White Top: a political technothriller (Miranda Chase Book 8)

by M. L. Buchman

  5

  Miranda sent Taz to ride up front with Andi, “There’s a playing field behind McCaw Hall at Seattle Center called Memorial Stadium. Could you arrange for us to land there?”

  “On it!” Taz yanked out her phone and was dialing before they’d even hovered out of the hangar.

  Once they were clear of the island, Miranda switched the intercom to Cabin Only so that they wouldn’t disturb Andi or Taz. The rear of the helicopter had the VIP configuration: two seats behind the pilots facing aft and two more at the rear facing forward. She sat in the back left with Mike beside her and Jeremy facing backward beside Holly.

  “Jeremy, I’d like you to treat this as a training investigation. I want you to be the Investigator-in-Charge.”

  “Really, Miranda? Oh my gosh, that’s so wonderful. Isn’t that wonderful, Taz?” He turned to her but his seat was back-to-back with hers and she was still on the phone. Even if she had heard, he didn’t give her time to answer before continuing. “I can’t believe that you trust me to do that. But what are you going to do? I mean, you’re the one who—”

  Holly punched his arm hard enough to send him slamming into the closed door of the helo.

  “Ow!”

  Mike patted his knee consolingly. “Rule Number One of being an IIC, buddy: listen more—talk less.”

  “Got it. Right. Makes sense. Listen more, talk less. Listen more, talk less. I’ll work on that. What else? Tell me more that I need to—”

  Holly held up a finger.

  “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Listen more, talk less. Got it.”

  Miranda tried to think of what else to say, but Holly had told her that part of her role was to keep her mouth shut.

  Holly was the one who answered him, apparently ignoring her own advice. “You’re in charge now, Jeremy. Go on. Take the lead.”

  “Well, if I’m the IIC now…” he turned to face Holly, “…you can stop punching me.”

  “There’s hope for him yet,” Mike whispered in Miranda’s ear as Holly patted him on the head hard enough to have him cringing.

  6

  “How did a plane that size cause such minimal damage?”

  “That’s part of what we’re here to learn, Mike.” Miranda thought that question was rather obvious for a seasoned National Transportation Safety Board investigator.

  “I understand that. I simply never thought that a ten-person commuter plane could create less damage in a crash than a Cessna 152 two-seater might. At least when those tiny planes crash, you get a crumpled up ball of metal.”

  “It did crash into an opera house,” Holly commented, her Strine accent easily indicated humor. “Tragic and ridiculous at the same time.”

  “Not a normal landing spot,” Taz agreed over the helicopter’s intercom headset as they circled above the downtown Seattle crash site.

  Miranda had learned to recognize Taz’s tone now as well. The point of Taz’s jokes typically eluded her—yet another aspect of her autism—but she’d learned Taz’s tone when she was using humor. Actually, over the last three months, Miranda had learned Taz’s “being serious” tone. Treating everything else she said as a joke or a “wry commentary”—which also often eluded her—had vastly increased her comprehension statistics regarding the newest member of her crash investigation team.

  Taz’s primary specialty was as the team’s liaison to the military and the defense contractors. It seemed that they were both terrified of the former Air Force colonel. She also offered many insights into how aircraft were manufactured, which had proved very useful.

  Andi, the team’s rotorcraft specialist and former Night Stalkers pilot, had flown them direct from the island to hovering above the McCaw Hall auditorium at Seattle Center in just thirty minutes.

  Miranda decided that the brand-new MD 902 Explorer helicopter was a good investment. Her own understanding of helicopters was definitely lacking in first-hand experience. It also provided a degree of operational convenience in the Pacific Northwest region that she appreciated. For now, she was adapting to the passenger experience. Then she would shift forward and take lessons from Andi.

  Andi was thoughtful enough to face the helo to offer Miranda’s seat the best view of the opera house crash. Miranda didn’t like crowds, so she never attended an opera performance, but she donated enough money that they allowed her to view the final dress rehearsal when the three-thousand-seat house was mostly empty.

  That experience provided sufficient information to interpret the form of the interior from the shape of the roof: the lower roofs over the lobby to the west and the Seattle Opera offices to the east, the rising peak over the twenty-nine-hundred-seat house, and the twelve-story-high tower for the fly loft.

  A fully loaded Cessna 208 Caravan had taken off from Boeing Field in south Seattle. Six miles after takeoff, in a direct line from the runway, it had flown into the top of the fly-loft tower just above the hundred-foot level. A large hole had been punched in the side of the tower but had not appeared out the other side, indicating that the aircraft had remained inside the building.

  Only minor wisps of smoke still emerged from the building.

  Mike was right; in surprising ways, it was a notably low damage profile for such an event. A hole in a wall ten stories above the ground and a thin streamer of smoke. Though the inside of the building could well be a different story.

  The lines of emergency vehicles parked by the rear loading docks attested to that. Five fire trucks, hoses snaking all around them like a living mat of vines, and several ambulances were gathered there. Beyond them were a phalanx of police cars trying to keep the heavy traffic on Mercer Street moving along.

  Even as she watched, two more ambulances rolled out and then raced away with their sirens going.

