Drone: an NTSB / military technothriller (Miranda Chase Book 1) Read online

  Miranda selected a pair of needle-nose pliers from her vest and delicately lifted the disk of metal, shaking it lightly to clear the dirt. Then she held it up in the general’s face, just inches away.

  “Hey!” he stumbled back another step, his weapon swinging down to point at the ground.

  “This is the dial card for an aircraft’s analog compass.”

  The helicopter that had delivered the blonde former SAS soldier and a man who remained in the background took off again, forcing Miranda to shout.

  “Normally I would ask myself what force could possibly move such an object so far from its point of impact. However, now that you’ve stepped on it, I must ask if it was bent by the force of the crash and thrown this far. Or, if your interference with the site has misplaced and damaged what may have been a key piece of evidence in my investigation. Now move your vehicle back fifty meters and leave me alone. And tell your pilots to stop flying over my crash site.”

  She turned away and carefully bagged the compass dial.

  It took her three tries as her hand was still shaking with a fury she was unused to. The fear…had been too familiar; an emotion she’d worked very hard to leave behind. Apparently not.

  The fact that the dial face had come from a Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk and had been sitting in the desert for at least fifteen years based on the scaling and edge corrosion was of little relevance to her. It made her point. Besides, she didn’t have one of this generation in her collection—bent or otherwise.

  While she bagged it, a staff sergeant ran up with a piece of paper and handed it to the general. It had only three lines and made the two-star nearly apoplectic before he threw it at her.

  Holly snatched it in mid-flutter and handed the message to her.

  To: Major General Oswald Harrington – NTTR

  Extend all access to NTSB agent.

  ALL!

  There was a code designation for a signature that she didn’t know: CJCSGDN.

  She checked. The name tag stitched over the general’s right breast said Harrington, so she’d assume this was addressed to him.

  Holly, whoever she was, read the message over Miranda’s shoulder, then Miranda handed it back to the staff sergeant as the general leaned forward until his face was only inches from her own.

  “Get one thing straight, Ms. IIC. This crash investigation is top secret, code-word classified.” He’d had eggs, a banana, and strong coffee for breakfast. She could use a cup of tea at the moment.

  He turned away and began stalking off toward his other guards, who had watched everything from a distance.

  “General?”

  “What?” He snarled back at her.

  “You didn’t give me the code word.”

  He looked around the site for a moment before snapping out, “Amber!” and walked away.

  “He totally just made that up,” Holly whispered in her ear.

  “Really?” Miranda had just accepted the word at face value.

  “Maybe he’s a fan of Jurassic Park,” Holly sounded as if she was ready to giggle.

  Miranda had heard of the movie, but never seen it. She could only presume that it had something to do with petrified tree sap. “It doesn’t matter if he made it up on the spot. He is the senior military leader on a military crash, so this investigation is hereafter code-word classified.”

  “Sure thing. No worries. I’m Holly.”

  “Hi, Holly. Do you know where the rest of my Go Team is?”

  The Australian pointed at her own chest.

  “No! I mean my team.”

  Why weren’t they here yet?

  5

  High over the Bering Sea, Lieutenant Colonel Harvey Whitmore circled his MQ-25 Stingray refueling drone. M for multi-mission, Q for unmanned, and he tried not to give a shit that no matter what you called it, the Stingray was just a fucking drone. It was hard. Sure, the eggheads preferred UAV—unmanned aerial vehicle—but he wasn’t an egghead; he was a pilot.

  Or he had been. And that was the hardest part.

  Not making the astronaut corps, he could deal with that. It had always been a major dream, but he knew the odds sucked with the thousands who applied. But being permanently grounded after seventeen years and thirty-seven days in the jets made flying a UAV just plain gross. Still, it was better than flying some damn desk.

  Accepting that it was a drone and doing nothing to defend it to others as being a “real plane” had cut down on most of the teasing that actual pilots could dump on him. Only in the dark of long sleepless nights did he ever contemplate his fall from hotshot air jock to a refueling boomer—so named because it stuck out a refueling boom like some lame jet fuel teat for real pilots to feed on.

