When she didn’t say anything, Jeremy wondered if she had the training to interpret what she was seeing. Maybe it would be better if he helped her out.
“Do you see how most of the break is completely smooth? Only a small portion of the metal shows brittle breakage. That’s a cut, with a very sharp saw.”
“Thirty-two teeth per inch,” Miranda agreed. “You can see the last line of scarification.”
Still without speaking, Captain Smithey stood up slowly, returned the magnifier to Miranda, then stared up at the sky.
Jeremy looked up, but the last of the parachutists was down. For the moment, the sky was clear.
“I was supposed to start my routine with a zoom climb to fifteen hundred feet, hammerhead stall, and after three of those, I’d do a spiral descent.”
“If you had, you’d be dead right now.” Seeing the dead woman in the dirt atop Hurricane Ridge yesterday made the image uncomfortably real.
“Yes, I would.”
“That would be a bad thing. I had a friend who was dead recently—at least for a while. It was a very bad thing.”
Captain Smithey looked at him strangely, but his own words had reminded him of Taz for the first time since he’d tackled her and rolled her under the table for safety during the Chinook’s crash.
He looked around, fearing she might have disappeared again.
But then he saw her by the gap in the fence with Mike, Holly, and a young Chinese woman not much taller than she was. Good. He really didn’t want her to be dead again.
When he waved, she hesitated, but then waved back.
Captain Smithey pulled out her phone.
Whoever she was dialing didn’t answer.
“Bob, Debbie here. Call me the instant you get this.”
She dialed again.
“Velma, medics clear you?...Good! That’s great. Now find Bob Wang. He—…What do you mean, he just walked out of the hangar and disappeared? Find him now! Crash priority. I don’t care whose toes you step on. He’s not answering. Start with tracing his phone. If anyone knows who attacked the Princess Jennie, he’ll be the one on top of it….Yeah, attacked. Someone on his team is a saboteur.”
45
A shrill ringing dragged him back from somewhere.
Another ring.
Not church bells. They wouldn’t have church bells in Hell, would they? Definitely where he was bound.
A phone.
He was so tired. So cold.
It stopped ringing.
Only slowly did he decide that he wasn’t dead.
But he was wet. Around his neck, down his cheek.
In his hand, on his chest, lay the hard, warm metal of a gun.
Right.
He’d shot himself.
Shot himself and somehow missed. Trying to move his jaw sent a slash of pain across the whole right side of his face. He didn’t have the energy to scream. The shot had gone in under the chin. Must have exited out through the cheek.
Cold.
Except for the slow, warm streams of blood leaking out of him.
The phone chimed that he had a message. Good luck with that.
He’d bleed out soon.
Fine with him.
He wasn’t sure he could find the energy or motivation to shoot himself again.
Maybe he could.
But it was a relief that he wouldn’t have to.
46
The crowd dispersed to the food booths—suddenly thirsty from seeing the crash.
Drake could see that they had towed the battered Chinook out of view and cleared most of the emergency vehicles. All that remained were a small crane, a dump truck, and a field of debris.
Miranda’s team had assembled into a line and were slowly sweeping back and forth across the accident area. Ru’s grandniece along with Taz—didn’t know what to think about her sudden return from the dead—stood to one side watching the others as they moved along with all the deft precision of a parade ground review.
Three steps, stop, survey both forward and behind them, then three more. Each area they covered, the cleanup crew followed close behind. The Chinook’s remains were rapidly disappearing from the field.
If only Ru would do the same. Instead, he remained stubbornly real. Drake flagged the airman who’d been guarding the gap over and pointed to the star-cracked slab of windshield that had flattened one of the chairs a few tables away. “Let the cleanup team know this is here, too.”
He saluted and took care of it.
“Taiwan.” Drake turned back to Ru and cut him off in mid-rhapsody to Lizzy about the flavors of Chinese stout beers versus the weak showing of American beers.
“He always cares not but business,” Ru tried to engage Lizzy again. By her pleasant smile and narrowed eyes, Drake estimated Ru was under ten seconds from engaging a fist to his chin.
“Taiwan, Ru.”
He had the decency to look uncomfortable.
“Someday we will take Taiwan. Why do you struggle against it? You Americans barely care about it anymore.”
Which was both true and false. The US had agreed that there was only one China and cut diplomatic ties with Taiwan, including having them no longer recognized as a separate country by most of the world, including the UN. However, the US sold billions of dollars of arms to Taiwan under the hand-waving of “in better defense of China’s outer island chain.” The fact that all of that weaponry was pointed toward the mainland was Taiwan’s choice, not the United States’—technically.
“We have not forgotten about Taiwan, but don’t you forget about the Japanese.”
Ru’s glance toward Lizzy was fast and angry, but he covered it quickly. “Well, this lovely Japanese may have conquered you, Drake, but China is another matter.”
Drake wondered how much self restraint it took Lizzy to not kick Ru in the balls.
And they all knew that China couldn’t ignore them, especially not over the Taiwan issue.
