Raider

by M. L. Buchman

  “Rolling,” the invisible Marine announced.

  They had both the feed from the Tower and a satellite view as the plane crossed the thousand feet from the compound’s main gate to the runway.

  As the C-5M turned onto the runway and opened its throttles wide, a new voice cut across the airwaves.

  “This is Turkish Air Control. Flight on active Incirlik runway, abort departure. I repeat—”

  “And now,” Drake said softly.

  On cue, it was already done. Power for the entire base flickered briefly, then blacked out.

  The emergency generators in the American section kicked in and the lights came back on.

  Drake knew that the emergency generator for the Control Tower had been sabotaged by the simple expedient of a pair of Vise-grip pliers, of Russian manufacture, being clamped on the rubber fuel line. The generator coughed once but never produced any power.

  The C-5M, now visible only by its navigation lights, could be seen accelerating down the runway. The Control Tower camera, conveniently still hooked to battery power, showed the C-5M rotate and lift off.

  “Have done a good job, guys. Have done a good job.” Barry was repeating it over and over like a prayer. His stress was finally showing.

  There were times Drake was glad he didn’t know the full implications of someone else’s job.

  Barry would know exactly what it meant if the loadmasters had screwed up.

  If the 757’s fuselage was more than a meter out of perfect balance inside the plane, it would be uncontrollable. It could dive or climb beyond the ability of the plane’s control surfaces to correct. The fifty-ton load might weigh less than an Abrams Main Battle Tank, but there were so many unknowns in a chopped-up chunk of 757 that it would be much harder to balance it fore-to-aft.

  Dozens of Boeing engineers back in Seattle had worked with them over the last four hours to make this happen.

  They continued the climb cleanly.

  “Two engine starts,” the Marine set another screen back to the Incirlik field and circled bright spots on the darkened field. “Three. All in the Turkish compound.”

  “How long?” President Cole called out.

  Barry answered him. “She’s not a speed demon, Mr. President. The Galaxy makes about five hundred miles an hour. Fifty miles to international waters. Six minutes to clear.”

  “Those are F-16 Falcons they’re firing up?”

  “Yes, sir. They can fly at fifteen hundred miles an hour. Three minutes from alert to flight. They can overtake us before we reach the coast.”

  “What the hell are you—”

  Drake held up a hand, then pointed.

  With seeming coincidence, two flights of two F-15 Strike Eagles were returning from a Syrian patrol…freshly refueled out over the Mediterranean by a C-130 out of Italy.

  “They’re faster and more maneuverable.”

  79

  “Metin!”

  “What?”

  He slapped the screen clear. For half a second he was afraid he’d actually hit the Purge command.

  A hundred times in the five hours since meeting General Kaan he’d reached out to delete his program. And a hundred times he hadn’t dared.

  If he could be sure there was no backup, he might do it—no matter the cost to himself. But he couldn’t be sure.

  General Firat was standing over his desk, shouting…something.

  It took him shaking his head to clear it enough to unscramble his words into meaning. He really should have slept.

  “Now! The plane! Departing Incirlik! It must be stopped! Turned! We need it! Safe!”

  Well, that sounded okay. Not a life-or-death moral question.

  He opened the launch screen.

  While he’d been thinking last night, he had come up with a way to accelerate his program. It had been easy to knock together.

  The first question the program now asked on launch was, “Ludicrous Speed?”

  Spaceballs had made him and Onur laugh their asses off when they’d found it on a pirate site.

  He punched the Y key.

  Every other user was immediately dropped from the SVR supercomputer and the login file blocked. His program now owned the entire machine’s two hundred and ninety servers and five thousand cores.

  It was Ludicrous Speed.

  He launched into the American’s GPS system like it was döner kebab and he was the sharp knife filling a pita bread with shavings of American code.

  80

  “There!” Heidi’s shout jolted Clarissa out of her reverie.

  She’d been trying to think of how to leverage this to make Clark’s star really shine, and frankly coming up with very little. He had all the marketing savvy of a city councilman.

  “He’s faster than before,” Harry had jumped onto his console as well.

  “Not even close to fast enough.” Heidi’s hands were moving so quickly that Clarissa could barely see them. “Cut me another slice.”

  Why would she choose this moment to ask for more pizza when she’d spent the last hour ignoring the one by her elbow?

  “Oak Ridge? Italy?”

  “Japan!”

  “Oooo,” Harry turned his head just enough for Clarissa to know that he was now talking to her even though his hands were moving as fast as Heidi’s. “She’s really pissed at this guy. Japan means Fugaku, the world’s fastest supercomputer. There!” He punched a final command. “I cut you a fifty-thousand-core slice.”

  Heidi barely grunted in acknowledgement.

  “Hope Los Alamos doesn’t mind,” Harry was actually chortling with hacker delight. “Their Summit and Sierra machines are going to be running kinda slow here for a few minutes. Right now? The biggest supercomputer in the world is sitting in that chair and going after our pal.”

