White Top: a political technothriller (Miranda Chase Book 8) Read online

  Andi hadn’t seen her look at her watch.

  They’d been climbing at ten thousand feet per minute, triple what most airliners would do during maximum climb.

  More than anything else, that brought home to Andi just how different a world they had stepped into.

  34

  “What are they doing aboard?” Danziger glared at them. He’d come down the stairs from the main deck above just as they were standing.

  “Don’t you ever trust anyone, Danziger?” Drake asked him.

  “Not part of the job description.” Danziger spoke as if it pained him.

  Miranda thought that was an interesting, though advisable, requirement to place in a Secret Service job description. “Was it also part of the job application as well as in the description?”

  “What?”

  “Was there a question when you joined the Secret Service about whether or not you trusted anybody?”

  Danziger looked at her for a long moment, then barked out a laugh. “Damn well should be. Drake, you and the President clearly trust them. As long as neither of them is armed, we’re fine.”

  In their race to the airplane, she and Andi had both shrugged into their NTSB vests. Miranda looked down and considered her own.

  “Well, there are a number of tools in my work vest that could be used as weapons,” Miranda held out a heavy-duty pair of metal shears as an example. They could remove a finger as neatly as they could slice through an airplane’s sheet metal skin.

  When she looked back up, Danziger was once again clutching his holstered sidearm. She was glad he hadn’t brandished it inside a pressurized airplane.

  But he wasn’t looking at her.

  Miranda turned to look at Andi; she was his target.

  Andi held out her left palm like she was stopping traffic, then flicked her right wrist downward. A black swing-blade knife dropped into her palm, which she then held out unopened.

  Danziger kept his distance, so Drake took the offered blade without blocking Danziger’s line of fire, and opened it himself.

  “A Cold Steel Recon Tanto blade,” Drake twisted it in the light. “I always liked this knife. I carried an early version of this as a utility blade back in the day. I had to be careful in the field because it wasn’t black-anodized to be nonreflective like this one.”

  Andi looked over at her and shrugged.

  Miranda had forgotten about how quickly Andi had pulled that knife to stop an incipient bar fight after a Chinook helicopter crash last fall. It had appeared in her hand magically. Now she knew how.

  Drake snapped it closed and waved it at the Secret Service agent but didn’t hand it over.

  “It’s a good reminder to not underestimate anyone on Miranda’s team. Andi may be five-two of American-born Chinese. But she’s also Captain Andrea Wu formerly of the 160th SOAR, one of the most elite helicopter pilots in the world. I wouldn’t try messing with her, Danziger.”

  “She’s not cleared Yankee White One. She should not be armed in the presence of the President.”

  Drake made a point of handing it back to Andi despite Danziger’s valid point.

  “I’d wager that the President is safer if you have this blade than if you don’t. I’m also betting that you’re lethal with that weapon, Captain Wu?”

  Andi slowly tucked it back into her sleeve. “I’m good. But not a patch on Taz or Holly.”

  “Who are they?” Danziger removed his hand from his weapon, much to Miranda’s relief, then rubbed at his eyes as if exhausted.

  Drake nodded for Miranda to answer.

  “A former Pentagon Air Force colonel and an Australian SASR operator, both members of my team,” Miranda answered, then remembered to tuck her shears back in their pocket so that it wouldn’t be perceived as a threat. “Mike used to work with the FBI, and Jeremy is…” Curiously, he was the only one on the team other than herself without any governmental association beyond the NTSB.

  “He’s Jeremy!” Andi finished for her.

  “Yes, that’s an accurate statement. And more than its obvious tautological completeness implies.”

  “Christ,” Danziger rubbed at his face, “I think I’m losing my mind. This way,” he led them up the stairs from the cargo deck, largely filled with banks of electronics, to the main deck.

  At the head of the stairs, he waved aft.

  “You two can go sit at the conference table or in the briefing area, neither one is in use. Just make it somewhere I can’t see you. General Nason, the President has asked you to join him and NSA Sarah Feldman in the office.”

