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  White Top

  a Miranda Chase political technothriller

  M. L. Buchman

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  About This Book

  When a political conspiracy targets the White House’s aircraft—only the nation’s #1 air-crash investigators can save the country.

  The White Top helicopters of HMX-1 are known by a much more familiar name: Marine One. The S-92A, the newest helicopter in the HMX fleet, enters service after years of testing.

  When their perfect safety record lies shattered across a shopping mall, Miranda Chase and her team of NTSB air-crash investigators go in. They must discover if it was an accident, a declaration of war, or something even worse.

  Prologue

  Naval Air Station Anacostia

  Elevation: unlisted for security reasons

  Washington, DC

  Six days ago

  * * *

  Major Tamatha Jones forced herself to breathe calmly. Marine Corps helicopter pilots were not supposed to be nervous under any conditions, but today was proving to be the exception to the rule. Within the next thirty minutes, she’d be flying the President aboard his Marine One helicopter for her first time.

  She worked her way through the preflight walkaround—a wholly redundant activity here at HMX-1. Their mechanics were the best in the world and the squadron’s birds reflected it; they had to. And none more so than her helo. When the President of the United States stepped aboard and it became Marine One, everything had to be perfect.

  But she still always did a full preflight inspection after the crew chiefs were done.

  Then she took one more circle around her brand-new VH-92A Superhawk just…because. Sixty-eight feet and six inches of executive transport muscle. Marine green below, white top above, and, block-lettered in white down the sides, “United States of America.” The only bright colors on the entire bird were also the ones that mattered most—the blue-and-yellow Presidential seals affixed below both pilots’ side windows.

  For her passengers’ sake, the Superhawk offered luxury seating, including a pair of armchairs for the President and a guest, couches alongside, and more seating to the rear. Less obvious were the armor, attack evasion gear (both passive and active), a fully isolatable air system, and a communications suite that could run a war—at least a small one. This wasn’t Air Force One after all.

  During the last four years of testing and certification of the VH-92A, Tamatha had made the landing on the White House’s South Lawn over a hundred times in the simulator. She’d also made it in the real world seven times—always when the President was not in residence so that he wouldn’t be disturbed.

  But today was the first transport of President Roy Cole aboard the Marine’s newest bird. And unexpectedly, the first Presidential “lift” in a Superhawk had fallen to her—carrying him from the White House for the ten-mile flight to Air Force One waiting at Andrews Air Force Base.

  Normally, HMX-1 commander Colonel McGrady was the President’s pilot. But he was already prepositioned at Tel Nof Airbase in Israel, the first stop of the President’s whirlwind global tour. The colonel would fly more than twenty-seven hours with the President aboard—and many more without him—during the next six days.

  She’d be aloft for approximately six and a half minutes.

  It didn’t matter.

  McGrady had tapped her for the Number Two slot, and she would be the first to fly the Commander-in-Chief aboard a Superhawk. Life just didn’t get any damn better than being a Marine Corps pilot.

  She trailed a hand over the shining paint job, after wiping her fingertips on the leg of her dress slacks to make sure she wouldn’t leave any smudges. The dark green paint was mirror-bright enough for her to check the set of her short-sleeved Service C—or more commonly Service Charlie—tan uniform shirt. Even the hubs of the wheels shone. Not a spec of grease would dare blemish a Marine One helo, not when it was prepared by the Marines of HMX-1.

  At the nose of the bird, Tamatha turned to face her helo directly and saluted sharply.

  “Seriously, Major?” Her copilot strolled over from the ready room. Vance “Tex” Brown was from Texas rather than the great state of Colorado, so there was no accounting for him. They’d flown together back in the VMM-265 out of Okinawa, and he knew full well that she always saluted any aircraft she was about to fly. It was a connection to her grandfather, who had told her stories of doing the same.

  Always thanked my birds for getting me home safe—before the flight. Musta worked. Then he’d laugh that glorious laugh of his. He’d flown three tours in Vietnam and come home to Boulder alive. As a little girl, she’d eaten up every story he’d tell. He was so proud, she was actually afraid he was going to die the day she told him she made HMX-1.

  “Here be Dragons!” Vance practically shouted the VMM-265’s motto.

  “No longer a Dragon, Captain. You’re a Nighthawk. Though I still don’t know how you fit your Texan ego in the cockpit.”

  “I turn it down so it doesn’t shame your mere Coloradoan past. Besides, once a Dragon, always a Dragon,” Vance insisted. The emblem of the VMM-265 was very cool and she’d worn it with immense pride—a green dragon wound through the heart of the Japanese kanji for dragon. The dragons flew primarily out of Okinawa.

  But now she wore the crossed rotor blades of HMX-1 and there was no prouder patch in the Corps except for the Presidential Pilot patch they’d both be cleared to wear after this flight.

  She ignored Vance and circled to the right forward stair. Unlike the prior HMX-1 helos, the entry door was on the pilot’s side. Whenever one of those landed on the White House lawn, the newsies were always photographing the copilot. Her big Superhawk would land facing the other way and she would be the one in the photographs.

