Drone

Chapter 1

1

The debris field of the C-130 Hercules transport plane lay strewn across the high desert of the NTTR.

Miranda had only handled two other crash investigations in the Nevada Test and Training Range and neither had been so near the highly sensitive base at Groom Lake, better known as Area 51. There were only three National Transportation Safety Board inspectors cleared to work inside the NTTR and she must have been closest. But she’d never been so near to Groom Lake itself.

Here be aliens! Tante Tanya might have teased her. Her childhood governess, who had raised her on the family island after her parents’ deaths, seemed to enjoy doing that for reasons Miranda could never fathom. She’d learned how to tell when Tanya was doing so—she always affected an overexcited tone, which was a helpful cue—but the logic remained elusive.

From aloft in the UH-1N Huey helicopter that had met her at the Las Vegas airport, Groom Lake was a dirty-white salt flat that probably hadn’t seen standing water since the last ice age. It lurked in a narrow valley deep in the heart of the largest and most secure testing area in the US military—the NTTR filled most of southern Nevada.

The mountains blocked Groom Lake from casual view, but the real security was its massive hangars. Everything was kept inside during daylight hours as much as possible, with aircraft only slipping out of their secret dens in the darkness of the night. Like raccoons or vicious wombats, the nation’s most lethal aircraft emerged from their secret burrows of Groom Lake—the ultimate testing place.

There, just beyond the low notch in the hills where the C-130 had crashed, the U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird spy planes had been developed. Secretly acquired Russian jets were extensively tested in dog fights flying out of Groom Lake. The F-117 Nighthawk—the first operational stealth fighter in history—had also been developed at Groom Lake before eventually moving to the nearby Tonopah Testing Range Airport once it was operational to make way for other projects. Now all of the Nighthawks were stored at Tonopah, outdated barely out of their second decade by the relentless advance of American ingenuity.

How mundane to have a C-130 cargo transport crashed at the very border of the top secret area. It was one of the most common military aircraft in the US and indeed worldwide with over sixty operator countries flying more than two thousand aircraft in total.

The juxtaposition could almost make Miranda smile.

Except she had hated airplane crashes ever since one had killed her parents when she was thirteen. Each time she struggled not to recoil from the mangled metal, the shattered airframes, and the vivid red splatters of fluids that had once been inside human bodies, instead forming a rapidly browning crust on every surface.

The C-130’s inverted-T tail section lay at the northeast end of the area. Usually the empennage survived mostly intact—which was why flight data recorders were mounted there. Not this time. It was barely recognizable.

A single Allison T56 engine stood tall, planted nose down into the soil like an ostrich with its exhaust port raised to the sky. At twelve feet, two inches long, it should not have been the highest remaining part of the thirty-eight-foot-tall, ninety-seven-foot-long airplane—but it was. The hull, where it hadn’t crumpled or shattered, had been pancaked as if a giant had stepped on it.

Was it down because of something she’d done? That she’d missed? She had only worked on three other C-130 crashes.

The C-130A Hercules loss on the Cannon Fire in 2002 had been straightforward. The brutal math had caught up with the forty-five-year-old airframe when it was dropping retardant on a wildfire. One jolt too many from the sudden unloading of seven tons of fire retardant on the stress-cracked wing-box cross members had caused the wings to catastrophically fold upward and break off. The crew had never stood a chance as the wingless fuselage had rolled in mid-flight and crashed inverted into the wilderness at a hundred and forty-six knots.

The additional crash of a fifty-seven-year-old PB4Y-2 Privateer thirty-one days later had caused a panic in the Forest Service. Mass inspections for microfractures had revealed significant issues in a wide variety of airframes, which ultimately led to the grounding of all thirty-three remaining Type I firebombers—those capable of delivering over three thousand gallons. The groundings, which had followed from her initial investigation, had greatly impacted the wildland firefight for years, with devastating losses to wildfire until the capacity loss of the large firebombers could be replaced with helicopters and smaller aircraft.

The planes had been her concern, but the damage of those unchecked fires weighed on her still.

One of the other two C-130s she’d investigated for the National Transportation Safety Board had also had a mechanical issue. Improper inspection of a propeller had led to the blade breaking off and arrowing into the fuselage, which had destroyed the aircraft in midair. The last C-130 had also been on a fire, where the pilot and his guide had failed to account for the possibility of a microburst and been slammed fatally into the ground through no fault of the plane.

But maybe she had missed something. Maybe more had died here in the Nevada desert because she hadn’t…

She noticed her hands were clasped together so tightly that they hurt.

Or maybe it was just another crash, Miranda. Don’t wrap yourself in a cloak of Jewish guilt—at least not until it’s warranted. How many times had Terence, her first mentor at the NTSB, given her that instruction?

He was right. Catholics don’t know anything about guilt. Her people had it down to a science since losing the Garden of Eden. Would Eve take it back if she could? Remain in paradise rather than lose the beneficent care of God her father to the harsh reality of—

She cut off the thought. God had not died in a plane crash. Except He had. Her belief in a Supreme Being had died the same day her parents had fallen from the sky. She stared out the window, forcing herself to keep her hands separate. Palms down. On either thigh.

The UH-1N Huey helo that had met her at McCarran International Airport in nearby Las Vegas flew directly over the wreck—as if he wanted to disrupt the evidence—to set down beside a Humvee parked too close to the eastern edge of the debris field.

Were his actions mere neglect, the cause of so many wasteful actions? Or was there malice or intent involved? A thousand times she wished she was better at discerning others’ emotions.

All irrelevant.

Focus on the next steps.