  And as suddenly as that, she and Andi were standing alone. She could see the President at his desk in the forward compartment. The room and desk were as utilitarian as Jeremy’s workbench in the aircraft hangar, though the few seats grouped around the desk were business-class comfortable by the look of them.

  She and Andi turned toward the rear of the plane.

  The first room was a conference room with all the charm of an air freighter’s cargo hold. White metal walls and a metal table big enough for nine seats and a narrow passage down either side. There was a large plasma flat-screen and four world clocks above.

  “Movie night?” Andi whispered.

  They peeked into the next room. Three rows of economy-class seats could accommodate about twenty people facing a podium and two more display screens. In the last row sat the three Secret Service agents of the President’s detail and the colonel with his case on the seat beside him.

  “Briefing room,” Miranda whispered back.

  Through the window beyond, she could see scores of technicians in Air Force uniforms seated at console after console.

  “What’s all that?”

  “Communications,” Andi squinted through the glass. “Anything we don’t recognize on this plane is probably to do with communications. If there’s a nuclear event, they get the President or Secretary of Defense aloft in one of these birds. These Nightwatch 747s are what the SecDef flies in when he goes overseas. There’s also always one at a standoff airport whenever the President travels, just as this one was at JBLM. This plane is in addition to the Navy’s smaller E-6Bs that are always aloft with a general aboard in case we lose all ground-based command capability at once due to an overwhelming enemy attack. I have no idea about the security, so we’d better not go back there.”

  Miranda decided there were things she’d rather not know about how the world worked and returned to the conference room.

  They sat in adjacent chairs at the corner of the table.

  “Now what?” Miranda could usually lose herself in the work, but because of all her insomnia last night, the only work presently outstanding was the report of the Cessna 208 Caravan crashing into the Seattle Opera House. And she couldn’t work on that because it was supposed to be Jeremy’s investigation. Except Jeremy was on her plane, somewhere in the middle of the country by now.

  “I have a stupid suggestion.” Andi reached into her vest pocket, but didn’t pull out whatever was in there.

  “Anything would be welcome at this point.” Miranda felt tired in ways she’d never been before. She still hadn’t been able to shake the possibility of losing Jeremy. And she had taken a liking to Taz even if Miranda still didn’t know how to interpret her actions.

  And the thought of replacing them was beyond burdensome and into—she pulled out her notebook and found the correct emoticon far too easily with its droopy eyes and downturned mouth—depressing. With an addition of wide-eyed, open-mouthed fear.

  “What?”

  “Anything,” Miranda took the risk of repeating herself and tucked the notebook away again.

  “Well, Jeremy—”

  Miranda cringed inside.

  “—wants us to test the latest version of his game.” Andi pulled a small box out of her pocket. The whole team had worked on this game on and off over the last six months, though no one as hard as Jeremy.

  Andi opened the box and turned over the first set of cards labeled
Character ID. And there was—

  “I’m supposed to play myself?”

  “Who better?” Andi asked.

  Which was true, she did know herself.

  Jeremy had made fake NTSB IDs for each of them.

  “Why does it say I can’t solve Diplomatic Emergencies?”

  “Because, Miranda,” Andi rested a hand over hers, “you suck at diplomacy, remember?”

  “Oh, right.” She did. “What about you?”

  Andi shuffled through the character IDs to find her own. “Um, I get to jump to wherever a rotorcraft card lands. I’m guessing that’s an advantage.”

  “You’re a helicopter pilot, so that makes sense.” Miranda was glad something did.

  Andi began laying out the world map gameboard across the E-4B’s conference table as they flew high over Idaho.

  35

  “Are you okay, Mike? You’re looking like you ate a bug. Maybe a lot of them.”

  Taz actually had to catch his arm. At the end of the four steps descending from the Citation M2 jet, he stumbled as if he expected the stairway to continue straight down into the pavement at the Frederick Municipal Airport. The place was quiet: private planes only, no commercial flights.

