“Really?” Now he was begging her.
How could she know? How to explain to the child she herself had once been, what she now knew to be the hard truth of death?
“Really?” An escalation of pleading. She didn’t want another choking embrace.
She wouldn’t lie, not even to an upset child.
How to explain what she knew in a way he’d understand? Then she remembered what she’d done when she’d finally stopped crying over her parents’ deaths.
“Do you know why I study plane crashes?”
Jeff bit his lower lip and shook his head.
“I don’t do it to learn why a plane crashed.”
“You don’t?” That earned her a frown that she hoped meant he was really listening.
“No. I do it to make sure it never happens to anyone else again. At least not for the same reason.”
Jeff stared at her hard, but she didn’t feel the need to look away from him.
She waited him out. That fierce concentration was something she knew very well from herself.
Finally, he nodded. “Teach me how to do that.”
From somewhere deep inside her, a laugh came up. A sad laugh that also had tears, though she blinked those back even as she swallowed the laugh—barely managing not to choke on it. It was a drive she knew that, once embraced, would never let him go. One that blocked out all other possibilities.
She’d spent a lifetime crawling through the remains of dead planes and past dead people. It wasn’t a task she’d wish for anybody.
“Maybe you’ll fly planes someday. Or help build safer ones.”
“I wanna learn why they break.”
She sighed—to herself—for his sake. “Well, that can be useful to understand if you want to fly them or make them safer, too.”
“Show me.”
“Well, next we need to get to the cockpit to do that.”
He jumped to his feet. “Let’s go!”
Then he looked around in every direction.
“Uh! Which way is it?”
She pointed in the direction opposite from where they’d found the tail and the scorched pole.
Jeff grabbed her hand and led the way.
11
Just as they were turning away, Holly and Mike came up over the ridge by the howitzer barrel.
Jeff kept tugging at her hand, but Miranda stopped and waited for them to pack up their climbing equipment and join them.
Mike set the battered orange case of the CVDR, cockpit voice and data recorder, at her feet.
“What happened to it?” It was incredibly battered.
“You should have seen the tail it came out of.” Holly tapped the radio in Miranda’s vest. “Isn’t it on?”
It wasn’t. Yet another thing she’d missed. This was a very…confusing wreck. She took a deep breath and centered herself. Then she began her usual process of tapping all of the pockets on her vest. When she reached the radio, she sighed and turned it on. Lastly, she tapped her chest, then had to look down in surprise. Not even her NTSB badge was in place.
“Someone been distracting you?” Holly gave Jeff a punch on the shoulder. Thankfully without the usual force she unleashed on others. “You been asking a lot of good questions?”
“Maybe,” Jeff grinned up at Holly.
Miranda fished out her badge and placed it so that it faced outward.
“I’m Miranda Chase. Investigator-in-charge for the NTSB.”
“Well, I’m glad we got that cleared up,” Holly joked.
Mike was laughing as well for some reason.
Miranda ignored them both and pointed at the steel pipe Holly had tied her rope to. “That’s the barrel of an M102 howitzer. And we also found a Bofors L/60 autocannon, or the remains of one.”
“That confirms it,” Holly nodded to Mike.
“What?”
“From down at the wing, Jon was whining that something was wrong. Must have picked up on it being an AC-130 gunship rather than a standard Hercules.”
“All that’s missing is the GAU-12 Equalizer rotary cannon.”
Holly shrugged. “We crossed paths with the remains of a 20 mm Vulcan cannon.”
Miranda looked at her in surprise. “That’s—”
“What’s all that stuff mean?” Jeff asked.
“It means that the plane that crashed here wasn’t one that should be flying anymore. That it still has the Vulcan cannon means that it was an old gunship and they were all retired by 2001.”
“You mean another plane crashed, too?” Jeff’s panicked tone was back.
“You’re thinking is upside down. Maybe this will help.” Holly grabbed him by the ankles and hung him upside down. “Do you always ask so many questions?”
Jeff’s panic turned to a half giggle.
“It means,” Holly explained still holding Jeff aloft, “that this plane isn’t one that should have been flying. That’s all. It’s still the plane what planted its nose here so hard. Got it?”
Jeff nodded from his inverted position. “Got it.”
Mike stepped in and grabbed Jeff around the waist to set him back on his feet.
“Remember to keep thinking upside down.” Holly’s order earned her another giggle.
Miranda let her mind consider the surrounding area.
Right side up or upside down, there was only the one reported crash.
But it was a plane that shouldn’t have been seen outside of a storage boneyard.
So where had this gunship come from?
12
When Miranda had raised her question about the gunship’s origin, Holly had shrugged.
“Like I told that guy panting on your trail, a crash is a crash.”
The guy…? Miranda shoved the thought aside as irrelevant.
Holly was right.
But the more Miranda investigated this crash, the less sense it made.
They found the very nose of the cockpit by following the trajectory of debris.
It had survived more or less intact. Its second landing—after the initial crash and then the brief flight due to the explosion—had plowed through a perimeter fence of orange plastic mesh. Jeff said it was there to stop people from skiing down the wrong side of the peak and into a dangerous wilderness area with avalanches and cliffs and things.
Past the fence, the cockpit section had tumbled down a rocky slope that had severely battered the exterior but left the interior surprisingly intact. It had landed nearly right side up. Out its missing windows towered the true peaks of Snowmass and the Maroon Bells mountains reaching another two thousand feet higher than the top of the Cirque where the plane had crashed.
They’d checked that it was firmly wedged and wouldn’t be falling off any cliffs before Miranda led the way aboard. This section was surprisingly intact. The ladder itself was badly warped, but still usable.
The view when she stepped into the cockpit was somewhat surreal.
Without the windshield glass, it was a disconcertingly clear sight from inside the plane. Both mountains were still snowcapped and close enough to imply imminent impact—if the Hercules could still have flown.
The QAR, quick access recorder, in the dashboard had survived. She extracted it for Jeremy to analyze when he joined them. Everything was…