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

by M. L. Buchman

  Jon’s shoulder brushed pleasantly against hers.

  He seemed to be doing it on purpose. When he saw that she’d caught on, he simply leaned in to her. It made eating the sandwich much more awkward, but it was very comfortable.

  Mike and Jeremy shared another while Holly sprawled on a third. Brett and Jeff were sitting on the helo’s cargo deck and both swinging their feet.

  The food was good. The sun warm through the cool breeze. Jon’s touch made it easy to just drift and not think about much at all.

  “The real prize,” Brett cut off her non-thoughts. “I managed to score some of Lisa Donovan’s peach hand pies.” He had Jeff hand them around.

  Each was indeed the size of Brett’s hand—at least twice the size of hers—thick with a flaky crust. Mike was making ecstatic noises and Holly’s eyes were closed in bliss. She tried the corner of one and rather liked it. The peach seemed to swim into her taste buds and embrace them before continuing on their way.

  On their way…

  Jon’s question, rhetorical or not, regarding the general’s whereabouts still remained. But she had so little to go on. Generals, especially high-ranking ones, were not a common occurrence in her world.

  Except…

  She pulled out her phone and dialed Drake.

  “Hi, Miranda. I only have a minute. The Saudis are being stupid again and are really pissing off the Iranians. Allies or not, I wish that I could just flatten their asses once and for all. What are you up to?” She’d rarely heard the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff being so brusque. But she preferred this to his peculiar jokes any day.

  “We are eating gourmet hand peach pies and attempting to trace the location of General Jorge Jesus Martinez. Can you offer us any assistance?”

  “With the pies?”

  “No, with the general.”

  “Too bad, I could use a treat right about now. JJ? What do you need him for?”

  “There is some doubt regarding his present corporeal state.”

  “What?”

  “We have a report and hard evidence that he’s dead, yet reason to believe that—”

  “JJ’s dead?” Drake gasped. “How can he be dead? He and I were just fighting over a beer and nachos a week or so ago.”

  “Why were you fighting over a beer and nachos? Couldn’t the restaurant serve you two orders?”

  “What? No. Yes. Sure they could have. I meant that he and I were arguing, while having a beer and nachos.”

  “Not two beers and nachos?” That made more sense when she tried to picture it.

  “Miranda!”

  She’d learned that when people hit the last syllable of her name extra hard that they were frustrated. She had the notes of repeated observations in her notebook to support that conclusion.

  “Well?”

  “There was a plane crash and—”

  “That can’t be right.”

  “Drake, I—”

  “You’ve got to be wrong on this one. JJ can’t be—”

  Miranda had finally learned how to deal with these kinds of situations. She placed her phone on speaker and handed it to Holly, who sat up to take it.

  “—dead. I know that he’s a pain in the ass sometimes. Seriously old school, even more than me. But he’s a top man who—”

  “Mr. Chairman,” Holly just cut him off as if he wasn’t the country’s highest ranking general and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  “What?”

  “Sir, with all due respect, you really need to learn to shut your yap and listen when Miranda’s speaking. She didn’t call for some friendly jaw.”

  “Ms. Harper, you don’t begin to underst—”

  “You don’t want me hanging up on you again, do you?” Something Holly seemed to delight in doing.

  “She’ll do it, Uncle Drake,” Jon was chortling. “So, as Holly would say, ‘Hush up some’.”

  “No self-respecting Ozzie would say such a thing,” she protested, then turned to the phone. “Just cut the yabber, Mr. Chairman.”

  Drake sputtered, but stopped talking. Miranda had never been able to confront such a wall of words. They always made her feel shaky and small, as if the world was peppering her, like when she forgot the lid on a pot of popping corn—a thousand little hits that didn’t particularly hurt, but made it impossible to think of anything else.

  “Do it up, boss.” Holly tried to hand back her phone but Miranda didn’t trust her grip, so she clenched her hands together, which was the only way to keep them still at times like these.

