She led him over to what must have been the lift’s final anchor pole. It was significantly bigger than any of the ones she could see on the slope below. “See the burn marks on the pole? What do they tell you?”
“I dunno. That it got burnt?”
“See how on this side, there’s no paint left at all. It’s completely gone, then there is soot on the bare metal. Around the back, the paint is scorched and sooty, even a little blistered, but it’s still there.” She pulled out pliers and a sample bag. Then she freed a thick piece of the paint and bagged it, before holding it up. “This corroborates what your fath—”
“It what it-ates?”
“Corroborates…matches what your father said. The burn pattern tells me that the main explosion was from that direction—it literally blew all the paint off this side of the pole. Then the whole pole was exposed to fire because it’s soot-marked on both sides. But the paint survived on the back side. By taking this sample back to the lab, we’ll be able to create an experiment to test how big an explosion was needed to peel off all of the paint on the other side, well before the fire even arrived here to put soot on the front and blister the paint on the back.”
Jeff squinted at the bag. “You can do all that from that little paint chip?”
“A little paint chip and a large Poma pole.” She pulled out her tablet and photographed it from several angles.
“Cool! Show me more stuff.”
Using the pole as a guide, they headed toward the center of the explosion.
8
“She’s not answering. You sure your radio works?”
Jeremy didn’t answer him. Whether it was because he’d actually crawled partway into the Number Four engine or because he was intentionally ignoring Jon for some reason, it was hard to tell.
He tried the radio again, “Miranda, pick up, damn it!”
Holly’s voice came back over the radio. “No swearing on the airwaves, Major Swift. The FCC doesn’t like it.”
“I don’t need sass. I need to talk to Miranda.”
“If she’s not answering you, mate, there’s a reason.”
“Can’t you just hand your radio to her?”
“Be glad to, except we’re chasing some tail, airplane tail,” he could hear her grin. “She and Jeff are chasing the cockpit. Keep an eye out. We found the last body—this poor sap makes thirteen. I called Mountain Rescue and they’re coming back up for it. Also, tell Jeremy that it looks like someone took a hammer to the black boxes. We’ll need him to see if there’s anything to recover.”
“Jeremy’s—”
“A hammer?” Jeremy asked from right next to his elbow, making him jump.
“Heard that, did you?” Jon snarled at him.
Jeremy winced but didn’t answer him.
“Figure of speech, my young Padawan,” Holly teased. “It’s awfully beat up.”
“Be careful disconnecting the main power buss.”
“Think that was done by the crash. We’re taking pictures and video, but you’d barely recognize it as an airplane’s derrière. This empennage is never flying again.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Jon broke in. “It’s the wrong plane.”
“It’s what?”
“It’s as if there’s something wrong with the crash site. Or maybe with the plane.”
“Yeah, it’s in more pieces than it was built with.”
“No, it’s something more than that. I just don’t know what.”
“Ooo-oo!” She made a noise like a haunting ghost. “There’s something spooky about the plane. Don’t be telling Miranda that it’s the wrong plane, mate. She’ll snap off your head faster than a saltie chowing down on a chihuahua.”
“A what on a—”
“Big nasty crocodile in Australia,” Jeremy explained.
Jon unkeyed the mike.
“Of course,” Holly came back with her accent even thicker, “none of the three of us is so shit-for-brains that we’d tell her something like that in the middle of an investigation.”
“Now who needs to watch their on-air language?”
“I’m Australian. I’m allowed. Anyway, we’re leaving that one for you to explain to her.”
“Well, she’s not answering,” Jon was going to throttle the whole team if they kept this up.
A silence stretched out long enough for Jon to become aware of a bird call that…sounded as if it was very upset about finding its home burned up.
Jeremy reached for his radio. Resigned, Jon gave it to him.
“I’ve got at least another hour here,” he reported to Holly. “I have to go through two more engines and I want to look inside the port wing.”
Holly took a moment to answer. “Mike’s almost done cutting free the black boxes. Nothing much to learn here without collecting every single scrap and rebuilding it. We’ll climb up and make sure nothing happened to Miranda. Meanwhile, this is a plane crash and our job is to investigate it. Finish what you’re doing.”
“Roger that,” Jeremy made a show of returning the radio to the pouch on the side of his pack rather than returning it to Jon.
It was enough to bring his sense of humor back as he turned to help Jeremy once more with the engine investigation.
9
“What kinda gun has such a big rifle barrel?” Jeff did indeed ask numerous questions as his father had implied, but as he listened to the answers and appeared to be absorbing them, Miranda found no dissatisfaction in the process.
She glanced at the barrel and other remains of the gun still attached to it. “It’s from a 40 millimeter L/60 Bofors autocannon.” That finally told her what variation of C-130 Hercules plane it was. An AC-130 gunship.
“Autocannon? That’s like an automatic cannon?”
“Yes.”
“It automatically shoots cannonballs? Like a pirate ship?” His streams of questions were curiously logical from a certain point of view—a person filled with infinite curiosity and only limited experience. Once she’d realized that, she’d discovered an ongoing interest in what he’d ask next.
“Forty-millimeter shells. That’s about an inch and a half across. But yes.” Miranda had never been fascinated by weapons. She could use them, her father had insisted, but only to put down a suffering animal on her island.
“Cool!” Then Jeff knelt in the char to stare into the open end of the barrel.
“Don’t do that!”
Jeff froze and looked at her. “Oh, right! Just like my .22, I gotta make sure there’s no round in the chamber. I never thought of that on a cannon. I thought they were different. Do you think pirates ever looked into their cannons?”
“Not while they were loaded. Not unless they wished to become dead pirates.”
“Right. Whups, I looked in a cannon just as it fired. Ker-Pow!” He splatted his palms against his face, covering his eyes as he staggered in a small circle. “Where’s my head? Where’s my head?” Then he shifted to inspect the Bofors’ feed armature. “So how do I check that?”