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

  She cut him off. “You know I don’t like to hear about the crash. I prefer to witness it for myself and reach my own conclusions.”

  “Right. Okay. Where are you now?”

  “Sitting on the edge of the tub in Holly’s bathroom.” She didn’t like repeating things, but this time it helped to ground her as she remembered the last time she’d been able to meet up with Jon.

  It had been right after a Black Hawk helicopter crash in Hawaii. She’d been called out because it had collided with a Cessna Citation Sovereign 680 business jet. Hawaii was part of the NTSB’s Western Pacific Region, which was based out of the “Seattle Office” incongruously located thirty miles south of Seattle in Federal Way—a fact that continued to bother her but upper management had remained unwilling to rectify.

  After the investigation, they’d had three particularly enjoyable days together, touring the air bases of all five branches of the service. Jon’s rank had granted them access to study many types of planes she’d never before been aboard.

  Jon had explained the various crew chiefs’ curious reactions to her.

  “You’re famous now, Miranda. Every crew chief is spooked by what you might find that they’ve done wrong, but they’re also crew chiefs who love their aircraft and are desperate to learn how to do their jobs better. You kind of freak them out both ways.”

  She really didn’t understand the former sentiment; only the results mattered. On the latter sentiment, she and the crew chiefs had aligned perfectly.

  She and Jon had also spent two equally enjoyable nights together, then he’d been posted to the Middle East for a three-month assignment shortly afterward.

  Ninety-seven days since he’d left. So, it was reasonable to assume that he was back in the States again. He’d called several times, but talking on the phone had never particularly worked for her. Their e-mails had gone better and she’d looked forward to hearing from him.

  But now was a perfect example of the problems with phone conversations.

  Jon’s continued silence told her she was being too literal again.

  She never seemed to get that particular question regarding her location right. Her answer of her position on Holly’s bathtub was the most valid and descriptive but, she was learning, not the most useful to the situation.

  “We’re all ten minutes from the Tacoma Narrows Airport in Washington State.”

  “I’ll have a C-21A Learjet there in fifteen.”

  “I haven’t even woken the oth—”

  Holly threw open the bathroom door. She was dressed in her full gear. “What are you still doing in your nightgown? There’s a crash, isn’t there?”

  Miranda could only nod.

  “I already rousted the boys. Mike is doing his fancy-coffee-machine thing.” Sure enough, there was the soft sound of grinding echoing from the distant kitchen.

  She noticed coffee was the one habit of Mike’s, perhaps the only habit, that Holly didn’t roll her eyes about. Mike always made sure that Holly received a monstrous thermal mug full each morning.

  “And he’s making his espresso and your hot cocoa,” and there was the missing eye roll. “So, let’s get going, Miranda. Not like you to be so slow off the mark.”

  She always left Miranda a little breathless when she was in this mode. Actually, from what she’d seen, she left everyone a little breathless most of the time.

  “I’m still on the phone to—”

  Holly pulled the phone from her fingers. “I’ll flirt with whatever yobbo is on the mobile. You, go! Get dressed.” She put the phone to her ear. “Is this Drake, ye old bastard, or Jon sniffin’ round our Miranda?... Jon! How ya garn? Guess what? Miranda’s about to get as naked as a James Bond girl in the next room, and you aren’t here to see it, you poor sod. She’s hot, you know.”

  Miranda opened her mouth to protest but, as Holly burst out laughing over some reply, she decided that escape was her best option.

  2

  Miranda had never been to Aspen. It was a small, municipal airport known to her primarily for its general aviation crashes. She had specialized in commercial aviation early in her career, but the military investigations had become her team’s most common callout.

  “Colorado has the third highest number of small planes per capita of any state in the US after Alaska and Montana. Though their pilot fatality rate is lower than seventeen other states, it’s still a lot of crashes.” Miranda was glad that the statistic did not carry into commercial air crashes in the state; the countryside beyond the plane’s window looked to be very rugged.

