Drone

Chapter 2

2

“Who the hell are you and what are you doing in the NTTR? This is a secure area. No civilians.” The two-star general didn’t even wait for her to get clear of the Huey’s pounding rotor blades.

No black smoke or carbon stench of fire from the wreck.

It was so unusual for such a violent crash that it startled her out of her normal investigation process.

No visual sign that it had burned at all. The sharp bite of kerosene on the air confirmed that plenty JP-8 jet fuel had been freshly spilled, but it hadn’t been ignited.

Miranda had been about to ask the second half of that question herself, though with a bit more tact: “Why have you sent for an NTSB inspector?” The military only called upon the National Transportation Safety Board for the most difficult or sensitive investigations. Now her pro forma question for military crashes had been made irrelevant and it threw her off balance.

“Well?” The general snapped it out like she was one of his junior officers. Two did indeed hover nearby. Seven more were spread out on the desert landscape, forming a wide perimeter around the plane.

The general’s forward-weighted posture invaded her personal space—which she knew was larger than most people’s—and was paired with a narrowing of eyes. Wouldn’t more widely opened eyes be more appropriate? Entering a conflict situation should call for maximizing visual acuity.

The New Zealand Maori war dancers made a particular point of this in their demonstrations. She’d witnessed a show after assisting their Transport Accident Investigation Commission with a particularly ugly crash of a DC-8 cargo plane well past its proper retirement age.

It turned out that the plane had suffered severe salt corrosion in its pitot tubes making the airspeed indicator wildly inaccurate on a simple landing at Rotorua Airport in New Zealand. Instead of landing, they’d flown into the lake and plowed into a large, fully loaded tourist boat. She was able to prove that it wasn’t pilot error or a maintenance error—at least not based on standard practices. New service recommendations had been made and adopted.

The Maori dancers at a hotel one night had shown the faces their ancestors had traditionally made to scare their opponents: eyes wide, tongue extended, a startling yell as they raised their spears.

Man was the only predator she knew of who typically reduced his visual acuity by squinting and decreasing light intake during an attack.

All the general had achieved with his tirade was to arouse her curiosity.

“Why are you here?” Miranda had never before seen a two-star general dressed in combat fatigues guarding a pile of airplane wreckage.

His snarl indicated that hadn’t been the correct response.

Start from the beginning. One of her basic survival rules when dealing with people.

She held out her ID while trying to regroup. Miranda always approached crash site investigations in an unvarying manner. Her mentor had helped her develop her own style of approach that had served her on hundreds of mishaps and accidents.

Here in the NTTR, they were already being forced to shift. She knew herself well enough to know that could fast become a problem if she didn’t correct the patterns.

Spheres. It’s all about the spheres.

But first she had to deal with the general.

As he inspected her ID, her attention again drifted to the single upright T-56 engine. It was unnatural. She’d seen a thousand engines in a hundred different attitudes, but never this one. What could have caused—

No! Don’t look yet! Don’t conjecture! Start with the facts. Yes, remembering that, she felt better.

“Miranda Chase,” the general read aloud as if doing so might make her ID less authentic. “National Transportation Safety Board, Two-C. What’s Two-C?”

“I-I-C. It’s not a Roman numeral. Investigator-in-charge.”

“What’s the NTSB doing here?”

“I was on a flight from LA to DC, but my plane was turned around. Only a top priority request to the NTSB would cause this. Your helicopter also arrived to meet me. I must conjecture that the two events have a similar root cause. If the order wasn’t yours, I don’t know whose it was. I’ll start now.” There. That was taken care of. She stepped up to the general’s Humvee and placed her knapsack on the hood.

Miranda extracted and donned her vest. Across the back it announced NTSB in shoulder-wide bright yellow letters. Even the smallest standard-issue vest was too large on her so she’d had one custom made—someday her country would understand that women now worked for a living. As she didn’t expect it to happen soon, she erased the thought as a waste of mental focus.

The numerous front pockets were already pre-filled with recorders (she always carried two plus spare batteries), flashlights, gloves, evidence bags in four sizes, and, in an oversized pocket, a tablet computer enabled for precise L5 band GPS tagging of every image she took with a localization accuracy of thirty centimeters. Four markers and three pens—arranged in order by increasing wavelength of their color—and a paper notebook. She could always trust paper.

“What time did it come down?” She didn’t like saying the word crash—too sharp, as if it had points like a medieval mace. Its late Middle English origin was particularly appropriate for the metaphor, which pleased her.

The general growled before answering, “At 0507 hours and 19 seconds.”

“Good.” Thirty-three minutes before sunrise and now it had been just two hours and eight minutes since the impact. That was better than most impact events—some of which she couldn’t reach in days, or sometimes weeks for planes downed and lost in a wilderness area.

It was also an atypical degree of precision that she appreciated and her team would confirm when they recovered the FDR—assuming the airframe wasn’t so old that it didn’t carry a flight data recorder. Typically, the military installed black boxes on their aircraft only during service-extension upgrades when they changed over to digital cockpits.

Even then, the recorders were often set to auto-wipe in the event of a crash so that the information couldn’t fall into enemy hands. Pilots were supposed to disable the erase function for service over friendly soil, but bitter experience with an F-22 Raptor, a crash that she’d never been able to properly resolve the causes for, had taught her that didn’t always happen.