“He’s—”
Andi reached across to slap Mike’s leg to stop him. “I’m asking Miranda.”
“But she’s terrible at metaphors.”
“Yes,” Miranda agreed looking at the bewildering array of possibilities. “He’s right.”
“Well, for the moment, we’re going to pretend he’s wrong. Choose one.”
Miranda studied the options.
Jon often flew a sleek C-21A Learjet transport, but if Mike wasn’t the Mooney, then the C-21A must also be too obvious for Jon.
They’d met during a crash investigation of a massive Russian AN-124 Condor cargo jet—not that he’d really ever fully understood what had happened to it.
He wasn’t a rotorcraft as that implied an agility of thought that Jon had never demonstrated. And he wasn’t very observant on crash investigations, which removed the remote-sensing and command specialists like the E-3 Sentry with its big radar dome or the several presidential command planes: Air Force One and Two, and the E-4B Nightwatch.
As she pushed each card aside, Andi gathered it up, simplifying the choices.
Jon had none of the attack-jet capabilities that Mike had assigned to Taz. Though he was good at investigation organization, which discarded a number of poor aircraft designs.
He was old-fashioned like a B-52 Stratofortress, which was the only remaining combat aircraft, but it was so old-fashioned that she handed that to Andi as well.
That left only a few of the cargo planes. She eliminated them one by one until only one remained.
“I know that he isn’t these other planes. So why is he the KC-135 Stratotanker?”
“Not flashy,” Andi offered.
“Reliable,” Mike said carefully.
“Useful?” Jeremy made it more of a question than a statement. The sixty-year-old design was finally being phased out in favor of the ten-year-old KC-46 Pegasus tanker. Though it was much better and fifty years newer, that plane also had issues of its own.
“Outdated and needs to be replaced—big time.” Taz had been the one to shoot Jon with her Taser.
She looked at the map. All of the team’s cards were in GMT -8 except for Holly’s Havoc in GMT +9. Or maybe +10 or +8. They didn’t even know where she was in Australia.
It felt like a piece of herself was broken off.
Not knowing where to place Jon’s card didn’t bother her at all. Which probably meant something.
She handed the Stratotanker flight card back to Andi.
44
“I changed it from a competitive game to a cooperative one.” Jeremy was in the middle of excited explanations of his new mission cards—that actually followed a clear logic if not a quite realistic methodology. “We get to solve missions together instead of…” He stopped and glanced sideways at Taz.
There was enough of a hesitation in his look that Miranda pulled out her emoticon reference page…but nothing matched his look.
“Cautious,” Andi whispered.
“Oh, thank you.” She put her notebook away.
“He got tired of the women kicking the men’s asses, especially his,” Taz gave Jeremy a friendly hip check that almost flattened him to the floor despite his being nine inches taller.
“I didn’t like the feeling of—”
“—always being the first to lose,” Taz finished for him.
“—of us working against each other instead of together.”
She blinked at him. “Are you trying to turn me into a goddamn mush, Jeremy?”
“I dunno. Is it working?”
“Not a bit.” Then, rather incongruously to Miranda’s way of thinking, Taz leaned her shoulder against Jeremy.
“So,” Jeremy returned to his explanation, “the mission cards spread aircraft crashes around the globe and we have to roll dice and move to solve them before—”
Miranda’s phone rang.
It was the startup whine of a C-5 Galaxy’s General Electric CF-6 engines, which only meant one thing.
“Hello, Jill. This is Miranda Chase. This is actually her, not a recording of her.”
Jill’s burst of laughter every time Miranda answered the phone was always unexplained. She assumed that Jill simply enjoyed laughing.
Miranda waited for it, but the Launch Coordinator at the NTSB didn’t laugh this time.
“We have a bad one, Miranda. An Air Force C-40B just went down with a Senate fact-finding mission aboard. There are three senators, two generals, and an entourage of forty others—all dead. The President wants answers fast. He needs to know if it was an attack, just a crash, or maybe a hijacking or hostage situation gone wrong. Depending on the answer, we could have a major diplomatic crisis. How fast can you get your team to Whidbey Naval Air Station near Seattle for transport?”
“I have my Citation M2, I can fly to the crash site myself.”
“Not this time, Miranda. They went down in the Middle East.”
“Oh,” she’d never been there before. “We’ll be at Whidbey NAS in twenty minutes.”
It was only after she hung up that she recalled that Holly wouldn’t be there. The jolt of worry made her finally understand Mike’s agitation.
45
Whidbey Island Naval Air Station lay two-thirds of the way from their office at Tacoma Narrows Airport to her house on Spieden Island. It was the primary Navy air base in the Pacific Northwest. Its permanently stationed squadrons specialized in electronic surveillance and search-and-rescue. Also, whenever an aircraft carrier was brought into the naval port in Everett, all of the deck aircraft were flown here as well.
They also had a separate field set up for practicing carrier launches complete with catapults and arresting wires that Miranda had always wanted to try. When she’d inquired, they said that she had to be a naval aviator. But now that she was doing so much military work, the training might prove useful.
