Condor

by M. L. Buchman

  “Um, thank you. Where are you going so soon?” Again that fleeting expression, this time definitely triumph.

  Nailed your skinny ass! But Holly kept her own smirk to herself.

  “We’ve been called to another matter. Civilian, but more pressing than this foolishness. I’m sure someone here at FedEx will be glad to run you over to the passenger terminal.”

  Holly shook Elizaveta’s / Elayne’s hand and felt the calluses.

  Inside the first joint of the forefinger.

  Deep in the webbing between thumb and forefinger.

  A slight one at the base of the palm.

  Holly used to have those—shooter’s calluses.

  The trigger finger. The repeated kick of the gun against the webbing. The repeated hard kick of the butt of the gun against the palm.

  But they weren’t just some average shooter’s calluses. They were very distinct against her own, now softer hand.

  No one shot as many rounds as the most elite units of Special Operations Forces. America’s tiny Delta Force shot more rounds in training than the entire Marine Corps. SEAL Team 6 far outgunned all of the other Navy SEAL teams combined.

  And their hands showed it.

  Zaslon would be the same, far more practiced than the rest of Spetsnaz.

  Elizaveta Egorova / Elayne Kasprak wasn’t some cute blonde. She was exactly what Holly had feared she might be.

  “Mike, Jeremy, let’s go.”

  Then she turned and walked away—managing not to wipe her palm against her jeans as she did.

  It had been over a year since she been that close to death in a living-breathing form. Closer than she’d thought she’d ever be again after leaving the SASR.

  Actually, all her years in the SASR, she’d never been so close—close enough to shake death’s hand.

  She’d killed people, but always at a distance. And most of her tasks had been executing bridges, planes, vehicles, and other targets in need of her explosives specialty.

  Only once before in her life had she been close enough to hold death’s hand. That time she’d lost everything except her own life.

  Given the choice, she’d rather have lost it—if she could have saved the other.

  35

  “Goddamn them both!” Drake finally gave up and slammed his phone down on the small table of the C-38 Gulfstream G100 business jet.

  “You know what Miranda’s like,” Elizabeth didn’t show the least bit of sympathy. “Antagonizing her won’t help a bit. What’s really bothering you?”

  “I told her it was of the utmost urgency, then she doesn’t call me back when she solved the crash.”

  “You know that’s not what’s making you angry.”

  And that was the problem with sleeping with someone. They got to know you too well, could read you too easily.

  With Patty, that hadn’t been a problem. She’d been a sweet, gentle soul who he’d started dating in high school. She’d been a housewife and active in the church that she believed in much more than he did. Around her, he’d been able to leave work at work, usually, and done his very best to be a good husband and father when he was home. Five years gone and he still missed her like a piece of him had left and never come back.

  Elizabeth, however, was part of his civilian life and his professional one. And she was a very different person from Patty. No one became a general without being smart and driven, and never taking anyone else’s shit—just as she wasn’t right now, sitting across from him so calmly.

  “Yes, I know how Miranda Chase is.” He yanked his seatbelt tight as the plane began its descent. It was too tight, but he’d be damned if he was going to ease it.

  Elizabeth still waited.

  “And yes, I know that’s not what’s making me angry. Though I’m going to have a word or two with that Holly Harper for hanging up on me.”

  Elizabeth laughed aloud, atypical enough even aside from being in “General” mode. “Oh, please let me be there to see that.”

  “See what?” But then he pictured it himself and didn’t like the image.

  “You. Taking on a former Australian SASR operative, who’s defending her boss. A civilian, I remind you, with nothing to lose in our world. Are we taking any bets on which of you will be on the ground first?”

  “Rangers lead the way,” he quoted his old unit’s motto.

  “So, you’ll be going down nose-first? As I said, I really want to watch this. Do you mind if I post it on social media?”

  “Damn your smile.” It was a great smile…even when it was laughing at him.

