Skibird: A Miranda Chase Technothriller Read online

  Skibird

  A Miranda Chase Technothriller

  M. L. Buchman

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  About This Book

  When the political battlefield spreads to Antarctica, can the team survive the deep freeze?

  Those who work there call Antarctica “The Ice.” A secret Russian cargo jet crashes into a crevasse near an Australian Station. The Aussies call in the top air-crash investigators on the planet.

  The best of them all, Miranda Chase, must face the Russians, Chinese, and use her own autistic abilities to keep her team alive. As the battle spreads across The Ice, are even her incredible skills enough?

  Or will they all be buried in the frozen wasteland?

  Prologue

  Altitude: 43,000 feet

  Off the coast of Antarctica

  69°22’25” S 76°22’18” E

  approximately

  “Kolya, I am going to rip out your eyes and crap in your skull!”

  “This is not my doing, Captain.”

  Captain Fyodor Novikov knew it wasn’t his navigator’s fault, but he needed someone to vent at and Kolya would know that. They’d started as young men together in flight school and knew each other’s ways.

  The Ilyushin Il-76's airframe creaked worse than his deda’s knees in a Moscow winter—a topic his grandfather loved to discuss in excruciating detail. Like Deda, his plane had earned the right to creak. Of the more than a thousand 76s built, it wouldn’t surprise him if his was the oldest remaining in service for the Russian military.

  The storm slammed the big cargo jet one way and then another across the Antarctic sky. Nothing to see out the windshield except a world of white—snow and cloud. At least it was daylight as it was high summer and they were below the Antarctic Circle. Below, he knew though he couldn’t see it, lay a world of death. Nothing but a storm-tossed ocean thick with ice floes down there.

  When he and his four crewmates had departed Cape Town International Airport seven hours ago, the report called for clear weather all the way to Progress Station in Antarctica. And it had been…for the first four thousand kilometers of the flight.

  But then Antarctica had decided to have a fit worse than his mother had when he’d brought home Aloysha the first time. The shouts, the pounding of fists on the armchair. In his bedroom that night they’d lain together listening to Mama’s vicious mutterings through the thin wall.

  He wished Kolya was sitting beside him in the cockpit instead of the party-hack copilot. He flew well enough, but couldn’t speak without spouting off some brainwashed nausea.

  Kolya, however, sat alone in the lower navigator’s cockpit. Though they were mere meters apart, their compartments connected back in the cargo bay. The party hack sat to Fyodor’s right and the engineer and loadmaster sat close behind him. No privacy this side of a good bar.

  The chaotic headwind flipped to a tailwind in a sharp, sixty-knot gust. The plane plummeted two hundred meters in the next three seconds as if the bottom had fallen out of the sky. He heard a grunt from the copilot who hadn’t known to tighten down his harness in a storm and had now bruised himself on the overhead. The engineer and loadmaster were old hands and had long since strapped down and were trying to sleep. Their work mostly happened on the ground.

  Fyodor waited five seconds. Six. Seven…they were down another four hundred meters before the gust dissipated and the plane began climbing again. Patience.

  This storm was as angry and foul as Mama had been—where patience had not worked.

  Flying headlong into that first storm, he had married the gorgeous Tatar blonde from Kazan—and regretted it ever since.

  Within the next year, she’d entered into an extended affair with his commander, which had caused one type of problem. Major Turgenev had assigned Fyodor to the most remote and long-lasting assignments, keeping him far from Moscow.

  Then she’d moved on to his commander in turn, which had caused Fyodor an entirely different type of problem. In retribution, Major Turgenev now assigned him the oldest aircraft on the worst routes.

  It wasn’t his navigator, it was Aloysha who should have her eyes ripped out. Little status-climbing sterva! Whose bed would the bitch find next, the Russian President’s? The Lord knew that enough others had. Rumors of his numerous unclaimed children and lovers who were quietly disappeared abounded like Russian ghost stories.

  At least that’s what he’d expected of her, but he’d checked his messages shortly before takeoff from Cape Town. Aloysha’s low voice had left a long, rambling apology of how he’d been the only man to ever treat her properly and how could she make it up to him?

  Not a chance, woman.

  He’d rather spend the rest of his days battling the physical storms, the ones he could fly into and fly back out of like this one. Storm above, sea-torn ice below, he’d fly right down its throat and land at Progress Station like he had fifty times before. Then he’d get good and drunk because tonight’s ride was a beast—the next gust sent his big sweetheart of a jet skittering sideways in a sharp crosswind.

  Aloysha had then turned fortune teller, as so many Russian women did who plunged into that Christmas tradition each December. She spoke of salvaging his career using everything she had learned while sleeping with his superiors and promised he could replace them with a few easy tactics.

  With her aid—of course.

  There would be a catch—of course.

  He knew her well enough now to know her supposed change of heart must be wholly self-serving. Aloysha might elevate his career but would use it as a launching point to strike yet higher for herself. Better than flying an ancient aircraft into a spawned-in-hell Antarctic storm?