As soon as she landed, an armed escort arrived complete with bomb sniffer dogs. The team scoured them, their site investigation gear, and her plane.
The instant they were cleared, the Navy whisked them aboard the C-40A Clipper. The Clipper was a modified Boeing Next Gen 737-700 that could be easily switched between all seats, all cargo, or half-and-half.
As they boarded, she saw that all of the standard seats had been removed.
The entire front was stacks of litters and body bags.
A conference module had been installed in the midsection. The carpet was deep pile Navy blue and there was a big oak, Scandi-design worktable and business-class flight seats along either side. It looked strangely out of place. Yet the module had no walls or ceiling. This slice of corporate office sat exposed on a durable steel cargo deck under an undulating arc of thick white sound insulation that lined the fuselage.
To the rear past the conference section, a bunks-and-shower module said this was going to be their home for a while.
“Sweet!” Taz nodded at the accommodations. “The Navy always has the right amount of class. The Air Force is a little too convinced that looks are everything, and the Army that they don’t need any luxuries because they’re rough-tough soldiers. This middle ground definitely works for me.”
“Christ, I thought I was done with body bags for a while.” Andi hurried past the forward stockpiles.
“Just another reminder that we’re still alive,” Taz answered.
“That’s a good perspective, Taz.” Miranda made a note of it in her notebook.
She tucked it away and noted that Taz was watching her. “What?”
“Nothing, Miranda. Just think that might be the first thing of mine you’ve ever written down. Does that mean I belong?”
“No, I have several entries. The first was how you felt being five inches shorter than I am had affected your perceptions of the world around you. And why would you ever doubt that you belong?”
Taz’s shrug wasn’t any answer that she could interpret.
Before Miranda could ask for an explanation, she called out, “Come on, Jeremy. Let�
��s check out the rest of our new home. Maybe they have a king-size bed for us to try out.” An odd statement as the eight single bunks were clearly visible.
Miranda was about to point out that it wasn’t a home but then recalled Holly calling the Airbus crash survivors on Johnston Island “natives.” If that was possible, perhaps this was a home. For the seventeenth time since departing the atoll, she turned to ask Holly—only to find that she wasn’t with them.
Jeremy had ignored Taz’s invitation, instead connecting his computers to the Clipper’s onboard systems, which included a large computer monitor at one end of the conference table.
Mike was the next to sit at the table.
“Miranda,” he called out and picked up an envelope with a large red Classified stamp on it with her name beneath.
She sat beside him and nodded for him to open it, which he did. She’d just given a nonverbal agreement and designation of responsibility to act—an interesting achievement. Had there been something of that in Taz’s shrug? Perhaps it had meant—
“What the hell were they doing in Syria? That’s a war zone,” Mike had pulled a report out of the folder.
“Syria? Shit, man! That’s ugliness personified.” Taz returned to the table, apparently having determined that no king-size bunks would be available for the flight.
“It says that several witnesses saw it go down. No one saw a missile strike. It blew up during final descent into al-Tanf airfield in southern Syria.”
Taz snorted out a laugh. “The runway there is a chunk of desert they barely flattened enough to land on. Miranda, your island runway is a better strip.”
Mike tossed a thumb drive to Jeremy as Andi hesitated beside the empty chair to Miranda’s right.
Her gesture, nonverbal, asked if it was okay to sit there.
Miranda considered how to ask her own question in silence, but couldn’t think of anything short of American Sign Language—which she didn’t speak. Speak or gesture? What did they call that? Oh, sign. You spoke words. You signed ASL. You gestured…gestures. At a loss, she asked aloud why Andi would ask about sitting there.
“Holly always sits beside you.”
“She,” Miranda managed not to look over her shoulder, “isn’t here. Always?”
Andi nodded, but finally sat.
Jeremy loaded the files onto his computer, calling them out as he did. “Passenger and crew manifest. Plane flight log and maintenance history. Schematics. Oh, photos. Just three.” He put them up on the big screen.
There was a grim silence during which the C-40A Clipper started its engines and closed the door.
They were photos of the debris field. It took experience to see that there was enough volume to show that there was no crash, just a debris field.
The plane hadn’t crashed.
It had shattered in the sky and rained down onto the desert.
Any hurry that the President was feeling wouldn’t be able to accelerate the analysis of such a wreck.
46
He paged through the three photographs slowly in the privacy of his secure Washington, DC, office.
The largest remaining objects were the mangled remains of the two engines. There wasn’t a single thing left that looked like the plane he’d watched take off from Andrews Air Force Base last night.
Zooming in for details revealed a wide field of bodies.
He glanced at the report again.
No survivors.
Good.
It had been so easy, coaxing the three liberal-leaning senators from conservative states aboard. They needed to have a little junket to “properly understand” the Middle East situation. Now, the more conservative governors could choose who filled their seats until the next election. Ones who understood the threat of Russia’s presence in Syria, the Saudi’s kill squads, Iran’s Quds Force—and had the balls to do something about it.
How convenient that the Russian presence there was about to be brought forcefully front and center.
