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

by M. L. Buchman

  “She also had a dead body-double. We’re guessing that she’s still with the general?” Jon asked the last with a shrug. “We were hoping that you might know something.”

  “Also without an official request,” Lizzy sighed.

  A special assignment for General Martinez, had been all Taz would say. Lizzy hadn’t doubted that it was the general’s request, but it had sounded as if the general didn’t want a paper trail. Lizzy had refused to play along. She’d been busy, tried to push Taz aside—finally throwing her out of the office—almost bodily. In retrospect, there was little doubt that Taz had gone elsewhere and managed to get what she needed. She certainly hadn’t tried again.

  And now she too was undead?

  On the up-and-up or not, Lizzy didn’t like the way this was feeling.

  “Actually,” Jon drew out the word, then smiled before she could think about ejecting him just as she had Taz. “As the Air Force major in charge of this investigation, I would be glad to make it an official request for assistance, as long as we can do it expeditiously. That’s why we came to you. Though any personal insights wouldn’t be amiss.”

  “JJ’s a complete hard-ass. No matter what Drake says.” Lizzy knew it was judgmental but that didn’t make it any less true.

  “So you should have gotten along just fine,” Jon’s smile made it a joke without it quite being one.

  She turned away and stared at the walls for a moment. She’d left them bare, with no stamp of her own. The previous director had made such a thing about past glories that he could barely lay claim to. She didn’t want to mimic that but she’d had more of herself in her workspace when she was an image analyst. Maybe that’s what had made Mike, Taz, and many of the directors treat her so casually.

  Fine. They needed a reminder of who she was, she’d give it to them.

  Lizzy picked up her phone and punched Thorsen’s extension.

  “I want two framed posters for my office. That F-16 poster with General LeMay’s quote about the love of freedom, except have them make it up with my old Viper as the image. Make the other one from the NRO’s latest sat launch for the KH-11 spy bird. That one on the Delta IV Heavy out of Vandenberg last January.” One that she’d overseen personally.

  “May I also suggest a USAF flag beside the national one—it is your lineage—and a display case for your medals and patches. The 79th Fighter Squadron Tigers is a great patch. You need to put those in people’s faces—hard. Ma’am.”

  “Remind me that you need a promotion soon, Thorsen. Thanks.” She hung up and turned back to face the others.

  “So, if they aren’t dead, you need to know what they’re up to.” She pulled over a keyboard.

  “Uh-huh,” Jeremy nodded eagerly. “And we also want a tour and orientation on the AC-130J Ghostrider that’s sitting over at Andrews.”

  That stopped her and made her turn to face him. “Why is that?”

  “I’m not sure, but Miranda seemed to think it was important. See, the plane that went down in Aspen was an AC-130H Spectre gunship. It’s a version of the C-130 Hercules that—”

  “I know what a Spectre is, Jeremy.”

  “Right, okay. Well, the one that’s currently burning in Avalon Harbor on Santa Catalina Island, unless they’ve put it out by now in which case it isn’t still burning, was an AC-130J Ghostrider based on the Super Hercules that—” He slowed just enough to take a breath and add a grimace. “—that you probably know all about, too. To properly investigate the crash, Miranda wants to know about the laser and any other upgrades. And I saw that there was a Block 30 here in DC at Andrews—oh, I already said that—so we thought we’d kill two birds with one stone and come see you and it. And that was a really horrible analogy, wasn’t it? Since two Hercules birds have gone down in the last fourteen hours. Curiously, both crashed on stone: the top of the Snowmass ski area is mostly rock, and the stone pier in Avalon harbor, and…shutting up now.”

  “The second crash was a Block 30 that went down?” She hadn’t heard about either one, but her usual concerns were space and what she could see of foreign military actions from there.

  Mike’s smile was back, but he was smart enough to keep his mouth shut.

  “How the hell did that happen?”

