“Just for now.”
Okay, she could do that. For now.
24
“You want to steal a plane from the middle of Russia?” Drake waved helplessly at the projected flightpath through their heartland.
“No, I want to inspect their satellite. It’s simply that the most likely opportunity to do so is by acquiring it while it’s on a plane in the middle of Russia.” Elizabeth offered one of her seraphic smiles that he’d learned were anything but. They both enjoyed word play, but this was too much.
“And who’s going to fly it? And don’t say you; you were a combat jet pilot, not a Russian cargo pilot.”
“How about a Russian?”
“Is Clarissa’s contact a pilot?”
“Engineer—design-type, not flight-type. And no, he doesn’t have access to the information I need; he designed the communications system. He won’t transmit plans, just verbal delivery of tidbits of information. I asked.”
“So we need to come up with a plan on how to steal a Russian plane, because it’s carrying a Russian satellite.”
“Precisely.”
Drake wished he slouched, but too many years in the military had made him unable to do it. Rangers didn’t slouch, even ones who’d left the door-kicking to younger men three decades ago. How was he supposed to tell his girlfriend not “No,” but “Hell no!”?
“No.”
Elizabeth barely hesitated. “Don’t we have people who do this kind of thing?”
“Steal three billion dollars of satellite? No.”
“Well, we should.”
“The closest we’ve got is the SOG, the CIA’s Special Operations Group. And they’re more about wetwork. Need someone assassinated, they’re your people. You need a multi-billion-dollar satellite lifted in broad daylight…I haven’t a clue.”
Elizabeth’s steady gaze said that even “Hell no!” wouldn’t have worked.
“Let me work on it,” though Drake didn’t know what good that would do.
“Remember, only four people know about this at the moment.” As if he needed the reminder.
“You know the old saying: Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead. Old Ben Franklin knew what he was talking about.”
“I choose me.”
“As what?”
“The one who lives. I’m sorry, Drake. I love you, but if one of us is going down, I’m going to push you over the cliff ahead of me.”
“Nice. Real nice.” That would teach him to fall for a warrior. Maybe he could slouch…just a little.
Of course, Elizabeth had just said that she loved him. Might not be worth going off a cliff first to hear that, but it might.
“Night Stalkers or Delta Force or one of those teams?” she asked without any awkwardly long pause awaiting his response to her offhand comment.
Seemingly offhand, Drake old boy. Remember, women are sneaky. Well, so were 75th Rangers—active duty or not.
“I can get them to grab it, but the Russians will know that we grabbed it. We need some way that they’ll think it never happened.”
“Maybe you could make the plane evaporate? Or crash, but not?”
That had Drake sitting bolt upright. “Now that is interesting. I knew there was a reason I loved you.”
It didn’t take her even a single beat to react.
The smile that lit her face was pure Lizzy without any hint of General Elizabeth Gray.
Score one for the Rangers.
25
Miranda’s cell phone rang loudly in the Antonov AN-124 Condor’s cockpit.
She, Jeremy, and Mike jumped in surprise.
The others didn’t even blink. How did they do that? Everything surprised her, particularly loud noises.
“This is Miranda Chase.”
“Hi, Miranda. This is Jill at NTSB. Is your team available for a launch?” It was the word that the National Transportation Safety Board used to send a team to an accident investigation.
“We’re in the middle of one right now.”
“Really? I don’t have one on the books. Where are you?”
Miranda puzzled at that for a moment. Oh, Drake had called and mobilized Team Chase directly, without going through proper channels. She supposed that was the prerogative of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“We’re at—”
Holly shook her head sharply.
“Where? I didn’t catch that,” Jill asked while Miranda mouthed, What? to Holly.
Holly whispered back, “Drake declared national security. Just say we’re in Kentucky.”
“Oh, good idea. Hi, Jill. We’re in Kentucky.”
“Well, that’s perfect. We have a bit of a mess in Nashville, bad enough that the president of FedEx called us himself. I could haul Rafe back from vacation or pull Terence from teaching his classes at the Training Academy, but…”
“But what?” Miranda asked when Jill didn’t finish the sentence.
“But it would really help if you could take this launch,” Jill was laughing. She often did that during their conversations.
Miranda muted the phone this time. It was very hard to follow the two conversations at once. At least she could mute Jill and pretend that conversation wasn’t happening for the moment.
“There’s an incident in Nashville. They’re asking us to mobilize.”
“Go,” Jon said before Holly had time to frown.
“But we aren’t done here yet.”
“You’ve mapped out the whole path of it. Beginning to end. I have an Air Force AIB team standing by. Let them have some glory. They can verify all the little details, not that you left many.”
Miranda always liked doing all the little details.
“We’ll brief them and you can on your way within the hour. Nashville is just an hour drive away. Better yet, I’ll shake loose a helicopter for you.”
Miranda looked at the others.
Mike just shrugged, but Holly nodded.
It didn’t seem right, but it was the military’s investigation, not the NTSB’s. She’d been escalated off launches before, and only rarely with an AIB team for backup.