  81

  Lieutenant Colonel Brad Whitman sat in the jump seat close behind the C-5M Super Galaxy’s pilots.

  “Remember, ignore everything except visual and radar.”

  “You’ve told us that a few times, Brad.”

  He grinned, “Gonna tell you guys a few more times, I’m sure. But I’ll try to restrain myself.”

  “How about the pair of fast movers hustling up on our asses?”

  “I’m thinking they’re going to have a few issues any moment now.”

  82

  “Flight leader. Target is two-five miles ahead. I’m on your seven o’clock a little low. I’ll—”

  Captain Tamar’s instruments went nuts.

  Half of them said he was headed west in a steep dive. But he’d been flying southeast in a shallow climb a moment before.

  His instincts said to correct.

  He pulled up, and the dive got steeper.

  He checked the artificial horizon—but he wasn’t inverted.

  Banking right didn’t get him back to southeast. Now one instrument said he was going north and the other south.

  One climbing, one diving.

  He looked up just a moment too late.

  83

  Major Gür felt the hard jar as Captain Tamar’s F-16’s tail clipped the underside of his left wing.

  A warning light flickered on for the Number Three hardpoint’s AIM-9 Sidewinder missile. The rear mount broke loose, but the front one held. The partially severed wiring harness sparked once, twice, then the missile launched.

  The bent rear nozzle and fins—also damaged by the collision with Captain Tamar’s Falcon—aimed the dangling Sidewinder up and to the right.

  It launched directly into Major Gür’s cockpit.

  Major Gür could only stare down at the long gap bisecting his leg for an instant before the Sidewinder ignition circuit fired and utterly destroyed his plane.

  84

  Captain Tamar saw the complete destruction of his flight leader’s plane. The guy was an asshole, but he was a good pilot.

  And Tamar knew that unless he did something amazing, he was going to be thrown out or jailed for what they’d call an “irresponsible loss
of control.”

  At least his own plane was still flyable.

  Intercept and escort them back to base?

  Like hell.

  They’d unleashed some kind of jamming signal he’d never seen.

  He was going to kick their asses.

  He ignored everything other than the radar signal, now out at thirty miles. They were at the coast. In twelve miles they’d be safe in international waters.

  His missiles could only reach twenty.

  He slammed the throttle into afterburner territory and punched after them.

  They were seventy seconds to international waters.

  He couldn’t catch them that fast, but he could get well inside the missile’s range in that time, then it could burn them wherever it wanted to.

  As Tamar blew through Mach 1, a pair of F-15E Strike Eagles flew up alongside him.

  There was just enough light to see the American markings and each pilot silhouetted against the glowing predawn sky.

  One signaled him to turn around with an upward twirling gesture.

  Tamar gave him the finger and focused on the C-5M Super Galaxy lumbering along ahead of them.

  Ten more seconds to range. Twenty to make sure there was fuel to spare in the missile’s engine.

  He was pushing the limits of the Never Exceed Speed of the aircraft. No drastic maneuvers at this speed. He wasn’t planning to make any.

  Then the two Strike Eagles jolted ahead.

  They dipped, then shot aloft in an X pattern not fifty meters off his nose.

  When he hit the turbulence of their jet wash, he might as well have hit a brick wall.

  He tumbled.

  And the very moment he overcorrected, he knew it.

  He reached for the ejection handles just as the right wing separated from the aircraft.

  If he ejected and survived, they were going to take him out and kill him for his failure.

  If he rode it down, the propaganda machine of the government might declare him a fallen hero. Then his wife and little girl would have an easier life.

  No. He’d take his chances. As he reached for the ejection handle, the decision was taken out of his hands. The left wing folded as the F-16 performed a backflip.

  The wing’s edge sheared the cockpit and the top half of his body away from the plane.

  85

  Metin had never seen anything like what slid into his computer. All three screens slipped out of his control.

  On the left-hand screen, a very sexy green monster—like if Zoe Saldana from Guardians of the Galaxy had a love child with a Tyrannosaurus rex—grabbed the edges of screen, peeled his code away from the edges, and read it for a moment. Then crumpled it up in its tiny hands before stomping the shit out of what was left.

  “Why are you playing video games, Metin?” General Firat asked from somewhere beside him.

  “I’m not.” Metin tapped the keyboard, but nothing happened. “I’m not in control.”

  “What do you mean you’re—”

  Metin ignored him.

  His middle screen, which had been showing the plane flights and how the GPS was being locally altered, went pure white—like pristine snow.

  The right-hand screen had been monitoring the status of the SVR computer. A sexy blonde witch on a broom flew into the middle of the screen, pulled out a wand, winked at him, then appeared to tap it against the middle of the screen.

  A thousand beams of light shot out in every direction.

  The witch remained, watching as the beams began returning.

  With flicks of her wand, she swept things this way and that.

  For a second he saw his own face flash up behind her. Her wand sucked that up. Then Onur’s. There was a longer pause when Asli’s file opened.