By the time he was ready to step forward, the Senate’s support would be in place—and he would be the one with the right answers.
He and the trapped Zaslon agent had proved particularly useful to each other. It was too bad that she now had to die.
No back doors. No leaks.
He sent an order to his man embedded at the Diego Garcia Black Site.
47
“This could be useful,” Miranda glanced at the on-screen images again, then looked around their plane. There were two military pilots and the five of them in a plane that could normally carry a hundred and twenty.
“What? Oh!” Jeremy nodded as he looked around.
Taz leaned over to buckle Jeremy in, which made Miranda feel much better about his safety as they were already taxiing. Jeremy continued without appearing to even notice.
“This is a C-40A and they said the crash was a C-40B. There are some key differences in radio and loading configurations but you’re right. This could be particularly useful if we need an aircraft for comparisons to existing conditions. That was very nice of them.”
“Trust me, Jeremy,” Taz patted his knee, “nobody in the Pentagon thinks hard enough to get that right, especially between the Air Force and the Navy. This one is pure coincidence.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that. You see, the—”
Her phone rang sharply. It seemed very intent on interrupting Jeremy every time he spoke.
“Oh, it’s Holly.” She forwarded the call to the secure phone on the conference table and set it to speaker as the plane began its takeoff roll.
“Hello, Holly. This is Miranda Chase. This is actually her, not a recording of her.”
“Hey, Her. I need you to— What’s that background noise?”
“It’s a pair of CFM56 engines on a C-40A Clipper. It is currently in an unusual combi configuration which may explain the unexpected quality of the noise signature.” The jet rotated and became airborne. Three loud clunks announced the raising of the landing gear.
Then she listened to the sounds over the phone.
“Are you on a Falcon 7X? It’s hard to tell with the sound from our own airplane.”
“You’re very good, Miranda.”
“Thank you. The triple Pratt & Whitney 307 makes quite a distinctive sound, which made that relatively easy to guess.”
“To you maybe. Where is the team going?”
“The Middle East.”
Holly remained silent for a long moment. “What went down there?”
“A C-40B with three US senators, two generals, and their entourages went down in Syria.”
“What the hell were those idiots doing in Syrian airspace? Never mind. Forget I asked. You can’t go.”
Miranda looked around the table. She didn’t even need to pull out her notebook to check: the other four team members’ expressions could be easily matched with the surprise emoticon.
“There’s a crash. We have a launch call. We’re already en route.” Miranda didn’t usually have to point out such simple facts to Holly.
“Miranda, trust me. You can’t go to Syria.”
“Why? Will it be more dangerous than anyplace else?”
Again a lengthy pause before Holly continued softly. “I don’t know, Miranda. I just don’t know. Just…I guess…be careful.”
“I’m always careful.”
“Miranda,” Holly sounded like she was either choking or laughing. “You’re never careful about anything except a plane crash.”
“Isn’t that all that matters?”
“Taz and Andi, you watch her goddamn back. I’ll join you as soon as I can.” Holly didn’t answer her question but Miranda didn’t feel comfortable asking it again.
“We’re on it,” Taz assured her after trading nods with Andi. “Where are you?”
“Mike there?” She ignored their question as well.
“Right here, Holly.”
“Mike, explain it to the others: Elayne Kasprak is loose.”
“Please tel
l me you’ve got a sick sense of humor, Holly.” But Mike’s look would definitely match the “grim” emoticon in her notebook.
With reason.
Miranda had only met her briefly, and never suspected at the time that she was other than she’d said—a representative of Ukraine’s Antonov aircraft manufacturer. But she’d seen what it had taken to stop her.
“I wish, mate.” Holly sounded no happier than Mike looked.
“You be careful, Holly,” Miranda felt she had to speak up. “Remember, that woman is an airplane killer.”
“And a killer-type killer. I’m on it, Miranda. They’ve got her trapped on a tropical island.”
“Tough life,” Mike muttered.
“Yeah, we cobbers should be so lucky. Though the last one wasn’t incredibly fun either.”
Miranda agreed, a sabotaged plane was never fun. She hadn’t enjoyed her time on Johnston Atoll very much either. She’d never understood the allure of tropical vacations.
“How hard will it be to hunt her down this time?” Last time, Holly and Jon had— Jon! He wasn’t available anymore, was he? How essential was he to the task of capturing Elayne Kasprak?
Holly was answering, “The island is twelve square miles, which is a lot bigger than it sounds when it’s all stretched out. It has four thousand people and a joint military base presently on full lockdown.”
“Diego Garcia.” It was the only base that Miranda knew of anywhere in the world that fit that description.
“Yes. You’ll certainly be safer in Syria than Diego Garcia.”
“That’s good,” Jeremy spoke up. “Does that include factoring in that we’re flying into a mostly Russian-occupied Middle Eastern war zone? I mean that—”
Holly cut him off. “Anywhere away from Elayne Kasprak is safer.”
There was a long pause before Holly spoke again.
“Mike?”
“Right here.”
“I… It’s just…” Holly huffed out a hard breath, then she spoke quickly. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry, Mike. I really am.”
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