Chinook

by M. L. Buchman

  Holly’s glare couldn’t be darker if she’d shot Jeremy’s dog. The woman was starting to seriously piss her off.

  “I don’t see how any of these could compete with modern aircraft if this deck is meant to be even a partially realistic game. The F-86 Sabrejet? It ruled the Korean War, but the MiG-17s wiped them off the board at the beginning of Vietnam.” She might not be able to fly planes, but any Air Force officer knew their outfit’s airborne history.

  Mike was smiling at her.

  Taz sighed. “Alright, whose toes did I step on this time?”

  Mike pointed at Miranda, who had pushed back enough from the table to look at her toes while Jon rolled his eyes. It looked as if she was making sure no one was stepping on them. It had to be a joke, except no one was laughing. Jon just rolled his eyes and sighed.

  Taz turned back to Mike and raised her eyebrows in question.

  “Hers is parked at our Tacoma office hangar.”

  Taz studied the card for a moment, then turned it to face Miranda. “You fly one of these? Oh, wait, you mentioned that at Port Angeles. Sorry.”

  Miranda nodded.

  “How many of these are still airworthy?”

  “That’s uncertain. My best estimate is twenty-eight of the original nine thousand eight hundred and sixty are still flyable.”

  “Globally?”

  “Globally, though several are in uncertain states being restored in museums.” Miranda didn’t appear upset; she just answered the questions.

  Taz tucked the card carefully back into the deck and decided it was time to put her mouth firmly in storage.

  Mike swept up the deck and began shuffling.

  Then he began spinning out cards one at a time, faceup in front of each person at the table without looking at them again. She made a mental note to never play poker with him.

  Miranda received her F-86 Sabrejet.

  Then, going clockwise away from Jon, Andi got the S-97 Raider Rotorcraft.

  At Taz’s—silent—question, she explained. “Former Night Stalker. I did a lot of the testing on this aircraft,” she tapped her finger on it. Her grimace said there was a dark story there.

  Mike dealt himself a Mooney M20V, the little four-passenger prop plane that Miranda had said she owned.

  “I fly that a lot for the team, though less since Cessna gave Miranda the Citation M2 jet. It’s also down at our Tacoma hangar. It’s a quick, friendly plane, and not overly complicated.”

  Taz wondered if he was underselling himself. And why?

  He dropped a Russian Mi-28 Havoc helicopter in front of Holly, and Taz couldn’t stop the laugh.

  Holly’s grimace was even darker than Andi’s. “Former SASR, the Australian chaps. Twelve years in. Mostly in the business of creating havoc.”

  That sobered Taz right up. No wonder Holly had been so damned fast in the knife fight. Over too quickly to even be called a fight.

  Mike studied Taz herself for a long moment, shuffled the deck, and spun out a card facedown.

  She scooted it up as carefully as the hole cards in a game of Texas Hold ’em.

  Holly tried to lean in, but Taz kept it shielded.

  An F-35 Lightning II.

  She tossed it to the table faceup in disgust. “Are you kidding me? These things are ridiculous!”

  Mike’s smile was easy. “Stealthy. New generation. High flying. Powerful. Fighters that are lethal as hell when they’re working, which they will eventually.”

  “Stupidly expensive.” She ignored his implications that she was a malfunctioning aircraft, too overdesigned to do anything properly. The rest of it was uncomfortably accurate, at least in relation to her past self. She’d much rather be something sweet and reliable like the F-14 Tomcat—even if it hadn’t been all that great a design.

  “Sure, they might be a little high cost to run alongside,” he was still talking about her, of course. He slid across another card facedown. “Would you prefer this one?”

  An F-22 Raptor. America’s other fifth-gen stealth fighter jet.

  An alpha predator of the sky.

  Without cares for anyone else. Even forcing Jeremy to help her kill.

  She placed the card firmly back on the table, facedown, and slid it back to him.

  “I’m good with this one,” she rapped a knuckle on the F-35. As if she had a choice.

  “What’s he?” she hooked a thumb at Jeremy.

