Condor

by M. L. Buchman

  And the game wasn’t over. She could picture the little glass timer still lying on its side by Mike’s armchair. The game was merely suspended.

  A niggling piece of her brain wanted to suggest they go back and finish it first, so that it would be complete and she wouldn’t be thinking about it until they did. But Holly tossed a folded blanket on the steel deck, shoved two more into her hands, and pushed Miranda down onto the first one as the plane reached its cruise altitude and headed east.

  Holly lay down close beside her. The guys were up forward looking over the pilots’ shoulders and asking questions about the plane—Mike about the piloting and Jeremy about how absolutely everything on the plane worked.

  Miranda lay back and pictured the game.

  “Holly, who is Ewan McGregor?” They were close enough that she didn’t have to shout too loudly over the engine’s roar to be heard, despite the earplugs.

  Holly didn’t bother opening her eyes. “Actor. Best known for being a Jedi master. Fights with a light saber. Becomes the second greatest Jedi master ever, Obi-wan Kenobi. At least until Luke. Nah, Obi-wan is better than Luke. Ewan’s way cuter, too. Though my brother was always a fan of Luke’s. Wanted to be just like him…” Holly’s voice trailed away strangely.

  “There are so many things that I don’t understand about that explanation that I don’t know where to begin.” Luke, light saber, Obi-wan, that Holly had a brother…

  “You don’t watch movies.”

  “Not space movies. And most of the action movies are so technically inaccurate that I simply can’t bring myself to continue when I do start one.” Which in itself was decidedly irritating. All of the incomplete movie watchings in her life were a real annoyance. “They’re just…wrong. Did you ever see a movie called Airplane?”

  At that Holly opened her eyes and looked at her. “That’s s’posed to be a laugh, Miranda.”

  “Oh. Well, it’s still wrong.”

  She thought about it a while.

  Holly didn’t say anything.

  “Air Force One and Flightplan weren’t much more accurate and those aren’t comedies.”

  “Sure, but Harrison Ford and Jodi Foster sure kicked ass. He was seriously cute when he was younger. So was she for that matter—just not my type.”

  Miranda wondered what type of man was Holly’s type. “Are you going to sleep with Mike?”

  “Jesus, Miranda!” Holly jerked up to a sitting position as if she’d been electrocuted. She twisted around until she spotted Mike still standing behind the pilots’ seats and released a hard puff of relief.

  “What?”

  “That’s a hell of question.”

  “Why?”

  Holly just sputtered.

  Mike and Jeremy came back into the cargo bay and began spreading out their blankets. Miranda could hear them talking about flight characteristics and control systems. She liked that they’d been studying that. One never knew when such information would be useful during an investigation.

  Holly probably already knew the plane from her deep military experience—the Australians had a number of the C-130s in their inventory.

  “You still haven’t answered the question.” Miranda didn’t like unanswered questions any better than incomplete sentences or unfinished games. They were all starting to pile up on her and were cluttering her mind.

  “What question?” Jeremy chimed in.

  “I just wanted to know if—”

  “Nick off, all of you.” Holly made a show of jamming in her earplugs before lying on her side facing the hull.

  Miranda knew Holly was right. Getting some sleep was a good idea. Tomorrow would start in less than five hours and it was bound to be a busy day.

  3

  Holly could always sleep on a flight.

  Any flight.

  Loud engines.

  Cold steel decking.

  Crammed up against a pile of combat gear.

  No problem.

  Her years as an operator for the Australian SASR had taught her that. Special operations meant never knowing when you’d get sleep next, so sack out while you could.

  The habit had followed her just fine to the Australian Transportation Safety Bureau when she’d had to leave the Special Air Service Regiment abruptly. And still when she’d opted for a year’s exchange program with the NTSB because getting completely out of Australia had suddenly seemed like a really nifty idea. Not hard for anything to seem that way when your life had been totally flushed down the shitter.

  But could she sleep here?

  Now?

  Mike?

  No way!

  First, she’d seen his taste in women—witnessed it on too many investigations over the six months that the team had been together.

  Mike wasn’t a blonde hound or a tall-and-willowy dog. He was plain and simple just a complete female hound dog.

  The 737 stewardess. The captain of a UPS cargo jet. One of the eyewitness passengers from that broken Bombardier commuter jet and one of the air traffic controllers from the same crash—after the passenger had bought a bus ticket home, but still.

  Not that she’d ever actually caught him in a hotel with one, but he sure eased up to them like an old dog, despite being a young dog.

  The man was as deep as a puddle on smooth tarmac. and too…pretty.

  Lousy excuse.

  She liked the pretty ones. Better them than the Spec Ops operators whose egos were even more built up than their muscle tone. beyond imagining. Like, of course she’d want them because she was the lone Sheila on the team.

  They’d learned fast quite how wrong they were.

  It had gotten better toward the end, but not much. An enlightened Australian elite warrior was roughly as evolved about women as Captain Kirk in the original Star Trek series—on a good day.

  The “pretty” ones were still nice to look at, and their egos were far more manageable.

