Lightning Read online

  LIGHTNING

  A MIRANDA CHASE POLITICAL TECHNOTHRILLER

  M. L. BUCHMAN

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  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  Miranda Chase—the autistic heroine you didn’t expect. Fighting the battles no one else could win.

  Revenge? A terrorist attack? Or a declaration of war?

  The head of the Senate Armed Services Committee lies dead. The murder weapon? An Air Force jet deliberately crashed into his DC hotel room.

  Half a world away in the South China Sea, an F-35C Lightning II crashes during landing. It cripples the aircraft supercarrier USS Theodore Roosevelt. An accident? Or China’s next move toward world domination?

  Miranda Chase and her NTSB air-crash investigation team are spread thin as they struggle to unravel two horrific crashes at once — and halt a global firestorm before it burns them all.

  Worse, the next target could be Miranda herself.

  PROLOGUE

  Friday evening of Memorial Day Weekend

  Joint Base Andrews

  Washington, DC

  “Two to go,” US Air Force Captain Beth Johnston told her C-20C Gulfstream III bizjet as she brushed a hand on the high-polish paint. It wore the distinctive United States of America blue-and-white of a VIP transport for the 89th Airlift Wing. One of three identical birds kept in this auxiliary hangar at Andrews Air Force Base, but this sweet 20C was hers.

  Tonight’s VIP lift mission was a flight to Georgia to return the Secretary of the Treasury to DC after a four-day vacation. Most people were headed out of DC for Memorial Day weekend, the secretary was headed in.

  Beth would take her pilot’s job over any other. She didn’t care crap about glory or power or politics—she wanted to fly.

  This flight would leave her with only the Secretaries of Interior and Veteran Affairs who she hadn’t transported yet. She had every other cabinet secretary’s signature in her log book.

  Of course it would be nice to snag a VP or even Presidential lift, but that wasn’t likely. She’d followed their big planes any number of times for emergency coverage, but had not been needed. And as much as she’d like to snag their signatures, she’d rather not have the scale of emergency that would call for the Commander in Chief to climb aboard her little ten-passenger jet.

  At 2007 hours, Captain Justin O’Dowd strode into the hangar and waved as he walked toward his usual 20C. She didn’t recall there being a second lift mission tonight, but it was Friday before a three-day weekend so anything was possible. Odd that his copilot wasn’t with him. It was easy to fly the plane solo, but it wasn’t certified for it.

  “How’s your mother holding up?” she called out.

  “Still mad for each other, they are,” he replied in a ridiculously overblown Irish accent. One of Justin’s running jokes was about his quiet Lebanese mother surviving his boisterous Irish father. His looks belonged to his mother, his sense of humor to his father, and his piloting skills to the US Air Force. He flew at least as well as she did.

  She returned to her preflight inspection. Her copilot Reggie was following behind her so that everything was double-checked. She’d always loved the peaceful process of checking over her plane from fan blades in the engines to tire pressure—before they went out and ripped a hole in the sky.

  “Hey, Reg, could you come take a look at this?” Justin’s accentless voice was overloud in the quiet hangar.

  Reggie glanced at her for permission, then circled around to the other side of Justin’s plane.

  Like her, Justin was always pure business when it came to flying. Another reason to like him, but she never quite felt that snap of attraction. She knew he was single and interested, but there was always something that had her keeping their relationship strictly professional.

  Moments later, a shout of surprise echoed about the hangar.

  Beth ducked low to look under the fuselage of her plane toward Justin’s plane—as Reggie’s body slumped limply to the scrubbed concrete floor.

  She sprinted around the nose of both planes, then around the long wing to where Reggie lay crumpled by the open rear baggage access.

  “What happened?” Beth knelt over him and reached for his pulse, but there was no need. His eyes were shot wide and his mouth was fixed in a rigid O of surprise. “What happened?”

  Kneeling beside her, Justin rested a hand on her shoulder to keep her steady.

  Then she saw his other hand. He held a needle-thin stiletto—with a blood-red blade.

  He shifted his hand from her shoulder to clamp it over her mouth. With the other, he slid the blade into her chest, angling up below her left ribcage. A scorching agony overwhelmed any sense of fear as he plunged the blade into her heart and then circled the tip with a quick twist of his wrist. Minimal hole. Minimal blood.

  She looked down in time to see the small stain of red on Reggie’s shirt where the blade had severed his heart inside his chest exactly as it severed hers.

  “I’m sorry, Beth. But I need your flight clearance tonight.”

  Captain Beth Johnston’s last thought ever as her head hit the concrete was that her look of surprise was going to exactly match Reggie’s.

  “Pull to the curb here!”

  CIA Director Clarissa Reese’s driver obeyed and slid out of the thick Friday evening traffic pushing into Columbus Circle. The congestion was worse than ever as everyone tried to escape the already sweltering city for the Memorial Day weekend. He eased into a crosswalk at the corner of North Capitol and E Streets, a half-block shy of the Kimpton George Hotel to her left. In a token gesture to the pedestrians, he backed up three feet to clear a slice of it, as if they mattered.

