Drone

by M. L. Buchman

  In 2000 he’d brought over two decades’ worth of front-line experience to the first class through the newly founded NTSB training academy—her year to join the National Transportation Safety Board. His courses had been like a ruthless firehose, washing clean the most obscure details that had become so critical. The fine art of tracing the unexpected.

  Miranda knew her greatest failing was a need for “elegance of solution” as Terence called it.

  “Sometimes the answer is just messy, girl. Gonna have to get used to it.”

  She never would. Late at night, she’d “come to” pacing up and down the length of the big family house still trying to solve some accident or other whose report had long since been filed and closed despite no clear results. “Unknown cause” was the bane of her sleep.

  If Terence couldn’t help her, she’d approach her contacts in the US Air Force Aircraft Accident Investigation Board—but she was less certain of them. In the many military aircraft she’d investigated, she’d rarely had the same investigator to work with.

  Yes, she’d start with Terence Graham if he was in DC. It had been too long since she’d seen him anyway. Perhaps he’d experienced the mixture of removed recorders and missing military investigation teams.

  And she would find time to visit TWA 800. How ironic that an eighty-foot section of reconstructed fuselage was the center of the NTSB Academy’s training program. She knew every heartless inch of it. Although it didn’t include any of the nosecone section—as it had broken away cleanly and not been a key part of the investigation but rather a consequence—she still visited it at every chance. It was the closest thing she had to a grave marker. The small stone she’d erected on their island after scattering her parents’ ashes felt far more empty.

  The two-acre memorial on Long Island, New York, near where the plane had plunged into the Atlantic, was stark, beautiful, and meaningless in comparison. Staring at her parents’ names etched into the curved granite wall had left her cold.

  The remains of the aircraft, as a classroom to herself and other NTSB investigators, had felt real, alive.

  What use was memory without action?

  She investigated airplanes so that others wouldn’t have the memories she did.

  As she exited baggage claim at Dulles Airport, she spotted her name on a tablet screen held by young man in a neat suit. She hadn’t called for a car, though she usually did. Maybe one of the crew had done it for her.

  Mike perhaps? Thinking considerately about people would be his department.

  She nodded to the man in greeting, who didn’t bother introducing himself. He simply took her site investigation pack and led the way out the automatic doors.

  It was only as the black sedan was pulling away from the curb that Miranda spotted a man pushing rapidly toward her through the crowd of debarking passengers.

  She didn’t recognize him, but he too held a tablet with her name showing brightly on its screen. His haste made her question her unquestioning state until this moment.

  Miranda narrowed her eyes to mask her inspection of the driver and his companion. They looked normal.

  But would she know if they didn’t?

  16

  “It’s still not making sense.” The twisted bits of steel that Holly seemed so fascinated by weren’t the only thing that wasn’t making sense.

  Mike had talked to everyone who would speak to him—all three of them. None of them even admitted to knowing a General Harrington.

  Three guards still encircled the plane, but the dynamic was different today. Yesterday they’d been facing outward, guarding against possible intruders in the heart of the Nevada Test and Training Range.

  Today, they lined the green-flagged perimeter of the debris field and faced inward. Nine heavily-armed mercenaries yesterday—Holly had assured him they were not regular Air Force personnel and he supposed if anyone knew, she would.

  So three heavily armed guards to watch three unarmed NTSB agents. The odds were definitely not in the NTSB’s favor.

  He suspected that it wasn’t so much Harrington’s doing that he was inaccessible. The two Camo Dudes who’d been awaiting their arrival looked as if they wouldn’t admit to knowing their own mothers. The pilot of the tiny four-seater helo had been the third of the silent trio.

  Jeremy had been oblivious to the implied threat of the encircling guard, who wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for their own crew. He plunged into tracing the plane’s systems, or rather the remains of them. He spoke constantly to himself as he worked, so it was easy to track what he was thinking.

  “Primary hydraulics. Twelve gallons possible in system, three-point-two still in reserve tank at full capacity. Estimated leakage through five known post-impact severed lines: five-point-six. Still two-point-eight elsewhere in the system. Total loss below two quarts. Far too little loss for a hydraulics-induced failure. Cockpit secondary pumps not turned on by pilots—lack of time or lack of need? Mostly likely, the latter. Okay, fuel system.” And he’d started crawling deeper into the plane’s wreckage.

  Holly wasn’t much better, photographing the ends of twisted metal pieces that looked just like every other twisted metal piece to him. At least she did it without the running commentary.

  “What are you expecting to find?” He asked her as he folded down one of the few remaining nylon-mesh seats that had once lined the entire hull down either side. Most of the others were crushed down the length of the sandwiched hull off to his right. This was about the only place on the entire site that was out of the blistering sun, also perhaps the only remaining seats that weren’t stained brown with dried blood. He had no intention of moving out of the marginal shade ever again.

  To his left, Holly stood where the nose must have once been attached. Instead of more plane, there was an open circle of sky and desert. He couldn’t see Groom Lake from here, but it lay there somewhere beyond Holly’s left shoulder. An arc of the desert was blocked by the crumpled nose of the plane off her right.

