Raider

by M. L. Buchman

  Of all of their investigations over the last year, only two had traced to human factors—one stating it was his fault from the outset. It left his main role being little more than an intern for the other three team members.

  The only definitive finding in the whole investigation had been an unending supply of frozen salmon scattered over a half mile of ice and snow. The pilots who ran them up to the site each day made a point of taking a couple coolers’ worth back on each trip. He himself had a pair of massive twenty-five pounders tucked away in the freezer at the house for the next time he fired up the barbeque.

  Nope, Mike just couldn’t make the dual-error scenario fly. There were none of the telltale signs to indicate that was at all likely. The fault had to be with the planes.

  “They shouldn’t have collided,” Miranda spoke for the first time since the whole review had begun.

  “You didn’t find even one thing wrong with the aircraft?”

  Miranda shook her head, “All damage that we observed could be directly tied to the collision itself. A team will be performing analyses on what was recovered, but I do not anticipate metallurgy or deeper analysis to reveal anything else.”

  Mike sighed. Which left the Demon of Fickleness pointing directly at him. He’d take the Fairy Godmother of Randomness any day of the week.

  2

  Miranda hated this.

  There were accidents that were going to forever be classified as “No cause determined.”

  Sometimes the plane was never found. This only happened once every year or so, and was rarely dramatic enough to make the news. Thankfully, a loss like that of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 was otherwise unheard of.

  Occasionally an airplane was unrecoverable despite knowing its location. Early in her career, she’d investigated a flight that had ended up in the bottom of a deep Arctic lake. No question about the location, because of the few pieces that had floated to the cold surface. She still remembered the sharp scent of chilled pine that had pervaded the remote lake as a fishing guide had motored her back and forth across a surface so still and reflective that it looked like the sky continued down into the dark water. A seat cushion, a teenage girl’s gym bag, a disposable coffee mug.

  There’d been numerous pilot errors in weather judgment and load planning. The accumulated factors had so clearly indicated human error that no one had been willing to bear the expense of recovering the aircraft itself.

  But to have the aircraft, both of the aircraft, available, and still have no clear direction of investigation was…

  Miranda pulled out her personal notebook while the other three continued arguing. She flipped to the emotions page.

  Negative category.

  She began scanning the emojis pasted there and their labels.

  Irritated? No. Too frowny.

  Not angry. Too red-cheeked.

  Irksome! She tried the expression herself, squinting with just one eye, and one cheek pulling a straight-line mouth to just one side.

  Yes, irksome was a good word to describe what she was feeling.

  She tucked the notebook away and contemplated Jeremy’s list still on the screen. He’d done his usual, very thorough job.

  “If I can’t solve this…”

  “If you can’t solve it, no one else could, Miranda. You know that, don’t you?” Mike was the only one sitting close enough to overhear her worry.

  Did she know that?

  Miranda tried to judge Mike’s smile to see if he was joking.

  No. He didn’t appear to be.

  To calm herself, she closed her eyes and did a round of “box” breathing. Four breaths. Count of four in. Hold for four. Count of four out.

  The last exhale of the last breath was jarred out of her by the sudden ringing of her phone.

  It was a special ring that she’d programmed for Jill at the NTSB.

  It began as a low whine, a TF-39 jet engine winding up from pre-start. She’d made the recording herself quite close to a C-5B Galaxy transport, the same model as her first-ever military crash investigation. It rapidly grew to unnerving, a reminder to answer it quickly.

  They all knew the sound of that ringtone. Mike’s groan was emphatic. Jeremy’s shoulders sagged. The team was exhausted and really deserved a break. She didn’t feel much better.

  “This is Miranda Chase speaking.”

  “Hello, Miranda Chase speaking,” Jill always greeted her that way. Always cheerful and with a ready laugh, though Miranda occasionally thought that she herself might be the target of the latter more than others. Or maybe that upbeat attitude was the reason that Jill ran the NTSB’s launch desk. “We have a launch for you.”

  Holly flopped sideways on the couch clutching her throat with both hands as if she was choking. Then she went so suddenly lax that Miranda was afraid she might have actually hurt herself.

  Mike poked her in the ribs, at which point Holly flinched, then batted his hand aside. “Leave me alone. I’m dying here.”

  She wasn’t dead. That was good.

  “Are there any other teams available?”

  The others looked at her in shock, she was fairly sure it was shock. Admittedly, it wasn’t like her to turn down a launch for any reason.

  “Sorry, Miranda. This is classified military. Rafe is the only other one with sufficient clearance and his team is presently in the Florida Everglades being chased by alligators.”

  “Why is he being chased by alligators?”

  “Commuter flight went down there. Alligators have this thing about crash investigators; they think we’re extra tasty.”

  “Oh,” Miranda would have to be careful to watch out for that in the future, though she was unsure why an NTSB team member would be more, or less for that matter, tasty than a crash victim. She’d never known alligators were so discerning. Was that a Crocodilia order-level trait, or was there a family-level taste differentiation between Alligatoridae and Crocodylidae?

  “Besides, it was a by-name request for you and your team. That’s all I have other than a destination.”

