Condor

by M. L. Buchman

  So, her cover story couldn’t be that she’d come from overseas. And she hadn’t looked up what technical conferences might have placed her already in the US. March was too early for the big US airshows.

  “I was meeting with a client in…” she practiced on a massive furniture truck in the next lane as she blew by it on Route 24.

  Houston would be NASA’s Space Center…no.

  Washington, DC? No, that would imply more than she wished to.

  Florida? Too boring. And it would imply too little.

  San Antonio? Yes! It was nicknamed Military City for a reason.

  She wouldn’t need the heavy-handed English she’d required with Voskov. Russian-inflected with minor syntactical errors would be more than sufficient.

  “I was meeting with a client in San Antonio. No, I can’t say which one.”

  No contractions.

  “No, I can not—make it two distinct words—say with which one. Da. That is better,” she told the next truck with a giant Chick-fil-A sign on the side.

  Fast-food fried chicken versus the slow-braised beef tenderloin with finger potatoes and fresh baby asparagus served with a split of California merlot during her transatlantic first-class flight. Tough choice.

  She hated fast food with a passion—America’s most heinous export. She only ate it when some of Zaslon team she was temporarily inserted with, usually for training, insisted they “Go eat American” at a Moscow McDonalds or some other similar slimehole.

  San Antonio. It was good. Such a story would imply that she had security clearances without having to reveal what they weren’t.

  And she had a forged Antonov ID just in case she’d needed it to get on the plane last night. Whoops! Except that was in the name of Elayne Kasprak.

  So she was Elayne. The only one who knew her as Valery should be very dead at the moment. Actually, if the Antonov’s pilot was still alive, her presence would be inexplicable, but she had confidence in her work. He wouldn’t be.

  She punched scan on the radio until she found a local news station.

  The Top story took less than three minutes to cycle through: Major crash at Campbell Army Airfield. No survivors.

  Perfect.

  Elayne turned off the radio and stowed Valery Tomaka back in a safe corner of her mind for some future mission.

  “You are now Elayne Kasprak, Antonov engineer. You have just come from meetings— What? Oh, sorry, I can not say what meetings, in your San Anne Tonio.”

  Yes, that would work well.

  She hadn’t had occasion to try an American military commissary, but their reputation was good. Maybe this time.

  6

  Miranda watched the pilots carefully as their C-130 Hercules transport neared the shorter Runway 18. It crossed the main runway at one end of Campbell Army Airfield.

  But the copilot was in control for the landing, and he used two hands. She didn’t get to see if the pilot used two hands or not.

  Disappointed, she turned to watch out one of the three small round windows.

  Wisps of smoke still wove lazily upward, lit by the first rays of sunlight. Every Striker fire truck from the entire base must be gathered around the massive wreckage in the center of the main runway.

  It was too obscured by the smoke and spray foam to readily identify.

  “That’s a right mess,” Holly said close by her shoulder.

  Mike and Jeremy were each at one of the other two windows.

  “Thanks, Miranda,” Holly continued in a whisper. “I’m so not up for explaining your question to those two.”

  It was one of those situations where there were two separate conversations going on. Miranda could now recognize when this was occurring, but it still flummoxed her on how to handle it.

  “What I’m trying to understand about relationships in general is—”

  “For us to talk about later. When there aren’t any boys around.”

  “Is…” Now she was stuck with an unfinished sentence on top of an unfinished game as well as a one- or two-handed pilot. Things were piling up.

  Fine. She would focus on the wreck. That’s how she would handle all of these broken pieces. Focus on the one thing she was good at to the exclusion of all else in her life.

  “I don’t like seeing it all at once.” She preferred to approach a wreck in stages from the outermost sphere of environment, moving to the innermost of systems and data recorders. Then interviews last of all to corroborate her findings. With a logical framework, she could develop a more accurate and holistic platform from which to build information architectures upon which to test original causes.