  “You know…” Mike leaned back in his leather airplane seat. The little eight-passenger C-21A VIP transport Learjet was a very comfortable way to travel, even if it did belong to the Air Force.

  Aside from the pair of military pilots, there were just the four of them aboard. They sat in pairs of facing seats on either side of a narrow aisle.

  “There’s a saying about Aspen. ‘The millionaires ruined it for the hippies, and the billionaires ruined it for the millionaires.’ So, don’t forget about all the out-of-state jetsetters flitting in and out of here in the worst of conditions for your crash tally.”

  “It’s late June,” Miranda looked out the window as they began their descent into Aspen. “Presently sunny. On the high lakes I can see only a little ice, so I would project that it is warm with a decreased chance of low-altitude icing on the plane’s surfaces. As there are no clear reflections off the water, there must be wind-rippling. However, the lack of buffeting aboard our flight would indicate that this wind is not of sufficient velocity to turbulate the air significantly despite the close proximity of numerous high mountain peaks.”

  Jeremy had a Bluetooth earpiece and was listening to something intently. “Aspen ATIS currently reports barometer steady at thirty even, winds at fifteen out of the west, humidity forty-seven percent, and temperature is sixty-eight.” She hadn’t realized that he carried a broadband receiver that covered the FAA frequencies. The Automated Terminal Information Service frequency would have all of the weather and pertinent airport information regularly updated on a broadcast loop.

  “This does not appear to be the ‘worst of conditions’,” Miranda concluded. “We’ll need to verify, of course, but it seems unlikely that last night’s conditions were significantly different.”

  Mike just shrugged. “Not quite what I was saying, but one point to you, Miranda.”

  “I didn’t realize we were keeping score. Are we keeping score?” If so, was she doing well? She’d never understood competitive sports and if they were now—

  “No, Miranda,” Mike leaned forward. “Not a competition. We’re not keeping score.” He waited until she nodded that she understood, even though she didn’t totally, before he settled back.

  “So, you’ve been to Aspen, Mikey?” Holly’s tone was derisive. “Chasing some hot snow bunny?”

  “If by that you mean Stephanie Garr, the country singer, yes.” Mike sipped at his sparkling water again.

  Miranda didn’t know her, but then she rarely listened to music composed after Mozart.

  Jeremy began humming some tune that sounded just like every other tune on country radio.

  “As you know, it’s not just her singing that’s so lovely.” Mike appeared to be very pleased at another chance to tease Holly. “What you may not know is she also has the exceptional legs of a top skier. She was born and raised here, even if all of her ‘country credentials’ are thought to be Tennessee. Anyway, we skied all of these areas, though she was especially fond of the expert trails atop Snowmass.”

  “Is that Snowmass?” Miranda pointed at a feature she’d noticed on their approach. It lay ahead and below but it was hard to miss as there were still some areas of it on fire—bright flames with billows of black smoke above. Several helicopters were flying between the mountaintop and a clear lake in a valley just five miles to the south, fetching loads of water to dump on the last of the flames. It must have been a massive torch in the
night when it was first burning.

  Below the fire’s location, the top of the mountain had a black ring where fire had begun five hundred feet or so below the top, then spread upward.

  Mike turned and glanced out the window.

  Then he jolted as if Holly had punched him, and pressed his face to the window.

  “That’s Snowmass Ski Area all right. The entire summit is gone. I can’t see what’s—”

  Jeremy handed him a pair of binoculars.

  Mike grabbed them and stared out the window. Their angle of view slowly shifted as the plane continued toward its landing.

  As they continued toward the airport, Miranda could see a long weave of wide trails traced through the pines that she presumed were for skiing in the winter season. They weren’t close enough to see the details, but there were several long straight lines that crossed all the twisting trails that might be the paths of the ski lifts.

