Ghostrider: an NTSB-military technothriller (Miranda Chase Book 4) Page 6

“I do.” She set it beside the shattered loader and placed a yellow warning marker on it before taking a picture of it and the shattered mechanism.

  “What else?”

  Miranda looked around at the shattered remnants of an AC-130 Hercules gunship. Even the rocks showed the two-event markings: explosion, then burn. Here it had peeled all of the moss and grass off one side of the rock and only scorched what was on the back side.

  They had walked less than a hundred meters from the pole.

  The paint had been blasted off this side of the pole, but scorched the opposite side of the rock.

  “Where was the center of the explosion?” They must have walked right through it.

  Jeff looked at the pole, then he looked down at the rocks she’d just been studying. “We passed it. Or maybe circled ’round it.”

  “Good observing. Now let’s go find it.” They carefully retraced their steps. Twenty meters back, she knew they’d arrived.

  Debris lay in radial patterns outward, yet nothing remained on the exact spot. For at least ten meters around, the surface rock had been shattered by the impact of the plane—but not a single piece of it remained in that circle. Beyond that, a field of twisted metal, structural scraps, even the occasional airplane seat were spread far and wide. Nothing stood higher than two meters in the entire visible debris field.

  She pulled out her tablet and shot a panorama from this point.

  10

  Additional study verified that they were indeed at the epicenter of the explosion. The shape of the impact crater on the rock, though shallow, was distinct. It was several times longer than it was wide. In its final tumble, the plane had landed lengthwise before it was blown apart.

  Jeff held the tape as Miranda took measurements and noted them down on the form. She let him be in charge of winding up the tape and carrying it.

  Brett’s report of actinic-white light suggested that it was the explosive shells that would have been aboard. Based on the scattering field and the location of sections of the heavier lower parts of the hull, it appeared to have landed on its side, the one away from the guns. The shells storage would have struck first, blown the fuselage upward and outward.

  Then she looked at the slender pole buried into the ground that Holly had tied her rope to. It had bothered Miranda that she couldn’t define the piece as any element of the C-130 Hercules.

  Now that she knew what type of plane it was, she knew what the slender pole was. It was the barrel of the M102 howitzer, driven deep into the ground. The guns must have been blown aloft, tossing the Bofors and GAU cannons aside and launching the howitzer’s barrel high enough for it to javelin back to earth. Not a part of the cargo as she’d thought.

  “No assumptions,” she remonstrated herself.

  “Dad always says that.”

  “What?”

  “No assumptions. He tells me to always kinda look at things and figure them out.”

  “Mine, too.”

  “Would he like my dad?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Oh.” Jeff went back to inspecting the ground.

  She’d said it. It wasn’t something she said very often; it hurt too much. But now, it was mostly just fact and it didn’t feel as if her world had ended all over again merely because she’d voiced the words. Just as if the day was less bright.

  “How’d he die?”

  “In a plane crash.”

  “This one?” Jeff’s voice was so soft she could barely hear it.

  “No. A long time ago.”

  “Could my dad die in a plane crash?” She could barely hear the whisper over the morning breeze.

  “Yes.”

  Jeff grabbed her hand, squeezing it hard enough to hurt. “No! You gotta fix that! You gotta make it so that he doesn’t. Can’t you fix that, Ms. Chase? You know stuff. You gotta save my dad. Yeah? Pleasepleaseplease?” His face was screwed up in such distress. The sheer force of his will had her looking in his eyes, perhaps because it was so reminiscent of her own unforgotten pain. Just as hers had, while she’d begged Tante Daniels to take back the news of her parents’ deaths, his tears began to flow.

  She squatted down in front of him and he threw his arms around her neck. Miranda could only kneel there and clutch her tablet as he clung to her.

  How was she supposed to explain the devastating hole in her life and that it actually could happen to him?

  “Pleasepleaseplease…” Jeff continued to almost pray through his sobs.

