Chinook

by M. L. Buchman

  Miranda and Jon were also a couple, though he’d never been comfortable with seeing them together—even on opposite sides of the card table. She was the best plane-crash investigator in the entire NTSB, and Jon…really wasn’t. He was a nice guy, but Miranda deserved better.

  That he himself got to work with her was beyond cool. And that she now trusted him to draft many of the team’s reports was simply unbelievable.

  She always added things he’d never thought to, of course, but still she let him create those first drafts. If he could just be half as good as her someday…

  Yeah, that was never going to happen.

  Mike tossed his cards into the middle of the table with no sign of the frustration that Jeremy knew he would’ve shown, instead offering an easy laugh. He then rose from the table, circled to Holly, and leaned down to really kiss her.

  Instead of shoving him away as she usually did, she grabbed him by the neck and kept him pinned in place. When Mike finally broke free, they were both smiling like a couple of lunatics, as if somehow convinced they each had just won their battle.

  “You two have serious issues.” Captain Andi Wu, formerly of the Night Stalkers and now the last and newest member of the team, gathered up the deck and began shuffling.

  “Like you and the sheep!” Holly shot back.

  “Somebody coulda warned me.”

  “Nope,” Mike, Holly, and Jon said practically in unison. Miranda sat quietly as she usually did during banter, just watching the others.

  When Andi had stepped down from Miranda’s sleek little Cessna Citation M2 jet onto the grass runway, a mouflon sheep had nosed forward to sniff her. Standing a meter high at the shoulders, it hadn’t had to strain to sniff her face-to-face. Its great horns curved almost a full circle around to its jaws.

  Andi’s yelp had spooked the sheep, making it bolt and sending her stumbling backward until she landed in the grass.

  His own first run-in with the island’s big sheep had been far less dramatic, and at a safer distance, so he shouldn’t feel superior. But he did.

  It still wasn’t fair how Andi had just stumbled into being part of the team. But there she was, dealing out the cards, then leading the attack on Jon now that he and Mike were out of the game. Like it was women against men or something.

  Jeremy had worked for years to make sure he had every necessary credential. Dual masters in Fluid Dynamics and Advanced System Topology Modeling from Princeton—which he’d managed when only two years older than Miranda herself had earned her two masters degrees at twenty.

  And despite a dozen big-firm offers, he’d applied only to the NTSB, hoping that he might at least meet Miranda Chase someday. That he’d been assigned to her team was still the best day of his life.

  Whereas Andi? She’d been thrown out of the military—because of PTSD according to Mike, which meant honorably, but still. And while Jeremy had taken and aced every single course at the NTSB Academy, she’d completed less than half before she’d been assigned to Miranda’s team out of the blue.

  Keeping Captain Wu from edging into his skills area sucked.

  Ever since the sabotage and explosion of a CH-47F Chinook had almost killed the team on their second major crash investigation a year ago, he’d been preparing for when they’d investigate another helicopter crash. He’d spent much of his spare time since then studying their mechanics and aerodynamics so that he could step in when Miranda finally got called to investigate one. He’d made sure he knew more than Holly, which was hard, or Mike, which wasn’t.

  Nothing against Mike. He was the human-factors specialist so he knew very little about the aircraft themselves. Holly covered structures. His own niche was systems, and rotorcraft had a lot of those.

  Then they’d finally had their first major rotorcraft crash, and Andi had swooped in from the 160th Night Stalkers—the Army’s secret helicopter regiment—like some sort uninvited ringer for the opposing team.

  Now there she was, laughing with the group as if she actually belonged. Jon merely shrugged when Andi knocked him out of the game as well.

  Mike, who’d hovered to watch the round, thumped Andi on the shoulder, then came into the kitchen area.

  “Thinking mighty hard there, Jeremy.” Mike fetched his own beer. “Good thoughts, I hope.”

  Jeremy blinked. “Uh, not so much.”

  “Not good, my young Padawan. That’s not like you. Besides, thinking cheerful thoughts is much more fun.”

