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

  She turned back to the wreckage.

  Almost as if she’d cued him, Jeremy began discussing the etymology of “madness in hatters” with Mike.

  “Tell me you weren’t just thinking that yourself. Please,” Holly whispered.

  “And if I was?”

  “Hmmm. As long as you unload it on Mike, you won’t find me complaining, mate.” Then she switched topics in mid-breath. “It doesn’t look right, does it? I can’t put my finger on quite why.”

  Holly, who up until that moment had seemed to jitter at the edge of Miranda’s vision, had shifted to a quiet, solid form.

  Miranda understood this quieter woman far better than the outspoken Australian. Perhaps the soldier had served a purpose destroying Colonel Gaddafi’s airplanes, but to have said she’d destroyed planes for a living, and to say it so lightly, still rankled deeply.

  “Also, where are the military inspectors?”

  Miranda noted that when she glanced at Holly, she instinctively narrowed her eyes in question. What genetic-survival trait that represented still eluded her.

  “Look at them. They’ve got nine guards standing about looking bored out of their skulls. I don’t know where they found you, but the NTSB hauled my bum out of a training session at the Boeing plant in Everett, Washington. That new 777 wing is like nothing we’ve ever seen. Between the titanium wing box at the center, the composite construction, and the folding wingtips, it’s really something. Even compared to the 787 it’s a major step ahead.”

  Miranda had thought the same herself when she’d inspected the prototype.

  “But the military crash inspectors can be no more than a ’roo hop away at Nellis Air Force Base. They should be all over this.”

  Whatever her past—Australia special Ops to ATSB to NTSB—Holly’s assessment was accurate. There was something about this wreck that was indeed unique in her experience. But she couldn’t see what it was either.

  So think of something else and let that question answer itself with time. There were other, more pressing matters.

  Like what had she been thinking, facing down the general like that? It was certainly the first time she’d stared down the barrel of a firearm.

  No. That wasn’t the right question.

  The right question was why had she ended up staring into the bottomless hole of the general’s M17? Not the meta-why that Mike Munroe seemed so focused on—as if it was somehow her fault that the general had aimed his weapon at her. That was something she still didn’t understand.

  But the concrete why. The facts were now forming a word cloud almost as clearly delineated as the crash itself: a general standing guard, plus nine armed guards, no military crash inspectors, an order from an unknown source of sufficient urgency that she hadn’t simply been told to take the next flight back but had instead had a seventy-three percent loaded commercial aircraft turned back to deliver her. The speed with which a team arrived, even if none of them were her team. There was something very urgent here…and very wrong.

  “It’s making my Spidey sense tingle.”

  She had no idea what Holly was referring to. Yet she was right. Whatever Spidey senses were, her own weren’t happy at the moment either.

  For perhaps the first time, she questioned whether the answers she needed would indeed be somewhere here on the floor of the high Nevada desert. If not, where else could she look?

  9

  At dusk, a Huey UH-1N had arrived to transport Miranda’s Go Team to a barracks at Creech Air Force Base. Creech lay in the southeast corner of the NTTR. Set among rugged mountains, the three runways of the air base formed a triangle on the perfectly flat valley floor. Originally the base for much of America’s nuclear bomb testing, it was now the center for drone missions. Rows of coffins commanded most of the large attack and reconnaissance drones. Half of the UK’s MQ-9 Reapers were flown by an RAF team stationed at Creech.

  Miranda had held her patience while Mike arranged for a secure conference room off the DFAC—what the Air Force called a dining facility. As soon as the doubled door was closed and the team seated, she pulled up a map of the crash site on her tablet. Jeremy hooked it up to the room’s systems and the image shone on the four big monitors arranged corner-to-corner to make a single screen.

  The four of them had taken over a thousand photographs in the last nine hours. They’d also placed over three hundred numbered orange flags and collected the GPS coordinates on every remaining piece of the aircraft larger than a compass dial.

