Thunderbolt Read online

  She counted seconds.

  Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven…

  And there was the heavy buzz saw sound. Even at a distance of two miles, the Minigun was so impressive that she felt decidedly unsafe.

  She glanced at the other members of the team and tried to read their expressions.

  Mike, the team’s personnel specialist, was looking very alarmed as he always seemed to be around the military. But he was, as he claimed, the very best at interviewing people.

  Holly barely glanced over to see what was happening. She’d probably become inured to such sounds from her years of service as an operator for the Australian SAS Special Operations Forces.

  Jeremy was watching the dogfighting Lightnings far above with a rapt expression, leaning into the curve as the F-35 did a hard bank and climb. It was a surprise he didn’t fall over with how far he leaned.

  Thankfully there was at least one person other than herself focused on the task at hand.

  Colonel Campos pointed back toward the base. “I’ve grounded all of the A-10s until you can tell me what happened here.”

  That was a significant statement. A third of all the Air Force’s remaining A-10s were based here. That meant over eighty aircraft were presently grounded.

  A high priority indeed.

  Miranda didn’t like to start with the crash itself as it biased her view of what had happened, but it was such a curious sight that she couldn’t help herself.

  The A-10 sat on the desert as if it had been planted there.

  Not parked, because its landing gear wasn’t extended. Instead the plane looked planted so that it lay belly-flat on the ground…partly into the ground. Like a flowerpot left sitting in the garden too long and the garden had grown up around it.

  Everything on the long Air Force gray-white fuselage appeared to be intact.

  Perhaps if they waited long enough it would sprout.

  This particular plane had an angry shark’s mouth and eyes painted on the nose around the GAU-8/A Avenger rotary cannon. On an A-10 Warthog, the shark face was roughly as common as the warthog face for reasons no one had ever been able to explain to her.

  “Is the pilot okay?” Mike asked a question she’d never have thought to.

  “Yes, his ejection seat is over there,” Colonel Campos pointed at an orange flag a few hundred meters to the west—directly beyond the plane’s nose as he had ejected up and out. “We didn’t touch it except to disarm and remove the seat’s backup firing system. It’s safe to approach now.”

  He’d been both thoughtful and meticulous. A very pleasant change from most of the overly self-assured pilots she’d met.

  Jeremy jumped right in. “The pilot will be an inch shorter the rest of his life, but that happens from ejections.”

  “It what?” Mike looked aghast.

  “The average ejection is between twelve and fourteen g of vertical force on the spine. Most of that spinal compression is non-recoverable. The older systems can fire even harder and they often broke the pilot’s backs as well, though rarely catastrophically. Almost everyone in the modern era who had to eject has survived, even many at supersonic airspeeds.”

  Miranda thought about her Sabrejet, which had one of the oldest ejection seat designs still flying. A broken back didn’t sound like something she’d enjoy.

  Jeremy continued with the history of ejection seats from the first-ever, used by Luftwaffe test pilot Helmut Schenk in 1942. That was if one ignored Everard Calthrop’s patented design, but never built, compressed-air ejection seat from 1916—and…

  Miranda noticed the colonel rub his wrist.

  No, he was brushing at the watch he wore. It was a simple man’s watch—with a distinctive red barrel.

  He noticed her attention, “I don’t wear ties very often.” Then he turned away with an odd look on his face.

  She knew that the Martin-Baker Tie Club had been founded by the company for all pilots saved by an MB ejection seat—all received a tie, clip, patch, and certificate. The watch could be purchased separately, but only by club members. Even partly underwritten by Martin-Baker, they cost thousands of dollars apiece. They were designed to be tough enough to survive a second ejection.

  There was something about his expression… But with his back to her, she couldn’t look again to see what it might mean.

  Instead, she turned back to the plane.

