Chinook Read online

  General Nason was too angry.

  And General Gray, while looking a little more approachable, was kept busy being the buffer between him and Ru. There would be no feasible way to speak with her that Ru wouldn’t overhear as they reached a small table and she was sent for four beers.

  Ru waved expansively at the clean-up of the battle scenario. The troops loading back onto their helicopters, waving the foam missiles about like banners. Machines of war and yellow toys. It was a very strange combination. In China, they would have fired real rounds and destroyed massive targets, just to prove the military’s dominance over everyone, including the Chinese populace.

  Under cover of all the rotor noise, she almost missed what Ru said to the generals as she served out the four beers.

  “All of these little helicopters. They not solve our problem, old friend.”

  “And what problem is that?” General Nason’s face was again growing red with anger at Ru’s constant evasions. One of his many tactics for manipulating others. That she could see what he did never diminished her inability to escape his tactics.

  This time, he turned it around, and increased the force of his words by stating them simply.

  “Now that we control Hong Kong? Taiwan.” Ru turned to watch the departing helicopters.

  Mei-Li watched the American generals, and saw the skin of both of them turn a bloodless white. Fury replaced by fear; by the threat of an imminent war.

  Ru’s timing was almost as perfect as a gymnast’s.

  37

  Captain Debbie Smithey brought her MH-47G Chinook Princess Jennie in low over the end of the McChord field runway. It was almost too big.

  Her typical landing area was two hundred and twenty feet, her hundred-foot baby plus a rotor’s diameter of safety margin. In combat, she’d occasionally squeezed that sixty-foot margin down to six.

  Gray Army Airfield on the other side of JBLM was sixty-one hundred feet long, but McChord was another four thousand, with a three-thousand-foot parallel strip. It was so expansive that it made her feel like a pinprick. For the show, they’d cleared most of the aircraft off the north parking apron and replaced them with hordes of people.

  The Air Force show runners had been chapping her ass all through practice this week, as if they knew what her little Army baby could do better than she did.

  “Who the fuck do they think they are, Night Stalkers?” Velma, her copilot, summed up her own feelings with her usual aplomb as they prepared to make their run. A high speed pass. Vertical climb. A series of dramatic stalls, then spin the top—a twin-rotor Chinook twisting on its midship’s center of gravity was much stranger looking that a Black Hawk spinning its tail around its rotor axis. After that would come the groundwork.

  “Screw ’em!”

  Debbie selected the command frequency rather than the show frequency where her radio calls would be broadcast over the show’s speaker system for the crowd. As if. The whole point of being a Night Stalker was that they were invisible. And, like most of their customers (mainly Delta Force, Rangers, and SEAL Team 6), they were silent.

  “McChord Tower, Chinook Princess Jennie. We’ll be running the script exactly backward. Princess Jennie out.” She always used her helo’s full name to honor the very last full-blooded Clatsop Native American, a tribe of the Chinook.

  Before they could start sputtering, she dove for the runway. Good luck to the announcer keeping up with her.

  Velma warned the crew of the flight plan change. It wouldn’t even make them blink; they were Night Stalkers after all—the absolute best.

  She raced along at her full two hundred miles an hour until she was just at the centerline of airshow, lined up on the middle of the runway.

  A hard pull, and Princess Jennie practically stood on her tail. Her rear rotor would be less than ten feet off the pavement as she went almost vertical to kill her speed. It would look like less. She could feel the crowd gasp.

  As she approached zero speed, Debbie eased the nose down. When she was at a thirty-degree angle, she let the rear wheels settle to the runway and kiss the surface.

  “Dare a Black Hawk to do this trick.” Velma chortled between calling out rear rotor-to-ground distances.

  They couldn’t even come close.

  Debbie taxied a hundred meters down the runway, balancing the twenty tons of helo perfectly on just the rear wheels. They sat in their seats twenty-two feet up in the air and tipped back like they were about to launch aloft in a rocket.

  Then she brought the helo to a stop and lowered the nose so slowly it would look as if it wasn’t even happening until it was done. As the nose descended, the crew chiefs were also lowering the rear ramp. Few would notice that. Instead it would just look like a black shadow they’d left lying on the runway.

  At least until the moment a JLTV—Joint Light Terrain Vehicle, the Humvee replacement—shot out the back, towing a 105 mm M119 howitzer.

  While they were pulling onto the grass behind her helo, setting up to fire a blank training round, Debbie re-raised the Jennie’s nose.

  Once the ramp was up and she again sat high in the air, she began the same balancing act, but rolling backward this time. Princess Jennie was acting like a curtain unveiling the now-rigged howitzer.

  “They’re eating it up,” Velma called in the middle of reporting angle-of-attack.

  Just as she cleared the line of view from crowd to artillery piece, she heard the hard thump of the howitzer.

  But it was twenty seconds earlier than scheduled.

  She glanced out her side window.

  There was no smoke from the gun. Instead, the Ranger team was all turning to look at her.

  Another thump.

  This one she felt despite the heavy padding of her seat.

  It was—

  “Blade strike!” Velma shouted.

