As she lay there trying to catch her breath, she did realize it was far easier to picture Pierre with a child than Tango or Gutz.
And he respected her for more than her ass and breasts.
Despite outranking her, at the end of training Pierre hadn’t even hesitated. He’d simply pointed at her and told their commander, She’s the best damn gunner I’ve ever seen. If you don’t put her on the laser, you’re an idiot.
“No. I’m not asking you to be my child’s father. I’m just trying to get a grip on a world that is suddenly overwhelming the crap out of me. I did absolutely nothing wrong before you threw me off the plane.”
“Other than take part in a conspiracy to steal a Ghostrider, and then failing to report that to your commanding officer.”
“Right,” she sagged back against the bed. “Other than that.”
“Spill it, Rosa.”
There was no path out that made this right. Sick of all the games and lies, she might as well go down for the truth.
“It was our commanding officer who came to me…”
30
Their flight was fast approaching Catalina Island. The airport, perched on the crest of the island, had never been one of Miranda’s favorites. Its primary asset was that there was no regular commercial air service to the island, so accidents here were rarely called in to her department.
The general aviation group, however, received a disproportionate numbers of calls here.
Instead of a long, flat safety area at either end of the runway to accommodate early landings and overshoots, there were steep cliffs. A sudden downdraft, quite common across the rounded island top, could make someone land in the cliff face propeller-first, rather than on the runway. Required approaches were steep and precise.
Also, the runway itself actually draped over the crest of the island’s highest point. Once down, landing planes couldn’t see the other half of the runway because of the central highpoint. There were numerous skid marks from excessive braking at midfield as it appeared that the runway suddenly ended far too soon.
It was even possible for two departing planes to choose opposite ends of the runway and not see each other until they were well into their takeoff rolls.
No, she’d never been a fan of Catalina Airport.
And yet she was here for a plane crash that had nothing to do with the airport. Any C-130 Hercules could have easily landed on the short runway, would have sufficient power to fight the toughest downdrafts, and was tall enough to see the whole runway for almost the entire distance.
Instead, an AC-130J Super Hercules Ghostrider had tried to act like America’s largest seaplane since the Spruce Goose—until it rammed into a massive stone pier.
As they flew over the harbor, she noted eerie similarities to the Aspen crash—aside from them both being AC-130 airframes.
There was far less of the plane visible than there should be for an aircraft of its size.
“Look,” Holly was pointing out her window. “Part of a wing and engine are jammed into that big yacht. Looks like there’s another piece over there in that sailboat.”
Indeed, there was a Hercules propeller snagged in the sailboat’s rigging. Both masts lay overboard, but a section of the wing remained there. That accounted for some of the missing plane.
“That fire is creeping me out, mate,” Holly shook her head.
Miranda would trust to Holly for naming the emotion. Again, the evidence of fire was widespread. None of the buildings ashore had been burned, but the two piers were badly blackened—the stone outer pier with char and burnt buildings, and the wooden inner pier was now little more than blackened stumps sticking out of the water. Several fire engines ranged along the waterfront.
Then the view was cut off as their plane turned onto final approach to land at the airport.
Ever since her first-ever military investigation—a downed C-5 Galaxy at Joint Base Lewis-McChord—fire had never bothered her particularly. Except she hated the destruction of evidence crucial to an investigation.
The view when they deplaned was refreshingly like her island in Washington State. This was far more familiar than the jagged peaks of Aspen. Rather than the towering Douglas firs of home, Catalina had brown scrubby slopes on the few hilltops that reached higher than the lofty airport. But in every direction that had a view, the sea shone brightly. It wasn’t the midnight blue of Puget Sound, but rather the true blue that was still the Pacific without the brighter tropical tones.
It smelled different. Dry brush rather than sharp conifer, but—
“Hope you’re not in a hurry,” one of the Air Force pilots remarked as he tied down the airplane.
“Why is that?”
“We’re ten miles from town here. A taxi can take half an hour each way on these roads. If there’s one available at all with that mess down in the harbor.”
Holly stepped in. “We’re with the NTSB. Of course we’re in a hurry to get down there, mate. Sooner’s not within a dingo’s whisker of fast enough.”
The pilot shrugged and went to walk away.
But Miranda saw something coming their way from the mainland.
A speck, bright in the sky and easy to spot. A rotorcraft.
“Captain. Could you please call that US Coast Guard helicopter and reroute them here? I presume that they’re on their way to the waterfront and we won’t be much out of their way.”
By the time it had come close enough to the island to resolve into more than a bright dot, it began turning in their direction.
Holly held up a hand palm out.
Miranda tried to slap it high-five, but it didn’t work very well. Maybe the ability to do high-fives was genetic like so many other things that she couldn’t do right.
“Hold up your hand, Miranda.”
She did, reluctantly.
Holly slapped it just hard enough to tingle, but not enough to hurt.
It appeared normal.
“Do that again.”
Holly shrugged and repeated the gesture. Miranda studied the angle of attack and pivot moments at shoulder, elbow, and wrist.
“Now hold up your hand.”
Holly did as she’d instructed.
