of being online. Flying together, fighting together, or even just sharing an adventure. He really missed that kind of hypersharing. Everyone wired in for hours at a stretch.

  Every communication immediate.

  Focused.

  No side conversation—except maybe about sex—which hadn’t meant a thing at eight, nine, ten… He’d been out of gaming about the same time he noticed girls. They were much more interesting in the flesh than online. Even if he’d never been a real winner in that department.

  It had taken a lot of effort to extract himself from gaming in Mom’s Halo. But he’d been much slower about getting out of Dad’s programming work on Flight Simulator.

  That still didn’t answer Miranda’s question.

  Then he remembered.

  “The SR-71 Blackbird that I mentioned before.”

  “What about it?”

  “I really only played with Microsoft Flight Simulator once. Dad loaded a pre-release of the next version onto my computer. He tried to show me, but I wanted to figure it out myself. I took the fastest plane—”

  “The SR-71 Blackbird,” Holly acknowledged from close beside him.

  “Right. For twenty-six hours I didn’t move. I didn’t eat. I didn’t pee.”

  “Too much information,” Holly covered her ears and made a loud humming noise.

  “All I did was keep working that SR-71 Blackbird. I’d zoom-climb up to a hundred thousand feet. Then, just before hard stall, I’d nose over and race down to the ground at better than Mach 3. I kept doing it until I could fly through an open hangar at Mach 3 without ripping off the wings.”

  “Jeremy…” He knew Holly’s warning tone.

  “No, this has a point. Really.”

  She raised an eyebrow as if saying, “Prove it to me.” Then she tapped her watch to reinforce the message.

  Right, he had t
o hurry.

  “I didn’t stop once I got it. I kept doing it over and over until I could do it ten times in a row without a failure. I didn’t care how tired I was, how hungry, or how much my bladder was hurting. I was afraid it might burst it was hurting so bad, but I didn’t stop. Not until I got it right ten times in a row. I loved reliving that success.”

  “Which means?” Miranda asked.

  “Which means that the hacker is going to go back to their greatest success and try to repeat it.”

  “North Korea.”

  “North Korea,” Jeremy agreed. Then he glanced at Holly and finally knew how to get her. “I never flew in Flight Simulator again. Too addictive for me. Besides, my bladder was in so much pain that I couldn’t stand and I had to crawl to the bathroom.”

  Holly punched his arm hard enough to hurt.

  But he didn’t care and just smiled back at her.

  Then she laughed that wonderful big laugh of hers that said he really did belong.

  84

  “Wipe everything else off the screen,” Miranda spoke into her headset.

  Jeremy did, then recentered her screen on just North Korea. Except there was nothing going on in North Korea.

  Miranda squinted at it. She tried tapping her knuckles on the side of her head but it didn’t seem to be bringing her any more luck.

  “Expand it back out,” Drake whispered to her. “South Korea and Japan. Especially Japan.”

  She passed the instruction on.

  Suddenly everything was in motion. Planes, ships, active missile batteries.

  “This is the simulation. How much of it is real?”

  Lizzie had taken over one of the simulator’s control computers. “Here. I’ll overlay what our satellites are reporting.”

  Miranda’s screen flashed and blurred.

  “Sorry. I forgot about the angular distortion of the satellite’s view. It isn’t directly overhead at the moment.”

  Everything distorted drastically, swirled left and right, then snapped into alignment.

  Drake grunted. “Damn it. That happened really fast. The Japanese have actually relaunched their entire fleet. They probably never even tied up to the docks, just sat there at the ready. Look, they’re flushing the F-35s back into the air.”

  “We have massive movement along the North Korean border,” Lizzy announced.

  “Our side or theirs?”

  “Both.”

  Drake grabbed a phone, dialed, and then used that command voice of his. “Get the President back in the PEOC, with my apologies. Then get him on the goddamn line. Take us straight to DEFCON 3 for the entire Pacific Rim. No, there’s not time to get him in the air. Besides, that’s probably not a very safe place to be at the moment.”

  Miranda knew there hadn’t been a DEFCON 3 incident since the 9/11 attacks.

  “We have missile launches out of North Korea,” someone in the background reported with perfect calm.

  Miranda glanced aside. There were many more people in the room than there had been mere minutes ago. Some were on phones, some were on computers.

  She turned and watched the simulations.

  “Lizzy, why don’t I see them in your satellite images? I should be able to because it’s daylight there.”

  “Because…” Lizzy drew it out. “Because they aren’t real.”

  “But the XC50 is reporting them as real to all of the Japanese systems.”

  “My god,” Drake moved up to stand close beside Miranda’s left shoulder. “That crazy hacker is trying to start World War III.”

  “So tell the Japanese that it’s fake.”

  “They won’t believe me, but I’ll try.”

  Miranda stared at the screen. Japan’s defensive helicopter carriers turned into aggressive aircraft carriers by simply changing out the aircraft. And all three were powering west into the Sea of Japan. With each passing moment, more and more aircraft were taking off from the Japanese air bases.