  “It’s a small-town airport, Mike. Not the sort of place with a stairway straight down to the flaming pits of hell.”

  “Says you. I just flew across the country. Solo. In a jet. For the first time ever! Give me a break.”

  “Okay, any special requests? Tibia? Femur? Right arm or left? Maybe just a finger or two?”

  “What, Taz? Not going to offer to snap my neck? Pity, it’s about the only thing that would help right now.”

  But Taz also noted that having to dig for sarcasm had steadied him. She wished she could have somehow helped on the flight, but for all of her nineteen years in the Air Force, she’d never been a pilot.

  “Next step,” she offered. “Let’s get a car. The crash is just three miles north of here.”

  “Yeah, I saw it coming in. It looks ugly. We’ve been in transit for six hours and there are still whole fleets of fire trucks and ambulances there with their lights going.”

  Taz wondered if her life would ever be done with death and destruction. She’d seen plenty during her career, even more when her Air Force career had ended. But now, on Miranda’s team, it was their job.

  “C’mon, Mike. You can ease off now; you did good.” She handed him his gear from the rear baggage compartment since he’d made no move to fetch it himself.

  Jeremy was already donning his vest and checking his gear much the way Miranda did each time. He was so cute when he was trying to be Mini-Miranda. Would she still think that twenty years from now?

  That froze her in her tracks.

  She very slowly looked away from Jeremy, not comfortable with what she was seeing. She’d be even less comfortable if Jeremy saw it on her face.

  Taz also didn’t spot any stairways to the underworld, which was a good thing at the moment or she might race down them for sanctuary.

  They’d been together less than six months. The fact that it was a record for either of them should not have her thinking thoughts like that.

  They were good together, but that’s all it was.

  “Sucks, doesn’t it?” Mike was now the one grinning at her.

  “What?”

  He nodded toward Jeremy.

  “What?” She was sounding like a slick-sleeve raw recruit without even an airman stripe.

  Mike’s expression turned serious, which was a bad sign. “Your face. I’ve seen that look in the mirror lately about—” he tipped his head toward Holly as if he still couldn’t say it aloud.

  “But…” She was still a brainless slick-sleeve.

  “You want to know the scary step?”

  “No!” She definitely didn’t want to if it was scarier than this.

  “Well, I’ll tell you anyway. It’s the day you have one of those thoughts and it feels normal instead of freaking you out.”

  “Not gonna happen to this—”

  Mike’s smile said otherwise, then he stepped over to Holly and gently nudged her shoulder with his.

  Rather than throttling him, as Taz had seen her do in the past, she simply nudged him back without turning.

  Mike grinned back at her.

  Holly and Mike were good together, and that was all it was for them.

  Wasn’t it?

  Taz couldn’t help but admire her. A woman who’d been an Australian SASR operator and was the only person to ever outdraw Taz in a knife fight were both compelling arguments in her favor—especially in favor of staying on her good side.

  Yet something had been different about Holly and Mike since she’d nearly died in the plane crash on her way to Australia. They’d been together before that, but they’d become close ever since.

  Holly was…looking up at the sky.

  Taz followed the line of her gaze. It was the first aircraft flying above the airport since their arrival.

  An ancient UH-1N Huey helicopter was on final approach. She knew its colors even though it was silhouetted against the afternoon sky—dark blue with a gold stripe and a white top. The only military units flying these Vietnam-era birds were, of course, her own former branch, the US Air Force. Out of the sixteen thousand ever built, sixty were still in military service and fifteen of those were part of the USAF 1st Helicopter Squadron out at Andrews.

  “What’s an Andrews’ bird doing here?”

  “Two guesses,” Holly must have overheard her.

  Taz gave it a moment’s thought. “I wish it was Miranda, but it’s probably Major Pain-in-the-ass Jon Swift.”

  “Bingo.” Holly had made the same two guesses.

  Taz slapped her hip to make sure that she still had her Taser. She didn’t. She took a moment to dig it out of her go bag and strap it to her hip.

