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

  A supercruise design had proved to be the answer to that endless growth cycle. The Concorde supersonic passenger plane’s design had incorporated sustainable supercruise over long distance flights. Apparently, so did the MQ-45.

  “Yes, from the Bering Sea to their test range was only eight thousand miles round trip.” He didn’t say China; he didn’t need to. He’d know that Harvey was smart enough to have already figured that out. But what did it mean that the general was confiding in him?

  Harvey could only stare at the aircraft. With a reach like that, they could fly over any city in the world. “But why wasn’t it detected as it—”

  And then he saw why. The F-117 Nighthawks retired from Groom Lake to hangars out at Tonopah Test Range Airport had been only the first step in stealth. The Raptor and Lightning jet fighters had extended that with two very distinct solutions.

  But this aircraft was the whole concept taken to another level. The sharp-edged chine ran like a ring around the middle as if the aircraft was sliced in two. The rounded underbelly looked to be from an entirely different vehicle than the more angular bulk of the upper section. The deeply ducted exhaust port would shield the engine’s heat signature from both above and below.

  A supercruise, stealth UAV.

  He wanted— He needed to touch it. He needed to take back that piece of himself that had been stuck on the ground since being grounded by his ear. The Martin-Baker Club tie (awarded to every ejectee saved by an MB ejection seat) didn’t make up for having his ass planted on terra firma.

  But a supersonic, stealth UAV was the unmanned aerial vehicle to beat them all.

  Harvey was a pilot.

  The general must need a pilot.

  A pilot for…

  He tried to speak, to ask, but his throat was too dry. Not knowing it, he’d gripped the mezzanine rail and felt powerful enough to rip it apart.

  “It’s not as simple a process as flying the MQ-25 Stingray refueling tanker. The control suite is similar, but the maneuvering is more similar to the F-22 Raptor, which is why I’m giving you the option. But I must warn you, for you to control it we have to—”

  “I don’t care,” it seemed that he wasn’t done with interrupting a superior officer. “I want in. You’re showing me this for a reason and I want it. God damn, General, just give me the chance to crack the sound barrier again and I’ll take the fight wherever you send me. I’m all in, just show me where to sign.”

  General Harrington actually smiled as he clapped a hand on Harvey’s shoulder.

  Oh god, please let that mean I’m in.

  “Helen thinks very highly of you. Said you were pure flier.”

  It took him a moment to understand that the general knew all about Harvey’s affair with his assistant. Is that why she’d joined him for those first dinners? An assessment for the general? Maybe. Probably. But what had happened between them after that was all them. Helen wasn’t the sort of woman to sell herself except for affection.

  Pure flier?

  Hell yeah.

  It was all Whitmore men ever dreamed about—and probably talked about too much. At least the declassified parts. Flying was the only thing he’d ever cared about since age four when Dad had let him sit in the cockpit of his F-14 Tomcat. His very first memory was that day, the moment he’d become a jet pilot in all but fact. He’d learned to read from the Tomcat’s operations manual.

  “Helen is cleared for all aspects of this project. Including myself, there are only six people at Groom Lake who are fully on the inside of this program—others know only small aspects, such as maintenance. If I hear so much as a whisper outside that circle, I’ll put the gun to your head myself and claim it was a training accident. We clear, flyboy?” He delivered his threat in a perfectly calm tone and Harvey didn’t doubt him for a second.

  Saluting seemed too trite a response. Instead he held out his hand, “Fire when ready, sir.”

  General Harrington’s firm grasp was all the answer he needed.

  12

  Clarissa leaned her elbows back on the CIA Director’s desk and relished the solidity of it. The wide cherrywood surface bearing only a picture of his deceased wife with their two Marine Corps sons. She could feel the strength of it behind her as clearly as the power of the man who sat before it.

