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  “Now, unless you want to go for a swim, mate. Tell me who cut your orders.”

  “It doesn’t. Work like that.” His fight to breathe despite the heat kept his sentences short. His panic made his few words almost unintelligibly fast. “We get orders. It has a verifiable code. We go.”

  “What were the orders?”

  “Right pocket.”

  “I’m not gonna jostle your balls for you, you prick.”

  “Shirt.”

  She fished into his right shirt pocket, then tossed him to the ground.

  As soon as she read the orders, she wished she’d thrown him into the flames rather than into the clear.

  Johnston Atoll. A330-900neo. Destroy in order: Tail section, cockpit, left wing. Load. Discard debris from C-17 during return flight over deep Pacific. All speed.

  Shit.

  All speed?

  That phrase had a lot of implications in Special Operations and none of them good. It had been no coincidence that the SOG cleanup operation had landed within minutes of the last civilian departing the island on the Coast Guard planes. Their timing was far too good. And the cleanup criteria, in order, would destroy: the flight recorders, the QAR recorder, and the damaged wing. Damaged…or sabotaged?

  She kicked him in the gut.

  “You sabotage a passenger airliner, asshole?”

  He groaned and shook his head.

  Holly cocked back a foot to ram his balls into his throat by the direct internal route.

  “Not our op. Just cleanup. Only know. What’s on that sheet.” He grunted it out in such a tone of desperation that she was inclined to believe him.

  Instead of castrating him by force of impact, she put her boot on his hip and shoved to roll him away from the building fire.

  “And what about us?” She waved toward Quint and the rest of Miranda’s team slowly coming out of hiding.

  His “Are you stupid?” look answered that one. Any witnesses would have exited the C-17 along with the key sections of the crushed airliner.

  She couldn’t even find the energy to put a boot to his gut, instead shoving his hip hard enough to roll him farther from the flames.

  “We okay, Holl?” Quint had come back to stand beside her now that things were quiet. Or quieter.

  “It seems that someone didn’t like your plane.” She photographed the note and sent the image to Clarissa before tucking it away.

  Holly tried not to take it personally.

  Even with the CIA’s involvement.

  But the itch between her shoulder blades said maybe she should.

  18

  The Collins Aerospace cargo winch used by the C-17 had a rating of seventy-five hundred pounds. Thankfully, it didn’t have to lift the destroyed seventeen-ton Cat excavator into its cargo bay. It hadn’t burned long because she’d shot it high in the tank. Most of the fuel stayed safe inside the machine.

  Holly watched as the C-17’s loadmasters used it to tug the excavator aboard, rolling on its own two treads. The cleats flashed light and dark as first the fire-soot-stained sides showed, then the tops that had only been heated until the pretty yellow paint job had peeled.

  “Bets on whether they paid for the insurance rider on that?” Quint was the first to speak as they watched it being dragged aboard.

  “Quarter million either in taxpayer dollars or upped insurance premiums. Either way, we pay,” Holly shrugged. Not her concern.

  “Not this boyo. I’m from Oz. This one’s your shout.”

  “I’m not buying a round of pints for a pub. Tell you what, Quint. I’ll pay for the Cat if you pay your half of the airplane you just trashed.”

  “Ouch!” Quint tossed up his hands, declaring no deal.

  “Cheapskate.”

  They grinned at each other. She’d forgotten how much harder it was to communicate with Americans. They never quite followed an Aussie’s sense of humor. Of course, neither did folks from some of the Big Smokes like Sydney or Melbourne. In those kind of places it was hard to tell you were even still in Oz.

  Once the excavator was back aboard and the loadmasters were hurrying around with chains to anchor it in place, Holly trooped the SOG team aboard. With more zip ties, she had Andi and Taz strap them to the notoriously uncomfortable fold-down seats near the tail of the plane. Every third seat, so that they had no chance of helping each other.

  The lead pilot had come down from the cockpit tucked up in the nose of the plane.

