Thunderbolt Read online

  Sucky as shit place to be a farmer.

  Nancy flashed her big smile as the sun shifted over her face through the cockpit canopy.

  Most pilots sighted the Avenger cannon by eye.

  Aim the nose.

  Pull the trigger.

  Ker-pow!

  The heads-up display would show the gun’s aiming point at different distances, but no real hog jockey needed it. Carl had made the cut to qualify in the A-10 Warthog straight out of flight school. Adding in a decade of tours in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria had made it automatic for him to aim and fire the jet’s primary weapon.

  Practice…and Nancy’s head.

  When her smile blocked the exact center of the A-10 canopy, the target was perfectly aligned in the gun’s sights.

  Flipping up the safety, he rested his thumb on the trigger.

  Nancy’s head was just lining up with the tail of the Taliban column. He could see that the soon-to-be total losers were still looking upward for his return from above after blasting the hilltop gun nests.

  Instead, he had the throttle wide open and was cruising along at thirty feet above the ground from directly behind.

  “Shoulda checked your six. Gonna ram it up your asses, dudes.”

  Steep valley walls to either side and an abrupt mountain wall at the head of the valley bounded his play area. He’d have a four-second, two-hundred-and-eighty-round pass, then he’d climb out and see what sort of mood they were in after that. Maybe drop a pair of Mark 80 iron bombs just to chew them up a bit as he went by.

  “MC-squared. Fast as a Thunderbolt.”

  There it was. Damn straight!

  He returned Nancy’s smile and pulled the trigger.

  Achin, Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan

  Elevation: 3,943’

  Staff Sergeant Jasper Kenning of the 3rd Ranger Battalion, Charlie Company dropped his radio but couldn’t look down as it bounced off the rocks.

  He could only watch through his rifle scope as the A-10 Warthog came apart in midair.

  There’d been no incoming round.

  One moment, their salvation had been racing up the valley toward them.

  The nose cannon—ready to spit death from where it reached out between the Warthog’s painted teeth and pissed-off scowl design—had started to spin.

  Rather than a lethal stream of punishment for the Taliban column, the three missiles mounted directly to the underside of the main fuselage ignited.

  Without releasing first.

  They blew the shit out of the middle of the Warthog’s belly.

  Totally gutted, the plane twisted hard and dove smack into the ground.

  The pilot never had a chance to eject.

  The fireball climbed high in the sky and the narrow valley echoed with the explosion as its load of bombs and fifteen hundred 30 mm rounds cooked off from the center of the blaze.

  For thirty seconds it was impossible to hear or even think anywhere in the vicinity until the explosives spent themselves.

  Then the valley echoed with silence.

  The Taliban troops remained hunkered in position. They hadn’t even seen the Warthog coming up behind them, and there hadn’t been time for them to do more than freeze where they were.

  Stunned silence.

  No victorious cheer came from the massed troops celebrating a successful takedown.

  Just shock.

  His own troops were just as frozen.

  Happiness is a warm gun. His drill sergeant had a thing about quoting Beatles’ lyrics like he was some fossil left over from the Stone Age.

  Kenning’s rifle wasn’t warm, it was blazing hot from all the rounds he’d pumped out of it during their retreat, but the enemy had just kept on coming no matter how many they put down.

  He was the very first to shake off the shock.

  Looking aloft offered no solace. There hadn’t been a spare Reaper drone to circle over their position for this operation, so no Hellfire missile was going to come down and shred the Taliban like God’s mighty hand striking from above.

  The A-10 unleashed another spate of explosions.

  This time the cloud was black with the JP-8 jet fuel from the breached midline tanks.

  “Rangers!” Kenning called out.

  “Hooah!” The responses were few and weak, but they were there.

  Three of his men were dead—including Lieutenant Bailey—their remains still back in the blown-up MRAP they’d had to abandon. A glance behind him showed that two more were never going to lift their rifles again.