  “Don’t think of it as information gathered too soon. Think of it as an overview to aid in choosing next actions.”

  Miranda turned to face Holly, and to look away from the wreck. “You’re suggesting that I pre-construct a, if you will, meta-sphere with a tentative structure that I reshape as the investigation progresses.”

  “Wow! You should definitely be yarning with Jeremy on that one. He’ll be sorry he missed that.”

  “I didn’t! That’s an utterly awesome—” Jeremy dropped into the seat next to them and snapped on a seatbelt just moments before the wheels hit the runway, “—way to think about it. Then any hypotheses can be tested against a dynamic three-dimensional space.”

  “Dynamic, yet hypothetical,” Miranda didn’t like it. “Hypotheses are dangerous by predisposing our minds to certain conclusions.”

  “Right but—”

  “Down to stun, buddy,” Mike clapped a hand on Jeremy’s shoulder. “Don’t mess with the magic.”

  “What magic?”

  Mike reached across Jeremy to tap Miranda’s forehead in what appeared to be a friendly fashion.

  Miranda tried to blink away the feeling of foreignness where Mike had tapped her. When that didn’t work, she scrubbed at it with her hand and it seemed to come off.

  “Magic?” Jeremy squinted at her forehead as if trying to see something there.

  She had to rub her forehead again after all his staring. “I don’t feel very magic. Oh, wait. That’s what Drake was asking for.”

  “You spoke with General Nason?” Mike leaned on Jeremy’s shoulder as if he was a signpost. The plane had slowed from its landing and was taxiing across the airport.

  “Yes, that’s why we woke you. Drake has declared this to be a matter of national security. He’s very concerned that it might have been an attack. He has asked for,” Miranda took a deep breath, unsure how the others would react, “Team Chase magic.”

  “Whoo-hoo!” Jeremy raised his hand in a high five.

  “Team Chase!” Mike and Holly called out in unison and took turns slapping Jeremy’s palm and each other’s.

  “It doesn’t bother any of you that he didn’t include your names in the team?”

  Mike shook his head and smiled.

  Jeremy slapped his hand over his heart, “It’s an honor.”

  “Team Chase it is,” Holly whispered in her ear.

  Miranda would never understand people.

  7

  Holly couldn’t seem to catch her breath.

  Team Chase.

  Fuck!

  She hadn’t been part of a team since…

  Since…

  The end of her decade as an operator for the Australian Special Air Service Regiment.

  One infinitesimal moment in time, one tiny decision, and she’d gone from being on a SASR team she trusted to the extremes of life-and-death to…

  Nothing.

  To be on a team again was incomprehensible. Beyond pear-shaped and right over into FUBAR—effed up beyond all recovery.

  She should hit the ground and run the other way. For all of their sakes.

  But for six months, these three wonderful people had welcomed her. They’d given her a sense of belonging that she missed like a piece of her body.

  Without even noticing, she’d slid back into patterns and modes that she swore she’d never risk again. S
he’d lost an entire team once, even more than that once before. When she left SASR, Holly had sworn off being anything but independent ever again.

  But now…Team Chase?

  This was wrong in so many ways that she didn’t know what to do. But that didn’t make it any less true.

  Habits were deeply ingrained; they were how a soldier stayed alive when the situation went sideways. By rote, Holly shrugged on her NTSB vest, shouldered her field kit, and tugged down on the brim of her Matildas baseball cap.

  Third time was the charm, right?

  After all, she’d survived the first two disasters, even if no one else had.

  That was one promise she made here and now. No one on this team would ever be at risk—other than herself.

  Like a, God help her, team, they trooped through the cargo bay together as the rear ramp of the C-130 Hercules began to lower.

  Despite herself, she began noticing the details.

  The March air spilling into the gap was crisp but not cold. Probably over ten degrees—forty-five in this last bastion of Fahrenheit temperatures—and already smelling of spring in ways that were still a month away on Miranda’s private island.

