Drone: an NTSB / military technothriller (Miranda Chase Book 1)

by M. L. Buchman

  Sam Chase might have thought his expression was neutral, but Miranda could now see the encouragement behind it. Could see how he had built her knowledge layer upon layer until she could simply see the solution to most basic ciphers and some of the intermediate ones. Until her mind was honed to the challenges of solving puzzles of any type.

  It hadn’t served her well in school though.

  She’d seen Terry Smits tinkering with a Rubik’s Cube. She should never have said that it looked simple, and certainly should never have proven that it was when he’d tossed it to her. It had been her first insight into three-dimensional coding sequences. Apparently solving it so quickly in front of his friends had been particularly upsetting. The bruise she’d sustained after being shoved hard into a locker had developed an intriguing tessellation.

  That was but the first of a dozen examples before she finally learned to keep herself to herself.

  Was that the trick to Kryptos’ fourth panel? Could it be segmented into a multi-dimensional matrix? Fourteen rows. The first of thirty-two characters, the next twelve of thirty-one characters and the last of either twenty-nine characters or thirty with a leading space. Possible index rows of—

  The general’s phone rang too loudly to focus.

  She pulled out her small personal code-reference notebook and added the concept to make sure that she didn’t forget it.

  The general set the phone to speaker.

  “This is Harrington.”

  “Why did you code-word classify a plane wreck?” General Nason’s snarl reminded her of Terry’s when she’d tried to explain how she’d solved his Rubik’s Cube so fast. He’d snatched it away so hard he’d almost broken one of her fingers—she hadn’t been able to hold a pen properly for days. That was before he’d shoved her into the locker.

  General Harrington’s silence was just as deep as Terry’s had been, finally driving her out of both Chess Club and Math Club. She hadn’t been much of a joiner since then. For reasons she didn’t understand, he’d only become angrier when, for the first time in the three years since she’d joined it, neither club made it past the city-level competitions.

  “Harrington,” Nason stood, planted his fists on his desk, and glared at the phone as if Harrington could possibly see him. “Unless you want to be in charge of the depot rebuilding captured AK-47s in Libya, you’ll give me the goddamn code word. Now!”

  The silence stretched until it had a thinness that defied all physics in that it still included connection.

  “Or would you prefer a court-martial for failure to follow a direct order from a superior officer?”

  “You are not in the chain of command.”

  An astute observation, in Miranda’s opinion. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, including the Chairman himself, were actually forbidden by law from direct command. They might be the highest-ranking officers in the military, but their roles were strictly advisory.

  “You doubt my ability to ram that last statement down your throat until you choke on it?”

  “No sir.” Harrington did not sound pleased to Miranda’s ear.

  “Well?” The next pause was equally long.

  “I don’t recall it, sir.” Holly had been right after all; General Harrington had made it up on the spot.

  “Security so effective that even you aren’t cleared for it,” General Nason almost smiled at that. “Well there’s a woman sitting here in my office who obviously has a memory far superior to yours. Perhaps I’ll put her in your job.”

  “That NTSB bitch couldn’t—”

  General Nason cut the connection, then rocked back in his chair and looked at her over steepled fingers. “He doesn’t seem to like you much.”

  “No, he doesn’t.” But Miranda already knew that. Another man who relished stating the obvious. Perhaps it was a Y-chromosome trait.

  31

  They were now a hundred feet up, but as the wreck was dead astern, there wasn’t much to see. Mike kept watching the desert intently, wishing his arm would stop throbbing where Holly had punched it.

  She was clearly superior physically, so he couldn’t get his revenge that way—besides, that wasn’t his way, it was hers. He’d think up some other devious trick…later.

  For now, he was appreciating her suspicious mind. Being cleared off the crash site with no notice had turned to careful silence, slipping a backup of their data into her boot heel, and now watching behind.

  If he knew what he was watching for…

  Would he recognize a wargame if he saw one?

  But Holly had been suspicious about that, too. If it wasn’t a wargame…

  He spotted a single plane racing in from the east. It was moving fast and low and would cross close behind them.

  He tapped Holly on the thigh in warning—hoping she wouldn’t kill him for presuming—not daring to look away so that he wouldn’t lose sight of it. Mike suspected that a wargame wouldn’t have a single jet off on its own.

  For half a second, her vest full of tools was jabbing into his back as she leaned against him.

  “Speed!” Holly shouted loudly enough to blow out his eardrum. “We need more speed!”

  The helicopter nosed down and leapt forward.

  The jet disappeared behind them. And Holly was gone to look out her side window.

  He swung over as well, until he was pressed up against her back. He had a notebook and a small pocket recorder, but that was it. No prickly vengeance would be his.

  The jet reappeared from behind her side of the helicopter and moved away. He’d never seen anything go so fast.

  “Hang on!” Holly shouted again.

  He wished she’d cut that out. They all sat within an arm’s length of each other.

  A shock wave slammed into them, hard, accompanied by a massive boom even louder than the turbine engine.

  The helicopter lurched, as if it had tripped on something in the empty sky.

