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

by M. L. Buchman

  He continued, “We have an image of a live one that’s now dead. All we have to do is find something that fits the facts. We figured out how the C-130 Hercules went down. It is up to the generals and the CIA to resolve why and what to do about it.”

  “You’re saying that we just need to provide a plausible mechanism to match the Russian who?” Miranda’s head felt as if it was going to explode.

  “It would have been easier if they’d accepted the first who of that poor shmuck of a pilot in the J-31 screwing up, but they didn’t.” Holly pointed west in the direction of China. “So the reason for the crash must be either the US’ or the Russians’ fault—and my vote is put it in those buggers’ lap. So all we need is some plausible mechanism, some Russian what that would cause a pilot to appear to be fighting for control of his own plane. Then let the Chinese figure out their own why.”

  “The RQ-170,” Jeremy’s eyes returned to normal size as he looked at her suddenly.

  Of course. Of course! Miranda knew that Jeremy was absolutely right.

  78

  Out of time, Zhang Ru returned to the Chrysanthemum Courtyard. He jolted to a halt when he saw that Mei-Li and Li Zuocheng still sat at the table. The little bitch still sat with that icy, untouchable perfection, rather than leading Zuocheng out of here by his dick.

  Ru forced himself to step forward with a smile on his face.

  Damn the girl! And damn you to hell, Nason! Next time you need help, you can go suck on a thousand-year egg!

  Zuocheng handed Mei-Li a slip of paper just as Ru reached the table, then pushed to his feet.

  “I too shall return in a moment. You took long enough, Ru, I was half afraid I’d be embarrassing myself in front of the young lady. But we don’t leave one such as her untended,” then he strode off toward the Men’s Room.

  “What did he give you?”

  She showed him a phone number.

  “You were supposed to be taking him to a hotel, not taking his number.” He knew he did a poor job of hiding his frustration.

  The girl studied him briefly, like he might study a materials requisition for an order of printer paper, before tucking away the number and speaking softly. “It is the number of his favorite granddaughter. He feels that we would be friends and hopes that I will be a good influence on her more modern ways.”

  Ru had never imagined such a ploy. If Mei-Li became friend and mentor to Zuocheng’s favorite, that was better than her sleeping with him.

  Wasn’t it?

  There were too many factors to calculate. Did being “his favorite” imply that he kept a constant eye on her activities and happiness, or that he sent her a present for her birthday? Or bedded her regularly?

  “How close are they?”

  “They’re spending a week together at the Duanwu Dragon Boat Festival next month.”

  Ru hissed between his teeth in pleasure, then smiled at the girl. “How convenient that we are as well.”

  “Yes, Uncle Ru,” she nodded with an imperial grace that even the Empress Wu Zetian would have found difficult to achieve.

  His phone buzzed. He snatched it from his pocket and read the brief message. Then he began to smile in earnest and sent a quick response.

  It was exactly what he needed to tell Zuocheng. It would place the Shenyang J-31 project back on track with no more than a six-month lapse. Not the plane’s fault, simply the failure to anticipate one particular weakness in the command-and-control system.

  He, Zhang Ru, would be the one who had solved what so many analysts and commanders hadn’t been able to unravel.

  Why?

  He needed to prove why he had solved it himself.

  Ah! Because the technicians and analysts had believed the fault lay with the pilot or the plane. The analysts had assumed that just because China copied the technology of others that it was suspect for that reason alone.

  But he and Zuocheng were both men of the world.

  They had both been pilots!

  It was up to thinkers like them to see the greater picture—such as an attack by their supposed Russian allies.

  With this and Zuocheng’s favoritism for Chen Mei-Li—who Ru supposed he must now treat as if she really was a most-favored niece—he himself would be the obvious person to replace Peng Yan on the Central Military Commission.

  It was a pity to no longer have the use of the girl’s services; she was such an artist in the bedroom. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t be used in other ways.

  Perhaps Mei-Li should be placed as his assistant.

  She did observe people as clearly as himself—a rare trait indeed. With her beauty, poise, and more training, she could become formidable.

  Yes, that was very good. At his side, but not too close, she would make an exceptional political asset if not a technical one.

  And maybe he would even redeem his true niece now that she was freed from the husband she’d never liked.

  Wang Fan? Best to let him rest unrepented in whatever uncomfortable grave he’d found.

  79

  “Okay, I’ve sent it. Now would you care to explain?” Drake jammed the phone back in his pocket after reading Zhang Ru’s message: Deeply in your debt. It was not a phrase a Chinese person used lightly.

  Miranda simply waved to Holly.

  “Jeremy thought it up.”

  “From your comment,” Jeremy answered her.

  “Which I based on Holly’s observation.”

  “Which was based on your statement.”

  “Because I was trying to answer Mike’s question about—”

  “Cut the goddamn commentary. What the hell does what I just sent mean?”

  “The RQ-170 Sentinel,” Clark was the one to answer the question, “was a flying-wing drone that the CIA was operating over Iran when—”

  “Like I don’t already know that. Get on with it, man.”