  “That’s why we’re here…General Lizzy.” Or not. Mike was incredibly convinced of his own cuteness. His charm and beautiful smile might work on others, but it wasn’t cutting him any slack in her office. She just ignored him. And she ignored his puzzled frown at the failure of his so-civilian tactics.

  33

  Lizzy led the way to the UH-1N Twin Huey helicopter that the USAF 1st Helicopter Squadron at Andrews had sent over. One of the nice benefits of being an agency director; her time was rated as too valuable to be wasted stuck in traffic.

  It landed inside the loop of the NRO’s running track, close by the grass volleyball court.

  Drake had a good eye. Her diamond exactly matched the Air Force-blue paint job and her gold band matched the helo’s gold side-stripe. There was no clear diamond to match the white tops of the Huey, but she preferred the simplicity of the ring with just the single stone and the smoothly twisted setting suggestive of the contrail of a jet barrel-rolling through the sky.

  Now she finally knew how to explain to her mother why she’d waited so long to get married. Not like her three sisters hadn’t already provided multiple grandchildren, along with four divorces and six marriages. Lizzy had waited…for Drake.

  They all clambered aboard and the helo lifted for the fifteen-minute ride to Andrews.

  A text chirped on her phone.

  “According to the NSA,” she read out, “Taz placed a called approximately five hours ago from—oh shit—Avalon Harbor.”

  She’d already checked her satellite logs while they were still in her office. There’d been no surveillance over Aspen or Santa Catalina at the time of either crash. We aren’t in the habit of surveilling non-military civilian territory. Mike hadn’t been pleased, but Jon was military and had nodded in understanding.

  “They found three call starts, none over twenty seconds. It was locked down with the full SCIP encryption, so we can’t trace them. All they know was that two of the calls were to the Pentagon.”

  “Before or after the crash time?” Mike asked while the rest of them were still processing the information.

  “Within five minutes after. Three minutes, fifteen seconds actually.”

  “Three-fifteen.” Mike sat back and spoke as if to himself, “Did she bail out at the last second? Was she ashore, witnessed the crash, and needed to report it? Or was it because the crash was unplanned and she then had to act quickly? I’m guessing the last.”

  “What about JJ?” Jon asked. They’d all taken to calling General Martinez by his nickname. It would have felt very disrespectful, but she was doing it herself despite barely knowing the man.

  “Let’s see,” Mike looked out the window as they crossed over the Potomac, but she guessed he wasn’t sightseeing the National Mall. “She wasn’t on the crash. It was too destructive. If she bailed out at the last moment, she’d have been in the ocean and wouldn’t have had time to be placing a secure call that quickly.”

  Lizzy found herself nodding. She’d never had to eject, but she’d practiced water landings by parachute. The first five minutes were all about dealing with the parachute and trying not to drown.

  “If we theorize that she was there to witness the results, she could have been reporting to the general. But that three-minute delay… No. She must have conferred with the general before the first call. They saw the crash together. It was unplanned. And he issued new orders for her to carry out. That’s the best fit.”

  Lizzy was still trying to get over Taz being undead from the initial crash, and on the site of a second major air crash.

  How had Mike already…

  Lizzy almost laughed. Once again, she’d underestimated Miranda’s team. They were the very best at what they did, even if she didn’
t always understand how they achieved their results. It wasn’t all Miranda. Jeremy was a technical wizard. And Mike probably saw motivational interactions the same way she understood the tactical implications of orbital dynamics—as a single gestalt.

  Mike looked at her. “Are JJ and Taz the sorts to just hang out at a place like Catalina Island?”

  Lizzy had met Taz just the once that had led Lizzy to throwing the colonel out of her office. She’d never met JJ, but Drake had talked about him enough for her to feel that she knew him.

  “They’re more likely to take a vacation at an active bombing range. A rock has a greater sense of fun.”

  “So…” Mike was now studying the cargo bay ceiling. “Why were they there? They were there to observe something about that plane. Maybe the crash made it so that they never got the chance?”

  “Then why did she make the phone calls immediately afterward?” Lizzy could almost see it… “Oh.”

