Ghostrider: an NTSB-military technothriller (Miranda Chase Book 4)

by M. L. Buchman

  “What’s your suggestion?”

  “Make every dumbass pilot out there be a hundred percent responsible for their own bird. Make them not lease it but own it, get the airframe and engine maintenance certification like I did, and have them put their own family’s welfare on the line if they do something wrong and the bird goes down on their watch.”

  “That seems reasonable.”

  He then smiled for the first time. “Reasonable but unlikely?”

  “Sadly,” Miranda admitted. “Why would that be hard on me?”

  “Because of all the idiots falling out of the air until it thinned the herd. Darwinian selection of every dumbass not smart enough to take care of his own equipment.”

  “Or her own equipment,” Holly joined them from where she’d been chatting with the others. “I like it.”

  Miranda didn’t. “Though I find little fault with your hypothesis, I’m not in favor of anything that increases the number of aircraft crashes.”

  He chuckled. “I expect not. I’m Brett Vance,” he held out a hand, which he used to shake hers with too much strength and energy.

  She responded with her own name, again, because she couldn’t think of what else to say. It left her right arm vibrating like it had just been through a crash of its own.

  “C’mon, Ms. Chase. I’ll really walk you through this bird.”

  And he did. Not just the preflight, but strengths and shortcomings. He fetched a ladder and they peeled back engine cowlings. He showed her how to inspect the rear-rotor drive shaft bearings with a mechanic’s eye rather than a pilot’s.

  When Major Jon Swift showed up, she and Brett were lying together under the belly of the helo between the skids. They were discussing the paths and percentages of force-transference vectors through the hull’s skin material versus the internal structure in the event of a hard landing.

  “Hi, Miranda,” Jon knelt on the other side of the skid’s open frame.

  She waved but kept listening to Brett about the structural changes AgustaWestland had made to the 109 before certifying it for skids rather than wheels.

  4

  “What do you think happened?” Brett called over the intercom as they climbed toward the site—the audio system from PS Engineering, very high end. She’d also always like the SIG headsets for their comfort and sound insulation.

  “I never conjecture prior to a crash investigation,” Miranda hadn’t wanted the copilot seat—because she didn’t want such a clear view of the crash prior to assessing terrain and other external factors—but Brett had insisted. The rest of her team, Jon Swift, and Brett’s nine-year-old son Jeffrey were seated in the back. They were clear of the airport and beginning the mile-high climb to the crash site.

  Now she could see the anticipated switchover to the dark conifers. Several fourteeners revealed themselves to the south—each popping into view like a giant Jack-in-the-box, which she’d never gotten over her fear of though she’d finally learned how to hide her reactions.

  “Well, you aren’t going to find the answer up there. I’ve been flying fire crews in all morning and there’s not much to see. I was first on site around four a.m. this morning.”

  Miranda didn’t want to hear this. It was in the wrong order. She hadn’t even begun the site investigation and suddenly she was receiving information from a witness, typically the very last step in her information-gathering process.

  She always approached a crash in spheres of influence. Weather and terrain at the outermost; the pilot’s intellectual process (or lack thereof) at the very innermost. Eyewitness accounts were only the slightest shade removed from those of the pilots themselves—assuming they survived. She’d never found either source to be wholly reliable, emotionally neutral, or even, on occasion, coherent.

  But she couldn’t think how to stop Brett Vance.

  “I was in the oval office when—”

  “The Oval Office? Why were you meeting with Roy?” And furthermore, President Roy Cole was sixteen hundred miles from here. “And how did you get here so quickly from DC?”

  He glanced over at her for a long moment with a slight frown. She wanted to ask Mike what it meant, but he was in the back and wouldn’t be able to see his expression.

  “The toilet. The room with the oval piece of porcelain. My oval office.”

  “Oh.” Other than Mike, she had very little experience with Coloradan colloquialisms.

  “Anyway, that’s where I was when the world lit up like daylight. Actinic white, like welding flame, not a gas fire.”

