“There is a very curious pattern of damage here that I haven’t seen before.”
“Well,” Holly returned to Miranda’s side. “It did have the shit blown out of it when it crashed.”
Miranda shook her head. “First, such a simple impact, even at high speed, should not have ignited the entire bomb load. Second, look at the effects.”
Pierre felt like an automaton as both he and Holly turned to look at the plane, turned back to look at each other, then shrugged in unison.
Miranda continued without appearing to notice. “Look past the obvious blast damage from the bomb’s detonations. Note the liquefaction of the underlying materials. Even the metal shows fluid rather than brittle deformation—which is not typical in a blast explosion.”
That, at least, he could explain. “That was me.” At least he’d told that part to the investigators.
Both women turned to look at him, though Miranda kept staring at his chin until he had to rub it to make sure there was nothing there.
“I had an…altercation with the pilot. Basically, he tried to shoot me when I realized he was stealing the plane. I broke the final mirror off the—” No. That was classified.
“The HEL-A laser,” Miranda stated.
“But you aren’t supposed to know about that.”
Holly just smirked at him.
Miranda turned back to studying the aircraft. “Without the final mirror, a partially unfocused beam would have been directed at the rear of the aircraft. Is it still the hundred-kilowatt version, or did they manage to get the one-fifty configured in time for the Block 30 upgrade?”
“One-fifty,” slipped out before he could stop himself.
Holly looked impressed; Miranda just looked at the plane.
“Based on the varying degrees of damage, assuming you used the laser’s full output—”
“I did.”
“—and a minimum of atmospheric blooming effect due to short range down the length of the plane, I’d estimate that the laser was engaged for thirty to forty seconds.”
According to the jet skier, they’d retrieved him approximately two-point-seven miles from Avalon. At three hundred miles per hour, the Ghostrider had flown another thirty-two seconds.
“Who the hell are you, lady?”
Holly shushed him. “Don’t bother her when she’s thinking. Besides, I can tell you the only answer you’ll ever get to that question. ‘My name is Miranda Chase. I’m the investigator-in-charge for the NTSB.’ ”
“Well, that doesn’t tell me shit.”
“Right. And it doesn’t tell you shit that she knows more about your top-secret laser than you do?”
Pierre grunted. Another question he didn’t have a good answer to. He thought that he knew everyone on the inside of this project, because the circle was very small—they’d all been in his class at Lockheed Martin in Marietta, Georgia, as either students or engineering instructors.
And now this NTSB investigator, who should be looking after bunged up 737s, was pointing out effects of the HEL-A laser after he’d intentionally broken it? That implied a level of knowledge that even he didn’t have.
“Therefore,” Miranda turned to face Holly, but didn’t quite look at her either, “we have a plane crash that was due to sabotage of a hijacked flight. And we have an earlier crash that was completely intentional. Why am I here? Neither of these are pilot error or aeronautical failures.”
“Wait. What?” Pierre hadn’t heard anything about a second one.
“I said hush!” Holly turned back to Miranda. “Even Mike can’t get what’s happening.”
“Who’s Mike?”
Holly punched his arm hard enough to hurt.
36
Lizzy had been a fighter pilot for years. Then she’d shifted over to tactical training. First training other flight leaders, then ultimately their commanders.
But her first love had always been space. Her dreams of leaving orbit had died before she’d been born, with the demise of the Apollo program. She hadn’t even tried for the shuttle program—a female fighter pilot had enough hurdles to climb without having to live it down if she failed to make the grade. That a class of only a dozen astronauts was chosen from nearly twenty thousand applicants wouldn’t offset that worst of labels among pilots—“failure.”
Or so she’d thought at the time.
But when the chance came to jump over to the NRO satellite program, she’d leapt without a hesitation. Everything about it, tactically and technologically, just…fit.
The same way technology seemed to fit Jeremy.
Once aboard the Ghostrider at Andrews, he’d spent less than three minutes inspecting the laser—barely glancing at the big guns. Instead, the moment he’d sat down at the weapons console, it was as if the rest of the Ghostrider disappeared for him.
The depths of his concentration was revealed in his running commentary to Mike.
“Pretty cute, huh, Auntie Gray?” Jon whispered over her shoulder as they watched.
She could only nod. Mike might understand barely a tenth of what Jeremy was saying, but that didn’t stop him from being encouraging.
More than that. He asked questions.
“So, how does it fire through clouds?”
“Well, there are several compensators here,” Jeremy tapped four separate controls. “It’s just a beam of light, so technically a line-of-sight instrument. However, by adjusting the emission frequency and pulse rate, you can—huh, yeah, like that—you can adjust for interference and retain a high percentage of the beam’s power for several seconds dependent upon the estimated cloud’s water density. Oh, look how they show that. Very cool.”
Lizzy saw that Mike wasn’t trying to increase his own understanding, but rather was asking questions that would increase Jeremy’s.
“He may irritate the hell out of you, Auntie, but Mike’s the best I’ve ever seen at what he does. I still don’t get why Miranda doesn’t want to directly contract her team to the military. She—”
“You asked her that? Jon, nephew-to-be, since when are you an idiot?”