  “Then you know that the Iranians managed to mimic and eventually take over command of the aircraft. We still don’t know how they—”

  Jeremy spoke up.

  “They overpowered the command frequencies from our distant satellite signals with a high-power focused array. The drone’s software rejected our own weaker signals as spurious data and the Iranians landed it with all of its equipment and surveillance data intact. It was actually a brilliant piece of work to take over and successfully land an aircraft they were wholly unfamiliar with. We’ve, of course, since modified our drones to function only on encrypted and code-validated communications, but we didn’t have that back in 2011. The Chinese were among the parties invited to inspect the aircraft. So I felt there would be a high likelihood that a high-level Chinese contact would know about that.”

  “What he said,” Holly confirmed.

  Drake considered the message Miranda had given him to send. Remember RQ-170 takedown by Iranians. Think about Russia interfacing through imported control systems into Chinese jet.

  “So, you didn’t actually lie. You simply told them to think it was a control takeover by the Russians through their electronics. It is a plausible who and how. The why, as is typical, is beyond the scope of the crash investigation itself. The CIA pilot destroyed the C-130 by flying so close. The pilot having a mental aberration is of no relevance to the situation,” Miranda concluded.

  Drake knew better. Perhaps not for the crash investigator, but he knew that the why was essential.

  “They’ll think the Russians deliberately crashed the Chinese fifth-generation jet,” Clark looked well pleased. “It will lead to a distinct cooling of Sino-Russian relations, at least in military cooperation. That’s been a problem since they normalized relations back in 1992 and formalized it in 2001. I like it.”

  Yes. Clark understood the importance of the why.

  Clarissa was being smart enough to keep her trap shut. Harrington had leveled several complaints against her as they’d discussed to-date operations—enough that she’d know her fate was in the balance.

  The fact that Drake was go
ing to force Harrington’s immediate retirement, for his failure to act sooner in the interest of his men, was a different issue. That was the first duty of any commanding officer.

  There was a long silence as everyone contemplated the solution.

  “Are we done?” Jeremy asked softly.

  Drake turned to Clark. “My order stands. The MQ-45 Casper is grounded. No future missions. I will not have a machine that kills pilots in my arsenal. How many pilots are there on the list still?”

  “Realistically?” Harrington shrugged. “There’s one left. He’s the best yet. He flies like—”

  “I don’t give a shit. He’s done.”

  Drake bemoaned the loss of Peng Yan, but couldn’t think what to do about it. Unless… Was there a chance that Zhang Ru would replace him? If so, how could he use that? He sighed. Not in any way that he could imagine. Peng Yan was a casual traitor; Zhang Ru a staunch patriot.

  “You two,” he jabbed a finger at Clark and Clarissa, “are on probation. And don’t start spouting about my not having the authority or I’ll ram President Roy Cole down your throats. I’m not saying don’t pursue innovative projects. I’m saying that if they touch any military asset in any way and you don’t inform me, I will have you drawn and quartered for treason before sundown.”

  “It’s already nighttime,” Miranda stated in that strange way of hers.

  80

  Miranda was last off the runway and up into the first light of morning. The long salt bed of Groom Lake fell rapidly astern. She flew over the remains of the C-130’s wreckage, observing a moment of silence. No accident report would ever be filed. Holly and Jeremy had given over all of their data and it had been destroyed.

  General Drake Nason flew east in the government Gulfstream along with the two CIA directors. General Harrington had been removed from command and was aboard as well. A Colonel Helen Thomas had been given temporary command. She, too, had known about the devastating effect of the program on the pilots, but had only been following a superior’s orders.

  Miranda wasn’t sure about the meaning of that; the military operated by rules she’d never thought to learn. Perhaps it was time for research on military culture. Drake had thanked her and the team most profusely and said he would call on them again if he ever needed help.

  She wished that was never, but as long as planes flew, they’d keep coming out of the sky.

  The other three members of her NTSB team were aloft in her Mooney M20V and headed back to the Tacoma airport.

  Past the remains of the C-130, she slid the throttle forward and the F-86 Sabrejet roared to life beneath her fingertips. Turning northwest toward her family’s island, she flew by the Mooney and rocked her wings to wave hello.

  It was an odd gesture.

  Waving.

  It was something done with friends.

  Bye. See you next time.

  And she would. They’d all agreed to remain on her team for now. That was as far ahead as she ever looked.

  From Groom Lake to the edge of the NTTR, she took advantage of the military test range and managed to nudge the Sabrejet to just over Mach 1. This was no longer the era of Jackie Cochran and even at this instant there might be another woman pilot or two breaking the sound barrier in a military jet…but not many.

  “Fastest woman in the world,” she told herself and even if it might not be true at this instant, the feeling never diminished. There was a glory in riding out the transition to supersonic flight—little more than a hard buffet in the Sabrejet. It was flight at its purest, at least the purest for a human.

  What bird had the purest flight? She’d never before considered whether a Peregrine falcon diving at two hundred and forty miles an hour might be having more fun than a gull soaring below thirty.