  That was the problem. He’d proven he was too tactless to climb the ranks on his own. Turgenev had once been a fellow pilot but was now his unit commander.

  For once, he was thankful for this long flight. It placed him out of reach for several days while he, by a miracle please, convinced himself to say Nyet! Sadly, he knew full well his answer would be Da!

  Perhaps he’d find a way to use Aloysha this time. Or at the very least break even out of the deal.

  The control yoke bucked against his palms as a fresh gust slapped at them from straight ahead. Please let that be momentary. If it stayed sustained at that level, he might not reach the continent at all.

  The forty-year-old Ilyushin Il-76 cargo jet had been modified for long range and could fly over nine thousand kilometers when traveling empty. With a full load of forty-eight tonnes, his range should be six thousand. It would have left him sufficient fuel reserve to return to South Africa when the storm notice had reached them as they crossed the sixtieth latitude south.

  However, the damned administrators of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute were cutting corners. In fact, the ARRI were cutting off whole sides—they’d increased his payload by cutting his fuel load. It was hard to blame them as they were trying to keep Russia’s five Antarctic stations operational, down from the Soviet Union’s twenty-three. And frankly, those five were hanging by the thinnest of threads.

  Another of Deda’s favorite topics, while consuming an excess of vodka, was discussing the collapse of the Motherland in a far too loud voice.

  When we built the Pole of Inaccessibility Station in 1958…so many of his diatribes began with that. Fyodor knew it was the high point of the old man’s life, but each repetition stretched Fyodor’s
patience thinner than his chances of a blissful marriage with the faithless Aloysha. He’d rather wrestle with a storm than yet another of her games any day.

  Deda’s expedition had occupied the station for twelve days, the farthest point in Antarctica from the ocean in all directions. The last time it was visited—which happened about once a decade—all that remained of the original two-story hut was the bust of Lenin that had perched at the top, the lone tip of a radio antenna, and an anemometer that no longer spun. The rest had been buried beneath the drifting snow.

  The Geographic South Pole, where the Americans squatted in their deluxe super-station, lay eight hundred kilometers from the center of the continent.

  To build at the Pole of Inaccessibility? That had taken Russian know-how! Then Deda would pound the table with the bottom of his empty glass, making his point as well as fresh dents in the old wood.

  It was Russian stupidity as far as Fyodor was concerned. The traverse across the ice in each direction had taken longer than the occupation of the station itself. In that same year, the Americans had moved to the South Pole—and been there for all of the sixty-plus years since.

  The question now was, how much longer would the few remaining Russian stations last?

  The freak, mid-December storm—currently offering such marginal visibility through the thick clouds and blowing snow that he could barely see his own wings when he looked back—was worthy of the dead of winter, not the height of the Antarctic summer. However, with too much cargo and not enough fuel to turn back, the only answer was to continue through and land in Antarctica.

  This cargo is top priority, Captain Novikov. Highest security, Major Turgenev had told him. Straight from Colonel Romanoff. The head of the entire Antarctic program.

  There were a couple tons of foodstuffs, and all the rest was need-to-know and it had been deemed that he didn’t need to know. Fine! He didn’t care what he was carrying. Let them play their games. Let Aloysha flaunt her fine ass elsewhere. He was a damn fine pilot and for now, that would be plenty.

  The four-engine Il-76 Candid was one of the largest cargo planes in the world. This old bird was his to command and he loved it for that. It was big enough that while the storm battered it, it was also tough enough to fly through it.

  Though it did rattle like a tin can of old bolts being shaken by the ogress Baba Yaga herself as she strove to raise the demons of the wind. He muttered an old prayer of Grandmother’s asking Baba Yaga to wander back to her usual occupation of kidnapping misbehaving children to cook for her dinner.

  She didn’t depart.

  “Sustained winds at ninety kmph, gusts to one-twenty.” Kolya sounded as dour as ever, like he was singing the closing dirge of a Mussorgsky opera. The man could make a wedding toast seem funereal.

  “The heading, Kolya. You had better keep me on the heading.” As if he wouldn’t.

  “You keep us in the air and I’ll make sure we don’t die until we get there.”

  “Good! I’ll try to make sure we don’t die after that.”

  The copilot looked at him aghast, but Fyodor knew his navigator’s skills were unmatched and it was his attitude that had him assigned to these remote flights. Any sane commander who feared death would want Navigator Kolya and his dire pronouncements flying as far from them as possible. Any pilot with half a brain wouldn’t care because no one was better at finding a safe landing despite storm, broken equipment, and archaic machinery.

  The Il-76 was so ancient, thanks to Aloysha dumping Major Turgenev, that it had never been upgraded to a digital cockpit. Fyodor had to fly using all dial instruments. His lone screened instrument, the GLONASS global-positioning system, had been mounted on a spindly arm, which had snapped two months ago during a rough landing and been completely destroyed. Maintenance was waiting for parts, which either meant the repair order was stalled in Major Turgenev’s inbox or that Deda was right about modern Russia’s failures. Or, more likely, both.

