Thunderbolt

by M. L. Buchman

Miranda paused.

  Drake did like to tease people.

  Is that what he was doing now? How was she supposed to know?

  Unsure how to respond, she ignored him and returned to her queue.

  And ended up with nine possible scenarios involving over twenty aircraft.

  “Jeremy. Can you tell me what these have in common?”

  “Miranda?” Drake again.

  “Later,” she called out.

  “What are we looking at?” Drake was insistent.

  “If I knew that, I wouldn’t need Jeremy’s help, would I? Now be quiet for a minute.”

  There was a muffled laugh. Female. Holly or Lizzy Gray.

  Together she and Jeremy—and probably everyone else as Jeremy had routed the playbacks to the main screen—watched each event.

  A combat loss in Afghanistan. Yet it was logged into the simulation computer, which was decidedly unusual. At least a final mission report of it was. More than should be for a mission flown nine-and-a-half time zones away.

  Colonel Campos’ A-10 crash at Davis-Monthan was there as well. Except it appeared on the data falsely as a simulation, not a real flight.

  “Look, something did take control of my plane. From here! What the hell are you up to, Kiley?” Colonel Campos yelled across the table.

  “Quiet!” Miranda hated when people shouted. The emotions seemed to charge into her and bounce around like a bullet fired inside a steel room, ricocheting unpredictably until she didn’t know where it would land.

  “But—”

  “Colonel. Do not disturb Ms. Chase.” Drake snapped out a sharp command.

  She could hear Campos sputter, but he otherwise kept his silence—which was all she cared about.

  Miranda played another simulation, two A-10s in a dogfight with Chinese PLAAF jets.

  She played it twice, then looked at Jeremy.

  He shrugged.

  Holly shook her head.

  Whatever Miranda was looking for, it wasn’t in this one.

  She deleted it.

  The next was a simulated airplane battle in Syria.

  “Hey,” Kiley spoke up. “I recognize that scenario.”

  “Damn good pilot,” Campos observed.

  Miranda ran it again and watched the lone A-10 take on a pair of Su-25 Frogfoot Russian aircraft, as well as dodging an AIM-9 Sidewinder missile. Yes, it was a very good pilot.

  “Trainee named—”

  “Irrelevant,” Miranda cut him off.

  It also had a different feel than the partial simulations she’d watched.

  “This really happened.”

  “No,” Kiley insisted. “I saw the flight in the simulators myself. Lieutenant William Blake flew that scenario.”

  Miranda turned to face him. “No. That really happened.”

  “But—”

  “There are a dozen flight characteristics that the simulator doesn’t have yet. There’s buffeting from air pockets. Control slippage. Unpredictable behaviors in adversarial aircraft. Colonel Kiley, please check action reports for Syria at the same time as your simulation.”

  “But—”

  “But what, Colonel?”

  “That means…” he sounded as if he was choking. “Select the next simulated flight, two more down on your list.”

  “Skipping ahead isn’t orderly.”

  “Lady, just do it.”

  Holly rested a hand lightly on her arm. Holly must think it was okay to review them out of order, even if Miranda still didn’t like it.

  She took a deep breath and skipped over the next one she’d selected to highlight to the one the lieutenant colonel indicated.

  It really wasn’t orderly. Order. It was in the very meaning of the word: this one, then the next.

  Still, she clicked Play.

  56

  Three A-10s faced off against three MQ-9 Reaper drones and an RQ-170 Sentinel in the replay from Eglin’s simulator.

  “The first two Reapers were very sloppy,” Jeremy observed as they watched.

  Miranda almost looked away to inspect him. Mike was the pilot—though only of small, general aviation planes.

  Jeremy wasn’t a pilot at all. Yet he could see that the Reaper pilots had indeed been sloppy.

  The cat-and-mouse game of the final Warthog and the lone Sentinel played out across the screen.