  Rather than taxiing to the hangar, the C-130 Hercules had taxied onto the main runway and carried them close to the crash, before doing one of those tight turns. The lowering ramp revealed the wreck in stages.

  The first thing to see was the farthest away, the tall vertical tail rose perfectly straight six stories into the sky. Painted white with a blue swoosh on the side of it.

  “An Antonov AN-124 Condor.” She knew she was right without even seeing the rest of the plane.

  “Really?” Jeremy was pushing up on his toes to see more, but Miranda’s nod confirmed Holly’s identification.

  As the ramp lowered more, it revealed nothing else that belonged to the monstrous plane.

  Nothing of the upper fuselage in front of the wings remained.

  The wings themselves were broken off and lying to either side of the fuselage. The hull itself had been flattened. Yet somehow that banner of a tail had remained upright.

  A gentle, sunrise breeze flickered by, just strong enough to riffle her hair across her neck. Then it brushed by a little stronger as if pushing aside the last of the night.

  It also brushed the giant tail.

  Which wavered.

  One way.

  The other.

  Then it began to topple to the right.

  There were shouts among the fire crews that were still gathered around the wreck. In moments, they were jumping out of Striker firefighting engines and sprinting to get away from the fifty-foot wide, six-story-tall tumbling tailfin.

  It looked as if everyone got clear, but two of the big airport fire engines were probably write-offs as the tail crashed down on top of them.

  The bang as it slammed onto the runway seemed to gather and boom around the inside of their parked Hercules, forcing them all to cover their ears.

  With that piece gone, the plane was a much squatter affair. The main part of the hull had been blown outward as if someone had filleted its backbone and peeled it open to lie flat, except for the pieces that had been blown completely aside.

  In front of the plane lay a massive block of metal that seemed as if it should make sense, but it didn’t.

  “Well, at least the cockpit section remained structurally intact,” Miranda said to no one in particular as they all moved down the Hercules’ ramp and headed towards the wreck. “There should be some good information there.”

  “The cockpit? Where is it?” Thankfully Mike asked the question so that she didn’t have to.

  Then Holly saw it.

  The entire cockpit section had been flipped onto its back in front of the plane. It was the craziest thing she’d ever seen.

  “This crash separated further aft than the C-5B Galaxy that crashed in Dover in 2006,” Jeremy pointed. “See, the entire crew module remained intact. Of course this one was separated from the lower section of the fuselage. The Dover C-5 broke vertically across the boundary between avionics and crew quarters when they crashed two thousand feet short of the runway. This appears to be the entire section from the cockpit to the aft bulkhead. We gotta check this out.”

  Jeremy raced off.

  Holly was about to follow. Should have followed. Should have controlled Jeremy into following Miranda’s meticulous approach to crashes.

  But she couldn’t.

  Miranda, apparently caught up in the swirl of Jeremy’s wake, also moved ahead.

  “Who’s the ghost?” Mike stood at casual ease beside her.

  Holly stood just one step from the runway, both feet still barely on the C-130’s ramp. Perched before the fall. The cliff.

  “You’ve obviously just seen one. Even for a ‘hot blonde Sheila with a sexy accent from Down Under’,” he teased her with a broad Strine accent. “Seriously, Holly. Never seen you so pale. What’s up?”

  Unable to think of how to explain her ghosts—besides, she’d rather be eaten by a dingo in the middle of the Great Victoria Desert than try—Holly did the only thing she could think of.

  She hit him.

  Not in his pretty face—but hard.

  8

  “What the hell is wrong with you, woman?” Mike shouted from behind them.

  Miranda turned just in time to almost be plowed to the ground by Holly who was head down and moving fast.

  What was wrong with her? Miranda should start a list about herself—but never did because she was half afraid that if she started she’d never be able to finish no matter how long it was.

  Mike had both arms wrapped around his ribcage.

  Then she understood that Holly was the target of his question.