  Squadron commander to drone pilot in under ten minutes totally sucked.

  Now he sat in a Groom Lake bunker the size of small shipping container and remotely flew his drone. There was a reason they were called coffins. All the guys he used to fly Hornets with were now moving on to Raptors and Lightnings—man but he’d love to have flown the F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter.

  But a suit failure during a high-altitude ejection had blown one of his eardrums. The hearing aid had fixed any deficiency, but scar tissue made it so that his right ear couldn’t equalize quickly to pressure changes. Even low-level domestic runs could be agony. Punching supersonic aircraft up to sixty thousand feet just wasn’t ever going to happen again.

  Of course the Stingray tanker was way better than flying nothing. Only recently approved for purchase by the Navy, he’d been flying one for the CIA from Groom Lake for two years before the first one was even ready for Navy testing. Even now there were only three Stingrays in operation—one here, one based in Elmendorf, Alaska (that he was currently piloting), and the last one out of Ramstein in Germany (also remotely piloted from here). He’d made lead pilot in a painfully small program but at least it was a form of flight. Sort of.

  Ever since the WWI box kites, Whitmores had flown for the US military. Grandpa had gone down in ’Nam. He’d come home as little more than a skeleton from four years as a POW, but died in a VA hospital from liver failure before Harvey was born. Dad had eaten it in a training mishap.

  But still Whitmores flew.

  Until suddenly he couldn’t.

  No son either.

  Just a girl that his long-ago ex-wife had made without him. He hadn’t even done anything wrong. He’d been riding hard in an F-15E Strike Eagle over Afghanistan when she’d decided to fuck a dentist instead of him. Bitch.

  The drone aerial tanker, which looked like little more than a fat fuel bladder with a turbine engine, could dump sixteen thousand pounds of JP-5 jet fuel into a mated aircraft in under a minute.

  Manned aerial tankers normally had a crew of three: two pilots facing forward and the boom operator who sat at the far stern, facing the incoming aircraft for refueling purposes. The Stingray had two pilots who flew remotely from a flight control station inside a secure coffin. But when refueling the top secret aircraft, he was the only one authorized to view the rear camera in order to line up the refueling boom.

  He might be flying a drone, but what slipped toward his Stingray—straight out of the forbidden airspace to the west—almost made him forget about what his life had become.

  He wasn’t really supposed to even look at the crazy aircraft he refueled, but the moonlight was plenty bright. Besides, he had to look to steer the refueling boom.

  Okay, he was supposed to look, but he wasn’t supposed to see. Or even think about what he saw. And the brass wondered why it was called the US Air Farce.

  The bird that sidled up to his aircraft to nurse a quick twenty-five hundred gallons of fuel from the Stingray’s boom-shaped teat was like nothing he’d ever seen before. At least not until last night. He’d been hoping to see it again—wished to hell he could ask someone what it was.

  The slender delta-winged needle fired the imagination with a hundred questions.

  Like why fifteen meters of aircraft ha
d a lower radar signature than a plastic Frisbee? And just where had it gone and what had it done there?

  No question that someone else at Groom Lake was the pilot, but who was it? Chuck who played shortstop on their interdepartmental softball team or maybe some babe he’d slept with?

  It could be anyone.

  Last night, in this same spot high over the Bering Sea, the unidentified drone had arrived from the east and departed to the west. Now it was returning by the same route. He didn’t have to still be a top fighter jock to know that his location was exactly on the best route from Nevada to central China. The flight path would just nick Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula, but pass well north of the Koreas. If it had only been going to coastal China, it would have returned last night instead of spending a full day in-country.

  Damn but that was the kind of cool-as-shit mission that he really missed.

  The real question as he watched it mate up and guzzle down his fuel: how fast could that aerial hotrod go?

