“Well, now, that’s a huge freaking relief!” Holly said with a huge sigh. She must have been watching for the same moment. It was like a weight gone into the sky.
All that remained on the island now were the cargo that would probably never reach Australia except for a few mail bags, the dead, Holly, and himself. The Coasties had tried to get them both onboard, too. Neither of them had felt right leaving the morgue they’d spent so much time in.
The quiet practically echoed. The wind was soft and steady, sweeping across the island with little interference. The highest points were the section of fuselage and the concrete bunker at the far end of the island. Now that the people and planes were gone, the calls of the seabirds were the loudest sound. A great frigatebird spread its nearly three-meter-wide wings to soar above the flocks of white terns. It almost felt…peaceful. As long as he didn’t look at the shattered airplane.
“Five hours until they get back. Let’s…” he didn’t know what, “…go for a walk. Get away from this mess for a moment.”
“Works for me,” Holly shouldered a small bag marked NTSB.
He decided not to ask why.
Instead of heading for the long walk down to the other end of the runway or through the few shady trees along the north side of the runway, she headed for the left wing near their landing point. It lay baking on the gray-black pavement, shimmering with the heat. Now the bag made sense.
“I thought tropical islands were supposed to be a romantic spot to go with a hot number.”
“What? Are you still twelve?”
“Turn thirty next week. But, damn, woman, you grew up eight kinds of fine. At some point I’ll get the shakes about not being dead out in the middle of the South Pacific thanks to you. But there be miles of beach here that could have our names on it.” He tried to make it light, but…
He glanced again at the lines of blanket-shrouded corpses and shuddered. Whatever dose of macho that hadn’t let him beg off when Holly suggested a morgue area, it had barely sustained him. Though their old adventures in the Outback had hardened him some—life was fragile out there—it hadn’t prepared him for people who had died aboard his flight. Another Dani lesson: every crew member had to take possession of each flight as if it was their very own.
“All alone on a radioactive tropical desert island with a ‘hot number’ and fifty-three corpses doesn’t quite ring the chimes, does it, Quint?”
He could only shake his head.
“They’re dead. Past caring.”
He knew her better than that. He’d been with her when they brought the battered remains of her brother’s pickup truck back in. Never found much more of him than a sneaker—even that was dingo-chewed almost past recognition.
He’d seen Holly’s agony. He knew she felt it, even if she didn’t show it.
Then she’d been gone. Dead as far as anyone knew. Word was she ate her knife, but he’d never been able to fit that with the wild girl he’d known.
When they reached the wing, still more or less intact, Holly pulled out a camera and squatted to photograph the break point.
Personally, he felt almost as ill looking at the mangled remains of his airplane’s wing as he had when handling the dead. So freaking close to…
“Can’t believe we’re not dead. I owe you a life, Holly Harper.”
Holly had stopped moving, just staring at the shredded remains of structure, wires, fuel lines, and what all. She hung her head and didn’t move at all.
“What? Did you find something?” He squatted down beside her.
She shook her head.
“What? Aren’t you glad to be alive?”
She nodded.
“Choking on an emu, Holl? Spit it out ’cause there’s no way to swallow it.”
She nodded again, then shook her head, then looked at him from almost kissing close.
She’d told him not to have thoughts about being with her, but he’d had those since they’d been a pack of about twenty kids who went into the bush, as the deep Outback was called. Mostly aboriginal kids from families that still kept some of the old skills of tracking and survival in the bush. Any chance they had would find them headed out into the Barkly Tablelands with little more than a knife, a canteen, and a swag roll of a blanket.
Holly and Stevie had been the only white kids other than himself.
And now that he thought about it, he remembered how he’d become a member of the gang at just twelve years old—following his first major crush…Holly Harper.
Six months later, Stevie and then Holly were dead and buried just a week apart.
Or so he’d thought.
“What did happen to you?”
Holly shook her head. Not like she was refusing to answer, more like a bluey cattle dog trying to shake off the flies after a hard day’s herding.
She slowly came back to life.
“You do not owe me a life. I don’t want that. Never again, Quint. Never!” She hit him hard enough that he tumbled onto his butt and rolled a lot of the way into a backward somersault before stopping.
“Shit, Holl. What did they do to you?” Quint rubbed his shoulder. Christ but she had a punch. It definitely hurt worse than all of the bangs and scrapes from the crash combined.
She shoved to her feet and moved along the hundred-foot length of wing lying right-side up and surprisingly intact on the black-tarred surface.
He found his feet and followed, at what he hoped was a safe distance.
“They threw me out for killing my brother.”
“Who? Your parents? For…what? But that doesn’t make any sense.”
“It was my fault he died. I did something stupid when he told me not to. Drove his ute, his pickup, into a running wash. We got swept off the track into that massive arroyo close by the bridge on the Stuart Highway. He got me to the bridge deck. I had hold of him…” she held out her hand into space as if striving to hold him across the width of the wide wing, “…but the current was too strong. He was dragging me in; we both knew it. He let go to save my life, and Stevie dropped down into that raging river.” She dropped the hand to her side.