  Elizabeth didn’t need to say anything else to put him in his place.

  The military pilot of the C-38 VIP transport was making a fast descent. Fine. Couldn’t get him on the ground soon enough.

  “What’s really making you angry, Drake?”

  “I knew it!” He pounded a fist on the table, making his phone jump. “Russia has been ramping up the rhetoric for years. I knew that it wasn’t a crash. Who crashes after making a clean landing on a dry field? No one. The goddamn Russians have driven us right back into the Cold War. I was feeling bad about actively stealing one of their satellites. I’m completely over that now. You know what happened thirty years ago?”

  Elizabeth nodded, because of course she knew her history. He was preaching to the choir but couldn’t stop himself.

  “I was stationed in Berlin when the Wall came down. I was right there. The parties, the sheer joy was like nothing you’ve ever seen. Families, separated for decades, stepped through the gaps ducking as if still expecting to be shot in the back. But they came through anyway, and were welcomed with open arms. You never saw anything like it. And what now?”

  Elizabeth simply sat and waited.

  “Now, the Cold War is back. Russia allying with China. We do nothing. They snatch the Crimea and we say, ‘Hey, don’t do that.’ Now they’re blowing up planes on our soil and we’re talking about stealing a multi-billion-dollar satellite.”

  “And so you take it out on Miranda Chase after flying over an hour to ask her for a favor?”

  Drake slumped in his chair. Or he would have if his seatbelt wasn’t so tight.

  “You know she’s going to hate it? Faking a crash? She’ll say it’s completely wrong.”

  Drake nodded, then sighed.

  Yes, he knew that.

  The problem was that she was right and he had to convince her anyway.

  36

  Holly really had to rearrange where she sat, not that there were all that many choices in the back of a Black Hawk. The main part of the cargo bay was eight feet square and half that high. Webbed jump seats had been rigged in the middle, two groups of three back-to-back.

  To one side Miranda, Jeremy, and Major Jon Swift were hunched over the information from the Nashville Airport mishap. Listening to tower recordings and viewing the data from the Quick Access Recorder as well as the numerous photos Jeremy had taken.

  She could hear Jon giving useful input from his own accident investigation experience. All the more reason for Miranda to like him. One saving grace, Jeremy and his tablet had ended up in the middle seat between the two of them.

  To the other side of the seating…she and Mike.

  The roar of the Black Hawk flying back to Fort Campbell was an odd background. It was soothing in its familiarity from a hundred missions and a thousand training flights. It was also an unnerving reminder of a past she’d been doing her best to never think about.

  And she needed a subject change right now.

  Holly switched their two headsets onto a private channel.

  “What do you know about your blonde?”

  Mike grimaced because, of course, he was bummed at losing his shot at bedding her.

  A brief image of Mike tangled up with Ms. Petite Wholesome-but-deadly really didn’t help her mood.

  “Really, really glad to be rid of her.”

  Holly twisted to look at him, but he didn’t appear to be joking. Instead his head
was back against the webbing and his eyes were closed.

  “There was something really wrong with her. Don’t know why I thought she was attractive for even a second.”

  “Because she was a hot as hell blonde?”

  “Usually I can see past that. Not with her. How did I miss all the signs?”

  As he appeared to be talking to himself, she kept her mouth shut. Not the Mike she’d been expecting at all.

  He shook himself as if he was a dog trying to shed his winter coat.

  Or maybe as if he was a little disgusted with himself? What did that mean?

  “What do you know about her?” Mike sounded tired, tired to the very core. So rather than some caustic remark about how she wasn’t the sort to go about “knowing” women in any biblical sense, she answered.

  “Insanely dangerous. Russian foreign agent of the worst kind—a group called Zaslon. She’s the one who downed the Antonov. Probably fucked one of the pilots to get onboard and plant the explosives.”

  Mike just nodded. “Wouldn’t surprise me for a second.”