  “I feel the need. The need for speed!” Maverick had it totally right in Top Gun. And here Harvey was poking along at three hundred knots in his lump of a refueling drone. Worse, his ass was still parked on the ground and it was his Stingray that was doing the cruising, even at a lazy three-double-zero.

  “Time,” as his mom said after hearing about Dad’s death, “definitely time to embrace the suck.”

  Two weeks later, she had. Right out the end of a shotgun.

  6

  Mike Munroe stepped up to the two women after the general was out of hearing range.

  “What is wrong with you two? Are you trying to get shot?”

  Holly, the blonde Australian who had been on his flight—apparently asleep from the moment she hit the seat until the helicopter’s skids touched the ground—arched an eyebrow at him. Clearly practiced to put men in their place, he didn’t bother reacting to it.

  The petite brunette on the other hand ignored him completely as she carefully labeled the scrap of metal she’d bagged.

  “I mean seriously. The man had a revolver.”

  “That’s not a revolver. It’s an M17; a Sig Sauer P320 to civilians. Nice upgrade from the M9 your Army boys used to carry,” the Australian was emphatic.

  “He was going to shoot you.”

  “Not with a revolver, he wasn’t, mate. Because he didn’t have one.”

  Mike considered kneeling down and pounding his forehead on the sandy soil.

  “You’re NTSB?”

  The blonde turned her back on him to show the NTSB emblazoned across the back of her vest that he probably should have noticed sooner.

  “How’d you get here from Australia?”

  “Decided to hop a ’roo and try something new. ATSB, Australian Transport Safety Board, sent me over for cross training.”

  “Here,” he tossed her a tube of sunscreen. She was fair-skinned enough to burn in minutes. She tossed it back right at his face. Only his quick reaction time managed to save his nose. Normally women appreciated his thoughtfulness.

  She then pulled out a ball cap as if that would save her ears, neck, and other exposed areas. She made an unruly ponytail through the loop of the cap. The woman looked as if she’d hacked off her hair with a knife. Maybe the big one strapped to her thigh.

  Her cap was yellow and green and announced the Australian Matildas.

  “Who are they?”

  “Hallo! Best soccer team in Oz? Well, not yet, but they will be. Catch a clue, pretty boy. There’ll be a quiz at end of week.”

  “It’s already Saturday.” And dammit, that reminded him that he’d had a hot date lined up for this afternoon: 5K run, dinner at Basta, and hopefully some serious sex afterward. At least he had before they’d mobilized him out of Denver a couple hours ago. He checked his cell. No reception. No way to reach her. Alejandra—even her name was sexy—was gonna be pissed, probably past recovery. This sucked in so many ways.

  “Better get studying then, hadn’t you?” Holly was enjoying herself too much at his expense, so he ignored her.

  The brunette was drifting away, turning back toward the wreck. “Excuse me, is one of you Miranda Chase?”

  The brunette turned back to look at him with narrowed eyes. Then she opened them incredibly wide—but not as if she was surprised. More as if she was seeing how wide she could make them. She didn’t speak; instead she tapped her badge.

  He glanced down and read her name.

  Mike held out a hand. “Hi. I’m Mike Munroe, your operations and human-performance investigator.”

  “You’re not Evelyn,” Miranda narrowed her eyes again. Was she angry that he wasn’t?

  He made a show of glancing down at himself. “No, I don’t seem to be. At least not today.”

  “He could be an Evelyn,” Holly inspected him from head to toe as if he was a dead fish. Usually ladies liked what they saw when they looked at him. Alejandra certainly had.

  “I’m not.” He waited a moment longer before withdrawing his unshaken hand.

  “Where’s Evelyn?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “You sure you’re not Evelyn?” Holly’s smile was only about one degree of separation from being a sneer. Kind of like being less than six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon, only even more pathetic.

  Miranda pulled out her cell phone and tried placing a call.

  “There’s no signal out here,” he sighed once more about the loss of Alejandra.

