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  Raider

  a Miranda Chase action-adventure technothriller

  M. L. Buchman

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  About This Book

  The US Army’s brand-new S-97 Raider reconnaissance helicopter goes down during final acceptance testing — hard.

  Cause: a failure, or the latest in a series of cyberattacks by Turkey?

  Miranda Chase and her team of NTSB air-crash specialists tackle the challenge. They must find the flaw, save the Vice President, and stop the US being forced into the next war in the Middle East. And they have to do it now!

  Prologue

  Ankara, Turkey

  Siberkume – Cyber Security Cluster

  Subbasement #2

  * * *

  Metin struggled against the collapsing code racing up his computer screen.

  The American satellite’s onboard software was self-correcting—constantly checking its synchronization and alignment.

  His right-hand computer screen showed the geographic shift he’d managed to induce in seven of the thirty-three satellites in this single system. It wasn’t systemic but, exactly as required, it was very localized.

  On his central screen, the American code he had decrypted was about to rotate. Every hour, the encryption routine scrambled itself. He’d had one hour to decrypt and infiltrate his own code before the door closed again, and he’d have had to start over from scratch.

  It had taken fifty-seven minutes for his program on the left screen to crack that code. That had left him only a three-minute window to alter the data broadcast that the satellites beamed downward.

  After three months of trying, his first successful hack had finally told him which path he’d needed to pursue. A week to break down and rebuild his code had taken out the element of chance that had let him crack it the first time.

  It still wasn’t an easy task, but he’d done it! In under the required hour and targeted the exact location called for in the new mission profile.

  But, between sixty minutes and sixty minutes-and-one second, the window into the American’s code imploded once more into encrypted gibberish.

  Metin collapsed back into his chair, drained as if he’d been on the attack for sixty hours, not sixty minutes.

  The noises around him came back slowly, the same way Gaye Su Akyol eased into her Anatolian rock videos.

  Siberkume was humming tonight, though with a very different tune.

  In the big room’s half-light that made it easier to stay focused on the screens, there sounded the harsh rattle of keys, soft-murmured conversations, and quiet curses of code gone wrong. It washed back and forth across the twenty stations crammed into the concrete bunker like a familiar tide. The sharp snap of an opening Red Bull can sounded like a gunshot. He liked that the Americans—all it took was watching the many eSports players Red Bull sponsored to know he belonged—were running on the same fuel he was, but still he’d beaten them.

  He snapped his own Red Bull because he definitely needed something to fight back the shakes from the sustained code dive.

  Siberkume might not have the vast banks of hackers like the Russians or Chinese, but he was part of a lean, mean, fighting machine.

  General Firat came striding up to his station like he owned the world. Since he ran Siberkume, he certainly owned Metin’s world.

  “I’m sorry, General. That was the best I could do this time.” It was the Cyber Security Cluster’s first real test of their abilities against a force like the Americans. He was the one who’d done it, but it was better to be cautious with the military. Their moods were more unpredictable than his sister’s crazy cat.

  “No, Metin. That was a very good start. Very good. You are çacal—‘like the coyote’.”

  General Firat thumped him hard enough on the shoulder that his keyboarding would be ten percent below normal speed for at least an hour.

  But “Metin the Coyote”?

  He could get down with that. It was seriously high praise.

  “I’ll get the effective window wider, General. I don’t know if I can beat the hourly reset. But now that I know how to get in, I can hone my code. I’ll make it faster so we have more time.” Though he had no idea how. He’d already streamlined it with every trick he knew to beat that one-hour limit.

  Unless he could talk his way onto the Yildiz SVR supercomputer…

  Wouldn’t that be hot shit? (He loved American slang and ferreted it out whenever he could sneak online.)

  “Yes, yes.” Clearly the General hadn’t understood a word of what he’d said about what could and couldn’t be done.

  Metin considered simplifying it, but he wasn’t sure how. It didn’t matter; General Firat didn’t pause for a breath.

  “Be ready. You have one week for the next level test. You are the very first one to make it through. Your skills have not gone unnoticed. Well done, Çacal. Bravo!” The general must mean it as he said the last loudly enough to be easily overheard by the ten closest programmers before striding off into the dim shadows of Siberkume.

  Metin grinned across the aisle at Onur.

  Onur groaned, but Metin didn’t rub it in too much. Onur’s sister Asli was the most lovely girl in the world, and his ability to visit with her, without appearing to visit with her, depended largely on Onur’s continuing friendship.

  But to rub it in a little, he rolled back his shoulders and pushed out his chest like Blackpink’s Rosé being so nice and just a little nasty. They’d watched all of the group’s K-pop videos over a totally illegal VPN to YouTube. It was one of the luxuries of working at Siberkume: access to the outside world—if you didn’t get caught.

  I’ve so got the stuff.

  Onur snorted and gave him an Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yeah, right! look. Onur didn’t look anything like Ewan McGregor, even with the expression. Of course, he himself didn’t look much like the superhot Rosé.