  Behind her, the US Capitol Building glowed orange in the May sunset; the sun still touched the dark bronze Statue of Freedom atop the dome so that it shone brighter than anything else in Washington, DC. Clarissa could feel her bronze glare like a simmering heat at the back of Clarissa’s head.

  She wished she could light the statue like a fuse on a dome-sized bomb. Or at least a missile-sized one dropped on the head of each member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

  The fact that she knew she was overreacting did little to ease the knot that had built in her stomach throughout today’s excruciating meetings, though she’d been careful to keep that off her face. Hadn’t she?

  Ahead, the columned facade of Union Station, stained dull orange by the setting sun, dared her to leave town. For the first time in her career, that actually sounded tempting.

  She didn’t want to face…anything.

  “You can do this, Clarissa.” Her self-instruction wasn’t helping. She’d been muttering some version of it over and over for the last twenty-three days with minimal effect. Twenty-four days ago she’d had a dozen plans all running fast on a clear and open rail. Then her world had changed and she couldn’t force a single one of those plans ahead.

  Her driver studiously ignored her. She’d long since made it clear that the last thing she needed was to interact with any agent who’d never be more than a security peon. By the time she was his age, she’d been at a CIA black site extracting information from the worst dregs of humanity involved in the Afghan madness.

  There’d been an art to that—one she’d thoroughly mastered.

  This? This was hard. In the last month, she’d lost everything.

  With her husband’s death, her path to the White House had been blocked. Vice Presidents were supposed to be well protected. But not Clark. His Marine Two helicopter had gone d
own in flames, the bastard.

  Now, the goddamn President was elevating his National Security Advisor Sarah Feldman to become Vice President rather than herself. The announcement was tomorrow and Congress was going to approve her nomination so fast that Feldman might suffer whiplash. She was the perfect mix of pro-America yet not rabid, which fit both parties well. She was, Clarissa hated to admit, incredibly well qualified as well.

  Clark’s death had also put Clarissa on the street. The grand Queen Anne Victorian at One Observatory Circle was for the Vice President, not his widow.

  She never should have sold her prime condo in Foggy Bottom, but Clark had been such an obvious choice to next occupy the Oval Office that she’d been assured of her future residence for years to come.

  The long stretch of E Street ran past the George to the White House, where now she’d never rule from the Oval Office.

  And at the rate the housing market was exploding in DC, even the sale of Clark’s country place out in Poolesville, Maryland—a place no one had heard of who didn’t actually live there—wouldn’t make up the difference.

  For the moment she had a crap townhouse rental out in Langley.

  And she’d had no part in the biggest political initiative since Bretton Woods and the Cold War.

  The President’s new MERP—Middle East Realignment Plan—had captured the imagination of everyone but the most hard-core contrarians who hated any idea that wasn’t theirs. Even marginal allies were flocking to the call.

  The flocks of people scowling at her driver as they squeezed past the front bumper were probably all talking about how wonderful it was. This was DC after all, and the disavowal of several long-term but terrorist-harboring allies, and a lifting of Iranian several Iranian sanctions had the entire city abuzz. If President Cole could run for a third term, they’d probably cheer down to the last secretary and dog walker.

  Worse, President Cole had made sure that the bulk of the credit had gone to her dead husband and NSA Sarah Feldman. If the woman didn’t screw up, she had the next election, eighteen months out, in the bag.

  Of course, when Sarah ran, she would need a Vice President…

  Clarissa couldn’t even find the energy to snarl at yet another closed door. If she couldn’t be President, she wouldn’t be able to pass for VP either.

  The hidden scandals—thankfully, all classified Top Secret but littered with Clarissa’s name—had guaranteed her shut-out from any future chance at the Oval Office. It was clear that certain parties would release everything if she tried to run. The House Intelligence Committee—that was damn well supposed to be on her side—had made that painfully clear all through today’s meetings.

  She had enough dirt to ruin half the committee and have the other half burned at the stake for the evil witchcraft they’d perpetrated during their careers. But their idea of a united front was, if they went down, they’d take her down with them.

  Bush’s route from CIA Director to Vice President to the Oval was lost to her, and it was time she accepted it. Time to move on…but in what direction?

  Clarissa sat in the back of her SUV and stared at the cubic brick edifice of the George and did her best to discover some shred of composure. It had become harder and harder in the weeks since Clark’s death as she identified more pieces of herself that she’d lost. Beyond her home and her path to the White House, there was the surprising revelation that she missed Clark himself. Immensely.

  Her fortieth birthday was in three days, and Clark had promised her a big Memorial Day celebration. She’d planned one for herself. Before it all came apart, she’d intended to inform him of her own place as Vice President on his ticket for the next election if that wasn’t his surprise. But his unrevealed plans—probably some romantic getaway, knowing Clark—had followed him to the grave.

  Another issue had become crystal clear during today’s meetings beneath the Capitol Dome. For once, she’d misjudged all of their power plays completely. She did that very rarely—and never before so badly.