“Shit.” Quint knew the place. Dry as a bone, often for years at a time. Then there’d be a dumper of rain somewhere out in the desert. In hours the canyon, eighteen meters deep and half a kilometer across, would fill as a monster river appeared from nowhere. Two days later, it would again be as dry as a drover’s dog.
“After they tossed me, I stuck out my thumb. Hit Three Ways and took a right turn to Mt. Isa. Lied about my age for some waitressing jobs while I finished high school. Went Army, then SASR. Now I’m here.”
Once more, she returned her attention to her camera and worked down the length of the wing on one side and back up on the other.
12
There were times Holly wished she was Miranda. Then she could compartmentalize and focus on what she was doing to the exclusion of all else.
Maybe being autistic gave a real-world advantage beyond being an air-crash genius. For all the screwed-up problems she had, Miranda seemed to have a real peace when she was working on a plane wreck. Like Dani when she was flying—except Miranda had no goofy side.
All Holly could think about was that she herself had killed everyone she cared about: her brother, her team. And she’d come so close to getting Miranda’s team killed by a Russian Zaslon operative that it still gave her nightmares a year later. It had taken everything she’d had to capture one of the SVR’s—Russian Foreign Intelligence Service’s—elite assassins and saboteurs.
And now Quint was stirring those memories back up hard.
Deep breath!
No wuckin’ furries.
Just—
“What are we looking at?” Quint leaned in close.
“I thought you were a pilot. It’s called an airplane wing.”
“Huh! I guess dumb old me didn’t recognize it lying there on the ground. Isn’t it supposed to be attached to a plane or something?” He made a such a show of lo
oking around that she finally caught up with what he was doing.
“Getting me to laugh at the moment might be a hard yakka, but I appreciate the thought.”
“Anything for you, Holl.” And he said it like he meant it. “Not just for old times’ sake either. You were always…special…to me.”
When she looked up at him, he was studying the ground by his feet pretty hard. He definitely wasn’t the gawky twelve-year-old tagalong that she remembered, always there every time she turned around. Always…
“Okay. That’s really sweet, Quint. And just a touch ridiculous given our current circumstances.”
He shrugged a maybe, then pointed at the wing while aiming a pretty nice half smile at her. “So, assuming—for just a moment, I’m trusting you on this for old times’ sake and all—that this is indeed an airplane wing, what can you tell me about it?”
“It’s long. It’s heavy.”
“I’ll avoid the obvious crude joke here.”
That almost did get her to laugh. “You wanker.”
“Caught!” Then his smile faded. “Seriously, Holl?”
“Well, Miranda would hate me jumping to conclusions without detailed forensic analysis…”
“Thankfully, she’s not here then. Saves her baking her brain in this sun, too.” He flicked the brim of the green-and-yellow Socceroos hat he’d dug out of his gear.
“…but, looking at this cracking in the two ribs and the rear spar…” She pointed a flashlight into the guts of the wing’s structure, exposed by the break. The large frames that supported the structure and shape of the wing had severe cracks in the lower two-thirds of each element. He might be a pilot but he must be able to see how bad it was.
“We…uh…” Yeah, his choking voice said that he could see it.
“…should not have remained in flight. About the only thing holding this wing on was the skin.” She flicked a finger against an upraised corner and it twonged. It wasn’t much thicker than the tin on a box of mints.
The high whine of a turbine engine on idle for landing had her looking aloft.
Four engines.
Big ones!
She was looking straight up at the underside of a jet so big and so low that it appeared to blot out the entire expanse of the tropical blue sky. It was the second largest airplane in the American military, a C-17 Globemaster III, and it came down to land farther along the runway.
“Holy shit! When your Miranda calls for help, she does it up big.”
Holly watched it carefully as it slowed, then trundled onto the taxiway, before returning slowly toward the crash site. It didn’t feel like Miranda’s style… Though Holly couldn’t even begin to count the number of times she’d underestimated Miranda in the year since she’d joined her team. Not because she thought so little of her, but because Miranda kept exceeding each new level of expectation that Holly could have of her.
The airplane was almost back to them when she heard the high whine of near-idling jet engines a second time.
This time she looked up into the belly of the long needle-shape of a twin-engine Air Force C-21A Learjet. Except for the long wings, two of the Lears would fit easily nose-to-tail inside a C-17’s cargo bay.
“No,” she told Quint, who was also looking skyward. “That’s Miranda. The big jet, that’s…something else.”
Not even waiting for the Learjet to land, the big jet turned back onto the active runway with its stern facing the crash.
The unexpected move had the slim Learjet roaring to life with an aborted landing, then circling once more to land farther down the field.
13
By the time Holly and Quint had sprinted back through the heat, the big doors at the rear of the C-17 split horizontally and folded, one half swung up into the fuselage and the longer, lower half of the sloping rear underbelly swung down to become the cargo ramp. A group of men came down the ramp.
