Thunderbolt: an NTSB / military technothriller (Miranda Chase Book 2) Read online

  And he hadn’t picked it up.

  He’d set it on…

  The leading edge of Number Two’s wing!

  He jolted to his feet as the second A-10 Thunderbolt II passed down the runway directly across from him.

  Please God! Let it have just fallen to the ground!

  He swore he’d take up prayer and follow in Master Sergeant Neville’s footsteps the rest of his life.

  If only—

  The second A-10C Thunderbolt II did its characteristic “pop” into the air.

  The quarter- by six-inch flat head screwdriver with the hardened-steel square shaft, bounced loose from where it had been nestled at the joint of the wing and fuselage. The leading curve of the wing gave the screwdriver an upward impetus to its own flight—one now following a different trajectory from the A-10.

  It managed to gain three feet in altitude before gravity broke its upward travel and began pulling it toward the ground.

  It fell three inches before it impacted the leading edge of the left engine’s cowling.

  The air current created by the General Electric TF34-GE-100A turbofan engine, spinning at seventy-five-hundred rpm for takeoff, made the final decision.

  The screwdriver was swept up into the engine.

  The impact of the hardened steel cracked four separate titanium fan blades. Eighty-three rotations later, less than three-quarters of a second, the first of them separated. As it was slammed around inside the engine like a howitzer shell, eight other blades were broken free.

  The engine barrel and cowling did their job and contained the catastrophe to within the engine itself.

  However, the A-10 Thunderbolt II lost half its thrust less than fifteen feet from the ground.

  The left wing dipped abruptly.

  Not high enough yet to clear the twenty-eight-and-a-quarter feet that the left wing extended from the side of the fuselage.

  However, the A-10 had flown just high enough to try to fly rather than flopping back onto its wheels.

  But the wing tip didn’t just skid along the pavement.

  It caught the runway like a pole vaulter planting the foot of his pole.

  The pilot pulled the ejection handles.

  The rocket-catapult fired immediately, as did as the reel gas initiator.

  Because the pilot was already leaning back against the seat for the takeoff, he sustained no injuries as the slack take-up reels on his harness made sure he was secured tightly against the seat to minimize spinal injuries.

  The seat launched through the acrylic canopy.

  As designed, the two steel canopy breakers at the top of the seatback made sure that the pilot didn’t impact the canopy directly—instead punching out through a wide hole.

  Two-hundredths of a second before the STAPAC pitch-and-control stabilization system was programmed to fire its rocket and correct the seat’s orientation to launch it upward prior to parachute deployment height, the pilot and the seat impacted the ground traveling at two hundred and ninety-four miles per hour.

  The pilot’s neck broke instantly.

  Then, with both the catapult and STAPAC rockets firing but no longer gyro stabilized, the seat spun end-over-end, igniting a long strip of sagebrush and creosote plants.

  Meanwhile, the plane planted its nose—hard.

  Banked almost vertically to the left, with the right-side engine still firing at full takeoff thrust of nine thousand pounds, the A-10 Thunderbolt II also became a pinwheel shedding body parts just as the pilot was.

  The debris field ultimately scattered for over a thousand meters down the runway.

  35

  Colonel Campos’ phone rang loudly in the quiet conference room at Davis-Monthan.

  Everyone but Miranda jumped in surprise.

  Miranda was never surprised by loud noises herself. With everything in the world seeming so loud and fractious and unpredictable all the time, what difference did one more sound make?

  She and the others waited through a predictable series of “Uh-huh” and other sounds one makes when receiving bad news.

  While she waited, she wondered why they were still here, two hours after they’d first sat down.

  The helo pilots were able to offer no new information.

  All her team had to inspect was a broken elevator trim motor that should never have been attached to an A-10 Thunderbolt II and a download from the Chinook helicopter’s flight recorder that Jeremy had salvaged.

  It hadn’t been informative.

  A modern helicopter had a minimum of twenty distinct databus architectures in operation. Flight control computers spoke different protocols than weapons control computers. Infrared mapping, terrain following, and visual were all distinct—then another protocol was necessary so that they could interact with a single screen. Communications swallowed at least five more. GPS navigation was a separate system from VOR, TACAN, and inertial nav. The more capable a system became, the more complex it became.

  The FVDR recorded all that it could from each of these channels—and their marginal cross-integration—with no ability to cross reference except by the factor of time.

  The spurious commands had entered the helicopter on a satellite communication bus, been transferred to a clock mechanism in the Chinook helicopter’s HMUS—Health Management and Usage monitor—where they had access to both storage space and timing from the helicopter’s master clock.

  When the helo had reached a thousand feet, it sent a signal to the emergency release on the cargo hook via the shared HMUS tracking software.

  The system had then waited fifteen minutes.

  Was the saboteur expecting the helicopter to be safely back at base by that time, in which case everyone would have been safely clear? Or had they anticipated that more people would have gathered to figure out what went wrong, thus creating more collateral damage?

  Jeremy’s one other discovery, in copying the file the moment before the helicopter was destroyed, was the final two instructions: first, to dump the gas tanks before igniting it, and second, to erase itself in the last few milliseconds that the recorder would have remained active.