  1

  Mike might be sitting in the luxury of his usual leather armchair in the office, but he was definitely feeling crowded into a corner.

  “I’m just saying that we didn’t find anything mechanical,” Jeremy Trahn waved at the big television screen on the wall. He was operating it from his workbench, which took up one whole end of the office.

  He’d been adding to his toolset over the six months since Miranda had set up the team’s high-security office, walled off in the back of her airplane hangar. Now there was little that the labs at the National Transportation Safety Board’s Washington, DC, headquarters could analyze better. None of Miranda’s team went into even the Seattle office anymore. Everything they needed was here.

  What had started as a comfortable office space six months ago now looked well lived-in. Jeremy’s cluttered tool bench at one end of the spectrum, and Miranda’s meticulous rolltop antique desk at the other.

  He’d expanded the kitchenette enough that he could cobble together a decent meal when they were working long hours and the airport restaurant was closed. Other than that, it was about comfortable seats arranged to face a lovely view.

  Out the office’s one-way windows lay a view of the quiet runway at Tacoma Narrows Airport and a stunning vista of the snow-capped Olympic mountains. Which reminded him all too much of their entire last week’s investigation.

  Between the windows hung a large monitor screen.

  But he didn’t want to look at that.

  Jeremy had loaded a list of everything they’d been able to verify about the crash itself. For emphasis, Jeremy used a pen on his connected tablet to make a checkmark in
front of each item on the long list of each system and structural test.

  “Doesn’t mean the cause isn’t there. The debris field covered most of a mile.” And it had been damned cold.

  That was Mike’s main memory of the site investigation. Eight August days at six thousand feet walking an Alaskan glacier on Denali’s eastern slope. North America’s tallest peak rose over twenty thousand feet above nearby Anchorage and created its own weather systems—none of them comfortable. There was gray with fierce winds driving horizontal ice needles into every exposed bit of skin, and there was an aching blue with a cold so biting that it kind of killed the wonder of it all.

  They’d only left Alaska yesterday because an early storm dropped three feet of fresh powder over the investigation site. There wouldn’t be anything to see until spring, if then, so they’d finally come back to the office in western Washington.

  It had been past midnight last night when they’d crashed—no other word to describe their exhaustion—at the team house in Gig Harbor. Nobody had so much as moved before lunch. Now they’d come to the office to analyze what they’d learned.

  Clarity? So not.

  Mike still felt muddle-headed from the six-hour night flight down the coast. His joints still ached though they’d returned to the pleasant late summer of Puget Sound. If this was how old age felt, he was retiring to Hawaii before he hit thirty next year.

  High on Denali hadn’t been the cozy cold of Aspen. A quick one-hour jaunt in his company’s little Beechcraft plane. Especially nice when he was dating someone. They’d carve up the slopes during the day and carve up the sheets in some firelit lodge each night. He’d loved that plane—the last business asset he’d had to forfeit shortly before he finally found a position with the NTSB.

  The personal office that Miranda had built in her hangar at Tacoma Narrows Airport was physically both warm and comfortable. Except he wasn’t getting a whole lot of comfort here. With Jeremy insisting that it wasn’t his systems, and Holly claiming there was no sign of any structural failure, everyone was pointing at pilot error.

  The atmosphere inside the warm office was just as chilly as a glacier on Denali.

  He pulled out his phone, opened the fireplace app, and propped it where only he could see the cheerfully crackling flames. That felt a little better on the warm part. Now if he just had a little spray bottle for woodsmoke scent…

  But Jeremy didn’t let up for a second, arguing for the sanctity of his beloved mechanical systems.

  To his right, Holly slumped on the couch with her feet on the coffee table. One of her socks had a hole in it so that her big toe stuck out. The other sock didn’t match. Socks weren’t the sort of thing that Holly Harper ever cared about. Her jeans, t-shirt, and polar fleece vest showed just how rough she was on her clothes.

  Miranda was, as usual at this stage, keeping her thoughts to herself. She sat neatly upright in the padded armchair to his left. At a slight five-four, she could curl up and sleep in that chair—if she ever stopped moving.

  She cared for her own looks about as much as Holly cared about her socks. Her clothes were always neat and of the very best quality. But her longish brunette hair was always a slightly disorganized ruffle sometimes hiding half her face, or falling loose from where she’d tucked it behind an ear. She was wired so tightly that even sitting still she seemed to buzz. She was as near opposite Holly as could be found.

  “You know, mate…”

  He and Holly had both been on Miranda’s team for a year—on-again off-again lovers for the last half of that—and still her smooth Australian Strine just slayed him. And that lovely long body. She’d chopped her gold-blonde hair at the jawline, probably with the big knife she habitually wore at her thigh. He suspected that she’d done it because he’d mentioned how much he’d liked it down past her shoulders. But that was Holly. It still looked perfect.

  “This is a two-aircraft collision,” Holly continued. “Those are almost always pilot error. In fact, it’s usually both pilots in error. You know that, Mike.”

