Drone

by M. L. Buchman

  The drone wasn’t Chinese.

  And it wasn’t Russian. Especially not a thousand kilometers into China.

  It must be American—and it was hunting him.

  There was no weapon he could bring to bear on something flying closer than his own shadow.

  As if reading his thoughts, the drone pulled ahead of him. He heard no sonic boom as it passed, though he should have. Stealth and boomless? Formidable indeed.

  At Mach 1.79—two thousand one hundred and forty kilometers per hour at this altitude—it descended abruptly to ten meters in front of him. Less than a hundredth of a second ahead.

  The precision of the move astonished him for a moment too long.

  Wang Fan tried to turn aside, but it was too late—too late the moment the drone started its move. He knew that he’d never make lieutenant colonel and that he’d never again bury himself in the glory of Chen Mei-Li.

  The turbulent air of the drone’s supersonic wake shattered his plane as surely as flying into the ground.

  Wang Fan reached for the emergency handle but didn’t pull it, knowing that even ejecting couldn’t save him now. Today his name—the Mortal Prince—would come true.

  The last thing he ever saw was the drone twisting aside to reveal a final look at the icy crevasses of Gongga Shan straight ahead.

  He would leave no more impression on its mighty edifice than a pork baozi splattered on a blue-and-white tile floor.

  CIA, Langley, Virginia

  Clarissa Reese sat alone in a secure observer’s room three stories beneath the New Headquarters Building. She watched the massive avalanche as it continued to bury any sign of the Shenyang J-31 and its pilot deeper and deeper. The Chinese would never find it there.

  Her pilot, deep in a Nevada control bunker, had flown his drone into formation with the J-31 when the high peaks were blocking all of the Chinese surveillance satellites. From that moment on, only the closest inspection would reveal the drone as anything other than an oddly dull reflection off the J-31—because nothing else could be that close to a supersonic craft performing high-g maneuvers. The Chinese would believe that right down to their boots.

  Her source had alerted her to, and a CIA analyst had confirmed, the escalating series of J-31 tests over the last few days, giving Clarissa enough time to have the drone flown deep into China the night before. That had allowed her to pick the place and time of the meet up. Those three minutes of the close-in flight had offered alarming information regarding the J-31’s true capabilities.

  The Chinese had started from stolen plans for the F-35 Lightning and they’d done a fine job of copying it. By theft and massive effort, they had closed a technological advance that should have taken them another decade to achieve. Like the Japanese of the ’70s and ’80s reverse engineering electronics and personal computers, the Chinese were now the masters of copying American ingenuity.

  There’d been no detectable transmission by the pilot for the forty-seven minutes they’d been tracking the jet since its departure from Fenghuangshan Airport in Chengdu. Once in formation, the drone had blocked the J-31’s radio frequencies but left the instrumentation reporting systems active.

  She imagined the horror of the Chinese as they watched their precious jet run wildly out of control—the pilot’s attempt to save his life—then disappear.

  The force of the jet’s impact with the mountainside had guaranteed that nothing bigger than a rivet would survive. The final crash had again been timed to be wholly out of view from any satellites other than the CIA’s own USA-224 KH-11 keyhole sat—an Earth-facing copy of the Hubble Space Telescope and one of the four active real-time capable craft. Actually, the Hubble was a space-facing version of the earlier KH-11.

  The drone certainly detected no emergency locator signal on a close flyby.

  She spoke into the secure link to the Nevada control bunker that had remained silent throughout the flight.

  “General Harrington, bring it home.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  She closed the link.

  Freezing the best image of the avalanche from the drone’s final pass on her screen, she tried to see any sign of the Chinese plane. There wasn’t even a hint of its ultimate resting place. No blemish of a fuel explosion on the face of the pristine fall of ice. It was simply gone.

