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

by M. L. Buchman

  She shook her head.

  Holly shrugged, lay down on the pavement in the shadow of the plane, and rested her head on her pack as if ready to take a nap. But something in how Holly tugged down the brim of her HeliSee hat told Miranda that Holly was watching them and was ready to come running if needed. Though she couldn’t imagine why that would happen.

  Jon tapped his phone in his pocket. “I was speaking with the general in charge of military crash investigations. He wants to bring your team onboard.”

  “We already are onboard. Over sixty-four percent of my team’s investigations have been military- or military personnel-related over the last eight months. That’s up from my prior lifetime average of forty-two percent.”

  “Life, the universe, and everything.”

  Perhaps ignoring anything she didn’t understand would be a useful tactic. At least things that people said. She would continue paying attention to the “voices” of the equipment and systems she investigated. But people, at least those she associated with the most, were becoming less comprehensible rather than more with increased exposure. Plotting the axial curves of familiarity versus comprehension decay over time would be an interesting challenge.

  “My commander wants to bring your team on full-time. Military contractors for both disaster recovery and—”

  “We work for the NTSB.”

  “I know that.”

  “I work for the NTSB. Your request doesn’t make sense. Thirty-six percent of my work is still in the commercial aviation sector. You’d want me to stop that?”

  “Yes. And it makes perfect sense from our point of view. Your consistent ability to accurately assess site crashes in unprecedented time frames would be a real asset to—”

  “No. Both myself and my team work for the NTSB.” Miranda tucked her suddenly cold hands under her arms. It made no sense—it was far warmer down here at Aspen’s elevation than atop Snowmass, yet her hands hadn’t been cold up there.

  “Look, Miranda. As contractors we can pay you far more than the NTSB can—”

  “I’m already wealthy. Jeremy’s parents are Microsoft millionaires many times over. No, this conversation is over.”

  “But Miranda—”

  “Hey boss,” Holly was standing at her elbow. “We’d better get a move-on right soon, I’m thinking. Crash in California and all.”

  “Yes.” She let Holly guide her toward the planes.

  “That was looking a bit intense,” Holly whispered.

  “No. It was just…wrong.” She’d trusted Jon. And now he wanted the military to absorb her team? She’d been reading NTSB reports since she was thirteen and writing them since twenty. She’d never wanted to be anything else.

  Why would Jon suggest such a thing? Didn’t he know her at all?

  27

  The two Air Force jets were still waiting—the one that had delivered her team and the one Jon had arrived in. With only five people, they could all easily fit aboard either one.

  If only she could be on both planes, then she could be in at least two of the three places she needed to be. Unless, perhaps, two of the places happened to be near each other.

  “Jeremy, where is there another AC-130J Ghostrider? A Block 30 with the laser.”

  He pulled out his tablet and answered within moments. “There are only two other Block 30s built so far. One at Eglin in Florida for testing. The other was just flown from Eglin to Andrews in DC. Apparently a demonstration tour for the House and Senate Armed Services Committees.”

  Miranda stopped with one foot on the first step, then turned to face Holly. She had an idea…and a reminder that— “You once said that we just investigate crashes. That it’s what we do.”

  “Actually, you said it, Miranda. I just agreed. You’re still right.”

  “So, you and I are going to the crash.”

  “It’s what we do,” Holly nodded. “What about these three amigos? You,” she pointed at Jeremy, “are obviously Martin Short. Mike is definitely in the Steve Martin role. Jon, that leaves you playing Chevy Chase.”

  Once again, Miranda had no idea what one of her team members was talking about. Except she was fairly sure Steve Martin was a banjo player; she wasn’t a fan of bluegrass music.

  The three men lined up side by side. They slapped their right hands to their own left shoulders, then left to right. Hands on their hips, they turned their heads and coughed as they did a pelvic thrust. Then they began a quick shuffle step where they tried to dance around each other in figure eights, instead colliding hard enough that they all would have fallen to the ground if their combined momentums hadn’t canceled each other out.

