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

by M. L. Buchman

  He wanted to go up the hill and confront Miranda, but he knew that the first thing she’d ask about would be the wings. And the second would be the engines. But these…

  “Hey, Jeremy?” he crossed over to the base of the broken-off wing, while Jeremy use a thermite cutting torch to snip off a piece of the distorted wing strut. Leave it to Jeremy to have the coolest tools always at hand.

  “Yeah?” Jeremy pulled out a sample bag for the cut-off piece, tapping the part against the soil to cool the cut first.

  “Everything okay with Miranda?” Real subtle, Jon. Though with Jeremy, direct was probably the best approach.

  “As far as I know. Did you know that she cleared our entire crash queue? We’re completely caught up. Or we were for one night before this accident came in. That seemed to worry her a bit. But other than that, she seemed okay.” Then he narrowed his eyes and looked at Jon. “Why?”

  Why? Probably because he was an idiot who worried too much.

  “No reason.” Lame. He glanced up the hill again.

  “Miranda won’t like it if we aren’t thorough.”

  “Duh!” He did know that. Jon glanced up the mountain again.

  Miranda and the kid…Jeff?

  What was that about?

  He’d tried to point out that taking a kid onto a crash site was—he’d chosen the word “unusual” rather than “totally inappropriate.”

  In response she’d simply proceeded as if he’d never said a word. Damn, but once she made up her mind, that was one seriously determined woman.

  He and Jeremy were halfway through the engine analysis, with him recording fracture patterns as Jeremy called them out, before he felt something was wrong. He’d learned to trust that instinct.

  “Hold it, Jeremy.”

  Jeremy froze with his arm extended all the way into the forward air intake of the engine to hold a flashlight while he inspected the primary intake fins.

  “What’s wrong here?”

  “Other than the crashed plane?”

  “Other than the crashed plane.”

  Jeremy extracted his arm and they both looked around. After thirty seconds of inspecting everything, their gazes met and they shrugged in unison.

  “Okay. Describe everything you see.”

  “That’s how Miranda does it.” Jeremy made it sound as if Jon was cheating.

  “That’s where I got the idea.”

  Jeremy grinned. “Isn’t she amazing?”

  “She is.”

  Apparently Jon’s agreement was a little too emphatic. Jeremy shifted back to being watchful before he began. He did Miranda’s thing of starting with the weather and terrain, then working his way inward.

  The wings.

  Leading edge.

  Flaps.

  Ailerons.

  Propellers.

  “We’re standing in front of the Number Three engine. It’s an Allison T56 turboshaft with two blades remaining.”

  Jon waited for the feeling to return, but it was none of those things.

  Jeremy just watched him.

  “Ever get the feeling that it’s too…”

  “Neat?”

  “Yeah,” Jon tried it tentatively, but…yeah. “That’s it. Somehow, this big messy crash spread across the entire top of a national ski area is too neat.”

  “You’re right. I think. At least maybe it feels that way. Like the Hawkins C-130A crash back in ’02 made sense.”

  Jon nodded. The forty-five-year-old, first-generation C-130A had been converted into an air tanker for fighting wildfires. After the Air Force was done with it, it had spent fourteen more years dumping nine tons of flame retardant thousands of times. The repeated stress of so many massive unloadings was finally too much, and one day the wings had just given up and broken off the plane in midflight, killing the two pilots.

  A depressurization event could cause a very wild ride, and perhaps even a crash. But these were military pilots. And he knew from being one, just how good that meant they had to be.

  “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Whatever it is, Miranda will find out why,” Jeremy declared with absolute faith.

  “Makes the crash kind of like her, doesn’t it?”

  “How?” Jeremy froze, halfway back to shining his light inside the engine again.

  “She’s all neat and perfect, except for the parts that really, really aren’t.”

  “Don’t say that!” Jeremy launched to his feet. “There’s nothing wrong with Miranda! Ever! She’s amazing. Don’t you ever say anything against her. She knows more about plane crashes than anyone else alive. Anywhere. If I know about them to the top of a molehill, she knows them to the top of Everest! To the moon! And back!” Then, at a complete loss for how to make his point stronger, he stabbed Jon in the chest with his finger-long flashlight hard enough that Jon was lucky it wasn’t a sword or he’d have been run clean through.

  “Okay, Jeremy. Okay.” He held up his hands until Jeremy calmed and finally returned to his engine.

  Jeremy was wrong on one point and so very right on another.

  Miranda had many things wrong with her, but they were also part of her charm. He’d never met such a literal-minded person. Or one who threw herself into everything with a hundred percent of her focus and passion—whether a plane crash or sex. …and could so completely ignore anything else during those moments.

  Duh! Like his arrival while she was inspecting a helicopter’s structural design. So maybe that hadn’t been about him even if it felt like it had.

  But Jeremy was right about something else.

  Miranda was the very best at plane investigations. He’d been a crash investigator for the Air Force for the last ten years. He knew enough to tell the difference between expertise and mastery. Yet she was like Yoda of the Jedi—operating at a whole other level beyond even that.

  Yes, there was something really wrong here; he could feel it.

  But while he couldn’t see it, Miranda would.

