“Look,” Holly was pointing out her window. “Part of a wing and engine are jammed into that big yacht. Looks like there’s another piece over there in that sailboat.”
Indeed, there was a Hercules propeller snagged in the sailboat’s rigging. Both masts lay overboard, but a section of the wing remained there. That accounted for some of the missing plane.
“That fire is creeping me out, mate,” Holly shook her head.
Miranda would trust to Holly for naming the emotion. Again, the evidence of fire was widespread. None of the buildings ashore had been burned, but the two piers were badly blackened—the stone outer pier with char and burnt buildings, and the wooden inner pier was now little more than blackened stumps sticking out of the water. Several fire engines ranged along the waterfront.
Then the view was cut off as their plane turned onto final approach to land at the airport.
Ever since her first-ever military investigation—a downed C-5 Galaxy at Joint Base Lewis-McChord—fire had never bothered her particularly. Except she hated the destruction of evidence crucial to an investigation.
The view when they deplaned was refreshingly like her island in Washington State. This was far more familiar than the jagged peaks of Aspen. Rather than the towering Douglas firs of home, Catalina had brown scrubby slopes on the few hilltops that reached higher than the lofty airport. But in every direction that had a view, the sea shone brightly. It wasn’t the midnight blue of Puget Sound, but rather the true blue that was still the Pacific without the brighter tropical tones.
It smelled different. Dry brush rather than sharp conifer, but—
“Hope you’re not in a hurry,” one of the Air Force pilots remarked as he tied down the airplane.
“Why is that?”
“We’re ten miles from town here. A taxi can take half an hour each way on these roads. If there’s one available at all with that mess down in the harbor.”
Holly stepped in. “We’re with the NTSB. Of course we’re in a hurry to get down there, mate. Sooner’s not within a dingo’s whisker of fast enough.”
The pilot shrugged and went to walk away.
But Miranda saw something coming their way from the mainland.
A speck, bright in the sky and easy to spot. A rotorcraft.
“Captain. Could you please call that US Coast Guard helicopter and reroute them here? I presume that they’re on their way to the waterfront and we won’t be much out of their way.”
By the time it had come close enough to the island to resolve into more than a bright dot, it began turning in their direction.
Holly held up a hand palm out.
Miranda tried to slap it high-five, but it didn’t work very well. Maybe the ability to do high-fives was genetic like so many other things that she couldn’t do right.
“Hold up your hand, Miranda.”
She did, reluctantly.
Holly slapped it just hard enough to tingle, but not enough to hurt.
It appeared normal.
“Do that again.”
Holly shrugged and repeated the gesture. Miranda studied the angle of attack and pivot moments at shoulder, elbow, and wrist.
“Now hold up your hand.”
Holly did as she’d instructed.
Miranda moved her joints through the observed motions at one-quarter speed.
Shoulder and elbow initiating the motion, hand lagging behind. As the shoulder stopped, the elbow continued with the hand shifting for correct angle of impact.
She repeated it at full speed. While her aim was off, there was still sufficient contact to create a similar tingle and zing on her skin’s surfaces.
Miranda lined up to try again, then saw the look on the face of the pilot, who had rejoined them. She wasn’t sure what it meant. So instead, she slipped out her phone and snapped a photo of him to study.
As the pilot blinked in surprise, she turned the phone to Holly. “What is that expression?”
Holly offered the pilot one of her grins. “Half disbelief and half thinking that you’re off your rocker.”
“Only half?”
At Holly’s laugh and nod, Miranda felt relieved. She’d always estimated that she was seventy to eighty percent off.
The big HH-60 Jayhawk variant of the Black Hawk settled close beside them, its white-and-orange paint job shining brightly next to the far duller Air Force jet.
It settled just long enough for her and Holly to scramble aboard. There were the pilots, two crew chiefs, a medic, and a man who reminded her a little of a gloomy troll hunched in the dark.
31
Master Sergeant Pierre Jones had been sitting on the hospital’s roof trying to figure out how his life had gotten so much more complicated than it had been this morning.
He’d started the day off looking forward to a series of tests on their new aircraft. Any airtime was good time as far as he was concerned. And that had been before he’d remembered he’d be flying those hours sitting beside Tech Sergeant Rosa Cruz. Beautiful, funny, and all-Christ competent.
Finding out that their unit commander was in on it just made the whole thing the shits. Then all the rest…
Right about the time he’d decided he’d just sit there on the hospital roof helipad until he turned into mulch, a medical crew had raced out from the elevator and shooed him aside.
A landing Coast Guard Jayhawk had disgorged multiple victims.
Burn victims.
“Avalon?” he’d asked one of the crew chiefs.
“More to come.” He’d helped the woman heft her end of a stretcher as they shifted the first of three from the cargo bay onto a rolling gurney.
“Need a lift.” Maybe the answer he was looking for was at the crash.
“Not a taxicab.”
He’d pulled his ID. “Master Sergeant Jones. I was on that plane until I had to bail out. Need to get back out there.”
“Still not a taxi.” But then she’d focused on his face.
He didn’t know what he looked like. He’d bet it was about right for having just reached Hell’s intake and registration desk. Apparently the crew chief thought the same.
“Shit!” She’d waved him aboard, then yelled forward to the pilots. “We got a hitchhiker. Crash investigation.”
Which wasn’t quite accurate, but he’d take it.
He sat in the corner of the Jayhawk’s cargo bay and did his best to stay out of the way as the crew re-stowed their medical gear during the short flight and prepared for the next load of victims.
They stopped at the top of the island and picked up a small brunette and a shining blonde.
“Still not a fucking taxi service,” the crew chief muttered to him as the bird lifted again.
He nodded his agreement. Not that it mattered.
The thing that Pierre couldn’t imagine was how to explain what he now knew. And by his silence, he too was complicit as sin. He still wasn’t clear why he’d kept his mouth shut when he shouldn’t have.
The investigators had asked the key question, Do you have anything else to add that might be relevant to this crash investigation?
He’d evaded with, Not at this time. But no way was that going to save his ass if there was a court-martial.
And there was a three-star general in the middle of the mess? That was way above his pay grade. He was just a master sergeant and had never actually met a three-star.