Thunderbolt

Prologue

Prologue

Spieden Island, Washington, USA

Elevation: 137’

Miranda Chase shooed a couple of sika deer off the runway. It was a chill November morning only a few degrees above freezing, so she didn’t spend long about it.

A slow wave of sea fog was rolling in from Vancouver and the Canadian Gulf Islands, adding a thick dampness to the chill. The first of the US San Juan islands, Stuart and Johns, were disappearing fast. If she didn’t get aloft in the next fifteen minutes, she’d be trapped here on Spieden Island until the weak November sun burned it off.

The call from the National Transportation Safety Board said that a new crash had been classified as urgent.

As if she would lag when there was a crash to investigate.

She opened the hangar door and began her pre-flight checklist at the pilot’s ladder, then circled the plane counterclockwise. Tires inflated and clear of obstructions. No leakage from the shock absorbers, brakes, or gear handling systems. No dings on the leading edge of the wings. All rote by now, but she never missed a step. She was her own ground crew, so it was up to her to make everything perfect.

Because of the frequent fog, she’d thought about installing an instrument landing system on her island. She liked that it would make Spieden one of the only grass strips in the world to have an ILS. The problem was that the outer and inner markers would have to be placed offshore in the deep waters of Puget Sound because, at two miles long and a half-mile wide, her island was too small to support the four-mile-long system.

Jones Island was in almost the right place, but it was a nature preserve that belonged to the state and they weren’t interested in having an ILS beacon set up there.

Besides, her plane couldn’t handle the Cat III equipment that would allow her to land in the exasperating near-zero visibility.

Her F-86 Sabrejet was neither pure North American F-86 Sabrejet nor the Canadair CL-13 Sabre Mk 5 variant anymore. One of the last ever produced before the line ended in 1958, she had tinkered with it over the years, including upgrading to the Mk 6’s more powerful Orenda 14 engine. She’d also had to make a few modifications so that she could start the plane herself—normally a ground crew was required to handle the power connections for engine start.

But even with the upgrades it was still all authentically a Sabrejet, and old jet fighters didn’t boast modern electronic suites. To shoehorn them in, she’d have to get a custom-designed cockpit—which was never going to happen. She loved the feel and familiarity of the old “steam” dial gauges mounted in the classic cockpit.

Her sole concession was a small tablet computer that attached to a Velcro strip on the right thigh of her flightsuit for GPS navigation and airport charts.

The preflight checks only took minutes. She rolled out onto the winter-dead grass as the first tendrils of fog began slipping across the field. Her time was shorter than she’d anticipated. She taxied ahead and punched the garage controller to close the hangar door. Normally, even though she lived alone on the island, she’d get down and padlock it from the outside. But this morning the fog was moving in fast.

Isolate.

Focus.

The island would be uninhabited by humans as soon as she was aloft.

Locking the door really didn’t matter.

You’re taxiing the airplane. Work the checklist.

Fuel tanks full.

Canopy Unsafe alarm dark.

Speed brakes retracted.

The sika deer were back, grazing along the runway as if antique fighter jets rolled by them all the time. They’d never yet run across the runway during a takeoff or landing, but she did hate disturbing their quiet island existence. They were startled every single time by the full-throttle roar of her turbojet engine.

She loved the deer. They were among the island’s many survivors from when Spieden had been set up as a big-game-hunter resort decades ago. Thankfully the zebras, the far larger European fallow deer, and the like were long gone.

Some of the other remaining wildlife she was less pleased about. The incredibly territorial wild turkeys really needed to be cleared out.

There was one particular tom she’d named Dillinger. Especially fond of the acoustics of her front porch—he frequently launched his shrill call there at two in the morning. So far, he had eluded her efforts at capture or kill.

Perhaps she’d throw a hunting party. Which would include herself and…

“You really need some friends,” Miranda could hear Tante Daniels teasing her. She had been doing that since she had been Miranda’s governess, even more so since Miranda’s parents had gone down on flight TWA 800 and she’d become the then thirteen-year-old Miranda’s guardian.

Quite why Tante Daniels so enjoyed teasing, despite knowing better than anyone how much it confused Miranda, was beyond her. At least Miranda found teasing to be more easily identifiable than sarcasm. Why some people thought that double meaning was somehow a more efficient way to communicate was beyond her.

At the end of the runway, she turned her jet around and performed the final checks.

Flaps to takeoff.

Trim two percent nose-up attitude.

Altimeter to one hundred and thirty-seven feet to match the height of the northwest end of the runway.

The orange windsock drooped. Winds calm.

Miranda snapped in the oxygen mask, as she would be flying high, and tucked the tail of her helmet strap inside the chin strap so that it wouldn’t tap against her cheek every time her jet hit an air pocket.

She called out her departure on the Unicom frequency in case anyone was in the area.

