Raider

by M. L. Buchman

  Other than the fact that there wasn’t one.

  He wanted to hug her goodbye, but it was one thing too many to deal with.

  There is no crash.

  But her job was to investigate crashes and prevent crashes. Not to watch a flight to see…

  Miranda knew she was in churn but—as always—couldn’t think of how to break out of the pattern when she was in it.

  Then, just when she thought she might have a grasp on one corner of it…

  “Let’s just go down to Hangar 33B,” General Thomas had waved toward the building standing all alone a mile down the field. “We’re using that as an operations center for the test flights and support teams. The commander of the Night Stalkers is flying in. We already have three Sikorsky manufacturer reps in attendance. As well as nine other reps overseeing different aspects of the testing regimen.”

  Group dynamics.

  No. No. No. No!

  Each would insist that any problems during testing weren’t their element—just as Holly, Jeremy, and Mike had been a few hours ago. So much noise with no sign of a possible rational solution.

  If a problem arose, General Electric would say, “Not my engines.”

  “Not the weapons or navigation systems,” Raytheon would be sure to insist.

  Collins Aerospace would defend their helmets, and so on.

  And Hangar 33B!

  It hurt to even look at the building’s outline in the descending darkness.

  Yes, the disastrous MQ-45 Casper drone had been flown out of that hangar.

  But it was also where she’d found out her parents were not who she’d thought they were. It made sense that they’d lied to her about their jobs—they had turned out to be in the CIA, after all—but even now, a year after the Casper mission and twenty-four years after their deaths, Hangar 33B was not a place she wished to revisit.

  In Hangar 33B there would be reminders of—

  Mike rested a hand lightly on her arm.

  He knew she couldn’t tolerate being lightly touched.

  Intensely, horribly distracting.

  Contact that was there but wasn’t there.

  Yet it was, impossibly, a relief from the former churning of her thoughts.

  When he tightened his grip to something more tolerable, Miranda realized he’d prompted Holly to speak with the general.

  “If we’re supposed to be independent observers, then shouldn’t we bloody well be independent? Not hanging out with that lot.”

  When Helen refused, Holly had begun demanding that they roll the M2 jet right back out of the hangar.

  “No,” Miranda managed to whisper to Mike. “I couldn’t fly right now.”

  “Don’t worry. You won’t have to.”

  She didn’t believe him at first, but she should have known better. Mike was never wrong about people.

  Within minutes General Thomas agreed to let them use her office in the main administration building to monitor the tests.

  Miranda wasn’t sure if she’d ever been more grateful for Mike joining the team.

  It was a more comfortable situation—marginally.

  General Helen Thomas’ office could have been any other slightly run-down governmental office, other than the light fading over the baking runway still hazy through the day’s heat. An American flag, a photo of President Cole, and not much other décor. Helen’s desk was military neat. The U-shaped conference table could seat ten and faced a set of large monitors mounted so that their inner corners were touching. Right now they were blank.

  Except Holly’s ploy hadn’t worked completely.

  Helen had decided to stay with them, adding a non-team member. Miranda had only met her briefly as General Harrington was arrested and she was given command of the Groom Lake complex last year. She was far from a familiar face.

  Andi would have been equally unfamiliar, except she came with Terence’s recommendation. So her unfamiliarity was sufficiently familiar to not be disorienting.

  Miranda wished she could think of any way to complain about Helen’s presence in her own office but couldn’t come up with one. While she decided that it would probably be rude to just ask her to leave, everyone got settled into chairs and she knew no one would be leaving.

  But where was she supposed to sit? Across from General Thomas? In front of the blank monitors? Would it matter if she sat between Mike and Holly or beside them? Would Jeremy feel left out? She hadn’t even spoken to Andi yet!

  So instead, she remained standing.

  “What do you mean there’s no crash?”

  Miranda knew she was repeating herself, a trait she had little tolerance for in others, but couldn’t stem the tide of her disbelief.

  She’d been launched by Jill at the NTSB. That meant there was a crash investigation.

  Except there wasn’t a crash to investigate.

  This day had not gone well. Another round of box breathing left her pulse rate no lower or steadier than when she’d started.

  This afternoon had begun with the unlikelihood of ever resolving the Alaska incident investigation.

  Jon’s presence was familiar enough, but it was always disruptive. It was a relief that he was now gone on a different assignment. Though seeing him so unexpectedly made it feel as if he was still here. Except he wasn’t.

  Andi and Helen made two additional people beyond the three members of her core team. A sixty-six-point-seven percent expansion of her normal sphere of people to deal with.

  Even the three were often too much.

  When the pressure of the Tacoma Narrows office built up to where she could no longer concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes at a time, she would climb into her Sabrejet and fly back to her island. The temptation to wrap her island about her and never leave had a very high potential energy.

  So she’d learned to never allow herself more than forty-eight hours there when the pressures mounted or she might truly not leave again. Usually, after a day or two of listening to the chickadees at the feeder while a Steller’s jay argued with the crows as she worked in her mother’s garden, she could return to work without too much difficulty. The rainwater catchment system would keep the flowers and vegetables watered when she couldn’t be there to tend them properly herself.