  The remains of his squad began forming up behind the scattered boulders that were going to shield their last stand.

  The Talis shook off their surprise. They looked side to side at each other. Then—they were close enough that Kenning could easily see—they smiled.

  A unison war cry in Pashto declaring “God is great!” shook the valley. Like they needed to thank God for their bloodthirsty ways.

  The Beatles’ tune When I’m Sixty-Four took a swing through his head because Drill Sergeant McCluskey had said that’s how old they’d be by the time he could make them into even marginally acceptable soldiers.

  Sixty-four.

  Yeah, that so wasn’t going to happen.

  US Air Force Agency for Modeling and Simulation (AFAMS)

  Site C-3, Elgin Air Force Base, Florida

  Elevation: Subbasement 2

  A loop of code tested the global R14A10ACH variable every three milliseconds as it had been since it was invoked seventeen minutes earlier by a higher-level process.

  The test loop resided on a Cray XC50 supercomputer—one small section of which was running simulations for a group of fourteen pilots battling it out two stories above.

  USAF Air Combat Command’s Cray was four ranks of computing cabinets. Each cabinet stood six and a half feet tall, six feet deep, and a yard wide. Each cabinet was water-cooled by a blower cabinet the same height but half as wide. Three sets made a rank. Four ranks created a twelve petaflop computer—twelve quadrillion operations per second.

  Fifty-seven thousand test cycles later—a hundred and seventy-one seconds and a compute load so trivial as to be wholly inconsequential—the R14A10ACH variable tested true.

  The subroutine proceeded through the next four hundred and nineteen lines of code in a cascading cycle lasting almost two full seconds.

  In that time, the invoked process carried out just four steps:

  Generate a one-word message.

  Deliver the word to three separate secure cellphones.

  After all three phones provided a delivery confirmation—over ninety-eight percent of the total elapsed processing time—drop the external connection.

  Finally, the subroutine erased both itself and the program that had called it—a load of barely ten thousand operations requiring more than a billionth of a second compute time, but less than two.

  1

  Davis-Monthan Air Force Base outside Tucson, Arizona, lay at the far corner of her assigned West Pacific region for the National Transportation Safety Board.

  It comprised the greatest concentration of military aircraft anywhere in the world. There were over three thousand of them parked in the storage area alone. Hundreds more were associated with the operational side of the busy Air Force base.

  Miranda’s approach circled her over acres of mothballed F-4, F-15, and F-16 fighter jets tucked tightly nose-to-tail. Ninety-six B-52 Stratofortress bombers snuggled up beside a hundred and twenty-three KC-135 aerial refueling tankers but no fuel hoses passed between them any longer. A hundred and nine Army Black Hawk helicopters sat beside seventy Navy Sea Stallions and another ninety-six Marine Corps Cobra attack helos—all sweltering in vast arrays.

  The most important thing to her was that these were all aircraft that she didn’t have to ever worry about. Parked in Davis-Monthan’s two-thousand-acre high-desert storage yard, they would all be unfueled and sealed tight. Many would have their engines and even their flight instruments remov
ed.

  There would be no crashes requiring an NTSB investigation among these aircraft. The dry desert air preserved them from all other types of harm until they were either remobilized or scrapped.

  It was strange seeing the planes disassembled by man rather than by impact, fire, collision, or the many other causes that usually brought her to the site of an airplane’s sudden removal from service.

  Davis-Monthan was also a busy airfield with many aircraft in the pattern—some bound for missions, some for training.

  It was the home of the 355th Wing. The resident operations units included most of the Air Force’s A-10 Thunderbolt IIs as well as: Air Force Pararescue, an Electronic Combat Group that flew the EC-130 surveillance planes, and the Arizona Air National Guard’s fighter jets.

  It was a very busy place.

  And apparently one plane that hadn’t survived to add to the flurry or they wouldn’t have called her in.