  “Look! The landing gear,” Miranda started laughing.

  The others leaned over to where she pointed at the lower opera house roof, but no one seemed to get the joke.

  “It looks like the plane landed on the inside of the ceiling but its wheels broke through. It landed in the sky.”

  Jeremy, who sat across from her, squinted. “I don’t think they’re in the right sequence. I think one of the side landing gear landed where the nose gear should be. And the dimensions are definitely off.”

  Mike and Taz merely looked puzzled. Holly didn’t make any comment, but Miranda heard Andi’s soft laugh over the intercom.

  “Thank you, Andi.” At least someone understood. “We can land now.”

  Andi landed close behind the opera house in the end zone of Memorial Field—the green grass white-lined with a confusing combination of a soccer field overlaid upon a football field. Or perhaps it was the other way around.

  Miranda assumed that the players could make sense of the two sets of lines, even in the heat of play; to her it was worse than an air-crash debris field.

  She wondered if it would be possible to attend operas by helicopter. At present, she had to fly mere minutes from her private island in the San Juans to pick up her car in Anacortes twenty-four miles away—she didn’t like the unfamiliarity of rental cars that might be available at some airport closer to Seattle. It was then a two-hour drive to the opera, and reverse the entire process afterward.

  Though she suspected that they wouldn’t clear her to land at Seattle Center for each performance. Besides, she hadn’t learned to fly a helicopter.

  “Do you like opera, Andi?” she asked as they both stepped onto the field and began walking up the stadium’s rear ramp toward the damaged opera house.

  “When there isn’t a plane parked there, you mean? I don’t know. I’ve never been to one.”

  “You could come to the next one with me. See if you like it. I get two tickets to the final rehearsals for being a significant donor.”

  “Who usually goes with you?”

  “No one.”

  Andi studied her sideways for half the length of the thirty-meter ramp before replying. “Okay. But I don’t think there will be any operas here for a
while.”

  Miranda looked up at the wisps of smoke still curling out the hole in the stage tower and decided that was an astute assessment.

  She led them to the west, toward the main entrance. It was the nearest access. The emergency crews were all around the far side of the block and she wouldn’t enjoy the mayhem. The tall, glassed-in lobby looked quiet and showed no obvious signs of smoke damage.

  They arrived at a yellow-tape barrier; “Police Line Do Not Cross” repeated endlessly down its length.

  “I always felt that these need punctuation. Mike, who should I talk to about that?”

  Now Mike laughed when she hadn’t intended a joke at all. “How about we discuss that at a different time, Miranda? There is a plane crash.” He lifted the tape for her to duck under.

  “Okay.” She stepped under the line and the others followed.

  Now she was on-site and she hadn’t checked her tools yet. She began tapping each of the tools in her multi-pocket NTSB vest to make sure everything was in place.

  A policeman came over. “Hey, I need you people to stay on the other side of the line. It says, ‘Do Not Cross’ for a reason.”

  Miranda continued checking her vest until she was sure of the placement of everything. She then turned on her pocket recorder.

  “Hey, lady. I’m talking to you.”

  She took out a fresh notebook, noted the location, date, and time, then tucked it away.

  “You can’t be here. Now please step back across that line pronto.”

  She spoke quickly when he left a brief gap to take a breath.

  “I’m Miranda Chase. I’m the Investigator-in-Charge for the NTSB.”

  They were all wearing their yellow ball caps—probably looking like a group of fans—which could account for his confusion.

  And that’s when she realized what the real problem was. She pulled out her ID, turned it to face outward, and slipped the lanyard around her neck. Everyone else was already wearing theirs.

  “What’s the NTSB?”

  “It’s— We’re—” She’d never been asked that at a crash site before and was unsure how to answer.

  Mike spoke up. “National Transportation Safety Board, Officer. We’re the folks in charge of investigating airplane crashes.”

  “No, Mike. You aren’t all investigators-in-charge, so that constitutes an inaccurate statement. Don’t mislead the officer. I’m the IIC, the rest of you are essential members of my team.”

  “Me? Essential? I like the sound of that.” He looked terribly surprised.

  “Why is he being so surprised?” she asked Andi. Andi and Mike often explained people’s reactions for her, but since she was making an inquiry about Mike, he didn’t seem to be the correct one to ask.

  “He’s being funny.”

  Mike was the one team member who could always deceive her that way.

  “Airplane crash? Where?” the officer was looking in every direction except the right one—upward. “They just told me to run the tape and watch the line. Figured it was just a fire by all the trucks racing around to the loading dock.”

  Mike waved him over to stand just at the tape, turned him around, and pointed up.

  The smoke seemed to have stopped, but the gaping hole remained.

  “Shit! They never tell you anything.”

  Mike thumped his shoulder in what his easy nod indicated was sympathy.

  Miranda didn’t have to open the Team Attributes page of her personal notebook to recognize that. While his humor was elusive, Mike’s kindness was always obvious. She wondered if that would surprise him for real.

  She saw that Jeremy already had his handheld weather station out and was recording wind and temperature.

  He had embraced his role and now it was her job to keep quiet.