Miranda moved her joints through the observed motions at one-quarter speed.
Shoulder and elbow initiating the motion, hand lagging behind. As the shoulder stopped, the elbow continued with the hand shifting for correct angle of impact.
She repeated it at full speed. While her aim was off, there was still sufficient contact to create a similar tingle and zing on her skin’s surfaces.
Miranda lined up to try again, then saw the look on the face of the pilot, who had rejoined them. She wasn’t sure what it meant. So instead, she slipped out her phone and snapped a photo of him to study.
As the pilot blinked in surprise, she turned the phone to Holly. “What is that expression?”
Holly offered the pilot one of her grins. “Half disbelief and half thinking that you’re off your rocker.”
“Only half?”
At Holly’s laugh and nod, Miranda felt relieved. She’d always estimated that she was seventy to eighty percent off.
The big HH-60 Jayhawk variant of the Black Hawk settled close beside them, its white-and-orange paint job shining brightly next to the far duller Air Force jet.
It settled just long enough for her and Holly to scramble aboard. There were the pilots, two crew chiefs, a medic, and a man who reminded her a little of a gloomy troll hunched in the dark.
31
Master Sergeant Pierre Jones had been sitting on the hospital’s roof trying to figure out how his life had gotten so much more complicated than it had been this morning.
He’d started the day off looking forward to a series of tests on their new aircraft. Any airtime was good time as far as he was concerned. And that had been before he’d remembered he’d be flying those hours sitting beside Tech Sergeant Rosa Cruz. Beautiful, funny, and all-Christ competent.
Finding
out that their unit commander was in on it just made the whole thing the shits. Then all the rest…
Right about the time he’d decided he’d just sit there on the hospital roof helipad until he turned into mulch, a medical crew had raced out from the elevator and shooed him aside.
A landing Coast Guard Jayhawk had disgorged multiple victims.
Burn victims.
“Avalon?” he’d asked one of the crew chiefs.
“More to come.” He’d helped the woman heft her end of a stretcher as they shifted the first of three from the cargo bay onto a rolling gurney.
“Need a lift.” Maybe the answer he was looking for was at the crash.
“Not a taxicab.”
He’d pulled his ID. “Master Sergeant Jones. I was on that plane until I had to bail out. Need to get back out there.”
“Still not a taxi.” But then she’d focused on his face.
He didn’t know what he looked like. He’d bet it was about right for having just reached Hell’s intake and registration desk. Apparently the crew chief thought the same.
“Shit!” She’d waved him aboard, then yelled forward to the pilots. “We got a hitchhiker. Crash investigation.”
Which wasn’t quite accurate, but he’d take it.
He sat in the corner of the Jayhawk’s cargo bay and did his best to stay out of the way as the crew re-stowed their medical gear during the short flight and prepared for the next load of victims.
They stopped at the top of the island and picked up a small brunette and a shining blonde.
“Still not a fucking taxi service,” the crew chief muttered to him as the bird lifted again.
He nodded his agreement. Not that it mattered.
The thing that Pierre couldn’t imagine was how to explain what he now knew. And by his silence, he too was complicit as sin. He still wasn’t clear why he’d kept his mouth shut when he shouldn’t have.
The investigators had asked the key question, Do you have anything else to add that might be relevant to this crash investigation?
He’d evaded with, Not at this time. But no way was that going to save his ass if there was a court-martial.
And there was a three-star general in the middle of the mess? That was way above his pay grade. He was just a master sergeant and had never actually met a three-star.
His aunt always said that he was damned because he hadn’t been to church since his own baptism—usually accompanied with another of her braying laughs. But this time?
“I really am going to hell.”
The blonde passenger was close enough to overhear and grinned at him. “Not as fast as the poor bastards who were on that plane.” Her accent was smoothly Australian—which was almost as sexy as Rosa’s soft Spanish.
“Perfect. Just perfect. Means I get an express nonstop flight. I was last one off the damned bird.” Maybe that was the problem. Had he actually gone down with the plane and this really was hell?
The blonde studied him for a long moment, then turned to her small companion. “We got a live one, Miranda.”
Turning back, the blonde stuck out a hand. He shook it because he didn’t know what else to do.
“Holly Harper. National Transportation Safety Board. Pleased as two peas in a pod to meet’cha.”
32
“Hi, Lizzy.”
General Elizabeth Gray was Lizzy to very few people other than herself. Miranda Chase was one of them. She had been from the very first moment they’d stumbled into each other the same night she’d met Drake.
It hadn’t hurt, much, when Miranda had proven her ability to analyze crash images even better than she could herself.
And Miranda’s abilities as a pilot—no textbook written said she should have survived that emergency landing on the National Mall when her plane was sabotaged. Lizzy had studied the flight. Ten degrees more bank, five degrees less flare, even a half second of hesitation and she’d have been dead. But Miranda had done it perfectly. The former combat pilot in her couldn’t help but respect the woman.
But what she’d liked most was Miranda’s unflappable focus. She’d faced down Drake, the President, and even the CIA director in the time Lizzy had known her. Her friend’s self-confidence had helped Lizzy bolster her own in her new role as the NRO’s director. And she loved managing the National Reconnaissance Office; from satellite launches to global image analysis, every part of it was a joy and a challenge.
