Honor Flight

by M. L. Buchman

  The woman turned to Miranda with a look that she couldn’t interpret. She held out a hand toward Miranda.

  When she took it, the woman used their shared grip as a lever to pull herself to her feet, letting the foil blanket remain over the coffin.

  Once she was upright, Miranda could feel her waver for a moment, then get steady on her feet. The woman finally let go of Miranda’s hand to tap the eagle pins on her collar points—she didn’t let go of her water bottle.

  Miranda could see Withers stitched into the pocket of her blouse.

  “At attention when you’re addressing me, Major.”

  The major’s eyes bulged for a moment, then he snapped to attention and saluted. “Yes ma’am.”

  Colonel Withers ignored the major’s salute for a long moment, then finally returned it casually.

  The major returned to standing at attention.

  Miranda wondered about that pause and the lazy salute. Was the colonel still suffering from her ordeal or was there some hidden message? She thought Sergeant Peters might know, but she couldn’t read anything from his expression as he filled the colonel in on the events.

  The major didn’t relax, but he did start looking around. Not at the plane or the coffins. Instead, he was looking at Sergeant Peters and the SFs—that was how they were labeled after all.

  “Three coffins too many?” Colonel Withers cut off the sergeant when he reached that point in his narrative.

  “Three more than were on my manifest.”

  “Did you count this one?” She pointed down at the hole in the plane.

  “No ma’am.”

  “It’s four then. Or it was. Where’s the body? The one I had to dump so that I could hide in his coffin from the explosion?”

  Miranda recalled something she’d seen and stepped back to the lip of the razor-sharp-edged hole in the bottom of the plane. The last of the foam had subsided and it revealed a badly burned corpse lying on the rubble below. It was closer to being a skeleton than a person. At least it had already been dead when it began its final ordeal.

  She pointed down.

  The colonel looked where she was pointing and sighed.

  Miranda stepped partly aside as Colonel Withers shifted to full attention and sharply saluted the corpse lying two stories below. More respect than she gave Major Charleston?

  Maybe.

  Miranda turned to see if she could interpret the major’s reaction.

  His eyes were darting about frantically, then narrowed and focused on Colonel Withers’ back.

  “Whoops!” he practically shouted, then appeared to tumble forward toward the colonel.

  He landed squarely against her back.

  The colonel’s arms flailed outward as she tried not to tumble into the sharp-edged hole.

  Her dropping salute swung close enough that Miranda was able to hook their elbows.

  Estimating angle of momentum from Colonel Withers’ imminent fall, partially counteracted by the fifteen-degree slope of the deck and their probable weight differential, Miranda leaned back and to the left.

  It wouldn’t be enough, so she grabbed Sergeant Peters’ belt with her free hand. The three of them managed to spin Colonel Withers clear.

  Together she and the colonel tumbled into the still-open coffin.

  Probably not where Colonel Withers wanted to be again so soon.

  11

  “Did you take care of my men?” General Elmont asked from where he lay in the McChord Clinic’s bed. He’d refused to be moved to the off-base hospital. Miranda was half surprised that he hadn’t taken his rolling IV stand with him and walked the seven-tenths of a mile back to the crash site.

  “Yes, General. I did. With the help of Sergeant Peters and Colonel Withers.”

  “Where is the sergeant?”

  “He’s still working with the honor detail to escort the dead to their families.”

  “That’s a good man,” Colonel Withers said from where she sat on the next bed over while a corpsman fussed over her. Mostly what she needed was antibacterial salve and time to regrow her hair. “Stood up when and how it counted.”

  If not for the sergeant’s quick action, the major probably would have died from his wounds where the jagged hole had sliced him so badly. When Colonel Withers swung aside, the major had fallen through himself and landed beside the corpse on the rubble pile.

  He’d been medevaced to Madigan Army Medical Center. And the colonel had sent the two SFs—who she also called SPs—to place him under arrest for reasons Miranda didn’t understand.

  “How did it happen?” General Elmont’s voice was surprisingly soft.

  Colonel Withers shooed away the corpsman and started to rise shakily to her feet.

  “You can report sitting down, Colonel.”

  “Yes sir,” she eased back down. “You saw me do the double check before landing, just making sure everything would be ready for the unloading of the Dignified Transfer.”

  The general nodded.

  Miranda had been wondering what her own role here was, but now that they were delivering a report, she knew what to do and awaited her portion of the investigation.

  “I was in my seat, we were on short final, when I realized that there were too many coffins. I knew a lot of these men. They were my men.” Colonel Withers hung her head and Miranda respected the shared silence.

  When she didn’t continue, the general prodded her gently, “Go on.”

  “Sorry. I realized that I didn’t recognize any of the front row of names or the center coffin in the second row.”

  “So, you thought to open a coffin in flight?”

  “There was something wrong about it, sir. The flag wasn’t set properly. And so, I went to fix it. In doing that, I uncovered a keypad. Mounted in the coffin’s lid. I now know that it was a disarming pad for the explosives inside the booby-trapped coffin. Regrettably, I released the latches on the coffin to see if it was a locking mechanism.”

