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

by M. L. Buchman

  That’s where he’d gotten the idea.

  Somehow, the military had found out what he was doing before his work was done. Before it was barely begun. Now he could only hope that someone would learn from his example. Though he knew that they wouldn’t. Instead, he’d be excoriated on the altar of what was ethically and politically permissible—and he’d gone way over that line.

  He finished his brief tour at the cockpit and thumped each pilot on the shoulder. Then he gripped their seat backs as they turned steeply left above what would be their final target in Nogales—their final target ever.

  The pilots banked over until the port wing centered and remained aimed at a major Sinaloa cartel mansion as they circled high above it. The leaders were meeting there tonight.

  In aiming the weapons downward, the plane behind and above him would know that his Ghostrider wasn’t positioned to fire at them.

  Opening up the intercom, he announced plane-wide, “Weapons free.”

  64

  Pierre stared at the display in disbelief.

  “I don’t get it. He has to know you’re there,” Holly’s voice sounded over the open intercom. Holly and Miranda were in a secure room at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington State.

  General Gray and Rosa stood close beside his chair. Major Jon Swift remained with the pilots.

  The stolen Ghostrider was shredding a mansion on the outskirts of Nogales as if they were alone in the sky without a worry in the world.

  “Think, Holly,” Miranda’s voice sounded over their headsets. “You already know. General Martinez is so like you.”

  “A man of honor,” General Elizabeth Gray whispered.

  For once, Holly had no snappy reply.

  Pierre had feared that he wouldn’t be good enough, no matter how well Rosa said he was doing. That somehow he’d screw up. Then JJ’s stolen plane would kill them, and it would all be his fault.

  But they weren’t going to fight back.

  That meant they were going to live. The only challenge now was to cripple but not kill the other plane.

  “Damn,” Rosa said softly. “Their laser operator is awfully good. Look at the precision of those hits. All against physical rather than human targets.”

  “That would be our Jeremy,” Holly announced happily.

  “Where did he train?” Pierre asked as he prepared his weapons for the attack.

  General Gray answered. “The first time he ever sat at a console was at Andrews Air Force Base. By the time we exited the plane, perhaps twenty minutes later, he was demonstrating the challenges of inverted firing tactics.”

  Pierre glanced up at Rosa. She hadn’t shown him any of those. By her look, she’d never thought to try one.

  He supposed it was always good to know when to be a little humbled. Her look of chagrin said the same. It had been a very humbling day in many ways—Rosa the greatest among those.

  “How long until you’re in firing range, Master Sergeant?”

  He turned to General Gray. “We’re just there now, ma’am.”

  She took a deep breath, stared hard at her bright blue ring for a moment.

  The future. There was going to be a future.

  In that case, he’d have to get Rosa a nice ring. But not Air Force blue. Nor would any stone match her dark eyes; so he’d make it a diamond to shine light in them. And then they’d find a way to serve way below the radar.

  “Master Sergeant,” the general’s voice was steady when she looked up from her ring. “Fire at will.”

  With the stolen Ghostrider’s port wing pointed steeply down at the targeted mansion, the sensor ball on the left side of their fuselage was aimed nearly straight down. He instructed the pilots to make a high-speed dive and zoom-climb pass, dipping only momentarily low enough to target only the highly sensitive sensor array.

  He narrowed the beam as tightly as possible.

  At the bottom of the dive, he fired.

  65

  Their screens fuzzed for one long second, then blanked all at once. Only the sight camera on the howitzer’s barrel remained operative. A far less effective system.

  “Continue firing,” JJ called over the intercom.

  Taz did the best she could with the crippled system.

  “Release bombs.”

  Jeremy had trained her how to pre-align those so that she wouldn’t have to think about them during an attack, just release them.

  She checked that the pilot was still maintaining his pylon turn so that the port wing was aimed at the center of the target.

  He was.

  Taz knew it was their last drop, so she didn’t attempt to conserve anything. She released everything that remained. Sixteen bombs—four thousand pounds of explosives—launched off the tail. The mansion had covered more than an acre.

  More by luck than design, all of the bombs landed inside the compound walls. Everything was obliterated.

  She continued firing the big howitzer into the devastation as fast as the crew could load it. It was their last target—ever.

  “One last round,” the gun crew called.

  “Thank you, everyone. Due north, please.” JJ announced over the intercom.

  “Why north?” Jeremy asked quickly as the deck leveled.

  “He’s taking you back home to the US. And removing this plane from potential capture by any foreign agency. Even an ally like Mexico. The border isn’t far.”

  When the light went green, she aimed at the trailing fire. Just before she punched the Fire button to send the final round down into the conflagration where it could make no possible difference, the screen flared and blanked.

  “What the—” Taz tried to stop the motion of her finger, but didn’t quite manage it.

  66

  “Massive explosion on the port side,” Pierre announced. “We have a massive explosion on the port side of the target Ghostrider.”

  “What the hell did you do?” Someone shouted at him. Holly?