  2

  Miranda put her F-86 Sabrejet down right on the numbers designating Runway 12, the very first safe position to land past the threshold. Flying mostly from the short field of Spieden, she wasn’t in the practice of wasting runway length. At Davis-Monthan, she had to taxi well down the thirteen-thousand-foot runway to reach the first taxiway turnoff.

  “Your team is awaiting you at Hanger 9,” Ground Control informed her.

  They were?

  But that wasn’t possible.

  She’d given them the use of her Mooney M20V Ultra, which was the fastest single-engine light plane built, but it still traveled at less than half the speed of sound. It was very disorienting to discover that they’d already arrived from their base in Tacoma, Washington, less than a hundred miles from her own home.

  She had anticipated a minimum of three hours lead time to organize herself and inspect the wreck.

  Why doesn’t anyone understand that a wreck needs to be approached slowly? So much pressure to go directly to the disaster itself.

  Spheres.

  That was the way to do it.

  Weather, terrain, debris extent, the debris field itself… Each of these were best considered separately, working inward—rather than jumping to the remains of the downed aircraft and eventually the individual systems and failures.

  It made perfect sense to her and she didn’t understand why nobody else understood that.

  Now she’d suddenly have people around her from the first moment. People who didn’t think that the human factor was the last, innermost sphere.

  So many investigators began with personnel. Pilot, controller, and mechanic errors were common accident causes, but there was no point investigating those until inspection of the accident had created a coherent contextual framework upon which to base interviews and other data-gathering strategies.

  Even her own team didn’t understand, except perhaps Holly Harper. But it was often hard to tell what she understood.

  How had her crew arrived first?

  There were no such things as time warps.

  Yet her Mooney did indeed sit close by Hangar 9. She confirmed the manufacturer’s tail number—definitely hers. Someone had once told her it was bad luck to rename a boat or ship, so she hadn’t altered the Mooney’s registration. It was a ship of the air after all, and that was danger enough.

  For her Sabrejet, she’d had to replace the military designator with a civilian number, so that had been okay. Not her willful choice, but a mandated rule of law.

  And no bad luck yet, so maybe that wasn’t a real problem.

  She looked for some wood to knock on. It seemed to be protocol to knock on wood whenever luck was mentioned. Or was it only at the mention of bad luck? She hadn’t observed sufficient demonstrations of the practice to draw a definite conclusion. The Sabrejet’s interior was metal and a few pieces of plastic—no wood. She reminded herself to find some to knock on as soon as possible.

  In the shadow of the hangar, she could see a military man in fatigues. An officer by the insignia on his sleeves. When she rolled close enough, she could see the birds on his collar points. Why was a bird colonel standing with her three team members? They were all watching her so intently that she almost taxied straight into the side of her parked Mooney.

  Why did she always mess up when people were watching her? Focus, girl. Focus.

  Cycling down, Miranda completed the shutdown checklist, opened the canopy (she was so short that she didn’t have to duck as it rolled backward), and climbed onto the ladder an airman had hung on the side of her jet.

  She was so rattled by their impossible arrival that she’d descended halfway down before she recognized it. It was an authentic Sabrejet ladder with the single hook at the cockpit and the two supports in exactly the right place. Usually she was lucky to have a painter’s A-frame ladder placed unsteadily to the side. Of the nine thousand, eight hundred and sixty produced airframes, the remaining fifty were in museums or civilian hands and most of those no longer flew.

  “They told me you’d be arriving in an F-86, so I had the boys dig out the right ladder,” the colonel introduced himself with his explanation. “Arturo Campos at your service, ma’am. I’m the commander of the 355th Wing here at Davis-Monthan.” He had sun-complected skin, dark curly hair cut military short, and just a hint of a Mexican accent.

  Miranda had something else to figure out first and turned to her crew.

  “How did you get here first?”

  Jeremy looked down and Mike shuffled his feet.

  Holly smiled. Or was it a smirk at the other two?

  “Mike flew us down to Vegas,” she answered in that thick Australian accent of hers.