  “It has—had a digital cockpit,” Jeremy began. “Wiring and mounts for both the Flight Data Recorder and the Cockpit Voice Recorder in the tail section, but no recorders on the mounts. Not that there was all that much left of the mounts either.”

  “Someone had already nicked them,” Holly tipped back in her chair with her crossed feet propped on the table. Her plate piled up with four massive slices of pizza.

  Mike had teased her about eating for two.

  She’d replied that he was as well: him and his ego.

  For herself? Miranda had been the only one to take a salad after the long arduous day in the baking sun. Again she didn’t fit in, though she didn’t know why this still continued to surprise her after all these years.

  “Fresh marks on the mounting bolts,” Holly explained with her mouth full. Miranda had been researching the curious ground impact patterns of various pieces of the aircraft and hadn’t heard about that.

  “Mike?”

  “Holly tipped me off on that. I talked to the general again. He needs more practice at lying. No question that his people took the recorders, but he wouldn’t admit that in a full-on court-martial. He did say he knew the cause of the crash. Made some scathing remarks about you not caring about the truth.”

  “Which was?” Miranda wondered if Mike’s need to draw out a statement of fact was time he spent thinking before speaking. She did recall the general claiming to know the answer, which she’d dismissed as irrelevant. The wreckage told the true story.

  “Pilot error. Stall at too low an altitude to recover.”

  Holly snickered, “And me mum was a ’roo herder.”

  Miranda pulled up the crash modeling software she’d been feeding information into on and off through the afternoon and plugged in the numbers. “Stall speed is—”

  “A hundred and fifteen miles an hour,” Jeremy leapt in. “Uh, sorry, I don’t have the stall speed altitude and loading corrections chart memorized. But one-fifteen is a good working number.” It earned him a smile from Holly and shrug from Mike. He would need to learn that something other than the personnel involved were relevant. Knowing the aircraft’s performance characteristics as well as the pilot could be useful during interviews. And the number was close enough for this simulation, so she didn’t correct Jeremy.

  “Even a hard stall can be recovered in five hundred feet by a skilled pilot under most conditions. We’ll assume it wasn’t a high-speed stall as that would be very unusual for… Tony?”

  When no one answered, she looked up to see where her personnel specialist was. But he wasn’t here. Oh he’d retired. Her new—

  “She’s talking to you, Evelyn,” Holly aimed a piece of pizza at Mike.

  “Is that your middle name?” Jeremy asked with all seriousness.

  Mike sighed before answering her, “Pilot was an Air Force Major with over thirteen thousand flight hours. Copilot a captain with only a few less years and hours.” His job was personnel and he seemed to know that part at least.

  A high-speed vertical stall ending in impact would require a steep dive of the airplane. Continuing down until too close to the ground before attempting a recovery. The resultant crash would be belly first—which did fit the crash—as the wings lost all lift due to the sudden change of direction creating an extreme angle of attack. However, the belly landings were not typical of the violence of the crash they’d witnessed today. It certainly didn’t explain the flattening effect on the fuselage.

  Miranda tapp
ed a thousand-foot flight level into the model (appropriate for the distance from the Groom Lake runway), set the ground’s hardness to nine (the same as diamond), and clicked Run.

  The software simulated a C-130 Hercules in a nose-high, low-speed stall at a thousand feet up and slowing below 115 mph.

  Imminent Stall pulsed in red on the screen. A buzzer would have sounded in the cockpit too loudly to be ignored. The digital cockpit upgrade that had replaced the old dial instruments with glass screens and far more sophisticated readouts would also have reported verbally, “Low speed. Low speed.” Then “Stall-stall. Stall-stall.”

  In the simulation, she left the four, six-bladed propellers turning fast but with the blades mostly feathered—appropriate for a low-speed stall.

  Stall, flashed on the simulator.