  “Plenty of signal,” Miranda said staring at her phone, “but you’re right. No connectivity.” Next she extracted a DF loop from her vest.

  He remembered from training that it was used for locating black boxes—not his part of an investigation.

  After a few moments of tinkering, she tucked it away. “There’s no signal from the black boxes. Though there is plenty of cell phone signal, I simply can’t connect to it. It must be the Groom Lake encrypted network.”

  “Groom Lake? Like Area 51 and aliens?”

  “Where the hell did you think we were, mate? The Great Barrier Reef?”

  Mike ignored Holly. He hadn’t noticed what direction they’d flown him from Vegas. He’d climbed aboard thinking it was just another crash in the desert.

  He and his dad had always kept up on Area 51. It was the thing they did together and was still some of the best memories of his childhood. Mom was always “tolerantly amused” but wanted nothing to do with “such nonsense,” so it was seriously exclusive Dad-time for him.

  He’d never really bought into it and he suspected Dad didn’t either, but it had meant that a lot of Saturday afternoons were spent on the living room couch with a couple of root beers, watching Mystery Science Theater 3000. They’d laughed together over the goofy comments of the host and two puppets as they watched old science fiction B-movies like This Island Earth and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. And they never missed an episode of The X-Files, even when Dad finished an episode passed out on the couch—wiped out by his hours as a longshoreman.

  Mike’s first major crush as a kid had been Dana Scully on her search for aliens and he was still partial to smart redheads.

  Miranda tucked away the DF loop and pulled out a satellite phone with the trademark fat antenna.

  “Where’s Evelyn?” Miranda asked as soon as the phone was answered.

  Between that and the general, she really had to work on her people skills.

  “Maternity leave? And where’s my structural specialist?”

  Holly raised her hand.

  “Not you. Where’s Tony?” Miranda asked into the phone. Another pause. “He retired? When? Wait. Maybe he told me about that.”

  “So you’re a structural specialist?” He asked softly enough to not disturb Miranda.

  “I’m not from back o’ Bourke.”

  “Back of where?”

  “Seriously remote town up against the edge of the Strzelecki Desert. I think you call it a hillbobby.”

  “Hillbilly?”

  “Right.
One of them. That’s not me. I’m more of a saltie.”

  “A Saltine?” Mike went for the tease. He knew enough Strine to know what she meant.

  “A saltie. A croc! Hallo? Six meters and a thousand kilos of armored nasty with teeth. Just like me,” Holly made a show of snapping her teeth at him, leaning in close enough as she did so to send him stumbling backward to protect the end of his nose.

  “Cut that out!”

  “Don’t be thinking ‘Ooo, she’s a hot blonde Shelia with a sexy accent from Down Under.’ You won’t like what happens to you if you start thinking things like that.”

  Hard not to think of her that way, because she definitely was. Holly was also well steeped in the Ozzie attitude that a good jibe made for a thousand laughs.

  “And don’t use Down Under, it’s rude just because you blokes are in the Northern Hemisphere.”

  “You’re using it.”

  “I’m from there. We get to. You don’t. Besides, you really need better boots.”

  He looked down at his Rockport walking shoes good for most terrain. “What’s wrong with these?”

  She bent down to pick up a rock and zinged it nonchalantly to the side. He didn’t think anything of it until he saw a rattlesnake racing out the far side of the puff of dirt that had erupted on the stone’s impact.

  “Snakes?” He looked down again quickly to see if one, or a whole Indiana Jones nest of them, was circled around ready to attack.

  “Easy, mate,” her grin was wicked. “Not like it’s a taipan or a common death adder. It’s not even a red-bellied black snake. Maybe you’re a close relative: a yellow-bellied white-boy snake? That’s just a quiet little rattler out for some sun. Young one by its looks.”

  He wondered how fast he could get knee-high boots made of armored saltie. Maybe taller. How high could a striking snake bite? Knee? Thigh… He swallowed hard and tried not to wince his legs together. He decided against asking Holly.