  Holly was laughing.

  Then the three of them lined up and shouted out, “The Three Amigos!”

  Miranda decided it was definitely better not to know, and made a note in her notebook about the potential long-term viability of ignoring obscure cultural references.

  Jon’s phone rang again.

  “Holly and I are going to investigate the crash on Catalina Island,” Miranda told the others once she’d finished her note and tucked the notebook back in its pocket. “Jeremy and Mike, you’re going to Washington, DC. I want you to investigate two things. Mike, talk to Drake to get more information about General JJ Martinez. Jeremy, I want you to study the AC-130J Ghostrider at Andrews. We need to understand the modifications, especially those introduced in the Block 30 upgrade.”

  “Cool!” Jeremy shot her a double thumbs-up, almost losing his tablet to the pavement.

  Mike looked less certain. “Perhaps…” He tipped his head as if cracking his spine, a very Holly-like gesture.

  Holly picked up his thought before Miranda could ask, “Perhaps…not Drake. He’s more stubborn than an Ozzie shepherd dog. Sounds like his claws are dug in pretty deep on the subject of General JJ.”

  “Precisely my thought, Holly. Wow! You do have a brain in that pretty head of yours. I thought it was just for show.” Mike dodged behind Jeremy before Holly could take a swing at him.

  Miranda would trust to their judgment on that. “How about Lizzy? She’s close to Drake and may know something.” She was the only other general who Miranda knew in DC.

  Holly snorted, “The director of the National Reconnaissance Office? I’d bet that General Elizabeth Gray knows far more than her boyfriend suspects. When are those two gonna do more than have a naughty anyway?”

  “A naughty?” Miranda could help herself.

  “A bangaroo. A good time in the sack. She needs to be making an honest man out of him some day.”

  Jon rejoined them, “Where do you want me?”

  Hopefully he’d been informing his commander that Miranda only worked for the NTSB: past, present, and future.

  Where did she want Jon?

  Jon was an able crash investigator, but so were she and Holly, and they’d both be in California. Mike’s specialty was people, not aircraft, and Jeremy still suffered from her own old failing of too narrow a focus.

  “I need you with Jeremy and Mike.” He frowned for a moment, but then he glanced at Jeremy and it switched to a broad smile almost immediately.

  “Got it! Wherever liberty is threatened, you will find—”

  “—The Three Amigos!” They all shouted it in unison and fired pretend guns made of fists and fingers into the air. Their bright HeliSee hats looked nothing like Mexican sombreros despite their oversized brims.

  “No, I don’t want you to fight. I want you to…”

  Holly rested her hand on Miranda’s arm just long enough to stop her. “It’s a quote from a comedy movie named The Three Amigos. They’re just big boys. Let them have their moment.”

  “Let’s ride!” They shouted again, grabbing their packs and storming aboard one of the airplanes. They jostled each other like five-year-olds as they struggled to all go up the narrow gangway together.

  Jon, last aboard, blew her a kiss from the entry before ducking inside. One of the pilots rolled his eyes as he leaned out to pu
ll up the gangway from inside—yet another misdirected expression. In moments, the plane was taxiing toward the runway.

  She and Holly climbed aboard the second plane like normal people.

  Once they were seated and their plane was moving as well, she asked Holly if she should watch the movie for cultural reasons.

  Holly snorted, “Are you kidding? I’d rather watch a water buffalo sleep in the sun.”

  Miranda thought about that as they lined up for takeoff.

  Why would anyone want to watch a water buffalo sleep in the sun?

  28

  Pierre Jones checked the hospital hallway in both directions. He felt like a geriatric patient. His entire body was mostly a big bruise. The docs couldn’t believe he’d survived his low-altitude jump, never mind without serious injury.

  No guards. Good sign.

  He peeked into Rosa Cruz’s room—the number he’d gotten by total subterfuge from the nurses’ station…he’d asked.