  Surprised the hell out of Holly that Mike would feel that way.

  “Her accent kept slipping. Her English was actually impeccable. And her reactions were all wrong. She didn’t even know what a QAR was or where to go looking for it. Knew a great deal about planes, but almost nothing about the Condor itself. So I knew she wasn’t working for Antonov. Bored where she should have been interested and vice versa. I did my best to make sure she thought we were all incompetent. You did a nice job of playing into that. Thanks.”

  He opened his eyes and turned to her. His deep browns were incredibly close. Even over the headset, his whisper barely carried above the noise of the racing Black Hawk.

  “We can’t tell Miranda or Jeremy.” He grimaced before continuing, “Neither one can keep a secret for shit.”

  “Got it in one, Mike. I’m impressed.”

  “Not stupid, Hol. Couldn’t survive on this team if I was. If Elayne Kasprak or whoever she is ever found out we even suspected, who knows what she’d do.”

  “Elizaveta Egorova, at least that’s the name she was born with, would terminate their asses. Ours too.”

  “Great.” Mike leaned his head back against the webbing once more. “Just great.”

  And now that Mike, of all people, had made her think about it, Holly didn’t like having Elayne out there as an open question.

  Holly knew all too well what it was like to keep looking back over your shoulder waiting for the axe to fall. There was no way she could allow that to happen to Miranda.

  “So what the hell spooked you?” Mike was watching her again.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about the ghost who bit your behind as we got off the C-130 Hercules transport this morning. I’m talking about your final handshake with Elayne. I’ve known you for six months and nothing gets past those thick defenses of yours. But something did—twice in one day.”

  Holly’s throat cut off her breathing as if it was trying to throttle her.

  “There. That.” Then Mike’s tone softened. “Seriously. If you need someone to talk to, I wouldn’t mind if it was me.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because you’re the most capable and honorable woman I’ve ever met.”

  “You don’t know shit!” Her shout was loud enough for Mike to wince as the intercom headset must have made his ears ring. The others behind them stopped what they were doing and turn to look her way through the webbing despite being on a different intercom channel.

  “You don’t know shit,” she repeated much more softly after the others had turned back to their study of the FedEx mishap.

  “Sure, Holly. Whatever you say.” Mike’s tone said that he was now as disgusted with her as he’d been with himself moments before. He closed his eyes and turned away.

  She knew what ghosts had loomed up before her.

  Holly didn’t like Mike’s disappointment—not in her. He was, oddly enough, the one she was closest to of their group.

  Jeremy was just the overeager, incredibly competent geek. Always a happy little vegemite.

  Miranda was…complicated.

  She and Mike? They were the ones who had a clear vision of how the world worked and what was required to function in it.

  Closest to Mike? Wasn’t that the strangest twist since Crow stole fire from the seven Karatgurk women who then became the Pleiades star cluster. Except this wasn’t some story of the Australian Dreamtime.

  And Mike had just proven that he deserved better than she’d been giving.

  The helo slowed and descended; they must be nearing Fort Campbell. A glance out the window and she saw they she hadn’t been paying attention and they were almost down. They’d arrived in Fort Campbell at dawn, gone to Nashville by noon, and now the midafternoon sunlight was starting to stretch out the shadows of the ranks of parked helos back at Campbell.

  She didn’t want Mike to think badly of her, and wasn’t going to think about why it mattered. It simply did.

  Unable to face the piece of the past that Elayne Kasprak’s hand had unearthed, Holly chose the other one.

  “Team Chase.”

  Mike opened one eye. “That’s what spooked you on the Hercules?”

  “You’ve got no idea.”

  The helo’s wheels hit the pavement.

  Holly’s knees were unsteady enough when she climbed down that Mike held her arm for a moment until she stabilized.

  Rather than hitting him for it, she offered a nod of thanks.

  It was all she could manage at the moment.

