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

by M. L. Buchman

  “Because you are.”

  Andi could only look at her aghast. That was impossible. This was impossible.

  “Consider it,” Miranda instructed. “Holly is always ready for a battle. Jeremy gets rattled when—”

  “What if I have a PTSD attack in midflight? I shouldn’t be allowed to fly. The doctors who cleared me for flight are idiots. And you’re asking me to fly the President of the United States—” she waved a hand up toward the sky because there was no way to finish that sentence.

  “When was the last time you had a PTSD attack?”

  “In about three minutes from now.”

  “I meant in the past.” Miranda said matter-of-factly. How could she be calling anyone else the ‘calm one’?

  “Just— Just—” Andi tried to remember. A PTSD attack was not the sort of thing that she went out of her way to catalog.

  “Several months ago, on Johnston Atoll,” Miranda filled in for her. “And that was triggered by my own autistic…regression…triggered in turn by Major Jon Swift.”

  “Christ, Miranda. That was so awful. I’m so glad you’re rid of him.”

  Miranda might not know her own feelings, but Andi found they were always clear on Miranda’s face.

  “Seriously, Miranda. Don’t you dare have second thoughts about him. He said awful things about you—to your face. Trying to make you who you aren’t.”

  “Trying to make me better.”

  “No! Goddamn it, no! He was trying to make you not be like who you are. Who you are is absolutely amazing. Anyone who tells you different is an idiot.”

  Miranda began rearranging the top layer of the firewood.

  “What?” Andi knew that Miranda had to look completely away from people when something was bothering her.

  “Roy… the President. He called me a savant.”

  “Did you rip him a new asshole?”

  Miranda stopped with the wood and actually looked directly at her; she did that very rarely. Andi could see the worry in her eyes.

  “You did, didn’t you? Did you go and stand up for yourself, Miranda?”

  She nodded, “I yelled at him. At the President.”

  Andi couldn’t help herself and threw her arms around her. As they hugged, she whispered in Miranda’s ear, “I’m so proud of you.”

  Miranda hesitated only a moment before she nodded and whispered back. “If you say so, I’ll have to trust you on that.” Miranda briefly hugged her back, which was new. Miranda tolerated the occasional hug, but never returned one.

  Andi stepped back before she herself could read anything more into it but kept her hands on Miranda’s shoulders. “I do say so.”

  “Okay.”

  “So, trust me when I say that I can’t fly the President, General Nason, or the National Security Advisor. It’s too much strain, I just can’t do it yet.”

  “I suppose I can understand that.”

  “The helicopter isn’t big enough to carry everyone anyway.”

  The head Secret Service agent had been very worried about the logistics. There were three VIPs here at the house, but Andi didn’t dare fly any of them. And then there were the four Secret Service agents of the Presidential Protection Detail, and the colonel toting the scary briefcase.

  “That’s true,” Miranda nodded. “See? You are the calm one. I do have an idea though.”

  “That’s good. Your ideas are always good.” Except the one about Miranda trusting her to be the calm one.

  31

  Colonel Blake McGrady had been put on alert the moment the Marine Two aircraft crashed. For thirty-seven minutes, they’d sat in the VH-92A at Victoria Harbour Heliport with the engines spinning at idle without ever being called. Thirty-seven minutes without a goddamn thing to do but watch the tour boats come to gawk at his aircraft and take selfies.

  He finally called the White House Military Office only to be told that the President wasn’t in Canada anymore! And they weren’t telling him shit else.

  After three tries, he managed to reach Captain Helen Ames, HMX-1’s liaison to the WHMO.

  “His location is classified Top Secret.”

  “I’m the fucking commander of HMX-1.”

  “Honestly, sir, I’m not supposed to say this, but we don’t know either. He just addressed the nation about the Vice President, but did so from an unknown location. He’s way out of pocket, wherever he is. His team isn’t going to make a peep until they get him back under wraps. As to Marine Two,” she knew his second priority after the President’s safety, “poison in the emergency air generator. At least that’s what Major Tamatha Jones’ final transmission implied.”

