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

  “Bloody hell!”

  “Yes sir. We’re tearing down the complete air system on each bird, but still nothing out of the ordinary.”

  Master Sergeant Whalen would know what that meant as well as he did. Someone had known precisely which bird to sabotage in order to target the attack on the Vice President. Which helo was the designated transport and which were the decoys was known to very few people.

  And they were all inside HMX-1.

  Whoever had killed the Vice President and everyone else aboard the Superhawk was a Marine.

  The thought was intolerable.

  He was pulling out his phone to call the Commandant of the Marine Corps when it rang sharply. He almost lost it to the concrete.

  “McGrady here.”

  “We need the Black Box data mapping of the VH-92A Superhawk.”

  “Who the—” he pulled the phone away enough to see the name. Miranda Chase. It took him a moment to remember that she was the flight investigator from the NTSB.

  He really needed some sleep, he was the one who’d insisted on having her contact info. He looked at his watch. He’d only gotten in from the crash site four hours ago. Well, he hadn’t missed much sleep.

  “Why?”

  “So that we can interpret the data from the Cockpit Voice Recorder and the Flight Data Recorder,” she said it like he was the dumbest man on the planet.

  Whalen had stepped back to give him privacy. Blake waved him closer.

  “The Black Box data map for the NTSB?”

  “Yes, that’s what I asked for,” Miranda said in one ear as Whalen actually smacked his own forehead.

  “I’ll send it to them right away.”

  Blake shook his head. “Where are you, Ms. Chase?”

  “NTSB Headquarters in the Data Recovery Lab at L’Enfant Plaza.”

  “I’ll deliver it myself in twenty minutes,” and he hung up. “Whalen, go get whatever it is she needs, then get that Viper spun up. We’re airborne to Anacostia in three.”

  Whalen saluted and raced away.

  Blake stopped himself before he called out Tamatha’s name.

  But his Number Two was dead. Poisoned, then burned to death in a fucking Walmart.

  Sweet Christ, he’d shopped in that goddamn store—his dad had a weak spot for the place. They’d eaten lunch at the Subway counter any number of times because it was the only way Dad could wolf down a foot-long meatball sub without Mom going ballistic on his diet—as if she didn’t know.

  But last night had creeped the shit out of him. Even if they rebuilt it, he’d never be able to go in there again. Maybe not ever hit a Walmart again. He knew that every time he did, all he’d see was a corpse burned past recognition except by which seat she’d sat in.

  He called over Captain Velasquez.

  “I need you to get on with personnel. First, I want every single Marine in HMX-1 accounted for. If they’re on assignment, just transferred out, hell, if they’re in the hospital giving birth, I want eyes-on confirmation that they haven’t tried to skip town or the country. Then start reviewing every single file, including yours and mine.”

  “Shit, Colonel! Internal?” Velasquez was as aghast as he felt.

  “Just check it out for me.”

  Velasquez saluted and trotted off, signaling his copilot to join him because, for the foreseeable future, no Marine traveled alone.

  The borrowed AH-1Z gunship began winding to life outside the hangar.

  No one traveled alone, but he’d sent Whalen off on an errand by himself.

  Shit! If he didn’t trust his crew chief, the world was going to hell.

  55

  “There you are.”

  Senator Hunter Ramson leapt out of his chair before he recognized Rose’s voice. For once, he wished she hadn’t tracked him to his office in the Capitol Building. She came here so rarely.

  He glanced at the clock. Six a.m. The sky outside his office window was already fading from black to palest blue.

  “You’re up early.”

  “You’re up late,” she countered as she slid into the chair across his desk. Thirty-one years together. Thirty-two if he counted from bedding her shortly before she won the Miss Utah pageant he’d been judging. And she still looked incredible. She wore a dress right out of the Kennedy era, but Jackie would never have looked so good in it. Rose had resurrected the sleeveless, knee-length summer dress as a fashion statement practically on her own.

  Looking at her this morning, the main thing he felt was his age.

  He wasn’t quite sixty, but he felt as if he was a hundred.

  Rather than speaking, Rose began tinkering with her wedding gift to him. All those years ago, before he’d even thought of running for any office, she’d given him a beautifully engraved triangle name plaque, appropriately made of rosewood so that he’d think of her every time he saw it.

  On the two facing sides, it read “Senator Hunter Ramson.”

  “You always knew and believed in me.”

  She tipped it over toward him. He now faced his name upside down, which was also far too appropriate.

  She tipped it again, exposing her private message to him that was always there: Keep asking.

  “I do that.” Then he studied her eyes, but couldn’t read her thoughts. “Don’t I?”

  “About certain things, dear.”

  Thirty years had taught him that his best strategy to avoid the uncomfortable was silence. Not that it worked often, but if he was the one who started speaking, then the conversation always seemed to go directly where he didn’t want it to go.

  And tonight…this morning, he definitely didn’t want to talk about what was actually going on.

  “You ask me to keep loving you,” Rose spoke softly.

  “And you do, don’t you?”

  “Of course, silly.”

  He relaxed at her smile.

  “But in addition to love, you can ask for help.”

