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

by M. L. Buchman

  “Denver Center. Status, Six-four?”

  “Negative control. Negative recovery.” His voice was dead calm. There was a pause, a sound she’d never be able to identify, then he said, “Aw, fuck.” He sounded more ticked off than scared.

  She hailed him again, but there was no response.

  Eleven seconds later, two new radar images appeared alongside the plane.

  “That’s the wings,” Kenneth whispered softly. “Ripped off the plane.”

  Nine seconds after that it impacted Snowmass Mountain, a fourteener, at twelve thousand five hundred feet, the very top of the ski area.

  Missy looked down at the checklist. She managed to get her finger on the phone number for Mountain Rescue, but she couldn’t make out the numbers.

  “I can’t see to call them. I can’t, Kenneth. I—”

  He rested a hand on her shoulder and picked up the phone himself. Brushing aside where her tears had blurred the number on the call sheet, he dialed and called out the search teams.

  They pulled her off the console and sat her in a small conference room. One of the assistant supervisors conducted the post-incident interview, recording and noting down everything she could recall. When they gave her a fresh mug of coffee, the scent actually made her puke into the wastebasket until she was a weeping, shivering mess.

  The assistant super was nice enough to say that it happened all the time after a bad one. He was also nice enough to not mention her weakness when Kenneth checked in on her during breaks in his own round of interviews. Though she could see from his extra sympathy that Kenneth knew.

  Fifty-three seconds.

  First-call to crash was just fifty-three seconds. That fast—thirteen people lost their lives. She couldn’t get around the fact. How could life suddenly be so short?

  When they were done, when all of this was done and the investigation was over, Missy knew one thing. She was so done with Vic.

  She also knew the pilot’s final comment, that one final moment when his humanity had slipped past all of his military training, would haunt her for the rest of her life.

  Aboard Shadow Six-four

  Elevation: 27,000 feet

  (23 seconds before impact)

  As soon as Lieutenant Colonel Luis Hernandez broadcast the final report from aboard the diving plane—“Negative recovery. Negative control.”—he released his seat harness.

  The plane wasn’t quite in freefall, so he fell into the yoke and flight console. “Aw, fuck.” Like it was going to hurt anything now other than his ego. The plane was safely past recovery and no one was left aboard to see anyway.

  He pulled off his headset and began climbing uphill through the Hercules’ cockpit. He moved fast in the near freefall. Two of the thirteen bodies scattered strategically through the plane had ended up in the aisle and he was forced to crawl over them. They were wearing his and Danny’s dog tags. They were also close to their build and coloring just in case anything survived the crash. Hopefully not, they weren’t that close because no way did he look like the fake Luis. Homely bugger.

  He continued aft quickly, having to struggle to shake off the memory of the last time he’d done this. He’d crawled over the bodies of his own crew when his C-130 Hercules had been shot down in Afghanistan due to insufficient fighter support in a war they never should have been in. He’d fought the plane all the way down—been one of the few to make it. He came to, crawling from body to body looking for other survivors.

  At least this time, neither the iron stench of hot blood nor the stinging kerosene of burning Jet A fuel permeated the air. Everyone except he and Danny had been dead before they boarded this flight.

  The ladder down to the main cargo deck was easier to navigate. They were in true freefall now and he could just pull himself along it.

  Major Danny Gonzalez had left the forward passenger door open after popping it at thirty-nine thousand feet. Though, Luis supposed, his copilot was just Danny now. Their military rank was one more thing they’d all agreed to leave behind along with the dead.

  Luis shrugged into the parachute rig.

  He took a moment to ensure that he was oriented properly and then grabbed the bottom edge of the door. It wouldn’t do to fling himself out of the plane and straight into the massive four-blade propeller of the Number Two engine spinning at a thousand RPM.

  The fuselage twisted sharply and he almost lost his grip as it began to tumble.

  Looking out into the darkness once more, he saw that the propeller was no longer an issue—the entire wing had ripped off.

