“What were they fighting over?” Holly asked. “Hold it! One jet jock shooting another? With the size of their egos? Musta been over some hot Sheila. Oh, your Rosa girlfriend.”
“Not girlfriend.” Maybe if he just threw himself off the pier… Not worth the effort; probably no convenient sharks to eat him alive and get him out of hell.
“Ooo! You like the tricky ones, don’t you?”
He sighed and nodded.
He could feel Miranda waiting. All she cared about was the plane.
“As I mentioned,” he turned to her, “I figured out that they were hijacking an AC-130J Ghostrider gunship. Didn’t sound like a good idea to me. Before I escaped, I busted that piece out of the laser and turned it on. Pilot tried to shoot me—twice. I got lucky once, he flat missed the second. That blood stain on the deck, guess I scorched him some as a bonus.”
Miranda was taking notes.
He sighed, still unsure which side to choose. “If you could leave this last fact out of your report, that’d be… I dunno anymore. Maybe pretend I didn’t say this, but Rosa Cruz was also in on it. Would have been if I hadn’t shoved her off the plane.”
Miranda stared down at her notebook with her pen poised. “I’m not very good at pretending things.”
Perfect. Just fucking perfect.
43
Pierre Jones looked distinctly unhappy every time Rosa was mentioned.
Miranda glanced over her notes to try and understand why. She’d recorded tiny emoji pictograms next to each of her notes. Checking her guesses with Mike after interviews had proved very useful.
The only time Pierre had smiled was when he’d said Rosa Cruz was “sexy as hell.”
And when Holly said that he was gone on Rosa, she’d drawn a “surprised” symbol of a round mouth.
Miranda had to wonder if Major Jon Swift found her to be “sexy as hell”? She looked down at herself and found it hard to imagine. But he had said he enjoyed being with her and seeing her in various states of dress and undress. Perhaps he did.
“Rosa didn’t say much,” Pierre continued. “At least not about the plane. Just that General JJ Martinez needed a Ghostrider and she’d…” he swallowed hard “…agreed to help him. At least until I threw her off the plane while I still thought it was crashing.”
“You’ve spoken to her since the crash?” Miranda’s pen was still hesitating over the page regarding a note about Rosa’s involvement in the hijacking.
“Sure, she’s over in the VA hospital,” he pointed toward the shore. “Dislocated shoulder and observation for mild hypothermia.”
“We need to talk to her,” Miranda needed more information if she was going to decide about whether or not the note was relevant to the investigation.
And maybe she could help them find Jeremy and Mike.
Yes, that was the priority. “We need to find her now.”
“ASAP it is,” Holly raced out to the road.
Miranda and Pierre followed just in time to see her step out in front of a Jeep, making it screech all four tires to avoid running her over. After a few intense moments, during which Holly kept her hand on her big knife, she waved them over.
Miranda and Pierre settled in the back of the Jeep for the long ride up to the airport. The driver looked very unhappy, but didn’t say a word when Holly climbed into the passenger seat and thumped her knife in its sheath on the dash.
Good. She needed to think without distractions. Chatty cab drivers caused her significant issues when traveling.
She would treat the problem in layers. With no crash, she’d have to treat it just like a missing plane. No grid search was relevant, because the plane wasn’t down.
She knew Point of Origin: Andrews Air Force Base.
Lizzy said that Andrews reported a tracked departure to the southwest at a heading of 235 degrees before losing contact. Lizzy was trying to thread together their flight pattern, but they’d turned off all tracking, staying down in the clutter of civilian, general aviation airspace. There were tens of thousands of that class of flights every day over the continental US.
No, they wouldn’t have turned off all tracking, or they’d cause an alarm at any tracking station’s radar as they flew over.
She sent a text to Lizzy, They’re squawking 1200.
Of course! And a thumbs up emoji.
All general aviation flights, not using air traffic control’s flight following service, would have their transponder set to send the 1200 code that would be sent every time the tracking radar swept over their plane. The Ghostrider would look just like any civilian plane to the nation’s traffic control electronics, but they would be tracked.
Still, threading that path across hundreds or thousands of miles was going to be a very hard task and couldn’t be counted on.
Instead, she must resort to interviews.
Pierre claimed he knew nothing else. Should she believe him? Though Miranda knew she was a poor judge of such things, Mike always said to trust her gut. All her gut was telling her was that the hand peach pie she’d eaten atop Snowmass Mountain had been a long time ago.
She’d withhold judgment until they interviewed Rosa Cruz.
Miranda was never very good at those.
“I wish Mike was here.”
“Me too,” Holly’s voice was barely a whisper. “Miss the annoying bugger.”
44
Miranda’s inner calm was shredding.
Thirty minutes to the airport—in the Jeep that had turned out not to be a taxi after all—fifteen miles from Avalon at the far end of Santa Catalina Island. The flight to the mainland had taken under five minutes. Taxiing to the terminal at Santa Monica Airport had taken five more…and the four miles to the hospital took twenty through evening rush-hour traffic. Sixty minutes in transit.
And her calm wasn’t shredding just at the fringes.
Ninety-seven minutes since the departure of the Ghostrider from Andrews Air Force Base with Jeremy and Mike aboard. Cruise speed of four hundred miles per hour equaled six hundred and forty-seven miles, not accounting for lower ground speed during climb-out to cruising altitude.
If they’d roughly held their heading, they could be over Paducah, Kentucky, Waynesboro, Tennessee, or Birmingham, Alabama. If not? Northern Maine, southern Georgia, or the middle of the Atlantic Gulfstream current.
The external brain that had become embodied in her team was being stretched beyond even what her actual brain usually felt like.
Finally at the hospital, they discovered that Rosa’s room was empty.
Before Holly could pull her knife on the entire nurses’ station, Pierre proved that he understood military bureaucracies. He pulled out his military ID, told them he was her squad leader, and they’d better find her stat.
Tech Sergeant Rosa Cruz was in the process of checking out and should be down in the lobby.
Holly sprinted for the stairs and beat their elevator to the lobby.
She’d cornered a very pretty Mexican woman dressed in military fatigues and wearing a left arm sling that was commensurate with a recently dislocated shoulder.
Holly had her backed into a small potted palm. Her knife wasn’t out, but her palm rested on the hilt.