  “Right,” Mike acknowledged.

  “What?” Jeremy asked but Mike ignored him.

  “There’s some reason they really want that plane. There are only the two others. One here at Andrews. Where’s the third Ghostrider?”

  “Eglin Air Force Base,” Jeremy somehow knew.

  Mike slapped him on the shoulder and refocused on her. “If I was Taz and the general just sitting on the Avalon harbor, and they somehow were involved with the crashed Ghostrider… Taz is looking for another one for her general. They need a Ghostrider for some reason. General Gray, you better call Eglin and get them to put a guard on that one they have down there.”

  Lizzy did.

  As she finished, Mike’s phone rang and he punched for speaker.

  The 1st Helicopter Squadron’s birds weren’t like the President’s birds from HMX-1 or even the gold-tops of the Army’s 12th Aviation Battalion. They were stuck with aged Hueys and boasted little more luxury than padded seats. Leather armchairs and mood lighting were for others. The Air Force’s 1st HS was for getting work done, but they did have decent sound insulation. It let her hear the conversation without too much straining.

  “Hey Mikey,” Holly’s voice sounded from the speaker. “We’ve got a chap here, took a parachute-assisted swim in the Pacific. Last off the AC-130J Ghostrider. Says that two pilots went down with it, everyone else got out.”

  “You still have him there?”

  “Bolted to my hip. He’s not as pretty as you, so I figure he’ll be less trouble.”

  “Ask him if there was a Colonel Vicki Cortez or a General Martinez on the flight.” Oddly, Mike ignored her side comment. Maybe under certain conditions he really was all business.

  Holly finally answered. “Neither name means anything to him. He’s been with the crew for six months.”

  “Shit!” Mike glared at the phone as if trying to see Holly and the man through it.

  “He doesn’t swear much,” Jeremy commented. “I think Mike’s cursed like three times since I met him. Something must be really weird on this one for him to—”

  “Sitting right here, Jeremy, and I could do without the running commentary, buddy. I’m missing something, but I don’t know what it is.”

  “You’ll get it, Mike!” Jeremy announced with absolute confidence.

  “Too many missing pieces,” Mike scowled out the window as they settled onto the parking area close beside the AC-130J Ghostrider at Andrews Air Force Base. “Keep working him, Holly. We’re missing something here. It’s important.”

  “Roger that.” And she was gone.

  34

  While Holly was still on the phone, Miranda had led Master Sergeant Pierre Jones out onto the stone quay, nose-to-tail with the Hercules. The big plane had flipped end-for-end, landing on its back with the rear closest to land. That placed the tail closest to Pierre’s and Miranda’s noses.

  The remains of the plane’s nose were at the ocean end of the quay. The remains of the rear end of the cargo bay were the closest piece to land. The broken off tail section still remained in the water nearly two hundred feet off the end of the stone, only a lone fin sticking above the water like a dead, giant shark.

  “Did you observe any problems with the weather?”

  Pierre squinted down at her, then waved a hand at the sky. “Clear and calm. So calm, there isn’t even any real wave action.”

  Miranda knew that oil and fuel spills could calm rough waters, making assessments deceptive for a wide area around a water crash. However, the spilled fuel had burned off and there were indeed no underlying waves that she could see on either the ocean or the harbor side of the pier. It was a surprisingly tranquil day on the Pacific Ocean.

  “The terrain wasn’t an issue,” she continued working her way down her mental checklist.

  “Not until they rammed the end of the pier.”

  She nodded. That was an accurate assessment and she noted it down.

  Diving equipment would be necessary to investigate the debris perimeter. In fact…

  The next Coast Guard helo dropped a dive team on the cleared area at the head of the pier. All she had to do was wave to Holly and point at the divers.

  Holly made a hand sign as if holding something the size of an aircraft’s black boxes and rushed over to convince the Coast Guard to go after those first.

