Ghostrider: an NTSB-military technothriller (Miranda Chase Book 4)

by M. L. Buchman

  Ghostrider

  a Miranda Chase thriller

  M. L. Buchman

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  About This Book

  An AC-130J “Ghostrider”—the latest variant of America’s most lethal aerial gunship—goes down hard in the Colorado Rockies. Except the data doesn’t match the airframe.

  Air-crash genius, and high-functioning autistic, Miranda Chase leads her NTSB team in to investigate. But what they uncover reveals a far greater threat.

  If she can’t solve the crash in time, a new war will erupt. One far too close to home which threatens to shatter her team.

  Prologue

  Tacoma Narrows Airport, Gig Harbor, Washington

  Elevation: 295 feet

  (1900 hours Pacific Daylight Time)

  Miranda’s laptop barely fit on the end of the plywood workbench in her airplane hangar. One of Jeremy’s ever-expanding projects was squeezing her aside, but she managed to hang on long enough to deliver her latest report.

  She selected Upload on the NTSB’s secure server. Her report “Airbus A320neo excursion from runway and collision with taxiing 737 at SFO” was complete and ready for final peer review.

  It had led to a large number of jokes about Boeing versus Airbus that had seemed irrelevant to the destructive mechanical interactions of the two aircraft or the fatal error to the pilot who had caused them.

  She had to blink twice at the following screen because it didn’t make any sense.

  “It’s blank.”

  “What is?” Jeremy didn’t look up from where he’d taken over most of her workbench. He’d scavenged a full set of cockpit instruments from a mothballed military C-5A Galaxy jet transport on his last trip to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base’s boneyard. He was meticulously dissecting, studying, then restoring each one. She appreciated that his thoroughness matched her own, even though they would never be used again. The faint scent of lightweight machine oil permeated the immediate area.

  She and her site investigation team—Team Chase they were now called, for reasons that continued to strike her as unfair to the others—were gathered in her hangar at Tacoma Narrows Airport. It was a warm summer day and the main doors were slid back to let the sun in.

  Her two planes were parked to the sides of the cozy hangar. There was room for a third. But her team used the Mooney, and she’d never found another plane she wanted more than her Sabrejet. Two planes were sufficient. Their “office” in the back corner was functional and smelled of a Pacific Northwest summer: all ocean, pine, and fresh mown grass…with just a hint of familiar avgas and Jet A fuel.

  Through the back wall, the sound of small aircraft taking off to the south occasionally filled the hangar with a cheery buzz. At the brief roar of a twin jet on the nearby runway, she looked up from her screen. She just couldn’t break the habit even though there were no windows facing in that direction. It was the sound of Williams FJ44-1 engines, but was it the -1A or -1AP—she couldn’t tell without seeing the plane.

  Aside from the occasional aircraft, the hangar was far quieter than her agency office at the National Transportation Safety Board just twenty miles away across the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

  She focused back on her screen, but nothing had changed.

  “Our queue is blank.”

  Mike laughed from where he sat opposite Holly.

  The two of them were playing Backgammon. Mike was playing as if he were reading a good book. Holly clearly felt that Backgammon was a blood sport. She didn’t roll her dice out of the cup and onto the board—she slammed it down with a crash that threatened to dislodge the wooden slats from the stout spare-parts crate that they were using as a table.

  “Why is that an issue? I could do with a break.” Mike eased back on the sagging sofa to look at her. “We’ve been busy campers of late.”

  “Just play, goddamn it.” Holly snarled at him.

  Miranda considered pointing out that the more anxious Holly became, the more casual Mike became. She didn’t understand it herself, but she’d observed the dynamic before.

  It was still unclear if having an intimate relationship was somehow at the core of their verbal swordsmanship, or perhaps their lack of one. Her attempts at studying human emotions as interacting dynamic systems were still providing erratic results long after any merely mechanical systems would have been clearly delineated.

  She returned to the queue, which was far more comprehensible, however unlikely.

  “I’ve been investigating accidents for the NTSB for eighteen years. My queue of open tasks has never been empty. There’s always been returning metallurgy, additional witness interviews, drafts in need of editing, and so on.” And now there was nothing. “The lack is…disconcerting.” With Mike’s assistance, she was trying to be better about labeling her emotions.

  Holly seemed to shift modes between one heartbeat and the next; the cheery Australian appeared in a flash. “Well, goodonya, Miranda. It means we’re so awesome that we’ve gone and solved everything. Let’s declare a national holiday. Won’t last longer’n a roo hop, so better do it fast. Call your pal Roy and have him declare it right now.”

  Miranda had actually picked up her phone before she spotted Mike’s amused smile. It was interesting that they always seemed to be ready to go three rounds in the verbal boxing ring, yet Mike was Miranda’s best gauge of Holly’s intentions.

  “Ah, a joke.” Which she also should have noted based on Holly’s abruptly thick Australian accent—Strine, Holly always insisted on correcting her. As spoken in Oz, not Australia. Miranda set her phone back down without calling the President. Besides, it was early evening here in Tacoma, Washington.