  Debbie slammed down on the left-hand thrust control and rammed the cyclic joystick between her knees all the way forward to level and fully land the bird.

  How could they have hit their blade on the pavement? Their deck angle was precisely on program.

  Perhaps it wasn’t—

  38

  Jeremy was the first one in the entire crowd to his feet.

  That first bang was too high a frequency for the howitzer. A round from the big gun should have hit him in the gut with a bass note.

  It didn’t.

  It spiked into his ears as his eyes caught what was happening.

  A single thirty-foot blade on the Chinook’s rotor had drooped suddenly.

  First it impacted the top of the fuselage, gouging a deep scar across the metal skin, but it didn’t break.

  Instead, it was deflected upward, bouncing high enough to spin around cleanly for several revolutions.

  Then it dipped again.

  The Chinook was dropping its nose toward the runway, but it wasn’t fast enough.

  This time, when the blade hit the fuselage, it broke, but it didn’t separate.

  Instead it swung around until it slammed into the cockpit, shearing off the nose cone radar dome and the windshield close in front of both of the pilots. It would have sliced far deeper if not for the long refueling probe that stuck out low on the right side. It’s hard shaft forced the blade to flex upward. Probably all that saved the pilots’ lives.

  Then it all came apart.

  Jeremy threw himself at Miranda and Taz. Taking them both down to the ground, he rolled all three of them under the table.

  Looking beneath the empty seats and through the low boundary fence, he saw chunks of rotor blade flying off. Several of them raining down in their direction, though few reached this far.

  The Chinook began an obscene bouncing twist as if it was trying to spin, roll over, and climb aloft all at once.

  Another blade bent and crashed so solidly into the middle of the fuselage that he was surprised it didn’t cut the helo in two.

  Then it rolled all the way over before landing back on its wheels. Not even the blade s
tumps had survived that. Free of the weight and resistance of the big rotors, the engines began to scream.

  The nose ended up facing him.

  He could see the pilots, still sitting in their seats, but with no controls in front of them.

  One reached up for the fire extinguisher T-handles, but the overhead console was lying twenty meters away on the runway.

  The other reached down and cut the fuel selector valves.

  The high whine of the engines slowly began to wind down.

  When the engines finally died, there was a silence so deep that it echoed.

  Then the members of the crowd started to scream. Some ran away, some ran forward. Kids who’d been bored to tears moments before were now crying for real.

  “Everyone okay?” Holly was the first of their group to break the silence.

  Jeremy looked around. She lay across Mike. Andi had Jon pinned to the ground.

  They eased out from under the table and determined that the only damage was a star-cracked section of the windshield—perhaps the pilot’s side window—that had skidded across the table and shattered Taz’s chair to splinters.

  They looked at each other for a second, but he couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

  Then the whole team turned, jumped through the hole in the fence, and sprinted for the field.

  39

  The forest was so quiet.

  Bob Wang’s ears rang with it. His own passage silenced any bird song.

  There was a distant buzz, too minor to be noticed if he hadn’t heard it a thousand times. The helicopters at the airshow. He was too far away to hear the Little Birds at all. The Black Hawks were no more than an occasional thudding sound at this distance.

  Finally, the bass note hammer—more felt than heard—that was a part of his blood. So low, it barely carried through the dense pine trees.

  It wavered along the edge of hearing as he dug himself a pit in the forest detritus. The sharp scent of pine needles and loam filled the shadowed cloister.

  The sound built briefly as he lay down and swept the brush and branches over himself. Here, beneath a snarl of blackberry surrounded by scrub alder, he might never be found.

  That would be best for everyone.

  He should have left a note for his parents not to worry, but it was too late for that.

  The low thudding of the Chinook’s big rotors was silenced.

  He hadn’t heard the crash, though at this distance that wasn’t a real surprise.

  No hard thump of an explosion either.

  If the helo hadn’t exploded on impact, maybe someone survived. Then he recalled that, in order to extract the pilot’s remains from the CH-47D that had gone down in the forest fire, they’d had to cut off the entire nose of the aircraft. If anyone survived the crash of this Night Stalkers Chinook, it wouldn’t be the pilots.

  Then he heard it.

  The few birds who’d returned to their song were all silenced at once.

  In the sudden stillness, the high thin whine of sirens sliced through the trees.

  Bob couldn’t even bear to think her name. He’d killed her, her crew, and the helicopter he’d sworn to maintain.

  Slipping his sidearm up under his chin, he did the same for himself.

  No one heard the single shot or the harsh cries of alarm from the jays flitting away through the Douglas firs.

  40

  The first thing Drake heard was the shouts of surprise from the crowd. That quickly turned to screams.

  He leapt to his feet and followed the direction they were scattering away from.

  It created an opening that let him see the last thrashing of a Chinook helo as it flopped hard onto its side. Chunks of rotor and helicopter were flying through the air. Most of it landing back on the field.

  Directly in front of him, there was hole in the fence and a small group of people trying to push onto the field.

  A senior airman with the Security Forces SF badge on his sleeve was shouting at them to get back just as they were shouting to be let through.

