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  “Where did you learn about aircraft structures?” Mike desperately needed a subject change.

  “Well, I know more about blowing them up, but I can’t do that anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “Shh. We’re on deck.”

  Miranda hung up and pocketed her phone. She did the eye-squint, then eye-wide thing one more time, as if she was clearing it out of her system.

  “Structural.” She asked the Australian without making it a question.

  “I know a fair amount about engines as well. You see, sometimes—”

  “And you?” Miranda cut Holly off, which Mike could actually like her for.

  “Mike Munroe, human factors and operations specialist. I’m the one who’s going to go convince the general that dragging you two off to a firing squad really isn’t his best option. At least not yet.” He considered holding his hand out in greeting again, but she preempted the move by turning back to the wreck.

  “Okay.” She went through a quick ritual of tapping every pocket on her vest and cargo pants without looking at either of them.

  “You’re with me,” she appeared to be talking to the blonde Australian. Maybe.

  Before following, Holly stuck her tongue out at him. She’d definitely be paying for that. Miranda though, she was a seriously odd duck.

  Even back in training, he’d heard Miranda Chase stories.

  “Best investigator the NTSB has ever seen.”

  “Crazier than a hologram of flying batshit.”

  “Heard she went through over a dozen team members in her first year.”

  “Pray you never work with her, dude. Just pray.”

  He’d imagined that his first assignment with an investigation with the NTSB would have a somewhat more rational start. Instead he’d landed straight in the fire.

  Mike took a moment to study the view before going to calm down a two-star general—which was going to be a first if he pulled it off.

  The white salt flats of Groom Lake lay nestled deep in the broken lands along the eastern side of Emigrant Valley and close by the low but rugged Groom Range. This really was too cool for words even if he had to put up with the weirdo of a lead investigator and a structural specialist with the sense of humor of an Australian guttersnipe.

  Dad was going to die when he heard Mike had been assigned here. But the wreck was code-word classified. Could he even mention it next time they spoke? Probably not. That really sucked.

  Mike was most of the way to the general, already had his casual greeting smile in place, when he realized that Miranda Chase had a satellite phone. He should have borrowed it to call Alejandra. Too late now.

  “Hi, I’m Mike Munroe.” It was time to get to work.

  7

  “Lady, any time I need a Sheila to take down a pissed-off general for me, you’re my gal.”

  The blonde Australian walked as if she owned the desert. But she did it silently and didn’t appear to even disturb the light soil as she did so, unlike the clumsy general who had clearly bent the old compass dial.

  Perhaps she wasn’t really there.

  Miranda had certainly had enough conversations with her dead parents. Of course they rarely answered back.

  “I wasn’t ‘taking him down’,” Miranda explained. “I simply required an expedient method to demonstrate that it’s the evidence that has importance, not some preconceived security concerns.” Even to herself that sounded pompous. She’d never developed the knack of making her own team comfortable. She’d known Evelyn and Tony for so long that they’d understood that about her and ignored any awkwardness. But now there were new people and how were they going to react to her?

  “Either way, you rocked it, girlfriend.”

  Girlfriend? Even after five years, she’d never have thought of Evelyn that way. And here Holly was using it in their first five minutes.

  She had no experience to judge such a statement by. There weren’t exactly a lot of women on the family island to be girlfriends with. Even ashore for school, she’d never fit in. Her last girlfriend had been…Cindy in eighth grade, who’d ultimately had no patience for a mourning Miranda whose parents had just been blown up over the Atlantic. In retrospect, Cindy hadn’t been all that great a friend before her parents died either.

  Finally returned to the point where she’d been trying to start this investigation twenty-three minutes ago, Miranda focused on the next sphere.

  Scope of Debris Field: It started—

  “Whoa! Someone really flattened that poor bugger, didn’t he? Looks like a pancake run over by a road roller.” Holly’s whistle of surprise forced Miranda to look three more spheres inward and actually study the fuselage.

  Holly’s description was not far wrong. The round tube of the fuselage, normally fifteen feet high, had indeed been pancaked flat so that only one or two small portions rose more than five feet above the desert.

  “It’s not explosives, there’s no peeling back around the edges of the skin breaks. No centerline of impact. Instead of being bent down in the middle—which would be bloody hard to do in the first place—it’s all bulged out at the side, making the top cave in. And that’s even harder to do. Seriously. It’s like it was slapped down from the top, but without ever being touched. Never seen anything like that before.”

  Miranda hadn’t either. “Where did you learn about airframe structures?”

  “Libya was a lot of it. Colonel Gaddafi should have won that mess like a piece of piss instead of getting a well-deserved bayonet up his lecherous bum. He certainly had the military force, whereas the rebels started with little more than sticks and stones. Me and a couple of my mates went in and made sure that Gaddafi’s aircraft didn’t work so well.”

  “You blew up planes?” Miranda’s skin went cold despite the day’s rising heat.

