Slowly.
Painfully.
And she was going to take care of it personally.
21
Miranda’s scream seemed to echo across the fathomless blue arc of sky over Johnston Atoll.
This time when Holly spun looking for the source, she had the Glock up. The safety, integral in the trigger, was depressed and she’d taken up half of the pressure to fire the first round.
Andi was curled up on the pavement with both arms clasped over her head.
Miranda was bent over, clutching herself tightly as she unleashed another ear-piercing gut-wrencher.
Jon came within milliseconds of being shot in the face.
“What the hell did you do to them?” Holly jammed the gun into her front waistband rather than the rear one for faster access as she hurried up to them.
No one answered.
Holly tried to wrap her arms around Miranda. For her trouble, Miranda almost crotched her with a flailing bunched fist.
Mike knelt beside Andi, who was staying in a tight protective ball.
Taz surfaced next with her new Taser drawn. Jeremy and Quint were close behind, but Taz stopped them before they got closer.
“What the hell did you do, Jon?”
“Nothing. I swear. Nothing. I just—” he waved a hand toward the wreck. “I said something and she went into crazy-spastic-woman meltdown.”
“What. Did. You. Say?” Holly reconsidered her split-second decision to not shoot Jon. At least in the arm or leg.
“I didn’t say…anything.” He honestly didn’t know. He also didn’t think his last statement was damnation enough.
Miranda had dropped down to sit beside the curled-up Andi. Miranda’s head was down, and her arms were wrapped around her knees as she rocked and rocked and rocked. She was mumbling something over and over.
Holly squatted close to hear. It took several incredibly fast repetitions before she got the hang of Miranda’s words as she rocked.
“Hell of a mess. Hell of a mess. Hell of a mess.”
She glanced at Mike still hovering over Andi. His headshake said that she was in full PTSD lockdown—Miranda’s scream had tripped some internal trigger hard.
Holly pushed to her feet and scanned the situation.
One shattered plane, fifty-three corpses, a desert island, eight people—nine with the other Air Force pilot apparently napping inside the Learjet.
“Hell of mess?” She focused on Jon.
He waved toward the wreck. “Well, it is. That’s all I said. Why’d that make her go all freak?”
It took everything Holly had not to take the bastard down right then and there. Jon was always trying to make Miranda be more “normal.” Some of it had stuck, some just wasn’t there.
Miranda liked him and he was kind to her, which were the only reasons Holly had put up with him. Triggering a full-on Miranda meltdown, like Holly had never seen, was beyond the limit.
Jon squatted down close in front of Miranda. “Hey there, you. What’s going on in that head of yours?”
Miranda reacted faster than Holly could. Her slap was hard enough to slam Jon’s head aside.
“What the fuck is wrong with you this time?”
Mike lunged from where he still knelt by Andi.
But this time Taz was fastest.
There was a loud pop of not-quite gunfire over Holly’s left shoulder. Twin Taser electrodes shot into Jon’s upper shoulder—one of the most effective locations with an electroshock weapon. Fifty thousand volts of electricity delivered two-point-one milliamps of current into his nervous system. All of his muscles spasmed at once, and he collapsed helplessly to the runway.
Holly looked back along the two wires that had passed within a foot of her left ear to face Taz.
“Glad you know how to aim that thing.”
“No big loss if I missed. The 7 CQ has a double cartridge. I could have fried you both.”
“Gee thanks. Still rather I gave you the Deagle?”
Taz shrugged a maybe not. “Now what?”
Holly resisted the urge to tell Taz to zap Jon again. Then she spotted the other Air Force pilot approaching cautiously from the C-21A Learjet.
That definitely gave her an idea.
22
“I’m noticing that we’re doing a whole lot of standing here and watching planes leaving without us being on them.” Quint noted that the pretty little Learjet had departed even faster than the massive C-17 Globemaster III.
“It is becoming a thing, isn’t it?” Holly nudged his shoulder. “Thanks for the help.”
