Raider

by M. L. Buchman

  “I’m fine. And for future reference, Mike, we’re trained to focus solely on the mission at hand—solely! No 160th pilot would inflect their tone even if a bomb had gone off in the cockpit.”

  And there it was.

  The thought she swore she’d never revisit was there, yet again.

  She managed to make it inside and close the door in his face—before the internal pin let go and she collapsed to the floor.

  The psychs had kinda said, without quite saying it, “Welcome to your new standard life.” They had stated it would become more manageable with time but had made it sound as if the apocalypse might happen first.

  Which sucked big time.

  Her…panic response, (that’s what she’d call it today), was definitely on her list of things that needed changing. She just didn’t know how to go about it. Going fetal wasn’t helping much, but it was all she had in her. She couldn’t even roll toward the still dark room to avoid the painful brightness slipping under the door.

  The blinding light.

  In between testing cycles of the S-97 Raider, she and Ken had been deployed to typical hellholes that US Special Operations always deployed to.

  Their final mission had flown deep into the Syrian Desert. They’d taken their Little Bird in-country to place a four-man team close by the Tiyas Airbase. A massive Russian air base (that of course Russia said was Syrian) lay in the very center of the harsh badhi terrain. Someone wanted eyes on the ground—whether to set up air strikes or a factual report to the UN wasn’t her business—at least not until they called for an extraction.

  What was her business was the grenade that had been fired at them as they raced back to the relative safety of the American-held DCZ—the Deconfliction Zone—at al-Tanf in Syria’s south. Nothing more than a flat area of red sand and dust, but the Americans had made a fifty-five kilometer stretch of desert their own.

  She hadn’t been flying hard nap of earth—instead holding a solid five meters above Syria’s central desert with the doors off. It wasn’t in a Night Stalker to not turn any flight into a training session.

  In the dead of night with no navigation lights, they were near enough invisible.

  But not quite near enough.

  It had been a thousand-to-one chance shot—probably by one of the Syrian government troops who always lurked along the edge of the DCZ. Or one of the Russian Spetsnaz they’d heard rumors of patrolling the area.

  It didn’t matter.

  One moment she and Ken had been racing low and fast, nearing the DCZ’s edge and the relative safety of the American zone.

  Then Ken had grunted in pain.

  “Grenade,” he’d scrabbled at his Kevlar vest. “Went in the side seam. Busted some ribs.”

  Andi had automatically begun counting seconds.

  One, the shot and a second of travel.

  Two, Ken reacting.

  Three and Four, Ken’s struggles to recover the grenade.

  Five, her shout of protest was drowned out by the grenade exploding.

  By its blinding flash of light, she’d been able to see that he’d wrapped his arms around his chest, turned away, and curled up around the grenade to protect her and the helicopter. He’d been splattered across her and the inside of the windscreen.

  The funeral had been with a closed coffin.

  25

  Mike continued down the hall to the room he’d seen Holly enter.

  He knocked, then tried the door handle.

  Locked. It had been a while since she’d done that to him. Woman was pricklier than one of her Tasmanian echidnas.

  He looked back toward Andi’s room, then thought about Holly walking in on them “just chatting” in the ladies’ bathroom. Andi had forced herself to act normally so quickly that she clearly didn’t want her panic attack made public.

  Had Holly assumed…?

  “Oh, give me a break, Holly,” he thumped the side of a fist on the door. “I was just helping her out.” But he couldn’t say why.

  No response.

  The team’s escort was gone. Even the escort had assumed he was bedding down with Andi.

  Perfect.

  The hall was just a long, off-white corridor of closed doors and well-spaced fluorescent tubes.

  The numbers on the doors told him nothing.

  At a loss for what else to do, he tried knocking on the door across the hall. He was in luck; Jeremy answered in his jockey shorts.

  “Too much information, buddy,” Mike made a show of covering his eyes. “Does your room have a second bed?”

  “No, but it has a couch.”

  Mike could see it over Jeremy’s shoulder. A short couch. Sagging with too many years of service.

  Fine.

  Just fine.

  26

  Andi appreciated the rhythm that Miranda set at the crash site. It had the same feel as her masterful reports.

  It also let Andi not have to look at the crash.

  The bodies of Morales and Christianson had been removed in the night, but otherwise General Thomas had followed Miranda’s request and kept the site completely isolated. Their arrival in the general’s UH-1N Huey helicopter had woken two very grumpy security guards, snoozing in their Chevy Suburban.

  The area had a stark clarity in the dawn light. The brick-brown rock rose in steep and jagged thrusts above the sand-patched desert. The grit was coarse and crunched beneath her boots.

  Even purposely not looking at the crash, it was impossible to ignore the pillar of rock that rose above it like a ten-story tombstone. Soot marks from burned fuel had blackened its flanks without scorching the front. The unburned rock face looked like…

  “Eye of Sauron,” Jeremy said as he passed close beside her. “The great eye of the Necromancer. The evil that glares down and devours all.” He looked to be very pleased with the analogy. It was hard to argue. The sun was rising directly behind it and streaming around both blackened sides. It was simultaneously blinding to look at, and shading the crash in darkness.

