Honor, p.6
Honor, page 6
“It’s a straight line conjecture, Roy. You’re here, her plane is here. It only makes sense. And, because we’re at Buckley Space Base, is the director of the GCHQ also aboard?” The GCHQ was the UK’s equivalent of the CIA mixed with the NRO and the NSA. Clarissa was the CIA Director, so it only made sense that GCHQ’s director would be as well.
“Head of the class, Miranda.”
She looked around, but there didn’t appear to be a class going on with only the three of them in the conference room. Perhaps she didn’t understand.
“The problem, as you noted, is that they can’t disembark.”
“Isn’t that a problem for airplane mechanics? I know that Dassault has a service center in Reno.”
Roy sighed.
“There’s nothing wrong with the damn plane,” Clarissa cut off the President. Miranda had noted that the CIA Director had little patience even with Roy.
“However, there is a problem, Ms. Chase,” a female voice sounded from the wall behind her.
She turned to see a large monitor at the end of the conference room. The interior was that of a Falcon 900LX. She estimated a high likelihood that it was the one on the tarmac, but didn’t like to risk false conclusions. It was the British Prime Minister and a disheveled man seated beside her, fidgeting as if he couldn’t stop worrying at his clothes.
The Prime Minister continued, “We received a threat while we were enroute.”
The UK PM will not live if she tries to exit the plane.
“After we received the message, we decided to continue to Buckley, calculating our best hope for aid was here,” Prime Minister Olivia Whittaker continued. “We don’t know if the threat is real or not, but risking our lives to find out would not be my first choice.”
Miranda looked at the message again. It was simple. Perhaps too simple? Like discovering a failed engine component and attributing the crash to that without considering all the possibilities: that the component had a history of manufacture, maintenance, and usage, or that perhaps it had failed as a result of the crash rather than being the root cause.
“How did you receive the message?”
“I don’t see how that’s relevant,” Gareth Clark, the rumpled Director of the GCHQ snapped out. “Can you get us off this aeroplane or can’t you?” He sounded like the male version of Clarissa. Miranda decided that she would keep her attention on the Prime Minister.
Miranda hated repeating herself but did so to refocus the conversation. “How did you receive the message?”
“It was transmitted through Buckley as we were crossing into the US.”
“Then how did Buckley receive the message?”
There was silence in the room as everyone glanced at each other.
Roy picked up the phone. “I need to speak with whoever intercepted the in-bound message.”
“No, Roy,” Miranda didn’t like correcting the President, but it was necessary. “I need to meet the person at their workstation.”
“She doesn’t have the goddamn clearance to go inside the Ops Center,” Clarissa protested, leaning forward to plant her fists on the table.
“My clearance matches yours, Clarissa. Can you not enter the Ops Center?” It would seem unlikely that the head of the CIA wasn’t authorized into the country’s most powerful center for collection of intelligence.
Clarissa merely snarled in response.
Miranda had witnessed such territoriality among the Mouflon sheep on her island. They would butt each other with their great curved horns for mating rights, making so much crashing-together noise in late autumn that she’d often been glad to escape to a crash investigation. Humans didn’t have a mating season that Miranda knew of. Oh! Clarissa had always been very aggressive about anything she felt was part of the CIA’s territory.
Clarissa led the way out of the room and Roy indicated Miranda should follow. She’d have preferred it if the President went first, in case Clarissa suddenly decided to turn and butt heads, but she did as Roy indicated.
Through another layer of security, they entered the Ops Center—the primary operations room. It made NASA’s Launch Control Center look low-tech and primitive. The large room was softly lit, most of the illumination provided by the numerous computer screens.
Ranks of operators were seated before curved monitors wide enough to equal three normal rectangular ones. Several stations had them stacked two high. Some displayed satellite orbital information, others were viewing multiple video feeds, and on yet another she could see the pulsing blue squiggles of sound waves.
At the front of the room, giant displays hung high on the wall showing different video feeds.
Everyone wore headsets and their chatter washed through the air like the sound of air conditioning—a constant murmur. Miranda was rather pleased with the metaphor, they used to completely stump her. Though the murmur wasn’t so much conditioning the air but rather conditioning space. Or using space-borne assets to condition the sphere of intelligence. Her metaphor was falling apart and she didn’t know how to recover it.
Then she saw the big screen to the right, switch over to a drone’s-eye night-vision video. One section of the room became much quieter and several people from the other section looked up to watch as well. It was tracking a trio of vehicles moving at high speed along a remote road. Then there was the now-familiar puff of an explosion in the gray world of night-vision, followed by a thermal white-out on the screen. Actually, three near-simultaneous flashes. When the image recovered, the three vehicles had been replaced by three white craters in the road—white with the heat of the explosions and the burning vehicles.
No one was seen running from the wreckage. After thirty seconds, the screen cleared, and the soft chatter of the room built once more to air-conditioning levels.
A man with a portable headset had been standing near the front of the room and watching the screen as well. Now he turned and crossed toward them.
“Somalia’s al-Shabaab is going to need three new generals,” was his greeting.