  “I don’t want to disturb him as it’s almost bedtime in DC. I also note that it’s dinnertime and you haven’t yet mentioned food, Holly. Are you feeling okay?”

  Now that she’d thought of it, she could smell the burgers grilling at the midfield restaurant wafting into the hangar. Simple conclusion that the smell had made her think of dinner and then thoughts of dinner had made that awareness conscious. What other unconscious triggers was she responding to? Were the triggers short-term or across a longer framework of experience?

  This time there was a bright screech of tires striking pavement and suddenly spinning from zero to eighty or a hundred miles an hour. It was hard to identify a small plane just by the sounds it made landing. The lack of a rear window in the hangar was more irritating the more time they spent here.

  “I’d be good-o if Mike played this game faster that a sloth on Xanax. Food, Jeremy.”

  “Oh, okay. You know, the 1983 version of the artificial horizon instrument was dependent on a gyro mount that should never have lasted as long as they did. The lack of wear is simply amazing considering the number of hours that were logged on that airframe. I was hoping to create a calibration of wear versus time for identifying instrument usage, but I’m having little luck.” He moved to a bench microscope.

  “We’ll have to tell the Air Force that they need shoddier workmanship in the future.” Mike turned back to the board, rattled his dice briefly, and rolled a perfect three-five.

  “Yank bastard,” Holly’s Australian drawl was thick, which Miranda reminded herself indicated Holly was enjoying herself no matter what her expression and tone said to the contrary.

  He sealed up the home board, knoc
king one of Holly’s pieces back to the bar. Another three rolls allowed him to get all of his pieces safe, and still her lone piece was trapped on the bar.

  “Hope you roll snake eyes.”

  He rolled double fives and cleared the point.

  Holly managed to escape and avoid being gammoned by getting off a single one of her pieces before Mike finished clearing the board.

  Holly glared at the half empty board—his half. “Are you sure there aren’t any crashes, Miranda? Maybe if I dropped a plane on Mike’s head we could investigate the death of an American weasel.”

  “Love you too, Harper.” Mike began stowing Holly’s pieces.

  “Not even a little, Munroe.” She helped him.

  “It wouldn’t work anyway.” He snapped the case shut and stowed it on top of the rolling tool case.

  “Why’s that?” She kicked the upside-down wastebasket she’d been using as a seat. She hit it just right so that it flipped with a loud clang of metal, then a ringing wobble that echoed back and forth across the hangar before it settled upright.

  Loud noises were so alarming. Miranda held her cringe for several moments longer.

  Sure enough, Holly then slapped it sideways like a soccer ball, sending it skidding loudly over the concrete floor before finally settling beside Miranda’s feet.

  “Only planes here are both Miranda’s. I know you wouldn’t risk damaging one of hers,” Mike explained.

  “Not on your thick head,” Holly declared particularly emphatically.

  Miranda’s Mooney M20V Ultra was the fastest single-propeller piston-engine production airplane there was. And her 1958 F-86 Sabrejet fighter plane was one of the last dozen still flying anywhere, out of over ten thousand built for the Korean War and the decade following.

  She didn’t believe that either would be damaged by an impact with Mike’s head, especially since his skull was unlikely to be significantly thicker than the average human’s no matter what Holly said. But dropping one of her planes in such a way that it would impact Mike would imply that it would then hit the ground—and she’d rather not have that happen, notwithstanding the damage to her personnel specialist.

  During her moment of inattention, Jeremy’s reconstruction project had consumed the last of the workbench; a line of engine gauges (N1 and N2 stage RPMs, exhaust gas temperature, fuel flow, and oil pressure) now separated her from her laptop.

  She supposed that it was fortunate that there wasn’t an accident investigation going on at the moment as she’d have nowhere to work. Over the last eight months, her team had slowly shifted most of their work from the NTSB’s Western Pacific Region office into her private hangar at Tacoma Narrows Airport.

  Miranda had initially insisted that they use the National Transportation Safety Board’s agency office as it seemed both proper and convenient. But as her team had become more and more specialized, particularly in highly classified military mishaps, the isolation of the hangar at TNA had become a better fit than the main office where all of the west coast investigators assumed that everything was open to their inspection.

  “Food it is,” Holly stepped up behind Jeremy and lifted him physically off his stool. He managed to drop his tools with a clatter before she began walking toward the hangar door with him dangling under her arm. Mike stepped up and grabbed his legs as Jeremy broke out laughing.

  It was fortunate for them that Jeremy was little bigger than Miranda herself. She was five-four and Jeremy was an equally slender five-seven. Holly still worked out hard. Perhaps not as hard as when she’d been a Special Operations warrior for the Australian SASR, but she did spend time every day at the weight set beside her and Jeremy’s workbench.

  Apparently, Jeremy was an easy load.

  Miranda picked up her phone and computer, without knocking aside any of Jeremy’s instruments, and followed behind them.

  Above Aspen, Colorado

  Elevation: 39,000 feet

  (0300 Mountain Daylight Time)

  “Denver Center, this is Shadow Six-four.”

  “Roger, Six-four. Go ahead.”