  Mike took the top card and spun it across the table to land in front of Jeremy. When he’d shuffled the cards, Mike had stacked the deck: two cards for her and then Jeremy’s.

  She looked at the card.

  “The Chinook? Because he just investigated the crash of one?”

  “Solid. Fastest in its class. Genius design. Insanely reliable. Can lift huge loads off Miranda’s shoulders when she needs him to.”

  “Finally, a metaphor that I fully understand,” Miranda sounded quite pleased.

  “But all I do is—” Jeremy’s protest was cut short by Miranda’s hand on his arm. For some reason that gesture surprised several of the people at the table.

  She glanced at Mike, who whispered, “Miranda is a high-functioning autistic. She rarely touches others. And never touch her lightly—it screws her up something fierce.”

  Taz should have recognized the patterns. She’d worked with any number of engineers who were definitely on the spectrum, but were particularly good at what they did. Seeking them out on the more messed-up aircraft development projects provided a lot of useful answers because they were crap at lying. Unlike all of their politically savvy bosses seeking to protect the cash flow of their Air Force contracts.

  “The metaphor is completely accurate, Jeremy,” Miranda assured Jeremy as she patted his arm.

  Again, Taz had to readjust her thinking.

  Out of this intensely competent crew, Jeremy was the one Miranda relied on the most? No mere genius cyber-geek could earn that, especially as Jeremy had not an ounce of guile in his blood.

  He really was something special. In ways that she herself didn’t understand. Or maybe some crucial gap in her upbringing and personality couldn’t understand.

  Maybe the F-35 Lightning wasn’t such a bad fit after all. What ways was she herself malfunctioning beyond the ones that she could see?

  Mike waited until the others were explaining some of the nuances of the various card metaphors to Miranda before he turned back face Taz. All of his easy-going manner since the moment they’d met at The Rail in Port Angeles, and all through dinner, was gone.

  “He’s one hundred percent reliable,” his voice was soft and his expression was dead serious, “unless someone breaks one of his rotor blades.”

  Holly might threaten her with physical destruction.

  Taz understood that.

  Was ready and willing to take a physical challenge.

  But unlike Holly, who threatened to confront her with force, Mike had confronted her with Taz’s own past actions of how she’d hurt Jeremy by manipulating him.

  A slap more painful than when she’d smashed Mike to the Ghostrider’s deck by slamming her sidearm against his face.

  Mike wasn’t some friendly little Mooney. He hadn’t been underselling himself. She’d been right about his attempt at misdirection by laying down the M20V Mooney card.

  Once she’d recovered her breath, Taz took his deck, spread it until she spotted the card she wanted, and tossed it down in front of him.

  The A-10C Thunderbolt II, the Warthog, the close air support specialist. It was the master of the ground attack—flying low, often below the radar, and protecting the troops like no other.

  He glanced down at the card—then smiled.

  But he didn’t deny the change.

  28

  “No! No! No! No!” Taz shoved back deeper into her seat. “No one said anything about landing at an Air Force base.”

  Like a damned idiot, she’d climbed aboard Miranda’s jet after a long, sleepless night, resigned to take whatever else
was coming to her. No matter what she thought of in a locked bedroom last night, she couldn’t figure out how to undo what she’d done to Jeremy six months ago before she’d died.

  The flight had been so short that she was able to pretend the view out the window was too interesting to allow for conversation. It was beautiful. Puget Sound was a land of water, islands, mountains, and the extended metropolis of Seattle.

  And she remembered none of it.

  That was before they came in to land, and she saw the neatly arranged lines of black-painted Chinook and Black Hawk helicopters parked on the tarmac. The Army’s 160th Night Stalkers were located at only three bases in the country, and Joint Base Lewis-McChord was the only one west of Kentucky.

  Her seat in the group of four faced backward, so she hadn’t even seen it coming.

  “Technically, we’re landing at Gray Army Airfield in Fort Lewis. The Air Force base is three miles that way,” Jeremy sat knee-to-knee with her and pointed off to the right.

