Chinook

by M. L. Buchman

  She should have kept Tanya’s name instead of risking the change. She’d been trying to make sure no one looking for Tanya Roberts would find her. Instead, it was her own name that was putting her at risk. Not Vicki Cortez, but perhaps close enough to trigger the memory of her for one of the guys.

  “What can you tell us?”

  Taz just pointed down at the rotor blade.

  Andi sighed, “Kinda tells the whole story, doesn’t it?”

  Taz nodded, then realized she shouldn’t have. What would a hotshot know about the dynamics of a rotor failure on a CH-47D Chinook helo?

  “I saw a tree launch, you know.” She went for a little touch of Valley speak, softening her consonants as she did so. Just a gal from LA, fighting wildfires. Pay no attention here. “They can go up like a Roman candle. Saw this one shoot up at least three, four hundred feet. Pow! I was gonna say they were lucky they didn’t land in the fire, but I s’pose that lucky isn’t what ya’d call them.”

  “They never had a chance.”

  Taz just shook her head. Only the one—who’d possibly survived the equivalent of a twenty-six-foot, five-thousand-Newton-meter fall—might have lived long enough to die after a five-hundred-foot one.

  “We were too far away to see much more. The tree went up, then the helicopter came down,” she pinched her fingers almost together and held them up against the sky to show how far away and small it had been. “Need anything else from me? My crew will be waiting.”

  “Just your cell number, in case we need to reach you.”

  “That was a past life,” it had been one of her most useful tools working for the general: the ability to reach out and touch someone—hard. “Can’t stand the things now, always buzzing at you. But you can call the Rogue River Hotshots if you need me.” She still had Tanya’s phone, which hadn’t rung once in six months. Not a whole lot of people looking for her; too bad she hadn’t kept the name. Taz treated it like an anonymous burner phone.

  “Oh. Okay. Thanks for sticking around.”

  “Andi?”

  Taz recognized Jeremy’s call through the trees. He was a lot closer than he should be.

  “Well, see ya.” Taz headed off in the opposite direction before Andi could complain.

  Once she heard the two of them talking, she circled back. Jeremy had left her axe by the corpse. By the dirt on the blade, he’d used it to dig the slit trench that now paralleled the body. The hotshot in her gave him only middling marks for technique. It was crazy that she knew that now; it had no relation to her former life.

  She knew Jeremy would have some esoteric, long-winded, and yet highly logical reason for cutting it in the first place, but she had no idea what that might be.

  She picked up the axe, trying not to be aware of her hands overlapping his on the wood, and headed out at a fast trot. Wouldn’t catch her dead or alive in this neck of the woods again—ever.

  Once the Rogue River Hotshots broke for the season in the next few days, she’d be gone.

  But she couldn’t help looking back over her shoulder, long after the dead helo and the NTSB team were out of sight.

  13

  With the whole team’s help, Miranda had them carry the heavy section of rotor blade back to the helo. Though her own efforts would add little, she did what she could.

  Andi and Holly went back in search of the broken tree mentioned by the hotshot.

  The “cause of incident” was already determined, but this was an excellent chance to study the dynamics of a CH-47D Chinook’s crash.

  “These blades are a mess,” Mike set a compass and a ruler on a snapped-off section so that Jeremy would have the orientation of the segment as he photographed it. Then they moved to the next one.

  “Rotorcraft never die pretty.” Jon was making notes on his Air Force report form as if he already knew what the conclusion was and didn’t need the details.

  “This is the matching one,” Jeremy pointed at a two-foot-long piece sheared off at both ends.

  Nearby, a full-length rotor blade—originally thirty feet long, thirty-two inches wide, and three inches thick—had been tied into a knot. Another had been folded neatly like a letter, if only there was an envelope big enough.