“Spieden Traffic. Sabrejet N19353 VFR departing to the southeast.”

Miranda felt a satisfying sense of rightness with her custom tail number.

Airplane identifier N-Numbers painted on a plane’s tail had only five characters—of which the first three had to be numeric. So, she’d started with the first five letters of the Kryptos sculpture in the CIA headquarters courtyard that she and her father had spent much of her childhood years trying to decrypt. She’d applied the Vigenère cipher (the same one used by the NSA and the CIA to decode the first two panels of the sculpture) using the word “Kryptos” itself just as the artist had when he’d initially encoded it.

KRYPT had become UIWEM once enciphered.

Rather than re-encoding that with a second word—“palimpsest” and “abscissa” respectively on the sculpture’s first two panels—she’d applied the first alphanumeric encryption method her father had ever taught her. By using only the last number of each letter’s position in the alphabet, 21-9-23-5-13, UIWEM had become 19353.

The custom N-Number was available from the FAA and she’d gladly paid the ten-dollar custom-number fee. The accompanying 20201 decryption key, for the tens place of 21-09-23-05-13, she’d ordered as a custom license plate for the island’s tractor, which she mainly used for mowing the runway. Sometimes it worried her that someone would decode the two together. Each time she reminded herself that it wouldn’t cause any problems if they did.

Her radio announcement was only a little unusual, as no other traffic ever flew here—except the one time she’d invited her team to visit—but it was in the FAR, and even if she was the only person she’d ever met who regularly read the complete Federal Aviation Regulations, she did her best to follow them at all times.

Rules were comfortable.

She liked rules.

They gave a structure to the chaotic world.

Miranda paused for five seconds to listen for a response from some other flier stating that her departure might be a problem for them. There was no recommended waiting time, not even in the recent Non-Towered Airport Flight Operation advisory circular AC 90-66B. It was the first update since 1993 and she found it uncomfortable that it had no listening duration mentioned, just like its predecessor 66A.

Uncomfortable? Perhaps annoying was a better word. She reminded herself that she was getting better at identifying emotions, even when it didn’t feel like it. At least the labels made them more tolerable.

She found it annoying that, as one of the lead NTSB accident investigators, she had reported on three separate accidents caused by a pilot who failed to allow sufficient time between an announcement and subsequent action. Three separate times she’d recommended that the FAA change their rules to include the five-second pause, but the National Transportation Safety Board only had the power to recommend, not to require.

Hearing nothing, she checked the skies once more before pressing her toes hard on the footbrakes and sliding the throttle forward. As the Orenda 14 engine crossed twenty percent power, she released the footbrakes and the Sabrejet instantly began to roll.

The deer looked up in alarm and bolted for the Doug fir woods as always.

And there was Dillinger.

The male turkey scowled at her from a low hedgerow she’d recently planted near the hangar, but he didn’t move. Maybe he had a stealth coating he used whenever she was out with a rifle or bow.

At a hundred and forty-five knots (a hundred and sixty miles an hour), she let the nose wheel lift. At one-fifty, she was wheels-up ahead of the first bank of fog prowling in through the conifers to the west. She tapped the brakes to stop the wheels from spinning, then retracted the landing gear.

Aloft, she was in clear blue skies.

Contacting Seattle Air Route Traffic Control Center, she initiated her filed flight plan and arranged for a fast climb to her best cruise height of thirty-one thousand feet. Now the only question was how fast could she get to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base outside Tucson, Arizona. It was illegal to fly over US soil at greater than Mach 1—an ability just within the performance envelope for her aircraft—but the law didn’t say anything about flying at ninety-nine percent of the speed of sound.

She would cross from Washington to Arizona in under two hours. Once again, her team would unavoidably follow hours behind.

The wreck awaited and the NTSB team was on its way.

She waved goodbye to the island and punched south.

Achin, Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan

Elevation: 25,000’

Nine hours earlier

“MC-squared heading down.”

Major Carl Carmichael said it aloud in the cockpit just to see how it sounded. He still wasn’t used to his new call sign—“MC-squared” had replaced his “Three-C” nickname almost overnight after his promotion from Captain Carl Carmichael to major two weeks ago. Most guys just got one nickname in a career, but his seemed to keep changing and needed some rethinking each time.

Riding the edge of the never-exceed speed, he dove his A-10C Thunderbolt II “Warthog” down from Flight Level Two-five-zero.

The b***h-cold November sky over the Afghan mountains was a hard, crystalline blue that looked as if it would crack where the sharp glaciated peaks jammed against it. It had that dark purity of midmorning.

It was still dark down in the deep valleys. Real dark for some assholes once he showed up.

“Straight on down, boy. Straight on down.”