  The nose of the aircraft dropped suddenly, dipping below vertical as the wings lost sufficient lift to keep the plane aloft. At a sixty-degree angle below level flight, the dive was steep enough for the wings to recover lift. The inherent airworthiness of the Hercules would have required only a light pull on the control wheel to return to level flight.

  She didn’t enter the command to indicate the pilot had made any corrections.

  Ground Impact Imminent had time for seven agonizing one-second flashes.

  The speed gathered during the fall created enough lift that the plane struggled to recover itself, achieving a forty-five-degree downward dive before—

  Ground Impact.

  The simulator crumpled the nose and snapped off the wings. As the hull slammed into the ground, the empennage broke free and the primary wreckage spread for a thousand meters.

  Changing the ground’s hardness to a four, not unreasonable for a silicate sand mixed with organic earths, made little difference—the aircraft tumbled more, but still the debris would have spread far and wide. Also, the plane would have remained far more intact.

  Again starting at five hundred feet.

  Again at…

  “Not a stall,” Holly observed in a dry tone and bit down on another slice of pizza.

  “Not a stall,” Miranda agreed.

  10

  Night had fallen by the time Harvey watched the MQ-45 Casper stealth drone—just like the one he’d refueled last night over the Bering Sea—roll into the Groom Lake hangar designated 33B. There wasn’t a 33 or 33A. In fact, at Groom Lake, where everything was very orderly, the next highest numbered hangar was 24. This building was a complete anomaly in the middle of a base that was known for its anomalies.

  Major General Oswald Harrington had asked Harvey to join him to “discuss something”—Air Force parlance for “you really fucked up this time, Harvey.” Lowly boomer-drone pilots never had anything to do with the general other than saluting whenever he happened to pass nearby.

  This so didn’t look good.

  With no other options, he’d followed where the general led. He’d expected at best the general’s office and at worst a firing squad. Instead he’d ended up here, inside Hangar 33B.

  Groom Lake was like Las Vegas—what happened here, stayed here. There was camaraderie in isolation and plenty of good times to be had.

  The beer and the grub were top notch, better than any Vegas hotel. The baseball games were fierce—he played first base for the USAF Remotes unmanned aircraft flight team and two days ago they’d thrashed the Lockheed Martin Technicians 9-4. Pending no mission, they’d take on the USAF Fire Heads (munitions specialists) in two days, who were a tough bunch.

  Women weren’t plentiful at Groom Lake, but this wasn’t the old days when they were desperately scarce either. Not just office and catering personnel, but contractors, scientists, mechanics, and a pilot or two as well.

  Many of the women got into the spirit of being locked away from friends and family. Personal privacy was guaranteed by the threat of a military court-martial if anything was said to anyone anywhere about what happened here. It was forbidden, when in the outside world, to even mention who else had been on the base in case it revealed something about what was happening at Groom Lake.

  And that threat didn’t end upon leaving the military, as a few fools had found out the hard way. A top secret clearance was a commitment for life.

  Some of the women, like the aircraft here, were very experimental. They tended to be the younger set, but didn’t complain as long as he was willing to play along. In that respect it was single guy heaven: hot women and hotter aircraft.

  What happened at Groom Lake, stayed at Groom Lake…but everyone here knew about what went on throughout the base.

  Except for this one building.

  In a land of open secrets where everyone had top secret clearances, not even rumors escaped Hangar 33B. It had been built in 2014 at the far southern end of the runway, and still no one was talking about why it stood over a mile away from the rest of the base. There’d been a lot of speculation about what was here, but that was all.

  Now that he was inside, he saw that none of the theories had come close. The general consensus said that 33B was for trialing the next generation of LRBs. Both Boeing and Lockheed Martin had long-range bombers they were hoping to sell to the Air Force. And now that he saw what was really here, he wished he didn’t know.

  Groom Lake security’s rules of engagement were shoot-to-kill. Patrolled twenty-four/seven by the Camo Dudes—the heavily-armed camouflage-wearing contracted teams in Chevy Suburbans—it was the most secure military base the US had anywhere in the world. Maybe not counting the cryptos and hackers dug down into their deep holes in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. But for people who did real work, this was the place.