  The temperature was a bitch though.

  Even on a warm June evening, ten thousand feet above Aspen was damn cold. Be lucky if he didn’t have frostbite by the time he got down. But no time to pull on a balaclava—the ground was coming up fast.

  He still made a point of flinging himself downward as he exited, just in case the tail was still attached.

  As soon as he’d ejected, he opened his black tactical ram-air chute. It was for night insertions deep behind enemy lines, and, like his specialized clothing, had the radar signature of a bird—a small one.

  He watched the plane continue down. Less than five seconds after he had his chute deployed and stable, the Hercules impacted at twelve thousand feet atop a high peak. It was supposed to plunge into the back-country wilderness beyond, but it didn’t really matter. At almost five hundred knots, the destruction was more than sufficient.

  As rigged beforehand, one of the rounds of 105 mm ammunition for the big howitzer—the main weapon of the AC-130 series of gunships—ignited on impact.

  In a single moment, the other eighty rounds lit off.

  The combination of all of the forty-two-inch-long, thirty-three-pound rounds igniting simultaneously unleashed sixteen hundred pounds of high explosives in the heart of the plane.

  If there had been anything left of the fuselage, it was now shattered. Probably the top of the mountain as well by the scale of the blinding fireball that lit the surrounding mountains like daylight. He hoped that no one was looking in his direction for the one moment he was starkly lit against the night sky.

  The wings landed farther down the slope, bursting into flame when the fuel tanks breached. The conflagration spread rapidly upslope. In minutes, any remains of the plane would be engulfed as well.

  Perfect.

  Then the shock wave caught up with him.

  Shit!

  “Didn’t think of that one, did you, Luis?”

  For a thousand feet of descent, he could do nothing but curse and flail as the shock wave dragged him wherever it wanted to.

  Once it cleared, he was amazed to still be holding the control toggles. The wonders of stark terror.

  He hadn’t jumped much since Basic, just enough to stay qualified. But the loud roar of the wind had to be a bad sign. Yanking on the toggles didn’t seem to do much either.

  Not daring to let go in case he couldn’t find the handles again, he almost snapped his own neck from nodding hard enough to flip down his night vision goggles. He managed it just in time to see what was happening above him.

  “Shit!” He didn’t have a parachute. He had a ripped-up mess of tangled nylon. It looked as if half the chute was missing and the rest was snarled.

  He yanked the cutaway. The general was going to be pissed if someone spotted the errant chute, but Luis was out of options.

  One side of the risers released, but not the other.

  Falling sideways.

  Dragging the main chute along off his right shoulder.

  Glance down.

  Out of time.

  Deploy the reserve and pray it didn’t snarl in the crippled main. It came out clean and almost gutted him with hard deceleration.

  He was well past Snowmass, but nowhere near the Aspen car racing track where Danny and their motorcycles would be waiting.

  Down below there was no sign of anything except sharp peaks and deep valleys.

  The wind still seemed too loud. Up a
bove, two-thirds of the reserve was drawing clean, the last third was fighting with the trailing main—and losing.

  “Two thirds has gotta be better than nothing, right?”

  A massive edifice loomed up in front of him.

  Colonel Hernandez cleared the sharp crags of Willoughby Mountain with feet to spare.

  Down the backside, the colonel wasn’t in freefall, but his training had taught him that any attempt to slow the chute would only make the entanglement worse.

  He hit the scree slope at a forty-five-degree angle. Luckily for him, the head-sized boulders gave way rather than his legs.

  But it didn’t stop there.

  The whole slip face let go. The field of a million rocks began to slide and tumble.

  For a brief few seconds, with the support of the collapsing chute, Luis Hernandez managed to dance along the top of the stone avalanche.

  He fell.

  Rolled once.

  Made it back to his feet.