  “Again, a very fine maneuver,” Campos concluded as the A-10 spiraled out of sight into the ocean.

  Kiley cleared his throat again. “Same trainee pilot, Poet Blake. But again, that wasn’t all a simulation. We lost three of our top trainer pilots this afternoon in the same area. Less than five hours ago.”

  Jeremy let out a low whistle. “Someone actually interfaced the simulation and the real world.”

  Miranda actually felt relieved. Aircraft losses at sea were very hard to explain. The loss of her parents’ 747 at sea had taken four years to solve and be finally reported by the NTSB. She’d been dreading the analysis of these three aircraft since the moment Colonel Campos had reported them back at Davis-Monthan.

  Now they knew the answer with no dredging of the seabed and piecing together infinitesimal clues.

  Miranda rolled the video back and read off the tail numbers on the A-10s. All three had “EG” tail codes—for Eglin AFB.

  “They check,” Kiley whispered.

  “Would someone explain what the hell is going on?” A small window in the corner of the screen showed Drake leaning toward the camera. Close enough to luridly distort his features.

  “Yes,” Miranda focused on the playback because Drake looked scary. “We’ve just identified the cause of three A-10 losses. They were shot down during a simulation run on your Cray XC50 computer. Four pilots, thinking it was a simulation, unknowingly flew real-world drones in an attack that killed three trainer pilots of the 96th Test Wing based here at Eglin.”

  “Oh, Christ.” Nason dropped back into his chair. Which was a relief.

  “Hey! Run that again,” Jeremy pointed at the screen.

  “But we still haven’t looked at the one before it.”

  “I saw something.”

  57

  Jeremy watched the simulation screen closely.

  He was missing something.

  Someone? No, something. He just had no idea what it was.

  The first A-10 losing a wing and plunging from the sky.

  An MQ-9 Reaper going down, and then another.

  A pair of Hellfire missiles aimed at the remaining A-10s. Then, just as the final A-10 shot the final Reaper, the view from the RQ-170 Sentinel caught a sideview of the last drone.

  “Freeze it!”

  Miranda did.

  “Zoom in.”

  Miranda manipulated the controls. The image was a little blurred by distance and air currents, but one thing was clear.

  “Who flies an MQ-9 Reaper with no markings on it?”

  58

  Drake’s blood ran cold.

  The Army, Air Force, and Navy all flew with tail numbers.

  The only people who didn’t were…he looked across his Pentagon office desk at Lizzy and she nodded confirmation.

  The CIA.

  “Whoever it is,” Jeremy was saying, “just lost three Reapers. And who flies the Sentinel? That’s gotta be the CIA, doesn’t it? I mean, who else would have that cool a surveillance drone?”

  “What makes it so cool?” Mike asked from Eglin.

  “It’s a flying wing. Super-stealth. Ultra-classified. That would explain why the last pilot never saw what hit him. And the simulator pilot knew it. He just slid the Sentinel in sweet as could be and Ker-pow! Down goes the A-10.”

  “Real people, Jeremy,” Holly this time.

  “Right. I knew that. But it was still amazing.” Though he did sound a little sorry for his comment.

  Drake pulled himself together. Though it was damn hard. He was losing planes all over again. If he got proof of that Clarissa Reese woman being involved, he’d have her taken out and shot�
�even if he had to pull the trigger himself.

  “Miranda. What about the flight into the DMZ?”

  “I still haven’t reviewed—”

  “Miranda,” he cut her off, then cursed himself. He hoped it didn’t stop her thinking as he’d seen it do before. “Please. I have the Japanese ready to start World War III in North Korea. Can you tell me what happened there?”

  There was a long silence.

  “Miranda?”

  “I haven’t watched that one yet, Drake. I don’t know anything about it.”

  “Let’s watch it together, okay?”

  Again the long pause.

  “Miranda?”

  “There’s a problem, Drake. I have a record here, but it’s empty. There’s nothing inside the record. Jeremy and Lt. Colonel Kiley are working on it.”