  “Not much, really. Look here,” she tapped on some piece of metal beam that was as big across as a briefcase. The mangled end looked shattered, like someone had snapped a stick of wood over their knee. Fragments stuck out in various strange angles. The surface looked like a bad attempt at frosting a cake—all lumpy and misshapen.

  “So what am I looking at?”

  “You’re looking at the strongest part of the plane. This is the main keel beam, if you will. It’s where all the frames that make the hull tie in together.”

  “Well it’s broken now, Holly.”

  “I can see that, Mike,” she put enough venom in that last word that he decided to keep his mouth shut. “I can even tell you what broke it. Something very rare and strange called ground impact. Based on the deformation angle and the degree that it was a brittle rather than a ductile failure—and no I’m not teaching a Metallurgy 101 class today—I can even estimate the speed and angle of impact once I get back to my computer. You know what that tells us?”

  “Sure. That this plane crashed.”

  “Exactly. All this,” she waved a hand at the metal she’d been inspecting, “happened because the plane crashed. What doesn’t it tell me?”

  Mike thought back to Miranda’s simulations this morning. “Uh, what it was that made it crash?” He wished it hadn’t come out so tentatively.

  “Give the man a Violet Crumble!”

  “A what?”

  “Best candy bar anywhere, just got to go to Australia to get one. Grab a clue, Mike. I’d kill for one right now,” Holly sighed as she leaned back against the remains of a large machine gun that had its barrel almost folded in two.

  “Which clue? That you’re a lunatic? I already figured that out.”

  “Won’t find an argument from any of my ex-boyos on that point.”

  “What are you doing here, Holly? Kick-ass Australian SAS soldier to American NTSB? You don’t make any sense.”

  “Another point none of my ex-boyos would argue.” She s
tudied the narrow wedge of hull protecting them from the sun. “Needed a change. That kind of mission is a drug. You get crazier and crazier, taking risks you should never take and surviving by skill and luck.”

  “You survived. I’m guessing that there was a lot of skill involved.” Because damn but the woman radiated competence.

  “I did.” Then she swallowed hard and looked sad. He didn’t like that expression on her face. It didn’t fit with the woman he was starting to like despite all of her bristly edges.

  “Oh.” Mike didn’t know what else to say. He wanted to offer a subject change, but couldn’t come up with one.

  Holly’s expression shifted to a frown and Mike braced himself to be the butt of some new remark.

  “You know…” she mumbled it half to herself.

  “Many things. I’m a smart guy. Just ask me.”

  “Miranda.”

  “She’s enough of a loon to make you look sane.” Mike wondered how long he’d have to stay out here in the desert.

  “Fair dinkum or not, she’s also a smart one. She knows the answer isn’t here, so she’s gone looking.”

  “Then what the hell are we doing out here in the desert?”

  Holly pushed back to her feet and positioned herself to study more crumples of metal. “You and me, mate, we’re the distraction.”

  “Oh great. Don’t forget Jeremy.”

  “Hey, Jeremy,” she called out. There was a crash of falling metal, a couple of scrambling sounds, then the man in question popped his head in through where the gun probably used to stick out.

  “Guess what I found. You’ll never guess. I’ll tell you. Unless you want to guess?”

  Holly did one of her withering looks.

  “Okay, so I’ll just tell you.” He pulled his head back out of the window and stepped around the one remaining partial hull frame to join them inside the plane. “I know why the plane didn’t explode on impact.”

  “No fuel,” Mike guessed.

  “No. We could smell it yesterday. That had to be at least fifty ppm.”

  “PPM?”

  Holly, now back to normal, aimed her disgust at Mike, but thankfully he could depend on Jeremy to just barrel straight in.

  “Parts per million. So if you have fifty parts of kerosene for every million parts of air, that’s a pretty strong smell. Humans can detect it right down to about half a part per million. Can you imagine what it must smell like to a dog? Most breeds are forty times as sensitive to smells as we are. I think they must—”

  “So why didn’t we explode?” Mike had been tempted to let Jeremy just keep rambling to irritate Holly, but decided to spare the kid her probable retribution.

  “The C-130 Hercules’ wings are attached at the very top of the fuselage, right? So they were most exposed to whatever struck from above. I’m guessing whatever it was, it punched right through the wings and the fuel tanks. You said that the general said that they were returning from a delivery, so their tanks were probably relatively empty anyway. If the breach was big enough, the bulk of the remaining fuel could have air dumped even in just the one to two seconds that Miranda hypothesized between whatever caused this and the crash. What little was left was mostly in the air by the time the plane hit.”

  “Which is why we could smell it so strongly but it didn’t ignite,” Mike was glad that none of them smoked. Who knew what lighting a match would have done.

  “No,” Holly’s twist of a smile said he’d goofed again. “There was a breeze. It would have blown away anything in the air. But if it sprayed over the soil, it would have continued to evaporate.”

  “Also,” Jeremy signaled one of his frequent topic jumps, “did you notice the Camo Dudes get really weird every time I crawl into the aft section of the fuselage?”

  He and Holly didn’t even have to exchange a glance. They both turned on Jeremy in unison.

  “Okay, which part of the hull and how weird were they?”