  He did know that. “But that doesn’t mean it’s right this time.”

  Two planes—a DHC-6 Series 100 Twin Otter, with a solo pilot and two thousand pounds of fresh-caught silver salmon out of Fairbanks, and a one-pilot-plus-seven-passenger sightseeing tour in a Piper Navajo out of Anchorage—had collided near the towering pinnacle of Denali.

  And everybody was pointing the finger at him. Or at least his specialty of “human factors.” But it felt personal.

  “You want my list?” he nodded toward the offending screen.

  Holly shrugged as if she didn’t care.

  Of them all, she’d been fairly well able to prove that the problem hadn’t stemmed from her structural specialty. No wings had broken off from metal fatigue, and no engines had fallen out of the sky detached from their surviving chunk of wing. No part of the tail’s empennage had failed on either plane—at least not from structural issues.

  That left systems or human factors, and there was no convincing Jeremy that any systems failure could have caused the collision.

  Flight recorders weren’t required on planes carrying fewer than ten passengers. So no evidence there.

  The collision had been bad enough that the Navajo had exploded in the air, as evidenced by the burn patterns on the metal that had barely melted into the glacier’s surface when it landed, indicating that most of the burning had happened during the fall.

  The body of the Twin Otter had impacted a quarter mile from one of its wings. But the ignition of the fuel in the one wing that had remained attached had ensured that the plane’s destruction was complete. The deep divot in the glacier revealed that the second plane had exploded on impact and burned in place. The cargo of fish had scattered uniformly in every direction like a silver salmon fountain.

  Thankfully, the human bodies had been removed by the pararescue folks of the 212th Rescue Squadron out of Elmendorf before their team reached Alaska. That was at least one memory he hadn’t had to bring back to the hangar with him.

  At least Miranda nodded for him to proceed, and that was all that mattered. She was always impartial and cared only about the facts.

  The facts about people? Yeah, there was a good laugh. Capricious, demented, chaotic. How Miranda had avoided having any of those oh-so-normal tendencies was still beyond him. Maybe it was a part of her autism.

  She might be challenged in so many ways, but she was the genius of air crashes—the very best in the entire National Transportation Safety Board. That he’d somehow lucked into being on her team was proof that there was a Fairy Godmother of Randomness at work in his life, a truth he’d always suspected before but never previously been able to confirm.

  “First, both pilots were highly experienced. The Twin Otter pilot had made the Anchorage-Fairbanks roundtrip run roughly a hundred times a year for the last decade.”

  “Complacency.”

  He ignored Holly. “The tour operator had fewer hours but still over fifteen thousand, and you know that’s more than many pilots retire with. He was also a certified flight instructor: multi-engine, commercial, and instruments.”

  “So he had some skills. He still smacked into another plane in broad daylight.”

  “Scattered clouds. Thick enough that they’d both filed IFR rather than VFR plans. So they were flying by instrument flight rules, not visual flight rules over very remote terrain.”

  “Then why were both planes off course?”

  As to that? Mike didn’t have an answer. By their flight plans, they should have passed a mile apart.

  “Instrumentation errors?”

  All that mattered was that he knew it wasn’t pilot error. Both guys were mature career pilots, not Alaska bush-pilot boneheads.

  Mike had uncovered nothing but glowing reports about both of them.

  No depression.

  No sleep deprivation.

  No alcohol abuse.

  One had left behind his high school sweetheart after twe
nty years together, the other a much younger but thoroughly pleasant second wife. The first wife had returned to the Lower 48 a decade before—the only one to not have nice things to say about him, most having to do with his choosing Alaska over her.

  The meds between them included just one: a low-dose statin for the tour pilot’s high cholesterol.

  The only prior noteworthy incidents were an engine failure on the Twin Otter due to a load of bad fuel three years ago, and a destructive bird strike on the Navajo. Both had landed safely.

  The Twin Otter pilot flying the load of salmon had drunk a single beer with his pizza at Moose’s Tooth Pub & Pizzeria in Anchorage before his round-trip flight to Fairbanks. Mike had verified his wife’s statement not only with the purchase receipt but with a waitress interview. He was a regular and easily remembered.

  Two hours each way to Fairbanks, and the other was only a three-hour tour. So neither pilot should have been overtired.

  One late thirties, the other early forties.

  Both pilots had passed their FAA medicals within the last six months.

  Malicious intent was about all that was left. But that hadn’t fit either. The two pilots knew each other, but had few dealings.

  He enumerated each point—again.

  “Also, no survivors and no residents for thirty miles around, so no witnesses. No tourist’s phones or cameras were in video mode at the moments leading up to impact, so no help there. No black boxes in such small aircraft, so no cockpit voice record to review. I did the rounds of air traffic controllers, fellow pilots, and the like, but there wasn’t a single red flag.”

  Both their lives were such open books that he’d only escaped the investigation on the high glacier for a single day to complete all of the interviews. The other seven days he’d done little more than be grunt labor for the other three. Which meant little need for the team’s human factors specialist—again.