  When Jill told her where, Miranda could only sigh. Yes, it was a launch she couldn’t turn down.

  Even as she looked up, a sleek business jet swooped by the office windows to land on the runway. It was the first aircraft to use the runway since the rest of the team’s arrival an hour ago. She did like the solitude of Tacoma Narrows Airport.

  The touchdown was good. The pilot’s timing was impeccable.

  3

  Mike dragged himself out of the office, through the security door, and into the hangar. He really didn’t feel up to flying. Miranda’s Mooney was fast, but it was still a four-hour slog of a flight to Las Vegas. And the landing would be after dark.

  Despite sleeping in and having lunch, he just didn’t feel up to it.

  Last night’s flight from Alaska to Gig Harbor, Washington, had been a tricky six-hour haul, and he’d only recently earned his instrument rating. There hadn’t even been a convenient road to follow from Anchorage to Juneau, for refueling, then southward to Washington State. Just a dark, jagged shoreline lost in low clouds for most of the route.

  Still, he’d flown the Mooney a lot over the last year since Miranda had lent it to him. He’d come to love the tough little plane.

  It was the height of cool after all.

  The fastest single-engine, piston-powered production plane had spooked him at first. But as their investigation team had been launched time and again throughout the western US, he’d grown accustomed to its immense power.

  The only other plane in the hangar was Miranda’s 1958 Sabrejet. The old, solo-pilot fighter jet was her own usual form of transport, capable of briefly cracking Mach 1. At just under the speed of sound, it moved her around the country at three times the speed he could manage.

  His six-hour flight last night had taken her barely two.

  He’d envy her the extra four hours’ sleep she’d gotten on her private island in northern Washington if he didn’t know better.
She’d probably gotten four hours less than anyone else. By the time the three of them managed to drag themselves into the hangar office, her jet had been neatly parked in the hangar beside the Mooney. The engine was fully cool when he’d come in. She’d probably arrived with the dawn and they found her working hard at her teak rolltop desk.

  Her zippy jet always left him feeling a step behind.

  The thing he really wasn’t up for today was having Holly and Jeremy in the Mooney’s tiny cabin for the next four hours badgering him to declare the cause of the Alaska collision as pilot error.

  Miranda crossed to the Sabrejet. But rather than starting the preflight, she opened a small service hatch and withdrew her investigation field pack and her personal go-bag. Then she caressed the jet along the side of its smooth aluminum nose like she was petting it goodbye.

  She might think it was a pet, but it had always looked a little vicious to him. The brushed aluminum plane looked like an artillery shell with wings and a tail—shining, even in the hangar’s shadows. The jet engine’s air intake made the nose a black hole rather than an arrow point. Six machine gun ports around the inlet, patched over with oval plates, were still a clear reminder that this had been a major weapon of war in both Korea and the early days of Vietnam.

  But if she was petting it goodbye, maybe she was coming with them in the Mooney.

  That would be awesome.

  At a knock on the hangar’s closed door, he turned and opened the personnel door beside the big slider.

  “I have a delivery for a Ms. Miranda Chase.” The man didn’t look like a FedEx guy, but what did he know.

  Miranda came over and signed some paperwork, then accepted a key.

  She thanked him and the man was gone.

  “New car?”

  Miranda peeked outside through the door. “No.”

  Intrigued, he followed her when she stepped through carrying her gear.

  And stopped dead in his tracks.

  A Cessna Citation M2 business jet was parked immediately outside their main hangar door. A high T-tail with a jet engine low to either side. Low wing. Four windows ran along the cabin in addition to the sweeping cockpit windows. It looked like it was racing madly rather than sitting still. The long sleek aspect was emphasized by the red-and-gold racing stripes down the length of the charcoal fuselage. It even had those cute little up-turned tips on its wings as if it was smiling at him.

  “Miranda! What the hell?”

  “What?” She opened a rear cargo door and placed her packs inside.

  “You bought a new jet?”

  “I was going to, because it would be more convenient if our whole team could move together. But Citation wanted me to consult on design and safety procedures for their next series of aircraft. They gave me this jet as a familiarization and test bed.”

  “Like a loan?”

  She handed him the piece of paper from the delivery agent. It was a certificate of title, with her name as sole owner.

  Mike grabbed her and gave her a big hug.

  He kept it brief and wasn’t surprised when Miranda didn’t return it. Her autism didn’t make that likely. A year ago he’d never even have been able to hug her at all. He did let her go quickly but he’d been unable to stop himself.

  “What?” She looked up at him in surprise. She was the most unassuming woman. Miranda might barely weigh a hundred pounds and have the fashion sense of a field hand, but it didn’t make her any less amazing.

  “You are not only an absolutely brilliant boss but you absolutely have the best toys.”

  “It’s not a toy. It’s a jet,” she answered with her perfect logic.

  “Trust me, it’s both.”

  When she squinted at him, he could only laugh. “Need a copilot?”

  “No. It’s certified for a single pilot. I have the CE-525 Type Rating, which covers the 525 series of Citation jets, including the M2.”