  It was curious that it had landed flat despite the pilot’s ejection. The seat had landed close by. Perhaps the pilot had guided it to a nearly safe landing and then ejected at the last moment as a precaution. Choosing what was called a zero-zero ejection—zero altitude-zero speed—was a very dangerous choice. A last-second tumble could disorient the ejection more than the seat’s rockets could compensate for.

  She waved Holly forward while Jeremy continued his discussion with Mike about record ejections: Mach 3 at over eighty thousand feet from an SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, underwater from an A-7 Corsair jet fighter after it had fallen into the ocean off the side of an aircraft carrier…

  It made the space between her shoulders itch.

  Maybe it was time to replace her F-86 Sabrejet’s seat.

  It might be original equipment, which she preferred, but it was getting very hard to find someone to service the old seat. And it was a first-generation design—not that far advanced from the German originals. Maybe it was time to call Martin-Baker for a retrofit of some fifth-generation protection.

  The crash.

  Focus on the crash.

  Determining the extent of the debris field was a trivial task in this case. Several of the bombs from the A-10’s hardpoints had been scrubbed off as the low wings had scraped across the desert. Flags, noting where each had landed, were scattered where the bombs had finally come to earth without exploding.

  A long furrow marked the plane’s smooth contact with the desert, like the trail left by a toboggan through fresh snow.

  She and Holly set off to scout the edge of the debris field. Except for the bombs—which had been removed—only a few bits and pieces had come off the plane.

  Everything else was intact.

  Miranda almost enjoyed the quiet and the gentle desert breeze. Together, they identified stray bits and pieces, but with only the occasional word between them until they were nearing the end of the circuit around the debris field.

  “This should be easier than skinning a roasted tiger snake,” Holly said once they’d completed their walk around the debris-field perimeter. “Though there is one thing this girl finds all sorts of puzzling.”

  Miranda liked that she didn’t need to respond aloud to Holly. She could simply glance her way and wait.

  Sure enough, Holly continued, “Why did they call the best NTSB investigator in the business for a simple crash? Not much like we need some aboriginal Elder wise in mysterious ways of the world to see what happened. Got too low or the engine died, and…splat!”

  “Something took over the controls.” The colonel had watched them walking the perimeter and, Miranda recognized, he had awaited them at exactly the point they would have completed their circuit of inspection.

  “Some…thing?”

  The colonel nodded.

  “But…” Miranda pictured the A-10’s systems. “The North American A-10 Thunderbolt II has a two-tier redundant hydraulic control system, and a mechanical control if both of those fail.”

  “You know your aircraft, Ms. Chase,” Colonel Campos tipped his head politely, then winced and straightened slowly.

  “Possible conflicts in the hydraulic systems?” Jeremy stepped in. “That might create the sensation that something else was controlling the aircraft. If there was an over- or under-pressure, it might easily be perceived as an unresponsive system…”

  “Especially to a younger, less experienced pilot,” Mike managed to get a word in edgewise, which was hard to do with Jeremy.

  “…They might feel that the aircraft was behaving in a way that they would perceive as something else contr
olling the aircraft. Then—”

  “Jeremy,” Holly stopped him with a soft-spoken word. She was the only one who could. Mike’s and her own attempts rarely succeeded.

  When Jeremy had the bit of his systems specialty between his teeth, he was very hard to slow down. But this enthusiasm made him easy to forgive. Twenty-five and a genius, Viet-American with an accentless voice of the Pacific Northwest, and the excitement of she didn’t know what.

  “Let the colonel actually speak, buddy. You learn more that way,” Holly chided him.

  4

  Jeremy knew he kept running off at the mouth whenever Miranda was around, but he couldn’t help himself.

  Three months.

  He’d been part of Miranda Chase’s NTSB team for three months and over a dozen investigations. He kept waiting for the glow to dim, but it hadn’t. Each time he was called in, his luck kept being good.

  He rapped his knuckles on his head.

  “Why did you do that?” Miranda was the one who cut off Colonel Campos this time. But she wasn’t watching the colonel; instead she’d looked at him.