  Today was testing that tenuous balance, and her current state of “peace” was mostly nonexistent.

  “Tonight,” Helen spoke in a serious tone that Miranda supposed was a “command” voice, “are the final acceptance test flights of the Army’s newest rotorcraft, the S-97 Raider.”

  11

  A helicopter?

  Miranda usually enjoyed a crash investigation.

  She was fairly certain that was the correct emotion. Not the devastation, of course, but the puzzle. When something went wrong with an airplane, there was a chance to find a better solution for all future airplanes.

  Airplanes.

  Yes, the NTSB spread its four hundred personnel across five modes of transportation. She didn’t care about highway, railroad, or pipeline mishaps. Maritime accidents were intriguing on a strictly intellectual basis.

  Aviation was her area.

  But there were at least as many subdivisions within that as there were lead investigators within the NTSB’s aeronautics division: gliders, ultra-light, general aviation, commercial aviation, military, experimental, and rotorcraft.

  She’d always felt unclear whether a hovercraft belonged in the maritime or aviation categories—perhaps dependent on its mode at the moment of the incident? She’d never worked on a hovercraft incident, so she wouldn’t worry about the proper division assignment at this time.

  Her preference had always been large-plane commercial aviation. Though she was also comfortable with the challenges of large-plane military aviation. Smaller aircraft were generally simpler merely due to fewer variables.

  Rotorcraft.

  Her last rotorcraft incident investigation had been the 2016 failure of the experimental Bell 525 Relentless. The eighte
en-seat prototype had developed a severe low-frequency oscillation during an OEI—one engine inoperative—test.

  The nose-up-then-tail-up swings had become severe twelve seconds into the test.

  The pilot’s grip on the collective control as he was subjected to an alternating force of plus and minus three g’s exacerbated the problem. Each time he was slammed down into his seat by the rising nose, he had inadvertently slammed the control down. Each time the nose pitched abruptly down and he was jerked to a halt by the limits of his shoulder harness, he hauled the control up.

  He had failed to exercise his only chance by not simply releasing the control and allowing the helicopter’s tendency to autocorrect to neutral flight to have a chance.

  Between twenty and twenty-one seconds into the test, the oscillation was so severe that the rotor blade was down-flexed sufficiently to slam into the side of the tail boom and chop it off. It had taken the same amount of time for the bits of the disintegrating helo to fall the two thousand feet as the failure itself.

  Many design changes were made as a result of that flight, several by her recommendation.

  The failure to require a cockpit voice recorder in test aircraft she had reported as a major oversight by the Flight Test Safety Committee. She’d certainly insisted that Cessna install one in her M2.

  She didn’t know if her current team knew anything about rotorcraft.

  She herself had never really understood rotorcraft. Not the way she did airplanes.

  Jeremy now sat across from her, inhaling the files that General Thomas had provided. Becoming smarter every moment.

  Miranda had tried. She could read the words but they didn’t have any meaning. They must, but they didn’t.

  Holly was questioning Andi about her past, though eliciting few replies.

  Mike sat beside her. He was smiling as he listened to Holly and Andi’s sparring.

  And Miranda herself was…

  Trying not to freeze up.

  As a child she’d rocked herself back and forth whenever she felt “the edge” come too close—and struck out every time Mother or Tante Daniels had tried to stop her. She never recalled Father being around for those episodes. She’d always thought that it was because he cut short her need for the self-soothing.

  Tante Daniels had recently revealed that he made himself scarce when she was having problems.

  She hated that second thought, but questioning the woman who had taken care of her for years—as therapist, then governess, and now friend—wasn’t right either.

  Over the years, Tante Daniels had taught Miranda to track her progress by the changes in her stimming.

  Rocking had become finger drumming.

  Drumming became hair twirling.

  Then she’d watched Top Gun.

  The Iceman twirled his pen between his fingers like magic. It had taken her weeks to perfect it; the pen flipping end-over-end up and down her four fingers. Then she’d advanced to flipping both directions around the thumb and once more through the fingers. She could no longer watch the movie, not for the technical errors, which were surprisingly few, but because Iceman’s simple finger pass now looked so slow and awkward.

  Since then, in stressful meetings, she looked just like any other bored executive and let the smooth flow of the pen guide her nerves to calm.

  But she couldn’t do it here.

  Her core team wouldn’t mind, if they even noticed. She’d been careful to only rarely do it in their presence.

  But she could feel Jon’s presence even if he wasn’t here. They’d spent frequent weekends together, just the two of them on her island as well as two brief vacations after a crash investigation. He caught her doing it enough to know it was a “thing” as he called it.

  He would decide that she was stressing and…try to engage. She’d recorded that pattern in her notebook enough times. The last thing she needed at the moment was for him to engage or discuss, forcing her to try to give him the explanations he so needed.

  Even if he wasn’t here. But they were. Her team. She couldn’t risk alerting them or she’d lose her hard-won method of relief.

  She tried clicking her fingernails together next to her thigh, out of sight. But it just wasn’t the same.