  To carry a backup GPS receiver to position himself by using the American satellite system was forbidden, though any American could access it by looking at their phone.

  So it was up to Kolya, seated in the Il-76’s navigation station directly below their feet, to keep them on course. He always managed, and Fyodor was careful not to ask how. Kolya probably used his personal phone and an illegal app for GPS positioning, as the GLONASS satellite system—when it was working—always seemed to have a gap at the most awkward moments.

  They had to take care though. With party fanatic copilot aboard—who Major Turgenev wisely also wanted kept as far away as possible—they couldn’t use American technology in his presence. Fyodor always warned Kolya when the copilot left his seat in case he decided to visit the navigator’s station below.

  There wasn’t much chatter, they were all at dead ends in their careers and only Lieutenant Ultranationalist Copilot didn’t know it. Below them, seated before the curve of the down-and-forward-looking windows and surrounded by his instruments, Kolya flew alone with the best view from the plane. It was these windows on the underside of the nose that gave the Il-76 the appearance of an evil toothed grin to all who approached.

  Somehow, out in the blinding whiteness, Kolya would find their landing strip. In mid-December the ice runway on the sea by Progress Station would be marginal. The summer heat would melt out the ice shelf shortly. This was the last possible delivery of the season until the sea refroze.

  Fyodor hoped that the ice crew had that right and he didn’t simply sink through the ice upon landing. Also that they’d done a better job of grooming the ice since his last landing. He’d thought that it would be his last one—ever. How the landing gear remained attached that time was both a miracle and a testament of old Soviet engineering. Another point favoring Deda’s tirades.

  The runway had better be perfect now or he might pass on a dose of Major Turgenev’s revenge. Of course, the days of threatening underlings with a trip to the Gulag were gone, again much to Deda’s disappointment.

  However, Fyodor had offered the men responsible for the runway maintenance an assignment to the Navy’s pride and joy if they didn’t take better care of the landing surface. The country’s sole aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, was no better than a prison ship. And every person in the Russian military knew it.

  It had to be towed to sea and anchored there for flight operations, when it was operational at all. Numerous pilots and planes died in horrific crashes during supposedly simple fair-weather daylight operations. They never attempted night or foul weather flights like the Americans. It definitely offered crew members a shortened lifespan from hazardous materials, fires, accidents, and poisonously bad food and air. One day it would simply sink, the way its dry dock had before the latest round of repairs could be started.

  With a gut-churning plunge and a raucous protest from the wings’ joints, he began his descent while still a hundred and fifty kilometers away from the coast.

  Because of Major Turgenev’s various assignments, Fyodor was exceptionally practiced at flying old equipment through horrid weather. Flying down into the maelstrom was nothing new to him. With his trusty old Ilyushin-76, he’d make a safe landing and simply have another bad-weather-flight story to tell.

  But his descent into the maelstrom of the sultry Aloysha when he next reached Moscow? If he decided to fly that particular route again, he didn’t need one of Kolya’s dire predictions to know how that storm would end.

  At least Mama would be happy. When Aloysha had moved on, it had taken Mama months to find a new topic to rail at him about, along with her son’s boundless stupidity.

  Storm system Aloysha? No question that would be a disaster of epic proportions.

  Was she worth the risk?

  Almost certainly not.

  Almost.

  But he could never be sure.

  The incoming projectile descended at thirty-four kilometers per second—five times the reentry speed of a manned space capsule. It entered the mesosphere ei
ghty kilometers above the ground, ten times the height of Everest, the first layer of the atmosphere with enough density to affect its motion to any measurable extent.

  Upon striking the thin traces of the upper atmosphere, its hypersonic speed compressed the air like a battering ram until the air glowed white-hot around it.

  It bore no wide heat shield designed to slow its passage. The common misunderstanding—that heat shields existed to slow down spacecraft—was backward. Reentry vehicles intended to reach the surface intact presented broad surfaces in order to dump orbital speed through atmospheric aero-braking. The friction with the air generates immense heat and the heat shield is designed to slowly burn away during reentry.

  Narrow projectiles have different aerodynamic considerations. Not designed to reach near-zero velocity on landing, they didn’t require large heat shields.

  But that didn’t mean they passed into the thick soup of Earth’s atmosphere unscathed.

  As the superheated air wrapped around the projectile, it protected the object. Between the rammed air and the main body itself, a thin envelope of trapped gas formed, which insulated it from the worst of the heat. What minor quantity of heat radiated through this barrier, scorched only the outermost molecules of the space-cold object before they were sloughed off, taking any accumulated heat with them.

  The core remained a bare nine degrees above absolute zero.

  Point-nine seconds later it entered the stratosphere. Crossing the thin, uppermost layers of atmosphere cost it a bare few percent of its velocity. Now, in thicker air, the object dumped kinetic energy and turned into a compact superheated inferno. The complex iron-nickel-cobalt alloy had sufficient density and mass that it didn’t shatter against the massive pressure wave created by its own descent.

  It slowed to a bare two kilometers a second as it traversed the twenty-five kilometers of the denser stratosphere.