  “We have two proofs of his death. His dog tags on a corpse and his name on the crew list for the crash.”

  “What kind of crash?”

  “An AC-130H gunship. But—”

  “Are we still flying the Hs? I thought—”

  Holly pressed a finger down on one of the number keys, making it emit a long beep.

  Drake stopped talking.

  Holly answered him. “It was stolen from Davis-Monthan’s boneyard, except it wasn’t, because according to the official records—that Jeremy hacked—it’s still there. But it isn’t. It’s now spread all over the top of the Colorado Rockies. Now pay attention to the next part.”

  At Holly’s nod, Miranda continued. “But we have reason to believe that this crash was fabricated. No, correct that. The crash is real, but we have reason to believe that it was deliberate, and the thirteen bodies aboard were not the individuals identified by the dog tags and crew roster.”

  “No way would JJ be a part of something like that. You never met a patriot like him. Somebody’s messing with you. Look, I’ve got to go. The President is waiting. Find JJ. If you can’t find him, track down that Colonel Taz Something. Taz Cortez. Scary as shit half-pint Mexican chick. She’s always at his side. JJ uses her like a tactical nuke. I’ve watched her destroy career officers during a single interview. Woman’s relentless.”

  “Get a taste of that yourself, Chairman?” Holly sounded delighted.

  “Thank God, no! JJ takes me on himself. We go way back to when we were both still punk majors. Besides, he’s hit mandatory retirement age. His party is tomorrow night—all the joint chiefs and half the Pentagon will be there. Even the President said he might drop by. If he does, I’ll think even better of him because JJ has always been a real thorn in Roy Cole’s side…and every President before him. Find him. Let me know as soon as you do. Maybe this is some elaborate hoax for him to get out of his retirement party, except he wouldn’t be a part of anything that isn’t strictly by the book. I’m gone.” And he disconnected.

  The phone gave a small chirp of Call Ended. Now Miranda could finally take it back when Holly handed it to her. She slipped it into the proper vest pocket.

  “So, what’s next?” Mike asked and they all looked at her.

  As if she was supposed to know.

  25

  “I mean, it’s a beautiful day here atop the mountains of Colorado,” Mike continued.

  Miranda didn’t need further proof that weather was not a factor in the crash. The crash was deliberate. It was the first deliberate military crash since Captain Craig Button had committed suicide-by-pilot with an A-10 Thunderbolt II in 1997. Though since no one had actually died during this crash…

  “We have a picnic and have had a fire,” Mike waved a hand to indicate the scorched mountaintop. “We could tell ghost stories—appropriate, as thirteen bodies were found here even if they didn’t die here.”

  “We do have a shattered plane to investigate,” but she didn’t sound convincing even to herself.

  “But if it was deliberately crashed?” Holly left the question dangling.

  “Not much point except as a scientific study.”

  Brett pointed his peach hand pie down toward Aspen. “Owners want to know if they can start the cleanup? It may be late June, but summer is very short at this elevation. They want to get crews up here clearing the mountain and fixing the Cirque Poma by winter—which comes early on this mountain.�
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  “Yay!” Jeff cheered around a mouthful of raisins. “Double black diamonds, here I come!”

  Mike smirked just a little. “Do I see a lot of airlift bonus for your birds?”

  Brett nodded. “Won’t mind the extra work. Already have a pair of heavy-lift Chinooks on call if I can get the contract.”

  “Smart man,” Mike nodded.

  Yes, Miranda already knew that about Brett.

  Jon’s phone rang and he stepped away to answer it.

  His distance made it the first time since he’d crested the ridge that she felt she could think. The man was very distracting, even when he wasn’t doing anything. She pulled out her personal notebook and made an entry for later consideration if that was a bad thing or a good one.

  Jeff led Mike away to show off the remains of the Bofors L/60 and M102 howitzer they’d found earlier. Brett tagged along.

