The top of the mountain was suddenly very still.
She and Jeff stood alone together at the very top of the ski area. A hundred feet below and well to the east, a small team of firefighters were using shovels to toss dirt on one of the last hotspots. Other than that, the fire was gone. It had burned fast and hot, leaving behind blackened soil, the scent of char, and little else other than tiny bits of a very large airplane. The timberline lay perhaps eight hundred feet below, near the level of the wings’ final landing places.
“It’s awful quiet,” Jeff whispered.
“It is.” A light breeze brushed cold air over them. She reached for her pocket anemometer…but wasn’t wearing her vest. Very unusual for her. She’d been distracted by so many things. She pulled it out of her pack.
Slipping out her personal notebook, she made an entry to remember to speak with Jon about how it was possible that he liked seeing her clothed—yet that didn’t somehow preclude him wanting to have sex again. Then she put it away and slipped out the anemometer.
“Can I have one of those?”
“My anemometer?”
“No. What’s a amonometer? I want a vest with all the cool pockets for stuff.”
“I only have this one. I’m sorry. But if you decide you need a tool, you just ask. Until then, I’ll carry them.”
“Okay. What’s a amanonometer?”
So, she showed him how to measure windspeed, direction, and relative humidity, and how she noted down each item.
“Cool, what’s next?”
Miranda surveyed the hillside covered with twists of metal. “Let’s see if we can find the cockpit of the plane.”
6
“I don’t see anything particularly wrong,” Jeremy was looking at the twisted remains of the port-side wing.
“Other than the thirteen dead?” Jon knew the bodies were cleared off the mountains, wouldn’t even have been here by the wings. Still, thirteen fellow fliers? That hurt bad, a feeling he’d never grown used to.
“I mean the wing. Nothing looks particularly wrong with the wing.”
Jon had to agree with Jeremy’s assessment. But he couldn’t help glancing away from the wings and up the hillside.
However, there was a lot wrong with Miranda. He just didn’t know what it was.
After three months apart, she’d barely acknowledged him at the airport. She didn’t strike him as fickle, though she’d been very cozy with the pilot, both on the ground and riding up front with him. Then taking his son with her up to the main crash site and dumping Jon downslope with Jeremy when the main crash was up above.
He’d thought their last round of e-mails had gone well. Or well enough. She was even more challenging to communicate with remotely than in person.
“Something strange is going on.” And he didn’t like it at all.
“You mean other than the wings being ripped off the sides of the Hercules, crashing into a mountain, and bursting into flame?” Jeremy was photographing the root of the starboard wing where the distortion of the metal was consistent with being torn off in flight. “I’d have to agree. I’m seeing no intrinsic damage to any of the wing’s structure that isn’t caused by impact with the rocks or trees it landed on. Flaps and ailerons are relatively intact and I’m seeing no stress shearing in the hinge points or control rods.”
Jon sighed and looked back down at the big wing. Fifty-seven feet long, it had been twisted and bent like a foam toy. The breached tanks had spilled fuel, but it hadn’t been an explosion. The metal around the tanks was crumpled inward by the impacts, not blown outward from inside. The fuel had leaked, caught fire, and that had ignited the forest fire that had burned the mountaintop. Actually, they were above the tree line, so it had been a brush fire, but still destructive.
Jeremy stowed his camera. “I think we should check one of the engines next. See if we can find any sign of thrust reversal on the propellers or over-revving. Maybe a flameout.” His tone went very wry at the end—a sense of humor about something mechanical was a surprise.
“Yeah. Sure,” Jon answered in kind. Then looked at Jeremy in surprise. They knew it was a depressurization event by the pilot’s report. So, was Jeremy teasing him out of a bad mood? Or just making a joke?
Either way it worked and they began a methodical investigation of the wing.
But talk about a flameout. Had he said something wrong while trying to flirt with Miranda over the phone this morning? He should know better, but it was how he’d connected with other women in the past. Except Miranda wasn’t other women. He was attracted to her precisely because she wasn’t like other women.
Most women saw “handsome Air Force major” and thought: stability, status, and meal ticket for life. Miranda seemed to see Jon Swift: crash investigator and pilot. That alone was a rare gift.
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.