  Director Clark Winston was a breast man—which was ironic, as breast cancer had killed his wife. Or perhaps that was why. He ran his hands up to grasp hers through blazer, blouse, and bra. Maybe it was affirming to him that Clarissa’s were still unsagging and unblemished by disease or nursing a child. Today’s red Merino wool pencil skirt had conveniently oversized buttons running up her left thigh that were now undone just enough to hike it over her hips.

  Since they’d become lovers, she never wore anything underneath her skirt at the office—a detail she’d only had to point out to Clark once for him to get the idea.

  Of course, like everything else in this world, men had it easy; he’d had to do no more than unzip his pants before she straddled him.

  “We lost another pilot,” she offered him a groan of pleasure that he always seemed to appreciate. Her putative reason for visiting his office in the late evenings was her end-of-day division director’s report.

  “Serious consequences?” He used one hand on her butt to keep their hips together as he buried his face by the small ruby heart that dangled in her cleavage. At fifty-seven he still had an enthralling strength from his years as a field agent.

  “None. He was unattached per our requirement. And the emergency pilot was able to regain manual control of the drone and land it safely.” At the same time one pilot had been performing magnificently over China, another had suffered a mental aberration so severe that he’d never leave a top secret mental clinic again. That they had landed rather than crashed the second drone had been a miracle she wouldn’t be bothering Clark with.

  “Good,” Clark grunted as she shifted her hips in small circles to massage him inside her.

  He was far from her best lover and she had yet to see if he’d be the most important one. The best had been a very high-ranking officer in the Bundesnachrichtendienst. Stefon was high inside the German foreign intelligence service. They’d had a very cooperative relationship during much of Clarissa’s climb within the CIA, mostly on the political-intel front except on the occasions where one of them found a reason to cross the ocean. On those occasions, Stefon loved Clarissa’s hair down and in exchange offered two things: head-spinning orgasms, and far more information than he’d ever received from Clarissa in return.

  But Stefon hadn’t been careful. He’d entered into an office politics battle, lost, and been assigned to the Africa desk. After that, he’d no longer been of any real use beyond occasional phone sex. Such a pity.

  Clarissa let Clark concentrate on her body as she watched the view out the one-way glass of his top-floor eastern-corner office in the Old Headquarters Building. It was the best view in Langley, looking out over the sleeping trees of the CIA’s private wooded reserve down to the Potomac. If she was director, she’d have chosen one that looked inward on the campus buildings, overseeing the thousands who worked here to keep the nation safe.

  D/CIA was but one of her possible futures.

  Clark was a sufficiently political animal the he could probably be talked into the idea of following in George Bush 41’s footsteps: Director of Central Intelligence to VP and eventually the 41st President of the United States of America. It wouldn’t be that hard to achieve, either. Between the two of them, they knew where most of the skeletons in DC lay.

  Clark wasn’t some pliable young buck with delusions of grandeur. He was a serious-minded chief spy with a weak spot for tall blondes with sharp minds and shapely bodies. She’d have to be careful to make sure he thought it was his idea.

  Then, as she was only twenty years Clark’s junior, perhaps she’d become his second wife and eventual First Lady. He was still terribly handsome and she was tall enough that they did look very goo
d together.

  Or perhaps D/CIA for herself while he was VP? Then maybe even run as his VP, opening her own path into the Oval Office. Now that was an attractive option. Perhaps marriage after they held the two highest offices in the land. Keep it all in the family.

  She opened the buttons on her blazer, glad she wasn’t wearing silk. This fabric wouldn’t stain as he teethed her through her blouse and bra. Another groan, not voiced only for his benefit. There were certain things that Clark did very well and breasts was one of them.

  For now, she was content to be the Director of Special Research—a position she’d spent years designing for herself since her early days as an agent running Taliban interrogations in Afghanistan. She’d made it to her position without once sleeping with a person key to winning a promotion. Oh, she might have suggested it would happen a time or two, but it hadn’t.

  She’d, by Jesus, made it with her brains far more than her body.

  Actually, completely with her brains. All her body did was level the playing field so biased against women.