  “Okay,” he often forgot to keep his questions very precise for Miranda. “Would it be okay if I flew in the right seat with you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Wonderful. Thanks so much.” Copilot seat on a jet was something he’d always wanted to try. As a complete—and major—bonus, it would spare him riding in the main cabin with Holly and Jeremy, and being harangued for the whole flight. He slipped his own pack in the rear cargo hold.

  Holly was next out the door. It was hard to tell if she was unimpressed or just had chill down to a science.

  “Nice,” was her only comment before she moved to stow her pack and go-bag in the nose section’s forward cargo hold.

  While Jeremy went through a dozen stages of geeky enthusiasm, Mike followed Miranda around the plane, reading off the preflight checklist for her.

  When they continued inside, it definitely had that new car smell.

  Seriously amazing.

  4

  As copilot, Mike had been about as useful as a VW Beetle at a NASCAR race. Shuttling their NTSB team around in the Mooney, he’d recovered all of his latent piloting skills and then some.

  Or so he’d convinced himself.

  Miranda’s new plane was in some other weird, science fiction category.

  Instead of dials and a nice little LCD nav screen like the Mooney, everything here was electronic. Each pilot had a large central screen just packed with information about flight attitudes, engine performance, and flight paths. A central screen in the middle of the console between the pilots could be set to show terrain, weather, airport details, and probably the going price of jet fuel sorted by airport, along with any recent interstellar space launches.

  Everything was controlled by a conveniently placed menu touchpad, one for each pilot, with more options than the little Mooney had controls—total. And most of those options had submenus.

  Miranda only occasionally looked out the windshield. She didn’t need to. The jet was feeding her far better information than mere eyes could ever achieve. Even the radar screen fed information about each passing flight’s altitude, course, and speed.

  The twin-engine Citation M2 jet had rushed them up to forty-one thousand feet instead of his normal ten-thousand-foot cruise altitude. From up here there wasn’t anything helpful to see anyway, just pretty blue sky and fluffy clouds far below. Even the horizon was just a suggestion from up here—the instruments were all the reference there was.

  They flitted south so fast that he felt as if they were sitting still, and Miranda had somehow forced the Earth to spin beneath them.

  Mike spent the whole trip down reading the manuals that Miranda had loaded onto his tablet. He didn’t feel much smarter for all his effort. All he really understood by the end of the flight was how to control all the menu options on his screen.

  They’d been to Groom Lake before, at the heart of the Nevada Test and Training Range. The airport, built on the dry lake’s salt-pan bed, shimmered in the late afternoon heat.

  They’d been here for their very first investigation as a team. His entire world had changed in the last year in too many ways to think about. He’d been—

  His thoughts definitely needed a subject change.

  He waited until they were down, off the runway, and taxiing toward the main terminal before he spoke. In a craft like this, you definitely didn’t distract a pilot during landing.

  “Is that what it’s like flying your Sabrejet?” Mike also felt completely out of place due to the two-and-a-quarter-hour flash across so much of the country. It was so much more visceral from the cockpit.

  Miranda blinked at him in surprise, as if she’d forgotten he was there.

  “No. This aircraft is far slower, four hundred and four knots maximum cruise compared with six hundred and seventy when I’m riding the edge of the sound barrier in the F-86 Sabrejet. You barely have to be a pilot to fly this plane.”

  Mike was about to protest that you’d have to be more of a pilot than he was, but thought better of it. He liked being allowed to sit up here with her.

  “Th
e Sabrejet may have been the first fighter jet in history to have an autopilot, but its capabilities are quite simplistic. From the moment I line up this jet on the runway, I can literally program it to takeoff, fly, and autoland in zero-zero conditions—if the airfield is CAT IIIC equipped, which many now are. I barely feel as if I’m flying.”

  Zero-zero was when the cloud ceiling literally touched the ground and the visibility ahead was nonexistent, or so close to nonexistent that it would be impossible to react fast enough if there was a problem.

  Mike tried to imagine letting a plane land itself—without being able to see the runway, perhaps even once you were on it. It was a very unnerving thought. Maybe it would be better if he just didn’t know, instead riding in the four passenger seats with Holly and Jeremy in the future.

  “However, there’s more to why I wanted this plane than the convenience of being able to have the whole team with me from the start. I also felt that it would be good to have a more personal experience of modern avionics and flight systems. This Citation M2’s design and avionics package is sixty-two years newer than my Sabrejet’s—which was actually designed seventy-three years ago. A lot has happened in that time.”

  From anyone else, that would be a wry observation, even a joke. From Miranda Chase, it was simply a fact.

  Mike almost asked what she’d learned, but knew that could well turn into a multi-hour explanation that he only had a moderate likelihood of understanding, and no chance of interrupting.

  Besides, there was a crash. He’d learned not to sidetrack Miranda’s focus with ill-timed idle questions. Still, he’d like to know, and made a mental note to ask her the next time they were just hanging around at the office in Tacoma, Washington. Not that they were doing much of that lately.

  Their team maintained a slightly alarming launch rate, which left little time for just hanging out anywhere.

  5

  “Excuse me, who are you?”