  It was so awkward splitting the team across the country. She only owned the one black box reader, and it was in Jeremy’s pack in Washington, DC. But still, the Cockpit Voice and Data Recorder’s recovery was the next essential step. Rather than her usual preference of working on her own, she was actually adapting to their extended abilities.

  This she did take time to note down. Pierre Jones didn’t appear to mind waiting; he just stared glumly at the inverted fuselage.

  Now Miranda allowed herself to look at the crash site itself.

  Other than scorch marks, the stone pier itself actually looked little the worse for wear from the Hercules collision. There had been two buildings on the top that were now little more than scorched foundations, but the stone remained.

  The nose of the Hercules, however, had been flattened and driven back into the fuselage. The plane’s hundred-foot length—roughly eighty without the tail section—was now closer to fifty feet long. The entire front end all the way back to the wings had been pancaked.

  There was unlikely to be anything recoverable from the cockpit, even the QAR. Unlike a black box—designed to withstand a minimum of thirty-four hundred g’s and a thousand degrees centigrade of fire—a quick access recorder was meant as a simple backup device.

  “Poor bastards,” Pierre was shaking his head.

  “Who?”

  “The pilots. They’re in there somewhere. Be a miracle if they ever even find enough to bury.”

  That also meant that the HEL-A laser she wanted to inspect would be unrecoverable as well, it was normally mounted close behind the cockpit opposite the weapon control stations.

  This was the moment, shortly after the death of both her parents, when people had tried to say comforting things to her. She’d never enjoyed it much, but Mike had been teaching her that such things were reasonable offerings to a grieving person.

  “I’m sure…it was quick.”

  “I sure as hell hope not. They were both absolute bastards.”

  35

  Which Pierre knew was an unfair assessment.

  Tango and Gutz weren’t bastards. They were jet jockeys. Classic, macho, half-a-century-after-their-time, pig-headed jet jockeys. No way either of them would have stepped up when they found out Rosa was carrying their kid.

  “Cheap. Two-bit. Arrogant…” He could feel his teeth grinding.

  “Why were they bastards?” The NTSB investigator asked without quite looking at him.

  He certainly wasn’t going to try explaining how they’d both leave Rosa in the lurch. But the rest of it?

  Screw it, his ass was toast now anyway.

  “They were hijacking the goddamn plane.”

  “It appears that the
y weren’t successful,” the woman said it absolutely deadpan.

  Pierre could only look at her in surprise. In his experience, most smaller women did something to compensate for their size: feisty, funny, hiding behind meekness. This Miranda woman didn’t sound like any of those.

  “No, lady. No, they weren’t.”

  “I wonder why not? If they had successfully convinced the crew to depart the aircraft and the plane was actually fully functional, it should have been an easy task.” She stepped forward until she was almost pithed by the jagged metal that now framed the open rear of the inverted cargo bay and peered in.

  He moved close enough to track her attention. She was intensely methodical, not just peering into the wreck. Instead, every foot of the rear break came under her scrutiny—top-left to bottom-right. Then she seemed to repeat the process one meter into the hull at exactly the same pace. Then another.

  “Um,” Pierre couldn’t decide what was safe to say and what wasn’t. What could he tell this investigator without implicating Rosa? Or should he turn her in? Rosa hadn’t actually done anything—other than agreeing to go along with everything and then not reporting the general’s plan.

  Shit!

  Could she get away with “under the orders of a superior officer” as an excuse? No, she said she’d volunteered.

  Double shit!

  And he’d never asked her why.

  He turned to look toward the mainland. The moment she’d told him that she was part of the plot to take the plane, his brain had shut down—or tried to.

  Then it had gotten worse.

  Three-star generals leading hijackings?

  Pierre was pure USAF. His lineage traced all the way back to pre-World War II Army Air Corps. And now one of the service’s top generals had decided to form his own Air Force.

  What was up with that?

  Unable to stand it anymore, he’d stormed out of Rosa’s room and somehow ended up sitting on top of the VA hospital’s roof by the helipad.