  “Declaring an emergency. Depressurization event. Current altitude three-niner-thousand. Request clearance emergency descent to one-five-thousand.”

  Missy Collins had only been on the Denver Air Route Traffic Control Center desk for six weeks, and she’d never handled an emergency before. She pulled up the checklist on a side screen. Suddenly the hot coffee smell that permeated all Traffic Control Centers tasted stale on the air and her stomach roiled in protest.

  “Please confirm Shadow Six-four is declaring an emergency? Squawk seventy-seven hundred.” Seven-seven-zero-zero was the official transponder code for an emergency.

  “Confirm emergency.”

  And right away the pilot changed the codes. It flashed brightly on her flight-tracking screen. The four-digit transponder squawk code immediately identified the plane’s position if not its type or other status.

  She checked the status of all other flights in the area.

  Nothing intersecting in the next five minutes. The air routes were generally very quiet at three in the morning—too late for the redeyes and too early for their intercontinental arrivals.

  “Shadow Six-four. You are cleared to initiate immediate descent at your discretion. Number aboard?” Next question on the checklist.

  “Full crew. Thirteen.”

  As she watched, the altitude readout dropped to thirty-eight, then thirty-seven. Their rate of descent was dangerously fast, even in an emergency situation. In fact…

  Kenneth, the head of her section, had been both kind and relentless in training their team. ARTCC wasn’t a job that allowed for inattention, yet he’d found moments to squeeze in additional training at every opportunity. He’d also showed special interest in her, but she still wasn’t sure how she felt about that.

  Now the training paid off. She slapped the supervisor-call switch. Then, pulling up the plane’s filed flight plan, Missy began studying the sector chart.

  Kenneth hurried over and patched in his headset beside hers, “What are we looking at, Missy?” As always at work, his tone was completely professional. They’d had dinner together after last night’s shift—the third in as many weeks. He’d been charmingly roundabout with how he’d propositioned her over dessert of brandied chocolate mousse and herbal tea.

  She’d turned him down; he was her boss after all. She also had a boyfriend, technically. Vic was very unhappy that she’d left LA, even for the nice promotion offer from Denver Center, and they weren’t on speaking terms at the moment. It was becoming clear that he was more upset about having to pay all of the apartment’s rent than about her actual departure.

  “We have a depressurization emergency on military flight Shadow Six-four. Which is listed as…” she inspected the record, “…an AC-130H. Is that the C-130 Hercules?” She didn’t typically interact much with the military planes and was still learning them.

  Kenneth whistled softly. “A for attack, C-130 for Hercules airframe, but the H isn’t for Hercules. It’s actually for the Spectre variant. It means that it’s a very nasty gunship with side-firing guns, big ones—like a 105 millimeter howitzer,” he held up a clenched fist to demonstrate the bore of the latter, as if she didn’t know that 105 mm was over four inches across. He couldn’t help himself but to include the extra information.

  She’d heard him do that with everyone. And it helped calm her down. Still, she pushed her coffee cup to the very edge of her station.

  “Do you know its V-max airspeed? They’re descending at two-eight…two-nine…now three-zero-zero knots.”

  “V-max on the standard C-130 is three-twenty. But on the H variant, I think it’s just two-sixty.”

  “They’re in major trouble.” She mumbled out as she searched for any problems along their flight path. There was… “Holy shit!”

  Crap! Now that would be on the tape forever if there was a future investigation. And if she couldn’t help them soon, there would be.r />
  She keyed the radio right away.

  “Shadow Six-four, this is Denver Center. Be aware your current airspeed is very high. Also your direct line of descent includes seven of the fourteeners.” They stood in a tight cluster barely southwest of Aspen, Colorado.

  “Fourteeners?” Was the plane’s radio operator’s voice more strained? She couldn’t tell. The military pilots were even more resolute than the airline pilots. It was the private pilots of general aviation who panicked all the time.

  She hadn’t known the word fourteeners either until Kenneth had told her about them over last night’s dinner. Out-of-state pilots weren’t used to mountains reaching that elevation, or the weather systems the mountain peaks generated for thousands of feet higher.

  “Mountains over fourteen thousand feet tall. What’s your status?” She checked her map for the nearest airports. She needed one big enough. Oh. Maybe… “Kenneth, the Hercules is designed for short-field landings, right?”

  He shot a thumbs up into her peripheral vision without interrupting. Kenneth wasn’t giving her any corrections, so she must be on track. She appreciated his oversight though. This was escalating too fast in many ways.

  She keyed her mike. “Shadow Six-four, can you divert to Aspen or Glenwood Springs Airport? Each are roughly twelve miles from your current location.”

  “Total LOC. Negative divert.”

  Total Loss of Control.

  They were falling through twenty-five thousand feet at over three hundred and fifty knots, four hundred miles an hour.

  “Roger, Six-four.” She looked away from the radar to Kenneth. What could she say from the ground to help the pilots? They’d know they were doomed. This was a cargo plane, not a fighter jet—it wouldn’t even have ejection seats.

  Kenneth cricked his neck to the side for a moment, then shrugged a little helplessly.