  “I’ve got to talk to her.”

  Jeremy began banging on something inside the engine with a wrench.

  “I need a radio,” he spoke louder.

  “What?” Jeremy shouted as he continued banging loudly inside the engine with a force that seemed completely unnecessary.

  “Hope your eardrums hurt!”

  Jeremy’s banging was now too loud for him to have heard Jon.

  He spotted the radio clipped to the side of Jeremy’s pack. He made sure the volume was up, then placed a call up the mountain.

  7

  Miranda led Jeff along the debris trail that spread across the top of the ski area.

  “This is bad,” Jeff kicked at the tangle of wires and foot-diameter pipes in front of them. It was no part of any airplane. The long pipes had one end bolted to concrete footings but had been bent and twisted despite their size. A heavy one-inch cable of woven steel snaked among the wreckage. Other curious parts—like a giant, steel wagon wheel four meters across—were caught up in the tangle. All of it was blackened to some degree.

  “It is?” It was certainly broken, but she had no frame of reference to make any sense of its goodness or badness.

  “This is the top of the Cirque Poma lift. They gotta fix it or I won’t be able to ski the double black diamond trails here next winter.”

  “Double black diamond?” It was only one of the things she didn’t understand about the boy’s statement.

  “The experts-only trails. Dad wouldn’t let me ski those until last winter. They’re the best. Don’t you ski?”

  “I live on an island. My home is fifty-seven feet above sea level in a temperate maritime environment. I remember six times in my whole life when snow deeper than my ankles stuck on the island for more than a day.”

  “Really? No snow?” He looked at her as if she was an alien come down from another planet.

  “Not very much, especially in the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains.”

  “Are they big?”
>
  “Not as big as these mountains, but yes.”

  “And you don’t ski on those mountains?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Weird.” The boy pointed down the slope along the tangled wires. She could see a line of tall poles descending the mountain. “This is a Poma lift. It’s…I dunno…like a Frisbee lying flat at the end of a long stick. Maybe a giant ski pole dangling from the wire. You put it between your legs and you kinda sit back, but not too much. The Poma, like a palm on your butt,” Jeff giggled, “drags you up the hill on your skis.”

  She couldn’t picture that. “I thought they just had chairlifts.”

  “Chair lifts, Poma lifts, T-bars—those are really hard to ride alone as a little kid…” His tone said that he could do it just fine. “…rope tows—they’re the worst but they’re only on kiddie slopes and I haven’t skied those since I turned five—and gondolas. Some places have J-bars. All kindsa things.”

  Miranda slipped out her notebook and made an annotation to investigate types of ski lifts. It was uncomfortable that she knew nothing about the technical operations of a ski area yet had to investigate a crash at one. That lack of knowledge made it much harder to determine any possible relevance of the damaged lift to the crash.

  “How come you don’t know this stuff?”

  “Because I’ve never been at a ski area before. You’ll have to be my expert in that. I have experts in computers, structures, and people. You can be my ski area expert.”

  “What do you know?”

  She led him over to what must have been the lift’s final anchor pole. It was significantly bigger than any of the ones she could see on the slope below. “See the burn marks on the pole? What do they tell you?”

  “I dunno. That it got burnt?”

  “See how on this side, there’s no paint left at all. It’s completely gone, then there is soot on the bare metal. Around the back, the paint is scorched and sooty, even a little blistered, but it’s still there.” She pulled out pliers and a sample bag. Then she freed a thick piece of the paint and bagged it, before holding it up. “This corroborates what your fath—”

  “It what it-ates?”

  “Corroborates…matches what your father said. The burn pattern tells me that the main explosion was from that direction—it literally blew all the paint off this side of the pole. Then the whole pole was exposed to fire because it’s soot-marked on both sides. But the paint survived on the back side. By taking this sample back to the lab, we’ll be able to create an experiment to test how big an explosion was needed to peel off all of the paint on the other side, well before the fire even arrived here to put soot on the front and blister the paint on the back.”

  Jeff squinted at the bag. “You can do all that from that little paint chip?”

  “A little paint chip and a large Poma pole.” She pulled out her tablet and photographed it from several angles.

  “Cool! Show me more stuff.”

  Using the pole as a guide, they headed toward the center of the explosion.

  8

  “She’s not answering. You sure your radio works?”

  Jeremy didn’t answer him. Whether it was because he’d actually crawled partway into the Number Four engine or because he was intentionally ignoring Jon for some reason, it was hard to tell.

  He tried the radio again, “Miranda, pick up, damn it!”

  Holly’s voice came back over the radio. “No swearing on the airwaves, Major Swift. The FCC doesn’t like it.”

  “I don’t need sass. I need to talk to Miranda.”

  “If she’s not answering you, mate, there’s a reason.”

  “Can’t you just hand your radio to her?”

  “Be glad to, except we’re chasing some tail, airplane tail,” he could hear her grin. “She and Jeff are chasing the cockpit. Keep an eye out. We found the last body—this poor sap makes thirteen. I called Mountain Rescue and they’re coming back up for it. Also, tell Jeremy that it looks like someone took a hammer to the black boxes. We’ll need him to see if there’s anything to recover.”