  Andi mirrored Miranda, turning her back to the crash. Miranda again went through her vest ritual, then said softly enough that only Andi could overhear: “I’m Miranda Chase. Investigator-in-charge for the NTSB.”

  Extracting a pocket recorder, she turned it on and then tucked it away again so that only the microphone showed above the fabric. A small notebook from another pocket was marked in clear block letters: S-97 Raider and the date.

  She pulled out a weather multi-tool and recorded the wind speed, humidity, temperature, and GPS elevation. A brief narration describing the crystalline blue sky was then recorded.

  Miranda handed Mike a high-resolution topo map of the area.

  “I want you and Andi to verify the canyon’s profile back along the flight path.”

  Then she’d turned away as if she’d already forgotten them.

  “Wait! What?”

  Mike shushed her until they’d rounded the corner, out of sight of the crash. No complaints from her about the change of scene; again an excuse to delay facing the wreckage. But…

  Once alone, Andi flapped the map at Mike, “Really? She doesn’t trust a topo map? Gee,” she held it up and looked along the valley, “the canyon’s landforms look just like the map. I’m so shocked.” She did let her eyes slide along the lines just like a helo’s flight.

  “She has her ways. It’s better not to question them too much because she always has her reasons and they’re usually right.”

  “Actually,” Andi double-checked, then pulled a pen from Mike’s shirt pocket, “there’s a slump there on the right, about three hundred meters along, that must have happened since the map was made. The debris can’t have shifted by more than ten meters, but it is different even if it’s well off the flight path.” She marked the correction.

  Mike was looking back and forth between the landscape and the map. “Wow, you certainly saw that fast.”

  “Terrain is remarkably important to those of us trained to nap-of-Earth fligh
t.”

  “Would have taken me forever to notice that, if I had at all. Thank you so much for marginalizing my purposefulness even more.”

  “Anything I can do to help, just let me know,” Andi tried to make it a joke, but Mike looked tired and humorless this morning.

  Probably best to simply ignore that. Especially because she suspected that it had something to do with her.

  “Why are we doing this anyway? She doesn’t act like some anal dictatorial bitch. Why doesn’t anyone dare ask her questions?”

  “You’re right, she isn’t. And I try to ask only pertinent questions because anything else may confuse her.”

  “Confuse her? She doesn’t appear to be stupid.”

  Mike waved her toward a pair of rocks and waited until they sat opposite each other. “We’ll give her a few minutes to think that we’re being thorough, because if it was just me, a terrain review would take a while.”

  “So what’s her deal?”

  Mike stared at her long enough for her to shift uncomfortably on her rock. If he wasn’t already with Holly, she’d think it was one of those I’m-such-an-open-guy come-ons. Except he was…and it didn’t feel that way.

  “I don’t know you,” Mike said softly.

  Andi didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “You know more about me than pretty much anyone now that Ken’s dead.”

  “Sure, I know that you’re a good pilot, feel totally lost without your flying partner and your career, and you’re a good person.”

  “Way more than I know…or believe.”

  Mike ignored her. “That doesn’t tell me much about how you feel about other people.”

  Andi could only shrug. At this point in her life, she was too busy trying to keep one person from totally coming apart to think about anyone else.

  All she’d told her family was that she’d been honorably discharged from the military and was going to DC to investigate helicopter accidents. The main reason she’d decided to do that was DC was about as far from her parents and brother in San Francisco as she could get and still be in the same country. The only places further away were northern Alaska and Maine. Maybe after this.

  “Miranda is…” Mike hesitated for a long moment, then started over. “Have you ever met someone with ASD?”

  “What? Like Automatic Smile Disease, spread by the Joker in Batman?” Mike didn’t even acknowledge what Andi felt was a pretty decent comeback on no notice.

  “Like Autism Spectrum Disorder.”

  “Oh…no.” Yeah, she’d heard of that one, but never had any reason to think about it.

  “Imagine…” Mike stared at the wide slot of blue that was the brightening sky above the canyon. “You’re a pilot.”

  “Past tense.”

  Mike focused on her, eye-to-eye. “You are a pilot. You may not be flying at the moment but— Never mind. That’s a discussion for another time. Okay, imagine that you’re on a flight. Engine sputtering, stall warning goes off, master alarm slams on, the stick shaker is trying to get your attention about the stall while you’re talking to a control tower, except six other flights are all talking over you.”

  “Eight kinds of ugly,” Andi nodded. She’d been in similar situations a few too many times for comfort. “It’s what a mission into a battlefield sometimes feels like. You simply can’t think fast enough. You have to trust your instincts to get through it.”

  “Right, exactly,” Mike pointed at her. “Just like that. Except no one ever issued you any instincts. That makes your life one continuous sensory overload.”

  “What does that have to do with Miranda?”

  “That,” he leaned forward and flicked a finger against Andi’s forehead hard enough to sting.

  She batted at his hand, too little too late. It seemed that her reaction time had followed wherever her flaky brain had gone to. Rubbing her forehead, she could still feel where he’d zapped her.