  “Sonic boom,” Holly called out. “Now comes the kicker.”

  “The wha—” Was all the chance he had to get out before there was another blast. This one slammed into them both sonically and physically.

  The helicopter seemed to lurch forward for a moment…then stop dead.

  It dropped like a lead weight.

  As the pilot wrestled to regain control of the aircraft—which had an alarming number of buzzers and red lights going off—Mike wondered what his last thought would be. He’d rather not have a replay of his life if he had a choice.

  Whatever his final thoughts before death were, he didn’t have a chance to think about them.

  As the helicopter struggled to survive, it twisted sideways.

  Past Holly’s shoulder, he had a clear view of something that looked right out of a war movie. A roiling cloud of superheated orange and yellow below, with a vast double cloud of smoke above like a pair of massive gray chrysanthemums. It bloomed exactly where they’d spent the last two days.

  The next instant he was looking up at the sky.

  He looked out his own window—straight into the fast-approaching surface of the Nevada desert.

  32

  “So it seems that you are the sole keeper of the classified code word on this project.”

  Miranda wasn’t, but she was the team’s IIC. Being in charge meant not exposing your team to undue distractions. Holly Harper had also heard the code word and Miranda had no doubts regarding her memory.

  Knowing that General Harrington had made it up on the spot, and then forgotten it in the uncontrolled heat of his anger, didn’t invalidate its existence. Or perhaps it did.

  She rose to walk about the office. Movement was conducive to thought processes involving ciphers and perhaps would be in resolving this particular conundrum. Much of his office was filled with various maps. Some made sense to his current position: central America, Eastern Africa and across the Arabian states, Southwest Asia, and much of Russia’s border shared with its former Soviet state protectorates.

  Close by the general’s
desk was a collection of photos that had her circling the large desk.

  They were career officer photos.

  “Grenada was my first operation back in ’83,” General Nason rose to stand beside her. “That’s me, the cocksure lieutenant who thought he knew some shit.” Even then he’d stood out for his lean height, towering several inches over the other members of his squad gathered close in front of a helicopter.

  “It’s the year I was born.”

  “Whole lot of miles behind both of us, Ms. Chase.”

  She looked through the photos.

  “My last field op,” he tapped the photo of him standing with a team in front of a small UAV drone with a flat nose but the distinctive downward v-tail and rear propeller of the MQ-1 Predator. “Operation Joint Guard in Bosnia. It was ’95, I think.”

  “It was 1996, the month after my parents were killed in TWA 800.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t know that. Though I remember the 747 going down. A whole class of French students went down with that, didn’t they?”

  “Sixteen students and five adult chaperones. My parents were not part of that.”

  “Why were they aboard?”

  “They were vacationing in France. I was supposed to join them the next week. If only I’d been with them.”

  “Then you’d be dead.”

  “That’s been pointed out to me. Perhaps if they’d waited until my horse camp was over, but they said they couldn’t wait.”

  “Did they have business over there?”

  Miranda could only blink at him in surprise. She’d never questioned why they couldn’t wait for her. They had left for France and died en route. Never asking the next logical question of why was…confusing. She considered calling Tante Daniels right now, but she suspected that it would be rude and decided against it.

  The general harrumphed at her silence. “We were a joint Air Force, Army, CIA team flying the GNAT 750 from Albania, the predecessor to the Predator UAV that offered us satellite control.”

  “All created from the mind of Abraham Karem, the father of the UAV. He started with the Albatross, then Amber.” Miranda felt as if she’d just tripped and fallen.

  “What is it?”

  Miranda tried to think how to unsay the word she’d just said, but it was now out there. For a moment she imagined being able to gobble up her words once they were spoken and was suddenly transported back to the childhood book The Phantom Tollbooth where that was possible. Her mother had given it to her to read at camp. She’d finished it the same night that Tante Daniels had come to tell her the bad news in person. The last book of her childhood.

  She could no longer eat her own words—at least not literally.

  “What about the Amber?” The general’s eyes were slowly narrowing until he was squinting at her.

  She squinted back, but all it did was shadow his features with a blurred focus on her eyelashes.

  “Ms. Chase?”

  “Amber,” she managed, picturing the early Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, “is also a very interesting word.” Not Jurassic Park at all. Holly would be disappointed to learn that.

  “As in a classified code word.”

  Miranda knew she was no good at hiding such things and sighed. Then gave it one more try, ignoring General Nason’s smile, “It is the first full-sized surveillance UAV with a high-reliability factor. In many ways the origin of the species.”

  “And a classified code word.”

  Resigned, she gave in. “And a classified code word.”

  “So tell me what’s going on with that crash.” The general looked smug as he returned to his chair and waved for her to sit once more across the desk from him.

  “I can’t, sir. You haven’t yet given me the code word.”

  He actually laughed, “I could get to like you, Ms. Chase.”

  “You would be among the select few.” Other than her mentor Terence and her aunt-in-all-but-blood, she wasn’t sure if she actually had any friends.

  “What can you tell me about the crash of the C-130 Hercules in the vicinity of Groom Lake that is code-word classified Amber?”