  Hunter could feel the pressure of the black tsunami he’d been contemplating all night. “I would if I needed any.”

  She tipped the name plaque right side up again. Then began tapping it with a perfectly manicured blood-red fingernail. Rose’s silences were as powerful as her words.

  “I truly don’t think you can help with this one, honey.”

  “What did you do, Hunter?”

  Christ! He’d never been able to hide a thing from her.

  56

  True to his word, Colonel McGrady and his crew chief arrived in just twenty minutes.

  Miranda appreciated the punctuality. So many people said twenty minutes and meant thirty…or forty. She considered asking if that was part of being a Marine, but decided against it. She was getting better at sorting distractions from the main line of focus. Per Mike’s recommendation, she patted herself on the back for that.

  Sergeant Whalen sat beside Jeremy and they began loading the profile into the conversion software.

  They sat before an arc of four screens.

  To the left were all of the zeroes and ones of the chip’s binary readout.

  The next screen rapidly populated with scores of graphed parameters. Neatly grouped into clusters of flight characteristics, engine, even voice curves of the four internal microphones.

  There was a massive disjunction in the middle of all the lines.

  “What’s that?” McGrady pointed.

  “Because the original chassis was damaged beyond recovery, we lost the final time marker on the chip’s data set. Jeremy will fix it in a moment—there.” The curves all smoothed out. “This is now a time-correct diagram of the Marine Two aircraft’s flight. Jeremy let’s—”

  Except was this supposed to be her investigation or his? Terence and Andi had said it was hers, but Holly and Mike had indicated that it should be his. How should she factor that her most senior and most junior people said one thing and her two midlevel team members said the other? The averages balanced.

  Yes, the field investigation had been hers, b
ut Jeremy was more skilled in the lab than she was.

  She nodded to Taz.

  Taz in turn jabbed Jeremy sharply in the ribs.

  “What?”

  “Your chart.” Taz’s comment didn’t mean anything to her, but Jeremy started nodding rapidly.

  “Chart? Right! The list of steps we made of an investigation! Got it. Let me show you something seriously cool, Sergeant Whalen.” In moments his fingers were running across the keyboard. The third screen of the console filled with an aerial map.

  The sergeant and Jeremy were whispering questions back and forth as Jeremy kept entering commands.

  “Let’s start with the flight path,” Jeremy finished another spate of keyboarding and a thin red line was overlaid on the image.

  Miranda hoped that it wasn’t being too forward when she reached between them to set the switch so that the large, wall-mounted screen now echoed the third console’s flight-path image.

  On the fourth screen, Jeremy loaded the vertical view, then slid it to appear side by side on the big screen.

  She and Colonel McGrady stepped forward in unison for a closer look.

  “Starting at the final takeoff from Camp David,” Jeremy began narrating.

  The colonel took over, “I’m seeing a normal takeoff and climb out. For the next three minutes, I see nothing unusual in the flight pattern. Here, north of Frederick, we see the Superhawk first turn sideways, then execute a circle. That must be the area of the fire that boxed it in.”

  Miranda held out her VH-92A notebook for Jeremy and pointed at the fire’s geographic coordinates.

  “You’re so good, Miranda.” Jeremy keyed it in and a neat red line formed a box around the area that the Superhawk had circled. “So that’s confirmed.”

  Taz pointed at the graph, “What’s that?” A vertical cursor line had been scrolling across the screen as it interpreted the data for display.

  One of the lines had a distinct, notched change.

  “That’s the initiation of the emergency oxygen generator system.” He placed a red dot on the flight path about halfway around the circle.

  “Goddamn it!” McGrady cursed. “Tamatha was so damn good. At least five seconds ahead of when I’d have made the same decision.”

  The flight path then remained clean as it raced through the southern perimeter of the box.

  “Look!” Taz pointed to the far-right screen on the console. The helo climbed abruptly, then dropped again.

  “A brief lift due to the fire’s heat,” McGrady noted. “It doesn’t match any control inputs.” He was right, the controls-group on the second console remained stable.

  Then the line on the cyclic revealed a slow roll to the right and the helicopter began to descend.

  No, Miranda decided, it began to fall.

  57

  “You did…what?” It wasn’t the first time in their thirty-odd years that she’d wanted to slap Hunter, but it was definitely the closest she’d come to doing so.

  When she’d bedded him for the win at the Miss Utah competition, she’d known exactly what she was doing—even if he hadn’t. He’d actually been sweet and surprised.

  He also had the balance she’d been seeking of desire for power matched with a slightly directionless aim for it. It would have helped if he’d been a little smarter, but she’d worked with what she’d found. With her guidance, he’d finally become one of the most powerful senators in the entire Congress, and she’d become the “First Lady of DC.”

  In answer, Hunter toyed with that stupid Viet Cong knife his father had given him. The thing was creepier than even the judges she’d refused to bed. Thank God the girls were so much better protected now. She’d seen what several of her fellow contestants had been forced to do before being tossed aside. She hadn’t just bedded Hunter for the win, she’d done it for the life.

  “Why does that knife still intrigue you?”

  “I like the rawness of it. The truth of it.”