  “Jeff,” she tried to pry him loose.

  “Jeff,” she pushed harder, but he clung about her so hard that he was actually choking her.

  “Jeff!” Miranda shoved him back hard enough that they flew apart and both landed on their butts on either side of the explosion’s epicenter.

  The air was briefly filled with a puff of scorched carbon. She raised a hand and saw that it was well-blackened from arresting her fall.

  At least the shock seemed to cut off his pleading as he looked at her with big round eyes.

  Miranda had learned to fly from her father. She’d often wondered about his final thoughts as he plummeted from the sky with no way to control the plane and save himself, and especially Mom.

  “Is your father a good pilot, Jeff?” Even at thirteen she’d known it was ridiculous, but that hadn’t stopped the nightmares of her father scrambling for the 747’s stairs to the cockpit and diving to the controls to save everyone—and failing. TWA 800 had been blown in two at over thirteen thousand feet. The greatest pilot in history couldn’t have saved that plane. Or her parents.

  “He’s the best ever!” Jeff shouted. At her? At the world?

  So was mine. But some instinct told Miranda to keep that thought to herself. “As long as he can reach the controls, then he’ll probably always be safe.”

  “Really?” Now he was begging her.

  How could she know? How to explain to the child she herself had once been, what she now knew to be the hard truth of death?

  “Really?” An escalation of pleading. She didn’t want another choking embrace.

  She wouldn’t lie, not even to an upset child.

  How to explain what she knew in a way he’d understand? Then she remembered what she’d done when she’d finally stopped crying over her parents’ deaths.

  “Do you know why I study plane crashes?”

  Jeff bit his lower lip and shook his head.

  “I don’t do it to learn why a plane crashed.”

  “You don’t?” That earned her a frown that she hoped meant he was really listening.

  “No. I do it to make sure it never happens to anyone else again. At least not for the same reason.”

  Jeff stared at her hard, but she didn’t feel the need to look away from him.

  She waited him out. That fierce concentration was something she knew very well from herself.

  Finally, he nodded. “Teach me how to do that.”

  From somewhere deep inside her, a laugh came up. A sad laugh that also had tears, though she blinked those back even as she swallowed the laugh—barely managing not to choke on it. It was a drive she knew that, once embraced, would never let him go. One that blocked out all other possibilities.

  She’d spent a lifetime crawling through the remains of dead planes and past dead people. It wasn’t a task she’d wish for anybody.

  “Maybe you’ll fly planes someday. Or help build safer ones.”

  “I wanna learn why they break.”

  She sighed—to herself—for his sake. “Well, that can be useful to understand if you want to fly them or make them safer, too.”

  “Show me.”

  “Well, next we need to get to the cockpit to do that.”

  He jumped to his feet. “Let’s go!”

  Then he looked around in every direction.

  “Uh! Which way is it?”

  She pointed in the direction opposite from where they’d found the tail and the scorched pole.

  Jeff grabbed her hand and le
d the way.

  11

  Just as they were turning away, Holly and Mike came up over the ridge by the howitzer barrel.

  Jeff kept tugging at her hand, but Miranda stopped and waited for them to pack up their climbing equipment and join them.

  Mike set the battered orange case of the CVDR, cockpit voice and data recorder, at her feet.

  “What happened to it?” It was incredibly battered.

  “You should have seen the tail it came out of.” Holly tapped the radio in Miranda’s vest. “Isn’t it on?”

  It wasn’t. Yet another thing she’d missed. This was a very…confusing wreck. She took a deep breath and centered herself. Then she began her usual process of tapping all of the pockets on her vest. When she reached the radio, she sighed and turned it on. Lastly, she tapped her chest, then had to look down in surprise. Not even her NTSB badge was in place.

  “Someone been distracting you?” Holly gave Jeff a punch on the shoulder. Thankfully without the usual force she unleashed on others. “You been asking a lot of good questions?”