  He’d closed his eyes against the pain. It had been an easy guess that Tamatha had gone down with the Vice President—he’d drawn up the flight schedules himself—but that didn’t diminish the impact of having it confirmed. And that she’d gone down knowing what was happening to her was simply too awful. He’d been planning to recommend her as the future first female commander of HMX-1. She was—had been—an exceptional Marine.

  For half an hour, right there at the Victoria Harbour Heliport, he and Crew Chief Warren had torn apart the VH-92A’s emergency air system. And they’d found nothing.

  Unlike a Black Hawk, they couldn’t fly with the door wide open for air circulation. So he’d lowered the rear ramp to the small cargo area, opened the rear access door and the pilots’ windows, then flown to Victoria International Airport.

  Still nothing.

  The team had broken down the birds for transport and rolled them aboard the waiting C-17 Globemaster III in record time. Thankfully, with the new VH-92A, the breakdown only included folding the rotor blades along the fuselage and dropping the tail rotor blades. Despite being longer and having more load capacity than a Black Hawk, it was also seventeen inches shorter to the top of the rear rotor mast, making the load that much easier.

  For the entire flight across the country, the Air Force wouldn’t let them touch the helo, just in case it triggered a poisonous gas release.

  All he could do was sit and feel his hands itch to get around the throat of whoever had tinkered with one of his helicopters.

  That.

  And wonder where in the hell the President had gotten to.

  32

  “Are you sure that Danziger’s heart is going to survive this?” Drake chuckled as he looked over at the MD helicopter flying just off the wing of their plane.

  “He is the best at his job or he wouldn’t have it.” Roy commented from the back seat where he was squeezed in beside Sarah.

  Danziger had insisted that the person in the back of a small plane would be a lesser target to a sniper, therefore the President had to sit in the rear. Even if he fit, Drake would feel foolish squeezing in the back and placing Sarah in the danger seat.

  Which had left Drake himself to sit up front beside Miranda as the target. Not that they were all that far apart; Miranda’s Mooney M20V four-seater airplane was smaller than the MH-6M Little Bird that he’d often ridden the side benches of when headed to battle as a Ranger. He just hoped that, if it came down to it, his separation from the President would be enough to make a difference.

  The helicopter flew fifty meters to their starboard side with its side doors slid open. The four Secret Service agents sat to either side, watching out the doors with the rifles they’d borrowed from Miranda’s gun safe at the ready, though out of sight. Danziger flew up front with Andi. Danziger’s arguments had been trumped by Andi’s CAC card as well, which listed her as a Captain of the 160th SOAR, and also possessing Top Secret clearance.

  It didn’t help that both Miranda and Andi were slender, short, dressed in working clothes, and wearing yellow ball caps for an Australian soccer team. They were surprisingly hard to take seriously unless you knew them. Drake always enjoyed watching others stumble on Miranda’s “stealth” mode—which had certainly tripped him up in the past. She and Andi standing together were at least stealth squared.

  Miran
da’s plane could have covered the distance in half the time by itself, but Danziger had refused to have the President out of his sight. Miranda kept even with the helo’s top speed.

  She also insisted on teaching him the basics of flight to land the plane. When he’d asked why, her reply had been both matter-of-fact and simple, “In case I’m the one who is shot.”

  So, for the length of the forty-minute flight down Puget Sound and past Seattle, he’d practiced flying the plane.

  “I’ve never been at the controls of a plane before. Nor flown in a plane so small.”

  “But you’re the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.”

  “Don’t be so shocked, Miranda.”

  “But aren’t you supposed to know everything about every service?”

  He laughed right in her face. Drake knew she didn’t take well to that, but he couldn’t stop himself, everything about flying was foreign to him. That a single gun shot could place the President’s life in his hands was…a damn good reason to focus.