  Now it was just Holly, Jeremy, and the dry wind riding fast and cool over the mountaintop.

  “Think we’ll learn anything more here?” Holly asked softly.

  Miranda considered, but finally shook her head. A deliberate crash was a criminal investigation, not a problem for the NTSB.

  That felt wrong but sounded right. Would it be better the other way around, if it felt right but sounded wrong?

  “This is weird.” Jeremy had perched on a nearby boulder in a way that reminded her of the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland. He wasn’t blue, three inches tall, or smoking a hookah atop a magic mushroom, but the similarity was there. He had his computer out and cables running into the black boxes that Holly and Mike had recovered. She could also see the card reader for the Quick Access Recorder drive that she’d recovered from the cockpit.

  “What did you find, Jeremy?”

  “Magic.”

  She doublechecked, but he definitely wasn’t sitting on a mushroom.

  “This plane magically appeared about five minutes before it crashed. There are no recordings on either device prior to their initial contact with Denver Center air traffic control. No handoff from Salt Lake Center, nothing.”

  “Did they erase parts of it?” Holly looked over his left shoulder. Miranda moved to look over his right.

  “No. There’s no background noise even. The media are factory fresh. Turned on just to capture the crash. I don’t even have the opening of the door. And I should, right there.” He stabbed a finger at a time mark. “At least that’s when they reported the depressurization event. The door must have already been open specifically so that the event wouldn’t be recorded in the data stream.”

  Miranda could see the spikes consistent with voice communication, but there was no mechanical record of the door opening.

  “They turned everything on to just capture the crash but wanted to keep their point of origin and flight route hidden,” Holly was nodding to herself as if that somehow made sense. “They wanted us to focus on the dead, assuming that no one would read these devices until they were sent back to the NTSB lab.”

  Which, Miranda knew, would have been the proper procedure. But Jeremy’s ability to quickly access the information had proven useful on a number of occasions. It had saved their lives in the New Mexico desert.

  “Why would someone do that?”

  Jon hung up his phone and joined them. “Because they knew they had to keep the best crash-investigation team in the business distracted.”

  That didn’t sound quite right, but Jon continued before she could think of why.

  “Brett,” he called out and the man turned from where he’d been repacking the cooler. “On my advice, they’ve called off the Air Force investigation team for this site. You can tell the owners that they’re good to start clearing the mountain. They’re to coordinate with Peterson AFB over in Colorado Springs.”

  Brett shot a thumb’s up and got on the helo’s radio to pass along the news.

  “Miranda, there’s another—”

  “Hang on, mate,” Holly rose to her feet, brushing pastry crumbs off so that they showered over Mike. “What Air Force investigation team?”

  “The one coming to investigate the crash.”

  “But I thought we were investigating the crash?” Jeremy covered his face as Mike brushed Holly’s and his own crumbs onto Jeremy.

  “You are. You were. You are.” Jon looked at her as if she knew what he was talking about. “I told Miranda earlier that—”

  “Not about another team.” She didn’t like that someone didn’t trust her team.

  “Yes. No. I started to. We don’t lose a three-star general without upsetting a lot of people.”

  “Penguins.”

  Now the team was looking at her strangely.

  “We were discussing the ratio of flying penguins in a known population versus the number of three-star lieutenant generals and—”

  “That’s easy. An infinite ratio. You’re dividing by zero,” Jeremy peeked out from under his hand to see if another shower of pastry crust flakes was inbound.

  “That’s what I told him. He was—”

  “Miranda,” Jon didn’t hit the last –da hard, but it sounded as if he wanted to. “They launched a full team in our direction the moment they found out that JJ Rodriguez was aboard.”

  “Supposedly aboard,” Holly corrected him.

  “Right. I never had a chance to mention it because when I got up here, you were already deep in the investigation.”

  “Been just sitting here through lunch, mate.” Holly’s sneer was accurate.

  “Right, sorry. I should have said. Anyway. They’re called off.”

