Raider

Chapter 4

4

As copilot, Mike had been about as useful as a VW Beetle at a NASCAR race. Shuttling their NTSB team around in the Mooney, he’d recovered all of his latent piloting skills and then some.

Or so he’d convinced himself.

Miranda’s new plane was in some other weird, science fiction category.

Instead of dials and a nice little LCD nav screen like the Mooney, everything here was electronic. Each pilot had a large central screen just packed with information about flight attitudes, engine performance, and flight paths. A central screen in the middle of the console between the pilots could be set to show terrain, weather, airport details, and probably the going price of jet fuel sorted by airport, along with any recent interstellar space launches.

Everything was controlled by a conveniently placed menu touchpad, one for each pilot, with more options than the little Mooney had controls—total. And most of those options had submenus.

Miranda only occasionally looked out the windshield. She didn’t need to. The jet was feeding her far better information than mere eyes could ever achieve. Even the radar screen fed information about each passing flight’s altitude, course, and speed.

The twin-engine Citation M2 jet had rushed them up to forty-one thousand feet instead of his normal ten-thousand-foot cruise altitude. From up here there wasn’t anything helpful to see anyway, just pretty blue sky and fluffy clouds far below. Even the horizon was just a suggestion from up here—the instruments were all the reference there was.

They flitted south so fast that he felt as if they were sitting still, and Miranda had somehow forced the Earth to spin beneath them.

Mike spent the whole trip down reading the manuals that Miranda had loaded onto his tablet. He didn’t feel much smarter for all his effort. All he really understood by the end of the flight was how to control all the menu options on his screen.

They’d been to Groom Lake before, at the heart of the Nevada Test and Training Range. The airport, built on the dry lake’s salt-pan bed, shimmered in the late afternoon heat.

They’d been here for their very first investigation as a team. His entire world had changed in the last year in too many ways to think about. He’d been—

His thoughts definitely needed a subject change.

He waited until they were down, off the runway, and taxiing toward the main terminal before he spoke. In a craft like this, you definitely didn’t distract a pilot during landing.

“Is that what it’s like flying your Sabrejet?” Mike also felt completely out of place due to the two-and-a-quarter-hour flash across so much of the country. It was so much more visceral from the cockpit.

Miranda blinked at him in surprise, as if she’d forgotten he was there.

“No. This aircraft is far slower, four hundred and four knots maximum cruise compared with six hundred and seventy when I’m riding the edge of the sound barrier in the F-86 Sabrejet. You barely have to be a pilot to fly this plane.”

Mike was about to protest that you’d have to be more of a pilot than he was, but thought better of it. He liked being allowed to sit up here with her.

“The Sabrejet may have been the first fighter jet in history to have an autopilot, but its capabilities are quite simplistic. From the moment I line up this jet on the runway, I can literally program it to takeoff, fly, and autoland in zero-zero conditions—if the airfield is CAT IIIC equipped, which many now are. I barely feel as if I’m flying.”

Zero-zero was when the cloud ceiling literally touched the ground and the visibility ahead was nonexistent, or so close to nonexistent that it would be impossible to react fast enough if there was a problem.

Mike tried to imagine letting a plane land itself—without being able to see the runway, perhaps even once you were on it. It was a very unnerving thought. Maybe it would be better if he just didn’t know, instead riding in the passenger seats with Holly and Jeremy in the future.

“However, there’s more to why I wanted this plane than the convenience of being able to have the whole team with me from the start. I also felt that it would be good to have a more personal experience of modern avionics and flight systems. This Citation M2’s design and avionics package is sixty-two years newer than my Sabrejet’s—which was actually designed seventy-three years ago. A lot has happened in that time.”

From anyone else, that would be a wry observation, even a joke. From Miranda Chase, it was simply a fact.

Mike almost asked what she’d learned, but knew that could well turn into a multi-hour explanation that he only had a moderate likelihood of understanding, and no chance of interrupting.

Besides, there was a crash. He’d learned not to sidetrack Miranda’s focus with ill-timed idle questions. Still, he’d like to know, and made a mental note to ask her the next time they were just hanging around at the office in Tacoma, Washington. Not that they were doing much of that lately.

Their team maintained a slightly alarming launch rate, which left little time for just hanging out anywhere.