  The Shenyang J-31 hadn’t had enough fuel to reach a border, so their military would be forced to cross off a possible defection. It had simply behaved chaotically, as if the pilot was fighting for his life against a failing aircraft that then disappeared forever up the narrow mountain valley. No search would find any evidence until it fell out the bottom of the glacier decades or even centuries from now.

  Clarissa would make sure her operative at Chengdu convinced Lieutenant General Zhang Ru that it was a fault with the plane. The next time Ru was in the operative’s arms, she’d drop a hint of trouble that the pilot had “happened to mention to her” during their night together. It would lay the seeds of doubt. Perhaps of something he had discovered—though been vague about—not wanting to shame his commander by pointing out the jet’s flaw.

  Yes. That should work nicely. And the highly detailed volume of classified information the pilot had divulged into the former gymnast’s recording equipment would be for Clarissa’s people alone.

  Should the operative cry for the lost pilot on Ru’s shoulder or shouldn’t she?

  The girl would know; she was perfect.

  Chen Mei-Li’s coach had made it easy to recruit the lovely gymnast at the last Olympics. He’d struck her to the ground (just out of sight of international television) for placing a single tenth-point off the gold to a meticulously drugged Russian wind-up doll.

  That the bastard had made himself her sexual coach from a young age, as well as her gymnastic one, had only made Clarissa’s job all the easier—she’d proven an unslakable hunger for revenge on the institutions of her native country.

  Clarissa had cemented the Chinese waif’s undying gratitude by arranging for the coach’s car to crash horribly before the games had ended.

  For strictly personal reasons, she’d made sure his death was slow and exceedingly painful. With a well-placed Agency med-tech, she’d arranged for acid to be mixed with the transfused blood, accompanied by under-dosed painkillers. The girl’s coach had burned to death from the inside and felt every single second of it. Too sad for him that he’d lost the ability to scream during the wreck.

  Clarissa purged all records of the drone and satellite session from the observation room’s secure server’s memory—one of the many advantages of holding a director-level clearance—then checked that there were no stray strands from her trademark blonde ponytail. The slick look combined with her five-ten height before donning heels said, “Mess with me at your own peril.” She hadn’t had to prove it more than two or three times before her reputation proceeded her.

  Men were always thrown off balance when she turned and they saw the rest of her hair. It wasn’t some neat, short, athletic ponytail. Instead her hair went thickly wavy where it passed her shoulders on its way to the middle of her back. In 2001, a Journal of Experimental Psychology article—read between sessions of teenage slavery on her father’s office couch—concluded that men perceived long hair as a sign of sexual health.

  The day of her father’s death—that she wished in retrospect she’d made ten times more painful than the coach’s—she’d begun growing it out in earnest. No longer was her hair bobbed short to avoid being a handhold for her father’s fist, but neither would any of the imprudent minions who dared cross her path ever get to touch it. She only let it down for very special occasions.

  With a sharp clack on the marble floors, her high heels heralded her approach as she strode toward her top-floor office. In the world of low-profile women, it announced that the CIA’s Director of Special Research was on her way and everyone should fear her. As well they should; she’d just set the Chinese fifth-generation jet program back by years.

&
nbsp; Enemies were to all be erased with maximum prejudice. Her country was all that mattered. Lovers? Occasionally. Friends? Who had the time?

  1

  The debris field of the C-130 Hercules transport plane lay strewn across the high desert of the NTTR.

  Miranda had only handled two other crash investigations in the Nevada Test and Training Range and neither had been so near the highly sensitive base at Groom Lake, better known as Area 51. There were only three National Transportation Safety Board inspectors cleared to work inside the NTTR and she must have been closest. But she’d never been so near to Groom Lake itself.

  Here be aliens! Tante Tanya might have teased her. Her childhood governess, who had raised her on the family island after her parents’ deaths, seemed to enjoy doing that for reasons Miranda could never fathom. She’d learned how to tell when Tanya was doing so—she always affected an overexcited tone, which was a helpful cue—but the logic remained elusive.