  37

  “No.” It was just so completely wrong. Miranda could only shake her head. “I save airplanes. I study them to avoid crashes, not to cause them.”

  “No one will be hurt. It only needs to look like a crash.” Drake was quite adamant. Or was it pleading?

  Mike snickered in the background.

  Miranda ignored him.

  She studied Drake and Lizzy across the narrow aisle. They were meeting in the small C-38 Gulfstream G100 jet that Drake had flown to Fort Campbell.

  The two of them sat in facing seats across a small table. She, Holly, and Mike sat on the couch opposite, their knees filling the aisle of the small airplane. Jeremy was in one of the rear seats diligently working on the Nashville report, hopefully using the framework they’d created during the flight.

  At least analyzing multiple crash investigations wasn’t an issue.

  That stopped her cold for a moment.

  “What?” Drake asked.

  She ignored him.

  Multiple crash investigations weren’t an issue. They’d never bothered her. While waiting for metallurgy or Flight Recorder decoding, she’d always been able to work on some other matter.

  Miranda turned to explain it to Holly, but Holly didn’t look at her in turn. In fact, she hadn’t said a word since the landing and sat there staring out the window between Drake and Lizzy. They were facing the process of cleaning up the Condor crash, though Miranda didn’t understand why Holly would find that so all-consuming.

  Mike was watching Holly, with what even she could tell was a worried look.

  Perhaps it would be better if she waited to discuss how she could extend her previously unnoted mechanical multitasking capabilities into “soft” realms like incomplete conversational threads.

  “Miranda?” Drake was asking about something.

  About… Oh! “I am not comfortable with engineering a crash.”

  “Engineering a simulated crash.”

  “You want to steal a large transport jet. To avoid suspicion, you’ll have to create a debris trail, which means creating a real crash.”

  “But we won’t crash it. We want to retain its cargo. That’s the whole point.”

  “I never said to crash the transport jet. But you need a crash of an identical aircraft. And you need to destroy it sufficiently that even detailed inspection couldn’t identify th
e fake. That’s airframe number, serial numbers on thousands of parts, even a wiring modification that was performed on one aircraft and not another.”

  “What if the destruction is so complete that there’s no way to tell?” Mike put in, nudging Holly’s elbow.

  Miranda waited for Holly to say something. Or elbow Mike’s ribs.

  But she didn’t respond.

  The lack of response was even more confusing that having to pause for the expected interruption.

  “I’d still be able to tell,” she informed Mike. “Drake, no. Just…no.”

  The only person making a sound in the whole cabin was Jeremy, humming quietly to himself as he typed rapidly on the fold-out keyboard he sometimes used with his tablet.

  The silence stretched until it was almost painful.

  “Let’s take a break,” Mike suggested.

  “But we just got back here.”

  “Let’s take a break anyway. Miranda, go see how Jon is doing on the cleanup of the Condor. Holly, you’re with me.”

  She was closest to the door, but didn’t move until Mike pushed her a few times. She went surprisingly meekly.

  Jeremy didn’t even notice their departure.

  Miranda wouldn’t mind checking in with Jon.

  Perhaps see what else the AIB team had discovered since their departure. Maybe he had new evidence emerging from the aircraft’s disassembly.

  “Hey!” Drake called out after them, but Lizzy shushed him.

  38

  The spring afternoon was warm, comfortable, and smelled of growing things. Low dogwoods offered bright pink and white blossoms along the airport perimeter road.

  And it all left Holly feeling like mud along a stagnant billabong.

  Holly leaned with her butt against the C-38’s wing, facing the wreckage of the Condor.

  In the few hours they’d been gone, Fort Campbell Army base had mobilized. A pair of Black Hawk helicopters, capable of lifting five tons at a time, were now above the site. The sparks of at least ten different welders were burning their way through the aircraft’s remains. You couldn’t just drag ninety tons of airplane and another forty-five tons of burned up helicopters aside to clear a runway—you had to remove it in manageable pieces.