They sat in silence for about half a sandwich.
Holly was just as glad that she couldn’t see the engines mounted to either side of the tail. Something falling off? She was too damn tired to care. The ocean continued to lie far below her, and would for the next five hours of the seven-hour flight to Tennant Creek.
Eli had insisted on delivering them direct. Quint was on a mandatory two-week leave—the airline’s standard time to detox after an incident of any significance. He’d chosen to head for home.
Hanging out with Quint for a couple of weeks…she could do worse.
“You headed back for your parents?” Quint broached the subject softly.
“No real secrets in TC.”
“Hardly.”
“Yeah. They left no will or anything. The courts tracked me down. They wanted me to come down personally. For myself? I’d vote against it, but…” She shrugged. Some tiny thread of obligation had her flying back. Though she’d made sure they were buried before she got there. “I don’t even know how they died.”
“Your dad died about a year ago on a run down the thousand klicks from Darwin. He spread his road train all over the Stuart, closing it for most of a day until they could get it shoved aside.”
A road train was a long-haul truck typically with five full trailers all strung together. They traveled fast on the flat line of the Stuart Highway and didn’t stop for anything. Dumping one of those would make a major mess. Especially as a run down from Darwin meant he’d been fully loaded. Not much shipped out of Tennant Creek to anywhere.
“A nighttime run,” Quint said it flat.
“Jesus, nobody’s that thick.” Except she could see Dad doing that. Nobody ran the Stuart after dark except for the crazy-ass night buses. That’s when the roos came out to feed on the thicker grasses that grew to either side of the sealed highway. Tiny bits of morning dew collected on the pavement, flowed to the sides, and created the richest feeding ground for hundreds of kilometers around. Hitting a two-hundred-pound big red kangaroo at speed destroyed a vehicle—even the ones with bull bars.
“And Mum?” Holly didn’t want to know, but couldn’t help herself.
Quint looked uncomfortable, then mumbled out, “Died pretty much like she lived.”
Drank herself to death.
The stories had all been there, part of the family legacy.
Sixteen and had me a skinful when your brother was conceived. Right smashed when I had you the next year. We was… Mum used to spin endless tales of how drunk she was on this or that occasion. The way she told it, she remembered them all—in painful detail—and seemed to love recounting each bout at length. Holly knew all the detailed variations of a drunken-high and a hangover-low long before she could read.
Broad Strine had a hundred words for being a drunk, and Mum had a story to go with every single one. I ’member we were havin’ a shoey blast and your dad filled one of his Wellies with beer. I finished off a pair. A party to drink out of shoes. And Dad’s Wellington boots stank plenty under any conditions. But Holly hadn’t doubted the story then and, sadly, she didn’t doubt it now.
“They wouldn’t even let her in The Memo by the end,” Quint grunted out like it hurt him.
“That had to be a blow.” Took a lot to get banned from The Memorial Club’s bar.
Never violent or nasty—except once—but never exactly functioning either. Holly could clean house by the age of four and could cook by six. Between that and the waitressing jobs she’d had before the army, she’d never cooked again if she could help it.
Mike wanted help in the kitchen? She always waited until someone else volunteered—even Jeremy, the can-barely-run-a-microwave kid. Taz being an avid cook made her an exceptional addition to the team for that reason alone.
Growing up, it had been her and her brother against the world…until she’d killed him.
She glared down at the glistening darkness of the Pacific Ocean’s depths. This Gulfstream was flying ten thousand feet higher than the Airbus had been but it looked no different.
It seemed that almost everyone who’d known her was dead.
There was an idea that had been tickling at her all day, even before the SOG team had showed up. It had begun when Miranda, who never repeated herself, who hated repeating herself, had said multiple times how unusual an incident this was.
But now the evidence was piling up against her desire to pretend it was in any way a normal crash.
Sabotage.
Coordinated attack by the CIA’s black squad—without the CIA Director’s knowledge. Which, much to her surprise, Holly actually believed when Clarissa had denied knowing about the SOG team.
The idea that was itching at her didn’t make any sense; there had been two hundred and forty other people on that flight from Seattle to Sydney.
But, despite how unlikely it seemed, she couldn’t quite shed the thought.
A plane crashed.
Fifty-three dead.
Chance? Or had she been the target?
32
Jeremy was the first out of his seat when the C-130J reached cruising altitude. He hurried forward to the section of the Airbus plane’s wing that the Coast Guard had flipped over, then chained in place at the front of the cargo bay.
“Look at those shear bolts,” he already had his camera out, had squatted down, and was blocking Miranda’s ability to see them. “I’ve never seen ones that actually sheared in flight before.”
Holly would have just nudged him aside with a knee to the ribs so that she and Miranda could see as well.
After he still didn’t move, Miranda tried nudging his ribs lightly with her own knee. He moved aside without even appearing to notice. He didn’t tumble aside as he would have when Holly did it; she must not have done it right. Holly had so many useful skills; she really needed to learn more of them. Top of her list: nudging force and appropriate application of same.
