Ghostrider: an NTSB-military technothriller (Miranda Chase Book 4) Read online

  She eased the knife back about three millimeters, and her ironclad grip on his balls by about three grams. It wasn’t good, but it was better than nothing.

  “I wasn’t part of it.” It was hard to speak without moving his jaw.

  “Part of what?”

  Not daring to speak, he rolled his eyes toward the remains of the Ghostrider behind him.

  “You know more?”

  He nodded with just his eyes.

  “And you’ve been keeping your mouth shut because?”

  “Rosa,” he managed to whisper.

  And he’d just betrayed that trust.

  But hadn’t she done the same thing? Betrayed his and the Air Force’s trust in her?

  No question, he was definitely in hell.

  He wanted to bang his head against the metal hull behind him—but there was a knife at his throat. Then he heard the cold, slick sound of it disappearing back into its sheath.

  He opened one eye carefully.

  “Know that look in the mirror all too well, mate. Worse than a hornet in a bottle. So angry you want to choke yourself dead.”

  Pierre tested a breath to see if it was safe, but her hand was gone from his crotch as well. “Never seen anyone move that fast.”

  “Good thing I’m not in a bad mood. Start talking or I will be.”

  He edged away from the vise jaws of the lethal blonde and the dead plane. At the edge of the quay, he simply stood and stared out over the water. The sun was just disappearing into the central hills of the island, the last of the long shadows slicing across the scorched harbor.

  The two women moved up to either side of him.

  “I don’t know much. Tech Sergeant Rosa…Rosa Cruz…is, was—I guess—the best damn laser operator in the US Air Force. Christ but that woman taught me so much about my own job. Absolutely incredible.”

  “And seriously hot,” Holly said it flat.

  “You have no idea. Brains, body, skills—the whole goddamn package. Just sexy as hell!” Then he twisted to look at her. She’d trapped him even more neatly than he’d trapped himself.

  “You’re gone on her.”

  “I am?” He supposed that was a stupid question. Yeah, or you would have turned her right in rather than risking your career and your freedom.

  “What does Tech Sergeant Cruz have to do with the crash?” Miranda leaned forward to ask around him.

  He grimaced. “There wasn’t anything wrong with the plane; it was a hijacking. Gunners jumped out. I got Rosa into a chute and pushed her out.”

  Maybe, just maybe, she’d been looking for an out? Maybe she hadn’t put on a parachute just to deceive him, to get him off the plane thinking she’d follow? Was her subconscious trying to protect her?

  Little late to be thinking that. It was as if his brain was only now coming back online.

  “Then I went to help the pilots. That’s when I figured out it was a hijacking. They were both in on it, but there was a fight and one shot the other."

  “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 g
ut 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.

  “This her?” Holly snarled at Pierre.

  “That’s her. Hi, Rosa.”

  “Um… Hi, Pierre. Are you okay?”

  “Never better.”

  Miranda understood how to interpret a smile and a frown, even a grimace. But Pierre’s current expression of a half-smile and half-frown didn’t make sense. Not even with the eye roll that she typically took to mean sarcasm. It’s like his emotions were all mixed up.

  Oh, his emotions were all mixed up. That actually made sense. She took a moment to draw a careful emoji in her notebook with annotations for the different elements.

  “You left a little abruptly and…I was worried,” Rosa spoke softly.

  Holly edged her a little deeper into the tree.

  Rosa turned on her. “If you don’t back off, lady, I’ll—”

  “No,” Pierre cut her off. “You won’t. Trust me.” He rubbed at his throat where Holly had pricked him with her knife.

  “Holly,” Miranda spoke softly and that seemed to snap her out of warrior-mode and back into Holly-mode.

  “Right. Sorry. We need to know everything about what you were supposed to do on the Ghostrider. General JJ’s plans, his base of operations, everything. And we need it now.”

  Instead of looking at Holly, Rosa’s attention snapped over to Pierre.

  “I thought you weren’t going to say anything.” And that was very definitely a deep frown with no accompanying eye roll. Definitely anger. Or was it hurt? Even diagrams didn’t help with emotions.

  “You should talk to these folks. We can help them. They aren’t Air Force. These two are with the NTSB. And your General JJ—”

  “Or Taz Cortez,” Holly snarled.

  “Or Colonel Cortez,” he agreed, “just kidnapped the other half of their team. About ninety minutes ago.”

  “A hundred and thirteen,” Miranda sighed. Seven hundred and fifty-three miles. St. Louis, Missouri. Orlando, Florida…

  45

  They were passing north of Little Rock, Arkansas, on their way to meet a refueling KC-130 out of Fort Worth, Texas.

  Taz explained the logic. “The pilots of the Marine Aerial Refueler Transport Squadron were only too happy to have an excuse to practice a midair refueling. They’re also the least likely to report it to the Air Force except as a cross-service invoice for flight cost and fuel rendered. That could take months to wend its way through accounting.”