  “A bit rash, Colonel.” Though the general’s voice remained calm, he used the controls to raise his bed to a sitting position to face the colonel.

  “I know that now, sir.” She shrugged uncomfortably. “I raised the lid just enough to see that there were wires leading from the lid down into the coffin. That’s the moment we landed. At the hard jostle, my weight was positioned such that I unintentionally flung the lid wide. I’ve seen IEDs before, General, and this was a nasty one—tank-sized rather than Humvee-sized. Had a ten-second delay timer. Took me down to seven to get moving. Grabbed a blanket and breather and dove into the next coffin over.”

  Now came Miranda’s part.

  “I’m reluctant to report items secondhand, sir.” She pulled out the pocket recorder that she had kept running so that she could take verbal as well as written notes. After a moment of searching, she found Sergeant Peters’ description of what happened.

  My team and I were waiting for the flight. It hit the runway clean—maybe kinda hard, but clean. Then there was sun glinting off the windshield for a moment and it veered aside. Instead of slowing, it seemed to accelerate. Or maybe everything was just happening in slow motion. It leaned so far into the curve that one wing was ripped off. It leaned the other way and lost the other wing. Then it crashed here.

  She stopped the recorder.

  “The sun was at the wrong angle to glint off the windshield, General. The C-5 Galaxy was landing on Runway 34, almost due north. It was 1:37 p.m. when the plane landed, and the sun would be just west of south. The light, we can reasonably assume, was the explosion inside the aircraft, shining outward.”

  “Then it veered off course and accelerated? That part I don’t understand,” Colonel Withers was squinting at Miranda, so she kept her eyes on the general’s IV drip to not lose focus.

  “The abrupt course correction…” Miranda pictured it in her head.

  Much of the C-5 Galaxy’s control systems ran beneath the cargo deck. They would have been severed by the explosion.

  But n
ot all of the systems.

  She looked up, not seeing the walls of the infirmary, but instead seeing the interlaced systems of the C-5 laid out before her. And then she remembered something else she’d seen.

  12

  “Oh.” Miranda understood now.

  “What?”

  “The copilot’s corpse was found thrown forward and toward the center.”

  She backtracked and mentally followed the scorch marks along the side of the cargo bay, on either side of the ladder leading, and finally up to the cockpit. On the copilot’s flight console, the instruments were far more damaged by heat there than on the pilot’s side.

  The blast hadn’t swept into the cockpit—it had curled into.

  Like a spinning firestorm.

  “The fire’s maelstrom threw the copilot against the control quadrant. When the corpse is removed, you will find that the throttles for the Number Three and Four engines on the right side were advanced by the impact of the copilot’s body.” Because it was the only way that the corpse could have been as far forward as it had been—thrown against the levers. His lap seatbelt insufficient to keep his broken body completely in place.

  She continued the image in her head.

  Landing.

  A flash of light that had nearly killed Colonel Withers as she dove for safety in a coffin.

  The copilot thrown forward.

  Both engines on the right wing—one wouldn’t be sufficient for the destruction that had followed—climbing to full thrust.

  The massive plane veering so sharply that it rolled outward and ripped off the right-side thrusting wing.

  The sudden weight loss of twenty tons of wing, eight tons of engines, and whatever remaining fuel had been in the wing tanks, would cause the plane to roll the other way.

  Ripping off the left wing and the already weakened tail section.

  Then it ran into the control tower and finally stopped, already on fire.

  The fire hadn’t happened because of the crash. The fire was the root cause.

  No.

  Technically, the explosion was the root cause and that had caused the fire.

  Miranda laid it all out for the two officers sitting there in the McChord Clinic.

  There were nods as they thought through the sequence themselves.

  “I still don’t understand why you arrested the major,” Miranda concluded.

  Colonel Withers twisted to look at her. “Because he tried to kill me?”

  Miranda blinked. “Well, his saying ‘Whoops’ did happen prior to him falling into—”

  “Lunging into me.”

  For once Miranda didn’t know how to complete her sentence from there.

  “He hoped I’d die going through that hole.” Anger. That was definitely anger in Colonel Withers’ voice.

  “But why?”

  “Ms. Chase, he was attempting to cover up a major crime.”

  “He was?”

  “Four extra coffins. All rigged with IEDs if opened incorrectly. He was running a smuggling operation on Dignified Transfer flights.”

  “That doesn’t seem very…dignified.” She would never understand people.

  General Elmont barked out a laugh, though she wasn’t sure why.

  “What was in those coffins?”

  Colonel Withers held up her phone. “I’ve been getting reports from an EOD team—the bomb squad. Three coffins filled with smuggled Afghanistan heroin.”

  “What was in the fourth coffin, the one that blew up?”

  “Why do you think the major was so upset?” The colonel’s smile was not a pleasant one. “It was his payment.”

  13

  “I’ve got something for you.” General Elmont had called Miranda back down to JBLM a week later.

  Flying her father’s single-engine Mooney plane into an Air Force base more typically serving large jet transports was still unnerving. Though the flight controllers were very polite to her this time.

  Most of the C-5 Galaxy’s wreckage had been cleared. The new control tower was almost completed.

  “You work fast.”