  Miranda tried to imagine how long it would take to lick a seal. Assume one second to lick a standard Number 10 envelope. With a typical wetted area of approximately three-point-four square inches, a commensurately upscaled envelope would have six-point-eight square feet of wetted area and would require thirty-one minutes to lick. By which time, most of it would have dried. A different solution would be required, such as—

  Miranda forced her attention away from the math-and-mechanics puzzle and back to the folded rotor blade.

  Then she managed to jump her attention from the blade to the debris field of rotor blade pieces. Many were snapped into sections varying from a few feet to half a blade. They’d been scattered in a wide area around the helo’s final resting place.

  And finally she shifted her attention back to the primary crash site.

  Based on the indentation in the ground, it appeared that the fifty-foot fuselage had landed nose first. This was corroborated by the symmetrical pancaking of the cockpit.

  Which was about all that really remained of the aircraft.

  Unlike a helicopter with a main and a tail rotor, a twin-rotor Chinook didn’t crash from altitude so much as it shattered, then fell. This one was surprisingly intact. The cockpit, lower hull, and cargo deck were still mostly intact. The forward rotary-wing head remained attached, but lay in the middle of the mangled cargo deck. One of the engines and the rear rotor head had broken free, but lay mostly on the deck as well. The second engine had impacted the soil nearby, driving its tail deep into the organics.

  The rest of the main fuselage in bits and pieces, as well as two of the other three crew members, were scattered across a hundred meters of charred soils.

  There were no objects that would have fallen in such a way that she could calculate how far it had to fall for air friction, at an altitude of five thousand three hundred feet, to orient any remaining piece in a particular orientation.

  Miranda double-checked that she had the barometric pressure reading marked in her notebook in order to make an accurate calculation of air density—if she did eventually locate something that she could measure the freefall acceleration of.

  “Here we go,” Jeremy had finished photographing the matching broken section of the rotor after he and Mike had placed it close beside the longer blade element that Andi had spotted.

  “What are we looking at?” Jon knelt down with the rest of them.

  Miranda couldn’t make sense of Jon’s words. Was he asking if it was a rotor blade? No, that was too obvious.

  Couldn’t he see the common material deformation patterns commensurate with a powerful impact on the underside of the blade? That was equally obvious.

  Jeremy began explaining. “See the break patterns in the fiberglass skin? The tearing and spreading of the fibers underneath is more pronounced than on the upper side. Also notice the tearing pattern across the internal Nomex honeycomb—the same material that is used to make a hotshot’s fire-resistant shirt. The trailing-edge fairings are a sandwich of wire mesh for lightning strike protection. The fairing was shredded by a lateral force rather than a perpendicular force.”

  “So, the tree punched through the blade…”

  Jon’s hesitation lasted so long that Miranda had to finish the sentence for him. She hated the incompletion of a thought.

  “It punched through the forward quarter of the blade’s width,” one should be precise in such situations. “But the rotor was still spinning at two hundred and forty rpm. At twenty-one feet from the rotor head, the rotational speed of the blade at the point of impact was three hundred and sixty miles an hour. The rotor ripped forward, and the tree tore out through the back of the blade, including the fairing. We should be able to get an approximate idea of the tree’s size once we analyze—”
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  “Five ruddy inches,” Holly and Andi returned, dragging a ten-foot section of tree between them. “Look at the bitch, right there.”

  And Holly was right.

  The top of the tree had been broken off by some storm in the past by the look of the wood. A four-inch blunt tip was what had remained.

  Three feet along the shaft of the trunk, where it had expanded to five inches wide, the bark was torn away. Deep scars made in the underlying wood would match the metal deformation of the shredding rotor blade as it swung forward. It had struck far enough behind the tough leading edge of the blade that it had shredded the composite without snapping off.

  14

  Andi was the first to notice the loud roar coming up the valley.

  She supposed that after a dozen years flying rotorcraft, it was built into her bloodstream.

  Miranda looked up at her.

  Andi tipped her head to the southeast, then Miranda nodded. Not only had she heard it, but she too had identified it. Andi had been on this team for just a month but it kept right on getting better.