  “You don’t think that Gaddafi’s Air Force went from three hundred and fifty combat capable aircraft to one-fifty total, including puddle jumpers and trainers, all on its own, do you? We got to where we were splitting them up in different ways, just to see how the airframes collapsed. Did you know that if you set up a MiG-25 just right, you can slice it from the cockpit back to the engine exhausts just like a sawmill slicing the length of a log? Plonk!” She made a show with her hands of the two halves of an aircraft tipping over sideways in opposite directions.

  Miranda swallowed hard and staggered aside. Looking away didn’t help, because all she could see was the wrecked C-130. The Australian had destroyed planes? On purpose? Her whole life was about putting them back together and Holly had…

  It took all her strength not to be sick.

  The woman had to go away.

  She couldn’t be here.

  Miranda couldn’t face—

  A young man with Vietnamese features stepped right in front of her.

  “You’re Miranda Chase? Oh my God! I can’t believe it.” He grabbed her hand and began shaking it. “I’m Jeremy. Jeremy Trahn. Systems specialist. I can’t believe I’m on your team. When the security guy driving me here told me who I was meeting, I didn’t believe him. No way, just no way. But here you are. I’ve read every single one of your investigation reports.” His English was accentless and so fast that it was hard to follow.

  Her hand was still tightly clasped between the two of his.

  “All the way back to that first Cessna 152 that flew into the powerlines by Boeing Field in Seattle and ended up dangling upside down for hours. I’ve taught you everything I know. No. Wait. Everything I know I’ve taught… You know what I mean. I’m— I’m…speechless.”

  “All evidence to the contrary,” Holly remarked drily from somewhere behind her.

  Miranda’s attempts to recover her hand weren’t working.

  “It’s amazing. I’ve been so hoping to just meet you or even attend one of your lectures. And now here I am assigned to your team. This is too perfect to be true. I’m Jeremy. Jeremy Trahn. Did I already say that? I’m just so excited to be here that I can’t
begin to tell you. Such an honor to—”

  Holly reached out and casually took Jeremy’s forearm.

  “Ow! Hey!” His clasp relaxed suddenly, as if his nerves had been switched off.

  Miranda recovered her hand and Holly let the man go.

  “I think she got the idea, mate.”

  “Sorry, it’s just—” Jeremy wrapped his other hand protectively over where Holly had seemed to barely touch his forearm.

  “Honor and privilege and all that rot.” Holly turned to Miranda. “So I’m guessing that you’re some kind of hot shit crash girl in addition to facing down generals. I seriously like that. Want to get married? Not that I’m into girls, but I bet you’re a gas to hang around with. What are you?” She addressed the last to Jeremy.

  “Systems specialist: electrical, fuel, hydraulics, you name it,” he rebounded with his full enthusiasm even as he rubbed at his arm. “Oh and weather. I’m always fascinated by the interaction of processes whether it’s electronic, fuel-based, or even atmospheric conditions. MIT at sixteen for computer systems. Though I went to Princeton for a double doctorate: fluid dynamics and advanced system topology modeling. Then I—”

  Holly reached out toward his arm again.

  Jeremy clutched it to his chest and stopped talking.

  Miranda managed a breath.

  “So, boss lady. What’s next?”

  Spheres. Miranda needed something even a little familiar to grab onto. She looked around seeking the next sphere. Not the oddly flattened fuselage. Not the upright engine plowed nose first into the ground.

  Not these strange people, none of whom she’d worked with before. Tony had retired? Evelyn was pregnant? Were these people her new team?

  But she didn’t know them!

  Didn’t know their skills or how best to apply them. What if—

  Focus, Miranda. You know how to do this. You began reading NTSB reports at thirteen to understand what happened to Mom and Dad.

  She looked at Jeremy, his eyes alight with the passion of investigating plane wreckage. For him, too. Even she could see it. But for him the wreckage wasn’t a dark burden, heavily awash in a murky gravy of guilt and doubt, but rather an intellectual pursuit of great fascination. It was such a different view.

  As was Holly’s, but Miranda couldn’t think about someone who had intentionally destroyed airplanes. At least not right now.

  “Perimeter,” she managed to grasp onto the next sphere. “We need to define the perimeter of the debris field.”

  8

  “Right.” Jeremy rushed over to the supplies duffle that he must have brought with him. He rushed back with small green flags on half-meter wires and handed them each a fistful.

  Miranda slipped hers into a thigh pocket on her pants. The familiar weight was the start of her next sphere of the investigation.

  Depending on the scale of the debris field and the type of terrain, it would sometimes take two or three circuits to define the outermost edge of wreckage. This one looked so compact, she felt as if she could draw a circle around it all by herself without fear of missing anything.

  Many investigators moved directly to the key elements: the wreckage, the black boxes, the cockpit that was the origin of so many problems. But they often missed the small details, only backtracking if they needed to—by which time so many of them had been obliterated. Miranda worked from the outside in, careful to miss nothing along the way, no matter how apparently trivial upon first inspection.

  She walked toward the wreckage, occasionally picking up the line of General Harrington’s fading boot prints in the powdery soil, until she found the first piece of the aircraft. The small curve of red plastic would be the lens of the marker light on the tip of the right wing. It had landed barely ten meters from the end of the wing itself. She pulled out one of her green stakes and stabbed it into the soil. The tiny plastic flag fluttered weakly in the breeze. They’d have to hurry. The wind was picking up and might soon hide evidence they needed.

