Thunderbolt Read online

  The only time Holly humbly took any suggestions was when they came from Miranda. She certainly never paid attention to him. And Mike, for some reason, always generated a negative response—typically in the form of derisive banter. Now, she simply turned and headed to the aircraft.

  “Jeremy, you and I are going to go over the hydraulics systems. It is the only force likely to exert sufficient control to overpower an experienced pilot.”

  One-on-one with Miranda Chase?

  He knocked hard on the side of his head. Twice. This couldn’t be real.

  But when his eyes stopped watering, it still was.

  5

  “Lieutenant William Blake?”

  “Here,” Billy glanced up to see Lieutenant Colonel Kiley standing at the end of his cadre’s table.

  “Sir!” Billy jolted to his feet and banged the DFAC—dining facility—table hard. His mates cursed and muttered as glasses of iced tea and soda spilled over half-finished meals.

  He’d look down later.

  Lt. Colonel Kiley was the military commander of the AFAMS—Air Force Agency for Modeling and Simulation—installation at Eglin Air Force Base. Billy remained at attention.

  “You have a sortie in ten minutes. If you’re not in your seat, the flight leaves without you.”

  Billy knew it didn’t matter that any sortie Kiley organized would be simulated. Scuttlebutt was that if a flier missed his start time, Kiley would dump him to the bottom of the rotation. And who knew how long it would take to climb back onto the active roster at all.

  “Sir. Yes sir!” By the time he saluted it was to Kiley’s back.

  He looked down at the mess scattered across the table. “Sorry, guys.”

  “He apologized?” His buddy “Toucan” Jones looked down his big nose at him. “Next thing Lieutenant William Blake will start writing poetry for us. Get out of here, Poet. Don’t ever keep an LC waiting.” Of course, with buddies like that…

  He’d hoped to leave “Poet” behind him in San Antonio, but it wasn’t gonna happen.

  He’d just met Kiley yesterday when he’d been haranguing the new arrivals during orientation—which included all ten of them at this table.

  Billy started away.

  “Hey, clear your own damn tray. We’re not your maidservants, Poet.”

  He wished he could avoid the nickname. Mom was a hotshot English Lit professor at Fordham University back in the Bronx. So, because Eloisa Bly married a Blake, he was named for her favorite poet.

  Tyger, Tyger, burning bright,

  In the forests of the night…

  And Mom wondered why he’d opted to fly the same jets his dad had before retiring to teach French linguistics. Jets were way cooler than being the butt of every senior high English class. The hottest girl in the class had made it clear that she liked him, but she refused to call him anything other than Tyger-Tyger.

  Like an idiot, he’d been unable to get past that.

  Give him math and science any day.

  Now? It sucked that Tyger hadn’t become his call sign. Too fancy for a bunch of air jocks; he’d gotten stuck with Poet.

  He dumped the tray and broke into a trot.

  Even though Kiley must have walked—senior officers never ran and the simulator building was too close to think of driving—he was already there and tapping his foot impatiently.

  Billy checked his watch as he saluted. He still had four minutes to spare but maybe Kiley counted time differently. Or maybe he was pissed that Blake had arrived in time.

  “Well, get your ass in the sling.”

  “Sir. Yes sir,” he dropped the salute and trotted for the stairs. The simulators were one floor up.

  In the ready room, five other pilots were milling about.

  “You the one we waiting on?” someone snapped at him from the crowd.

  He shrugged a response, like anyone ever told him anything.

  “Shit! Whatdaya fly?”

  “A-10C Thunderbolt II, sir.”

  “You dumb, flyboy?” A real insult to anyone inside the Air Force. The major confronted him from so close that he couldn’t look down to see the man’s last name.

  “Sir. No sir.”

  “Well I say you are, so you are. What idiot opts for a forty-year-old piece of shit?”