Roy simply nodded in response to the news.
Miranda decided to follow suit and skip her own normal introduction. Maybe names weren’t used in this room.
“Miranda here would like to speak with the operator who intercepted the message,” Roy explained.
So names were used here. But now that she hadn’t properly introduced herself, what was the correct next action?
The man led them to the leftmost desk of the third bank of consoles. “Marni, what information do you have on that message’s origin?”
She didn’t turn from her screen. “Sat USA-278 captured it. That’s a Trumpet Class Electronic Surveillance bird.” A drawing of a dish-shaped satellite popped up on her secondary screen.
Miranda glanced at the metrics. The dish was three hundred and fifty feet in diameter. She didn’t need anything more to know that it could pick up any signal it focused on, even a cell phone a thousand miles below on the Earth’s surface.
“It stood out from the chatter in that it broadcast unencrypted from the roof antenna on FSB headquarters on Lubyanka Square in Moscow. It’s as if they wanted to make sure we didn’t miss it. No related chatter before or after.”
“What new disasters are those assholes cooking up?” Clarissa still sounded very angry. “Do they really want a world war? Are they planning to make the sky fall on us? Chicken Little finally coming home to roost?”
Miranda had always loved the sky, rarely happier than when she was aloft. Imagining having to fear the sky was…horrifying.
“More likely,” Roy’s voice remained patient, “they wish to damage Five Eyes by attacking the UK’s Falcon jet on US soil. Your job, Clarissa, is to mobilize the CIA to find out how they found out about its existence. Until then, kindly keep the side-chatter to a minimum.”
“Yes sir.” She still didn’t sound happy despite having been assigned a task to do. Miranda always liked having something to work on.
With a dish like the one on the Trumpet satellite, a broadcast from a primary FSB antenna would have sounded like a roar.
“I have a tentative match on the voice,” the person sitting next over from the antenna operator spoke up. His screen was covered with moving oscillations of sound waves. “Though it makes little sense. A General Artemy Turgenev. Last year he ascended from being a major in charge of Antarctica cargo handling, to being a full bird colonel the day they lost those three Antarctic stations to the Chinese. Shortly after that, the general in charge of ARRI—that’s their Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, heavily military of course, though they claim not to be—was caught in some big scandal and Turgenev ascended there as well. A new poster boy for how to be a power player inside the Russian security branch.”
Miranda shivered at the memory of the Antarctic disaster that had cost Russia those three stations. It had marooned her for a week on The Ice in a crashed Skibird airplane wrapped in a bitter white-out blizzard.
“Turgenev,” the President was staring at the central screen on the far wall, which showed China’s newest Air Force Base on an island in the South China Sea. “Does he report to General Murov? That’s the Russian President’s right-hand man.”
The agent pulled up an organizational chart next to the soundwaves on his screen and cocked his head to stare at it for a moment. It was more question marks and commentary than actual connections. “It’s possible,” he offered with a shrug.
Roy nodded. “Yes, I’d confirm this as a credible threat then. But what exactly is the threat?”
Now Miranda knew why she was here. “Executing the threat to Prime Minister Whittaker,” she avoided mentioning the nasty, rumpled GCHQ Director, “could be easy or difficult.”
“For example?” Roy asked.
“Release of poisonous gas would kill the passengers. But that works better if they don’t open the door. The message implies that the trap will be triggered by the door opening. That makes an explosive device far more likely.”
“Or a fake,” Clarissa said.
Miranda hadn’t considered that. She’d been brought here to resolve a problem according to Roy. Now she was again uncertain of her purpose here.
“A simple fear tactic,” Clarissa continued. “Doing it simply to scare the crap out of us. How did they even know about the meeting?”
“What meeting? More than us?” Miranda looked around.
“This is supposed to be a top-secret meeting of Five Eyes. Australia, New Zealand, and Canada should be here shortly.”
“If they’re still flying,” Miranda corrected.
Roy’s complexion blanched white.
The console operator brought up a world map and two blips appeared on screen.
“Where’s the third?” Roy gasped out.
“Australia routed through Auckland to pick up New Zealand. They’re having meetings of their own on the flight over and back.”
Roy blew out a breath, hard. “Right, I’d forgotten about that. Okay, what else Miranda? How do we find a bomb and defuse it without opening the door?”
“You don’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“If there’s a bomb, it’s inside the skin or perhaps in the fuel tank. You’d have to disassemble the plane around them to make sure it wasn’t there. And you might trigger it anyway.”
“Remove the skin? Could you get them out that way?”
Miranda pictured the structure of a Falcon 900LX. There were numerous points where they could cut into the fuselage to create an opening, but she hated to damage the plane. It hadn’t done anything wrong after all. And again, what might they trigger in turn?
“Not knowing how the device is wired, if it indeed exists, makes that difficult. Without inspecting the security operations at RAF Northolt, there’s an unknown factor of how long someone had access to sabotage the plane. Quick and dirty or a more complex, complete-envelope sabotage.”
“We can answer part of that,” a man from the sound desk said. “We alerted RAF Northolt. They’re convinced any window of opportunity would be very short.”