  If she understood their expressions correctly, they definitely weren’t sleeping together. Or if they had been, they weren’t anymore.

  Miranda wanted to ask, but recalled the pinkie swear just in time.

  Mike was still back at the helicopter ramp, doubled over now.

  Jeremy was well ahead.

  She and Holly stood in a void between them.

  But an Air Force officer was walking up to them.

  The pinkie swear had included the phrase, “Girl talk only.” Did that preclude asking why Holly had struck Mike due to the presence of an unknown male?

  She was fairly certain that it did. But did that additionally prevent her from inquiring whether or not the stranger’s presence did indeed invoke that implied but unstated aspect of a pinkie swear? Pinkie swears should be like planes; they should come with a manual.

  Her doubt was set aside—along with the unfinished game, the unanswered status of Holly’s relationship with Mike, and the pilot’s one-handed flying abilities—for the moment. Assuming her head didn’t simply split in two before any of those were answered.

  “Ms. Chase, I assume.” The officer’s greeting was cheery. “Hope you’re not having any trouble with your people.” He winked at Holly for reasons that passed understanding.

  “Not a bit,” Holly replied, then pointed at her. “But she’s the one you want.”

  He stood five-ten, half a foot taller than Miranda herself, and had short, wavy hair that was halfway between her brown and Holly’s blonde. Fatigues, a light jacket, and major’s oak leaves on the collar points.

  “My apologies. Didn’t expect the NTSB’s Number One investigator to stand half a foot down. I’m Major Jonathan Swift, but everyone calls me Gull.”

  “From Jonathan Livingston Seagull, I assume,” Mike came up, though he was still rubbing his ribs as he introduced himself.

  “No,” Miranda shook her head. “It would be because Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels. Actually, that’s what it’s commonly called, but the proper title is Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. I found your book very confusing.”

  “Not my doing,” Major Swift held up his hands. “Mom found out we’re very remotely related so named me for him. They
rousted me for the crash four hours ago. Two hours ago Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Nason did everything short of ordering me to polish your boots as my first priority.”

  “I’m Miranda Chase. Investigator-in-Charge for the NTSB.” Introductions had already happened, but an investigation required that she state who she was. Not NTSB rules, but Miranda rules. It sounded odd this time. Apparently Major Gull thought so as well.

  Major Swift? Gull? If General Nason wanted her to call him Drake…

  “Jon, I’m ready to start.”

  He waved her toward the wreck.

  She turned her back on him and the wreck, and looked up to observe the sky. The sunrise was now fully above the trees and she could already feel the coming warmth of the day on her face.

  Jeremy rushed up. “Wind light and variable. I asked the tower and it was at the time of the crash as well. No report of microbursts. The terrain is flat with no significant hills or obstacles in the flight path. The runway was dry, no rain or ice on the surface. Overnight low was just thirty-nine degrees. Humidity low at forty-five percent.”

  “Thank you.” That defined her outer layers of interest. “Let’s do a perimeter walk to define the debris area.”

  Yet she continued scanning the field. Fort Campbell was a new one for her and it was unlike any other she’d ever been to. The hangars and runway configuration were typical enough. Yet something was bothering her and she wouldn’t be able to focus until she understood what it was.

  A flight of five pitch-black MH-6M Little Bird helicopters lifted in unison.

  That’s when she picked it out. Most airports were dedicated to airplanes—helicopters were incidental or simply not present.

  Here the vast apron parking areas were populated with long rows of neatly aligned helicopters. Small Little Birds, Black Hawks, massive Chinook twin-rotor transports, and Apache attack helos. One whole section of the rotorcraft were painted in typical Army colors, but another were all painted in flat black—Night Stalkers’ black.

  By the time she turned to the wreck, Jeremy waved a fistful of orange flags on thin wire stakes he’d pulled from his pack. “They won’t work on the runway, but we can lay them down in the right places and replace them with cones later if we need to.”