  From aloft in the UH-1N Huey helicopter that had met her at the Las Vegas airport, Groom Lake was a dirty-white salt flat that probably hadn’t seen standing water since the last ice age. It lurked in a narrow valley deep in the heart of the largest and most secure testing area in the US military—the NTTR filled most of southern Nevada.

  The mountains blocked Groom Lake from casual view, but the real security was its massive hangars. Everything was kept inside during daylight hours as much as possible, with aircraft only slipping out of their secret dens in the darkness of the night. Like raccoons or vicious wombats, the nation’s most lethal aircraft emerged from their secret burrows of Groom Lake—the ultimate testing place.

  There, just beyond the low notch in the hills where the C-130 had crashed, the U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird spy planes had been developed. Secretly acquired Russian jets were extensively tested in dog fights flying out of Groom Lake. The F-117 Nighthawk—the first operational stealth fighter in history—had also been developed at Groom Lake before eventually moving to the nearby Tonopah Testing Range Airport once it was operational to make way for other projects. Now all of the Nighthawks were stored at Tonopah, outdated barely out of their second decade by the relentless advance of American ingenuity.

  How mundane to have a C-130 cargo transport crashed at the very border of the top secret area. It was one of the most common military aircraft in the US and indeed worldwide with over sixty operator countries flying more than two thousand aircraft in total.

  The juxtaposition could almost make Miranda smile.

  Except she had hated airplane crashes ever since one had killed her parents when she was thirteen. Each time she struggled not to recoil from the mangled metal, the shattered airframes, and the vivid red splatters of fluids that had once been inside human bodies, instead forming a rapidly browning crust on every surface.

  The C-130’s inverted-T tail section lay at the northeast end of the area. Usually the empennage survived mostly intact—which was why flight data recorders were mounted there. Not this time. It was barely recognizable.

  A single Allison T56 engine stood tall, planted nose down into the soil like an ostrich with its exhaust port raised to the sky. At twelve feet, two inches long, it should not have been the highest remaining part of the thirty-eight-foot-tall, ninety-seven-foot-long airplane—but it was. The hull, where it hadn’t crumpled or shattered, had been pancaked as if a giant had stepped on it.

  Was it down because of something she’d done? That she’d missed? She had only worked on three other C-130 crashes.

  The C-130A Hercules loss on the Cannon Fire in 2002 had been straightforward. The brutal math had caught up with the forty-five-year-old airframe when it was dropping retardant on a wildfire. One jolt too many from the sudden unloading of seven tons of fire retardant on the stress-cracked wing-box cross members had caused the wings to catastrophically fold upward and break off. The crew had never stood a chance as the wingless fuselage had rolled in mid-flight and crashed inverted into the wilderness at a hundred and forty-six knots.

  The additional crash of a fifty-seven-year-old PB4Y-2 Privateer thirty-one days later had caused a panic in the Forest Service. Mass inspections for microfractures had revealed significant issues in a wide variety of airframes, which ultimately led to the grounding of all thirty-three remaining Type I firebombers—those capable of delivering over three thousand gallons. The groundings, which had followed from her initial investigation, had greatly impacted the wildland firefight for years, with devastating losses to wildfire until the capacity loss of the large firebombers could be replaced with helicopters and smaller aircraft.

  The planes had been her concern, but the damage of those unchecked fires weighed on her still.

  One of the other two C-130s she’d investigated for the National Transportation Safety Board had also had a mechanical issue. Improper inspection of a propeller had led to the blade breaking off and arrowing into the fuselage, which had destroyed the aircraft in midair. The last C-130 had also been on a fire, where the pilot and his guide had failed to account for the possibility of a microburst and been slammed fatally into the ground through no fault of the plane.

  But maybe she had missed something. Maybe more had died here in the Nevada desert because she hadn’t…

  She noticed her hands were clasped together so tightly that they hurt.