  When Holly looked at her, she explained, “Shot him with it once. Glad to offer a repeat performance for the fans.”

  Holly’s affirming nod felt good. It said Taz belonged—she liked that.

  So what did it say for her future that they were training Jeremy to lead a team? That meant he’d eventually form his own investigation team. She was barely used to being part of Miranda’s and now they were getting rid of Jeremy? Or her and Jeremy? That suddenly seemed particularly important to know. Would her future depend on Jeremy’s path? That was too bizarre to think about right now.

  The old helicopter thudded down out of the sky with its distinctive heavy two-bladed beat and heavy downdraft, drowning out any ability to ask. It landed lightly near the Cessna M2.

  “Yes!” Holly offered a fist pump when Andi and then Miranda stepped off the helo and ducked as they scuttled out from under the spinning blades. “You slippery bitches!” She met them at the edge of the Huey’s rotor sweep and swept them both into a hard hug.

  Taz’s hand clamped hard around the butt of the Taser when Miranda’s ex, Major Jon Swift of the USAF Accident Investigation Board, was next off the helo. To his credit, when he was halfway clear of the rotors and spotted her, he flinched—hard. Good!

  And then a pair of Gianvito Rossi black suede boots preceding long legs and a sleek red skirt, which stopped notably above the knees, emerged from the passenger door.

  “Shit, Holly. We needed three guesses.”

  Holly turned and swore, “Oh, fuck me dead.”

  CIA Director Clarissa Reese ducked out from under the rotor blades to join them.

  36

  “Ma’am, you can’t come in here.”

  “Talk to them,” Holly waved the policeman toward Jon and Clarissa.

  As soon as his back was turned, Holly walked around the barrier that had been set at the head of the driveway into the Walmart off Monocacy Boulevard as if it wasn’t even there.

  Miranda could only watch in surprise.

  Andi took her arm and tugged her forward around the barrier.

  She didn’t like to ignore authority, but Holl
y seemed so certain. The others walked ahead, so she let Andi lead her after them.

  Once they had woven through the layers of police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks—dodging emergency workers and sheet-draped stretchers every step of the way—the whole team stumbled to a halt at the edge of the debris field.

  It didn’t extend beyond the parking lot, but the devastation there was the worst she’d ever seen in an air crash.

  Most of the building had collapsed.

  Great swaths of scorch marks indicated that fire had swept across the parking lot, destroying vehicles that had burned and become their own centers of fire. Shopping carts were jumbled with car tires and cans of groceries with the labels burned off. It was by far the most complex debris field she’d ever seen.

  “Are you okay with him being here?” Andi asked.

  “Who? Jeremy or Mike?”

  Andi laughed at her. “I meant Jon.”

  Miranda had still never fully settled her feelings about Jon. After most of a year as occasional lovers, she hadn’t seen him since the Johnston Atoll crash. It had been an abrupt breakup and she didn’t remember any of it due to the autistic meltdown he had triggered in her—before Taz had tasered him and Holly had dumped him on the next plane out.

  Now, months later, he had simply joined the helicopter flight from Andrews Air Force Base where the E-4B had landed as if it was the most natural thing.

  However, Drake had given her an update as they’d deplaned from the E-4B, and she’d spent the short flight to Frederick focusing on that. Its core conclusion was that they knew little more than she’d already been told.

  The words of the pilot’s final transmission: Poison. Oxy. Generator. Dying.—with a question mark on the last—was still classified as Top Secret. Videos from the escorting helicopters had been collected. She and Andi had studied them on the flight from Andrews. Even to her non-rotorcraft-trained eye, the final flight was in keeping with decreasing pilot function. Andi had concurred.

  So far, there were seventeen smart phone videos shot by civilians. Only two covered the flight from its first appearance above the Walmart. One captured the back of her husband’s head rather than the final crash, but two more tracked the final moments of the Marine Two helicopter flying into the store’s front entrance. The remaining videos were worth future study, but were all of the fireball and the subsequent explosion and building collapse.