“Piss-easy. He weighed less than a wallaroo.” At Holly’s signal, Quint had tossed the still twitching Major Jon Swift over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry and dumped him in one of the Lear’s passenger seats.
“Still. Owe you.”
“Shit, woman. Still owe you a life even if you don’t want to hear nothing about it. Anyway, got me a question.” He had about a thousand. Starting with just what was up with Miranda and Andi? A third of the NTSB team was out of commission without anyone touching either woman. And now they’d shipped out the Air Force AIB investigator still twitching from the Taser charge.
“Fire away.”
“We’re on a desert island.” He left it as a simple statement.
“Uh-huh,” she was still watching the disappearing dot of the Learjet, like she was wishing it to be gone even faster.
“Eight hundred miles to Hawaii.”
“’Bout the size of it.”
“I’m noticing that the only plane here on this desert island of ours isn’t going anywhere this side of next Christmas.” He waved at the wreckage of his A330-900.
“Yep.” Holly agreed easily.
“Knowing all that…” he drew it out to tease her, “…you’re still thinking kicking them aloft was a clever idea?”
“Bloody righto, mate.” Holly shot him the kind of smile that could fry a man’s brain.
“Okay. Just wanted to make sure I had my facts straight.”
She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. “Smack on!” Then she headed back to check on her teammates.
Christ, the woman was killing him.
23
When Miranda finally limped her way back, it was just her and Holly.
A shredded engine cowling had been propped up against a pair of seats to act as a sunshade.
She felt…shredded.
“Where is everyone?” Her voice croaked.
Holly handed her a warm can of soda. “Sorry, all of the ice has long since melted.”
“Thank you.”
“They’re doing the accident investigation. You saved a lot of lives today, Miranda.”
“It doesn’t look that way.” She could see the lined-up bodies beneath their blankets.
“Almost one-eighty more would be dead without your help. Me included, which I wouldn’t have enjoyed one bit. You called it exactly. We lost the wing out past the missing engine on touchdown, but the landing gear survived until we were down to a hundred knots.”
“Oh, that explains the breakup pattern.” She’d expected significantly more damage than she’d seen on their two flyovers before landing. “A twenty-nine-point-five percent reduction in speed from one hundred and forty-two knots best landing speed to one hundred would have a commensurate reduction in the translational momentum force of two-point-six-nine kilogram-meters-per-second.”
Then she closed her eyes before she dared ask the next question.
“Where’s Jon?” She remembered yelling at him. Or being yelled at by him. Or maybe both?
“Halfway back to Hawaii by now.”
“Halfway to—”
“Well, first you slapped him. How’s your hand?”
She flexed it experimentally. “Sore.”
“It was a good one. Then Taz zapped him hard with her new toy. I figured his best chance of survival was shipping him out.”
“On our only airplane?”
“Well, it wa
s either that or I was going to have to shoot him with something much worse than a Taser the moment he opened his mouth again. Seriously, Miranda. I hate to intrude, but why the hell are…were…you with him?”
Miranda listened to the wind for a minute. She could hear the voices of the rest of the team investigating the wreck, with the occasional bang of metal as a piece of wreckage was shifted aside.
“Jeremy’s leading?”
Holly nodded.
“That’s okay then.” He was skilled enough that it was time he took the lead on at least a partial investigation. A good next step in his training.
She also tried listening to her own feelings. They were less obvious.
She tugged out her personal notebook and flipped to the emoticon pages that Mike had given her. She scanned each of the round faces until she found the one that best fit what she was feeling and read the label.
Then she turned it to Holly and pointed.
The little face was wiping its brow and huffing a breath out of a rounded mouth.
“Relieved,” Holly read aloud softly.
Miranda nodded.
“Good. I wouldn’t want to upset you, but it was all I could think to do at the time. Why were you with him so long?”
