“Therefore,” Miranda turned to face Holly, but didn’t quite look at her either, “we have a plane crash that was due to sabotage of a hijacked flight. And we have an earlier crash that was completely intentional. Why am I here? Neither of these are pilot error or aeronautical failures.”
“Wait. What?” Pierre hadn’t heard anything about a second one.
“I said hush!” Holly turned back to Miranda. “Even Mike can’t get what’s happening.”
“Who’s Mike?”
Holly punched his arm hard enough to hurt.
36
Lizzy had been a fighter pilot for years. Then she’d shifted over to tactical training. First training other flight leaders, then ultimately their commanders.
But her first love had always been space. Her dreams of leaving orbit had died before she’d been born, with the demise of the Apollo program. She hadn’t even tried for the shuttle program—a female fighter pilot had enough hurdles to climb without having to live it down if she failed to make the grade. That a class of only a dozen astronauts was chosen from nearly twenty thousand applicants wouldn’t offset that worst of labels among pilots—“failure.”
Or so she’d thought at the time.
But when the chance came to jump over to the NRO satellite program, she’d leapt without a hesitation. Everything about it, tactically and technologically, just…fit.
The same way technology seemed to fit Jeremy.
Once aboard the Ghostrider at Andrews, he’d spent less than three minutes inspecting the laser—barely glancing at the big guns. Instead, the moment he’d sat down at the weapons console, it was as if the rest of the Ghostrider disappeared for him.
The depths of his concentration was revealed in his running commentary to Mike.
“Pretty cute, huh, Auntie Gray?” Jon whispered over her shoulder as they watched.
She could only nod. Mike might understand barely a tenth of what Jeremy was saying, but that didn’t stop him from being encouraging.
More than that. He asked questions.
“So, how does it fire through clouds?”
“Well, there are several compensators here,” Jeremy tapped four separate controls. “It’s just a beam of light, so technically a line-of-sight instrument. However, by adjusting the emission frequency and pulse rate, you can—huh, yeah, like that—you can adjust for interference and retain a high percentage of the beam’s power for several seconds dependent upon the estimated cloud’s water density. Oh, look how they show that. Very cool.”
Lizzy saw that Mike wasn’t trying to increase his own understanding, but rather was asking questions that would increase Jeremy’s.
“He may irritate the hell out of you, Auntie, but Mike’s the best I’ve ever seen at what he does. I still don’t get why Miranda doesn’t want to directly contract her team to the military. She—”
“You asked her that? Jon, nephew-to-be, since when are you an idiot?”
Jon just gaped at her.
Lizzy rubbed at her face. A crew began coming aboard through the forward door. Despite the size of a C-130, there was little extra space in a Ghostrider.
Five big men entered and headed to the guns. Two more for the cockpit. A small woman in combat fatigues stepped into the shadows by the sensor control station.
Every post had its position and it was soon clear that they were in the way. Even Mike was getting squeezed for his space beside Jeremy.
She led Jon back out onto the tarmac. Night had slipped up on them and the perimeter of security lights around the massive hangar for the Air Force One and Two jets began standing out against the darkness at the far end of the airfield. The cool air was a relief—even in June, DC was heating up. They came to a stop out past the port wingtip.
“Why did you suggest that to Miranda?” Lizzy wondered where the tact had suddenly come from. Because Jon actually was her nephew-to-be? No. She was not into nepotism. It was because he was a good young officer and she liked him.
“My commanding general felt that bringing her team on board as full-time contractors would be a good move. Her insights have proven to be essential to multiple investigations. Also, working on existing safety practices would—”
“Don’t you know anything about Miranda Chase?”
“More than you might think, General Gray,” he responded stiffly. “I’ve been studying information about—”
“You’re as bad as she is.”
“But I—”
“No,” she wasn’t going to let him speak. “Throw out whatever books you’re reading. If you really care about her…”
“I do!”
“Then study her. This is me speaking, not General Gray. Damn it, Jon. Yes, she’s the best crash investigator I’ve ever seen, present company included.”
“No argument,” Jon held up his hands.
“Miranda Chase is a high-functioning autistic, air-crash savant. But don’t think that’s all she is any more than I’m just some glorified image analyst turned bureaucrat. She’s also a woman terrified of change. No. That’s wrong. Miranda is a woman mortally confused by change. You weren’t around when she first acquired this team. It’s been eight months and she’s only just now figuring out how to work with them—and I’d wager that’s stretching her to the limits every single day.”
Jon grimaced. “Yeah, I saw her make some notes to that effect in that little book she always carries.”
Lizzy had seen her do that as well. “You have to pay attention to the woman, not to wherever the hell your imagination thinks she fits. She belongs in the NTSB, and she knows it. If you try to take away the one thing she truly knows, you’ll lose. Trust me!”
Jon was hunched with his hands in his pockets. Finally, after inspecting the pavement for an inordinately long time, he looked up at her but didn’t lose the hunch.
“Shit! When did you get so smart?”
She could only laugh at that. “Hell if I know! Maybe it comes with the star.” She tapped the one on the shoulder of her uniform.
“Huh, got a ways to go then.” He rubbed at his own collar point oak leaf. “Guess I know one thing though.”
“What’s that?”
“My uncle is one lucky bastard.”
“He is!” Lizzy counted herself pretty lucky too.
37
Taz was amazed that it had worked.
Her first call after the Ghostrider crash in Avalon harbor had been to locate the other two AC-130Js.
Her second had ascertained that there was no training flight planned tonight for the one at Andrews Air Force Base.
The third had been to file a new training order—to be manned by a very different crew.
Base security had worried her. But apparently their IDs weren’t registered as dead yet, so it had been a simple matter to get to the plane. Then she’d almost blown it by nearly stepping in front of General Gray, ducking into the Ghostrider’s interior shadows at the last second. That had been too close.
Now she stood in those shadows and watched the two men at the weapons control console.