She grabbed Quint’s elbow as he went to move forward.
“What?”
Holly just shook her head and kept watching.
Six of them.
Moving like a trio of two-man rifle teams.
They didn’t move past the end of the ramp, instead stopping at the end of the slope, moving to either side, and facing outward.
Guards.
Rifles were slung over their backs, sidearms were holstered, and they had fighting knives strapped to their thighs. Beards, dark sunglasses, black bill hats, and the standard black t-shirt, jeans, and boots of military.
Like recognized like. By the way they moved and stood, they were Special Operations Forces.
Except they weren’t.
Their gear didn’t match by more than just personal taste. A Spec Ops warrior might choose one knife or another, but a fighting unit needed to be able to exchange ammo during a firefight, so their armament always matched.
They did all wear the same rifle—M4 carbines with EOTech scopes.
But the sidearms were a crazy mashup. Two wore the Glocks favored by Delta, three the Sig Sauer P226 favored by SEALs, and a completely incongruous Desert Eagle. A Deagle was so big and heavy that it was often called a hand cannon, and it only looked right in hands the size of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s. Its owner was no Arnold.
Holly would wager twenty-to-one against her last dollar that he’d have the ego to match his sidearm, not his size.
Mr. Tiny-dick Deagle was the only one who wore a double-holstered shoulder rig, though it took her a moment to recognize the bright yellow handgrip of the second weapon. It was almost enough to make her smile—almost.
They weren’t Spec Ops; they were former Spec Ops. Which meant hired mercenaries or—
A deep roar sounded inside the shadowy cavern of the C-17. A cloud of black smoke puffed out the open cargo door and then a deep grinding sound that was amplified ten-fold by the funnel of the cargo bay.
“Do they have a dragon in there?” Quint had to raise his voice and repeat the question.
“Construction machinery,” she knew the sound.
“Maybe they want to clear the runway?”
Miranda’s Learjet came around a second time.
Not a single one of the guards looked up as it slid by low over the C-17’s towering T-tail and landed on the closed runway of Johnston Island.
“That,” she nodded toward the guards, “is no construction crew.”
14
Miranda stepped off the C-21A Learjet and into the crash scene.
Every time it was a visceral shock, like when she finally got home to the island after a hard investigation. This—so different from the rest of her life—was where she belonged.
Most airplane crash sites were curiously serene places by the time the NTSB investigation team arrived. The plane was done crashing. The people were already evacuated. The area was often cordoned off or so obscurely remote that there were few gawkers. She’d always enjoyed the peace of approaching a wreck in a slow, logical fashion.
She and her team could approach it, study the weather, the environment, the debris field, and finally the crash itself with an orderly, rational methodology.
Plovers and boobies dodged around the black great frigatebirds that soared lazily on the midday thermals rising off the sun-heated runway. The breeze, as noted on the weather station that she’d reported to Holly, remained steady out of the east-northeast.
The crash lay strewn upon a perfect tableau of a closed runway on an unpopulated island. No airport officials would try to hurry her investigation along so that they could reopen the runway.
She could already see the impact of force dynamics that must have occurred to spread the pieces across the field in such a pattern. That was a rather startling observation. Even a year ago, she couldn’t have looked at that until she’d mapped the outer ring of debris and the debris field itself. She must remember to tell Mike about this.
She turned to look at him, but he wasn’t at her side. Instead, he was heading over to where Holly stood, looking like a man who neede
d to run—but couldn’t.
But that’s where all common sense stopped.
Parked in front of the wreck, so close that the four big engines’ backwash must have disturbed whole sections of the wreckage, was a monstrous C-17 Globemaster III belching smoke like her woodstove when the chimney was blocked.
A man stood near Holly along with six armed guards nearby. No one else was around.
Even as she watched, a sunshine-yellow Cat 313 excavator lumbered down the ramp. Seventeen tons of excavator riding on twin steel treads that were each eighteen inches wide and twelve feet long. With its twenty-foot boom arm folded in half and tucked flat in front of it, the excavator almost looked like a child’s toy as it emerged from the great maw of the C-17’s loading door that was twice its width and half again its height.
There was a mesmerized stillness as it clanked its way onto the pavement, unfolding its arm as it proceeded forward.
Not a scratch on its paint, not a spec of mud on its tracks. This was a brand-new machine off the showroom floor.
At the end of the boom there was a tined bucket with an opposing gripper called a thumb.
If the operator was good, that would be a great help. That gentle grip could lift or turn over heavy parts as needed, for her inspection.
Mike had stumbled to a halt halfway to Holly. The rest of her team was gathered around her.
The excavator drove up to the tail section with the armed ground assistants walking along either side. She hadn’t seen armed construction workers before, but she had little experience with them.
The excavator stopped just a few feet short of the tail section and began reaching out its long arm with the steely jaw wide open.
That wasn’t right.
She hadn’t inspected anything yet.
Miranda hurried toward Holly.
15
Holly wasn’t sure where to look. Too many things were happening too fast.
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