  But that single roll was his undoing. The three sets of parachute risers, two from the reserve and one from the main, had wrapped around his upper body like the old cartoon of tying a villain to a chair with a hundred feet of rope.

  Unable to move his arms, his balance didn’t last another full second.

  He remained conscious for the next two hundred feet of descent as eleven and a half thousand tons of rock swept him toward the valley floor. As he tumbled and rolled, his body acted like a fisherman’s reel, winding the parachute’s riser lines tighter and tighter around him.

  At three hundred feet below his initial point of landing, one of the risers sliced off his head. It was all that saved him from being killed by the rocks.

  At the base of the scree slope, the mountain built a burial mound—wider than four school buses parked end to end, and over three stories high.

  Lieutenant Colonel Luis Hernandez’s head, body, and parachutes were near enough the bottom of the pile that the general wouldn’t have to worry. No one would ever spot the errant chutes or the man it had killed.

  1

  Gig Harbor, Washington

  Elevation: 37 feet

  (0300 hours Pacific Daylight Time)

  Miranda’s phone vibrated violently under her pillow. It slipped into her dream of a single-element plane.

  No engines.

  No separate fuselage.

  Somehow all one, single, unified machine of perfect flight.

  Nothing to break.

  It flew clean.

  Pure white.

  Transonic but with no boom to echo across the pastoral land below.

  Untouchable by fault or error.

  Perfectly silent and safe for—

  The phone’s second vibration shattered the plane. Not merely broke it apart but shattered it into a hundred thousand pieces from within.

  Her breath caught and she could taste the panic of every soul on board. Somehow they all survived, only to die in the long fall to—

  The end of the nightmare was familiar enough, if not the white plane, that her hand only shook a little as she slid it under her pillow to silence the call.

  Across the room, Holly mumbled something in her sleep but didn’t appear to wake. On the rare occasions when Miranda stayed in town rather than flying back to her island home, she had taken to staying in Holly’s spare bed. Holly, Mike, and Jeremy had rented a three-bedroom house in Gig Harbor.

  It was a quiet little community just ten minutes from the airport. The cozy harbor was thick with pleasure boats, ringed by houses and then tall conifers atop the surrounding ridge to three sides. To the fourth side, beyond the harbor mouth, was a splendid view of the icy peak of Mt. Rainier; the dormant volcano soared fourteen thousand feet above all of the surrounding area. The tickling smell of roses blooming outside the just-cracked window floated on the damply cool June air.

  Miranda had woken hours ago. Actually, she’d finally given up after a few hours of not really sleeping at all.

  Even leaning sideways close toward her parents’ picture—the only way she used to be able to tolerate a hug was one-armed and sideways—didn’t help.

  Normally it did, because the image was so familiar. Her parents in their garden by the house on Spieden Island. Behind them the one-third-sized replica of the enigmatic Kryptos sculpture at the CIA she’d spent so many hours trying to decrypt with her father. Her mother in her big gardening hat. And herself, carefully not in any photograph, safe behind the camera.

  Tonight, all it did was make her miss them all the more.

  Twenty-four years ago next month they’d gone down when TWA 800 had exploded over the Atlantic Ocean. Through all the Kübler-Ross phases of grieving, even the anger phase, she’d never stopped missing them.

  Unable to sleep, she had sat up in bed and fired up her laptop.

  The discussion at dinner had circled around a variety of topics. But one had kept coming back. Once during the fried chicken taquitos appetizer, twice during the main course—two bean enchiladas for her, a monstrous plate of shrimp-and-steak fajitas for Holly, and carne asada burritos for the boys—and yet again over flan and deep-fried ice cream.

  Their workspace.

  Her personal airplane hangar at the south end of Tacoma Narrows Airport wasn’t really up to the task of high-security military plane-crash investigations any more than their Western Pacific Region offices at the NTSB.

  After two hours of lying awake and organizing her thoughts, she’d decided it was time to make some changes. Windows, with one-way glass, cut into the walls.