  Another Chinook. Probably out of Joint Base Lewis-McChord, which lay just eighty miles away. Perhaps come to help with the firefight.

  What she hadn’t expected was an all black Chinook with a refueling probe sticking forward, low on the fuselage.

  The Night Stalkers.

  Her old regiment had sent one of their highly modified MH-47Gs. They couldn’t be here to fight the fire. And there were no clearings in the burned-over forest big enough to land in, not even for a Night Stalkers pilot. But that wouldn’t stop them.

  Sure enough, the big helo came to a hover a hundred meters away from the crash. In seconds, they’d kicked out a long Fast rope, and four people slid down its length to the ground.

  They strode over with all of the confidence she now lacked. She hated that the PTSD meant that she no longer belonged. It sucked almost as badly as if she’d been the one impaled by the tree.

  But they wouldn’t find her wanting.

  She saluted them when they approached even if she was no longer in the military. It was too deeply ingrained to be denied.

  They returned the salute smartly, though the lead sergeant raised his eyebrows in question.

  “Captain Andi Wu, formerly of the 1st battalion of the 160th. Now NTSB. This is Miranda Chase, Investigator-in-Charge. You have five dead. Four here at the helo, one lying seventy-five meters to the northwest.”

  The sergeant was good. He turned and asked Miranda, “Any reason to delay recovery?”

  Miranda looked to Jeremy, who shook his head before she said there wasn’t.

  Andi didn’t know which of them was more impressive. Jeremy was twelve years Miranda’s junior, but seemed to know almost everything she did. Andi herself was seven years older than Jeremy, but she still found him a little unnerving to be around. She also had the distinct impression that he didn’t like her very much. She’d tried being nicer, with little success.

  The sergeant flagged two of his crew toward the woman who’d been thrown clear. Jeremy scooted ahead to show them the way.

  “Extractable?” The sergeant turned back to her. It was strange to be back in the world where minimum-required communication was the norm.

  Andi hadn’t inspected the bodies, but Holly answered the question.

  “Two crew chiefs, yes. Two in the cockpit will take some serious machinery. The entire nose frame was compressed back to, uh, pin them in their seats.”

  “Roger that.” And with no more fuss, he was on his radio.

  In under ten minutes, they had the three dead crew members winched up to the hovering helo. The two pilots were left pinned in their Chinook coffin.

  Then the hovering Chinook lowered a heavy cable down through the hellhole in the center of the cargo bay’s floor. Between the cable and their combined teams, the second engine and cargo ramp were stacked on the CH-47D’s open cargo bay. All of the parts of the rotor blades as well. That was all the main pieces, nothing else would need the heavy hoist of a Chinook to move.

  “A separate team will be dispatched to gather the rest of the debris,” the sergeant announced after a bit of radio work.

  When Miranda told them that she would need to further inspect the two adjacent rotor segments where the tree had impacted, they marked them carefully and loaded the section of tree trunk as well.

  “It will all be in a hangar at JBLM’s Gray Army Airfield.”

  After they wrapped a net over the whole thing so that it wouldn’t shed parts en route, the MH-47G lowered two more heavy cables fore and aft.

  Mike and Jeremy gasped in surprise when they saw what was happening. Even Holly raised her eyebrows.

  “Why are they surprised?” Miranda asked from close by her elbow.

  “Because most people don’t know that a Chinook can lift a Chinook. At least if one of them belongs to the Night Stalkers.” A normal Army Chinook couldn’t have done this, especially at this altitude, but the Night Stalkers’ MH-47G Block II wasn’t just some average heavy-lift helicopter.

  “But it’s just simple math.”

  Andi glanced over, but Miranda looked serious. “Are there any aircraft that you don’t know all of the operational specifications of?”

  Miranda grimaced. “I know very little about aircraft that predate my Sabrejet, which was one of the last built in 1958.”

  Andi watched the Night Stalkers attach the cargo hooks onto on the downed Chinook. Then they were calling instructions on the radio to take up the slack in each line.