  “Maybe,” Jeff grinned up at Holly.

  Miranda fished out her badge and placed it so that it faced outward.

  “I’m Miranda Chase. Investigator-in-charge for the NTSB.”

  “Well, I’m glad we got that cleared up,” Holly joked.

  Mike was laughing as well for some reason.

  Miranda ignored them both and pointed at the steel pipe Holly had tied her rope to. “That’s the barrel of an M102 howitzer. And we also found a Bofors L/60 autocannon, or the remains of one.”

  “That confirms it,” Holly nodded to Mike.

  “What?”

  “From down at the wing, Jon was whining that something was wrong. Must have picked up on it being an AC-130 gunship rather than a standard Hercules.”

  “All that’s missing is the GAU-12 Equalizer rotary cannon.”

  Holly shrugged. “We crossed paths with the remains of a 20 mm Vulcan cannon.”

  Miranda looked at her in surprise. “That’s—”

  “What’s all that stuff mean?” Jeff asked.

  “It means that the plane that crashed here wasn’t one that should be flying anymore. That it still has the Vulcan cannon means that it was an old gunship and they were all retired by 2001.”

  “You mean another plane crashed, too?” Jeff’s panicked tone was back.

  “You’re thinking is upside down. Maybe this will help.” Holly grabbed him by the ankles and hung him upside down. “Do you always ask so many questions?”

  Jeff’s panic turned to a half giggle.

  “It means,” Holly explained still holding Jeff aloft, “that this plane isn’t one that should have been flying. That’s all. It’s still the plane what planted its nose here so hard. Got it?”

  Jeff nodded from his inverted position. “Got it.”

  Mike stepped in and grabbed Jeff around the waist to set him back on his feet.

  “Remember to keep thinking upside down.” Holly’s order earned her another giggle.

  Miranda let her mind consider the surrounding area.

  Right side up or upside down, there was only the one reported crash.

  But it was a plane that shouldn’t have been seen outside of a storage boneyard.

  So where had this gunship come from?

  12

  When Miranda had raised her question about the gunship’s origin, Holly had shrugged.

  “Like I told that guy panting on your trail, a crash is a crash.”

  The guy…? Miranda shoved the thought aside as irrelevant.

  Holly was right.

  But the more Miranda investigated this crash, the less sense it made.

  They found the very nose of the cockpit by following the trajectory of debris.

  It had survived more or less intact. Its second landing—after the initial crash and then the brief flight due to the explosion—had plowed through a perimeter fence of orange plastic mesh. Jeff said it was there to stop people from skiing down the wrong side of the peak and into a dangerous wilderness area with avalanches and cliffs and things.

  Past the fence, the cockpit section had tumbled down a rocky slope that had severely battered the exterior but left the interior surprisingly intact. It had landed nearly right side up. Out its missing windows towered the true peaks of Snowmass and the Maroon Bells mountains reaching another two thousand feet higher than the top of the Cirque where the plane had crashed.

  They’d checked that it was firmly wedged and wouldn’t be falling off any cliffs before Miranda led the way aboard. This section was surprisingly intact. The ladder itself was badly warped, but still usable.

  The view when she stepped into the cockpit was somewhat surreal.

  Without the windshield glass, it was a disconcertingly clear sight from inside the plane. Both mountains were still snowcapped and close enough to imply imminent impact—if the Hercules could still have flown.

  The QAR, quick access recorder, in the dashboard had survived. She extracted it for Jeremy to analyze when he joined them. Everything was…

  “What’s missing?” It had been one of her father’s favorite questions. He trained her how to see what wasn’t there as much as what was.

  Holly came up and looked over her shoulder. “Other than the bodies?”

  “Other than the bodies.” There were yellow tags marking where Mountain Rescue removed the two bodies of the pilots.

  The two of them looked over everything, but Miranda could see that Holly didn’t know what it was either.

