Honor Flight Page 3

“Jesus,” he shook his head. Whatever his perceived duty was, he had apparently discharged it by invoking a deity. Or perhaps the son of one. There was apparently some debate regarding the invoked’s true status though she’d never taken time to research it herself.

  7

  The coffins covered the entire length of the plane’s long cargo bay—twenty-five rows of three coffins each.

  “Going to need nine body bags, sergeant,” one of his men had returned from the upstairs passenger area.

  “Roger that.”

  “Make sure that they’re photographed in place,” Miranda told him.

  “Have a heart, ma’am.”

  “They’re already dead. I surmise that they won’t care.”

  The man turned away quickly—perhaps to more rapidly achieve his task. Yet he didn’t move to do so.

  “We also know that there are still at least seven crewpersons unaccounted for,” Miranda reminded him. “They will need body bags as well.”

  “Jesus,” the airman whispered just as the fireman had—in a way that didn’t seem appropriate for someone seeking spiritual guidance or supernatural assistance.

  Finally Sergeant Peters muttered out, “Just do what she says, Airman.”

  “If you say so, Sarge.”

  As they continued forward, the fire damage to the coffins increased. Flags were almost completely gone. Char and smoke damage darkened the burnished metal.

  Then dents. Front panels bowed inward, indicating an explosive overpressure. She took measurements for future calculations once she’d determined the bending force pressure necessary to displace a sealed metal coffin’s structure.

  Some coffins were knocked askew despite their heavy anchor chains.

  At the midpoint of the aircraft, the circular frames that made up the cavernous arch of the hull were bent where the massive wings had broken free from the structural wing box.

  But near the bow, other forces had been at work. The integral steel deck bent and warped. The hull’s frames were not only out of round, but flexed differently from the ones near the wing support box. Perhaps due to the upward bending force of the nose section.

  All of Miranda’s training hadn’t prepared her for this. In its fifty years of service, the C-5 Galaxy had only suffered seven Class-A hull-loss incidents and three of those had been due to ground fire.

  A Class-A loss was defined as over two million dollars in damage or the death of any personnel. This plane cost over two hundred million and even though the majority of its passengers had been dead to begin with, more had died.

  Definitely Class-A.

  There hadn’t been any major hull losses of any commercial or military planes during her training, so she’d never seen one in person before. She had studied every single one in the past though.

  And military.

  She’d known that her security clearance—one of only three IICs to have top-secret clearance—would probably involve her in future military investigations. But this was her first.

  The plane. She would focus on the aircraft.

  Through a gash in the plane’s skin, she could see tumbled and shattered concrete blocks. Presumably the remains of JBLM’s control tower.

  “The problem is…”

  “What, ma’am?” The sergeant was close by her side.

  The response surprised her. There hadn’t been time to assemble an NTSB team. She had no structural specialist, systems specialist, human factors, engine manufacturer rep, Lockheed manufacturer rep, or any of the others to confer with.

  They would all be here. Probably soon. And then she’d have a dozen conflicting opinions and people with too many theories and not enough facts. Such distractions were terribly hard to focus through.

  But Sergeant Peters had offered her thoughts from outside her own head, which might be helpful.

  She needed to sit. Miranda was halfway to sitting on a coffin—

  “Ma’am!” The sergeant snapped it out.

  “Oh, sorry.” She forgot that death upset some people. They were in a plane wreck. Didn’t they see that? At the moment the whole plane was shrouded in death, whether it was neatly packaged in a coffin or not.

  But she moved to the side.

  A row of fold-down web seats had been mounted along the hull. Because of the angle and twist of the fuselage, they were particularly uncomfortable, but she supposed that was the least of today’s problems.

  “You said there was a problem, ma’am. My problem is that I want to get these men off this flight and delivered to their families.”

  “Oh, go ahead and do that. At least the ten rows at the rear of the aircraft.”

  He huffed out a sound that was either relief or exasperation…or perhaps he’d been holding his breath for some unknown reason.

  “The problem, sergeant, isn’t the coffins. Correction, it’s not only the coffins. How many plane wrecks have you seen?”

  “This is my first, ma’am.”

  “Of the four previous hull losses of a C-5 while in some stage of flight, three of the planes were shattered by crash landing in fields or trees after significant mechanical problems. All three were during high-speed maneuvers of flight or takeoff and the damage was significant. The fourth was an emergency landing at Dover Air Force Base. It was attributable to engine failure and pilot error, but it was performed at the significantly slower flight profile of landing speed. It broke into four relatively neat pieces that remained close together. It had been flying at landing speeds when it impacted a field two thousand feet short of the runway.”

  “O-kay.”

  “This aircraft veered over a quarter mile to the side of the runway and still had sufficient momentum to cause this much destruction That is very unusual for a plane that was moving at landing speeds. Actually, I’ll need to verify that it was.”

  “It looked normal to me.”

  Miranda actually looked up at Sergeant Peters’ eyes but, thankfully, he wasn’t watching her. He was looking at one of the few relatively undamaged sections of the hull.