  He looked down at her. He was only five-seven. Only. He was the second tallest person ever in their family. His sister was like an alien from another planet, towering over them all at five-nine. Jeremy had teased her about that mercilessly, as someone at school had told him was his bound duty as a big brother—and he didn’t want to fail at any “bound duty.” She’d finally made them all get DNA tests, and beat him up because she was way, way better at martial arts than he was.

  He’d gotten back at her by refusing to fix her computer for over six months.

  Still, he wasn’t used to looking down at people other than his parents. Mike and Holly were both five-ten, but Miranda was just five-four.

  Miranda was so slight that she looked as if her vest should be too heavy for her, yet she’d outlasted him on three major site investigations. He’d go to sleep thinking they were done and she would return to the site for another four hours in the middle of the night to check some facts.

  It was amazing that the Number One IIC—Investigator-in-Charge—for the entire NTSB was a woman who made him feel tall.

  “Why did I do what?”

  “Knock your knuckles on your head.”

  Had he?

  Miranda always flustered him, leaving him awkward and bumbling. He’d studied every single one of her NTSB reports dating all the way back to her very first in 2003. She had a clarity of thought that he could only aspire to and a methodology so meticulous that he often felt like he was in a sterile laboratory rather than the chaos of a crash site.

  He didn’t really believe in a higher power, but something had seen that he was assigned to the Miranda Chase’s team.

  Could it be something as simple as chance or luck?

  Reaching up to tap his knuckles on his head, he froze. Yes, he had knocked on his head.

  “Mom.”

  Miranda blinked at him in confusion.

  Had he just called her Mom? Not unless she’d given birth to him when she was eleven.

  He really needed to get his shit together around Miranda.

  “My mom,” and that sounded even more foolish, so he just plowed ahead. “Whenever there was a question about good luck, Mom would say knock on wood, then rap her knuckles on her head.”

  The others were just watching them. The colonel looked confused and Mike looked amused. It was Holly he kept an eye on—she was dangerous if he rambled too long. He rubbed his arm, still remembering the pain she was able to inflict with the merest touch when he got too carried away. Some weird military nerve pressure-point thing he never wanted to experience again.

  “But your head isn’t made of wood. It consists of brain, bone, and three outer layers of protective dermis,” Miranda was quite insistent. “Around the brain there’s—”

  “Haven’t you ever heard the phrase ‘I’m a blockhead’?”

  She nodded. “But blocks are stone, concrete, metal, or… Oh, wood.”

  “Right. So, if I’m blockhead?”

  “It means…that your head is made of wood. But it isn’t.” Miranda frowned at him.

  It was strange to discover that Miranda Chase was confused about anything—ever. But he’d seen it enough times now to know that sometimes she was anyway.

  “It’s just a saying,” Jeremy tried to explain, wishing he was better at such things.

  “And because of the metaphor that your head is made of wood, it then becomes a readily available object to knock your knuckles against when you’re speaking of luck. Especially useful if, as at the present, there isn’t any wood close to hand.”

  Jeremy nodded.

  Miranda tipped her head slightly to the side. “Good luck, bad luck, or both?”

  Jeremy had to think about it. “Good luck. You knock on wood to not jinx good luck. Like my luck at being on your team. I can’t begin to tell you how much I’ve loved working with you. I never imagined that—”

  Holly drew his attention by tapping her own forearm with her fingertips. She did it precisely where she’d squeezed the pressure point on his own arm that first day and almost dropped him to his knees. His arm hadn’t worked right for hours. He’d tried to do it to himself since, but hadn’t been able to reproduce the mechanism. Online research about pressure-point and nerve-junction attacks had actually given him nightmares before he’d stopped looking.

  Luck. Right.

  “Uh…the luck that I’d be on your team.”

  Shut up. Right.