  “The truth that your father was psycho enough to be a tunnel rat in Vietnam, willing to go down into those holes to kill. That he named you for that ugly Viet Cong blade soaked in American blood.”

  “Dad was—”

  “A bastard!” Normally she didn’t give voice to her real feelings about the man but she was so sick of his hold over Hunter that it slipped out.

  Hunter merely grunted but kept toying with the blade. She knew he hated his father, too, but had never let him go.

  Rose took a slow, deep breath and forced her voice to the calm tones that let her host even the greatest fool at one of her parties—if he was well connected.

  She tapped a fingernail on the triangular name block and no longer felt the urge to beat him with it.

  “You know why I never let you run for President, Hunter?”

  “Because you said a life of power for term after term was better than eight years and done.”

  “Yes, and I still think that’s true. But also, even by the time I met you, you were already making deals that would never survive the scrutiny of a Presidential campaign.”

  “But—”

  “Finances. Corporate games. Your close ties to too many of the defense contractors. And you don’t want me pointing out your barely hidden roles in breaking several careers.”

  Hunter frowned as he fooled with the Viet Cong blade.

  “But do you know what you just cut off?”

  “I didn’t! I only—”

  “I only… If I just… They can’t trace it to me…” Rose bit back on the bile that threatened to choke her.

  “I didn’t kill Clark!” He leaned forward and thumped the butt of the blade hard enough on his desk to dent the cherrywood. It was his “fierce Senator” role. Did he forget that she’d trained him in how and when to use that?

  “No, you just opened the door for someone else to.”

  “I didn’t know that was going to—”

  Rose held up her hand palm-out to stop him.

  He dropped the blade and began rubbing a finger on the dent in his desk as if that would fix anything.

  “I don’t care that much about Clark.”

  “Neither did I. His position on the Middle East was intolerab—”

  She held up her palm again. “However, you also cut off Clarissa’s best chance.”

  “Her best chance for what?”

  “To become the Vice President and then the President, you fool!”

  And Rose felt the jab in her chest as clearly as if Hunter had just knifed her.

  From the moment she’d met Clarissa, Rose knew that the woman had the abilities so few people—male or female—possessed.

  Clarissa’s play to install Clark as the Vice President had been flawless in its execution. She’d created a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

  And yesterday—was it just yesterday?—Clarissa had confirmed her intention to take on the Presidency, and to offer her the title of Vice President Rose Ramson. It was a dream for herself—that had been murdered aborning. The wonders that she and Clarissa could have done together…

  But her popinjay of a husband had “opened a door” that had killed the Vice President. With Clark gone, their chances of success at the Presidential horse race had gone from being a top finisher to betting on the extreme long shot—moments before he came up lame.

  It took all of her years of self-control to not spit out the words she could never take back.

  Instead, she rose carefully to her feet, smoothed the Oscar de la Renta summer dress, and stepped out of her husband’s office.

  He called after her once, but that was all.

  He didn’t even try to follow.

  For once, she was glad that her lesson on the importance of that hadn’t stuck.

  58

  “What the hell, Miranda?” Holly’s outburst was so loud that it rang in the lab.

  Andi punched her in the arm as hard as Holly usually tagged others.

  Holly glared at her for a long moment, long enough for Andi to
wonder if she was about to die. Then Holly muttered, “Dumb as a dingo,” before smacking her own forehead.

  “Sorry, Miranda. Why didn’t you wake us when you came in?” Holly’s tone was much more moderated, though far from calm.

  “I was just trying to come to work. I accidentally woke Jeremy and he didn’t see any reason to cut off everyone’s sleep for the first technical stages of the process.”

  Personally, Andi felt as if she’d slept about five minutes. First in worry, because Miranda had been so near her breaking point. Then lying there next to Miranda, listening to her sleep as if they were a couple, was just too bizarre and had kept her awake for hours.

  “Mike and Andi,” Taz spoke up, “you two have all of the collected videos, right?”

  They both nodded.

  “Good. Do a quick trawl of social media to see if anyone posted anything new. Then start syncing them up to that profile.” Taz pointed at the screens that showed the final flight of Marine Two. She wasn’t even pretending that instructions were coming from Jeremy at the moment.

  Andi moved closer to the screen. “What’s that?”

  “What’s what?”

  “Run that back to exiting the smoke screen and play it again, normal speed.”

  “It’s—”

  “Shh! Sorry, Colonel, just be quiet. Roll it, Jeremy.”

  She watched the flight path. It didn’t last long—under sixty seconds.

  Andi shuddered and called for Jeremy to roll it again.

  “Freeze it! There.”

  “She lost control for a moment,” Colonel McGrady stated.

  “And there?” Andi pointed at a near identical control input twelve seconds later. “It’s the wrong shape. Something slammed the controls, smacked them right out of her hands.”

  “An attacker in the cockpit?”

  “No. Look at the voice recorder. Nothing going on. No shouts. Standard emergency-only pilot crosstalk. You don’t even have to hear that to see it in the visual sound graph.” Andi closed her eyes. “I know exactly what caused it.” If ever there was an excuse to revisit a PTSD moment, this was it.