  “What the hell are you doing that for?”

  “Are you Air Force or SAC Air Branch?”

  “I’m not authorized to discuss—”

  Holly pulled out her NTSB CAC card and handed it over. The Common Access Card had her name, face, a verifiable chip and barcode, and her clearance level—Miranda’s entire team was Top Secret or better. Between the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the President, they’d made sure that the whole team’s clearance was much better.

  He studied it for a moment but didn’t bother scanning it. He had been standing at the head of his plane’s ramp, watching when she’d taken down a six-man SOG squad. He knew enough to not doubt that she was for real.

  Of course, it never should have really worked, except for most Spec Ops operators’ tendency to still underestimate women. It was better not to think about how close she’d just come to having all three of them killed. With her, Andi, and Taz down, the rest of the team really might have wound up in the deep ocean.

  SOG-level operators were lethal, even tied up as they presently were—they also had the morals of a cowbird laying her eggs in another’s nest to raise.

  He handed her card back. “I’m Air Force, ma’am. I was told that the CIA’s Air Branch had no pilots available in the area on such short notice.”

  “Okay, do yourself a favor. These jokers had clearance to dump the debris of a downed civilian airliner.”

  His face darkened as he caught the active form of the verb; downed meant sabotaged or shot.

  “With instructions to dump key parts, like the flight recorders, midocean. It wouldn’t surprise me if there wasn’t a secondary order to dump your crew along with them. I’ll arrange for someone to meet you at your destination. My advice, if one of them gets loose, shoot him.”

  The lieutenant colonel looked thoughtful for a moment. “We’ll be back at Travis in just under six hours.”

  “I’ll make sure someone is waiting.”

  “Thanks for the advice, ma’am. I appreciate it.” He hooked a thumb at the scorched CAT excavator. “What am I supposed to do with that thing?”

  “You could do worse than dumping that in the middle of the ocean. And not a tear would be shed in this world or the next if these six just happened to be tied to it at the time.”

  “Don’t tempt me, ma’am. Don’t even tempt me.” He offered a salute and turned back to his crew.

  Within minutes of her deplaning, the C-17 Globemaster III fired off its four monster Pratt & Whitney engines. Then it launched back into the sky so fast that it was clear the lieutenant colonel wanted to be anywhere but here. It didn’t even use half the runway before it was aloft. Now that was a sweet cargo plane.

  She turned to Andi and Taz. “Appreciate you having my back.”

  “Next time the Chinese chick gets the Taser and I get the Deagle,” Taz’s tone said that she was still as cross as a frog in a sock.

  Andi made a show of tucking the big gun, which she’d kept, in her back waistband. Holly noted that Taz had kept Captain Wankasaurus’ Taser as well, its flat nose holstering neatly into her jeans’ back pocket. They’d dumped the rest of the arsenal that they’d stripped off the SOGs with the C-17’s crew.

  “A big gun like the Deagle would just knock you on your ass,” Holly kept teasing Taz. She still didn’t have a handle on the woman.

  “Just try me, Holly. I dare you.”

  She knew that wouldn’t be the best idea. When she did run with Taz in the mornings, much to her chagrin, Taz could dust her every time.

/>   19

  “Is it safe to start my investigation now?” Miranda couldn’t look away from the dismal wreckage of the plane’s tail section. Extracting any information from that area was going to be much harder than necessary.

  “Cheer up, Miranda,” Holly nudged her elbow against Miranda’s shoulder. Miranda had noted previously that their six-inch height difference made it so that shoulder-to-shoulder bumps didn’t really work. “I’ve got the recorders stashed over in my kit bag.”

  “Oh. That’s good news.”

  Jeremy had come up beside her.

  Holly leaned over and rapped her knuckles against Jeremy’s crotch. There was a metallic clank, even as Jeremy stumbled back.

  Miranda was fairly sure that it was from surprise rather than pain.

  “And there’s your QAR. You can take it out of your pants now. Just the drive please, leave the rest of it tucked away for Taz.”