  “I fired the laser at the barrel of the M102 howitzer as we agreed. My goal was to take out the sight camera along the barrel.”

  “How hot would the barrel have become?” Miranda asked in the strangely analytical way that told him what had happened.

  “They were already firing at the gun’s maximum rate. If they fired a round into a hot barrel at the same moment I was heating it with the laser… The round must have exploded as it was leaving the breech.”

  “Flames now,” Rosa pointed.

  “Oh shit!” Pierre could only watch in horror. “They’ve got a real fire over there. A bad one.”

  67

  “Go. Now!” Taz shoved the two parachutes she’d stashed into Jeremy’s and Mike’s arms. JJ had ordered that there be none aboard—burning the ships behind them, like her almost namesake Cortés had five hundred years ago to motivate the men. She’d kept two back, well hidden.

  Mike dragged on his chute with the signs of previous, if not deep, experience. Jeremy fumbled at the straps until he was actually holding it upside down. Something as simple as donning a chute had no place in his genius world. Other than a brief moment on a mountainous Baja rock shelf, their worlds had no overlap. One glimpse of another way life could be.

  “Where’s yours?” Jeremy asked as she and Mike worked together to get Jeremy strapped in.

  “I don’t have one.” She fisted the emergency release on the forward passenger door, then yanked the handle. It rolled upward on its tracks. The wind-and-propeller roar filled the cabin. It only served to fan the flames that were fast consuming the rear of the plane. None of the gun crew had survived the initial blast.

  Even as she glanced down, the brightly lit US border passed below them. Safely north of the border. At least she wouldn’t die in Mexico.

  Jeremy grabbed both her arms as she double-checked his gear. “Come with me. We’re both light. The parachute must be strong enough.”

  It was. A military chute could take a strapping Special Forces operator and a full kit weighing more
than her hundred and five pounds with perfect safety.

  “No.”

  “But—”

  “A life in Leavenworth or some Mexican jail? Not for me.”

  “I know the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Miranda knows the President. We can get you a pardon.”

  Mike nodded to confirm the unlikely truth of that.

  For a moment, just a moment, she blinked.

  In that split instant she saw a different world. One that might have been. Back before she’d buried a knife in the coyote man’s chest. Before she’d become who she was.

  “Out and down to stay below the prop,” she shouted at Mike. Seeing her decision, he offered a sad smile, then was gone.

  She kissed Jeremy for that glimpse. Fast, as time was running, but hard so that he’d remember her.

  “Pull this after you’re clear,” she shouted and put his hand on the ripcord handle.

  “But—”

  “I can’t leave the general.”

  Jeremy reached into his pocket and pulled out something to hand to her.

  She took it and then she shoved hard against the middle of his chest.

  Jeremy tumbled out the door, down and backward into the slipstream—gone into the night.

  She slapped the Door Close control before she could be tempted to dive after him.

  The crippled AC-130J Ghostrider was twisting down through the sky. It wouldn’t be long now.

  In her hand she clutched an MRE bag. Inside were the three unused heaters from his prodigious consumption of pizza slices. There was also a lighter he’d scrounged from somewhere.

  Three together. Add water. Flick a spark. And the hydrogen gas generated by three flameless heaters together would make an impressive one-shot flamethrower. Enough to permanently blind her, the general, or maybe both.

  Jeremy had built a weapon out of nothing…but had chosen not to use it on her.

  Taz clutched the bag to her chest and felt both ridiculous and—

  She spotted General Martinez watching her intently.

  “Was there anything you needed, sir?” Her throat was tight, but she managed to get out the words.

  “No, Vicki. No. Not a thing. I just wanted to thank you for your service.” And he saluted her crisply as the plane died beneath their feet.

  She hadn’t even known that he knew her first name.

  68

  Miranda barely recognized Mike and Jeremy as they disembarked from the C-21 Learjet that had returned them to Tacoma Narrows Airport.

  Jon had waited until they’d been rescued and checked out medically. Then he’d brought them home himself.

  She and Holly had been returned from JBLM only minutes before the others landed. Together they’d waited outside their hangar in the cool, rising-dawn light. Soon the sun would clear the towering Cascades, but for now the sky was shot with reds and golds. Even the icy beacon of the glaciers atop Mount Rainier weren’t lit yet.

  The air was still, the dead calm of sunrise so typical of the Pacific Northwest. Often dawn and dusk were the only truly calm times of day here.

  Hearing what to expect was one thing, but seeing it was much worse.

  Jeremy had a cast on his arm from a bad parachute landing. One side of Mike’s face was all black and blue. The other side had been badly scraped as his parachute had dragged him over the rough ground.

  The moment they deplaned, Holly threw herself at them and locked them both in a hard hug. Protests and complaints of pain made no difference.

  Miranda made sure that her own welcomes were gentler.

  “I’m so very pleased to see you.”

  Mike touched her cheek, then rubbed his fingers together. “I feel the same, Miranda.”

  She brushed at her own cheeks, surprised to discover that they were wet.

  They all laughed, briefly, but it died fast and felt awkward.