  At the edge of the NTTR—which she reached all too soon—she eased back to subsonic speeds. By law, supersonic speeds were illegal over civilian land throughout the US. But she stayed up near the limit. She wanted, she needed to get home. Mach 0.98 was subsonic and she rode the edge north.

  As she passed east of Reno, Nevada—riding the air currents at forty-five thousand feet above the dry and tortured mountains of the northeast corner of California—a shadow slid over her cockpit, blocking the sun.

  81

  The needle length of the MQ-45 Casper, haloed by the rising sun, seemed to float effortlessly beside her. Miranda marveled at the contrast between her sixty-year-old F-86 and the most advanced aircraft in the world. There had been almost ten thousand of the former and there would never be more than this last one of the latter. Someday soon there would be a replacement—another new breakthrough—but the Casper’s days were done.

  She knew who flew it.

  She and the last MQ-45 pilot ever had sat together for over an hour. A tall, handsome man. His obvious love for his aircraft—he touched it the way she sometimes touched the model of Kryptos in her garden—had her feeling an instant bond with him.

  They’d spoken only a few words; instead watching the video of his one flight against the narco-submarines. His desperate sadness at the program’s closure had reached out to her own sadness.

  Miranda had never liked being touched—each contact felt as if it was erasing her mother’s and father’s final hugs.

  But that clear understanding of shared pain had led her to embrace Lt. Colonel Harvey Whitmore. He returned it with all the silent anguish in his heart.

  And now they flew, side by side.

  Neither moved from formation flight.

  If he lost his mind like other pilots and moved in to kill her, there was nothing she could do about it. But his flight, so close that they almost touched wingtips, didn’t feel aggressive.

  He had no radio, no frequency that could reach him.

  So instead, they simply flew.

  Together they dropped down to circle the peaks of the Cascade Range, once each: Crater Lake, Mount Hood near Portland, Mount St. Helens and Rainier, and finally Mount Baker north of Seattle.

  When she turned for her home island, he followed along beside her, so close that he was no more than a shadow—a reflection. He mimicked her every maneuver as instinctively as she followed the spheres at a crash site.

  Harvey was a magnificent pilot.

  She’d seen enough in the videos to know that he was the very best of them all. Even better than the pilot on the China flight.

  She descended in a lazy spiral centered on her parents’ island. On her island.

  Maybe it was time she left them dead in the Atlantic. What had been found of their remains were buried on the island.

  Director Clark Winston had offered to point out their stars on the CIA Memorial Wall at her next trip to DC. They’d been deemed to have died in the line of service and had numbered—but unnamed—stars there; a tradition for every agent who died in the line of duty.

  The Casper circled with her. The runway was too short for his aircraft. That worried her for a moment, then she realized that Harvey would never land here. His body was in Las Vegas and he was taking an unauthorized last flight.

  Oh, a final flight.

  A thousand feet above the runway, he waggled his wings.

  Friend.

  She waggled hers in reply.

  Friend.

  Then the Casper peeled aside with a suddenness that had her yelping in surprise.

  In moments, the Casper turned west toward the trackless vastness of the Pacific Ocean and went transonic.

  The last glint of sunlight she saw off the drone showed it was punching toward the heavens on full afterburners.

  82

  Helen found Harvey.

  Alone.

  In the flight chair.

  He no longer needed straps to hold him in place. He’d managed to power up the systems and connect himself in. She hadn’t thought to look for him here until she’d noticed the open hangar door from far down the field.

  By the time she’d arrived, the drone was long gone.

  There was noth
ing to say, even if he was still capable of responding.

  Instead she sat and took his hand.

  He squeezed her hand, once. But she held on and watched the command screens.

  Harvey flew. Loops, rolls, Immelmanns—maneuver after maneuver in a beautiful flight of such joy and such sadness. She didn’t know what she’d expected once he found the woman who had exposed and caused the ending of the Casper program, but it wasn’t the flight that followed.

  The tears burned hot on her cheeks as the two pilots in craft of such different eras flew over some of the most beautiful scenery in the world. Mountainscape to mountainscape as only a pilot could see them, finally circling above the San Juan Islands she’d never been to and now knew she could never stand to go see.

  He waved goodbye to the woman.

  Did he also reach back down the fading connections of his body to twitch his hand in her own or was it just a reflexive response to the maneuver—a question she would ask herself a thousand times in the years to come.

  He opened the engine wide.

  Mach 1.

  Mach 2.

  Two-five.

  Two-seven.

  Harvey still had some connection to his body; he grunted at the g-force that must have slammed the craft as he sent the Casper aloft.

  It was rated to seventy thousand feet. But rating wasn’t capability.

  He drove for space with everything the Casper could deliver. Maybe he even did it partly for her. Maybe for both of their lost dreams of space.

  He didn’t begin bleeding speed until ninety-seven thousand feet. With no munitions and a partial remaining load of fuel, the aircraft was light and powerful. It was still above Mach 2 at a hundred and twenty thousand feet. Even though the engines were starving for lack of oxygen, Harvey kept pushing aloft.

  One forty.

  One fifty.

  At one hundred and sixty-seven thousand feet, he reached the Casper’s limits.