  Miranda opened her mouth but the sharp ring of her phone cut her off.

  33

  “They blew it up.”

  “They nearly blew us up with it,” Miranda could hear Mike call out in the background of Holly’s call.

  “Blew it up?”

  General Nason jolted at her words and she switched her phone to speaker since he was, by whatever method, now cleared for this investigation.

  “They sent in an F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter, supersonic, which was kind of cool, and blew the shit out it. Based on the pressure shock wave around one psi that tumbled our helo, it was probably a pair of GBU-12 Paveway IIs, corroborated by the accuracy with which they struck. At least a thousand pounds of combined explosive and definitely guided in.”

  The general looked at her in puzzlement. “Hit what?”

  “Our bleeding wreck. Weren’t you paying attention? First Mike almost pissing himself because—”

  “I didn’t! Besides we were almost killed!” Mike shouted.

  “But you screamed like a little girl. We all heard it, so don’t try to change the story. And then getting the full frisk and pat down before they confiscated all our data at Creech,” Holly continued.

  “I went to Groom Lake and all I got was a rectal probe. I want a goddamn t-shirt that says that!” Mike was still fuming in the background.

  “Who would do that?” Miranda couldn’t imagine such a thing. Or couldn’t have before her visit to the CIA earlier this afternoon.

  “Who held a gun to our faces yesterday morning? I’ll give you two guesses but neither one was me.” Holly sounded completely calm, but with no sense of humor. She was in some strange soldier efficient mode unfamiliar to Miranda.

  The general narrowed his eyes at Miranda in what now appeared to be a question.

  “Harrington,” she suggested.

  He shifted from narrowed eyes to narrowed eyes with a furrowed brow that might just be fury once more. At least she’d guessed right on the question part of his look.

  “Don’t forget your desk drawer.”

  “What was that?” He and Holly said in unison.

  Then the general looked down to his side and slapped the drawer shut with a curse.

  “Who confiscated your data?”

  “Depends,” Holly answered the general. “Who am I talking to?”

  “This is Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Drake Nason.”

  “CJCSGDN,” Miranda added to help Holly make the connection.

  “Oh, the chap who signed the orders that almost got us shot a second time.”

  “They what?” the general-in-question’s face suffused with red.

  “Catch a clue, mate. Miranda, I know that you’re the Investigator in Charge and all, but you really need to find someone quicker on the uptake. No offense, General.” The Holly she knew was now back in place, enjoying an excuse to tease the highest-ranking officer in the US military.

  “It was seriously cool,” Jeremy chimed in. “Primary buffet from the sonic boom, then the pounder from the double blast off the two bombs. I bet we weren’t a thousand feet out. Pilot hit the desert hard enough to bend a skid, but he didn’t bust a blade. Awesome flight. I’ve got to learn how to fly a helicopter.”

  Nason punched his phone. “Get me Harrington again.”

  “Why would I get him for you? We just got away from his people. Miranda, I got your messages. We decided not to wait and cleared out. We’re en route to Vegas by car. You want us in DC?”

  She glanced at the general yelling into the phone for someone to find him Harrington and then thought of the CIA who’d been waiting at the airport for her.

  “Yes,” she picked up her phone and texted a quick message as she spoke. “That would be good. Why don’t you meet me here in DC at NTSB headquarters?” Better not to say some things aloud.

  “Roger that.”
She heard Holly’s phone ping with a completely different set of instructions. “Got your message loud and clear.”

  A message pinged back in from Holly. We saved the data and photos, no samples, but not sure if any of it has meaning.

  “Good,” Miranda answered aloud. “I’ll catch up with you when you arrive.”

  “Roger and out.” The call ended from Holly’s end.

  The CIA, seeing Kryptos, and now this. They were like secret agents together. Maybe her team (God, she actually had a team?) needed to get matching hats or something.

  Nason punched his phone to speaker. “What do you mean you didn’t order the flight?”

  “I mean that I didn’t order the flight,” General Harrington answered back.

  “Then who the hell flew an F-35 Lightning II within ten klicks of Groom Lake and blew up my plane crash site?”

  “Are you sure someone blew up the plane? It was just a wreck, why would anyone do that?”

  Miranda could see General Nason was once again rising to his feet. This time, not only were his bunched fists planted firmly on either side of his phone, but his face remained suffused with red.

  Was fury an opportunity? The concept had worked once, when she’d managed to get the upper hand with an aged Sikorsky compass dial that General Harrington had inadvertently stepped on.

  Before the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs could explode with rage or hang up his phone, Miranda leaned in with her question.

  “Perhaps the same person who removed the flight recorders from the crash prior to my arrival, General Harrington?”

  “No. That was me. But I didn’t order the bombing.”

  “There were flight recorders on that flight?” Nason snarled. Like a dog, an actual snarl.

  “Cockpit and data,” Harrington replied after a long hesitation.

  “And they were removed?”

  “Yes sir.” A little faster, like he was finally giving in.

  “Well at least he’s answering my questions now,” the Chairman muttered to her. “Where are they?” he asked aloud.