Jon just gaped at her.
Lizzy rubbed at her face. A crew began coming aboard through the forward door. Despite the size of a C-130, there was little extra space in a Ghostrider.
Five big men entered and headed to the guns. Two more for the cockpit. A small woman in combat fatigues stepped into the shadows by the sensor control station.
Every post had its position and it was soon clear that they were in the way. Even Mike was getting squeezed for his space beside Jeremy.
She led Jon back out onto the tarmac. Night had slipped up on them and the perimeter of security lights around the massive hangar for the Air Force One and Two jets began standing out against the darkness at the far end of the airfield. The cool air was a relief—even in June, DC was heating up. They came to a stop out past the port wingtip.
“Why did you suggest that to Miranda?” Lizzy wondered where the tact had suddenly come from. Because Jon actually was her nephew-to-be? No. She was not into nepotism. It was because he was a good young officer and she liked him.
“My commanding general felt that bringing her team on board as full-time contractors would be a good move. Her insights have proven to be essential to multiple investigations. Also, working on existing safety practices would—”
“Don’t you know anything about Miranda Chase?”
“More than you might think, General Gray,” he responded stiffly. “I’ve been studying information about—”
“You’re as bad as she is.”
“But I—”
“No,” she wasn’t going to let him speak. “Throw out whatever books you’re reading. If you really care about her…”
“I do!”
“Then study her. This is me speaking, not General Gray. Damn it, Jon. Yes, she’s the best crash investigator I’ve ever seen, present company included.”
“No argument,” Jon held up his hands.
“Miranda Chase is a h
igh-functioning autistic, air-crash savant. But don’t think that’s all she is any more than I’m just some glorified image analyst turned bureaucrat. She’s also a woman terrified of change. No. That’s wrong. Miranda is a woman mortally confused by change. You weren’t around when she first acquired this team. It’s been eight months and she’s only just now figuring out how to work with them—and I’d wager that’s stretching her to the limits every single day.”
Jon grimaced. “Yeah, I saw her make some notes to that effect in that little book she always carries.”
Lizzy had seen her do that as well. “You have to pay attention to the woman, not to wherever the hell your imagination thinks she fits. She belongs in the NTSB, and she knows it. If you try to take away the one thing she truly knows, you’ll lose. Trust me!”
Jon was hunched with his hands in his pockets. Finally, after inspecting the pavement for an inordinately long time, he looked up at her but didn’t lose the hunch.
“Shit! When did you get so smart?”
She could only laugh at that. “Hell if I know! Maybe it comes with the star.” She tapped the one on the shoulder of her uniform.
“Huh, got a ways to go then.” He rubbed at his own collar point oak leaf. “Guess I know one thing though.”
“What’s that?”
“My uncle is one lucky bastard.”
“He is!” Lizzy counted herself pretty lucky too.
37
Taz was amazed that it had worked.
Her first call after the Ghostrider crash in Avalon harbor had been to locate the other two AC-130Js.
Her second had ascertained that there was no training flight planned tonight for the one at Andrews Air Force Base.
The third had been to file a new training order—to be manned by a very different crew.
Base security had worried her. But apparently their IDs weren’t registered as dead yet, so it had been a simple matter to get to the plane. Then she’d almost blown it by nearly stepping in front of General Gray, ducking into the Ghostrider’s interior shadows at the last second. That had been too close.
Now she stood in those shadows and watched the two men at the weapons control console.
“But what happens when you’re in nonstandard flight configurations?” The slender man asked the seated Vietnamese.
“Okay, watch this, Mike. It’s so cool. I’ll just set up a SIM space here.”
There was a fast rattle of keys that Taz couldn’t quite see. She shifted through the shadows as their sensor operator came aboard until she had a better view.
“I’ve simulated us in inverted flight.”
“Put on your seat harness,” this Mike person teased the man at the laser console.
The operator took him literally, and snapped in with an ease that showed a deep familiarity with the complexities of a five-point harness. “Okay, here we are in a sixty-degree, inverted bank. Watch what happens.”
And Taz watched as the man’s fingers flew over the console.
“I don’t actually need to key any corrections. Now the M102 howitzer requires compensation for angle of attack, airspeed, and so on. Especially the trajectory from our theoretical inverted position. The howitzer shell will appear to fall upward due to the Earth’s gravity pulling the shell down to earth. The targeting information must be inverted with the over-ninety-degree bank angle. But watch the laser.”
And Taz studied the simulation as he targeted and fired, nailing the simulated drone.
“See? It’s all line-of-sight operations. No gravitational effects. We need to worry about air density, humidity levels, and particulate content like dust, which will scatter the beam,” he tapped various pieces of information on the screens that meant nothing to her. “But the angle doesn’t matter at all.”
General JJ Martinez walked up the aisle from the gunnery positions.
She eased away to join him.
“Did you find us a laser operator?”
Taz considered as she continued watching the two of them. “Civilian contractors by their dress and speech patterns. But definitely the skill set we need.”