  He kept his mouth shut, but shouted in his head, The kind of pilot whose dad flew A-10 Thunderbolt IIs in Operation Desert Storm and survived shit you couldn’t handle, sir.

  He didn’t recognize a single pilot. In fact—he scanned again—he was the only lieutenant in the room. Not a soul from his training cadre of first years. Everyone else was a captain or a major.

  Was this one of those ante up or forever be the butt of every joke moments? Billy made a quick guess about what the Major flew.

  “Ninety-four percent flight availability. Sir.”

  The guy did look pained at that.

  Billy had nailed it.

  The US military’s most expensive weapon system ever, the F-35 Lightning II jet fighters, were lucky to hit twenty-five percent availability. It was about the worst introduction of a new aircraft in the Air Force’s history.

  “Fuck off, flyboy.”

  “Sir. Yes sir!” Billy saluted smartly and the major stalked off. Again, he missed a chance to see the guy’s name. Major Ass-face would fit him just fine.

  One of the other officers offered him a smirk, but it looked like a friendly smirk—sympathy rather than derision. “Bell” on the Captain’s jacket, Billy noted for later.

  The remaining three just flat out ignored him.

  Being the only junior officer in the flight was either a really good thing or a really, really bad one.

  6

  “I should have picked up that he was the pilot,” Holly rubbed her wrist.

  Just like the colonel’s gesture.

  Miranda still didn’t see the connection. Unless the big watch had hurt during the ejection. Or maybe…

  Miranda tapped her knuckles on her head to test the idea. Yes, perhaps that was the colonel’s symbol of luck—rubbing the watch he’d received for surviving the first ejection somehow helping him survive the second.

  She’d never really believed in luck, having had so little of it in her life. The outsider to everyone except her parents. Them both dying in the plane explosion when she was thirteen and should have died with them.

  All her years investigating crashes and no closer to understanding why.

  She knew all about the how but that wasn’t enough.

  Miranda needed—

  “I hate it when Mike gets something before I do,” Holly was still grumbling.

  “Why is that?” Jeremy asked.

  The all-too-familiar darkness swirled murkily waist deep, dragging to pull her under.

  “That’s one bloke who’s far too sure of himself. It’s my duty as a woman to put men like Mike in his place.” She faced Miranda. “Our duty as women.”

  As women.

  Miranda caught a breath of clear air.

  Miranda tried to make sense of her sudden inclusion in Holly’s world. She made it sound like a noble calling. Women. As if they were something special for being that.

  Holly sounded so certain.

  Women.

  She liked the idea of being part of something bigger than herself.

  Lighter than herself.

  But while she believed Holly on most other topics, perhaps Mike Munroe shouldn’t be one of them.

  “I like Mike.”

  “Well, sure you do.” Holly looked to the heavens as if pleading for the sky to do something. “He doesn’t see you as some hot Sheila just begging for a tumble in the tall weeds. I’d rather go a round or two with a saltie.”

  Miranda recalled that a saltie was the larger and more dangerous type of the two crocodile breeds that lived in Australia. She wasn’t sure about the relevance of the metaphor.

  After all, she didn’t know of any salties currently in the cool Arizona desert. Would they survi
ve under the crystalline blue of the winter sky? Probably not. The arid desert here stretched from the usually dry river bed of the Santa Cruz River to the drier San Pedro River. Not exactly saltie country.

  But if she had to choose between a saltie and Mike Munroe, the choice wouldn’t be difficult. Mike was a very handsome man. But men like Mike didn’t notice women like her.

  In fact, most men ran the other way when they met her.

  Of Miranda’s seven attempts at relationships, five had made it past the first date. Three past a week. None past the second or third time in bed.

  She would blurt something out. About how good or bad it had been. In public. At a restaurant or in the middle of a movie. Not knowing what to do with the emotion it always found an escape, and—by the time she figured out that it had been really inappropriate—she’d be alone again.