  Jeremy tried to remember back a year to when he, Mike, and Holly had become Miranda’s new team. He’d been…naive.

  “I was like some overeager puppy dog back then, wasn’t I?”

  “Back when? Oh, before our unasked-for trip on Taz’s Ghostrider? Yeah, you kind of were.” Mike ruffled his hair.

  Jeremy batted Mike’s hand aside, but Mike just laughed.

  “My, how our boy has grown.” Then he pulled out a big skillet. “Everything changed all at once, didn’t it?”

  Jeremy just grimaced.

  While Mike rubbed allspice, salt, and pepper over a row of chicken breasts, he had Jeremy slicing onions, carrots, and a red bell pepper. Before Jeremy was done, Mike had the chicken sizzling in oil and had begun doing something with thin-sliced jalapeno peppers in a boiling sugar-and-vinegar mix.

  He made it look so easy. But when Jeremy tried to remember Mike’s cooking later, it just turned into a blur.

  Sure enough, in moments Mike was wielding a knife like it was another piece of his arm. Minced onions and garlic were soon sizzling in a heavy pot.

  “Mexican rice.”

  Which just reminded him again of Taz. He didn’t even know where in Mexico she’d been from.

  “You never got closure,” Mike’s voice was suddenly serious. “That must be hard. When I lost my parents, at least I got to go to the funeral. I was nine, so what did I know, but it was a chance to say goodbye. Still, it’s been six months since she went down, Jeremy. Got to start letting go at some point.”

  Jeremy took the onion and garlic skins to the small composting crock. At least he knew how to do that.

  How to survive the memory of Vicki Cortez?

  How to not see her every time he closed his eyes—her plane impacting the desert not two miles from where his parachute had landed? How to not feel and hear the explosion, so violent that he’d felt the shockwave across the wide stretch of barren desert?

  That he couldn’t seem to do.

  2

  Jeremy sat in the second-story library with the lights off, watching the moonlight creeping across Miranda’s island. The deep couch faced southeast through the great half-circle window. It rose from knee-high until it curved nearly to the cathedral ceiling.

  The many radial panes seemed to offer different views of the world, despite the glass being well aligned. Slices of light slipped over the face of the bookcases, highlighting one section, then another. None clearly enough to read, but prior inspection had taught him what was there: a massive section about aircraft, a smaller one about codebreaking, and a collection of novels exclusively on those two topics. Sections on gardening, construction, and the wildlife that lived on her island were almost afterthoughts.

  Sitting here at night was like looking through the nose of a librarian’s starship. Except instead of just stars, the world lay painted in a moonlit monochrome of meaningless shapes.

  Sixty miles that way were his parents and sister. Asleep, perhaps dreaming. Another day of software design ahead of them.

  Tomorrow for him?

  It all depended on Miranda’s phone.

  If it didn’t ring, Holly would spend time checking over the metallurgy reports on the F-16 training accident. Mike would review interview tapes of a Bombardier Q400 that had smeared itself down the length of SeaTac airport’s runway, yet without a single fatality. For himself, he wanted to reprocess the audio files from the Q400’s flight recorders. There were background sounds he still wanted to identify but it would take some effort to extract.<
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  Jon would hover around Miranda distracting her, which never boded well.

  Andi would…he didn’t know what.

  If Miranda’s phone rang, there’d be a new accident. A new launch for the team. A new investigation to pile atop their on-going investigations.

  He wanted the answers. He and Miranda shared that; they both wanted them now.

  But for most incidents it was the slow, methodical study that removed variables and only eventually drove the focus toward the final solution. And even when the solution was found, there were the recommendations to consider to avoid it happening again.

  “I like watching the night from here when I can’t sleep.” Miranda’s voice was soft but it still surprised him. He hadn’t heard a single squeak from the plank flooring as she’d approached. Of course, she’d lived her whole life here and would know where every single one was.

  “Why can’t you sleep?”