Twenty-five thousand feet at four hundred and fifty knots (five hundred and eighteen miles an hour) meant thirty-five seconds to target. Actually thirty-one seconds as the ground elevation in the rugged front range of the Safēd Kōh Mountains was above three thousand feet.

A full dive in a Warthog was the best ride there ever was.

The design was fifty years old and his plane was forty. It was still the most kick-ass jet ever. The only plane in the US arsenal dedicated to close air support for ground troops.

Nothing touched it.

“Energy like light, we’re kicking it with MC-squared according to old Einstein. Moving like the A-10 Thunderbolt we are, Nancy.”

The action figure perched on the top of his flight console didn’t reply; she just grinned as he worked on how best to use his new call sign.

The hop from Bagram Airfield a hundred kilometers away had taken only seven minutes and he was almost there. He’d crossed the desert flats and the rugged gray hills of the east.

As usual, command had ignored the unofficial Warthog motto: Go ugly early. The A-10 was a seriously homely plane, but it totally rocked. And the best way to help ground troops was to get a hog there before they were getting their asses kicked.

If they’d called him in before the squad of 75th Rangers had gotten pinned down and cornered in the brutal mountains outside the Afghani village of Achin, they wouldn’t be in such desperate straits now.

Total airworthy F-35 Lightning II’s at Bagram who could get there in a third the time he could? Zero. He’d be sure to rub that in at the DFAC tonight over steak and baked potatoes.

And the F-18 Hornets sucked for ground attack—at least compared to a Warthog—which is why he and his sweet old bird still had a job.

Medevac helos had launched at the same time he had but, even slower than a Hog, were still twelve minutes-forty out. In twelve minutes there wouldn’t be any need for the helos because there’d be no one left for the medical teams to rescue.

…If those rotorboys even dared fly into the valley filled with Taliban.

“No worries, boys and girls. Nancy and I are on the job.”

His high-res thermal tracker let him catalog the situation quickly.

The Taliban were dug in on two different hilltops, pinning down the Rangers in the crossfire while their pals chased the good guys up a dead-end valley.

“Nasty little Talis. Let’s get ’em, Nancy.”

A cliff wall behind the Rangers and a platoon-size phalanx of Afghani ragheads coming at them fast had to suck.

“Ug-ly! That’s the only word for it, Nancy. The only word. Ug-ly!”

A line of three broken US Army vehicles scattered in between the two ground forces said that the Rangers were probably now on foot, whereas the Taliban were still mostly mounted.

Technicals—pickups with heavy machine guns and even artillery mounted in the back—totally sucked. They had six of those, one for every two Rangers.

“Twelve minutes to get it all cleaned up, Nancy.”

His sister was a bestselling romance novelist who worshipped Nancy Pearl—a major Seattle librarian who had encouraged Sis since early in her career.

When Carl had graduated from the Air Force Academy, Sis had given him the Nancy Pearl figurine. Ever since, he and Nancy had flown together. With short graying hair, big glasses, and a bigger smile, she was kinda sexy in her tight plastic top and red cape.

She’d begun her flying looking out the windshield, but when he’d found himself wondering about her ass hidden by the flowing cape, he figured it was better if she kept an eye on him.

At fifteen thousand feet up, he lased one hilltop gun emplacement and fired off a laser-guided AGM-65 Maverick air-to-surface missile. It would take care of that group in another fifteen seconds.

At ten thousand, he lased the other hilltop and kicked off his other Maverick.

Now he was getting some attention from the ground. The bad kind of attention, but he was ready for it.

“Time to do our dance, Nancy.”

He jinked sideways and flipped through a hard wing-over-wing twist as he dove around the back side of the western ridge. From above he’d seen that the valley along the back of the ridge turned and led back up the valley the Rangers were pinned down in.

The two hilltops blew simultaneously.

“Ranger Ground to A-10. Nice shooting.”

“Hold tight, boys, Nancy and I are comin’ at you just like light.”

Not bad. Still a little clunky. Had to be some better way to use his new call sign.

An A-10 Warthog’s real strength wasn’t its heavy armor—though Carl appreciated the well-fortified cockpit every time someone got a bead on him. Nor was it in the variety of bombs and missiles hanging from the eleven hardpoints on the hog’s wings and fuselage.

The plane rocked the ground assault role because it had been built starting with a gun.

A damned big gun.

At its heart, the A-10 was two tons of 30 mm GAU-8/A Avenger rotary cannon that just happened to have a tough-as-hell twin-engine jet built around it. Each second it could deliver seventy inch-and-a-quarter by four-inch, high-explosive rounds at three times the speed of sound.

The Talis were about to have their line shredded.

“Ready, Nancy?”

He carved a hard turn at the valley junction over the crap town of Achin—half-a-hundred homes squatting among steeply terraced fields. Anybody who wasn’t Taliban was probably al-Qaeda.

Sucky as s**t 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 s**t 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.