Japan’s Navy could turn from defense to offense in a matter of minutes. He’d once witnessed just how fast. So quickly that he’d barely kept North Korea from being wiped off the face of the Earth last year. Couldn’t have even done that without Miranda’s help.
And Japan could become the world’s tenth nuclear power within hours—everything poised at the ready except for some final assembly…if his reports were accurate. Otherwise, they already had a secret stockpile.
“There’s still the Taiwanese. They dropped thirteen billion into the military last year. That places them in the top thirty militaries worldwide.”
“Is there that,” Ru admitted, and sipped his beer as if China didn’t care about so trivial a number. Against China’s quarter of a trillion, he did have a point.
The airshow burst back to life as the Air Force Thunderbirds screamed by low overhead with no warning. One moment not there, the next everyone covering their ears in surprise.
He was amused that no one in Miranda’s team so much as looked up.
Lizzy, however, had a look of longing on her face like he’d rarely seen. He reached out and took her hand, which she squeezed hard but didn’t look away.
During a brief silence, or at least a less deafening moment, he asked, “Did you ever try out?”
She shook her head and followed the diamond formation doing a twisting vertical climb that he didn’t know the name of.
“Chicken?”
She shook her head. “I wasn’t good enough.”
“Are you kidding me? You’ve got serious medals; I’ve seen them in your office. You were the leader of an entire flight.”
She looked down from the aircraft, and he felt like a heel for breaking in on her enjoyment of the moment.
“Look at them.”
He looked around, but during his moment of inattention, they’d disappeared again.
“Not the Thunderbirds. Look at Miranda and her people.”
They were all huddled around something on the ground.
“They’re all very ski
lled. Even your nephew Jon.”
“Okay.” He’d had proof that Jon was more than skilled, Miranda had accepted him as the Air Force liaison on a number of incidents—high praise indeed.
“And then there’s Miranda.”
“Oh.” He got it now.
“These pilots are past the level where mere excellence becomes art. I was very, very skilled in the air, but I was never an artist.”
She turned her attention upward once more.
Less than a second later, two jets came screaming in from either end of the runway. Closing fast, they were headed straight for each other. At the last instant, so close it seemed impossible they wouldn’t collide, they each rotated sideways so that they were belly-to-belly for just an instant in a knife-edge pass, then they were racing past each other and gone.
“How close did they just come?” He had to shout over the thundering roar that slapped in a second after their passage.
“Under twenty feet. About half of their wingspan. At a closing rate of a thousand miles an hour.”
Numbers like that just made him dizzy. Drake left Lizzy to her airshow, turning to Ru and the Taiwan problem.
But Ru also was gazing aloft with a look of longing not all that unlike Lizzy’s. Right. He’d been a pilot forty years ago during the Sino-Vietnamese War.
Drake had read hundreds of reports on the “Taiwan Problem” over the years. It wasn’t an issue of ownership…mostly.
It was a matter of defense and commerce. The outer island chain of Japan, South Korea (cut off from the mainland by North Korea effectively made it an island), Taiwan, and the Philippines controlled much of China’s access to global commerce. All sides were well aware of the balance of power, and what it would mean if the connecting pin of Taiwan actually disappeared back into the PRC’s control.
Was Ru warning him of an imminent move against Taiwan?
Maybe if Drake retired tomorrow, he wouldn’t have to face another war as Chairman. Not that he’d trust anyone else to avoid it.
The law legally stated that there was One Country, Two Systems. But no one other than the PRC actually wanted the one country. And, as they’d just proven with Hong Kong, the PRC didn’t view the two-systems concept as a worthwhile long-term scenario.
“If our President were holy man,” Ru looked down at Drake, then waved his beer like a Catholic priest scattering holy water over a crowd, “he might say he had divine right to rule the One Country, One System. He made himself President-for-life but he feels his age. Before he dies, he feels must do this. Must break the outer island chain and take Taiwan in his fist.”
Drake was eight years younger than China’s President, and he himself was feeling his age. Not that he had any aspirations to conquer the occasional country; though there were a few governments he wouldn’t mind stamping out of existence. Ten fewer suppressive, authoritarian regimes and eighty percent of his stress would be gone.
And if China was one of those, he wouldn’t be sorry.
Ru leaned in close as Lizzy’s jets roared by close overhead.
“We can not let him be doing this.”
Drake could only stare at Zhang Ru in surprise. He couldn’t have heard that correctly.
Ru smiled brightly, leaned back comfortably in his plastic chair, then he toasted his beer toward the field.
The jets so loud a moment before had once again raced away.
The only thing on the field was Miranda’s team. Except for a single piece of hardware that Jeremy was carrying over his shoulder like a club, all of the debris had been cleared.
He looked back at Ru.
What the hell was he being so happy about?
47
Taz watched the approaching team. The team that she wasn’t a member of, even if Miranda had told Drake Nason that she was.
Besides, she knew nothing of crash investigations. The only crashes she knew about in any detail were the three she’d been a part of. And she didn’t know much about those except that she’d survived two of them when the odds said she shouldn’t have.