  “Sorry, Miranda. My job is to advise the President. I know what the world’s various military forces can do, especially our own. It doesn’t mean I know how to do it myself.”

  “The truth is out,” the President called out from the back seat.

  “With all do respect, Mr. President, go to hell.”

  “Then shut up and fly the damned plane.” The President had the decency to laugh along with his order.

  “Yes sir, Mr. President, sir.” Drake didn’t salute because it would mean taking a hand off the controls and he didn’t dare to unclamp either from the small steering wheel.

  Enough minutes later for Drake to be convinced that he’d never get it, Miranda waved him off the controls. His palms were slick and he was glad to let go.

  “It’s time. We’ll be in their airspace in two minutes.”

  Drake pulled out his phone and dialed Joint Base Lewis-McChord. One of the largest military bases in the world, it lay just a hundred miles south of Miranda’s island.

  “I have an encrypted priority call for your base commander,” he informed the operator who answered.

  “Encrypting now,” the operator was efficiency itself. The phone squealed sharply in his ear. Drake yanked it away and set encryption on his own phone.

  “I need a clearance code,” the operator responded.

  Drake gave his.

  “Verified. Hold please.”

  “Colonel Williams here,” the base commander answered seconds later.

  “Colonel, this is General Drake Nason, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. You have an E-4B Nightwatch on station. This is a klaxon launch warning. I’m currently inbound in a flight of a private aircraft and helicopter. We need immediate clearance direct to the E-4B’s hangar. This is a high-security event.”

  33

  Andi stayed just off her wing as Miranda landed at JBLM. It was funny seeing the Mooney land on the ten-thousand-foot runway designed to handle the biggest and heaviest jets in the world.

  She hadn’t been privy to the plan, just told to stay on the President’s wing, even if it was actually Miranda’s plane. Danziger had the humor of a rock and apparently trusted nobody. Of course, if her job was protecting the President and he was out in the wind like this, she’d probably feel much the same.

  However Miranda had arranged it, they were given top priority on the runway, and several big aircraft were left to cool their jets on the taxiway. That the Mooney was just twenty-six feet long made it look comical. Of course her helo was all of thirty-two feet from tip-of-nose to end-of-tail-boom, so she wasn’t exactly in a position to brag.

  The Mooney needed so little of the pavement, Miranda could have turned off at the first taxiway, except it was blocked by a hundred-and-seventy-foot, four-engine C-17 Globemaster III jet, waiting for departure clearance.

  She wished she could hear what the plane’s pilots were saying about their two tiny aircraft.

  So, she and Miranda hurried side by side down the massive slab of concrete to the next taxiway.

  Andi held station a hundred feet off Miranda’s right wing and two feet above the grassy verge.

  She hadn’t flown into a military base since she’d been forced to leave the Army. To once more be back inside prohibited airspace had sent waves of prickles over her skin as if she’d been irradiated or something. Actually landing at a base? That was pumping her heart rate toward catastrophic.

  She was a former Night Stalker, goddamn it. She could do anything.

  Her nerves were less than convinced by her pep talk as they turned toward the third hangar in the long row.

  On their side-by-side approach to the hangar, the massive door split down the middle and began rolling open.

  No one had told her what to expect and she nearly screwed up her hover. The bulbous nose of a shining white 747 with a thin blue stripe down the side loomed in the shadows. The tip of the nose itself, where the primary radar was installed, was unpainted. And it had the most obvious giveaway of all: a second lobe on top of the bulge of the 747’s upper deck for the super-high-frequency antenna.

  An E-4B Nightwatch.

  There were just four of them ever built and, despite being forty-five years old, they were among the most sophisticated planes in the sky. They were like the VC-25s used for Air Force One, with all of the pretty bits replaced by specialty equipment. A Nightwatch had no seating for the press, nor a squad of Secret Service, nor luxury spaces for guests. It wasn’t a flying symbol with a Situation Room; it was a flying NORAD control-and-command center.

