An hour to Tacoma?
“Sorry, ma’am. General Gray’s orders.” And the microphone clicked off.
Holly eyed the door for a long moment, then sat across from her.
“An hour to Tacoma?” Miranda blinked out the window and indeed saw Elko, Nevada rolling by below them. “What happened?”
Holly glanced at her watch. “You’ve been pretty out of it for the last two and a quarter hours.”
How had she lost—
“What’s up, Miranda?”
“Fuel. It’s all about the fuel. I’ve got to tell Lizzy. We’ve got to turn the plane around.”
Holly smiled and pointed at the plane’s secure phone.
54
Lizzy figured she was being an idiot. She wasn’t following her own advice, but she had to see it through. Boarding the Ghostrider at Lackland AFB had felt right, even though she had no purpose aboard.
Pierre sat at the laser console with Rosa, still wearing her sling, hovering in the sole weapons observer seat close behind him. The normal operator had been off-base on authorized leave when they’d called for the plane. Unable to reach him, Miranda had put Rosa and Pierre forward as the best team for the job. They were needed.
However, as the Ghostrider took off from Lackland at sunset, she and Jon were both aboard in the cockpit’s observer seats. And they weren’t needed. At least not in the air.
“Not a weapons specialist? Not a pilot? At least I’m a pilot,” Jon teased her.
“Flying a giant cargo van like a C-5 Galaxy doesn’t count. And don’t forget that I flew F-16 Vipers for almost as long as you’ve even been in the Air Force.”
“Don’t know if that even counts, Auntie General Gray. A squidgy little fighter jet? Who cares about those? I mean, good God, they only have like one engine? How do they even get aloft? You need at least four. From the C-130 all the way to the C-5, any decent plane has four. Besides, without us cargo guys, you jet jocks wouldn’t have any place to go to.”
She appreciated what he was trying to do, lighten the mood for even a moment. But it wasn’t working. At this point she just wanted something, anything, to show up so that she could “switch to guns” and shoot it out of the sky.
Her phone rang—she’d patched it into the Ghostrider’s system.
Miranda.
She almost didn’t answer it.
“It’s only been about twenty minutes since we took off, Miranda. We aren’t even out of Lackland airspace yet.”
Miranda didn’t even acknowledge that and plunged right in. “The Ghostrider is an area-denial specialist weapon—for extremely small areas. If you were going to hit the cartels and traffickers, and really hit them hard, where would you strike? Mexicali, Nogales, and Ciudad Juárez right along the border from Tijuana to the western tip of Texas. The exact targets would come from the Drug Enforcement Administration or maybe inside your own NRO. Drug lords’ homes, arsenals, and processing and shipping plants.”
“Makes sense. I’d need to—”
“They can’t afford to waste fuel,” Miranda was still on a roll. “They would plan to either start at Texas and sweep west or start in the west and sweep east.”
“We already know tha—”
“Yes,” Miranda insisted. “But from Andrews Air Force Base to Mexico—”
“Holy shit! They would have burned all of their fuel in transit!” Lizzy couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen that. Jon was right, it had been too long since she’d flown. The combat range of her F-16 had been only three hundred miles—a tenth of its ferry radius. Fuel was a constant calculation and a major tradeoff between reach and the ability to climb, turn, and fight. It was at the forefront of every pilot’s brain.
“Precisely. Though I’ve never understood that phrase. Is there such a thing as blessed excrement? Never mind. I can almost guarantee that they refueled last night. Probably over Texas.”
“By a Marine KC-130 out of Fort Worth, just like ours.”
Was this what it felt like inside Miranda’s head? This smooth flow so fast but so right?
Then Lizzy remembered the feeling from another time. It was like flying with the very best pilots—that instant when it was a privilege and honor to be flying together.
“We’ll get right on it. We’ll know something of their heading once we confirm where they were refueled.”
Jon already had the pilots calling down to the KC-130 tanker. Yes, that would be the fastest way to get an answer.
He gave her a thumbs up. Faster than she’d expected.
“Same pilots,” Jon spoke as he listened over his intercom headset. “Over Roswell, New Mexico… About two a.m., which is right for the flight time from Andrews… Short-notice Air Force flight… Full fuel load.”
She relayed the information to Miranda.
“They’re starting from the west,” Miranda declared it as fact. “I’m guessing that they’re somewhere in Sonora or Baja. Probably Baja as it is relatively unpopulated and therefore easy to hide in. Also, they could cover the whole range from Tijuana to Ciudad Juárez in a single pass out and back. It’s under a thousand miles round trip. They can cover that twice on the fuel they’d already have aboard. They probably planned on ducking back across the border and calling up the Marines again if they needed a refuel for additional sorties.”
Lizzy called out to Jon. “I don’t care who you have to bribe, lie to, or shoot. Get us permission to circle over the Sea of Cortez.”
“You mean the Gulf of California?” He smiled at her and he finally made her smile back.
“Shut up, you young pup. I was brought up properly.” Her fifth-grade schoolteacher had been very traditional about his use of geography names and she’d always done the same. She also knew of its earliest Western name, the Vermillion Sea, though he’d be disappointed that she didn’t recall the original native name. “Just make sure that we’re way high, so that we look like an airliner.”
A thousand miles from San Antonio to Baja. It was already sunset here. It would be sunset there in just over an hour, but it was two hours of flying time away.
Shit! They were going to be late.
Next she called Captain Thorsen back in DC.
“Get me imaging of Baja and west Sonora in Mexico. I don’t care what satellite time you need to grab or whose program you have to bump, just do it. They’ll be aloft at local sunset. I want to know if so much as a bug takes off without a flight plan.”
He snorted a laugh, “I think you overestimate our satellites. How about bigger than a robin?”
“Fine. A robin.”
Jon looked at her strangely.
“Then, very quietly, find out who Colonel Vicki Taz Cortez got to. Could be DEA, but it could be us. It would have been after her meeting with me about two weeks ago.”
“I’ve got it on the calendar, ma’am.” And he was gone.
If there was a leak in her NRO, she was going to plug it but good—with a round from the Ghostrider’s M102 howitzer if necessary.
55
“We have to get moving. It will be sunset here soon.”