  He signaled Lizzy, who spoke up, “Watch your screen. We have the satellite files of the flight.”

  She hit Play.

  Together they watched the broken diamond formation reform. Lizzy had synced the pilots’ crosstalk with the satellite image.

  “But the KH-11 doesn’t record audio.”

  “No, Liz— General Gray synced it from their actual broadcasts.”

  “As long as you didn’t corrupt the original files.”

  “They’re stored separately,” Lizzy assured Miranda.

  “Oh, okay. Play it again.”

  This time the viewing passed in silence except for the pilots’ voices.

  “That would appear to be real world. Which doesn’t explain why there was any record at all in the AFAMS simulation computer. However, we can likely conclude that the aircraft were tampered with.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “We can either hypothesize that three of them had both GPS and inertial tracking failures, or that that those three aircraft were tampered with. This flight remains an anomaly.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “The other four flights—Afghanistan, Colonel Campos, Syria, and the Gulf of Mexico—occurred within minutes of six-hour intervals. This one occurred nineteen hours and twenty-eight minutes after the initial known event. Nineteen hours and twenty-eight minutes is not evenly divisible by six hours. It’s now nine-oh-one Eastern Standard Time. There’s two hours and fifty-nine minutes until the next expected occurrence.”

  Drake hit the mute button.

  “What do you think, Lizzy?”

  “Uh…” Lizzy fooled with the keyboard, aligning it with the edge of the desk. “There’s a reason you called her. We hadn’t even connected the events. She not only connected them, but she found a pattern as well.”

  He unmuted the phone.

  “Two hours and fifty-nine minutes—”

  “Fifty-eight now,” Miranda replied.

  “Any theories?”

  “There is no pattern of East to West or North to South, even discounting the event in the DMZ. I’d say that the answer either lies in the computer here, or in Washington, DC.”

  “Here?”

  “Commands have been issued. CIA drones were either used or stolen. A highly secure supercomputer here at Eglin appears to have been hacked. That speaks to CIA, NSA, or someone else at the Fort Belvoir, Virginia, intelligence complex. Unless we can capture the next action, we won’t know about it until after it occurs. We must be ready for that.”

  Drake cricked his neck.

  No way to stop it until he knew what was going to happen next.

  And no way to know what was going to happen next, until it had happened.

  “Ms. Chase. How fast can you get to DC?”

  “I have my jet. Which places me a little over an hour away.”

  “Go.”

  He cut the connection and looked at Lizzy.

  “Another person for the Wagyu beef barbeque?” Lizzy’s tone was painfully dry.

  “Maybe we can get her to bring a date. That will just make the President’s day.”

  Lizzy actually smiled despite all the grim news.

  “What?”

  “The image of Miranda Chase with a date. I don’t know. It just seems…funny.”

  Sadly for Miranda, that was true.

  As much as he hated to, he hit his intercom to his assistant, “Find me CIA Director of Special Projects Clarissa Reese. Give her an official escort to my office.”

  “Sir?” His assistant clearly remembered how much trouble the woman could be.

  “No cuffs. But get her here.” He disconnected.

  “Do you think she’ll cooperate?” Lizzy’s questions weren’t always the most comfortable.

  “No, probably not. Does that mean that we need Director Clark Winston as well?”

  “Might help keep her in line.”

  Drake sighed and picked up the phone to place the call.

  “Do you think she likes missile-fried beef as well? I mean, since you’re already inviting her date.”

  He hung up the phone without calling.

  Drake really should have retired while he still had a chance.

  Unless…

  “Come on, Lizzy. We’re going back to the White House Situation Room. There’s more than one way to control the renegade.”

  “Here she’d assume she’s under attack. There she might think she was called in to help,” Lizzy nodded her agreement.

  He notified his assistant of the change of plans, to notify Ms. Chase’s escort and call for his car to meet them in forty-five minutes.