  Miranda knocked her knuckles on the side of her head, then looked very relieved. “Thanks, that’s been worrying me.” Then, without pausing for breath, she turned back to the colonel. “How much experience have you had flying the A-10, Colonel Campos?”

  He grunted and folded his arms across his chest. “Over ten thousand hours.”

  Since it was very rare for a fighter pilot to fly over five hundred hours a year, that meant his numbers were amazingly high. Of course he was old—to make colonel meant he was at least forty-five.

  “You say that the pilot said that something took over the controls.”

  He flexed his hands unconsciously, “I did.”

  That flexing must indicate something.

  Miranda glanced at Mike Munroe. So Jeremy did as well.

  He didn’t know how Mike did it, but he could read people in ways Jeremy knew that he’d never master. Maybe Mike could read something in the colonel’s gestures.

  “So, colonel,” Mike appeared calm. His NTSB vest was slung over one shoulder. He looked like he was just hanging out, maybe at a horse-racing track.

  Jeremy had tried copying Mike’s mannerisms in the mirror with absolutely no luck at all. Goofy nerd just wasn’t a very cool look.

  “Was this the first time you had to eject?”

  The colonel flinched.

  Oh! He was “the pilot” on this crash.

  But he already wore a Bremont MBI watch. It stood out prominently on his left wrist. Jeremy had recognized it right away, though he’d never seen one in person. The back of every one was scribed with their Martin-Baker membership number and either their call sign or the date of their ejection. He was about to ask if he could see it. What font and font size had they chosen to—

  “It’s the second time. He has the watch,” Miranda answered for him when the colonel didn’t speak.

  Mike looked at the watch but just frowned in puzzlement. That was cool. He liked knowing something Mike didn’t.

  Would the colonel get a second Martin-Baker Tie Club membership? Maybe add another date to the back of his watch? But even more interesting…

  “Did you lose more height the second time or did you already experience maximum compression from the first ejection? I mean, are you feeling additional loss of control issues from herniated disks? Or is it alignment variations that allowed the vertebrae to pack closer? I need to look that up. Perhaps—”

  He didn’t see Holly move up to him this time. He
r quick squeeze on his shoulder completely stole his breath away. Even more startling than the forearm pinch. Suprascapular nerve, right near the Vulcan nerve pinch point. And it felt as if he’d be happier if it knocked him out.

  Colonel Campos was scowling at him.

  No one spoke for a long moment.

  Maybe that hadn’t been the best line of questioning.

  Finally the colonel relented, yet spoke facing Miranda. “I know the handling characteristics of an A-10 Thunderbolt II. When I say that something took control of my aircraft, I mean that very literally. And it did it in such a way that if I’d been even a tenth of a second slower in my reactions, you’d be studying a wreck scattered across the entire landscape and speaking with my deputy commander.”

  “Oh.” Miranda looked around like a confused owl caught out in the daylight.

  Right, her spheres. He’d learned that Miranda hung onto what she called the “Music of the Spheres” for her investigations like it was some magic talisman.

  “I already did the weather sphere, and there isn’t really any terrain to record for the second one,” he told her.

  She nodded once, then looked around at the flatness of the desert terrain and nodded twice more.

  “And you already did the perimeter walk.” Jeremy wasn’t sure why he whispered it so that the colonel wouldn’t hear, but he did.

  This time Miranda nodded three times as she acknowledged her third sphere.

  “The hull, wings, and control surfaces all appeared to be intact,” he prompted her again.

  Then Miranda did one of those amazing things she did. From one moment to the next, she shifted from confused to commanding, having formulated an entire plan of attack faster than he could take a breath.

  “Mike. Find out everything you can from the reticent colonel,” as if he wasn’t still standing there with them.

  As she turned her back on the colonel, Campos looked down at the top of her head in some surprise.

  Jeremy knew from experience that while Miranda never forgot anything, she would not be thinking at all about the colonel at this moment.

  “Holly. I want you on mechanical factors. I doubt that you’ll find any, but we need to look.”