  Drake got off the phone, then swore vividly. “The Chief of Staff, Joint Staff of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, just hung up on me. They’re convinced it’s real and they’re going to launch everything they’ve got. Thank God we didn’t sell them any bombers, but they’ve got over three hundred F-4s, F-15s, and F-16s, in addition to their first twenty F-35s.”

  “How do we stop it?” Lizzy asked.

  “Well, they sure aren’t going to stand down for the price of a few seared steaks,” Drake told her.

  Miranda looked up at him.

  “Never mind. They won’t be turning back just because we asked them to. I’m going to get the 7th Fleet out to sea, but if I start shooting down the Japanese planes, we’ll have a whole different war on our hands.” He turned away to say something to the President, who was on a screen she couldn’t see.

  Miranda stared at her own screen.

  The answer had to be there somewhere.

  What if it wasn’t?

  What if it was in the earlier crashes caused by the hacker?

  “Jeremy, let’s review the crashes.”

  85

  “Let’s do what?” Jeremy could usually follow what Miranda wanted.

  In fact, he’d been pretty proud about guessing her needs ahead of time. Like delaying to grab his pack when they’d gone to the CH-47F Chinook so that he could read the black box—before it blew up.

  He hadn’t seen that coming.

  And he didn’t see what she wanted now.

  The general was right. World War III was shaping up fast on the screen. North Korea’s perceived attack on South Korea and Japan would launch the Americans. Neither China nor Russia could ignore a war on their very borders.

  Yet Miranda wanted to go back to—

  “Let’s review the crashes.” She didn’t often repeat herself. Miranda was a genius…

  “Is this one of your sphere things?”

  “That’s an interesting question. A sphere greater than one individual occurrence. One of interaction between lesser spheres.”

  “Stop her,” Holly whispered urgently in his ear. “She can’t stop herself from things like that. I thought you knew that.”

  Jeremy stared at Holly, her face just inches away as Miranda pursued the idea of an interactive sphere in superposition, inclusive of more directly discernible manifestations represented by individual crash events.

  He did know that about Miranda. He’d just never thought of it as a problem.

  But Holly was right.

  He could see that he’d completely sidetracked Miranda from the fearsome issue at hand.

  She didn’t have a measure of magnitude, but rather focused on what was right in front of her to the exclusion of all else.

  He turned from Holly and looked back at his list.

  “Okay,” he cut Miranda off in midsentence and tried to not feel awful about doing so. “I think we can dismiss the first crash in Achin, Afghanistan. Like an opening salvo, it was mostly a testing of abilities.”

  Holly hugged him hard from the side, kissed him on the cheek, and then ruffled his hair—partly dislodging his headset.

  He straightened it and continued. “If the hacker’s intent was to destroy an A-10, it was successful. But if it was to discredit A-10s in general, then it was a failure.”

  “Okay…” Miranda’s voice dragged, then, “Next!” She’d made the switch back.

  “The downing of Colonel Campos was even sloppier. An attached mechanical device and the probable murder of the mechanic responsible.”

  “I was lucky to survive that,” the colonel protested from somewhere on the system.

  “Yes, but as it didn’t show an aircraft failure, but rather direct sabotage, it’s inconsequential.”

  The colonel started to speak again, but Jeremy just cut him off. The same way he’d cut off Miranda. The same way that Holly cut him off when he was rambling too much.

  He’d never thought of the rambling as a problem in himself, but he could see it now.

  And he’d alway
s hated interrupting people. But it was a tool that seemed to work just as well as his wrenches worked on loosening a bolt. As long as he didn’t have to use it very often.

  “Syria was the first real success. The integration of real and simulated worlds.”

  “And I barely got out with my skin intact,” one of the pilots called out. “I’m guessing that I was piloting an A-10PCAS. It’s a remote-piloted version of the Warthog. The program was supposedly discontinued, but it’s the only thing that fits.”

  “That’s affirmative, Lt. Blake,” Lt. Colonel Kiley backed him up. “It’s classified, but it’s out there.”

  Jeremy didn’t want Miranda to get distracted so he moved on.

  “Taking over the drones over the Gulf of Mexico was another mistake.”

  “A mistake? Hell, yeah,” Lt. Blake again, sounding infinitely sad this time…and kinda pissed.

  “Three A-10s were lost. No initial evidence that they were shot down, but also no proof that they were failures either. Not a good demonstration.”

  “Then there was Korea,” Miranda stated simply.

  “Right. Because it was off your six-hour schedule, for whatever reason, we must assume that it was programmed quickly. Apparently only three of the four aircraft were sabotaged. If all four had been, we might assume navigation failures rather than reprogramming. That idea is supported by the fact that the aircraft were reprogrammed directly and never hooked into the Cray XC50 except for the report of their downing.”

  Miranda didn’t say anything.

  Jeremy looked at Holly and Mike as the silence stretched.

  Mike stood close behind Holly with a hand resting on her shoulder. They both shrugged uncertainly. As Holly did so, she noticed Mike’s hand. She nipped it hard with a sharp clack of her teeth. Mike yelped as he pulled it away.

  “Then there’s Korea,” Jeremy finally prompted her again.

  86