  A bigger workbench for Jeremy and a small desk for herself that he would be forbidden to encroach on. But she wasn’t comfortable having to say that to him, or to the others. Then she spotted the answer. A lovely, hand-carved teak rolltop desk that she could lock “for security’s sake” without having to tell the others not to use it. It was only a little underhanded and she decided that she was okay with that.

  When she was done with the furniture and fittings, she focused on ordering interior walls, heating, high security… It had taken her much of the night, but she was pleased with the results.

  She’d finally lain down and gone to sleep at three. The house at Gig Harbor was even quieter than her own island residence. It was rare to not hear the waves at home, and the gulls here apparently slept very soundly.

  Now it was four a.m. and the stars were just dimming in the east beyond Holly’s big bay windows. Miranda’s phone vibrated again with a re-call rather than a message. She slipped out of bed and raced into the bathroom to avoid disturbing Holly, then closed the door on herself before answering.

  “Miranda, we’ve got a bad crash in Colorado. Are you available for a launch?”

  “Good morning, Jill.” Miranda had been practicing what Mike called “appropriate human interaction.” It was supposed to make things easier, or so he said. She wasn’t convinced yet.

  Jill sighed. “It’s too early in the morning for this; I haven’t had my coffee yet.”

  “It’s four a.m. here. It is seven a.m. in Washington, DC, where you are.”

  “Oh, right. Sorry. Still haven’t had my coffee. Are you available for a launch?”

  And for all her efforts in appropriate human interaction, they’d ended up exactly where they’d started. “Yes,” seemed to be the simplest way forward. Holly had, as usual, been right: their empty queue hadn’t lasted for long.

  “The military has put a high priority on it. They’ve asked me to forward you through to the military liaison for transport.” Jill’s mumble of “I really need some coff—” was cut off by the military liaison clicking in and Jill hanging up.

  Miranda liked this version of Jill much better. Normally her conversations were rife with incomplete sentences and laughter when Miranda asked for the rest of the thought. Barely awake, Jill was just business.

  “This is Major Swift.” She hadn’t expected him as the liaison, though perhaps she should have. He was an officer of the Air Force’s Accident Inv
estigation Bureau and she’d known he was returning from his overseas assignment. They’d also been lovers briefly before he’d left, which had been nice.

  “Good morning, Jonathan.”

  “Miranda!” The enthusiasm in his voice said that he was not struggling to wake up. “I was hoping it would be you they called in. It’s wonderful to hear your voice. Where are you?”

  “Sitting on the edge of the tub in Holly’s bathroom. It’s still just four a.m. here.”

  “Are you wearing that white flannel nightgown?” His voice shifted to a low and soft tone that probably implied something, but tone of voice was often deceptive. It didn’t sound like sarcasm or irritation…

  “Yes, why?”

  His laughter seemed friendly. “Just like picturing you in that.”

  “I would have thought that you liked picturing me out of it. Or is that some way of saying you don’t want to have sex again?” She really hoped it wasn’t. Jon had been the first man she’d really enjoyed spending time with that way.

  “I also like picturing you out of it, and no, I’m not saying that at all.”

  “Then why did you say that you liked picturing me more clothed rather than less clothed?”

  “You look lovely both ways, Miranda. Different, but lovely.”

  “How different?”

  “Would it be okay if we tabled this discussion until after we talked about the crash? How you look in your full NTSB gear versus that flannel nightgown versus completely unclothed is something I’m happy to discuss—at length. But not at the moment.”

  She was getting better about when to set aside a topic. Her system was to note it down in her personal notebook that she reviewed each evening for Incomplete Issues. But the notebook wasn’t here; it was in her vest out in Holly’s bedroom. She’d have to wait to write it down and only hoped that not too many other conversational threads had to be set aside before she had a chance to access her notebook and record them.

  “Yes, it would be okay.”

  “Based on the call sign, we just lost an AC-130J Ghostrider gunship. It’s—”