  “Jeremy’s—”

  “A hammer?” Jeremy asked from right next to his elbow, making him jump.

  “Heard that, did you?” Jon snarled at him.

  Jeremy winced but didn’t answer him.

  “Figure of speech, my young Padawan,” Holly teased. “It’s awfully beat up.”

  “Be careful disconnecting the main power buss.”

  “Think that was done by the crash. We’re taking pictures and video, but you’d barely recognize it as an airplane’s derrière. This empennage is never flying again.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Jon broke in. “It’s the wrong plane.”

  “It’s what?”

  “It’s as if there’s something wrong with the crash site. Or maybe with the plane.”

  “Yeah, it’s in more pieces than it was built with.”

  “No, it’s something more than that. I just don’t know what.”

  “Ooo-oo!” She made a noise like a haunting ghost. “There’s something spooky about the plane. Don’t be telling Miranda that it’s the wrong plane, mate. She’ll snap off your head faster than a saltie chowing down on a chihuahua.”

  “A what on a—”

  “Big nasty crocodile in Australia,” Jeremy explained.

  Jon unkeyed the mike.

  “Of course,” Holly came back with her accent even thicker, “none of the three of us is so shit-for-brains that we’d tell her something like that in the middle of an investigation.”

  “Now who needs to watch their on-air language?”

  “I’m Australian. I’m allowed. Anyway, we’re leaving that one for you to explain to her.”

  “Well, she’s not answering,” Jon was going to throttle the whole team if they kept this up.

  A silence stretched out long enough for Jon to become aware of a bird call that…sounded as if it was very upset about finding its home burned up.

  Jeremy reached for his radio. Resigned, Jon gave it to him.

  “I’ve got at least another hour here,” he reported to Holly. “I have to go through two more engines and I want to look inside the port wing.”

  Holly took a moment to answer. “Mike’s almost done cutting free the black boxes. Nothing much to learn here without collecting every single scrap and rebuilding it. We’ll climb up and make sure nothing happened to Miranda. Meanwhile, this is a plane crash and our job is to investigate it. Finish what you’re doing.”

  “Roger that,” Jeremy made a show of returning the radio to the pouch on the side of his pack rather than returning it to Jon.

  It was enough to bring his sense of humor back as he turned to help Jeremy once more with the engine investigation.

  9

  “What kinda gun has such a big rifle barrel?” Jeff did indeed ask numerous questions as his father had implied, but as he listened to the answers and appeared to be absorbing them, Miranda found no dissatisfaction in the process.

  She glanced at the barrel and other remains of the gun still attached to it. “It’s from a 40 millimeter L/60 Bofors autocannon.” That finally told her what variation of C-130 Hercules plane it was. An AC-130 gunship.

  “Autocannon? That’s like an automatic cannon?”

  “Yes.”

  “It automatically shoots cannonballs? Like a pirate ship?” His streams of questions were curiously logical from a certain point of view—a person filled with infinite curiosity and only limited experience. Once she’d realized that, she’d discovered an ongoing interest in what he’d ask next.

  “Forty-millimeter shells. That’s about an inch and a half across. But yes.” Miranda had never been fascinated by weapons. She could use them, her father had insisted, but only to put down a suffering animal on her island.

  “Cool!” Then Jeff knelt in the char to stare into the open end of the barrel.

  “Don’t do that!”

  Jeff froze and looked at her. “Oh, right! Just lik
e my .22, I gotta make sure there’s no round in the chamber. I never thought of that on a cannon. I thought they were different. Do you think pirates ever looked into their cannons?”

  “Not while they were loaded. Not unless they wished to become dead pirates.”

  “Right. Whups, I looked in a cannon just as it fired. Ker-Pow!” He splatted his palms against his face, covering his eyes as he staggered in a small circle. “Where’s my head? Where’s my head?” Then he shifted to inspect the Bofors’ feed armature. “So how do I check that?”

  “You have to wait for a professional.”

  “But you know how, don’tcha?”

  She did. All of the rounds that had been in the feed had exploded in place, shredding the mechanism designed to handle and load a hundred and twenty, foot-long, two-pound shells every minute.

  The mechanism to release the feeder from the firing mechanism in case of a jam was still sufficiently intact to operate. Between them, they were able to open the breech. A round still sat in the firing chamber.

  She slipped it out and showed it to Jeff.

  “Oh man. Please don’t tell Dad. He’d be all angry if he knew I’d almost looked down a loaded barrel.”

  “I’ll try not to.”

  He looked up at her cautiously. “You’ll try? That doesn’t sound like much of a promise.”

  “I sometimes say things I shouldn’t. I try to stop myself, but I’ll be too late and it just comes out.”

  Jeff nodded. “I do that. Like you want to gobble up the words after they’re gone.”

  Miranda liked that image, but couldn’t think how to do it. Jeff reached out a hand for the shell and she handed it to him.

  “Wow! That weighs more than my rifle.”

  “If you have a standard .22 rifle, it probably weighs six pounds. This is only two pounds. But its density—small size for the amount of weight—makes it feel heavier than it is.”

  “You do know science stuff,” he handed the shell back.