  “They’ll know me here!”

  The tiny Citation M2 jet compressed around her until she felt it crushing her.

  “Good!” Major Jon Swift called from the last seat on the plane. Somehow it was him, not her who was relegated to sit in the worst spot of all.

  Mike flew up front with Miranda. Holly, Andi, and Jeremy completed the four-seat group. The only open spot left was the fold-down cushion atop the lavatory behind a half-partition at the rear. Somehow, Miranda’s boyfriend was more ostracized by the team than she herself was—which was definitely saying something. Something she’d wager that Miranda didn’t understand at all and Jon understood only too well.

  Holly twisted around enough to glare back at Jon. “Shut yer yap, Jon! Stop being a bloody yobbo or I’ll be making you a seat back in the cargo compartment. Might have to fold you up some to get you in there.”

  “Yobbo?” Taz hadn’t heard that one before.

  “Tosser. Fuck knuckle.” Holly was on a roll.

  Taz wondered how many words Strine had for calling someone an idiot.

  “Five coldies short of a six pack, you wanker.” Apparently quite a few.

  Even when she herself had been facing down the very worst of the Pentagon elite for General Martinez, she’d never have considered going to a base insult. Yet Holly seemed to make them work for her.

  “He’s going to report me soon, you know that?”

  A bright squeal of tires on the runway was the only thing that announced they were down; it was a remarkably smooth landing. Come to think of it, last night’s on the island’s grass runway had been equally effortless. For a moment, Taz wondered what someone like Miranda Chase considered to be a “fully qualified” pilot. She’d ridden a lot of C-21A Learjets with the general, piloted by USAF pilots, who only rarely made such a perfect landing.

  Holly sent another scowl toward the rear. “If he’s dumb enough to, V— What the hell should I call you, anyway?”

  “My chosen name is Tasia Vicki Flores.” Not that it would matter for long. “I’ll answer to any of them.”

  “Okay, Taz it is,” Holly’s grin was in happily evil mode.

  Taz shrugged. She’d answer to that too. Holly’s little games didn’t faze her in the slightest.

  “So, Taz, if Jon is,” she raised her voice much louder than the reversing engines, “actually that stupid, then we’ll deal with it then.”

  “Why aren’t you turning me in?”

  In answer, Holly fired a punch sideways across the aisle without bothering to look. It caught Jeremy hard on the arm as Miranda turned the jet onto one of the taxiways.

  “Ow! Hey! What was that for?”

  Taz didn’t need to ask.

  Holly had actually meant what she’d said yesterday. She was withholding judgement, and possible execution, until Taz somehow made things square with Jeremy.

  Since every idea she’d come up with last night had been even dumber than telling Major Jon Swift to make his phone call, that was going to be a long hold. Except Holly didn’t strike her as the patient sort.

  She definitely needed a subject change.

  Taz looked at Andi and waved a hand toward the helicopters they were taxiing past.

  “So you’re going to be right at home here. Night Stalker city.”

  “So not!” Andi shuddered.

  Taz almost laughed, assuming she was fooling around. Then she noticed Andi’s clenched jaw and her tight-fisted hands resting in her lap. Couldn’t she say anything without alienating her jailkeepers?

  “Besides,” Holly broadened her accent, “unlike Jon, my jurisdiction is a little thin on the ground here in your United States of Nonsense. Even we Aussies, with our penal colony heritage, do a better job of getting along than you lot.” She pointed a finger at Jeremy again, who raised a fist defensively.

  Holly must have great peripheral vision as she grinned wickedly. Or perhaps she simply knew how Jeremy would react.

  “I’m no more interested in playing stool pigeon than to be inspecting an emu’s arsehole. I am interested in helping out my little buddy here—though he’s way taller than Andi and you, but he’s still my young Padawan.” Then the Strine went away. “If Jeremy needs to talk to you, I want to make sure he has a chance.”

  “Well, that’s decent of you.”