“They look like…shear bolts.” Andi stood on the other side of the wing, with Mike and Taz beside her.
Miranda waited half a beat. She’d learned to always hesitate after any overtly obvious remark as Holly was sure to spin out one of her Strine sayings. When she didn’t hear anything, she looked around to see if Holly had spoken more softly than the roar of the C-130J’s four big six-bladed scimitar propellers.
That’s when she recalled again that Holly wasn’t there. It was an odd sensation; she was so used to Holly’s constant presence at her side.
Miranda leaned in to look more closely herself.
The fuse pins and bolts were sheared cleanly.
“This one’s color isn’t correct,” she pulled a graduated punch tool out of its vest pocket and dialed in a setting. Placing its point against the metal, she leaned her weight into it.
“This one is also different,” Jeremy said from where he was aiming a flashlight into the other end of the engine mount pylon.
With a loud snap, the spring released the point of the punch in a sharp jolt at the selected force.
They all leaned in to look at the small divot. Then Miranda turned the punch for them to see.
“A hundred?” Jeremy’s exclamation was loud enough to hurt her ears, even over the engine’s roar. “It dented the metal at only a hundred ksi? That can’t be right.”
“Why?” Andi was a rotorcraft specialist and wouldn’t know much about airplane shear bolts.
“Inconel 718 is used a lot in high-stress, high-temperature situations in aerospace.” Miranda was always glad to explain the details; there was something comforting about the process. Curiously, she knew that Andi—unlike Jon, who was always a bit haphazard—would now remember that and integrate it into any future situations.
Haphazard? Was that another metaphor? She turned to ask Holly…who again wasn’t there. This was hard.
“Inconel is a nickel-chromium superalloy used in places like engine shear pins and fuse links,” but Jeremy was right there with her.
“Exactly. It should have a y
ield strength of a hundred and sixty ksi—”
“That’s kilopounds—thousands of pounds—per square inch,” Jeremy interjected but she didn’t let it sidetrack her.
“—and this is testing below a hundred. That shouldn’t happen unless—”
“It’s superheated to over thirteen hundred degrees at the time of the test.”
“Latent degradation from overheating?” Yes, Andi was already asking the relevant question.
Miranda placed the punch against another pin—two of the four were distinctly shinier. Again she pressed on the punch until it snapped loudly, unleashing the spring to drive the point in. The sheared-off remains of the second pin wasn’t so much as scuffed.
“Not overheating. Two key pins were replaced with an under-spec material. The real question is why it took them so long to fail.”
“Are these pins manufactured in multiple grades?” Mike sat down on the wing flap, which groaned and creaked but held.
Miranda shook her head.
“Then it’s definitely sabotage, just like Holly said.” He reached out and wiggled an element of the engine mounting bracket. “This all got pretty twisted, didn’t it?”
Miranda focused on the bracket. It was badly bent. Even though Mike was decidedly nontechnical, it was an astute observation. Far more so than Jon’s “Hell of a mess.” Maybe she needed to be open to changing things more often, even if she didn’t like change. She made a note in her personal notebook for later consideration.
The engine’s mounting brackets had been bent and twisted, though not—
“Which direction was the wing dragged?”
“Holly said—” Mike twisted as if turning to Holly, then looked confused for a moment.
It was comforting that she wasn’t the only one having problems with Holly’s absence.
“She said,” he looked down and wiggled the bracket again, “that the wing didn’t drag. Not the root of it. The tip did, then it ripped off when the landing gear failed. It probably skidded some, but it was still perpendicular to the runway. It never dragged sideways.”
Miranda touched the kitty-corner end of the mount bracketing. She could almost feel its pain. But more importantly, it had been bent in the opposite direction to the one Mike still held onto.
“This wasn’t caused by the sliding of the wing, in any direction.”
Andi gasped, then held out her arm with her forearm over the wing where the engine would be. Then she simply twisted her hand one way and her elbow the other.
“Yes, the engine was torqued strongly counterclockwise, away from the main fuselage at the time of failure.”
“So, these two pins,” Jeremy pointed at the dulled ones, “with their softer material, failed as the engine swung outward. Wouldn’t you expected them to fail on the inward swing?” He raised his arm and twisted it in the opposite direction to the way Andi had done.
“Yes. In fact, when you run the match, you’ll find that it’s really chance that the airplane survived. No more of a window than a few hundredths of a second out of every twenty-seven-hundredths per vibrational cycle.”
“If it had failed in any other part of the vibrational swing…” Miranda saw the scenario and found herself unable to finish the sentence.
“What?” Mike looked at her. “What?” he asked the others.
Jeremy looked grim. Andi had gone sheet white.
It was finally Taz who answered him. “Picture it. The engine mount fully fails on an inward swing of a hard side-to-side vibration. What sits immediately to the right of the left engine?”
“The fuselage? The engine would have flown into the fuselage.”
Taz nodded. “Straight through business class and into hell.”
“The plane—” Mike didn’t finish.
Then he spoke so softly that Miranda could barely hear him over the C-130J’s engines.
“Holy shit!”