  Following his detailed analysis of the A109’s strengths and weaknesses, she knew to trust Brett’s word on the spectral temperature of the light. A fuel fire, even an explosive one, trended deeply into the yellows and oranges. Even at its hottest, it would never be described as actinic white.

  “I live just down there,” he nodded toward sprawling homes scattered among the trees at the base of the mountain’s ski area. “Old home, nothing fancy, but we like it and I didn’t want to sell off to the developers. We’re just two miles from the top of Snowmass, plus a mile down.”

  A direct line of two-point-two-three miles—eleven seconds at the speed of sound.

  “Counted thirteen seconds before a big boom rolled in—real sharp.”

  Thirteen seconds would imply that his distances were inaccurate or his accelerated excitement level at the explosion had caused him to count inaccurately. Assuming he knew the elevation difference between his home and the top of Snowmass mountain, thirteen seconds would place his home two-point-four-five miles horizontally from Snowmass, not two miles.

  Though such an inaccuracy seemed unlikely in Brett Vance’s case.

  Oh! She’d neglected altitude. The speed of sound slowed in thinner air: nine percent slower at Aspen’s elevation and almost fourteen percent at Snowmass’ peak. If she integrated the speed of sound over the distance, thirteen seconds was surprisingly accurate for a human observer without a stopwatch or other aid.

  “By that time I was out on the back deck. Not much to see until the two lower fires, sparked by the wings, started working. Early in the season for fire. Normally, the undergrowth is still damp from the snowmelt, though it was a dry winter. Whatever the conditions, the fire grabbed hold and burned up the slope hard and fast. Swept right over the crash site. Nothing much left to burn anyway after that explosion.”

  Miranda decided that she was willing to accept Brett’s observations, pending further observation, despite the early stage of the investigation.

  “ARTCC Denver said,” Mike had been on the phone even as he’d boarded the helo, “that the flight reported a depressurization event at Flight Level Three-niner-zero and basically augered in at over four hundred knots. Thirteen crew.”

  Brett nodded, “Mountain Rescue has twelve of them off the mountain. Bits and pieces of them anyway. Can’t find the last one anywhere.”

  Over four hundred knots, almost five hundred miles an hour, he didn’t need to mention that there hadn’t been any survivors.

  “Wow! Look at those wings. They’re totally trashed!” Brett’s son Jeffrey’s high voice sounded over the intercom.

  “You’ll have to pardon my boy, he’s quite the aviation enthusiast—”

  “I’m gonna be a pilot, just like my dad!” Jeffrey declared loudly.

  Brett’s tone shifted deeper, “—who rarely knows when to keep quiet about it.”

  “Yet his assessment is wholly accurate.” Miranda inspected the wings herself, though that too was the wrong sphere of a proper investigation. Everything was all out of order but that seemed to be out of her control. The wings were relatively intact, which indicated that they’d separated from the diving aircraft to fall at a much slower pace. “Those wings are totally trashed.”

  “See, Dad. I told ya.”

  Miranda remembered her early days of flying, begging rides and free lessons from anyone who flew out to visit their family.

  Jeffrey’s enthusiasm reminded her a lot o
f herself. “What else do you see, Jeffrey?”

  Brett slowed to a hover at the same altitude as the wings’ final resting place.

  “Jeff,” the boy announced. “Just Jeff.”

  He was silent long enough that she was wondering if he was awaiting a response from her. But then he continued.

  “I see four engines. One still has a couple of its propellers. By the angle, I’m guessing four blades?”

  She glanced down and saw that he was correct. Which meant that it might by a Hercules, but it wasn’t an AC-130J Ghostrider. She turned around far enough to look at Jon, who just shrugged in confusion.

  “Good guess,” Miranda shifted her attention back to Jeffrey. “Does that tell you what plane it is?”

  There was another long silence before he answered tentatively, “C-1300 Hercules? Like the Disney movie?”