  Jon flagged her from the cockpit of the little Learjet.

  “Oh, I didn’t realize he was staying.” She hurried to unlock the hangar door.

  “Duh!” Holly’s voice sounded behind her.

  When it slid open, the pine scent of the Northwest was replaced by the sharper smells of fresh paint and new leather. She squinted into the dim depths of the hangar. Wonderful!

  Then she stepped aside and let the others enter first.

  They were halfway across before anyone noticed the new wall, sectioning off the back of the hangar. Holly was first, as usual, “By crikey.”

  Jeremy and Mike both blinked in surprise, but couldn’t seem to find any words at all. The door stood open. A small envelope hung beside an outer keypad, which would be the default combination for the new room’s security system.

  Jeremy and Mike crossed the threshold side by side and stumbled to a halt. Miranda tried going up on tiptoes to see over their shoulders, then tried looking between them to no avail.

  Holly finally pushed the two boys far enough apart that she could step between them. Miranda followed through the brief gap.

  “Well, I’ll be stuffed, mate!” Holly amended her assessment.

  The renovation crews had been working hard for the two days they’d been gone.

  The back of the hangar now had two large windows facing the runway, and a third facing south over Puget Sound. The one-way glass barely dimmed the view. The golden dawn filled the visible sky and glinted off the ice-capped towers of the Olympic Mountains. Now, not only could she hear the distinctive sound of a Cessna 172’s Lycoming four-cylinder engine and two-blade propeller lifting off the runway, she could see its happily blinking navigation lights. The two passengers were just visible in the front seats, silhouetted against the lightening sky.

  The new-built room had been finished in soft pastels. She liked the distinction from her wood-finished home up on Spieden Island. She’d opted for a laminate floor with Douglas fir patterning to stand up to whatever abuses the future would bring, but she’d also selected several modern throw rugs.

  With the views out the big windows, there was no need for art on the walls.

  “This is amazing!” Jeremy had found his workbench. She’d doubled its size and added drawers below and cubbies above. The tool cabinets sat off to either side and she’d updated all of the equipment to a full digital test suite and a high-speed computer for modeling aerodynamics.

  Mike ran his fingers over the top-of-the-line Breville Oracle home espresso machine and the matching Grind Control grinder-brewer as he inspected the kitchenette with a soft smile. Then, with a sigh of relief that Miranda was fairly sure was happy, he settled slowly into the vintage cordovan-leather Chesterfield wingback armchair she’d found for him.

  Holly plunged into the oversized deep-cushioned armchair next to him and propped her boots on the stout teak coffee table. Her chair was centered directly across from the big-screen television that could run simulations from Jeremy’s bench, or movies.

  Her own teak rolltop desk sat just to the side of the big windows so that she could watch the planes while she was working.

  She could feel Jon come up behind her after rolling the Air Force C-21 into the hangar. He slid his hands around her waist from behind and laced his fingers as she laid her hands over his.

  “Pretty nice digs you have here,” his whisper tickled her ear.

  “Thank you.”

  She didn’t yet know him well enough to get the right kind of chair for him. For now, he’d have to share one of the couches with either her or Jeremy.

  69

  Too exhausted to fly home, Miranda had opted to stay at the team’s Gig Harbor house. Holly had insisted on sleeping out on the couch so that she and Jon could have the privacy of a bedroom.

  Despite the harrowing two days and the long morning and afternoon just catching up with events, Miranda lay wide awake at midnight.

  Jon slept soundly beside her.

  He had gone to some trouble to prove that he liked her in her NTSB clothes, liked taking them off her before introducing her to several new experienc
es in the shower, and then finally liked helping her to slip on her nightgown. She no longer needed him to explain that each was good but different; he’d proven his point with precise demonstration and a most enjoyable thoroughness.

  Though her body was very well sated, she was unable to stop the whirl of her thoughts. Slipping from his arms, she went into the bathroom and once more changed.

  As she eased out through the bedroom’s darkness, Jon spoke up softly.

  “I thought it was the guy who was supposed to slip away in the middle of the night.”

  “They are? Why would they do that?”

  Jon’s voice was thick with sleep and a soft laugh. “To avoid attachment? Utter stupidity? As for me, I like the idea of waking up with you.”

  She was fairly sure that she was right in imagining his smile even though she couldn’t see it.

  “Where are you going? A walk in the moonlight? Do you want company?”

  “I’m not sure. The moon set over an hour ago. And no.”

  “Well,” she could hear him shift in the sheets. “That certainly puts me in my place.”

  “There’s just something I have to see, I think. Goodbye, Jon.”

  “Hold it. Wait!” His shadow rose from the bed and stepped up close enough that she could feel his warmth, smell the curious scent of him that she couldn’t put words to despite several attempts.

  “Is that like a goodbye-goodbye or a goodbye-until-I-see-you-next-time goodbye?”

  Another one of those words with situational meanings. She really wished she could rewrite the English language and eradicate them all permanently.

  “Are you asking if we can have sex again in the future? Yes, Jon, I’d like that very much.”