  “But didn’t we just decide that there’s nothing further to investigate here as it has a known cause—intentional destruction?” Mike found some more crumbs that Holly had gotten on him. Jeremy ducked aside before they were showered over him.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Jon sighed.

  “Why not?”

  “Because, Miranda, there’s another crash. Far worse than this. An AC-130J Ghostrider Block 30, flying out of Edwards Air Force Base—we’re sure of that much this time—just plowed into Avalon Harbor on Santa Catalina Island off LA during a planned testing flight. At least fifty confirmed dead, but probably a lot higher.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Just over an hour. A lot of things are still on fire. Multiple engine failures. At the moment of trouble, they clipped the observer plane and it went down with all hands as well. Then they spilled people in parachutes over twenty miles. While fighting for control, they wandered out of the test zone, ultimately ramming the pier at Avalon. Looks to actually be an accident, as the plane was under only marginal control. The pilots never got out.”

  Miranda felt a chill, not just from the cool Aspen air.

  First a Spectre and now a Ghostrider? Two gunships down within hours of each other—built forty years apart but both AC-130s.

  She hated plane crashes, but she’d wager that she’d like this one even less than usual.

  26

  Once aboard the helo, Jeff had asked if he could go “help” with the California crash. Before Miranda could even consider the request, his father shut that down.

  “You can watch it on TV. It’ll be the only thing on all the news channels.”

  For the rest of the short flight down the mountain, Miranda struggled to fit together the pieces.

  The AC-130J Ghostrider had several unique features that were unfamiliar. The biggest change was the laser system. She needed to go inspect one so that she’d know how to understand its possible effects. Beyond its five-ton mass, she knew little about it.

  She also needed to inspect the new crash.

  And if there was still an undead general involved, then…

  Miranda felt torn in all three directions. And a part of her wanted to return to the top of Snowmass and study the unusual effects of such a complete and destructive impact.

  When she stepped from the HeliSee helicopter back onto the ground at Aspen airport, Jeff clasped her around the m
iddle in a hard hug. She held his shoulders tightly for a moment—an almost hug—before she tried pushing him back. He went more easily this time so neither of them landed on their butts, though she kept a firm hold on him until she was sure of the success of that strategy.

  He looked up at her face. “I’m gonna learn everything and then I’m gonna come work for you, Ms. Chase. We’re gonna save planes together.”

  Brett had come up behind his son.

  “Dad, for Christmas I want a vest with a lot of pockets and tools. A notebook to write cool stuff down in, and an anonymommenator.”

  “It’s only June, short stuff,” Brett said, keeping a hand on Jeff’s shoulder.

  “It’s what I want,” Jeff insisted. “Don’t forget the aniometer. It’s important.”

  Again, Brett’s eyebrows raised above his aviators as he turned his attention to Miranda. “Seems you made quite the impression.”

  “I’m sorry.” Miranda pictured Jeff’s terror over his father’s possible death and his commitment to spend his life investigating dead planes and dead people. “I didn’t mean to.”

  Brett tipped his head to the side, started to speak, then cut himself off.

  Mouth curved down, unhappy frown. The old childhood lesson came back to her, but she didn’t know what else to do. She’d already apologized.

  She turned for the waiting US Air Force jets, but halfway there Jon stopped her with a hand on her arm. A light touch that was so hard to ignore. It was there but it wasn’t and that jangled against her nerves.

  It had taken her a long time to learn how to deal with it—she pulled her arm away.

  “Oh, right, sorry. Can we talk for a minute?”

  “Jon. I can’t think about our relationship at the moment. It’s one factor too many for me to—”

  “It’s not about that.”

  “—process at this time. Oh. What is it?”

  “It’s about your team.”

  Everyone else had continued over to the two waiting Air Force planes and dropped their packs on the pavement.

  “What about them?”

  Holly glanced back at her. Somehow Miranda knew that she was offering to backtrack if Miranda needed help.