  With Asli’s photo still on the screen, the witch looked over at him for a moment so steadily he’d swear that she could see him, though his consoles had no cameras. No, but she’d know he was watching.

  More files gathered.

  General Firat popped up. And General Kaan.

  “What the hell is going on?” Firat demanded.

  “I don’t know.”

  She flipped through them for a moment and appeared to be shaking her head sadly.

  Then there was another wink as the witch dropped their two files, and a third general he didn’t recognize, into a mail slot that had magically appeared entitled, The New York Times. She repeated the action twice more for Pravda and Al Jazeera.

  Then the slot blinked and was gone.

  Next came a network diagram. He recognized their small section of Siberkume, but the rest was new. He never knew how extensive the network really was.

  A giant red button appeared on the screen.

  The witch moved to press it, then stopped and turned as if to look at him.

  When he hesitated, she began tapping her wand against her other palm as if counting seconds.

  He’d wager she wasn’t going to count past ten.

  A glance aside. Firat was on the phone, yelling for Kaan to pay attention.

  Metin turned back, thought of Asli—

  No matter the costs.

  —and punched the Enter key.

  The witch smiled brilliantly.

  An email address flashed up too briefly for him to fully see, but he’d bet it was hers.

  She wrapped it like a present, in layer after layer of code.

  Then she made a show of dropping it into a private e-mail inbox that no one anywhere was supposed to know was his.

  The message was obvious. Once you’re good enough to crack this code, you’ll be able to contact me.

  She pointed her wand upward.

  Along the top of the screen, three satellites showed impossible little rockets—fire didn’t burn in space. But the brilliant orange exhaust fumes were spitting out the word “Deorbit” from each sat. The three Turkish spy satellites were coming down.

  Then he watched the nodes on the Siberkume network map go dark, starting with the SVR supercomputer.

  One by one they blinked out.

  Through the open office door, he heard angry exclamations out on the main floor as their machines were being wiped.

  Onur’s station beside him dazzled for a moment, then the screens went dark.

  The witch hopped back on her broom, waved cheerily, and zipped across all three screens, which was a good trick as they were three completely separate computers.

  All three screens dazzled white.

  Then a raw BIOS boot prompt flashed onto his screen.

  He’d bet the computers, all of them throughout the complex, had been scrubbed back to factory-fresh bare drives.

  Metin rose very slowly from his chair, then tucked it neatly back under the desk.

  He stepped up beside General Firat, who was just standing there. Very still.

  Firat slowly turned his phone toward Metin. “What does it mean?”

  The Cataclysm. No Extra Life.

  Firat tapped the screen, but it wouldn’t clear.

  “Just what it says, sir.” Metin pulled out his Siberkume pass card and tucked it into Firat’s pocket before leaving.

  “The Cataclysm” had been the ultimate weapon at the end of the Ready Player One gamer movie. And the hero, the entire world that mattered, had been saved by an “Extra Life” token—that Firat hadn’t been given.

  Metin knew he hadn’t won the game. But he hadn’t lost it either. He’d survived it. For this game, that was all he needed to do.

  Once he was out in the sunrise, he sent a text to Asli.

  Did the right thing.

  She sent back a heart emoji.

  86

  “We made it?”

  “Yes, Clark, it would appear we did.” Miranda had expected more than a straight-and-level flight to escape Turkey, but no additional maneuvering had been necessary.

  They had kept the fuel load light to escape Incirlik. But now they’d refueled over Italy and would cruise straight through to Washington,
DC, to drop off Clark. Then on to Groom Lake. There, Miranda could retrieve her Citation M2 jet. The 757 might be stripped there or sent back to Seattle to be rebuilt. Someone else would make that decision.

  “Before I go and call my wife to let her know I’ll be home for dinner, I wanted to thank you all again. You’ve got a hot team here, Miranda. It’s one your parents would be proud of. Don’t let any of them go. Especially this one.” He grabbed Mike’s hand and shook it solidly. “Anything any of you need, just ask.”

  “Some sleep might help, mate.” Holly said cheerily.

  “Whoa!” he held up his hands. “I’m only Vice President. That’s out of my jurisdiction.”

  He was still laughing as he dialed his phone and walked toward his office at the front of the 757.

  “I like him,” Andi said softly.

  “He knew my parents.” And she still didn’t know if she wanted more of the stories he might be able to tell about them. He knew them back when they were all in the CIA. A whole part of their lives that they had never shared with her.

  Maybe someday, but not today.

  “What the hell are you doing, Jeremy?” Holly nudged his arm hard enough to send his hand skittering across the keyboard. He’d been typing on his laptop since the moment they’d boarded at Incirlik.

  “I’m…just… There!” He tapped a final key and then closed the machine. “I was just finishing the reports on all three crashes. I just sent the drafts to you for review, Miranda.”

  “Yes, he’s always like this,” Holly whispered loudly to Andi.

  “I wish I could stick around to find out,” Andi’s voice was even quieter.