  She wasn’t ready to interview eyewitnesses—that was the last step of her process.

  But he began speaking before she could stop him. Mom had taught her it was rude to interrupt. It was hard to listen to this information arriving out of order. No time to write it all down, she tried as hard as she could to absorb the information.

  “My team and I were waiting for the flight. It hit the runway clean—maybe kinda hard, but clean. Then there was sun glinting off the windshield for a moment and it veered aside. Instead of slowing, it seemed to accelerate. Or maybe everything was just happening in slow motion. It leaned so far into the curve that one wing was ripped off. It leaned the other way and lost the other wing. Then it crashed here.” He shrugged. “How could something so fast happen so slowly? I can’t stop thinking about it.”

  Miranda considered. When a C-5’s massive wings lost lift they drooped, sagging from thirty feet to thirteen feet above the ground. A seven-point-four-degree sideways roll would be sufficient to drag a hundred-and-eleven-foot wing that had already lost its lift. She would have to spend some time to determine how much force would be required to tip a C-5 Galaxy that far.

  She’d always liked the simple clarity of numbers and looked forward to that stage of writing an investigation report. But that layer of consideration would only become pertinent after completing the site investigation. Reluctantly she set it aside as a task for later.

  8

  She pushed to her feet and continued working forward. It was just her and the sergeant now. His men were occupied with removing the passengers from the upper area and removing the first rows of coffins.

  “Wait a second,” Sergeant Peters called to her.

  Miranda continued forward as the sergeant turned to look back.

  “Something’s not right here. There are more coffins than I have on my manifest.”

  Miranda liked being methodical, but she could see that the coffins ahead of her, the last row directly
beneath the cockpit high above, were scorched on the ends facing the rear rather than the fronts as all of the others had been.

  She was so intrigued that she almost fell out of the plane—straight down.

  A massive hole had been punched through the decking and the hull in the center of the second-to-foremost row. There was no coffin in this one spot of the otherwise uniform rows that stretched from bow to stern.

  The coffins to either side had lost their chains and been flipped over and away to land against the sides of the hull.

  Straight down was a two-story drop. The gap was created by where the rounded nose of the plane had ridden up on the face of the control tower as it destroyed it. Below her she could see the wall that was probably all that remained of the structure.

  “Christ!” Again the supernatural invocation. This time from the sergeant.

  Oh! A curse.

  Commonly used to express anger, surprise, frustration, sadness, woe, as well as reverence. How was she supposed to differentiate which emotion was intended? A single emotion should be attached to a single word. It would make life so much easier.

  “Somebody shot the plane.”

  “Possibly, Sergeant Peters, but unlikely. Note the direction of the damage. The perimeter of the puncture is bent downward.”

  Miranda considered the sergeant’s unlikely scenario of someone outside shooting the plane. It was possible that a small inward hole had been made by an explosive shell penetrating the hold from below. Then, once inside, exploding dynamically enough to punch the outward hole thus masking all evidence of its initial inward passage.

  “An anti-tank guided missile, such as a Javelin, has a two-stage warhead; the first would blow a hole in the outer layers of armor—or in this case the airplane’s hull. Because of its lack of armor, the first stage would probably penetrate the cargo decking as well, prior to igniting the second stage. The second stage would be very destructive. I see no signs of the initial upward blast from the first stage, and the payload on a Javelin would have caused significantly more destruction.”

  “So, what exploded? A coffin?”

  “Quite likely.” Miranda looked again at the neat rows and the one un-coffined space. “Yes.”

  “I was joking.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You’re something else, ma’am.”

  “Something else? Compared to what?”

  The sergeant just shook his head.

  9

  “What are you doing?” Major Charleston was running up the steep slope of the cargo deck.

  Again, Miranda saw no point in repeating herself.

  “Well?” He planted himself directly in front of her.

  Apparently there was some point. “My name is Miranda Chase. I’m the Investigator-in-Charge for the NTSB. I’ve been ordered by General Elmont to take care of his men.”

  Sergeant Peters was smiling at something behind Major Charleston’s back.

  She tried to step around the major to see what it was, but he moved to block her way. The large hole punched through the bottom of the cargo deck made it impossible to try in the other direction.

  Miranda circled around one of the coffins, but the major just turned to face her, so she couldn’t see whatever was behind him that was amusing the sergeant.

  It did bring her closer to one of the coffins flipped onto its side away from the hole. Despite the heavy side latches, the top was loose and lying partly open against the curve of the hull.

  She couldn’t see any body through the gap.

  It was wide enough that she should have.

  Then a flicker with her flashlight and she saw a bright metallic flash. “Come look—”

  “Sergeant, arrest this woman and escort her off the plane.”

  Sergeant Peters’ look of amusement turned to one of surprise. Or at least his smile went away but his eyes widened. She was fairly sure those were indicators for surprise.

  “I’m just an unarmed honor guard, sir.”

  “General Elmont instructed me—” Miranda began.

  “General Elmont is in surgery at the hospital. I’m in charge now.”