  They were hardened against electromagnetic-pulse attacks, could trail a five-mile-long antenna specifically for communicating directly with deep-submerged missile submarines anywhere in the world, or use that rooftop antenna to steer a satellite. No other aircraft anywhere carried as much electronics—or could oversee a war so effectively.

  Instead of nearly four hundred passengers that a typical 747 could carry, it was operated by a crew of a hundred elite technicians. With in-flight refueling, it could stay aloft for a week or more with no other resupply.

  “Set us here,” Danziger pointed down, “then get the hell out of the way.”

  Andi thudded the skids down onto the tarmac with all the grace of her first training flight in a TH-67 Creek helo.

  The five Secret Service agents dumped out of her helicopter without so much as a “Thanks,” then raced over to Miranda’s plane that was still taxiing toward the built-in stairs extended from the 747’s right belly.

  Unsure where to go, Andi hesitated.

  Apparently that was a moment too long.

  A security team, with their rifles in hand—still pointed at the ground, but for how long?—lined up between her and the 747 now fully exposed by the big doors. Then an aircraft marshal stepped directly in front of her. He waved his palms upward. Rather than giving her a depart signal, he waved her into a clear space in the now wide-open hangar.

  She eased forward…slowly. She could have crawled faster on her hands and knees. The air marshal clearly wanted her to, but she didn’t dare.

  Finally, she settled beneath the end of the E-4B’s high wing.

  He crossed his arms low for her to land.

  Once she was down inside the hangar—a tiny bit more gracefully this time—he gave the cross-throat signal that either he wanted her engines cut or he was going to cut her throat to keep this all secret. Because the latter seemed unlikely, she ran through her engine shutdown procedure checklist in record time.

  As she climbed out, Miranda taxied over to park beside her.

  The Mooney’s shutdown only took seconds. An airman had the plane’s wheels chocked before she was out of the seat.

  “What now?” Andi sidled up. She had to shout, because the 747’s engines, over their heads, were spinning up fast.

  Miranda shrugged.

  They both turned to look at the airstairs. Drake was signaling them urgently from the head of them.

  Even hesitating to grab
her NTSB vest and go bag caused frantic gesticulations.

  They started at a trot, but were at a dead run by the time they were racing up the stairs.

  The stairs began retracting into the underbelly of the jet close on their heels.

  “Here,” Drake pointed at a line of seats mounted sideways along the aisle beside the door.

  By the time the three of them had sat down and kicked their gear under the seats, the plane was in motion.

  “Jesus,” Andi twisted to glance out the window as the big jet drove forward. “It’s going to make a mess of the hangar.”

  “It’s a klaxon launch, that’s the least of our worries.”

  Andi looked at him, but he was serious.

  She looked at Miranda, who sat as calmly as if it was a Sunday stroll.

  “Hang on,” Andi whispered.

  “Why? What’s a klaxon launch?”

  “In an alert fighter, like the interceptors in place to protect the White House, they’re able to be airborne in three minutes from the need-to-launch warning, and on-site over the White House thirty seconds later if they go supersonic from Andrews. In a 747, I have no idea what it means.”

  What it meant was that they didn’t taxi to the far end of the runway. They ignored all of the waiting jets. From the hangar, they rolled directly to the runway, then firewalled the engines.

  She’d always heard that the VC-25s of Air Force One and the E-4B Nightwatches were massively overpowered for just such moments, and now she had proof. The gigantic jet slammed aloft; there was no other word for it. It continued to climb hard at a far steeper angle than any commercial airliner would ever attempt. Thirty-five tons less people and no cargo certainly enhanced the performance as well.

  Andi checked her watch, then looked out the window. It didn’t take long until they were above the height of the fourteen-thousand-foot peak of the dormant volcano Mount Rainier. It was so massive that it always seemed to hover over Tacoma though it lay forty miles away.

  “Eighty-two seconds,” Miranda observed quietly.