“What’s missing?” It had been one of her father’s favorite questions. He trained her how to see what wasn’t there as much as what was.
Holly came up and looked over her shoulder. “Other than the bodies?”
“Other than the bodies.” There were yellow tags marking where Mountain Rescue removed the two bodies of the pilots.
The two of them looked over everything, but Miranda could see that Holly didn’t know what it was either.
She pictured the cockpits she’d investigated at other crashes. There were few signs of fire that swept through the interiors of so many crashes, but that was not definitive.
The only burns were the scorch marks of the initial explosion that had launched the cockpit through the fence and down the slope. None of the brush fire had reached here over the back side of the Cirque’s crown.
“When Dad shoots a deer, it can be really messy.” Jeff had been playing with the circuit breakers. She’d recorded the position of each before allowing him to pull and reset them, making small explosive noises with his mouth each time he pushed one in with a sharp click.
“Really messy how?”
He didn’t look up from the breaker panel. “Well, there’s always blood. And if you don’t get a heart or brain shot—Dad says you got to kill them right away like that to be kind—it can go everywhere.” Click. Pow! Click. Boom! Click. Ker-Pow!
Miranda looked down at her feet.
“No blood,” Holly whispered.
“These bodies were dead before the crash. Maybe they died at altitude.”
“Not just dead,” Holly corrected her. She reached out to muss Jeff’s hair, who batted his hands at her to make her stop. “Kid got it all aces. But not dead like recently. Otherwise there would still have been blood.”
“Their seatbelts were unbuckled,” Mike poked his head in through the pilot’s window making the mountain view seem more like a painting than a pending crash. “The FAA wouldn’t approve.”
“The FAA has very limited jurisdiction regarding military flights,” Miranda replied, but it was a knee-jerk reaction. The reality was that Mike was correct. In fact, one of the bodies had been removed from behind the copilot’s seat if the marker was accurate. She couldn’t think of any professional pilot she’d ever met who would unbuckle and try to hide behind their seat, not even with the plane past any possibility of recovery.
“That’s majorly pear-shaped.” Holly tapped the two emergency air masks. The pilot’s was looped around the control yoke. The copilot’s mask was still stowed as if it had never been used.
“You like that, Holly? You’ll love this,” Mike pointed off to the side.
Miranda had had trouble keeping Jeff from playing with the main panel, so she scooted him out ahead of her.
Mike led them about twenty meters away around a rough outcropping.
There stood the front, port-side passenger door for the Hercules all by itself. The base was jammed against the ground and the two sides of the frame had been caught by two boulders. Unlike most commercial airliners where the door opened outward, the C-130 passenger door pulled inward, then slid upward on tracks. The entire door frame had survived intact and landed upright wedged in the rocks.
Looking through the open door was even more surreal than the cockpit windows. One step beyond the threshold was a hundred-meter drop. Yet the big door was perfectly intact, though she expected it would topple and fall at the lightest touch.
Holly had a firm grip on Jeff’s shoulder to make sure he stayed back with the rest of them.
Mike pointed east where the sun was high enough to shine through the door and out toward the true top of Snowmass peak beyond.
“I spoke to the folks at Denver ARTCC again. The Air Route Traffic Control Center was very helpful. The actual flight controller was very upset, but made it through the post-incident interviews before the shift supervisor took her home. I managed to chat with the assistant supervisor who did the debrief.”
“Get her home number while you were about it, mate?”
Mike merely sniffed at Holly’s comment. “He said that the flight declared a depressurization emergency at thirty-nine thousand.”
“Opening this thing,” Holly eased up to the door, “would be one spectacular depressurization event. But if they were masked up, it shouldn’t have been that big an issue.”
“The assistant super says that Shadow Six-four’s flight path nosed down and never came back up. In fact, there was no significant maneuvering before the pilot called total loss of control and stopped responding—other than a final curse. Wings ripped off about ten seconds later, up around twenty thousand feet.”
Miranda looked back toward the cockpit.
Something else was missing from the cockpit. More upside-down thinking. She liked that phrase enough that she knew there was no need to write it down.
There was no blood. There should have been brown stains of dried blood after the force of the impact. That was missing.
The seat belts should have been buckled. Both masks should have been used…
And…
“Come along, Jeff. I want you to help me find something. If it’s here, it should be between the cockpit and the center of the explosion.”
Jeff ran to her side as she explained what she was looking for.
13
Jon stared at the message on his phone. It was a long one and he had to scroll several times to read it all. When he got to the end, he couldn’t believe it and scrolled back to the top. But he’d read the header correctly. This hadn’t been some ordinary flight.
“Jeremy, we’ve got to go.” He began packing his gear.
Jeremy stuck his head out from under the port wing where he’d been inspecting the exhaust port of the Number Three engine. “I’m not done yet.”
“Doesn’t matter. We’ve got bigger problems. I need to get up the mountain.” Then he began stuffing Jeremy’s tools into his pack.
“Hey!” Jeremy scrambled free. “You’ve got to organize it or it doesn’t all fit.”
“Fine, then you do it. You have thirty seconds.” Jon threw up his hands, then shouldered his own pack.
“Where’s the fire?” Somehow, though his pack had been half emptied and laid out across the top of the wing, Jeremy had everything stowed and had slung it into place while Jon was still adjusting his straps.
“In Washington, DC,” Jon said grimly, then turned to climb up the steep slope. It was steep enough that in many places it was only a matter of reaching out to touch the rising ground. “People really ski down this?”
“I’m a computer and airplane nerd from Seattle. What makes you think I’d know?”
“I’m a SEAL’s kid from San Diego who decided to be a black sheep and join the Air Force. You’ve got to know more than me.”
“Not about skiing. I can’t even waterski. Besides, isn’t the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs? That’s where the Olympic ski team trains, right?”
Jon could waterski, but had never liked the cold so kept his mouth shut.
He knew they were about six or seven hundred feet from the top. That shouldn’t take long. He might not have skied at the Academy, but he’d certainly run more than enough in the foothills of the Rockies.