  She settled on the far end of the couch, pulling a quilt over her lap. “There haven’t been five guests in the house at once since my parents died. I was thirteen. I can feel everyone like a weight. Not a bad weight, but it makes it hard to breathe.”

  “I’ve never lived alone. Living in the dorms at Princeton, I had a single the last year, but that doesn’t really count with thirty-four other people on the floor and communal dining.” Was that why he was sitting here? To feel what it might be like to be alone?

  No.

  But he also didn’t know why he was awake long enough to watch the Douglas fir moon shadows shift through thirty degrees—two full hours. The deer and sheep were bedded down. The only shadows he’d seen interrupting the still night had been a pair of owls. Not even a late-night ferry. And they were facing the wrong way to spot any cargo ships heading up the Haro Strait to Vancouver.

  “How could you stand it?” Miranda’s voice was disembodied in the darkness, almost as if he was asking the questions of himself.

  “The people? I never really noticed. Our family was close and always busy. We lived in a townhouse near the Microsoft campus. Lots of other kids: daycare, computer clubs and camps. I never thought about it much.”

  “Did you have a lot of friends?”

  Jeremy shook his head. “I skipped a couple of grades along the way. Not as many as you, but I didn’t fit in anywhere after that. Never even had a girlfriend. There was a girl who was really nice to me when I graduated high school. But that was kind of it until…” No. He wouldn’t finish that sentence.

  Miranda didn’t ask.

  Jeremy couldn’t even explain it to himself. He’d met Colonel Vicki Cortez less than thirty hours before her death. When Mike offered his sympathy, he didn’t know what to do with it; it had no logical place to connect. Yet she had done something to him, even if he couldn’t understand what.

  Miranda’s silence was thankfully just that.

  Together, they sat and watched the moon shift the shadows some more.

  3

  This was the way to travel.

  Taz sat on the tail ramp of the CH-47D Chinook helicopter and watched the night-black forest go by. She’d never thought to fly in a military aircraft again, even if it was just Army National Guard.

  The Chinook was the military’s primary heavy lifter rotorcraft. Sure, the Navy’s CH-53E Super Sea Stallion could lift more, but they also had a nasty habit of falling out the sky and killing another platoon of Marines.

  She’d take the twin-rotor Chinook any day. They almost never went down, unless they were shot. Even then, they were incredibly tough.

  Her hotshot wildfire crew had been called up from southern Oregon to a nasty burn on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. The firefight was in the rugged mountains above Port Angeles along the northernmost shore of the state. The achingly dry summer had turned the entire place into a giant tinderbox.

  It was late in the season, they’d been on the verge of cutting her and the other seasonal firefighters loose, but the Washington wilderness had decided it still had one good burn to go.

  They’d crammed into the team’s pair of ten-seat hotshot buggies and driven through the afternoon and evening to get to the town of Port Angeles at midnight. The ARNG had been waiting to immediately airlift her team of twenty to defend the Hurricane Ridge Visitor Center. The lone access road was on fire at either end. Airlift was the only way in or out.

  She rubbed at the calluses on her hands. Physical work was something she’d left behind for nineteen years after Basic Training. Even after five months with the hotshots, her hands ached. But it felt good to be doing something physical after all these years. No power plays. No national crises. Simply good, hard work.

  As the flight humped over the first ridge, the landscape glowed—lit from within by firelight. Bright smears of red and gold peeking through wind-torn rents in the obscuring smoke. Where the smoke hid the terrain, it was luminous with the raging fires it masked.

  The Chinook was so powerful that it didn’t have to claw to make the mile-high climb. It was as smooth a ride as a C-130 Hercules transport plane. I’m going this way.

  She liked its muscley attitude.

  So much of her life she’d been just that—the unstoppable force. At least in the halls and offices of the American defense system.

  Her life was so different now that she barely recognized it. For over a month after the Ghostrider crash had “killed” her, she’d just drifted north from Phoenix. Sleeping wild and seeing places she’d only ever heard of. The Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, Mesa Verde…she’d just played tourist.