  “Who?”

  For half a second Mike considered what he could do to get back at him. Then realized that Jeremy wasn’t playing Holly-style games; his brain had simply moved on. Thankfully, he was able to haul it back just as quickly.

  “Oh. The Camo Dudes. They always flinch when I get near the hinge point of the rear ramp.”

  “Anything else?” If Holly was trying to look casual and disinterested, she wasn’t doing a very good job of it. She was leaning back comfortably enough, but she’d gone quiet as if preparing for action.

  “Not really. Their hands drift to weapons like they’re ready to take me down if I find something they don’t want found. Crazy, huh? I must be reading that wrong. Anyway, I didn’t notice anything weird. Other than the guns I mean. Nothing about the plane.”

  Mike didn’t need Holly’s training to know that Jeremy wasn’t reading it wrong.

  “Look, Jeremy, why don’t you just stay away from that part of the wreck for now.”

  “I’m already done there. Not many important systems that far aft, really. Elevator and rudder control, ramp mechanisms, and stuff. Most of the stuff I’m interested in next will be out in the tail empennage, which broke off. Probably just a lot of sheared wiring, but I want to see if there’s anything I wouldn’t expect in a crash.”

  Holly pulled out a handful of plastic sample bags and a marker pen, then held them out.

  Mike took them cautiously, “What am I supposed to do with these?”

  “Go out fifty feet past the green-flagged edge of the debris field—that’s about twenty-two steps or eleven paces with your typical stride.”

  Mike looked down at his feet and wondered if they even knew what his typical stride was because he certainly didn’t. “Why would I do that?”

  “I want twelve soil samples in a radial pattern just like a clock around the whole wreck. We can analyze them back in the lab to see if we can spot a pattern of soil contamination so make sure you label them clearly.”

  “You want me to go out there in the sun with the snakes?” He’d already forgotten about the fuel question.

  “Better yet,” Holly handed him some more bags and a black duffle to put them in. “Get samples at a hundred feet out as well. That would be another eleven paces in case the higher math is beyond you. Do you need a calculator?”

  “But—” Then Mike shut his mouth. He didn’t want to be told to venture even farther out into this snake-infested wilderness.

  “Oh, and keep your eyes open for anything strange.”

  “Strange like what? Stranger than you?”

  She shot him a radiant smile. “There’s naught on God’s green Earth stranger than me.”

  “Hallelujah! That’s assuming we don’t count our fearless team leader.”

  “Isn’t Miranda amazing? Wow! I can’t believe I’m on a first name basis with Miranda Chase.” Jeremy disappeared out of sight once more.

  “And what exactly are you hoping to learn? That there’s fuel in the soil around a crashed plane? Can’t we just call the EPA?”

  “What I’m hoping for is to have you be my distraction,” Holly began pocketing the tools that she’d been using to measure and test the shattered keel beam thing. “Try not to get yourself shot.”

  “You want me to go out there and deliberately irritate three guys carrying big, mean, nasty rifles?”

  “They aren’t rifles. They’re equipped with M4A1 carbines, which have a shorter barrel and are lighter weight than rifles,” Holly was emphatic. “Thirty-round magazine with just Insight optics—not even a Block I upgrade to one of Trijicon’s sights, which are a serious improvement.”

  “They are so going to shoot me.”

  “Not with a rifle, they aren’t, mate. Because they don’t have any.”

  17

  “This is an unusual request, sir.”

  “I’m an unusual man.” Drake rocked back in his chair and propped his feet on the desk drawer he always kept pulled out for that purpose.

  “Seriously, sir. We don’t—”

/>   “You do know who I am, right?” A lieutenant would have just delivered the item. The woman might be one of those ageless Eurasians, but her lapel insignia were shining birds, which said colonel and meant she was mid-forties, which he found hard to believe.

  “Yes sir. You’re Four-star General Drake Nason, CJCS, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But the NRO is not in the habit of—”

  “I don’t care what the National Reconnaissance Office is in the habit of.”

  “—the habit of,” Colonel Gray persisted with the stiffest spine since Christ was nailed to a cross, “providing surveillance of high security American sites.”

  “Yet you are standing here, aren’t you? In the Pentagon, just across my desk from me? And you are actually here, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “Yes sir. I noticed,” her dry tone stated that there was actually a person behind that stiff spine.

  Drake had always cultivated a casual attitude when he could; it tended to unbalance most lower ranks and make them reveal more than they intended. He’d been tagged with the handle “Renegade” back when he’d joined the Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion of the 75th Ranger Regiment. A Georgia boy serving in Georgia had fit him down to his boots. He no longer had to worry about not ticking off the higher ranks, because with four stars on his office door, there weren’t any other than the Commander-in-Chief.

  “And since you’re here, that tells this old boy that you have the data I requested, which means that you are surveilling those sites and you have something to deliver. Otherwise Patrick would have called me up and told me to go suck an egg.”

  “I’m told he considered it, sir.”

  “Patrick was always a bit of a prick.” The man had been an Air Force puke before shifting over to run the NRO. It wouldn’t surprise Drake for a second if Patrick tried to refuse the request just to get back at Drake’s own Army heritage.