  Because of that, she double-checked that the Presidential Seal below her window was perfectly clean. Crew Chief Mathieson caught her at it and just grinned. Not a chance he would have missed that. There was an entire special protocol for cleaning and maintenance of the right front quadrant of the Superhawk. It, along with Sergeant Mathieson, would be the two most photographed Marine Corps assets for several years to come. Times ten today, as this was the first Superhawk flight.

  It was only fitting that he was the one photographed while he waited to salute the President at the base of the stairs. It was really his bird; she simply was allowed to fly it.

  They’d pre-staged at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling at the juncture of the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers close by downtown DC early this morning. A sea fog was rolling in to their main base at Quantico near the mouth of the Potomac, and she hadn’t wanted to risk being grounded.

  At Anacostia, the Marines kept the HMX-1 hangar and the sixty-thousand square feet that made up the squadron’s seven helipads as a forward operating base, so that a Marine helo would always be within three minutes of the White House. The rest of the old Flying Field had long since been consumed by office buildings, primarily the headquarters of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

  Give her a helo cockpit over a desk any day of the week.

  Once in and seated, she took that crucial moment to switch her brain over. The thousand worries from overseeing her section of the squadron—training new pilots and making sure every action or decision was properly updated in both the training and the logged procedures—all of it went away.

  For the next hour or so, she was just a pilot and nothing else mattered.

  She and Vance buckled in and started down the checklists. They could do it by ro
te, but they followed every step in the standard call-and-response that had kept pilots alive since the beginning of flight.

  To her left and right, two identical birds were doing the same. HMX-1 always flew in flights of two or three—one designated primary and the others as decoy birds. In flight, the three of them would shuffle about the sky so that no one could guess which carried the President.

  “Package ready?” she keyed the mic.

  First, the two decoys acknowledged, then the two Night Stalkers’ gunships that were already aloft in a high guard position. The black helos of the 160th SOAR typically flew overwatch of the official “lift package” as the Marine Corps flight was known.

  Last of all, the White House Military Office confirmed. The WHMO was responsible for the scheduling of White House flights, and their call meant the mission was still a Go.

  Tiny wisps of fog that had wandered this far up the Potomac were blasted aside as the three big VH-92As took to the sky for their first-ever Presidential lift.

  Her world condensed even further. The key to flying at this level was to be completely present. And she was.

  Two hundred feet above Anacostia, she sliced over the golf course that divided the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers and turned upriver.

  The route was the most highly guarded air route in the world. The P-56 Prohibited Areas surrounding the White House, the National Mall, and the Vice President’s house were all tucked tight beside the incredibly restricted approach to Reagan National Airport. Except during an emergency evacuation, no one was allowed to fly the P-56 except the Marine Corps helicopters of HMX-1.

  Just one more reason Tamatha was proud to be a Marine.

  Hard right past the Jefferson Memorial.

  Maintain altitude across the National Mall, well below the top of the Washington Monument.

  That perfect instant when everything lined up. The Washington Monument and the Capitol building to the right; the World War II Memorial, the Reflecting Pool, and Lincoln to the left.

  She always allowed herself a three-second glance to either side—to check that the airspace remained clear, of course. Unable to take her hands from the controls to salute the marble President, she always gave Lincoln a respectful nod.

  No one except an HMX-1 pilot, not even the President, was privileged to have such a view of the nation’s capital as she had through the wraparound windshield of her high-visibility cockpit. For now, she stayed focused. She could cheer later when she watched herself tonight; she’d been careful to set Record on CNN for the next two hours, plus the nightly news.

  She and Vance did, however, trade grins.

  Sergeant Mathieson had left his seat directly behind her own to stand between the seats and watch the city with them. It wasn’t regulation, but no one deserved it more.

  One of the decoy helos slid in front of her and headed for the South Lawn. At the fifty-foot treetop level, he peeled up and to the right, coming to a hover over the Treasury Building to the east. The other decoy was close on her tail until she began the final descent. He too peeled off to take up station above the Eisenhower Executive Office Building to the west. The two decoys and the two overwatch birds hung back far enough that rotor noise wouldn’t disturb the President’s departure.

  First, she flattened the spray from the South Lawn fountain with her rotor downwash. Ducking down between the trees, the approach always looked impossibly small. But practice had taught her that the helo fit, as long as the pilot was perfect. A deep breath prepared her for the final move.

  At twenty-five feet, she hovered directly facing the White House. A hundred cameras were focused on her, but the press corps was irrelevant and she ignored them.

  She eyed the three six-foot aluminum disks, doing her best to fix their positions in her mind. As the White House ground crew had pre-placed them in the proper layout for her bird, all she had to do was hit the marks.

  No ground crew, because HMX-1 Marine pilots didn’t need them.

  Instead, her guides were two six-inch-wide, twenty-foot-long strips of canvas tacked to the lawn.