“Close enough. We’re out of time. I’ll be up in the cockpit. Get them to come along nicely, if you can.” Then he turned on his heel and headed for the cockpit ladder. Nicely if you can meant under duress if necessary.
She decided on a combination approach.
“Excuse me,” she stepped from the shadows.
“Well, hello there,” Mike’s tone did one of those, I’m now speaking to a woman things that made her so sick of the old-guard military. At least it didn’t sound demeaning per SOP. No, this Mike’s standard operating procedure was “flirt mode” not “misogynistic-asshole mode.”
She definitely didn’t have time for that and ignored him.
“Are we at your station?” the operator asked. “I hope that’s okay. I just can’t get over the wonderful control suite for the HEL-A. That’s one bad-boy laser but it is configured to be run with…”
He kept going on about the tech at a level she couldn’t follow. Taz never had been a technical gal.
The Number Three engine fired to life and began winding up to speed with a throaty buzz. Number Four fired close behind it; General JJ wasn’t wasting any time.
Her art was cutting through the bureaucracy of red tape; something she did by leveraging people’s weaknesses. His overeager manner gave her the key she needed to turn.
“We’re about to run a test flight over the offshore VACAPES Test Range. We’ll be night-firing at numerous targets. Would you like to come along for the flight?”
“Like to? Like to! That would be fantastic. I mean usually it’s Jon or Holly who get to go along on a flight, because I’m not a pilot. But I’d love a chance to study the actual performance profiles of—”
“Good. You just need to tell your ground team.” She couldn’t do it herself or General Gray might recognize her.
“Ground team? Oh, Jon and General Gray.” He shot to his feet…or tried to. The harness slammed him back into the seat. He looked down at it in surprise, which was pretty amusing. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt that.
“I’ve got it, Jeremy,” Mike patted his shoulder, which also gave Taz the operator’s name. How curious for a young Vietnamese man to be named Jeremy.
She could overhear Mike as he shouted out the door that they were going on the “training” flight—at least as far as he knew. She considered coaxing Mike off the plane, but he might prove to be useful leverage later and decided to let him remain aboard.
“Look at this!” Jeremy called for her attention, apparently unable to restrain himself. “See how they’re compensating for atmospheric blooming—that’s air turbulence caused by the laser superheating the air—by oscillating the beam over the millisecond time frame. That’s just so cool!”
He continued displaying different aspects of the weapon. She could feel the energy and excitement coursing through him.
Mike returned. “If she and Jon head back to her office, they’ll toss our packs in the hangar office.”
“Oh, I need to secure your phones for the flight. Please set them to Airplane Mode and hand them to me. It’s a required security precaution.”
They both handed them over as engines One and Two came up to full revolutions. The plane eased into forward motion smoothly enough that none of them stumbled.
“I’ll just stow these.” Taz circled around the other side of the weapon control stations. As the plane taxied to the head of Runway 01, they passed a grass strip.
She heaved both phones into the grass.
Then she pulled out her own phone and stared down at it.
For nineteen years her life had been about communicating the general’s wishes to whoever opposed him.
For better or worse, that was over now. This mission was their final play.
She heaved it after the other two, and closed the forward passenger door.
Taz leaned her forehead against the se
aled door. For the thousandth time she wished her life was different. Too bad she had no idea what she wanted it to be.
Moments later they were aloft and headed south-southwest—the opposite direction from their filed flight plan to the VACAPES Test Range. She checked in with the man at sensors; he’d already shut down all tracking devices. Now they would look no different electronically than any other general aviation plane out for a night flight.
Time to go break the news to their new laser operator.
38
“I don’t understand what’s happening.” Miranda glared at his left ear hard enough to make Pierre scratch at it.
“It is a very rare accident that I must report as ‘Cause Unknown.’ Those are almost exclusively when the plane was completely lost in the ocean or deepest wilderness. There’s only an average of one every year or so, including both commercial and general aviation.”
Pierre didn’t care about any of that. But when he went to speak, Holly gave him an urgent shake of her head.
“In a crash with multiple causes yet with a clear final result, there typically remain some indicators signifying safety recommendations to be made. However, two consecutive crashes of very elite and rare AC-130 gunships, both with known causes unrelated to the aircraft? That just isn’t right.”
Pierre followed her gaze as she looked around the remains. They’d managed to climb about fifteen feet into the remaining fuselage before being completely blocked by the wreckage.
Miranda had explained what they were seeing as they went. Which was pretty amazing as he could barely recognize anything in an aircraft type he’d spent thousands of hours in.
“The bomb racks in the rear ramp were definitely the point of ignition for the final explosion as evidenced by the deformation angles observable in the aft portion of the remaining hull.” Yada. Yada. Yada.
Forward of that, their way was blocked by the mass of the M102 howitzer. There was a subtle scent on the air that was almost lost behind the smell of the scorching. But here, deep inside the cargo hold where the fire hadn’t reached, it was prevalent.
Ghostrider: an NTSB-military technothriller (Miranda Chase Book 4) Page 15