But the members of Miranda’s team calling her Lizzy? Barely maybe. And definitely not in her outer office in front of her chief aide, Captain Thorsen.
“Hello, Michael. Jeremy. Jonathon.” All three men had intensely bright hats dangling behind their shoulders from loose chin straps around their necks.
“Wow, that’s a hell of a sparkler, Lizzy,” Mike persisted in being cheery. “Matches your eyes.” He laughed at his own joke.
She didn’t. Her eyes were Eurasian dark and her engagement ring shone brilliant blue.
Thorsen twisted around to look at her hand, then looked up at her with surprise. Of course he hadn’t noticed; he was a male. But Mike had, and now announced it to the world. It would rip through the three thousand employees of the NRO in hours—their job was generating and handling vast amounts of information, after all. Gossip moved even faster than news of a new Russian jet.
She’d been trying to keep the Air Force-blue diamond turned toward the inside of her hand. Mostly because every time she looked at it, it freaked her out.
Last night, Drake had taken her back to the Metro 29 Diner where they’d had their first date. He’d done the whole bent-knee proposal thing in front of the crowd, waitresses, and everybody (thankfully no other military personnel). There’d been no press, of course. And it had been over the same “patriotic” banana split they’d shared the first time—strawberry, vanilla, and blueberry ice creams. It was all alarmingly romantic, especially coming from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs dressed in jeans and a black t-shirt.
At fifty she was too old to have squealed with delight. Thankfully she had an excuse as her big five-o birthday was still four months away—she’d met him on her forty-ninth.
Married on her fiftieth? Wow! There was a startling thought.
But she didn’t need her private life rubbed in her staff’s face.
She herded the three men into her office and shut the door. Circling around her desk, she sat, then waved them to settle across from her.
“So, Old Drake finally popped the question.” Mike looked very pleased.
“The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Drake Nason’s private business is none of yours, Mr. Munroe.”
Mike seemed to finally catch on—mostly. His smile barely abated as he bowed his acknowledgement before sitting in a chair.
“And that’s General Elizabeth Gray to you until I say otherwise. Are we clear?” She hadn’t really used that tone of voice since she’d been a combat flight leader.
He blanched white, “Yes ma’am.”
Maybe it had been overharsh, but she was past caring.
Just this morning, she’d managed to excise a real prick—brother of the CEO for a major defense contractor—that the former director had put in charge of space launch acquisition. The idiot shouldn’t be allowed to launch a rowboat off a car trailer. It was only the third time in her life she’d had to recommend an officer for a court-martial offense for failure to obey a direct order to stand down, and sexually abusive language. She’d stripped his security clearance and had him escorted out of the building under heavy guard less than an hour ago.
Her tolerance for more bullshit was at a low ebb at the moment. Let Mike spin for a bit.
“May I offer my congratulations, General?” Jon asked carefully.
“On my becoming your evil step-aunt?” She hadn’t yet had time to think about the fact of Drake’s extended family. His two sons and daughter—with a granddaughter, she was going to be a step-grandmother!—were enough for her to contemplate. “Yes, you may.”<
br />
“My congratulations, Aunt Gray.” Jon kept it that succinct, but offered a nice smile with it.
“Thank you, step-nephew-to-be.”
Jeremy squinted at her. “Is ‘step’ the correct term? Once you marry General Nason, then you will technically become Jon Swift’s aunt. There is no genetic lineage consideration as the connection is through Drake’s brother, not your genes. And that would imply—”
“Jeremy,” Jon stopped him before she had to. Though even in her present mood it was impossible to be angry at someone like Jeremy.
“Oh, right. Why we’re here—that’s what I need to focus on. Gotta remember that,” he mumbled to himself. Then he spoke succinctly, which wasn’t like him at all. “We need to find out everything we can about Lieutenant General Jorge Jesus Martinez.”
“Why aren’t you asking Drake…General Nason?” She’d never get used to this. Screw it! They were engaged and she could call him any damn thing she wanted. “Jorge is one of Drake’s oldest friends. Ahh, because Drake is one of his oldest friends. But what do you need to know about him?”
The three men all eyed each other, then Jon spoke up. “We need to know why we found his dog tags on an incinerated body-double at a crash of a decommissioned and stolen AC-130H Spectre gunship on a mountaintop in Aspen.”
Lizzy carefully showed nothing as she waited, but Jon didn’t continue. Somehow, impossibly, that was a complete thought. She hadn’t become the head of the NRO, or one of the rare female generals, by revealing her thoughts. But it didn’t stop her thinking them.
JJ dead. But not dead. He’d faked his death?
“Where is Taz? Colonel Vicki ‘Taser’ Cortez?” She’d had a run-in with Taz just a few weeks ago. The woman hadn’t been on the attack, exactly, more of an exploratory probe—a hard one. She’d been after a feed for a certain type of intel, without carrying orders from the general granting her access to that type of intel.
Ghostrider: an NTSB-military technothriller (Miranda Chase Book 4) Page 13