  Or maybe it was just another crash, Miranda. Don’t wrap yourself in a cloak of Jewish guilt—at least not until it’s warranted. How many times had Terence, her first mentor at the NTSB, given her that instruction?

  He was right. Catholics don’t know anything about guilt. Her people had it down to a science since losing the Garden of Eden. Would Eve take it back if she could? Remain in paradise rather than lose the beneficent care of God her father to the harsh reality of—

  She cut off the thought. God had not died in a plane crash. Except He had. Her belief in a Supreme Being had died the same day her parents had fallen from the sky. She stared out the window, forcing herself to keep her hands separate. Palms down. On either thigh.

  The UH-1N Huey helo that had met her at McCarran International Airport in nearby Las Vegas flew directly over the wreck—as if he wanted to disrupt the evidence—to set down beside a Humvee parked too close to the eastern edge of the debris field.

  Were his actions mere neglect, the cause of so many wasteful actions? Or was there malice or intent involved? A thousand times she wished she was better at discerning others’ emotions.

  All irrelevant.

  Focus on the next steps.

  2

  “Who the hell are you and what are you doing in the NTTR? This is a secure area. No civilians.” The two-star general didn’t even wait for her to get clear of the Huey’s pounding rotor blades.

  No black smoke or carbon stench of fire from the wreck.

  It was so unusual for such a violent crash that it startled her out of her normal investigation process.

  No visual sign that it had burned at all. The sharp bite of kerosene on the air confirmed that plenty JP-8 jet fuel had been freshly spilled, but it hadn’t been ignited.

  Miranda had been about to ask the second half of that question herself, though with a bit more tact: “Why have you sent for an NTSB inspector?” The military only called upon the National Transportation Safety Board for the most difficult or sensitive investigations. Now her pro forma question for military crashes had been made irrelevant and it threw her off balance.

  “Well?” The general snapped it out like she was one of his junior officers. Two did indeed hover nearby. Seven more were spread out on the desert landscape, forming a wide perimeter around the plane.

  The general’s forward-weighted posture invaded her personal space—which she knew was larger than most people’s—and was paired with a narrowing of eyes. Wouldn’t more widely opened eyes be more appropriate? Entering a conflict situation should call for maximizing visual acuity.

  The New Zealand Maori war dancers made a particular point of this in their demonstra
tions. She’d witnessed a show after assisting their Transport Accident Investigation Commission with a particularly ugly crash of a DC-8 cargo plane well past its proper retirement age.

  It turned out that the plane had suffered severe salt corrosion in its pitot tubes making the airspeed indicator wildly inaccurate on a simple landing at Rotorua Airport in New Zealand. Instead of landing, they’d flown into the lake and plowed into a large, fully loaded tourist boat. She was able to prove that it wasn’t pilot error or a maintenance error—at least not based on standard practices. New service recommendations had been made and adopted.

  The Maori dancers at a hotel one night had shown the faces their ancestors had traditionally made to scare their opponents: eyes wide, tongue extended, a startling yell as they raised their spears.

  Man was the only predator she knew of who typically reduced his visual acuity by squinting and decreasing light intake during an attack.

  All the general had achieved with his tirade was to arouse her curiosity.

  “Why are you here?” Miranda had never before seen a two-star general dressed in combat fatigues guarding a pile of airplane wreckage.

  His snarl indicated that hadn’t been the correct response.

  Start from the beginning. One of her basic survival rules when dealing with people.

  She held out her ID while trying to regroup. Miranda always approached crash site investigations in an unvarying manner. Her mentor had helped her develop her own style of approach that had served her on hundreds of mishaps and accidents.

  Here in the NTTR, they were already being forced to shift. She knew herself well enough to know that could fast become a problem if she didn’t correct the patterns.

  Spheres. It’s all about the spheres.

  But first she had to deal with the general.

  As he inspected her ID, her attention again drifted to the single upright T-56 engine. It was unnatural. She’d seen a thousand engines in a hundred different attitudes, but never this one. What could have caused—