  “And if my wee pal…” her accent snapped back into place, “…needs a body to have a real funeral, I’ve a mate with a lovely float of salties living out back of his cattle station. That’s crocodiles to you.”

  “I know what salties are, thanks so very much.”

  When the jet stopped, Taz rose and left the cabin first.

  No question but this day was only going to keep getting worse; time to see just how far down it could go.

  “Nice landing,” she called into the small cockpit. Miranda at least had seemed to be on her side.

  “Um, okay.” Miranda was reading down a checklist and barely seemed to hear her.

  Or not.

  29

  Jeremy had slept on the couch of Miranda’s second-floor library again.

  He’d half-hoped that Miranda would join him once more; half-feared that Taz would.

  Neither had.

  All he wanted today was to lose himself in the crash investigation. There really was no need to pursue the CH-47D’s demise further, but Miranda had said it would be a good opportunity for them all to brush up their rotorcraft skills. She’d arranged for talks from the Army mechanics who’d been responsible for the ground maintenance of the Chinook helicopter. He loved that Miranda always went right to the primary source.

  But when he entered the hangar at Gray Army Airfield on the south side of the sprawling JBLM base, all he could see was the crumpled helicopter flopped onto the immaculate concrete.

  As the rest of the team, even Taz, moved in to inspect some detail or other, all he could see was the shattered helo.

  That and the playing card Mike had dealt him last night.

  He was the crashed Chinook.

  None of his systems were functioning correctly.

  It was a given that he wasn’t smooth around women, but he hadn’t even said “Good morning” to Taz. Not that she’d tried to talk to him last night or this morning either. The brief moment that he’d held her outside The Rail pub had consoled neither of them. It just reminded him of the past, and she’d probably been thinking about that big firefighter she’d hugged in the bar.

  He wished he’d never seen her again. Life would be so much simpler if she was still dead. Or if he believed she was.

  Instead, he was a crashed helicopter, and she was the finest jet that modern technology could build. Sleek, powerful, and in a whole different class than fifty-year-old rotorcraft designs—no matter how good they were at their jobs.

  Andi got to be the new stealth S-97 Raider, and he was a Chinook—like the salmon they’d eaten last night. Thoroughly dead.

  The pair of crew chiefs who arrived to lead them through the Chinook’s systems loo
ked as if they wanted to barf.

  Right. This had been their aircraft. They’d probably been friends with the crew.

  He felt a little better that someone was having a worse day than he was.

  Then he felt awful for feeling better because of that.

  30

  “You weren’t kidding!”

  “I think this is where I say, I told you so!” Drake only had to watch Lizzy’s face to know she was in heaven.

  She dragged him down into a kiss that confirmed the assessment.

  They were at JBLM AWE. The Joint Base Lewis-McChord Airshow and Warrior’s Expo was one of the finest military airshows he’d ever been to. No vendors hounding his heels to talk about the last strategic and tactical innovations, or Block III upgrades to existing aircraft, or “special” projects that just needed a few billion dollars in funding to make them happen.

  AWE was about the men, women, and machines that made the military tick.

  A hundred thousand civilians and servicepeople would come through here in the next two days, and, for today at least, it was all he and Lizzy were going to be—two civilians on the last day of their honeymoon.

  JBLM was the fourth largest military base in the US, and also in the world. Located in the Pacific Northwest, it was a major base for reaching the entire Pacific Rim. Most of it was hidden from view: massive training areas buried in the thick Douglas fir forests. But McChord Field itself was still a standout. When they put on a show, it wasn’t some neat little collection of jets.

  Within the roped-off area, so that people could get up close and personal with them, were the big three transporters: a C-130 Hercules, a C-17 Globemaster III, and the monster of them all, a C-5 Galaxy. Drake was amused. Just to make everyone feel small, himself included, an additional pair of C-17s and another monstrous C-5 sat just beyond the rope line as if they had nothing better to do at the moment than look imposing.

  There was a line of rotorcraft, rescue vehicles, a B-1B bomber—he always forgot how damn big those things were—and numerous smaller displays spread across the parking area.