  “C-130 Hercules. Just like the Disney movie.” It had come out the year after her parents died and she had watched it innumerable times. Not for the conquering of evil, but for Zeus challenging young Hercules to become a “true hero.” Her own father had always pushed her to excel, no matter what her learning and behavioral challenges. But it was Father Zeus who had given her the words for the goal she’d striven to satisfy ever since. Father Zeus’ words combined with Father Sam Chase’s demise in a plane crash had driven her to be the best NTSB crash investigator she could be. A true hero.

  “What happened to it?”

  “That’s what we’re here to find out. Do you want to help?”

  “Really?” His squeal hurt her ears over the intercom; there was no questioning his excitement.

  Brett looked over at her sharply. He mouthed, Are you sure?

  Miranda replied aloud, “Of course I’m sure. Or I wouldn’t have offered.”

  “Please, Daddy? Please? Please? Please?”

  Brett sighed for reasons that eluded her.

  “Jeff. You are not to bother Ms. Chase with too many questions.”

  “Questions are helpful. That is our job: to ask questions until we find answers.”

  Suddenly Brett truly smiled for the first time. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “Warn me of what?”

  But a chuckle was his only answer.

  She recognized Jeff’s passion for aircraft and wanted to nurture that. It was all that had sustained her after her own parents had died in a crash. His father was a pilot in a very dangerous environment.

  Miranda wanted Jeff to have that passion as well—in case it was ever the only thing left for him to hold on to.

  5

  At her suggestion, they dropped Jeremy and Jon near the wings to inspect them.

  Brett landed the rest of the team—including Jeff, with more admonishments to behave—at the top of the mountain before gathering up a load of firefighters to deliver back to the bottom of the mountain now that the fire was beaten.

  The char was thick on the air. Every step puffed up a small cloud of ash from the burned vegetation. For a moment, the morning breeze would swirl it aside in a brush of fresh mountain air—and then it would drive a cloud of ash up the hill.

  Jeremy handed around paper masks.

  Brett had been accurate when he’d told Miranda that there wasn’t much to see. Actually, the problem was that there was so much to see and most of it was very small—and scattered widely. Any attempt to map the debris perimeter would involve tracking far and wide. Very little of the area was truly vertical but, beyond the broad crown of the peak and the few ski trails, much of it was quite steep.

  The tail section had landed below a particularly steep headwall. Climbing gear would certainly be advisable for safety.

  “Looks like my game,” Holly swung loose her pack and propped it on a steel pipe sticking out of the ground.

  As Holly began pulling out climbing gear, Miranda circled the pipe twice but was unable to identify it. Five inches across, eight feet showing above the soil. The upper end appeared to be shattered, as if the metal hadn’t even had time to deform due to the suddenness of the blow. She looked down to inspect what Holly was doing.

  “Do you always bring climbing equipment?”

  “Jon said the crash was on a mountaintop in Colorado. So I tossed in a bit of gear just in case. I brought a second set. Want to join in?”

  “I never learned to climb.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Mike stepped up.

  “You?” Holly sneered. “Don’t tell me. Stephanie Garr was also into rock climbing?”

  “Mandy Becot. She’s a romance author. She uses actual written words, so you probably wouldn’t know about her.”

  Even Miranda knew about Mandy Becot. “She’s amazing.”

  “In more ways than one,” Mike turned away from Holly before winking at Miranda.

  She hoped that Holly’s eye roll was the intended response, even if he wasn’t in position to witness it, as that’s what she delivered him.

  Once Holly and Mike had on climbing belts and hard hats, Holly threw her body weight at the embedded pipe. It didn’t budge. Within moments, she’d lashed her rope around it, and the two of them disappeared off the edge of a steep embankment strewn with parts of what appeared to be the rear ramp and tail section. Hopefully, somewhere in the scattered debris below would be the black boxes.

  The top of the mountain was suddenly very still.

  She and Jeff stood alone together at the very top of the ski area. A hundred feet below and well to the east, a small team of firefighters were using shovels to toss dirt on one of the last hotspots. Other than that, the fire was gone. It had burned fast and hot, leaving behind blackened soil, the scent of char, and little else other than tiny bits of a very large airplane. The timberline lay perhaps eight hundred feet below, near the level of the wings’ final landing places.