  She pictured the cockpits she’d investigated at other crashes. There were few signs of fire that swept through the interiors of so many crashes, but that was not definitive.

  The only burns were the scorch marks of the initial explosion that had launched the cockpit through the fence and down the slope. None of the brush fire had reached here over the back side of the Cirque’s crown.

  “When Dad shoots a deer, it can be really messy.” Jeff had been playing with the circuit breakers. She’d recorded the position of each before allowing him to pull and reset them, making small explosive noises with his mouth each time he pushed one in with a sharp click.

  “Really messy how?”

  He didn’t look up from the breaker panel. “Well, there’s always blood. And if you don’t get a heart or brain shot—Dad says you got to kill them right away like that to be kind—it can go everywhere.” Click. Pow! Click. Boom! Click. Ker-Pow!

  Miranda looked down at her feet.

  “No blood,” Holly whispered.

  “These bodies were dead before the crash. Maybe they died at altitude.”

  “Not just dead,” Holly corrected her. She reached out to muss Jeff’s hair, who batted his hands at her to make her stop. “Kid got it all aces. But not dead like recently. Otherwise there would still have been blood.”

  “Their seatbelts were unbuckled,” Mike poked his head in through the pilot’s window making the mountain view seem more like a painting than a pending crash. “The FAA wouldn’t approve.”

  “The FAA has very limited jurisdiction regarding military flights,” Miranda replied, but it was a knee-jerk reaction. The reality was that Mike was correct. In fact, one of the bodies had been removed from behind the copilot’s seat if the marker was accurate. She couldn’t think of any professional pilot she’d ever met who would unbuckle and try to hide behind their seat, not even with the plane past any possibility of recovery.

  “That’s majorly pear-shaped.” Holly tapped the two emergency air masks. The pilot’s was looped around the control yoke. The copilot’s mask was still stowed as if it had never been used.

  “You like that, Holly? You’ll love this,” Mike pointed off to the side.

  Miranda had had trouble keeping Jeff from playing with the main panel, so she scooted him out ahead of her.

  Mike led them about twenty meters away around a rough outcropping.

  There stood the front, port-side passenger doo
r for the Hercules all by itself. The base was jammed against the ground and the two sides of the frame had been caught by two boulders. Unlike most commercial airliners where the door opened outward, the C-130 passenger door pulled inward, then slid upward on tracks. The entire door frame had survived intact and landed upright wedged in the rocks.

  Looking through the open door was even more surreal than the cockpit windows. One step beyond the threshold was a hundred-meter drop. Yet the big door was perfectly intact, though she expected it would topple and fall at the lightest touch.

  Holly had a firm grip on Jeff’s shoulder to make sure he stayed back with the rest of them.

  Mike pointed east where the sun was high enough to shine through the door and out toward the true top of Snowmass peak beyond.

  “I spoke to the folks at Denver ARTCC again. The Air Route Traffic Control Center was very helpful. The actual flight controller was very upset, but made it through the post-incident interviews before the shift supervisor took her home. I managed to chat with the assistant supervisor who did the debrief.”

  “Get her home number while you were about it, mate?”

  Mike merely sniffed at Holly’s comment. “He said that the flight declared a depressurization emergency at thirty-nine thousand.”

  “Opening this thing,” Holly eased up to the door, “would be one spectacular depressurization event. But if they were masked up, it shouldn’t have been that big an issue.”

  “The assistant super says that Shadow Six-four’s flight path nosed down and never came back up. In fact, there was no significant maneuvering before the pilot called total loss of control and stopped responding—other than a final curse. Wings ripped off about ten seconds later, up around twenty thousand feet.”

  Miranda looked back toward the cockpit.

  Something else was missing from the cockpit. More upside-down thinking. She liked that phrase enough that she knew there was no need to write it down.

  There was no blood. There should have been brown stains of dried blood after the force of the impact. That was missing.

  The seat belts should have been buckled. Both masks should have been used…