  “When we have to,” the general acknowledged. He was leaning on a pair of crutches when he met her plane. “But that’s not why I called you here.”

  Miranda didn’t think that introducing herself was the right next step, so she wasn’t sure what else to say.

  A real Air Force Aircraft Investigation Board team had come to JBLM. Their study had fully confirmed her conclusions.

  “The AIB guys still want to know how you did it,” the general began walking (crutching?) his way toward one of the hangars.

  “How I did what?”

  “They said that without your detailed report, they’d have missed a lot of what had happened. Especially with the burn patterns and the copilot being thrown against the controls. So how did you do it?”

  “It…seemed obvious once I thought about it. Right down to how you were thrown clear.” Miranda could still see the events laid out in her head like a continuous timeline.

  The initial stress fractures in the tail section when the plane had veered abruptly but the broad rudder surfaces of the T-tail had resisted those shifts. Then the hard rotational stresses as the hull had twisted right, then left—again resisted by the towering empennage—finally snapping off the tail section and the general with it. If he hadn’t been seated at the very rear, he’d have remained in the hull and probably died as had the rest of the crew. Even that conclusion had been confirmed by the pattern of stress fractures around the tail section.

  “I’m glad it was obvious to someone. I’m proud of what you did to make sure my men were taken care of properly.”

  “It was also Master Sergeant Peters’ diligence.”

  “You mean Senior Master Sergeant Peters.”

  “I do?”

  “I recommended that he received a promotion and an Airman’s Medal for a distinguishing act of heroism. I suggested officer training, but he says that he likes working the front lines of Dignified Transfer too much. I’m afraid he’s going to have a lot of work in these coming years.”

  Miranda didn’t know much about the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, but she’d read about how many aircraft had already been lost in the year and a half since their October, 2001 beginnings—twenty-one helicopters, seven jets, and three C-130 Hercules. She expected that meant the general was right.

  “There, what do you think?”

  Miranda wasn’t sure what she was supposed to be looking at.

  Inside the big hangar, a C-130 Hercules transport was up on jacks. It appeared to be receiving a new set of tires and brakes. A C-17 Globemaster had only three of its four jet engines mounted—she finally located the fourth one in a shop area at the rear of the hangar.

  And off to the side was an antique. A shiny aluminum F-86 Sabrejet. It looked immaculate despite being fifty years old. The first of the swept-wing fighters. It had an open nose intake for the single, center-mounted engine and a glass canopy for a sole pilot. The six machine-gun ports around the nose had been covered over. No bombs or missiles hung from the hardpoints under the wings, only an outboard auxiliary fuel tank to either side which would vastly extend its operational range.

  “I see by the wing shape that it’s the Canadair Mk 5 variant, but it has the wing slats of an Mk 6.”

  The general was smiling, “An upgrade. You do know your aircraft, Ms. Chase. Removing the wing slats from the Mk 5 was a mistake that was rectified in the Mk 6. She was built in 1958. My father flew this plane in the early days of the Vietnam War. He bought it when she was decommissioned for scrapping. Gave her to me as a graduation present from the Academy.”

  “It’s very pretty, sir.”

  The general seemed to want to admire the F-86 Sabrejet in silence.

  Silence was one of the few types of conversation that Miranda understood.

  It was a long while before he spoke again.

  “It’s yours.”

  She actually had to look at him,
but he appeared to be serious.

  “Nerve damage, Chase,” he pointed at his leg. “Docs tell me that it will never recover enough to properly manage the rudder pedals.”

  “Oh.”

  “So, she’s yours.”

  “But I’m not certified in type.”

  “Have you ever trained in a jet?”

  Miranda nodded. She’d felt it was a key element to understanding crash characteristics. Jets handled and behaved in ways that were very distinct from propeller-driven planes.

  “Well, we’ll do some ground training and get you some check rides. She’s a sweet aircraft and very well behaved.”

  Miranda turned from the general back to the aircraft. Built in 1958. The same year that the Boeing 707 was first introduced. The F-86 Sabrejet had been the primary fighter of the Korean War as well as the very early days of Vietnam. One customized variant had been used by Jackie Cochran to be the first woman to break the sound barrier. It also boasted the highest number manufactured of any military plane in history—almost ten thousand had come off the assembly lines.

  “Are you sure, General?”

  “You’d better call me Joe if you’re going to be flying my old plane.”

  “Okay, Joe.”

  “There is a price.” He turned on his crutches to face her.

  She forced herself to look up at his face, but couldn’t quite meet his eyes. Eyes were even more unnerving than crowds.

  “Keep looking after my men.”

  She nodded. She understood that he wasn’t talking about just the dead.

  No, his vision was bigger than that.

  She could see his love for the aircraft under his command. That’s what he thought was important. If he looked after the aircraft—all the aircraft—then his men would be just that much safer.

  That’s why she’d become a crash investigator. Every day since she’d lost her parents as a thirteen-year-old, she’d tried to make planes safer.

  She stepped forward to rub her palm on the smooth curve of aluminum that made the nose’s jet intake. Miranda used a firm pressure, just in case the jet felt the same way about touch that she did.