  Depending on the current projects, five hundred to a thousand people lived and worked inside the Area 51 security bubble. Even so, his entry into Hangar 33B had required an escort just to get him close enough to the guard station to offer his ID. He’d been around enough to recognize the difference as he was validated for future reference. These weren’t US Air Force or even Camos—they were heavily-armed and trigger-happy CIA.

  “Sir?” He wanted to know why the general had brought him here.

  Instead, Harrington remained stoically silent on the mezzanine at parade rest as he too looked down on the newly arrived drone that looked nothing like Harvey’s fat Stingray.

  The MQ-45 Casper looked like science fiction—missile-thin and mean as hell. Far more lethal than it had looked through his Stingray’s camera.

  Two people moved in to service it.

  He hoped to hell this wasn’t about what he thought it was.

  11

  “A rather unique craft,” the general remarked drily. His first words since ordering Harvey to follow him.

  At first Harvey had been afraid that Harrington was upset because of Harvey’s on-going affair with the general’s chief assistant, a full colonel who outranked Harvey by a step. A five-foot-eight, unpresuming brunette who most guys didn’t look at twice, unless they were at full attention receiving orders passed on from the general. She’d proved to be exceptionally high-performance for a mom with two teenage kids and a husband on the outside.

  She’d surprised him by joining him at a table in the DFAC when he’d been dining alone with a good thriller. They’d started with that. After a few more friendly meals mostly discussing books they’d both read, she’d become the first woman his own age that he’d bedded in some time.

  She’d taught Harvey about the advantages of a mature women with experience and imagination—and a killer body hidden under her fatigues. The sex had quickly turned into a genuine affection. Not that she’d ever leave her family—they both knew that from the start—but as their schedules allowed, they’d now spent most weeknights together for over three months.

  Each Friday night, Helen took the Janet Airlines commuter flight from Groom Lake to the private and secure terminal on the west side of McCarran Airport in Las Vegas built specifically for servicing personnel flights to all of the secure military bases from Edwards to Groom Lake. After the weekend
with her family, she’d catch the early Monday morning flight back. Many personnel took the flights daily, but her role as Harrington’s right hand hadn’t allowed that.

  Being single, Harvey rarely bothered to leave the base.

  But as he and the general stood in Hanger 33B and he saw the drone rolling in under the cover of darkness and another already parked there, he knew that Helen wasn’t tonight’s problem.

  “Yes sir. That is something special.”

  The long dagger of the MQ-45 Casper was mostly nose. The first break in its perfectly smooth shaft of a hull was a tiny canard wing at the midpoint. Close behind that, a slender delta wing continued to the very stern like the spreading section of a smooth-flowing river. There was no tail empennage, instead another tiny canard wing looking like an afterthought—the small canards could compensate for the supersonic collapse of the wing’s trailing edge control ability. The only break in the flow of the entire structure was the open maw of the air intake scoop for the engine near the midpoint. The mottled carbon-fiber-gray hull made it hard to see against the concrete floor.

  “Mach 2.9—”

  Harvey couldn’t hold in his whistle of surprise. “Faster than the Lightning or the Raptor jets?”

  Harrington offered a ghost of a smile as he continued. “Range of ten thousand miles with fifty percent of flight time at supercruise of Mach 2.1 and—”

  “Which was why it only needed to be refueled over the Bering Sea.” Harvey didn’t know why he kept interrupting the general, but it was such a magnificent piece of engineering that he couldn’t help himself.

  Supercruise was the ability for an aircraft to fly faster than the speed of sound without lighting the afterburners that inhaled fuel. Afterburners delivered a serious amount of “go fast.” But that meant more fuel usage, which meant bigger tanks, which meant a larger aircraft just to carry the tanks for the fuel the afterburners needed, which then had to be more powerful because the plane was bigger…