  “General Elmont instructed me—” she didn’t like unfinished sentences, “—to take care of his men. I promised. I have not been discharged from that promise.”

  “You aren’t military.”

  “I promised. My father taught me that breaking promises is bad, and I’ve never found reason to doubt that instruction. I won’t do that to the general merely because he is absent.”

  Major Charleston gaped at her.

  “Now, I have an investigation to continue.” She turned back to the sergeant.

  “Just forget that shit. Don’t move an inch.” The major yanked out a radio. “I need an immediate SP detail inside the downed C-5 Galaxy.”

  His radio only crackled in response.

  “SP?” Miranda asked Sergeant Peters softly while the major tried again.

  “Security Police or Security Forces. Newer name for the MPs.” Then he turned to address the major. “No signal getting out through the skin, sir.”

  “Goddamn it and goddamn you, Lady.” He called on the radio again as he strode downslope toward the missing tail section.

  “That won’t keep him for long, ma’am. You’ll want to work quickly. I don’t recognize him, but I know the type.”

  “You said that there were more coffins than in your manifest.”

  “Yes, ma’am. More.”

  “Help me right this coffin, Sergeant.”

  “Why this one? Never mind, no time. Yes, ma’am.”

  They tried, but it didn’t budge. It was pinned under parts of the wreckage. Again she looked inside, but all she could see through the narrow gap was that bright metallic reflection. The latches had been released, not broken. She shined a light at the last three coffins at the very front—all of which were properly latched. As was the one on the opposite side of the explosion’s hole.

  Something was different about this one.

  The sergeant placed his fingers between his lips and unleashed a piercing whistle.

  His men, who at the far end of the cargo bay had just lifted a coffin with a fresh flag on it, turned to look.

  “This way. Double-time it.”

  They set the coffin down and trotted up the length of the cargo deck.

  In moments, they had the tipped coffin freed and turned upright.

  “Open it just a little,” Miranda knelt down to check through the crack.

  Sergeant Peters and one of his men raised the edge slowly.

  A weak voice sounded from inside.

  “I’m alive?”

  10

  In the coffin lay a woman partly cloaked in a foil blanket. Her pants were scorched, and she looked worse than Miranda had felt the day she’d found out that her parents had died in a crash.

  Sergeant Peters helped her out of the coffin.

  When she sat heavily on one of the closed coffins with her foil blanket still wrapped around her, Sergeant Peters made no complaint. One of the sergeant’s team handed her a water bottle, which she guzzled down.

  “There were two survivors,” Miranda couldn’t imagine how, but there definitely were.

  The woman nodded for a moment. Then croaked out, “Who else?”

  “General Elmont.”

  Again the weary nod.

  “Why were you in a coffin?”

  Her hair was crisped. Her eyebrows mostly lines of ash. Various parts of her fatigues were scorched. Inside the coffin was one of the emergency breather masks that were normally stored down the length of the C-5 in case of an emergency decompression.

  “What happened?” the woman’s voice was still rough.

  The sergeant spoke first. “You’re aboard a C-5 Galaxy that landed at JBLM. It was either fired upon or there was an internal explosion moments later—”

  “The second one,” the woman held up two fingers from the water bottle, then drank some more.

  “The
plane veered badly, ripped off both wings, and crashed into the control tower before catching fire.”

  “How long was I in there?”

  Miranda entered the conversation, “I don’t know when you entered the coffin or the precise time of the incident.” Twenty minutes from the time she’d been rerouted from Boeing Field until she’d arrived at the site. Another twenty-nine minutes since then. Factoring in the minimum time for General Elmont to contact the NTSB and the NTSB to contact her—

  “Just over an hour since the crash,” Sergeant Peters reported.

  Oh, right. He’d been present and witnessed the crash. She made a note in her personal notebook to remember that eyewitnesses could provide a wide variety of information. Then a note in the crash notebook to remember to ask him if he knew the exact time of the initial crash.

  Or should she ask him now? It was really too early in her data gathering process. But perhaps she shou—

  “Felt like a year,” the woman groaned. She brushed at her hair, then stared at the ashen clump that had broken off in her hand. “Glad I was passed out for part of it.”

  “There she is. Arrest her!” Major Charleston came back up the ramp leading a pair of Air Force police. They both had sidearms, rifles, and a large black-on-white “SF” patch on their left arms. Curious that they were called SPs when they were clearly labeled with an SF for Security Forces.

  The woman looked at Miranda in some surprise.

  “Miranda Chase is the Investigator-in-Charge from the NTSB, ma’am.” Sergeant Peters indicated Miranda.

  Since he’d already done the first part of her new introduction, she completed it. “I’ve been ordered by General Elmont to take care of his men.”

  “And she found you,” Sergeant Peters finished.

  “Arrest her now!”

  At the major’s repeated order, the two SF took a step up the inclined deck toward her.

  “Belay that order,” the woman called out.

  The two police stopped and looked at her in some surprise.

  “And who the fuck are you, Lady?”