  Besides, she liked Mike Munroe, as much as she liked any man. His Mr. Suave wasn’t just in his looks. He was sharp, funny…

  And she was losing her mind.

  No way on earth was she that desperate.

  Not that she wasn’t up for a pleasant tumble now and then, but she’d rather swim with a great white shark than be another notch on Mike’s brag shelf.

  If anyone other than Miranda had asked, Holly could laugh it off.

  But Miranda wasn’t some shit-for-brains. She just saw the world in a different way. Strange and incomprehensible ways that allowed her to walk straight into the center of an airplane crash, point at some insignificant fact that no one else saw, and eventually prove it to be the solution’s key.

  So what was she seeing that Holly had missed?

  That question was a game that Holly used to play whether doing survival training in the Outback, rock-and-ice practice up in the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales, or on assignment as Libya ate itself alive during Gaddafi’s downfall. By constantly asking what was she missing, she saw so much more than most people.

  Libya had been a fine time.

  Muammar al-Gaddafi had finally pushed both the West and his own people too far. To give the rebels a fighting chance, NATO had sent in jets to bomb military installations. The attacks were so visible that the protests from other Western governments against them had been almost as loud as the bombs themselves.

  So, they’d sent in the black ops warriors instead.

  No one knew how many elite teams were on the ground, not even the teams themselves. Hers had almost taken on a squadron of French GIGN in Sabha before they figured out they were on the same side. Neither team imagined that anyone else would probe so far in-country.

  Once they’d decided not to kill each other, they’d had a good time disabling, and occasionally destroying, the old MiG-25 Foxbat interceptor jets that had been based there. Gaddafi’s Air Force had started out much larger than the rebels’…and ended up much smaller thanks to their efforts. They’d worked four of Gaddafi’s six air bases. The rebel
s had controlled the other two.

  There’d also been a French dragoon who she’d done a lot more than talk explosives with.

  But she’d just been a young nipper back then. Now Libya was nine years in her past and her world had changed.

  Her job was no longer about some game of survival—identifying and taking out military threats before they took out something themselves.

  The daily challenge now was the slow-and-steady of analyzing wreckage and unraveling what had happened to it.

  Crash investigator was the “new” her. Even after a year with the ATSB and six months more with Miranda at the NTSB, it still hadn’t fully replaced the “old” her. Or had it? Could that be what she’d become?

  Holly tucked aside the edge of the scratchy wool Air Force blanket and rested her forehead against the cold steel clarity of the C-130’s cargo deck.

  This was real.

  The humming vibration was familiar.

  Despite the two previous times that Miranda and their team were called to military air-crash investigations, it was her first time flying aboard a military plane in over a year.

  All too familiar.

  Like she was back home, in so many ways.

  The accents were American and her teammates were crash investigators rather than black ops warriors.

  But it was home.

  Except she could never go back home.

  It was a kindness that Command had merely let Holly fade away. Nobody wanted the embarrassment of court-martialing one of the nation’s most elite warriors. They said it wasn’t her fault, but she knew better.

  Frankly, if she’d been in command, Holly would have taken herself off into the Outback and put a round through her thick skull.

  4

  “This one is ugly, Miranda.”

  One of the pilots had woken her twenty minutes from landing to take the secure radio call from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. CJCS General Drake Nason didn’t sound as if this was one of his teases.

  “Okay.”

  The sun was just rising out beyond the windshield of the C-130 Hercules. The rolling fields and the wooded hills of Kentucky were still deep enough in shadow to all look the same.

  “I need to know what happened and I need to know it fast.”

  “Drake you know—”

  “—that you can’t guarantee results, duration of the investigation, or any of that.”

  Miranda considered her distaste for incomplete sentences. Was it acceptable when someone else had completed her sentence correctly for her?

  Yes, she supposed that it was. Therefore, she allowed Drake’s interruption to stand.

  But was it now his sentence or was it still hers? Was it her turn to speak next?

  Drake resolved the question for her by continuing. “Just hurry, Miranda. Call me if you need anything. I placed a Major Swift in charge of protecting the crash site—I trust him implicitly and you may safely do so as well. Shit this thing’s a mess. I’d rather that no one knew about it.”

  “Then why did you ask for this team?”

  “Because, Miranda, I’m guessing that without them you’re of much less use to me. Sorry. That was more blunt than I intended.”

  “Meaning that I’m unreliable.” She didn’t mind blunt; it was far easier to follow than implication or suggestion. But to be called unreli—

  “No! Shit!” Drake groaned. “It came out wrong. Not unreliable. Maybe unpredictable? More… I don’t know. I’ve seen how you function with your team—and without. You’re…better…with them. You and your people are doing things that no military crash team can match. I need that Team Chase magic on this one.”

  “Team Chase?” How would the others react to not having their names included?

  “I need to know if it was a crash or an attack on US soil. And I need to know fast.”

  That was language she finally understood. “I’ll tell the others.”

  As she handed the headset back to the engineer, the pilots slowed the engines for the long descent from their cruising altitude.

  Holly was awake and sitting in one of the fold-down web seats that lined either side of the cargo bay. She’d chosen a seat as far as possible from where the two guys still slept.