She unmuted the phone. “Jill, we’ll be on-site in seventy-five minutes. Where are we needed?”
“West side taxiway at the Nashville Airport; you can’t miss it. Some tool of a tech genius tried to park his brand-new seventy-million-dollar Bombardier Global 7500 luxury jet inside a fully loaded FedEx Boeing 767 plane. He survived, but he’s pitching a major fit, as is FedEx. You know…”
“What?” Miranda wasn’t sure what she was supposed to know. Jill never seemed to complete her thoughts. She was originally from Los Angeles. Was it a Los Angeles thing?
“Normal madness.”
“I’m not mad at anyone.”
Jill giggled. “Just go to Nashville, Miranda.”
“Okay.” Miranda hung up. “Jon, let’s go brief your team.”
He placed a call and simply said, “We’re ready for you.”
They all climbed back out through the missing windshield. Once more Jon went first and made sure she landed lightly on her feet. Did he hold on to her for an extra moment? If he did, she liked it. Even if he didn’t, she liked it anyway.
“We only need the three of us for the debriefing,” Holly waved to indicate Miranda, herself, and Jon. “Why don’t you others do a quick scout through the debris field to see if anything unusual catches your eye?”
26
Holly watched reactions as she made the suggestion. But she kept an especially careful eye on Elayne Kasprak as she did so.
Jeremy handed Jon the black box recorders and pulled out his tablet and camera, ready to go.
Mike rolled his eyes at her.
Elayne Kasprak looked actively distressed.
“What about my plane?”
“Oh, we know what brought it down.”
Elayne’s eyes went wide. Just for an instant—a flicker, then gone.
Not surprise.
Worry?
/>
Fear?
“You can tell your boss that it wasn’t the plane’s fault. It appears that the loadmaster failed to safety some of the helicopter’s armament properly. A hard landing apparently fired one of the missiles.”
Miranda and Jon both looked at her in surprise, but they were behind Elayne, so it didn’t matter, as long as Miranda kept quiet.
She was about to protest when Jon rested a hand on her arm to silence her. Smart. Holly couldn’t help liking him.
“And did you find the sixth crew member?” Elayne’s voice remained tight.
“Mr. Bones? Yeah. Rescue crew missed him because there’s so little left of him.”
“Oh, the poor man,” but again her eyes belied her words.
Relieved.
Definitely relieved.
Holly hoped that her own feelings weren’t so bleeding transparent. Maybe Elayne Kasprak didn’t have her guard up. All the better. Holly hadn’t missed that first slap Ms. Kasprak had made for a weapon, and now here were more anomalies in her behavior.
“Let’s go.”
Miranda and Jon headed toward a pair of SUVs that were pulling up. That must be the AIB team.
Elayne followed Jeremy into the debris field more readily than any other action she’d made all day.
Holly tugged Mike aside for a moment. Hopefully he wasn’t too besotted to be sensible.
“Have you been keeping your eyes open?”
“Not stupid, Holly. You go pointing a gun at someone, I’m gonna trust your instincts. Something’s wrong with her. I stuck close, but I can’t figure out what’s up.”
“Huh. I assumed you’d be too busy trying for a little root fest to notice anything.” How badly had she misjudged him?
“Root fest?”
“Looking for someone to go burying your root in, mate.”
“God but you Aussies are crass. Sure, I wouldn’t mind that for a second. She’s incredibly hot.”
Apparently not misjudged by much.
“Almost as hot as you. But you threatened to beat the shit out of me if I ever mentioned that, so I didn’t just say it.” And he hit her with one of those Mike Munroe killer smiles.
Well, she was made of sterner stuff than that.
Then he winked.
He was teasing her? If so, was it about his hopes of bedding Elayne or…
Shit! He was messing with her mind—successfully. That could not be allowed to happen.
She punched him and sent him off cursing to go pant after the perky Elayne. If that’s what he was actually doing. Mike was the one guy she’d never been able to read.
Then at the last second she had a thought…
“Hey, Mike?”
“Yeah?”
“See if you can grab a set of her fingerprints. Both index fingers at least.”
“With what? I don’t carry a fingerprint kit.”
“Maybe a piece of debris that she picks up. Bag it carefully.”
“Woman doesn’t like getting her hands dirty. Thought she was going to have a stroke when she got some lube grease on her fancy jeans. But I’ll try.” He gave her a casual two-finger-to-the-forehead salute before sauntering off.
Sauntering.
Too damn sure of himself by far.
But it was good that he’d been being suspicious of Elayne rather than trying to bed her. If he ever forgot to protect Miranda first, he was going to be getting a severe wake-up call that it was time to die.
Finally alone, Holly pulled the small bag out of her pocket and inspected the contents.
It was very small and quite clever. A sticky back, a tiny microswitch, and a small circuit board that she’d wager was the transmitter matching the remains of the receiver-trigger she’d found. It had also been nearly invisible.
Whoever had placed it and the explosive charge had been in both the bunk area and the cockpit.
Alone?
That would imply official clearance to be aboard.
Or maybe as someone’s guest, planting both devices while their host was distracted.