“I’m autistic. I don’t like change. Jon was nice to me. And it was nice to have him in my bed. But he isn’t particularly good at his job and he was always—” she shrugged because she didn’t have the words.
“Pushing you to be someone other than who you were?” Holly offered.
“Yes. That’s it. He really wanted a neurotypical girlfriend, not an autistic mess.”
“No, Miranda, don’t go there. This one’s on him. Besides, he’s gone for now. Up to you whether or not you ever invite him back.”
Miranda really didn’t like change. Now that she knew she was relieved that he was gone, she didn’t want to change that either. She just shook her head.
“Feel up to looking at that left wing?”
“Yes. That sounds good. Very, very good.”
Holly rose to her feet, then offered Miranda a hand.
Once clear of the cowling, Miranda could see the team and a man she didn’t recognize.
“Who’s he?”
“Quint Dermott, first officer of the crashed plane,” Holly explained. “From my old hometown, if you can believe the world is that small.”
“It’s only twenty-four thousand, nine hundred and one miles around. Four of the eight planets are significantly larger and only three smaller.”
Holly smiled. “It still seemed unlikely, running into him on a crashing plane.”
“Well, I think it’s nice. Andi’s missing.”
“Your scream—”
“I screamed?”
Holly’s shudder didn’t appear faked. “Like you were dying.”
Miranda wondered if maybe a part of her had been; she felt…lighter. And a little light-headed from the soda; it had been caffeinated.
“Anyway, Andi’s PTSD got caught in the side blast. She’s up, but shaky. Decided that she wanted to sit with the dead. Keep them company until the Coast Guard came back for them.”
“And for us.”
“And for us.”
Miranda offered a half wave when Andi looked up. It felt as if every one of her muscles was being stretched to the limit by even that.
Andi’s return wave appeared much the same.
Holly offered her a sideways grin and thickened her accent. “Let’s go see that wing before these bums take all the glory.”
“It’s not about glory…” Miranda started, then gave up.
Holly’s smile said that she already knew that and was just teasing.
Miranda knew that she’d never learn. But she didn’t miss not feeling Jon’s eye roll somewhere over her shoulder.
“I forgot my hat.” She was the only one of the team not wearing the yellow Matilda’s ball cap of Holly’s favorite soccer team. It had made Andi easy to spot among all of the blanketed corpses.
“Quint had some spare ones with the airline’s logo. We’ll get you one of those so that you don’t scorch.”
“But I’ll be different. Will I still be on the team?”
Holly rose to her feet then offered Miranda a hand to help her up.
“Miranda, you are the team.” They turned shoulder to elbow and began walking toward the left wing.
She didn’t understand how one person could also be a team; those were different categories—individual versus group. But Holly sounded so certain, that Miranda decided it was better not to contradict her.
24
Clarissa waited until nine p.m. and most of the senior staff had gone home before dropping in on the Hacker Twins. It was something she’d taken to doing a couple times a week. If someone was watching for her reactions to their hijacking an SOG team, it wouldn’t stand out.
Harry was practically nose to his screen, his fingers prowling about his keyboard in brief bursts that appeared to be afterthoughts while the rest of his body was frozen in place. Except for an ever-present slice of pizza, his workstation was as immaculate as ever.
Heidi, the queen of kitsch, had her feet up on her desk with her keyboard in her lap. Her workstation was heavily adorned with witch paraphernalia. Wizard Boy and Witchy Lady were their hacker handles, so it was appropriate—just ridiculous.
When she nodded toward Harry in question, Heidi explained.
“He’s chasing a hole in a Finnish firewall. Thinks it might be an old back door that will let him slip past the Russian defenses.”
“Okay.” Clarissa had no idea why and really didn’t care tonight. She knew that when he was in this state, they could do anything except zap more pizza and he’d never notice.
Heidi, on the other hand, was always chatty. And she became even chattier when she was on the attack. Since she was head of Cyber Security, she was more typically building and testing code, but Clarissa had been around to see it happen a few times.