  “The rest of it…” Then Miranda stopped herself. Oh, Taz was staying in Jeremy’s room at the team house in Gig Harbor. Why Holly was talking about their sexual relationship at the same time as the airplane’s Quick Access Recorder was beyond her.

  “Jeremy, could you take a look at that?”

  He pulled it out of his pants, made a show of wiping it on his shirt, then stared at it intently without saying anything.

  Holly burst out laughing and punched him hard enough on the arm to send him reeling into Mike, who just propped him back upright.

  “I meant with a computer,” Miranda was surprised she had to clarify her wishes.

  “I…” Jeremy stammered, then blushed. “I only meant… I was going to…” Then he shook himself. “I’ll take care of it, Miranda. The first thing is the left engine breakaway, right? I’ll look at everything about the whole left wing, but I’ll focus on that because an event like that hasn’t happened since—”

  “Jeremy,” Holly cut him off. “Also see if you can get any information regarding last-minute changes to the engine while we were still on the ground. We were half an hour late for takeoff. Quint, was that for engine service?” He’d remained in the background of the group.

  “Um, yeah. We had a light on the Blue Loop for Engine One hydraulics. But engineering cleaned it up right quick.”

  “I’ll just bet they did, mate.”

  Miranda sighed. “You think someone sabotaged Engine One.” Holly might have a suspicious mind, but that was part of what Miranda depended on her for.

  Jeremy hurried off to fetch his gear bag from the parked Learjet. Taz went with him.

  Miranda turned to the crash.

  Was there any point?

  She hadn’t even begun the investigation. Hadn’t recorded the weather. There wasn’t anything to map about the terrain. The edges of the debris field were scattered down a thousand feet of runway but had already been altered by the destructive excavator, the fire that had destroyed it, and now the pounding blowback from the departing C-17’s four Pratt & Whitney forty-thousand-foot-pound-thrust engines.

  They’d had to back the aircraft up very close to the excavator to load it. That had placed the engines’ exhaust practically in the wreck on departure. The exhaust had blasted a wide area with fifty-mile-an-hour winds and a much wider area with thirty-plus.

  “Just once…” she whispered to herself.

  “Just once what?” Andi stood close beside her. Everyone else had drifted away to other tasks.

  “Just once I’d like to investigate a crash where no human failings were involved. No human errors, attacks, mis-designs, laziness, sabotage, foolishness, outsider interference—”

  “You’re repeating yourself, Miranda.”

  “—pilot errors, mechanics errors, manufacturing errors—”

  “If that were the case, there wouldn’t be many crashes for us to investigate.”

  “I know!” The words felt as if they were ripped out of her chest. “That’s my point. How am I supposed to do a proper investigation when I already have reason to believe that the plane was sabotaged? How am I supposed to start to understand what’s happening when it has nothing to do with the machinery and everything to do with people?”

  “I hear you, Miranda.” Andi rested a hand on her shoulder. That, at least, was steadying.

  Steadying? It was the only thing keeping her from flying apart.

  “But I think that if we just—”

  “Hell, of a mess, huh?” Jon stepped up beside her and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, knocking Andi’s hand aside.

  Miranda could only look at him aghast.

  She twisted out from under his arm.

  “Hell…of…a…mess? That’s your professional assessment as a United States Air Force major of the Accident Investigation Board? Hell of a mess?”

  “Well, it is. I mean, just look at it. Chunks of torn-up fuselage scattered everywhere like dropped toys. And all the shredding along the edges. If that isn’t a mess, I don’t know what is.”

  Miranda hated looking at the crash before the debris.

  Jon knew that!

  And the debris field before locating its perimeter. And that before the outer spheres of influence of terrain and weather had been assessed.

  That his delay had denied her the opportunity to inspect the tail section of the crashed A330-900neo before that excavator had destroyed it.

  That all of those hundreds of hours she’d invested in discussing crash investigation methodology with him was being passed on to unsuspecting AIB students, with who knew how many errors and omissions.