  “It’s awful quiet,” Jeff whispered.

  “It is.” A light breeze brushed cold air over them. She reached for her pocket anemometer…but wasn’t wearing her vest. Very unusual for her. She’d been distracted by so many things. She pulled it out of her pack.

  Slipping out her personal notebook, she made an entry to remember to speak with Jon about how it was possible that he liked seeing her clothed—yet that didn’t somehow preclude him wanting to have sex again. Then she put it away and slipped out the anemometer.

  “Can I have one of those?”

  “My anemometer?”

  “No. What’s a amonometer? I want a vest with all the cool pockets for stuff.”

  “I only have this one. I’m sorry. But if you decide you need a tool, you just ask. Until then, I’ll carry them.”

  “Okay. What’s a amanonometer?”

  So, she showed him how to measure windspeed, direction, and relative humidity, and how she noted down each item.

  “Cool, what’s next?”

  Miranda surveyed the hillside covered with twists of metal. “Let’s see if we can find the cockpit of the plane.”

  6

  “I don’t see anything particularly wrong,” Jeremy was looking at the twisted remains of the port-side wing.

  “Other than the thirteen dead?” Jon knew the bodies were cleared off the mountains, wouldn’t even have been here by the wings. Still, thirteen fellow fliers? That hurt bad, a feeling he’d never grown used to.

  “I mean the wing. Nothing looks particularly wrong with the wing.”

  Jon had to agree with Jeremy’s assessment. But he couldn’t help glancing away from the wings and up the hillside.

  However, there was a lot wrong with Miranda. He just didn’t know what it was.

  After three months apart, she’d barely acknowledged him at the airport. She didn’t strike him as fickle, though she’d been very cozy with the pilot, both on the ground and riding up front with him. Then taking his son with her up to the main crash site and dumping Jon downslope with Jeremy when the main crash was up above.

  He’d thought their last round of e-mails had gone well. Or well enough. She was even mor
e challenging to communicate with remotely than in person.

  “Something strange is going on.” And he didn’t like it at all.

  “You mean other than the wings being ripped off the sides of the Hercules, crashing into a mountain, and bursting into flame?” Jeremy was photographing the root of the starboard wing where the distortion of the metal was consistent with being torn off in flight. “I’d have to agree. I’m seeing no intrinsic damage to any of the wing’s structure that isn’t caused by impact with the rocks or trees it landed on. Flaps and ailerons are relatively intact and I’m seeing no stress shearing in the hinge points or control rods.”

  Jon sighed and looked back down at the big wing. Fifty-seven feet long, it had been twisted and bent like a foam toy. The breached tanks had spilled fuel, but it hadn’t been an explosion. The metal around the tanks was crumpled inward by the impacts, not blown outward from inside. The fuel had leaked, caught fire, and that had ignited the forest fire that had burned the mountaintop. Actually, they were above the tree line, so it had been a brush fire, but still destructive.

  Jeremy stowed his camera. “I think we should check one of the engines next. See if we can find any sign of thrust reversal on the propellers or over-revving. Maybe a flameout.” His tone went very wry at the end—a sense of humor about something mechanical was a surprise.

  “Yeah. Sure,” Jon answered in kind. Then looked at Jeremy in surprise. They knew it was a depressurization event by the pilot’s report. So, was Jeremy teasing him out of a bad mood? Or just making a joke?

  Either way it worked and they began a methodical investigation of the wing.

  But talk about a flameout. Had he said something wrong while trying to flirt with Miranda over the phone this morning? He should know better, but it was how he’d connected with other women in the past. Except Miranda wasn’t other women. He was attracted to her precisely because she wasn’t like other women.

  Most women saw “handsome Air Force major” and thought: stability, status, and meal ticket for life. Miranda seemed to see Jon Swift: crash investigator and pilot. That alone was a rare gift.