  It seemed thicker than normal for reasons Miranda couldn’t understand. “Why?”

  “Well, apparently Mike wanted to lose some money. Jeremy wanted to get thrown out of a casino for counting cards in Blackjack. Then—”

  “But it’s so easy,” Jeremy jumped in with his normal enthusiasm. “I really don’t understand the game. How complex can it be, even with a four-deck shoe? Counting cards just isn’t all that hard. It seemed like easy money to me. Then I just—”

  “Some of us,” Holly cut him off. “We just stick with the poker table.”

  “Okay.” Miranda assumed that had some significance. Oh. That’s why Holly was probably smiling so much.

  “You did well.”

  Holly started to speak, but Miranda had already shifted her attention to the colonel who was now glaring at her.

  “Why am I being met by a full colonel?” She tried to suppress her alarm, but was sure that she did a poor job of it. Major General Harrington had been forcibly retired a month ago—for reasons that had nothing to do with anything so trivial as his greeting an NTSB investigator with a pistol aimed directly at her face.

  “One of my planes just went down on the training range and I want to know why. I heard that you’re the best there is, Ms. Chase. So I’m the one who sent for you.”

  Miranda decided that this was a much more comfortable greeting than being threatened with a handgun at a range of less than two meters.

  Just to double-check, she glanced at the structural specialist of her team.

  Holly nodded that everything was okay just enough to tip the brim of her yellow Waltzing Matildas hat—her favorite Australian women’s soccer team. The hat Holly had given her was—

  “I’m sorry. I left my cap on the mantel back home.”

  “What?” Colonel Campos seemed to think that he had some part in the conversation.

  Holly pulled the one off her head, freeing her long blonde hair from its impromptu ponytail out the back, and handed it over.

  Holly had insisted that it was important that the entire team wore them on each investigation and they had—five major investigations now in the last three months and many minor ones.

  Miranda had learned that one didn’t argue with Holly and expect to win. But with the rush to beat this morning’s fog off the island—and Dillinger sounding sunrise with a shrill gobble at b
oth two and four a.m.—she’d left her own behind.

  “But what about you?” Holly’s hair and fair complexion now shone brightly, uncovered in the hot sun.

  Jeremy Trahn and Mike Munroe had remembered theirs and she felt worse for forgetting her own.

  Mike offered his to Holly, which she pretended not to see.

  “I’ve another in my kit, no worries,” Holly offered a friendly shrug, her thick Australian accent now familiar enough to be soothing rather than jarring.

  Miranda tugged the hat on and felt better about being in the proper uniform. She exchanged her flightsuit for her NTSB vest and hung her badge facing outward from the front pocket.

  Once she was assured that all her tools were in place, she turned to the colonel who was watching her closely.

  “What?”

  He smiled easily. “You’re not what I expected, Ms. Chase.”

  She was never what anyone expected, least of all herself. Unsure what else to say, she decided to keep it simple.

  “I’m ready.”

  3

  Except she wasn’t.

  Colonel Campos himself flew them out into the immense US Air Force training area of the Barry M. Goldwater Range. Almost three million acres of Sonoran desert was reserved for bombing and dogfight practice. It was bigger than the state of Connecticut.

  “We isolated the section with the area of the crash, so please try to ignore the other aircraft.”

  The significance of that statement didn’t become clear until the Huey UH-1N helicopter’s rotor had slowed to a stop.

  Racing close to the sparse desert grasses of the softly rolling terrain, attack jets appeared to be very busy. Far above, a pair of F-35A Lightning IIs were engaged in an intense mock air battle of hard maneuvers—at least Miranda hoped it was mock. In the distance, she saw a trio of HH-60G Pave Hawk rescue helicopters flying low and fast.

  Then she saw a slash of rounds firing from the helos’ side-mounted miniguns. An old vehicle parked in the desert convulsed as hundreds of rounds slammed into it.