  He only needed to see one face to know who they were.

  “Miranda. Thank God! Airman, let these people through.” He held out his ID. To his credit, the man checked his face twice against the badge.

  “No disrespect, sir,” the airman stood his ground, “who are these people?”

  “The top crash team for the NTSB,” though he’d thought there were only four of them, not seven. Then he spotted Jon. “Oh, and Major Jon Swift of the US Air Force Accident Investigation Board. You have a crash, now let them through. No one else except emergency services, by my order.”

  “Yes sir!”

  Then he turned to face Miranda’s team. “Hi, Miranda. What are you doing here?”

  “Eating lunch.”

  “You…what?”

  “I had a slice of mushroom pizza, as did Andi. Holly had pepperoni. Taz had a slice of garlic chicken and… I’m sorry. I don’t remember the other one.”

  He couldn’t have heard that right.

  He rested a hand on Miranda’s arm.

  “Could you repeat that?”

  Miranda didn’t say anything. Instead, she was staring at his hand.

  “Miranda?”

  Nothing. She was just looking down, her breathing fast and blinking hard.

  “What the—”

  Holly slapped his hand hard enough to hurt like hell.

  He yanked it back.

  “Don’t do that to her, you idiot!” Then she raced toward the helicopter, accompanied by a Chinese woman he didn’t recognize.

  As he nursed his hand, he replayed Miranda’s words, Taz had…

  He turned very slowly.

  Close beside Jeremy stood…

  “Aren’t you dead?”

  41

  Taz wondered if it would be better if she was.

  It was bad enough running into Jeremy in the wilderness atop Hurricane Ridge. Running into General Drake Nason and—

  “Hello, Colonel Cortez. How have you been?” —General Elizabeth Gray. Their last meeting had not gone well. Taz had been trying to extract classified information from the NRO’s director, and hadn’t been…subtle.

  “Good, General Gray. Yourself?”

  “Very good. Except you’re dead, aren’t you?”

  “I was. Until yesterday.” Taz scowled at Jeremy’s back as he headed over to the wreck, leaving her alone with no protection. “I—”

  “General Nason,” Jon cut her off. “I tried to report that we found this criminal, but was unable to do so.”

  “Who stopped you?”

  “Holly Harper,” Jon pointed an accusing finger toward the wreck.

  “She has her reasons, sir,” Mike stepped up from behind her.

  Taz wasn’t sure if she should feel better because “friendly” Mike-the-Mooney M20V-passenger-plane had arrived. Or was she about to catch hell because he was in A-10 Thunderbolt II-ground-attack mode? She didn’t know how to tell.

  The general looked down at Miranda, started to reach for her, then flexed his hand and apparently thought better of it.

  “Miranda, do you have anything to add to that?”

  Miranda shook her head. “No, Drake. She’s only been a member of my team for nineteen hours and eleven minutes. In that time, I haven’t been given any cause to second guess Holly’s and Mike’s suggestions that it would be better for Taz to remain with us and keep a low profile.”

  “I don’t have time for this. For now, as long as I don’t have to deal with her, she stays with you,” he faced Taz for just a moment, then turned back to the wreck. “What the hell happened here?”

  “Until we have done our investigation, Drake, how are we supposed to know?” Miranda said it without any of the demeaning “you idiot” subtext Taz would have used.

  For a moment Taz could only blink.

  At their very last moment together on the crashing Ghostrider, before she’d pushed Jeremy to safety, he’d made the ridiculous claim that he
knew the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the President. Through them, he’d offered to get her a full pardon. As if.

  Apparently the first part of the statement was true.

  But General Nason had made it sound as if Miranda’s word was all he needed to not court-martial her ass out of existence on the spot.

  Miranda—on a first name basis with the chairman, and fully trusted.

  Did she somehow call the President of the United States by his first name, too?

  Who the hell was this woman?

  The general turned back to a table where an older Chinese man and four beers were waiting for him.

  Miranda walked toward the wreck, but Taz couldn’t move.

  General Gray spoke softly, “A low profile includes coming to JBLM AWE?” Her smile might have even been an actual smile, not a threat.

  “Out of my control, ma’am. Miranda was studying another Chinook crash over at Gray Army Airfield, and the team came here for lunch.” Taz had shifted to stand at attention without realizing, but now that she had, she couldn’t undo it.

  “Another?”

  “In a forest fire yesterday, ma’am. Tree exploded and speared the helicopter. Not related to whatever this is.” She was even speaking in addressing-superior-officer clipped sentences.

  “Oh, okay.”

  When she, too, turned to follow General Nason, Taz just had to say something.

  “General?”

  “Yes?” General Gray turned to her once more.

  “I’m sorry for…” so many things, “…for before. Going behind your back. Getting… Doing…” Oh God. “I guess for almost everything I did before the moment I died. Supposedly died. Very nearly did die.”

  The general studied her for a long moment. “Good. That means you learned something by dying. Don’t stop.” Then she returned to her companions.

  What the hell did that mean? Nothing was making any sense. In fact, the only one who did was Major Jon Swift, and his desperate need to report her to somebody.