  “You going to come along, Lizzy?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world, General Nason.”

  He sighed. If only he could.

  59

  Daemon had decided to scratch the itch with Haggador II.

  And things were just getting good.

  He and her avatar, a harpy of sensuous female with an eagle’s wings and talons, were helping the Mongols shred the Chinese at the Great Wall. There really was nothing like a good pillage to stir up the hormones. She was just about to have a mid-battle tryst with a remarkably virile Kublai Kahn—whose avatar looked like a pumped-up Leonardo DiCaprio—when a whole cascade of alarms went off.

  She flipped out of the sim to see what they were…

  And completely forgot about the Mongol hordes.

  ACH, DAVIS, SYR, GM3, even DMZ had all been opened on the Cray XC50.

  That was seriously bad. No one should have even looked for them.

  And they’d been deleted.

  There had to be some other backup running that she’d missed.

  Shit! The supercomputer had a massive memory cache to service repeated access of information more quickly. She’d deleted the original commands and the backups, but she hadn’t thought to flush the cache.

  Even now, someone was scrabbling down into time stamps and user signatures—not that they’d find anything, she wasn’t that sloppy.

  But no one should even be looking. Especially not this fast.

  Haggador II pinged her.

  She shut him down.

  He pinged again.

  She blocked his address.

  He could walk around that easily enough—Haggador was good enough—but he didn’t.

  Didn’t matter.

  Daemon stared at the screen and thought back to when the trouble had begun.

  That A-10 Thunderbolt II that should have died at Davis-Monthan. Then that stupid helicopter dropping it should have been enough.

  But it wasn’t. It hadn’t returned to base; it had been called back to the crash site for inspection.

  That had meant she’d had to destroy the helo.

  Whoever had investigated the Davis-Monthan incidents was apparently now at Eglin prowling through her computer code. Code that was supposed to have been erased.

  Oh well, no use beating herself up about the past.

  Who had called back a helicopter that should have been forgotten? Or flew to Eglin?

  She didn’t like anomaly. Anomalies…

  Two of them.

  What if it wa
s a pattern?

  It took almost an hour to find it…

  An F-86 Sabrejet had arrived at Davis-Monthan. Then from there to Eglin Air Force Base in the exact time window between the helo crash and the folder pings.

  And now…

  It was approaching Washington, DC.

  Well, clearly the folks in DC needed a distraction.

  Too bad an F-86 was so primitive. It limited her options from doing something truly spectacular.

  60

  Harry and Heidi were set up in a small, and very secure CIA conference room at two facing terminals.

  “Nothing here, Wizard Boy.”

  “Nothing here, Witchy Lady.” But he knew that patience was the key to this game.

  Well, the first key.

  He hoped.

  Between them they’d gotten a glimpse of Daemon’s trail a few hours ago. A query had come in, dipping toward that protection code that Heidi had discovered wrapped around Clarissa Reese’s name.

  Per agreement, Heidi had slow-hacked Daemon—fast enough to keep her moving, but not so fast as to make her cut and run—while he’d unleashed a suite of tracking tools to race ahead. They’d gotten a clear footprint.

  “Same structure as Reese’s protection,” Heidi had gasped out.

  As close as you got to a positive ID in the Black Hat world.

  When Harry had gotten mired in the Crimean nightmare of anonymous directories and failed passwords, Heidi had leapfrogged to look for what came out the back of the snarl.

  The instant the hacker had emerged, Harry had abandoned the trap and they’d both chased her back through a satellite broadcasting station.

  But there was no way past the destabilized sat.

  “That was a brilliant move.”

  “Major,” Heidi agreed.

  Their boss had hired the craziest Black Hatter of them all to make her protection code. Then she’d brought Daemon on board for this project.

  Whatever the hell it was.

  For now they could only wait and watch…and watch.

  And watch.

  And…

  A new packet arrived for insertion into the AFAMS computer.

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