  “I’ll catch up in a minute.” Andi then turned to talk to the officer to make sure that he knew her helicopter had been cleared to land at Memorial Field.

  Miranda nodded even though Andi was no longer facing her. Keeping her mouth shut, she followed Jeremy and the others into the building.

  7

  Miranda had seen airplane crashes, from two-seater training planes that had tangled into telephone wires to a shattered C-5M Super Galaxy, the US military’s largest transport jet. Curiously, the two extremes had been her first and second solo investigations as a newly certified investigator.

  She had traveled from frozen glaciers in the remote wilderness to a shattered apartment complex close by an airfield, and out to remote desert islands.

  But the opera house was perhaps the strangest crash site yet.

  There was a crash, except there was little sign of it.

  They’d come in through the stage right door—the right-hand side as they stood on the stage and faced the seating. The offstage area was empty. A massive, multi-tiered set in the form of a stone castle dominated the stage. Through gaps in the set and side curtains she could see the numerous firemen and their hoses that had been strung into the opera house from the stage left side.

  The stage was a hangar-sized space bigger than either of hers, on her island or down at the Tacoma office. What’s more, unlike her hangars, it was a hundred feet high. It extended twenty feet to this side of the area visible from the house seating, and seventy feet to the other. Andi could park ten of their new helicopters in here without overlapping the rotors.

  Today was their first local investigation since she’d purchased the MD 902. She’d wanted a chance to study rotorcraft flight dynamics personally, but was also pleased at how conveniently and quickly it had been able to transport them to a crash site. Two major advantages.

  Looking abandoned in the middle of the stage, the elaborate set must be for the upcoming production of Turandot. It had never been one of her favorites; Puccini was so overdramatic and the set reflected that. The towering Chinese palace was, in turn, dominated by a great dragon hunched as if ready to attack.

  He was now a tragic dragon, scorched and drooping as if burned by his own fire.

  Miranda considered for a moment but was unsure if that would count as a joke or not.

  Much of the set was scorched; holes burned through the facing material. The exposed innards were incongruously modern supports for an ancient Chinese palace. Everything was either drenched with water or spray foam. It all smelled curiously fresh, like a spring day right after a rain shower.

  The proscenium opening that should reveal the house seating was blocked by a vast fire curtain. Its face was also scorched with a splash of fire, though in the wrong configuration to have issued from the dragon.

  Jeremy and Taz were crisscrossing the stage to take photographs, hopping over firehoses and dodging rushing rescue workers. Mike and Holly were simply standing and watching them.

  Miranda tapped the curtain material, fiberglass over a metal frame. The only thing it allowed to escape into the house was the steady stream of water sheeting across the stage.

  Even as she watched, a small group of stagehands rushed in and began laying sandbags along the base to stem the flow. They didn’t have nearly enough and the water simply flowed between them.

  The simple solution would be to lay one of the charged firehoses along the entire length. That would hold back up to three inches of water. Was that related to the crash or not related to the crash? She wasn’t sure if she should speak or not.

  Probably not.

  Knowing that would bother her until she found a new topic to focus on, she pulled out her personal notebook and added an entry: “Research the design, operation, and fire resistance of theatrical fire curtains.”

  Then she tucked the notebook away and looked around once more.

  Something was missing.

  Which she’d always observed was much harder to notice than what was actually there.

  It took her two full, slow turns to realize what it was amid the wounded grandeur of the emperor’s palace.

  “Where’s the plane?” Then she slapped a hand over her mouth to ke
ep it shut.

  Holly pointed aloft as if the plane was still flying overhead.

  And indeed, after a fashion, it was.

  As her eyes tracked upward, she spotted several artificial trees high in the loft that were still badly scorched like the aftermath of a forest fire.

  A hundred feet above the stage, on top of the vast gridwork of steel supports, lay the airplane, or at least the dim outline of one viewed between the gaps.

  A plane flying over the charred remains of a fake forest.

  How terribly operatic.

  She was quite sure that was somehow a joke. But while she’d been looking, Mike and Holly had followed Jeremy and Taz on the long climb to the fly loft itself so she couldn’t ask them.

  That’s when she realized that something else was missing.

  “Where’s Andi?”

  8

  President Cole actually slumped in the chair in his office aboard Air Force One. “Give me your opinions on the last week, and keep it short. We land in Canada in two hours and I need to get some sleep because I know for damn sure I won’t get a wink during the G-7 meetings.”

  Drake glanced at Sarah but the National Security Advisor just shook her head, so Drake took the bit.

  “Middle East first. I think you have only two choices, Mr. President.”

  “Am I going to like either one?”

  “First, we could step in and provide area security, making ourselves primary targets for everyone.”

  “Old patterns.”

  “Exactly, Mr. President. If you do what you’ve always done…” Drake mused.

  “You’ll still be green—Kermit the Frog. I was a Green Beret, I know that particular truism well, Drake. So what’s the new action?”

  “First, if we no longer want to be the world’s policemen, we have to stop the old. Have you seen Senator Ramson’s latest?”

  “I don’t recall that in my morning briefing. When was morning, anyway, New Zealand?”