  Rotorcraft.

  An even narrower niche this time: experimental military rotorcraft.

  The flight.

  She’d just focus on the flight.

  Even if it was a helicopter.

  How could she make sure she didn’t miss anything on a helicopter?

  There was a feel to an airplane crash when it was resolved. She’d done fifty-two major investigations in the last seventeen years, more than most NTSB investigators did in an entire career.

  Terence was the one who kept telling her that. Until she’d looked up his record and confronted him with it. Ninety-seven major investigations and untold smaller ones. He’d just smiled and told her that she’d better get her ass in gear if she was going to surpass his record.

  Assuming that she was able to remain in the NTSB as long as he had, she should surpass his total by twenty-five investigations—theoretically surpassing his current record in fourteen-point-seven-two more years. That included the assumption that he remained at the academy and performed no more major launches, and that major crashes continued to occur at a consistent rate across time.

  The Alaska crash was her smallest investigation in several years. Yet she couldn’t even resolve that.

  What good was she?

  In desperation, she pulled out her notebook, flipped to the back, and stared down at the blank page.

  Something should be here, had to be here.

  But she couldn’t think of what.

  12

  Mike saw the panic slam in.

  Andi didn’t just freeze. She looked as if she might puke, or just outright combust. Her jaw was clenched hard enough that the muscle in her cheek was jumping and sweat stood out on her forehead.

  Holly and Jeremy were now engaging with Helen about the parameters of the upcoming test flight—paying no attention to what was happening to Andi.

  Miranda had one of her notebooks out and was studying something closely.

  Mike hooked Andi’s arm, practically dragged her to her feet, and got her out of Helen’s office. She offered all the resistance of a Raggedy Ann doll.

  Helen’s assistant moved to stop them for not having a security escort. But he got one look at Andi’s now-greening face and pointed toward the ladies’ room just down the hall.

  There being so few women in the upper echelons of the military made that a good choice for privacy.

  He led Andi in. A glance under the stall doors showed that they were alone.

  “Uh,” she needed to sit down before she fell down, but parking her in a toilet stall didn’t seem the best choice. Lifting her up onto the counter like some child probably wasn’t a good one either. He still couldn’t believe that she’d managed to take down Holly for even a moment—she was incredibly fast. The sharp contrast of her easy compliance at the moment told him just how badly panicked she was.

  The floor below the paper towel dispensers was military clean, he hoped, and he eased them both down onto it with their backs to the tiled wall.

  Captain Andi Wu didn’t sit, she crumpled. When she took on Holly, he’d decided that she had a spine of pure military steel. It had turned into a spine of Jell-O.

  In fact, he wasn’t even sure if she was a breathing.

  “Andi?”

  Nothing. Not even shaking her shoulder earned him a response.

  Her eyes were saucer wide.

  Mike remembered Holly looking just as freaked—once. It had been about survivor’s guilt when her whole team went down on an operation gone bad. Whatever had triggered Andi, it was something at least as bad.

  She might be staring directly at one of the toilets, but it was a good bet that wasn’t what she was seeing.

  He took the liberty of shoving her head forward between he
r knees so that she didn’t faint.

  “Breathe, Andi. It would really help if you would just breathe.”

  It was more of a stutter than a gasp, but she began moving air again.

  “That’s good,” he kept his voice steady. “Try another breath.”

  She did. Shaky would be a kind description of it.

  Would Holly know what to do? Or would it freak her out? It was still hard to imagine anything pushing Holly to the edge, but he’d seen it. He considered going to fetch her, but didn’t want to leave Andi.

  Then he remembered how horrified Holly had been that he had even noticed. Better not to embarrass Andi further than she probably already was.

  What was it with strong women who hated showing any weakness? Like they weren’t human. Strangely, Miranda, the most messed up of them all, ended up being the most normal woman of the lot.

  It took a few minutes, but Andi finally managed to sit up and lean against the wall on her own.

  The way Mike saw it was, if Terence Graham had sent someone to Miranda, it meant that there were a whole lot of things right with her. Holly had sounded seriously impressed that she’d flown for the Night Stalkers. All Mike really knew about them was they were some ultra-secret helicopter group.

  “Uh…” Andi made a soft noise.

  He continued his own inspection of the opposite toilet to give her some space. Everything was blah beige right down to the tile and ceiling except for the white porcelain. It made him depressed just being here, aside from the fact that he was sitting on the floor of a ladies’ bathroom. Could he sink much lower?

  “Where…” but she didn’t finish the question.

  “Smells awful,” she mumbled.

  He sniffed. Bleach with that thin underlayment of piss that pervaded all public bathrooms. “Yep!”

  “Ugh!” Her exclamation was just loud enough to echo a bit in the hard room.

  Mike took that as permission to stop looking at the toilet.

  Andi wore jeans and a black t-shirt. A light vest partially masked her slim figure, the pockets empty—except for her balled fists. He wondered how long that would last. Jeremy and Miranda carried enough tools to take apart and rebuild a 747, or so it appeared. Maybe Andi wouldn’t need any of her own. Who knew how long she was with them anyway.