  She was awake.

  Her smile lit brightly when she saw him in the doorway. It was a very powerful weapon on a lovely woman clothed in almost nothing and already lying in a bed. A sling held one arm, completely immobilized with a crossbody strap just below her breasts. That was something of a deterrent. And she wasn’t his lover, but rather Tango’s…and Gutz’s.

  “What are you in for, Rosa?” He hadn’t heard she was injured.

  She flinched briefly and that lovely smile wavered for the length of a single heartbeat before she covered it.

  Please don’t let that flinch be because of what he expected it was. What he knew it was. He wished he’d phrased his question differently so that he could deny noticing anything. But he hadn’t…and she’d flinched.

  Rosa knew that he knew something. But instead of addressing that, she shied off and answered the hospital question.

  “I was the last one they picked up. They said they hadn’t even been looking for me until after they found the ‘last person out’—which must have been you. I was in the water long enough to become marginally hypothermic. And the shoulder.” She raised her arm ever so slightly, winced more understandably this time, then lowered it again. “Dislocated. Fixed, but I’m strapped in for a week. I didn’t know it was possible to be so cold. I’m warmer now, but still under observation. They said I should be free in a few hours. You that sent them back for me?”

  “Of course.” He himself had been picked up by a group of jet skiers, making the seventeen-mile crossing from the mainland to Catalina. They’d spotted his chute and pulled him out of the water. The instant he’d come to, he’d called in his best guess at Rosa’s position.

  “Are you okay?”

  He shrugged yes, then wished he hadn’t. Wouldn’t surprise him if his whole body turned black-and-blue from how hard he’d hit the water.

  As to Rosa, there’d been a long gap between the cluster of gunners and her own departure from the plane. Long enough for them to end up in a brief clench and—

  Pierre cast the thought aside and took another step closer, both physically and to the elephant question in the room of her being a conspirator in a hundred-million-dollar hijacking.

  “What did you tell them?” He knew that she would have been through the same level of debriefing he’d faced. Two officers and a video camera, cross-questioned on every moment from the first alert until they were hauled from the water.

  She looked aside quickly and spoke low and fast. “That I don’t know what happened to the plane. That you helped me with my chute and pushed me out the door before going to help the pilots. Which was incredibly brave.”

  “You heard?” He tipped his head toward the sea. They were in LA’s main VA hospital. The Pacific lay just a few miles away across Santa Monica.

  She nodded and that’s when he saw how red her eyes were.

  “Did you love him? Them?” Not that it was any of his goddamn business. But maybe it was. “Is that why you were helping them?”

  Rosa nodded. Then shook her head. Then shrugged helplessly. “No. That’s not why I was helping them. Love them? I… They were both very good to me…in different ways.”

  “But they didn’t know about each other.”

  She shook her head. “Neither one would have liked it. I don’t know what I was doing. Mama always said that my older twin brothers and I were like three puppies in a pile.”

  “So you tried to recreate it with Gutz and Tango?”

  “Maybe. Mostly I was just not thinking. Life by default. Neither of them would ever have accepted another man. I was juggling them but it was close to coming apart. I knew that if they found out it was going to be ugly.”

  He was on the verge of telling her just how ugly, brains spattered in the cockpit of a crashing hijacked plane, but thought better of it. In fact, he hoped that she never read the official report because he’d told the investigators about it—saying he hadn’t heard what woman they were fighting over.

  Then he noticed the position of her hand. Her fine fingers, that were never still as they danced across the keyboard of the HEL-A laser firing console, lay on her abdomen just below the sling.

  Perfectly still.

  29

  “Who’s is it?”

  “Who’s is what?” Rosa jerked her hand aside but she knew it was too late.

  “Neither one knew.” Pierre said it as a flat accusation.

  She wilted. “I don’t either. It was a birth control failure, not a plan. I guess now, without a DNA test that I can’t ask for, I never will.” She wanted to cry again, but she’d done enough of that. And that hadn’t even been for Tango or Gutz, not really. It had been for the overwhelming madness that her life had become.