  “Which means you still know more than most people, all the way back to the Wright Flyer.”

  “Well, that wasn’t really the beginning, if that’s the reference you were making. Before they flew the Wright Flyer in 1903 using Charlie Taylor’s engine, there was the 1899 Kite and the three Gliders between those. And they—”

  Andi giggled.

  “What?” Miranda turned from watching them ease the Chinook into the air. It might be the first time Miranda had looked her in the face. It hadn’t taken long to figure out that was something Miranda just didn’t do.

  There was a cloud of black ash as the downdraft from the hovering MH-47G blew across the area previously covered by the Chinook’s shattered frame.

  “I’m sorry to laugh, Miranda. But someday you’re just going to have to accept that when it comes to aircraft, you’re smarter than absolutely everyone around you.”

  “Oh.”

  She was silent for as long as it took the Night Stalkers crew chiefs to double-check the security of the cargo hook attachment points.

  Then the crew were winched aloft one by one on a lightweight rescue hoist.

  Finally, the crew chief sent her a sharp salute. “Captain.”

  She saluted him back. “Sergeant.”

  And he too was gone aloft.

  It felt good, even for that moment, to once again be acknowledged as a Night Stalker. As if she still belonged. As if she could still fly, which she didn’t dare try.

  Miranda maintained her silence as the MH-47G eased upward.

  There was a pause for the final balancing of the cables, then the deep roar of the big Lycoming T55 engines filled the sky as it eased the broken Chinook aloft.

  Everyone remained still and watched the spectacle of one Chinook carrying the other southward and away. Fading until they were two dots, then gone.

  The silence that was left seemed to echo.

  The fire had crossed the ridge to the east and the planes dropping water on it circled nowhere near their position.

  There was an uncertain bird call from high on one of the burned trees, perhaps asking after its favorite perch.

  “If I’m so smart,” Miranda whispered, “how is it that I don’t know how we’re getting off this mountain?”

  Andi bumped her shoulder against Miranda’s. “Because being wicked smart about aircraft doesn’t mean that you get to know everything.”

  15

  By the time a h
elo could be freed to return them from Hurricane Ridge to Port Angeles, it was late afternoon and Jeremy’s stomach was beyond growling. A hurried bowl of granola before sunrise was long gone. An energy bar for lunch simply didn’t fix that.

  Thankfully, the helo pilot was the same local who’d delivered them to the crash site.

  “Best fancy or best burger?” he’d asked at Jeremy’s question about places to eat.

  Jeremy didn’t even poll the others before saying they wanted the latter.

  So the pilot sent them to The Rail. It was just a mile or so from the airport, close by the Port Angeles waterfront.

  The building had the gambrel roofline of an old Dairy Queen.

  Inside, the ice cream parlor had been converted into pure pub: wooden walls, a long bar well stocked with microbrew taps, and a kitchen in the back pumping out awesome smells. It was quiet in the late afternoon, and they took a round table in the corner on the side opposite the bar.

  He went for the Porter: mushroom, red onion, a rich porter beer sauce, and topped with swiss. A pile of Buffalo-style wings and fried onion rings in the middle of the table as appetizers, and he was in heaven.

  The silence of a good meal descended for a moment.

  “Good to be off that damn little hillock,” Holly set aside her already half-eaten double Bacon Cheese Burger and was the first to break the silence. “’Minds me of this time me and my mates were out in the Simpson. That be a little dry spot up to Queensland way.”

  “Meaning it’s deep desert,” Mike laughed at her.

  Holly gave a happy shrug and was about to continue when a crowd burst in through the door.

  Even before he saw them, Jeremy could smell them. The sharp bite of fire smoke.

  “We done killed that sum-bitch blaze.”

  “Hell of a weenie thing to end a season on.”

  “Yeah, it saw us coming and just put its little ashes up in the air and we drove all the way in.” There was a round of happy laughter and high fives at that.