  “That is what is going on inside Miranda’s head twenty-four seven. Nothing is instinct, everything is learned—usually the hard way. How she happens to be a genius crash investigator and a nice person despite that is a lot of what makes her so miraculous. We neurotypicals have it easy.”

  “Seriously?” Andi couldn’t equate that with the woman she’d met. “She just seems a little odd.”

  “A little odd, yes. But I’m starting to think that she’s also the best and smartest person I’ve ever known.”

  Andi chewed on that. “So…what? Like with Jon yesterday?”

  “Right. A perfect example. They’re in a relationship, except she has no idea what that means, and no instincts about how to handle it. If Holly hadn’t given her a nudge, Jon could have tipped Miranda off the edge. Not likely, as she’s getting steadier even just in the year that I’ve known her, but he certainly wasn’t helping by trying to force her somewhere closer to being normal. Whatever the hell that is—don’t be asking me.”

  Mike shuddered as if it must be something nasty, actually forcing a laugh out of her.

  “My theory is that part of how she gets through it all is by having a team around her. The reference points we create in her world just by consistently doing what we do is what lets her not only do what she does, but maybe it also helps her to know who she is. If you, Captain Andi Wu, are the kind of person I’d like to think you are, you won’t do anything to make her question that. That includes asking irrelevant questions in the middle of an investigation.”

  “Like why she doesn’t trust a topo map.”

  “Right. But I do know the answer to that one. Short version—which you wouldn’t have gotten if you’d asked her—she’d most likely have given you a step-by-step full breakdown on how she got through the two months of work to explain a crash back in 2009. There was an aberration in the topo map that had been mirrored on the Sectional Chart. A hot-dogger beginner pilot, not even licensed yet, decided he should do an instruments only flight without an IFR chart or training. He was well below flight minimums, but for all that was doing it correctly. Right up until he slammed into a mountain that the chart had said was a hundred feet lower. The trees saved his life, barely; he’ll never walk again. And he killed his girlfriend, who wasn’t legally on the flight.”

  “That’s why she doesn’t trust topo maps.”

  “Exactly. Don’t be messing with Miranda’s internal topo map.” Mike pushed to his feet. “That should be long enough. Let’s go back.”

  As they came back around the bend in the canyon, Holly was the first one to notice them. She offered a glare that would make Superman proud. Andi double-checked that there were no heat-ray burn holes through her chest. But she could feel the scorch marks like skin prickles.

  Still a cast-iron bitch.

  Then Mike’s words sank in.

  However, while Mike might seem as Holly described him, the “touchy-feely” Human Factors Specialist that didn’t have any real skills, that wasn’t right. While appearing to be very kind, he’d actually just put her on notice more effectively than any drill sergeant or Special Operations flight instructor. She was either an asset to Miranda—or she was toast. And he’d done it using a pilot’s metaphor specifically for her, which only made it all the clearer.

  27

  “Seriously, Holly. Get a grip.”

  “Around your throat? Should have crushed it while I had the chance.”

  Mike should have had this conversation on the ground. Instead, he and Holly were roped up and exploring the face of the stone pillar. Miranda had wanted them to inspect all of the ledges for possible debris, study the point of impact, and collect rock samples from the rock face for hardness analysis back in the lab.

  The rest were walking the debris perimeter several stories below and far enough away that he and Holly wouldn’t be overheard without shouting. Which was fine, because her voice was low and dangerous.

  “I was just trying to help her.”

  “By fucking her instead of me. Fine. We never made any vows or anything. But for going after he
r ass on her first day, you’re just a total shit despite being Mr. Touchy-feely All-aware New-Age-creep!”

  Mike sighed and hammered another piton into the hard rock. He clipped in, then tested the hold before climbing higher. Climbing was a trust exercise. At the moment he wasn’t so sure that Holly wouldn’t just let him plummet to the rocks below if he fell. She might not do that if it would kill him, but they were only high enough that it would merely break him in many places, so all bets were off.

  When Holly was good, which was most of the time, she was amazing.

  When she was pissed? Not so much.

  What did he owe to Andi? He wasn’t some priest confessor, but she had told him things in confidence.

  He free-climbed another five meters, being especially careful not to slip, before spiking in another piton in the hard quartzite.

  Mike belayed Holly up to his position, but kept the belay tight before she could head farther up the rock face, trapping her face-to-face with him on the bare rock.

  “Holly?”

  “What?”

  “Do you honestly think that my role is as useless as you told Andi?”

  “Yes,” but she said it with a snap of anger that he’d learned to ignore. Her first reaction was rarely the true one.

  Mike waited her out as she stared up the cliff—anywhere other than looking at him. They were just a few meters below the impact marks carved by the rotor blades. She rested her forehead against the rock and he could barely hear her mumble.

  “I’m really sorry about your throat.”

  Mike laughed right in her face. “You think that’s what this is about?”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No, it isn’t.” How much shit did he have to put up with? “I kissed you awake because I wanted to. I wanted to. I, me, the guy who never cares about women past the morning after. You’re pretty much the most lovely, fascinating, and utterly ornery woman I’ve ever been with. I’m with you because I want to be. You better figure out why you’re with me.”