  By Jesus. One of her father’s favorite phrases. You’ll strip and get on your knees right now or, by Jesus, I’ll— As if that somehow made his abuse holy. She really had to purge that phrase from her thoughts.

  How much had he told the family priest? Had he mentioned that he’d begun making her life hell on the night of Mom’s funeral—the single worst night of her life? Bury Mom on the same day that Dad buried himself in her and permanently interred her naive teenage dreams. No, of course, the priest bastard hadn’t said a word. Confession: the sanctimonious hole down which girls’ lives could be safely flushed.

  Clarissa had held absolute control of her own life since Dad had “unexpectedly” died on the night of her own sixteenth birthday—the age at which she finally wouldn’t have been slammed into foster care by social services.

  She’d had the satisfaction of feeling him shrivel inside her as he died.

  Never even got to shoot your last load, Dad.

  She’d cleaned him up and left him in his own bed with a vibrator up his ass, his hand clenched around his withered penis, and enough opiates in his bloodstream to kill a horse. The drug companies gave such cool samples to psychiatrists.

  Her alibi had stood the test.

  She’d taken the JV quarterback’s cherry in his own bed that evening, then slipped him a couple of Dad’s sleeping pill samples. A quick trip home to deal with Dear Old Dad for the last time ever aside from his funeral, then she’d crawled back into bed with Danny Boy. His parents had been more than a little upset at finding her asleep there in the morning, but he’d been thrilled when she’d cleared the last of his drug hangover with a good morning fuck after his parents had stormed out of the room. With a little guidance, he threw a better than average balling. She’d offered some extra deep groans of pleasure and tossed in a few happy yips for his folks’ edification. They’d stayed an item for all of sophomore year.

  Since then, she’d made her own way in her own way.

  She’d already made Division Director before her unplanned liaison with Clark had begun. She hadn’t turned from offering him solace for his recently lost wife when the opportunity arose last year.

  “I’ve already arranged for a replacement,” she scraped her fingernails over the back of Clark’s suit jacket and let him imagine her doing it to his skin this weekend. They were planning a little getaway in a luxury cabin in the Poconos.

  “A replacement for what?” Men’s minds seemed to have so much trouble maintaining focus during sex. It was useful knowledge even if she didn’t understand it. Sex only served to sharpen her own attention as her pulse and respiration rose in autonomic response to Clark’s increasing efforts. He wasn’t a bad lover, just unskilled, which meant he was trainable once she decided if he was worth the effort.

  “The pilot. Don’t worry,” she shifted over him so that he slid even deeper inside her and then began using her hips to lead him upward in earnest. “Our prize drone program is still completely on track.”

  D/CIA to VP then President?

  Yes, the drone wasn’t the only program on track. This weekend she’d begin teaching Clark exactly what was possible both in and out of bed. Perhaps she’d finally let her hair down for him this weekend.

  This corner office was a good choice. By leaning her chest into Clark’s eager attentions and looking to the right down the Potomac as his body clenched before his sadly predictable release, she could just see the seven miles to the White House sparkling in the distance—as if she could reach out and touch it.

  13

  “I spent the night running different scenarios,” Miranda informed the team over breakfast. “No stall—not even a full-power, high-speed stall—breaks the inherent strength of the C-130’s tubular hull section to allow the flattened form we witnessed yesterday. Also, none of the scenarios actually fold the nose of the aircraft back underneath the body of the plane like a broken toe.”

  “What does?” Holly stopped eating her Western omelet with a side of sausages and English muffins, then thumped her feet to the floor to look more closely at the screen as if the answer was there.

  It wasn’t.

  It was out in the field, but just in a way that no one, including herself, had thought to look at it.

  Miranda called up the profile she’d finally found at three a.m. and spent the last several hours refining, then tapped Run.

  At full cruise speed of three hundred and thirty-five miles per hour (Mach 0.447 at this altitude), the graphic of the C-130 Hercules cargo plane suddenly flipped upside down.