  She watched a tumbleweed roll lazily by in the late morning breeze. She liked the juxtaposition. Mike would like to have sex with Holly in the tall weeds. Whereas Holly would probably rather lie down with the spiny tumbleweeds than with Mike.

  Whereas she herself… What would she prefer?

  To…solve the reason for this plane crash.

  She moved forward to inspect the canopy.

  “Stay in my tracks,” she told the others. She didn’t want the site contaminated.

  “Oh, like we’re the first to tramp about here. There’s tracks everywhere, Sherlock,” Holly scoffed, but she and Jeremy did stay in Miranda’s tracks.

  “Sherlock was a fictional man. You said I needed to perform my duties as a woman. As I don’t believe that I’m fictional, I fail to see the similarity.” Miranda kept her eyes on the shifting desert soil.

  “Benedict Cumberbatch,” Holly sighed happily. “Not so fictional. Would definitely work for me.”

  “In the movies, Basil Rathbone came the closest for me,” she had watched every single movie ever made about her hero detective. “Until I saw him being the French-slinging, villain-pirate in Captain Blood. Unable to reconcile the two, I never watched the old movies again. I have always preferred Doyle’s original written Sherlock anyway.”

  Holly laughed. “Let’s get to work.”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to do for some time now.”

  Holly laughed again and hugged her.

  Unsure what to do, Miranda just stood there until Holly was done. Once Holly let her go, she asked, “Why did you do that?”

  “Because you’re so completely you, Miranda.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “You’ll figure it out someday,” but Holly was smiling in a way that Miranda could only interpret as friendly. Then she turned aside to inspect the mechanical systems, logically starting from the aileron trim tabs.

  Miranda moved to the shattered canopy and she and Jeremy looked down through it into the empty cockpit.

  The ACES II ejection seat for the A-10 was not a subtle machine. At the top of the seat were a pair of canopy breakers—rabbit-ear steel protrusions. As designed, they’d shattered the thick, polycarbonate-acrylic-layered canopy when the seat had punched upward.

  In her Sabre, an ejection would require six steps: hook up to emergency oxygen bottle if over fifteen thousand feet, duck down to keep her head clear when she pulled the canopy eject lever on the right handgrip—firing it backward on its rails—sit up and lock the harness with the left handgrip, place her feet on the seat’s footrests, push her head back against the headrest while tucking her chin, and finally pull on the right handgrip’s trigger lever.

  If she was under a thousand feet, her chances of survival would be negligible.

  To use the A-10’s ACES II seat, you sat back and yanked the big yellow handles at the end of the chair arms. It took care of everything else.

  And you could do it from the ground, as the colonel had, with a reasonable hope of survival.

  She mentally followed the arc up into the air. The colonel would have ejected because he was still unsure if his efforts to save the aircraft had been sufficient even at the last second.

  After the canopy was shattered, rockets would propel him at three hundred miles an hour to approximately twenty stories into the air—auto-steering him to the correct angle.

  At the apex of his arc, the seat would cut loose from the harness.

  The seat would plummet to earth and a land…about where it still remained.

  Now that he was separate from the seat, a charge would deploy the parachute still attached to the pilot by his harness—and he’d have a single swing before he returned to the earth…there.

  But his parachute wasn’t there.

  Perhaps they had cleaned it up along with the explosives.

  But…she walked away from the A-10.

  “Hey! What are you…” Jeremy called after her.

  The sound of feet trotting came up from behind. In her tracks, because Jeremy always listened.

  She found what she was looking for well past the location of the seat—which would hold no unique information for her. It had done its job, saved the colonel’s life, then fallen to land where ballistics had taken it.

  But on landing, the Colonels’ feet had made two deep punches in soft sand that would be where he first hit after a barely arrested twenty-story fall. Then the smoothly flattened area of a professional tuck-and-roll parachute landing. Beyond the end of the smoothed section was another deep furrow as the pilot was dragged by his chute twenty more feet before stopping against a large clump of desert grass.