  The first step was to move directly over the disks. She wouldn’t see them again until she was down.

  “L marks the spot,” Tamatha muttered to herself as she slowly twisted the helo to face to the left so that the entry door would be facing the West Wing and the President’s route of arrival.

  If she turned to look over her shoulder, she’d be able to see part of the disk that had to end up beneath her right wheel, but practice had taught her that was a distraction.

  Head up, face front when flying. Colonel McGrady had made it clear what he expected of his Marine Corps pilots, and she’d given everything she had to getting it right by the McGrady Bible.

  Must have worked; she was here.

  She lined up the two canvas strips, one dead ahead of her nose and the other at ninety degrees to the tip of the nose, and eased down on the collective control with her left hand.

  The wheels kissed down.

  A nice tap onto a hard surface: no soft, missed-the-disk-and-hit-the-grass feel.

  There was also no secondary jolt; she’d nailed the magic of putting down all three wheels exactly level. With a wheelbase that measured ten-six wide and twenty feet long, that was as much luck as skill, but she was glad Lady Luck was on her side this morning.

  Set the parking brake. Engines to idle. Brake the rotors to a stop.

  She was here.

  Parked on the White House South Lawn. She glanced right as Sergeant Mathieson lowered the door, descended, and moved to guard the stair. Unlike the old Presidential helos, the Superhawk possessed only the one entrance—no back stair for everyone other than the President and his family.

  Tamatha checked the clock, precisely five minutes early.

  Exactly when she wanted to be.

  Though she could do without the news-pool photographers who, for the next five minutes, would have nothing to photograph except her aircraft, her crew chief, and herself.

  “You’re both with me. Let’s move.”

  “Are you sure it’s not too late to resign, Mr. President?” General Drake Nason pushed back from the Situation Room table and rose to his feet.

  An orderly somewhere blanked the display screen of the recent clashes map of the Middle East they’d been studying along with the National Security Advisor.

  President Roy Cole laughed, which had been the point. “If you resign, you have to give me notice so that I can quit first.”

  “I knew there was a catch.”

  “Between you and Sarah, I’ve got to find myself better help.”

  “Hey, I’m Jewish,” NSA Sarah Feldman protested, “whining is part of the heritage. Just listen to my mother and her three sisters for five minutes and you’ll know. I have no idea what his problem is, Mr. President.”

  The three of them had practically been in each other’s pockets all week in preparation for this trip; few vestiges of formality beyond the President’s title had survived such an effort.

  Drake was actually looking forward to the trip. As a four-star general and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he rarely left the circuit of the Pentagon and the White House anymore. Spending a week aloft aboard Air Force One was a welcome break—and even the chance to ease global political problems was exhilarating.

  The Middle East was always a nightmare. Hopefully this trip would dial it back some…maybe…not likely. At each stop, while the President was meeting with a country’s leaders, he and Sarah would be meeting with their counterparts in a three-pronged attack—executive, security, and military—which they’d agreed not to call an attack but definitely was.

  The second part of the trip around the globe to Southeast Asia had much more potential for success. After two days of meetings in Singapore, then Hanoi, and brief stops in Australia and New Zealand, they’d fly to western Canada for the nightmare of the G-7 meeting.

  It was going to be a brutally long week.

  “How did this
become my life?” He teased the President as he picked up the beautiful Berluti leather satchel that Lizzy had bought him for their one-year anniversary—which had probably cost as much as the pearl necklace he’d bought for her.

  The President headed out the Situation Room door. “You both made the same damn mistake: you said ‘Yes’ when I asked you to serve.”

  “Damn it! I knew it was something,” Sarah gathered the final files off the Situation Room table and slipped them into her own briefcase. She fussed with her pantsuit jacket.

  “You look fine, Sarah…” Drake let the sentence drag like a tease.

  “But what?” she glanced up at him as they followed the President up the stairs, then headed toward the Oval Office for the President to get his coat.

  “But don’t worry, all they’re going to care about is him and his new helicopter.”

  Roy glanced back. “The new Marine One? About time. I was afraid they wouldn’t be ready for the next President.”

  “The Marine Corps seems to think that being careful means four years of testing.”

  “Well,” Sarah commented, “I for one am in favor of that. Helicopters make me crazy.”

  Through the Oval Office’s bulletproof glass—so thick that everything outside looked like a watercolor that had been caught in the rain—Drake saw the VH-92A Superhawk shining in the South Lawn sun. He loved helos. As a 75th Army Ranger, he’d ridden in many of them. Even ones flown by Marines, God help him. He missed sitting on the cargo deck, kitted up with a band of door-kicking Ranger brothers, and watching the world zip by below his dangling feet. He was sure that the times weren’t as romantic as he remembered them—definitely not the awful years of the Bosnian War—but the nostalgia still wrapped around him at times.

  The VH-92A had been a long time coming.

  It couldn’t have any real relation to this trip, but it gave him hope anyway. Hope that maybe they could turn a few things around in the Middle East.