“Long enough for a bomb and…” Miranda hated unfinished sentences, but she’d had a thought. “You said the message was sent as they crossed into United States airspace.”
“No, I didn’t.” The console operator shook her head.
“The Prime Minister did. Can you bring them up on your screen?”
In moments the conference camera aboard the Falcon jet parked less than a mile away was displayed at the corner of the operator’s screen.
“Prime Minister. You said that you received the message as you crossed into United States airspace.”
“That’s correct. I happened to be watching the flight tracker. We were just past the Canadian-US border when we received the call from Buckley about the message.”
Miranda turned back to the console operator. “How did you know the position of the other two diplomatic jets, ADS-B or IFF?”
“IFF.”
“What’s that?” Roy asked.
“That, Mr. President is your answer.” Miranda looked up at the dim ceiling of the Ops Center and considered how to avoid the Problem becoming a Crash.
Miranda liked the heft of the PPE gear used by the firefighters. First she donned the thermal underwear, then the heavy Nomex suit. On top of that she wore a Kevlar bulletproof vest, a head-to-toe foil heat suit, and a breather bottle with full mask. The hard hat with a bright headlamp finished her preparation.
The suit applied a solid pressure, like an all-enveloping hug—always a good thing for an autistic, especially when no confusing human was attached to it. The heat wouldn’t have time to become overwhelming.
“Remember, we have to do this fast,” she called over the team radio.
All the other members of the firefighting team offered a thumbs-up. Roy had wanted to come, but his Secret Service agents wouldn’t allow it. Clarissa hadn’t volunteered.
Miranda checked her watch. “One minute.”
The IFF—Identify Friend or Foe—system didn’t broadcast a signal to be used by standard flight tracking sites. Instead, it was used in battle by military flights to avoid shooting an ally. It was also used by high-priority diplomatic flights to avoid trackability by non-military systems.
The threat had been broadcast the moment the plane had crossed over the Canadian-US border. The only sure way for the Russians to track the plane, with its distinctive Union Jack tail markings, was visually—from orbit. And they must have followed it all the way from the UK to the US border to announce the threat at that precise moment.
Roy had conjectured that if the Prime Minister were to die on US soil, it could destroy relations between the two countries. With a population of over sixty-seven million in the UK, the loss of two lives being such a significant factor seemed all out of proportion to the mathematics. She wished And was here to explain it as Miranda never understood such things.
Miranda had observed that people typically followed a common modus operandi in their lives. She herself had been so ingrained within her life on her island that she was still having trouble adjusting to her temporary residence in the team house. Part of how she dealt with her autism was by building habits, simple rote routines that allowed her to do what other people did without thinking. For her, each action was conscious but, by making them sufficiently routine, they didn’t require great thought to perform.
In thirty more seconds, Buckley’s tracking predicted the opening of a one-minute window during which no known Russian satellites would have a clear view of the area in front of the CFR station house. The Russians had circumvented IFF with visual tracking. They would have little motivation to alter their to-date-successful methodology.
The gap in satellite passes was not long enough to stage a rescue but, she hoped, long enough to set one up.
“Five, four, three,” she braced herself to run, “Two, one.”
They each yanked the pull-tab on a smoke flare and sent them skittering across the tarmac and under the plane. By the time the Russian satellite would have a clear view again, the plane would be enveloped in harmless gray smoke that looked like a fire.
Miranda looked aloft at the crystalline blue, so deep and rich here at the Mile-high City. She would fight, fight to the core of her soul to keep that sky a place of joy, not dread.
They remained poised as the plane and the sky faded from view despite the wind, steady at eighteen knots—she’d measured and recorded it in her notebook prior to donning her PPE.
The smoke was in place as the next Russian satellite would now be regaining a view.
They waited another fifteen seconds to be sure.
Then, with a full-throated roar, a trio of fire trucks raced out of the open station doors and encircled the plane beyond the smoke.
Within five seconds, the Oshkosh Stryker firetrucks were blasting great curtains of high-expansion foam at the highest—thousand-to-one—setting. As a gallon of foam was mixed with water, it expanded to cover a hundred-foot-square area over ten feet deep. With a wingspan of only seventy feet and two-and-a-half stories of height, the Falcon 900LX rapidly disappeared from sight beneath the foam.
The moment before the foam enveloped them, she targeted her alignment toward the plane.
When the foam hit like a cotton wall, she and the five other people in full-PPEs raced forward.
Miranda felt as if she swam through clouds. No visibility. No hinderance. A world of lovely unblemished white. Nothing dragged visually for her attention—until she almost slammed her face into the Union Jack flag.
Her trajectory had been off by almost a foot, but she found the cargo hatch release by feel despite the thick gloves. The meter-square hatch was mounted between the wing and the tail, directly under the starboard engine.
She pulled out her next weapon in the battle—and drew a small black X nine inches off-center on the cargo hatch with her marker pen.
The fire chief, armed with a foot-long battery-operated drill, placed the bit against the outer aluminum. She raised his elbow to correct the angle and signaled him to drill.