  The three of them spread out in a line with her closest to the aircraft, then Holly and Jeremy in a line perpendicular to the heart of the craft. It would be better to have four, but she’d rather have Mike keeping the general out of their way than walking the desert with them.

  They stood close enough to have overlapping fields of vision, far enough apart to cover as much ground as possible.

  She turned to face right, parallel to the wreckage.

  Holly and Jeremy turned left, noticed what she’d done, and turned to match.

  Miranda always walked wreckage in a counterclockwise direction. She’d observed that most Westerners, upon entering a church or museum walked clockwise. Muslims, perhaps from their traditions of walking counterclockwise during the Hajj to Mecca—seven times around the massive black-shrouded shrine of the Kaaba—tended to do the same in other public places. Walking counterclockwise forced her and her team’s Western sensibilities out of their normal modes of perception, thus heightening awareness.

  As the walk began, one part of her mind watched the ground and one part watched the wreckage. She tried to focus wholly on the walk, but her inner thoughts were already cataloging the overall layout.

  One, two, three, four…stop at five paces. Turn back to see if something had been hidden from view, perhaps by landing to one side of the low desert scrub. Holly, being at the center, was the call leader.

  “Anything?”

  At her and Jeremy’s negatives, Miranda led them closer to the center of the crash. Four steps later she found an outboard aileron trim tab and staked it.

  Both port side engine cowlings remained sufficiently intact to indicate there’d been no engine explosion on this side.

  Holly called the turn and they once more stepped five times, then stopped and inspected the area. This time it was Holly who found a piece of something. She staked it and they shifted the line back outward before proceeding.

  The twenty-foot-tall rudder snapped off and folded up like a piece of paper into neat quarters.

  Five more paces. A piece of scrap metal that might be from the hull.

  The horizontal stabilizers that stuck out to either side of the tail were bent down at a very unlikely angle, like the downbeat of a grey goose rather than the soaring spread of a vulture.

  Five more paces…

  In less than an hour they had a small line of green flags marking the outlines of the debris field. And she had made a hundred observations of the next sphere. Even though she’d done her best not to look ahead, she’d failed. There was something strange about this wreck.

  “Well that’s odd,” Jeremy was looking over their circle. Odd enough to curb even his effusive eloquence.

  In addition to her own observations, the size of the perimeter was very unusual. With only a few minor exceptions, the debris field was no more than ten meters longer or wider than the intact plane had been. It was also symmetrical—nothing had been cast particularly more to one side or the other.

  “I’ve seen roadkill Down the Alice what covered more ground than this.” Holly saw it as well.

  While Miranda didn’t believe that even in Australia could there be a dead animal that covered an area forty meters long and fifty wide, it made Holly’s point. Miranda had certainly seen wrecked Cessna light planes with debris fields twice this size.

  Debris Field Sphere: She’d seen enough of the wreckage during the walk to skip that sphere for now. Typically, key evidence was scattered widely across an expansive site; not in this case. Because it encompassed such a confined space, their inspection could wait for the moment.

  Wreck Exterior Sphere: Second to last.

  She finally allowed herself to turn and fully contemplate the wreckage.

  “I spoke with the general,” Mike said as he joined them, interrupting her thoughts before they had any chance to form. He apparently took joy in stating the obvious. They’d seen him standing beside the general for the entire duration of the perimeter walk.

  “And…” H
olly growled at him.

  Mike’s smile said that he’d just gotten exactly what he wanted, though Miranda couldn’t imagine what.

  “He said that all they touched were the five bodies they removed: two pilots, navigator, flight engineer, and loadmaster. He said it was traveling empty, returning from a delivery run. Though he declined to say what he was delivering.”

  “And why did it take you so long to figure that out?”

  “Well, he’s not exactly a warm guy. And with you and Holly making him madder than a hatter, it took some doing to calm him down.”

  “He already had his M17 aimed at her before I came along,” Holly sounded ticked about that.

  “A general pointed a gun at you?” Jeremy was horrified. “Why did he do that?” His degree of idol worship had not detectably diminished over the last hour and didn’t seem likely to be altered if she addressed it, so she didn’t bother.

  “General Harrington was angry before I arrived,” Miranda recalled. “Finally being ordered to cooperate seemed to tip him over some edge.”

  “So you just went out of your way to make it worse,” Mike was laughing.

  And people wondered why she rarely talked.

  She considered pointing out to him that “madder than a hatter” was a historical reference to mental insanity among nineteenth-century hat makers probably due to mercuric nitrate poisoning from the felt curing process and was therefore an inappropriate description for the general’s fury. He hadn’t appeared the least bit addle-brained as he’d aimed his weapon at her face. So what would the proper form be? Mad as one of Holly’s Tasmanian Devils perhaps? A breed indeed know for a high degree of intolerance.

  Miranda opened her mouth, then closed it without speaking. She’d long since learned it was best when she kept such thoughts to herself.

  She turned back to the wreckage.

  Almost as if she’d cued him, Jeremy began discussing the etymology of “madness in hatters” with Mike.