  “A strong tailwind,” Jeremy observed correctly.

  “Loss of lift in flight,” Miranda noted. “A strong tailwind, especially a burst at the last moment, would drastically decrease the wing’s lift that depends on forward motion relative to the air.”

  “Are you saying the colonel was incautious and too close to the ground when he lost too much lift due to some microburst?”

  Miranda turned to look at him. “I was discussing facts. You’re discussing conclusions.”

  “Right. Right. Right.”

  Miranda recognized the habit and understood that the closing of his eyes and nodding his head emphatically with each repetition was to focus his concentration.

  Jeremy was driving the information into his mental construct. Experience had taught her that it wasn’t the most efficient method, but it worked.

  “Don’t think in a completed image, Jeremy. Think in a tree-shape of accumulating facts. Each piece has a place. We can now discern that there was a tailwind sufficient to drag a man into this clump of grass, but not through or over it. I have not tested this specific soil,” she knelt down and scooped up a handful then allowed the sandy content to spill through her fingers, “but we can surmise that a wind speed under fifteen knots would be sufficient to drag the colonel.”

  “Especially if he was momentarily unresponsive or perhaps just happy to be alive and didn’t think to cut away. We’d have to inspect the chute to be sure, but as it’s not here, he probably carried it back to the base.”

  “Very good.” Miranda knew that was more than she would have thought about the human factor. “And an emergency landing, without flaps…” She left the sentence open just as she’d learned to do when lecturing at the NTSB Training Center—the few times she’d let Terence talk her into doing so.

  Jeremy was nodding rapidly. “Such a landing would be performed at a significantly higher-than-normal speed. Colonel Campos said that he had only moments to compensate and attempt to save his plane. Which means he would have still been at maneuvering speed, not landing speed. Therefore, the tailwind would have a minimal effect on the aircraft traveling at perhaps a couple hundred knots.”

  “But not no effect,” she lifted a handful of the dry soil and shook it out between her fingers. It was light enough that even the light breeze carried it several steps away.

  Again the rapid nodding. “Right. A possible factor, though not a likely one. How do I learn to do what you do, Miranda?”

  “Never stop le
arning.” That was her father’s voice. One of the last things he ever said to her before his death, though he’d said it so often she was still unsure if that counted as a special final instruction or not.

  “I can do that.”

  “Good,” Miranda dusted off her hands. “Back to the plane.”

  “Back to the plane,” Jeremy agreed.

  Miranda fished a hundred-foot tape out of her pack and handed the end to him. She positioned herself to measure the length of the pilot’s skid and the distance to both the fallen ejection seat and the plane itself.

  Again, facts.

  7

  No longer the center of attention, Billy took a moment to check out the Eglin Air Force base’s simulator room.

  It was still surprising that he was here.

  He and the guys he’d left at the table in the DFAC had just graduated the Pilot Training Next program at AETC last week. The Air Education and Training Command at Joint Base San Antonio, Texas, had run his class through a six-month simulator course rather than the year-long course that included mostly classroom time and some trainer time.

  He loved the simulators.

  Pilot Next had given him unlimited hours. If he screwed up a flight maneuver, he wasn’t taken into a classroom to discuss what had happened. Instead, they reset the flight to the moment he’d screwed up and he could keep reworking the moment until he nailed its ass.

  He’d applied for the A-10 Warthog upon graduation, and gotten the assignment, which had transferred his training to Air Combat Command at Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base. The November temperatures were the same 50s as San Antonio, but it was still a balm to his New York blood expecting a bitter winter. Besides, his life was indoors. More simulators, and soon inside a fighter jet.

  There was a little jostling for the stations, but there was no difference that he could see. It didn’t affect him as they were all climbing into simulators labeled F-35 Lightning II—America’s newest fighter jet.

  He headed for one of the few labeled A-10 Thunderbolt II—America’s oldest fighter jet. No one else headed for those.