  She couldn’t tell if Mike was paying attention to anything, or just zoned out with his back against the hull.

  “Are the accounting systems really so archaic that no one would notice? And what about when they do find it, won’t the Marines get in trouble for not questioning why they were called up in the middle of the night to do this?” Jeremy, however, was the ultimate litmus test of right and wrong.

  “It will get signed off along with the other couple dozen refuelings that are probably going on just tonight all around the country. All of the information will be there, but it will be essentially untraceable.”

  Jeremy frowned unhappily.

  Taz really needed to come to the point.

  She’d delayed them with food—which was a woeful dinner at its best. Because of the speed of the operation to extract the second Ghostrider from Andrews, she hadn’t had a chance to check or amend their food supplies.

  The prior crew had left MREs, crackers (not Bretons or even Triscuits, but Ritz, which were all about the salt), and a half-used case of spray-can cheddar cheese (for which they should be court-martialed).

  Mike had followed her lead in selecting the Lemon Pepper Tuna MRE. As Meals-Ready-to-Eat went, it was one of the best for pretending it was real food.

  Jeremy on the other hand dove for one of the new MRE flavors, Pepperoni Pizza Slice. It also had Italian bread sticks with cheddar and jalapeno cheese spread (that should have been left in the can), cookies, and a marginal excuse for a cherry-blueberry cobbler. The chocolate protein drink powder was about the only redeeming element. Jeremy burned through two of everything and was eyeing a third.

  “What the hell? One of those will feed a soldier with full kit on an infiltration hike.”

  “Jeremy and pizza. He’s almost bad as Holly, except she’ll eat anything.”

  “And probably looks it.”

  Jeremy went for the third slice, dumping the flameless heater in the outer bag. Just as he had twice before, on the verge of pouring in the water to activate it and slipping the sealed pizza slice bag in after it, he stopped. It could heat the pizza to almost palatable in under ten minutes. Instead he sliced open the inner bag and ate it cold, just like the first two.

  “No. No, she’s not a bit heavy.” Mike stared over at the C-130’s bulkhead. “She’s hyper, chaotic, and a retired special operations warrior.” His words slowed along with his thoughts.

  “Easy to see what you’re thinking of.”

  He blinked at her in surprise. “What? Holly? Are you crazy?”

  “She’d kill him,” Jeremy concurred with a full mouth.

  “So, care to tell us why we’re here?” Mike went for the subject change.

  Taz sighed. She liked these two—not that such things had ever stopped her before. But she really didn’t know how to sell them on what was about to happen; to get their willing participation.

  “She wants us to fight a war for her general.”

  Taz could only gape at Jeremy as he continued to chew. He was absolutely right.

  46

  “That’s right, young man.” JJ had never seen Taz hesitate about an assignment before. He’d come to check how she was doing with the civilians, but become fascinated by watching the dynamic. He’d been able to hear enough over the engines’ steady thrum to follow what was happening from the shadows around the side of the control station.
“What else have you concluded?”

  “You must be Drake’s friend, JJ.” Jeremy held out a hand, then looked at it, wiped it on his pants, and held it out again.

  His hands were almost as soft as a clerk’s…and still slightly greasy from the pizza.

  He saw Taz bristle, but he signaled her to stand down. “If you’re a friend of Drake’s, you’re welcome to call me JJ.”

  Mike Munroe’s self-introduction was more respectful. “A friend might be a strong word, sir, but he likes our boss a great deal, so we all get ‘Drake’ privileges by association. Sort of.” His grimace spoke volumes he couldn’t read. But he could read his handshake. It proved that he was even less used to real work.

  JJ glanced at his own hands and wondered who was calling the kettle black. Three-star generals had an entourage to do everything from driving cars to pouring coffee. Most were climbers, hoping for a ride on a three-star’s coattails. The last few weeks, with his pending retirement, they’d become relentless in seeking a last-minute favor. Few, like Taz, were useful. Too damn young to be given a star—too young to be a full colonel, but she’d earned it. Deserved the star more than most in the Pentagon.

  “Your boss?” JJ was curious. He’d always been JJ, but Drake’s stiff spine allowed only a very select few to have that privilege.

  “Miranda Chase.”

  He glanced at Taz, whose memory was a steel trap for each detail of everyone who flowed past him. Stumped, she shook her head.

  “Interesting. Colonel Taz Cortez remembers everyone.”

  Jeremy finished his pizza and started crunching loudly on his Italian breadsticks. “If you haven’t dealt with plane crashes, then you wouldn’t know about her. She’s the best crash investigator the NTSB has ever had. Drake calls us in on all the really tricky ones. It only took her about an hour to figure out that your AC-130H crash was a fake.”

  “Jeremy!” Mike admonished him, but the boy was on a roll.

  “And I’ll bet she’s solved the Catalina crash already.”