Mike didn’t ever swear.
33
The thwack of the electronic bolts in her cell door jolted Elayne out of sleep.
Two in the morning by the clock.
That had never happened before.
She didn’t waste time getting dressed, she didn’t need to.
Since finding out about Holly Harper’s survival, she’d slept fully clothed—ready at a moment’s notice for the slightest chance.
Maybe this was it.
She dropped her feet to floor, ready to rush whoever came in the door.
Her sneakers splashed ankle deep in cool water.
An incredibly good sign. When things went wrong, opportunities arose.
By the time she reached the door, it was swinging open and the water had increased from ten to twenty centimeters.
The common room was in darkness. The only light was that red-lit “Exit” sign above the vault door—plenty for her night-adapted eyes.
One inward-swinging cell door was blown outward off its frame, and water continued to spill out of it. A body washed by. Whoever had been locked up in there had drowned in bed.
Others were emerging from their rooms. Some half dressed, some in their PJs.
No time for them.
She sprinted for the stairs.
High-kneed steps, like a prancing horse’s, sped her passage through the knee-deep water. A splash of water on her lips. Salt. This prison block was below sea level—and the tide was definitely coming in. How far below was the big question.
Alarms must be sounding somewhere if an automatic system had unlocked all of their doors. Guards would be coming in to secure the area.
Nonstandard operations, like an emergency, definitely meant opportunity.
Up the stairs, she reached the door, then slammed back against the wall beside it to be ready.
Nineteen seconds.
Nineteen long seconds she counted as others began slogging through the now-thigh-deep water. Some idiots doubled back into their rooms—probably to put on their favorite fucking tutu. What kind of fools were locked in here with her?
In the lead, a slender Arabic woman, had just reached the bottom of the stairs when the vault door opened.
“Shit, Harv! The pit is flooding!”
Then he stepped through the door. A knife-hand blow collapsed his larynx, making those his final words ever—and, she’d hit him hard enough, his last breath too.
As he collapsed, she ignored his rifle. Instead she simply reached out to grab his knife and sidearm before he slid out from under them.
“Harv” caught a round from his buddy’s Glock in each eye. The loud gunfire reverberated in the small room past the vault door.
No one behind them.
She recognized him as she stripped Harv’s weapons.
“Aw, my little phone tech. Did you lose your connection somewhere?”
M4 rifle with the Aimpoint CompM4 scope and two extra thirty-round mags. Oh sweet, a KAC flash suppressor and silencer—she took an extra couple seconds to mount it on the end of the barrel. Two more mags for the Glock. A pocketful of flashbangs, and a knife—in a sheath this time.
The Arab woman was stripping the first guard with a fast professionalism.
Elayne tossed her the first guard’s knife. She caught it in midair, tapped the tip to her forehead in quick salute, then took the guard’s sheath and strapped it to her own thigh.
While Elayne had been arming herself, she’d also assessed the room.
A little waiting area. Dim with a single work light. Coffee machine, couches, a desk, and another set of stairs leading upward.
More feet sounded at the head of the upper stairs as well as the other prisoners climbing the stairs beyond the vault door.
Again, she moved fast to the wall beside the second flight.
She again waited for the guard to step into view.
Except he fired first. Firing down at the concrete floor to skip bullets ahead of his being visible.
The Arab woman screamed as she went down.
He continued firing. By the changi
ng angle, Elayne gauged his progress as he raced down the flight.
At the right moment, just as the gun barrel passed her, Elayne stepped around the door edge. She rammed her blade under his chin—upward with a hard thrust to scramble his brain—a sharp twist to snip his spinal column.
He switched off like a toy.
“Girl still has it!” She gave the air a little hip check and ducked back out of sight.
For fifteen seconds, no one else came down the steps.
One of the other prisoners, a tiny Chinese man in his twenties, picked up the dead Arab woman’s rifle and rushed the upper stairs. He held the weapon wrong. Didn’t even know to flick off the safety.
Just the kind of idiot she needed.
Elayne raced upward tight on his heels—but not too tight.
He made it five feet past the upper door.
Night, humid, tropical, ocean. Her senses registered each fact automatically.
When the Chinese guy went down, his body pitched right and back. Bullseye on the heart.
Shooter out there with night vision—low and left.
Another round hit the corpse, but she wasn’t sure from which direction.
Elayne heaved one of the flashbangs out the door, then closed her eyes and covered them with her forearm.
When the bang fired off, she rolled out the door.
Two cries of pain sounded as the pyrotechnic glare forty times brighter than the sun overloaded the shooters’ night-vision optics.
To the left—a soldier standing clear in the dying light—she popped off three quick rounds.
The other shout of pained-surprise was dead ahead.
He ate another three rounds before the flashbang’s light completely faded.
She dove behind a thick tree. She was in a dense coconut grove.
A coconut lay against her hip.
She tossed it high to land in the clearing by the door.
No one shot it.
Just silence.
And air. Fresh air.
Two deep breaths was all she allowed herself as she listened.
Sound of the sea to both sides. Island or a coral atoll.
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