  Taz had spent so much of her life on the move that sitting still didn’t work for more than a few hours behind the wheel. Picking up some decent hiking gear at a pawn shop in Flagstaff, she took to the hills and trails wherever she went. The farther she got out in nature, the better she felt.

  Chance had placed her in Southern Oregon at Pearsony Falls Park on the first day of the testing for the Rogue River Hotshots. One of the crew bosses laughed when she asked if she could join the test. Hard to begrudge him, she stood eight inches shorter and forty pounds lighter than either of the other women among the thirty hopefuls. Half the team were regulars, which meant there were only ten open spots. Didn’t matter to her, she was just looking for something new to do for a few days.

  She’d waited him out.

  The superintendent had shrugged as if it was no skin off his back if she wanted to join them for a bit of a workout.

  Tasia Vicki Flores had lasted about an hour into those tryouts. After she came in well ahead of the pack on the first hike, her old nickname of Taz resurfaced. But she was no longer the general’s Taser. It was a hundred percent her now.

  As for the physical testing, what had started out as an amusing diversion had turned into a brutal ten-day trial that had fit her down to her boots. Hiking a forty-pound pack across three miles in ninety minutes was about physical toughness, the kind she’d spent a month building up during her own explorations of the Sierra Nevada. Digging organic debris off a fireline in hour thirty-six was about mental toughness. Spending nights “coyote”—sleeping wild—was what she’d already been doing anyway.

  She earned her place, did the work to earn a Red Card, and became a seasonal wildland firefighter on a crew of twenty other hard-headed hotshots. One other woman made it through. The crew boss who’d laughed at her asked specifically to have her on his crew.

  You’re tenacious. Facing a fire, I like tenacious.

  For five months they chased burns up and down the hills until she was in the best shape of her life.

  And she belonged.

  Taz glanced around the Chinook helicopter’s cargo bay. Every one of the crew was more familiar than anyone had ever been in her life other than General JJ Martinez.

  She knew that Jeff had a husband in Sacramento who didn’t understand his need to fight fires half the year, but made it work. Jeff felt guilty all the time, calling fire his “evil mistress”, but this was his eighth season.

  Cla
re had been married twice, both times to firefighters, and had been well on her way to a third firefighter before deciding it would be better to go hotshot herself. First thing I’ve gotten right in years.

  Taz had slowly fabricated a past.

  A San Diego childhood.

  Living with a Lockheed Martin engineer in El Segundo, California, then DC, to explain how she knew so much about aircraft and the nation’s capital.

  Catching his cheating ass with a Congressional aide, resulting in her wandering road trip in her beater Corolla.

  It hadn’t held together all that well until she let slip a few words about a barely avoided court-martial. Of course, implying her fictitious lover’s trial—not the one she’d avoided herself by conveniently “dying” in the Ghostrider’s crash without ending up dead.

  She became a woman with a shadowy past, which actually made her story more acceptable to the rest of the crew. No one here to recognize Colonel Vicki Cortez. Outside the Pentagon, that wasn’t much of a worry.

  Yes, she’d take the present any day.

  4

  Miranda watched the night.

  She’d always found it soothing. Everyone asleep. No demands on her attention. The shadows and the quiet dark the only thing in her life that moved slowly enough to not totally derail her from her own thoughts.

  If Mother or Father had known about how many nights she’d spent here, they’d never said anything. Usually it was Tante Daniels who found her here in the mornings and shooed her back to her room with no one the wiser.

  There had been a stillness about her that Miranda had appreciated while growing up, even if she hadn’t understood it.

  And then, nineteen years ago, the world changed. Or, more accurately, her world changed.

  Tante Daniels, Miranda couldn’t even remember her not living on the island, had brought her here to this same couch.

  You’re about to turn eighteen, Miranda. There are things you need to know.

  Yes, that her parents had died five years ago, and the world they’d left behind was not one iota less confusing than it had been before their deaths.