  The only thing Jon seemed to really care about was them in bed together. Somehow, sex, aircraft, investigations, military protocols, and excavators had all been dumped into a single massive cauldron and stirred like…like…like a whole lot of things mixed up together in a massive cauldron.

  Everything was a jumble—and she couldn’t hold it inside. Couldn’t keep it organized in her head, her chest, her body.

  Unable to control it, manage it, contain it, she let it out in the only way she knew how.

  Just as when she’d seen the excavator tearing into her wreck—wantonly destroyed potentially valuable evidence—she let all of the rage, anger, and confusion out in a single blast.

  She screamed her agony out into the world.

  20

  Clarissa remained at the head of the conference table after the meeting ended and everyone else had dispersed. Through the glass tabletop, she could see her Kate Spade ankle boots.

  She wasn’t given to tantrums, had never understood them. Her way forward had always been achieved by calm, cool thinking.

  At the moment, though, she wanted to kick the table’s legs with her Kate Spade boots until her feet were in bloody shreds.

  Not a single one of her department heads had offered any hint of having circumvented her authority and mobilized an SOG team. Thank God they hadn’t lost the C-17 plane, too; that would be almost impossible to explain.

  She needed more information to figure out who was after her job but couldn’t think of how to begin.

  A message beeped into her phone.

  It was a photograph of an SOG team. They looked…ragged. Heads bowed and hands clearly bound behind their backs—probably a first among SOG outside of resistance training. Holly had really done them in. But—

  It had taken her a moment to spot why they looked so disheveled. They’d been stripped of their weapons. Empty holsters, untucked shirts, torn open pockets and seams. Whoever had cleaned them out—Holly—knew exactly what to look for.

  The caption on the last image, the six operators tied to airplane seats to either side of a charred excavator, was very brief: Travis AFB. 6 hours.

  She sent the six face images to Kurt Grice, then dialed his number.

  As always, the head of the Special Operations Group answered her call immediately. They’d first worked together in Afghanistan when he was still just a 75th Ranger. As far as she could tell, he was a complete and total eunuch in every way. He wasn’t tempted
by men or women, by drink or drugs; he wasn’t even a glory hound. Kurt Grice was simply a warrior to the core.

  She’d never been able to discover what made him tick, but over the years they’d been extremely useful to each other.

  Long before she’d been made CIA Director, she’d convinced Clark to place him in charge of SOG operations.

  “Go ahead.” His standard greeting.

  “I just sent you six images. Please confirm they’re your people.”

  There was a pause. “They’re mine.”

  “Did you dispatch them this morning?”

  “Per order. Coming to you.”

  She glanced at the terse words of the order, noted that the authorization code was in the right format. It matched the first image that Holly had sent her half an hour ago.

  Clarissa forwarded it to her two pet hackers, Harry and Heidi, with a quick note: Find out who sent this. Don’t let anyone catch you looking.

  She turned her attention back to Kurt. “They botched an operation that I didn’t order. They’re arriving at Travis Air Force Base in six hours and you’ll need to have a cleanup team in place.”

  “That you didn’t order,” Kurt made it a flat statement.

  “Yes. As of this moment, all SOG orders must be verified by me and me alone.”

  “Not even the deputy director?”

  Clarissa pictured Pamela Rosewater. Ever so slightly plump and a little motherly, like she was a cliché of herself. Clarissa knew that behind that cheerful exterior lay a very keen mind, but it was never one she’d doubted. Still…

  “Not even her.”

  “Roger.”

  “And Kurt?”

  “Yes?”

  “Make that in person.”

  “No mistakes,” he acknowledged and was gone.

  A message pinged back from The Hacker Twins as she typically referred to Harry and Heidi, the two heads of her Cyber Security and Cyber Attack Divisions.

  You did. Per encrypted tracking record.

  She’d issued the order?

  When she found out who was setting her up, they were going to die.