  Her hand returned to her belly of its own volition. She’d heard about that, but never really believed. It was ridiculous.

  Except both of her child’s potential fathers just died. And wasn’t it obvious that Pierre had something he wasn’t telling her about them. But she trusted him; she probably didn’t want to know whatever he was hiding.

  He slumped down in the visitor’s chair with his hands jammed deep in his pockets, scowling in the vicinity of his boots. Papa did that sometimes, when things had been hard at his work. She knew from watching Mama that there were times to let a man sulk, but there were times to just break it apart.

  “You’re doing a crappy job of flirting with me right now, Pierre.”

  He barely smiled. “Half of that was because I thought you were ‘safe.’ Saw you with Tango and knew you weren’t available. Easy to have some fun when you don’t think it means anything.”

  He was right, it had been fun. From the first moment they’d met, both seasoned AC-130 gunners, arriving together on the factory floor in Marietta, Georgia, to watch the first Ghostrider slide off the line. A lot of classroom hours because firing a HEL-A laser wasn’t at all like firing an M102 howitzer.

  A month in the classroom, then five more of shakedown. Their Ghostrider was to be the first to be declared mission ready—available for combat after today’s tests. Not counting General JJ’s plans to do just that with it, simply not by following any orders but his own.

  “What was the other half?”

  “Why did you kiss me?” Pierre grunted out.

  She could feel the heat flash to her face as she looked away.

  “You don’t mind telling me that you’re okay with lovers in pairs without a single blush, and you can’t tell me why you kissed me like that?”

  Rosa still wasn’t sure, though she’d given it a lot of thought. “How did you really break your nose?”

  “Weird-ass question.”

  No argument from her. Why was that suddenly important? But it seemed like it was.

  “Local swimming pool. Seventh grade,” he grumbled out. “Carmen McAllister’s seventh-grade bikini curves could boil your hormones. Well, mine anyway. Watching them go by, I walked square into the high-dive board’s support pole. Broke my nose, tripped, and fell on the pool’s concrete edge ha
rd enough to break my arm, before I fell in and had to be rescued by the lifeguard.”

  “Was she impressed?”

  “My aunt sure was. Almost laughed herself out of her one-piece—which would have been gross as hell because she makes heifers look svelte. She still roars with great brays of laughter when she retells it at every family gathering over the last fifteen years. Carmen never even noticed me: before, during, or after.” His grimace spoke volumes.

  She couldn’t help but laugh despite everything else that was going on.

  And there it was.

  Not the humor, something both Gutz and Tango lacked—though Tango thought he was funny as hell.

  There was a kindness there. And an honesty.

  “Why didn’t you tell the Air Force investigators about…” She couldn’t quite bring herself to say it.

  “Your part in the conspiracy?”

  She could only nod.

  “Needed to hear your side of the story first. Were you coerced? What?”

  And there was another piece of it. Tango wouldn’t have hesitated to throw her under the wheels if it meant saving his own ass.

  “Why, Rosa?” And she realized that he liked her far more than he was willing to admit even to himself.

  Again she looked away, because there was no way to speak to the pain on his features. She made a show of patting her stomach. “I wasn’t coerced. But then this changed the world. I’ve known for,” she glanced at the wall clock, “fifty-three hours and nine minutes. It changes your world in ways you can’t imagine. The…two of them were good fun but…”

  “They’d have sucked as husbands,” he finished her sentence more harshly than she would have.

  She bit her lower lip and nodded yes to the opposite wall. That was absolutely without question.

  “Then you kissed me like… Oh, give me a fucking break, lady. Are you suddenly reeling me in for someone else’s kid in the middle of all this shit?”

  “No!” She twisted to face him, and the pain came crashing right through the drugs as if they weren’t even there. She’d forgotten about the dislocated shoulder.