  Plenty of time.

  If Jeremy hadn’t made a copy of it first.

  Campos ended the call as another buzzed in.

  Miranda began gathering her things. There wasn’t anything else to do here.

  This time he slumped back in his chair and hid his face as he grunted out another series of unhappy sounds.

  “This so doesn’t look right, pal,” Holly whispered to her.

  “We’ve done our bit. Everything we were here to inspect has been blown up.”

  Holly tipped her head sideways uncertainly as if—

  “Is your neck okay?”

  “Neck’s fine. Except for the hairs prickling up the back of it.”

  “Why?”

  Holly just tipped her head toward Colonel Campos, who had finished his call and was setting the phone down very carefully on the table as if it might explode.

  Miranda had heard of certain smartphone models catching fire, but never exploding.

  “Chinook flight crew,” Campos spoke in a dead monotone. “Your records will be cleared of any wrongdoing in the loss of the A-10 Thunderbolt II airframe or your CH-47 helicopter. You will stand down for one week—”

  There was a murmur among the fliers until he held up his hand to silence them.

  “I don’t want you having a sudden attack of the jitters on your next flight. You’re going to chill for a week. Consider it medical leave. You may go home, go surfing, I don’t care. Just get out of here for a week. Counseling will be available if you want it. You’re dismissed.”

  After a little uncertain shuffling and a round of salutes that he didn’t answer because the colonel didn’t look up from his phone, they shuffled out of the room.

  Miranda put her hands on her notebook, then looked at Holly.

  Holly gave her head a small shake which must mean to wait.

  Campos sighed, still
without looking up from his phone.

  “Anyone have a sledgehammer?”

  36

  Jeremy reached into his pack and pulled out the twenty-four-ounce framing hammer that he’d found useful when trying to beat his way into a particular section of a wreck and offered it to the colonel.

  “I was kidding.”

  “Oh,” Jeremy put it back in the bag.

  Still no one spoke. He could see that Miranda was ready to leave and Holly was saying not yet. Mike was just watching the colonel with a grim look on his face.

  Why would the colonel want a sledgehammer in a conference room?

  Oh man.

  He hated it when he missed the obvious. The hammer was for the colonel to kill his phone before it delivered more bad news.

  A metaphorical joke.

  And Jeremy had offered a real hammer. Why was he always doing things like that?

  He was the ultimate sucker for a straight line.

  He really needed to learn to think first, then—

  The colonel spoke up. “Three of our top A-10 instructors at Eglin Air Force Base just disappeared over the Gulf of Mexico and we don’t know why.”

  “Flew away?” Mike asked.

  “Bermuda Triangle?” Jeremy had always wanted to go searching for something in the Bermuda Triangle. Then recalled that the Bermuda Triangle was on the other side of Florida from the Gulf—near Bermuda. Maybe he should pull out his framing hammer and try klonking some sense into his own head.

  “They didn’t fly or descend or anything. They simply stopped reporting in any fashion. A search team over the last known position has identified significant floating debris—none of it very big.”

  “Seriously?”

  Campos just scowled at him.

  “Seriously. Okay. Three at once doesn’t seem very likely.”

  “Five,” Miranda said with that perfect calm he could never seem to match.

  “Five?”

  “Those three, the colonel’s crash here at Davis-Monthan, and one in Afghanistan.”

  “There was one in Afghanistan? What happened to it?”

  “Shot down. Maybe,” Miranda answered.

  The colonel swiveled sharply to look at her, “Shot down…maybe?”

  “I choose my words carefully, Colonel.”

  “Explain.”

  Miranda sighed to herself. “What do we actually know?”

  “That Major Carl Carmichael was shot down over—”

  “No.”

  Colonel Campos sputtered to a halt and glared at her.

  “We know that his A-10 Thunderbolt II was lost during a battle in Achin, Afghanistan.”

  “While taking on over seventy aggressors.”

  “Yes. But we have no witnesses as to what actually happened. All of the Rangers he was there to protect died and can’t offer eyewitness accounts. I’m assuming that no prisoners were taken during the extraction of the bodies?”

  He shook his head.

  “Therefore—especially in light of the loss of five other aircraft of the same type in the same twelve-hour period—I would be unwilling to assume that it was lost in an attack rather than some failure independent of the attack.”

  “Well, you better add another,” Campos growled. “The second call was that we just lost an A-10 during takeoff for a training flight at Nellis.”

  “Six. When was the last time you lost six A-10 Thunderbolt IIs in one day, Colonel?”

  “Never,” Jeremy knew the answer to that one. “The worst one-day loss of jets was the Diamond Crash in 1982 when four planes from the US Air Force Thunderbirds demonstration team flew into the ground. The lead pilot had a jammed stabilizer, and the three jets in close formation were watching their position on his lead like they were supposed to—it meant they followed him in. Four in one day. Certainly never six. At least not since World War II. Did you know that we lost sixty B-29 bombers in a single day over the Schweinfurt ball bearing plants in 1943? Black Thursday they called it. That was…”

  Jeremy saw the looks on their faces, eyes glazing over, and clamped his jaws together. No one wanted to know about that.