  At the White House’s request, she’d had the CIA draw up a master list of every known terrorist action against the US. She’d done so for every nation from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe—actually to Yemen as both Zambia and Zimbabwe were too busy wallowing in their own shit to bother the US in any notable way.

  And she’d listed every CIA counterstroke, the good and the bad. She’d left out any true black ops performed by the CIA’s Special Activities Division—as well as anything patently illegal done by the Special Operations Group—but included everything else.

  It was supposed to be a strictly internal document, but it had predictably leaked. Clarissa had expected that and planned accordingly. The disastrous 1974 leak of the dreaded Family Jewels memos had chronicled the hundreds of times that the CIA had overstepped their charter. The public and Congressional retribution, which had nearly led to the breakup of the CIA, were not going to happen on her watch.

  And they hadn’t.

  Instead, against all projections, the opposite had occurred.

  Clarissa had carefully laid all of the questionable activities at Clark’s feet as he’d been the CIA Director before her. Finally, having a dead Vice President for a predecessor and a husband came in handy.

  It was always better to blame a dead man.

  Except, instead of the leaked summary wreaking domestic havoc this time, it had become a key document in the President’s proposed MERP. It had justified massive realignments and the disavowal of several long-term Middle East allies caught with their fingers deep in terrorism.

  It had also elevated Clark’s posthumous popularity, for laying the groundwork to the realignment, to far past anything it deserved. She knew that for a fact as she’d spent years engineering his image during his ascendency. Now it was impossible to take back the credit, even for her own operations, that she had so publicly given away. The House Intelligence Committee had made that abundantly clear this afternoon.

  This committee will protect our nation and Vice President Clark Winston’s legacy—despite knowing damn well how much of that was hers—against all comers. The silence that followed had echoed about the meeting room until it hurt her ears. They’d gladly shred her reputation if they thought they could survive doing so.

  Grinding on past woes achieved nothing. She needed a way forward.

  Clarissa sighed and checked her watch. The committee had kept her until she’d been fifteen minutes late, now she was twenty. Senator Hunter and Rose Ramson would be waiting in the George’s penthouse suite where they always held their monthly dinner meeting.

  She didn’t need the influence of the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, not anymore. Hunter had lost much of his power in his efforts to block the President’s Middle East Realignment Plan. MERP had voided billions of dollars of foreign arms sales for Hunter’s pet defense contractors and dropped his lobbying power to near zero.

  To say that the contractors and the Saudis, among others, were livid about his inability to quash MERP, was a significant understatement. They’d all become much less friendly over these same three weeks since Clark’s death.

  No, she hadn’t needed anything from Hunter since long before his fall from grace. Now there was a growing doubt that he’d manage to retain his Senate seat for a fifth six-year term at the next election. There were rumors—that she knew to be true—that both parties were vetting new candidates to replace the suddenly vulnerable Hunter Ramson. No longer the favored son.

  What Clarissa needed tonight was the sharp mind of Washington’s top socialite, Rose Ramson, the so-called First Lady of DC. Perhaps so powerful in her own right that she could weather the storm of her husband’s fall.

  Clarissa had once promised Rose the future Vice Presidency but, as hard as it was to accept, that was gone and they both knew it. The question now? Could Rose help her consolidate what power she did have? Clarissa would leave it up to Rose to name her price.

  Sadly, Clarissa suspected that her scattered thou
ghts wouldn’t become any more coherent than they were at this moment.

  “Let’s get this done already,” she finally told the driver.

  Pedestrians had stopped in the narrow slice of crosswalk at the front of the car. They were gawking and pointing at something behind her.

  The driver checked his side mirror—ducking low to look upward. He didn’t look away.

  Clarissa turned to look out the rear window.

  Instead of a big truck blocking the lane, she spotted a jet, a black blot on an achingly deep blue evening sky. Weaving around the Capitol Dome as if the Statue of Freedom was the marker post for Turn Four in a horse race. It sped toward them—where no planes were ever supposed to be.

  Downtown DC was the most protected no-fly zone in the country.

  An idiot, hoping to be in tomorrow’s headlines for buzzing DC, had swooped between the Capitol and the Supreme Court Building, and was now carving a hard turn at Columbus Circle above Union Station.

  Heading for the White House? If both President Cole and future-VP Feldman were there, and it all went wrong… Well, the Speaker of the House, who was next in line, was a ridiculous progressive and had no love for the CIA, making him hard to leverage.

  It was a sleek C-20C Gulfstream III painted in United States of America blue-and-white.

  “Damn, they’re low,” her driver spoke for the first time since leaving the Capitol Building.

  They were.

  In fact, they were so low that—

  The plane passed close overhead as it flew into the narrow slot of E Street Northwest, which was barely wider than its wingspan.

  Below the tops of the buildings.

  Was the pilot out to kill himself?

  The sonic lash of its jet engines reverberated along the brick-and-glass canyon. The wind of its passage slammed into them hard enough to shake her Cadillac Escalade SUV despite the extra weight of the Class VI up-armor and thick bulletproof glass.