  Inverted, but still plunging at a steep angle, it dove almost straight down into the ground from an unrecoverable height of five hundred feet—a distance it covered in 1.08 seconds.

  Not a peep out of the stall indicator.

  “See how the nose folds under,” she hit pause, then moved through the rest of the display in tenth-of-a-second frames. “By hitting off center after the nose broke off,”—painfully reminiscent of her parents’ last flight aboard TWA 800 but she pushed that to one side—“the hull twisted in the air and slammed into the ground right-side up. Yesterday I spotted a sharp twist in the primary frame members just aft of the cockpit but I couldn’t account for it. It must have survived long enough to keep the hull in line as it flipped over. These need to be revisited today.” She highlighted the three most likely elements to inspect.

  “That would finally explain the hull failure,” Holly proved out her knowledge of structural considerations as she nodded her agreement. “The hull slammed down on its belly faster than a barracuda hitting a jackfish. The upper framing would shatter at about three g’s, especially with the tearing of the high wings. Once that happens, it wouldn’t need more than four g’s to flatten the sides like that.”

  “The model shows that hull impact varies down the length from four-point-seven to six-point-two g’s,” Miranda confirmed.

  “More than plenty,” Holly picked up her plate and went back to eating.

  No one else spoke, so Miranda resumed her explanation.

  “Here, at 1.22 and 1.43 seconds, the tail section broke off and tumbled to land right-side up by chance. I’m hypothesizing that it was the straight-down, vertical impact—crumpling the propellers and the leading edge of the engines where the nacelles extend forward—that buffered the wings enough to not catastrophically shatter the fuel tanks.”

  “How did you figure that out?” Jeremy was twisting his neck trying to look at it upside down. He had proven himself very insightful as they’d worked over the wreck yesterday, but even he hadn’t seen it, which partially compensated for her second sleepless night in a row.

  “Bugger me!” Holly exclaimed. “The wings are on the wrong sides of the plane. Why didn’t I see that?”

  Jeremy began cursing as well. Mike still didn’t see it, but he didn’t need to. The aircraft itself wasn’t his specialty—people were. But she could certainly appreciate that—she hadn’t been re
quired to suffer through any more dealings with General Harrington. That alone had immense value.

  “It took me half the night to see it, because of the general’s one misleading comment. A stall would have landed the plane right side up. A one-wing stall and we’d have expected to see a full roll. His ‘solution’ biased my perceptions until I recalled that only the wreck mattered. Dead planes don’t lie.”

  “Oh, I like that.” Holly repeated it once or twice.

  “Miranda invented it,” Jeremy jumped in. “One of the instructors told me all about how you proved what had happened to—” He jolted as if…

  Miranda checked Holly’s smile. As if she’d kicked Jeremy under the table.

  Miranda continued, “This plane wasn’t flying east to west, but rather west to east. The wings were mostly broken off and landed straight down when the flipping of the hull finally separated them fully. Some force didn’t knock the plane from the sky, but rather threw it down. I was unable to simulate sufficient wind shear. I actually overrode the model and replaced the four Allison T56s with a pair of GE90s.”

  “The engines off a Boeing 777 twinjet.”

  “Your idea. Or at least the idea I had from you talking about the 777, Holly.”

  “That would send it down like it had been swatted by a bloody fly whacker,” Holly demonstrated by slapping her hand on the table loudly enough to make Mike jump and spill coffee on his pants leg.

  “Like spiking a ball in the endzone,” Mike replied as if correcting Holly’s Ozzie metaphor while he dabbed at his thigh with a napkin.

  “Seventy-five… seventy-four-point-seven…four times as much thrust with the engine change,” Jeremy looked down from where he’d been staring at the ceiling.

  Holly and Mike were staring at him in surprise.

  “What? I’m sorry I was so slow, but I wanted to make sure I didn’t drop a zero going from kilowatts to Newton meters per second.”