  Miranda went and sat by Holly.

  “Something nasty, boss?”

  “That was Drake. He chose the adjective ‘ugly.’ He’s placing a major rush on the cause: accident or attack?”

  Holly whistled tunelessly for a moment as if just passing the time. “Sounds like fun. Did he tell you anything else?”

  “We’re to liaison with a Major Swift.”

  “I meant about the crash?”

  Miranda could only shake her head. “You said that it ‘Sounds like fun.’ You always have a strange idea of what’s entertaining, Holly. I can never seem to predetermine what you’ll find amusing.”

  “That’s okay, following your thoughts isn’t exactly a cakewalk either. I’ve been thinking about that…” Holly glanced toward where Mike and Jeremy still slept before continuing softly, “…open issue.”

  “Which one? The Ewan McGregor one or whether you were planning to—”

  “The second one. What? Are you still worried about the first one?”

  “Mike laid the timer on its side. The matter is held in suspension pending completion of that step of the game.”

  “Well, we could just play out the last bit of it between now and when we land if that would make you feel better.”

  “No, we can’t. The timer is still in Washington. We’re in Kentucky.” If she’d thought to bring it, would she have been able to keep it level so that the amount of remaining time didn’t change? Probably not. Better that it remained where it was.

  “It’s just a game, Miranda. It doesn’t really matter.”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better about not completing my assigned task? Can the pilot really land a C-130 with only one hand? Is all of the teasing you and Mike do just a game?”

  “The first? Mellow out. The second? No, he was joking. And—”

  “Or is it a prelude to sexual relations? Or have there already been sexual relations between you of which I’m unaware and this is part of an aftermath pattern? I don’t understand how to judge that and assess—”

  “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! I have not slept with Mike and I don’t plan on ever doing the old two-step with that boyo.”

  “But—”

  “No, Miranda. I don’t want to know what you observed that made you ask that question.”

  “What question?” Jeremy had come up without either of them noticing.

  “Nothing,” Holly almost shouted. “Girl stuff.”

  Then she grabbed Miranda’s hand and hooked their pinkie fingers together.

  “Girl talk only,” Holly looked so seriously into Miranda’s eyes that she couldn’t look anywhere else.

  Holly spoke so softly that Miranda had to pull an earplug to be sure she heard properly. The engine and propeller noise had abated somewhat for landing or she wouldn’t have heard Holly’s next words even without the ear plugs.

  “Pinkie swear. Girls only.”

  Miranda had never done a pinkie swear before.

  Not ever.

  “Okay. Pinkie swear. Girls only.”

  At Holly’s nod, Miranda felt as if she’d done something right.

  “Do we need to pinkie swear about the security on the crash investigation?” It seemed to fit but she was unfamiliar with the detailed rules governing pinkie swears versus other levels of secrecy classifications.

  “No,” Holly kept their fingers hooked. “Pinkie swears are way more powerful than security clearances.”

  “Oh. Okay. We should probably wake Mike.”

  “I’ll do it.” Holly let go and pushed to her feet before Jeremy could even turn his head.

  She strode up the length of the cargo deck. Holly looked as if she was going to kick Mike in the ass—hard. Instead she glanced back at Miranda, appeared to sig
h, and then kicked the bottom of Mike’s boot with enough force to have him yelp in surprise.

  “What was that for?” he looked around wildly, blinking hard to clear away sleep.

  “You deserved it.”

  “Why?”

  “Just… Trust me, you did! Now get your act together, for once. We’re landing soon, you total wanker.”

  5

  Elayne Kasprak enjoyed the First-Class American Airlines direct flight to JFK. International customs never caused her problems, except the Swedes, who appeared to be impervious to all of her usual I’m-so-cute-and-innocent tactics for easing through borders. She could almost like them for that.

  Delta Business to Nashville was also surprisingly pleasant.

  Zaslon, unlike US Special Operations, pampered its operators whenever it could. Their near unlimited budget wasn’t restricted to just weapons and training, but also offered comfortable travel and fine hotels—when it wasn’t out of character.

  The SUV that she rented as Valery Tomaka in Nashville for the hour drive to Fort Campbell was a little flashy for her role, but she trusted American drivers even less than Russian ones and preferred the added protection. Besides, the Porsche Cayenne was hella fun to drive. The gas mileage sucked like most SUVs, but gas here in the United States cost about the same as it did in Russia, despite having double the mean income. Really cheap.

  Americans were so spoiled.

  Not her worry.

  Her worry was passing herself off as the Antonov factory rep long enough to ascertain that no useful intelligence was recoverable from the crash. It wasn’t often that she had the opportunity to review her demolition handiwork and looked forward to that.

  Normally, she’d have used a timer and blown them out of the sky over the Atlantic. But Command had wanted to rub it in the Americans’ faces that they almost had the six Russian helicopters—until they suddenly didn’t.

  She’d timed her trip well.

  When the Antonov had finally left Helsinki, she’d already been halfway to New York. The layover in JFK and driving up from Nashville had placed her just eight hours after the crash.