For the hundredth time, she considered asking if that same pattern held true when the couple was having geek sex. But some things were perhaps better left as a mystery.
Clark was out of town again, doing his vice-presidential dance at an Alaskan wildfire this time. So she took a slice of pizza from the nearest box—triple pepperoni, Harry had clearly placed the last order—and zapped it for a minute in the microwave before sitting across from Heidi.
“So, what do you have for me?” She began peeling off the pepperoni with every intention of setting at least three-quarters of it aside.
“Some raisins?” Heidi leaned over to fish a box out of her lower desk drawer.
“Ha. Ha. Ha.” She hadn’t even cleared off one whole layer when she ate a piece of the pepperoni. It wasn’t that pale-red pressed stuff; it was dark, New York deli grade sliced paper thin. She began putting pieces back on despite the pending grease load.
“Oh, you mean how did your account issue an illegal order to the Special Operation Group without you ever issuing it?”
“Yes,” Clarissa sighed. “That.” She’d learned not to mess with Heidi’s little games or Heidi would take her down convoluted paths of logic just because she enjoyed being contrary.
“I did look into that a bit.” Heidi began eating from the box of raisins.
It damn well better be her Number One priority!
“And?” Heidi could be just as much of a pain in the ass as Clarissa knew she herself was. She rather liked that about Heidi, but wouldn’t admit it.
“The engine departed company from the airplane at ten a.m. our time this morning, about eleven hours ago.”
“Civilian, right?”
“An Airbus A330-900neo. Two hundred and forty passengers and crew including the cockpit. So, at eighty percent of capacity. They were six hours into the flight when they lost the engine. They managed to crash land on a nowhere spot called Johnston Island Airport, which is unsurprisingly on Johnston Island, one of the four islands of Johnston Atoll, which
has an utterly fascinating history—”
“That if you tell me about right now, you’ll be eating those raisins through your nose as I ram them up there with a sharpened pencil.”
“But I’ll leave that out for now as I rather like my nose the way it is,” Heidi didn’t miss a beat. “Still. Look it up. A lot of weird Air Force history out there. The B-29 Enola Gay refueled there crossing the Pacific. Nuclear rockets, too. Bad ones. The kind that blow up on launch and pollute the shit out of everything. Just saying.” She kept eating her raisins. “Approximately ten minutes after the crash, the captain called her head office with the information that they’d crashed and had some survivors, number unknown.”
“When did the order go out to the SOG?”
“Not until twenty minutes after that.”
“Okay, a bit slow off the mark but—”
“They received their launch orders precisely…” Heidi took such joy in cutting her off that Clarissa started looking for a sharp pencil, “…one minute after one Holly Harper completed her second satellite phone call of the morning to the NTSB’s lead crash investigator, Miranda Chase. Her first call was approximately five minutes after the loss of the engine. Both calls were unencrypted, and because you added her to the watch list, we captured both conversations. The first was all about the damage and not crashing. During the second call, she revealed that most of the passengers had survived a hard landing on Johnston Atoll. We also heard that Miranda’s team was already en route to the crash site, along with the US Coast Guard, also mobilized by Miranda’s team.”
Clarissa decided that letting Heidi ramble a bit in her explanations had its merits.
“So, I’ve been building up a timeline of what happened because we left Coincidenceville way back somewhere in the deep ocean. Within fifteen minutes of the US Coast Guard forces departing, the SOG team arrived. The USCG reported that they left two survivors on the island. Probably awaiting Miranda Chase’s arrival.”
“One of them being Holly Harper.”
Heidi nodded. “And Chase’s plane did arrive within minutes after that. It’s unclear what happened, but approximately forty minutes later, the C-17 departed with a destroyed quarter-million-dollar excavator—which, by the way, an SOG communique issued by Group Commander Kurt Grice had them eject into the ocean, sans parachute.”
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