  “Six is a lot,” he finished lamely.

  37

  A phone in an Edinburgh, Scotland self-storage unit jangled sharply once.

  A microphone—because it was always good to have a physical disconnect to block an electronic trace chain—picked up the sound and triggered a one-character text message on another phone to a number in Cabo San Lucas.

  One that had never been answered.

  It simply sat silently, on a small solar charger in an unoccupied hut in a resort that had not survived the American recession, with an auto-forward set for all incoming messages.

  Nothing quite like low-tech.

  The single letter, F, arrived on a phone in Oklahoma City.

  Because nothing bad happened in Oklahoma City anymore.

  The recipient smiled. Nothing except her.

  Hello, Client F! And what are you wound up about today?

  Because that was definitely what Client F seemed to enjoy doing, getting wound up. It wasn’t like this was a rocket science project, it was just jet science and she could totally handle that.

  Daemon opened an app on an otherwise unused computer. She—her identity was female today—was almost always female in Oklahoma City. It was nice to actually just be herself here.

  But as Mum always said, “Don’t get too complacent.”

  Yes, it would be time to move on shortly.

  Oslo had exceptional Internet connectivity, and in midwinter, it was easy to pass as a slightly androgynous male during the winters there. She did love those thick wooly sweaters.

  And sex? Daemon mostly used the ultimate in safe sex…online avatars so she could play any role, or roles, she wanted at the moment. Haggador II in the Norse role play was particularly skilled in visual and audio online play—made her breathless every damn time.

  He hadn’t just slung a massive schlong on his avatar, like most idiots. Haggador II had serious skills. Made her wonder if the person behind Haggador II self-identified as male, female, or something other. Didn’t matter as long as she/him/they didn’t stop.

  The app completed loading.

  The NSA and others had the Internet fully wired for tracking malefactors.

  Something poor old Mum had found out the hard way. She’d started way back, long before the heavy shit ever came online and the security grew around her in ways she didn’t see or fully understand.

  She’d never have survived today.

  Now nothing happened along the electronic superhighway without them knowing. Anyone dumb enough to hack from the Internet totally deserved what they got.

  The agencies were close to achieving that same level of scrutiny on the Dark Web. Would have already if they’d focused, but the FBI kept tripping over the NSA’s code, the Chinese weren’t cooperating, and the Russians thought it was still the Wild West. Mossad was actually doing better than they knew because it was a little personal vendetta of hers to always fuck with them. The CIA’s lame attempts were always such a muddle.

  Though lately they’d been showing some actual craft in their coding that she really should look into.

  However, the old ARPANET—the first harbinger of the Internet to come—had a node right here in OK City.

  She glanced out the apartment window at Tinker Air Force Base. It had been one of the original twenty-five nodes of the first-ever national computer network back in the 1970s. And the network connection had passed through an underground enclosure less than twenty feet from her current apartment.

  Best of all, the ARPANET security was exceptional.

  Not because it was robust.

  Because it was forgotten.

  Staying on the ARPANET protocols, she slid to Stanford, which had kept it active for historical reasons, then up to Utah because those people deserved whatever was coming to them.

  There she surfaced into the Dark Web and, after a f
ew pings off random cities, connected with a computer just down the road in San Antonio. Well, at least electronically just down the road.

  “What do you, uh, want?” She used an AI trained on movies to alter her voice. Today a bumbling Hugh Grant would do her talking.

  Her contact had no such masking. Of course, Client F didn’t need it as she knew exactly who he was.

  “The Chinook helicopter? At Davis-Monthan? Was that you? Why did you kill a helicopter? That’s not what we hired you for.” He sounded pissed.

  There was no video connection to double-check—the old ARPANET bandwidth barely supported voice, even with heavy compression. How did people ever live like that?

  His anger made no sense.

  A couple of quick searches clarified the matter. His boy was a combat pilot currently stationed—aw, so sweet—aboard a Chinook helicopter at Incirlik Air Force Base in Turkey.

  Poppy all worried about Whiddle Baby Boy. WBB’s Chinook had an upgraded glass cockpit, which meant it was as eminently hackable as the one at Davis-Monthan. She made a note of the frame number and equipment IP addresses in case she needed some leverage later.

  She flipped her voice over to Arnold—not the slightly wry Terminator voice, but the dead-serious Predator voice.

  “You are an idiot,” in over-enunciated looming-doom Austrian-accented English.

  She ignored the sputtering response.

  “I had to destroy the Davis-Monthan A-10 to hide your clumsy mechanical solution. To do that, I had to send instructions through the helicopter’s systems. So, QED,” not very Arnold-like, “I had to obliterate the helicopter to cover that evidence. Vas der anyting else?” That was better.

  The silence stretched long.

  The dude thought so slow. How was it that he was a fixer, thinking that slowly? Next time one of the big military manufacturers needed some dirty work done, they should skip the middleman and come straight to her.

  “You should have killed Campos on the first try,” he finally grumbled. “Now he’s got an NTSB team stirring up trouble.”

  “Don’t make me laugh.”