  “The Cirque Poma lift is gone,” Mike groaned. “Oh man, are the owners ever going to be pissed. They spent at least a hundred thousand extra to not impact the summertime environment when they installed that lift. Winter work, helicopters for all of the steel and concrete. There’s also a whole May to June wildlife breeding area at altitude up there they were trying to protect. I guess that was just wiped out.”

  Miranda didn’t like to see crashes before she was ready to, but it seemed to be okay this time. Perhaps it was the angle but she didn’t think so.

  This was the first crash site she’d ever seen from above where she couldn’t see any sign of the plane.

  3

  The HeliSki/HeliSee helicopter awaiting them at the Aspen airport was an AgustaWestland A109 Trekker. But while they were allowed to load their gear in the side cage that hung along one side of the helo—where skiers would normally place their skis and poles—they weren’t allowed to board the helicopter.

  Miranda wasn’t sure what to do as that was the obvious next step of the process.

  “What’s going on?”

  In answer, the pilot pointed aloft before walking back into the terminal building.

  She looked up, but didn’t see anything except for a flight of crows.

  “Well, if that’s how he treats his tourists, I’m amazed he’s still in business,” Mike scowled after him.

  Miranda inspected the quality of both the helicopter here and the three more she could see in the hangar. Externally, they were all in immaculate condition. She sniffed the air for traces of spilled hydraulic fluid or avgas, but detected none. A glance inside revealed that the waiting helo had been upgraded to a very high-end set of avionics. That would have been a very costly retrofit. This operation was clearly successful and well run despite Mike’s assessment.

  The Aspen airport sat in a narrow valley among the highest peaks in the Rockies, none of which were visible from the field. Any snow that had fallen during the drought year had already melted off all of the lower, visible peaks.

  White-barked aspen trees bearing bright green leaves covered some of the lower areas. And scrub oak.

  It was all a little…disappointing. She’d barely had a glimpse of the highest peaks due to her attention to the Snowmass fire. Dark green conifers didn’t take over until the higher elevations. They were generally softer woods of spruce and larch that would interact less catastrophically with a plane crashing through them than the far stronger Douglas fir so prevalent in the Pacific Northwest. A two-hundred-foot Douglas fir sometimes seemed as if it could swat a plane from the sky. A thirty-foot aspen or fifty-foot larch would just snap or perhaps even be flexible enough to bend against a plane’s onslaught, barely retarding its demise.

  Miranda made a note in the back of her investigations notebook to consider a paper studying the effects of differing pre-grounding flora on the final crash zone.

  The air was so dry that it was nearly odorless. It was also cool, shadowed down here at the base of the valley. The sun wouldn’t climb clear of the peaks for another hour.

  The taciturn HeliSee pilot—after all, it was the wrong season for the HeliSki portion of their name to be relevant—returned from the hangar.

  He handed each of them a quart-sized water bottle, then a ridiculous hat with a five-inch brim all the way around. Even after Miranda got it adjusted so that it didn’t keep sliding down over her eyes and ears, it was still wide enough to extend out to her shoulders.

  “Once the sun clears the mountains, those yellow ball caps of yours aren’t going to be enough protection, even down here. Get you up on top of Snowmass and the sun’ll cook ya. Coming up from sea level, you’re going to get heavy-duty headaches from the altitude change. Your best fix is lots of water and move slow. Don’t even think about running while you’re up there or you’ll get a wicked migraine, even if you don’t get migraines.”

  While he might be less than friendly, Miranda appreciated his clarity of communication.

  Mike donned his hat.

  Holly was refusing to give up wearing her beloved Matildas soccer team hat until Mike teased her about not wanting to be a team player. That seemed to be a rather unfair assessment in Miranda’s opinion, but it worked and Holly changed hats—only after she punched Mike’s arm.

  Jeremy had simply reached into his big field pack and pulled out his own hat very similar to the ones from HeliSee, though without their mountain peak logo plastered around the crown in garish tie-dye colors.