Mei-Li had only had time to tell Mike and Holly the barest bones of Zhang Ru’s and the CMC’s vulnerability. Before they had a chance to confer, Jeremy had found something at the forward rotor head, and everyone went running.
Except her, because she still didn’t know any more about site investigations than she had ten minutes ago.
Mei-Li had begged for their silence until she could tell them more.
Taz was actually impressed that Holly hadn’t hunted down Ru right away and beat the shit out of him for what he’d done to Mei-Li herself. That was completely aside from the brutal political manipulations she’d managed to verify.
The fact that Drake had taken him away into the crowd was probably all that saved his life.
Holly and Mike returned to them while Miranda, Andi, and Jeremy continued on to the fence line with the piece they were carrying. Major Jon Swift had followed the broken Chinook as it was towed away.
All six Thunderbirds raced over the runway in a delta group. Now that the clean-up crews were off the field, they passed by just a hundred feet up with an ear-splitting roar. Only after they’d passed did she realize they were all upside down as they did it.
Holly yelled at Mei-Li as soon as she arrived. “You’re saying that Zhang Ru did all of that? Why I can’t kill him right now?”
Mei-Li’s voice was drowned out by the Lead Solo pilot breaking from the formation and returning to fly a continuous twisting roll down the entire length of the runway.
“Try that again,” Holly was up on her toes, poised for action.
“If you kill him, then we do not get to destroy the Central Military Commission,” Mei-Li’s voice was as small and delicate as she was, and shouting out the whole sentence left her breathless.
Holly didn’t ease back.
Mike rested a hand on her shoulder.
Holly slammed him to the grass so hard he could only grunt. Taz didn’t even have time to jump back despite him landing on her toes; Holly was just that fast.
With her feet trapped by Mike’s weight, Taz fell to her butt on the grass.
“Oh, shit, Mike,” Holly knelt down beside him. “I thought you knew not touch me when I’m like that. I’m so…sorry.” The last word appeared to pain her.
48
“Sabotage,” Jeremy thumped the pitch-varying housing down on the plastic table. Maybe he did it a little hard because the table groaned as if in pain. He could definitely sympathize. Why was it always Holly who got to be with Taz?
Instead, it had somehow become his job to show off the sabotage just because he’d uncovered it.
Drake was staring at the metal housing as if it might attack him. Maybe because it was upside-down. That’s the orientation Jeremy had found it in, rammed into the dirt where the helicopter had rolled over on its back and snapped it off.
He flipped it right-side up.
Still nothing. Oh right. General Drake Nason had been an Army Ranger, not a helo pilot.
Jeremy spoke quickly, before Andi (who had been a helo pilot) could take that away from him as well.
“Okay. The rotor blade attaches here and the other end is anchored to the rotor head.”
Then he lifted and lowered the pitch arm a few times. “See, as this raises and lowers, it changes the pitch angle on the rotor blade by rolling it up or down. The amount of change is controlled by a fitting called a pitch link. It’s this little rod that’s dangling here. Except that’s only half of it.”
He patted his pockets until he felt Andi pull it out of his back pants pocket. She handed it to him, rather than using it as an opportunity to jump in. He could only look at her in surprise.
She mouthed, “What?”
Maybe he was making assumptions about her trying to take his place. Maybe he should try just talking to her…but not until after he’d talked to Taz.
He turned back to Drake, Lizzy, and the old Chinese man.
“This,” he held i
t up, “is the other half of the lifter, the part that was still attached to the swash plate that controls the angle of all three rotor blades. Except it was no longer one piece. As Captain Smithey applied back control on the cyclic to taxi backward, it caused two of the blades to twist—angle the leading edge upward—into a stronger lift mode. The third one, with the broken lifter link, didn’t. Instead, it remained neutral and the helicopter backed into it. The catastrophic failure was assured from that moment.”
“Who the hell would do something like that?”
Jeremy looked at Drake, “Debbie, Captain Smithey, said she knew who would know.”
“Where is she?”
He looked around but didn’t see her anywhere.
49
At Velma’s call, Captain Debbie Smithey raced to the nearest hangar. The first vehicle she reached was a Striker airport fire engine.
She climbed up the short ladder into the passenger side of the monster eight-wheeled vehicle.
“Hey, you can’t be in here,” the driver, a senior airman—Christ but they got younger every day—was filling out a logbook.
“Drive!”
“Where? I’d need to check with the sergeant, he—”
“See these?” she tapped her captain’s bars.
“Yes…”
“Now fucking drive before I shoot your ass.”
When he didn’t, she yanked her sidearm.
She didn’t have to point it at him, he started moving plenty fast.
The cockpit could seat five: driver, engineer, fire control, and two observers. The Striker had a bumper sprayer and a boom arm with a nozzle folded up on top of the vehicle. Forty-five feet long and carrying twenty tons of water and foam, it was lacking the one thing she needed most—speed.
“South. Step on it.” She holstered her sidearm and yanked out her phone. Velma had sent her the locator information on Bob Wang’s phone, and it was hell-and-gone from anywhere it should have been. Deep in the woods of the Army’s practice ranges.
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