Yes, Elayne Kasprak would be very good at distracting any male she wanted to—except, curiously, Mike. But if Elayne had been playing the sex card, she couldn’t just pull on gloves before planting the devices.
The tiny transmitter was just big enough to retain a single fingerprint of whoever put it in place.
27
Elayne knew that something was wrong, but she couldn’t figure out what.
All six crew dead, that was excellent news.
But she knew that the helicopters’ armament shouldn’t just go off. Any fool would know that. For all their flash, how incompetent was this team?
Holly wasn’t incompetent.
She was dangerously competent. But perhaps only as a warrior and not as a crash investigator?
Until Elayne could be sure of her, she needed an excuse to stick with this team.
“Mike, my rental car was acting very strangely. Do you think I could get a lift back to Nashville Airport when you go? I’ll just call the rental company to come get it.”
“Sure, no problem. Maybe you’d like to stick around and see us kick ass on another investigation. I’m betting we’ll be overnight in Nashville.”
His eyes didn’t drift down her body, but his smile most certainly did.
It would give her a chance to overhear if there was anything else they’d learned from the Antonov crash—not that she was really worried anymore. But that Holly woman did run this crew, no matter what the others thought, and she was hiding something. Elayne would like a chance to figure out what.
If that meant taking pretty boy Mike for a tumble, she saw no reason to complain.
“That sounds wonderful.” No suggestive tones, but she didn’t want to close the door either. “I should be getting back to San Antonio, but I could also catch any early flight tomorrow before my first meetings.”
As she finished the sentence, Elayne realized that she’d let her accent slip too far into clear English.
“Yes, that could be most good,” she chose Dmitri Voskov’s mangled English. Mike didn’t react at all; he hadn’t noticed.
As they began walking the debris field, she jammed her hands in her jacket pockets and focused on protecting her clothes from more damage.
28
They gathered in a circle around the hood of one of the Air Combat Command Accident Investigation Board’s SUVs.
Miranda checked in with Holly. “I have to tell them.”
“Yes, everything.”
Miranda tried to figure out why she could speak now, but not before. But she suspected that the reason was under one of Holly’s secrecy rules, and with Jon and his team all here, she couldn’t ask.
So, she laid out the entire progress of the accident from the initial shaped-charge sabotage, the fuel fire, and the final explosion of the Russian helicopter’s armament.
On a large aerial photograph, she marked each of the key points of evidence and details that needed additional follow-up.
It took her most of an hour to complete the summary with all of their questions. Smart questions, they were just as high caliber a team as she’d expect from the US Air Force.
“The only thing we didn’t find was who did it and how they triggered it,” Jon told his team.
Right. Miranda had somehow again forgotten that.
She could see mechanical systems so clearly—versus people-based systems, which always seemed to pass in a blur. Perhaps if she considered a person’s actions as the next logical step in the chain of mechanical events…?
She liked that.
A lot.
Miranda tugged out her personal notebook and made a note to think of people’s actions as a chain of mechanical actions. Could that extend to person-to-person interactions?
For example, was there an extensible reason that Major Jon Swift had held her waist multiple times in the last hour, beyond her short stature and their circuitous entering and exiting the crew section of
the wreck?
But his actions weren’t connected to other systems, so that wasn’t helpful. Perhaps if—
“Actually,” Holly reached into her vest pocket and pulled out two small, clear-plastic evidence bags, “we know how the initial explosion was triggered, and I have an idea who.”
Everyone turned to her in surprise.
“Exhibit A.” In the center of the car hood that had been their impromptu meeting table, Holly set the broken bit of electronics and wire that they’d found mixed in with the skeleton’s bones.
She marked where it was found on the diagram of the crew quarters.
“Bluetooth receiver,” one of the technicians inspected it carefully.
Holly set her second small bag beside the first, “Exhibit B.”
“Transmitter with a microswitch. Where was this?”
Holly took one of the team’s tablet computers and pulled up an image of the AN-124’s control cluster. She picked up an electronic pen and drew it in at the base of one of the throttle levers.
“Sorry I removed it, but I was under a bit of time pressure and had to make sure it didn’t go astray.”
Miranda could see the logic of it. “The thrust reverser. There would be no need to engage it on takeoff or during the flight. But the thrust reversers would invariably be engaged at landing with any large jet.”
Jon turned to the man who’d taken possession of the flight recorders. “You’ll probably be able to find the event on the recorders—thrust reverser engagement to the sound of the initial explosion. They should be nearly simultaneous.”
“All that leaves is who.” Miranda was getting the hang of this. Someone had placed the trigger which had caused the explosion. In the opposite process direction that implied a human action. Yes. “Whoever had placed it there.”
“Anyone have a fingerprint kit?” Holly asked.
No one did.
“Get this to a lab. I’m hoping to get a match.”
“With whom?” Miranda asked.
“Classified. Top secret. Sorry.” Then Holly changed the topic, taking on what Miranda interpreted as Aussie teasing tone. “So, Major Jon, do you have a swift helicopter hangin’ ’round to zip us over Nashville Airport way?”
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