  Holly yanked it off his head. “I have to wear one of these ridiculous things? Then so do you.” And she slapped a HeliSee hat onto his head. Then she turned and spun Jeremy’s hat away like a Frisbee. Mike sprinted about ten steps, jumped up gracefully, and snagged it from high in the air. Even as he was landing, he twisted and spun the hat through the air back to Jeremy, who caught it and tucked it away.

  The pilot was shaking his head. “That. That’s the kind of thing you don’t want to be doing.”

  “Used to live in Denver. Skied up here plenty of times,” Mike looked unworried as he rejoined them.

  “And where do you live now?” the pilot shot back.

  “About thirty feet above sea level with the rest of us,” Holly answered for him.

  The guy just shook his head, then shaded his eyes despite the silvered aviators and looked up.

  Miranda had already noted the bright spark of an incoming flight.

  “That’ll be the rest of your crew.”

  “But my team is already here.”

  The pilot shrugged at her response and then began his preflight inspection of the helicopter. Again, the professionalism showed in his care with each detail. She wasn’t familiar with the exact procedures of the AgustaWestland Trekker’s preflight and caught up with him.

  “Does the preflight checklist include a torque check of the swash plate bolts?” As that’s what the pilot was doing.

  “No, lady. But it’s my company and I do a lot of my own mechanicking. What do you care as long as it’s right?”

  “I’m considering whether or not that would be a good addition to recommend. Should the FAA mandate that the procedure be included for all rotorcraft preflight checklists?”

  “And you have that kind of power?” He moved to the tail rotor and actually ran a hand along the front and back edge of each blade rather than merely inspecting it visually.

  “I do.”

  He turned to look directly at her for the first time, raising his eyebrows above his mirrored aviators.

  She never understood why the truth always seemed so surprising to people.

  Even though she couldn’t see his eyes—all she saw was the twinned reflection of herself with the rather garish hat—she found it disconcerting. So instead she looked up at the approaching airplane above his right shoulder.

  “Does it need to be so bright?”

  He followed the direction of her gaze. “That plane?”

  “This hat.”

  She could feel his eyes return to her, then shift upward to inspect the logo above her forehead. He gr
imaced. “My wife’s design.”

  “The plane is not very bright. I surmise that it’s painted matte Air Force-gray similar to the aircraft that delivered my team. An Army-tan plane would have a somewhat higher albedo.”

  “Coast Guard would be the brightest.”

  “Yes,” Miranda agreed, though it seemed a redundant observation. “The USCG’s planes are high-gloss white and orange as they’re meant to be seen, not to be hidden.”

  “You’re with the FAA?”

  “The NTSB. And the hat is very bright.”

  “You got a name, lady?”

  “Yes.” Like the question of Where are you? the asked question never garnered the desired information. Or perhaps it was some curious regionalism. She decided to short-circuit the cycle that invariably evoked and supplied her name even though he hadn’t asked for it.

  “Miranda Chase? You do the investigation on Eames’ Cessna 208?”

  Two years ago. Fourteen passengers (only licensed for thirteen though not relevant to the incident’s cause). Final ground contact eleven thousand feet on Pikes Peak in Colorado. No survivors. Airport of origin…ah, Aspen.

  She nodded carefully, unsure of the pilot’s pending reaction.

  The approaching plane had finally resolved from a point of light to a bullet shape as it approached. It was Air Force-gray as she’d anticipated.

  “Read that report. Eames was always a sloppy idiot. You nailed it in one, Ms. Chase. That man was a pilot error waiting to happen since the day he left the womb. Probably botched that departure as well.”

  She’d had no doubts about the accuracy of her report, but she liked that the pilot seemed pleased. That would increase the care he was likely to take when transporting her and her team. She had no idea if she was supposed to say anything about his opinion regarding Eames’ birth.

  Instead, she turned back to the helicopter. “What else would you include on a preflight checklist for this particular model that isn’t there?”

  He eyed her, then the helicopter. “That’s an easy one, but it would be hard on you for a while.”