Ghostrider: an NTSB-military technothriller (Miranda Chase Book 4) Read online

  Gutz lined the Ghostrider up on the third run and Tango reported the start to the observers. He knew that the general would be monitoring their status. Everything was scheduled to fly off-plan in just moments.

  Rosa flashed “Ready” from her midship control station.

  If their maneuver didn’t work, it would be her job to finish it.

  The AC-130J had just the pilot and copilot on the flight deck. Down the left side behind them were the weapons. First, the five tons of HEL-A laser where the 30 mm GAU-23 autocannon usually sat. Back under the wing lurked the monster 105 mm howitzer.

  Integrated into the rear cargo ramp were ten drop tubes. Most were filled with guided sixteen-kilo glide bombs in ten-round magazines, but several also had small surveillance drones that could be launched in flight, provide over-the-horizon data, and then be discarded.

  On the right side, across from the laser, were the weapons control stations. The loaders in the bay kept the guns fed, but the weapons control team aimed and fired them using all of the visible light, infrared, and radar information fed to them by the sensor technician.

  Tango had always been a flier and there were few machines more complex than a big military plane. From the first time he climbed into one, it had just been a part of him; every upgrade made perfect sense. Weather and threat radars, status on the four big engines, and every other one of the hundred thousand pieces that made an AC-130J Ghostrider fly.

  Too bad there was no way to go down on Rosa while she was firing the big guns or for her to do him extra hard while they were flying. Rosa was wild and had a laugh that burst out at the most amazing times. Out in the desert, she’d let loose a wolf-howl as she slammed into her peaks.

  Or maybe there was a way to tap that in flight.

  After all, they were permanently exiting the United States Air Force at the end of this run. Who knew what could happen after they joined General JJ’s Air Force. No one called it that to the old man’s face, of course.

  Or to Taz’s.

  Damn but she was one hard-bodied bitch. The general had to be tapping that himself, even if the rumor mill said not.

  He imagined Taz would be hard, fast, and deathly silent. Yeah, idiot. Then she’d snap off your head and drink your blood like a praying mantis bitch.

  He counted down the seconds, did the last five aloud for Gutz because it was always a shock when they blasted the first round out of the big 105.

  On cue for their last-ever training run, the big gun spoke from the Ghostrider’s belly with a bang that shook the length of the aircraft. Even though he wasn’t flying, he rested his finger on the control yoke. He felt Gutz make that automatic correction for the recoil. The gun’s mount was so well buffered that beginning pilots couldn’t even feel it. But he and Gutz had been flying the ACs together for almost a decade, and the recoil was there even if the “experts” said it was impossible.

  Rosa began calling her laser shots as Pierre Jones kept the big howitzer barking at targets. Not like the guy was all tall, lean, and elegant. He looked like he’d walked into several too many squid bars just to have a brawl with way too many Navy boys. But he could shoot almost as well as Rosa, which was all Tango cared about. Turned out he wasn’t a bad sort to grab a beer with either.

  “First round, dead center of Target B,” Pierre announced—B for boat. It took the big gun’s crew six seconds to clear and reload the howitzer.

  In the meantime—

  “In-bound Hellfire.”

  Rosa’s laser responded. Silent and invisible.

  But Tango saw a spark of light four miles away at the ten o’clock position out the windshield. It would be the explosion of the destroyed missile—heated to ignition by a one-second burst.

  “Target M,” M for missile, “neutralized,” she reported.

  “Now!” Tango called out.

  Gutz slipped out of the planned flight path slowly, easing toward the observer plane that was following close on at the seven o’clock position and just a little high to stay clear of the big Ghostrider’s turbulent wake.

  “Hey, go easy there, Shadow,” the observer’s pilot called across.

  “Oh, roger that,” Tango answered as Gutz slid clear—then eased back even a little closer.

  “Everything okay over there?”

  “Just fine,” Tango did his best to sound even more at ease than his usual slick self. He nodded to Gutz that they were close enough now. “Just a few little air pockets. We’re gonna—”

  Gutz twisted sharply left and traded speed for a little more altitude. The tip of the Ghostrider’s massive wing slammed into the empennage of the observer plane. The rudder and elevator of the little twin-engine crumpled on contact.

  “Oh, sorry. You guys okay over there?” Tango watched as the remaining bits of metal flapped uselessly in the wind. He couldn’t even see a ding in their own big wing. Probably broke the lens on the green navigation light that they’d never be using again.

  “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is Oversight Nine-five-two. We have a complete loss of control. We’re going in at—” The pilot proceeded to read out the coordinates.

  Tango stopped paying attention.

  Gutz raised his left hand and Tango high-fived it. The maneuver had been perfect.

  Sometimes sacrifices were necessary, the general had been very clear on that. It was both horrible and beautiful to watch the little plane die. He’d lost enough fellow fliers in battle that he could avoid thinking about the men dying aboard her—almost.

  Rosa had been ready to unleash the HEL-A laser if they’d missed, but that would be a little obvious. Unlike the Spectre gunship “Coffin Flight” staged over Colorado—where most of them had “died”—no one was supposed to know what happened to their Ghostrider.

  Gutz fully feathered the props on engines One and Two. With the left engines now just spinning in neutral and the right engines still at full claw, they entered a counterclockwise spin.

  It drove Tango to the right; would have dumped him in the aisle if not for his harness.

  It was time to shed their Ghostrider’s own excess crew. That was going to be even easier…and far less messy.

  Tango got on the radio. “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is Shadow Three-five declaring an emergency. We have lost engines One and Two.” Then Tango had an evil thought, “Correction: One, Two, and Three.”

  Gutz feathered the prop on Three and scowled at him. Keeping tight control on a C-130 Hercules with only a single outboard engine was going to be a major challenge.

  Tango only grinned back.

  It made up for the time Gutz had informed him there was a hot missile on his tail when it was only a F-35 Lightning II jet passing through the testing range. Explaining away that particular evasive maneuver to the flight leader had taken some serious song and dance. It was bad form to blame the other guy.

  Tango continued his report as he watched the little C-12 Huron finally auger into the Pacific Ocean below. “Engine Four controls are nonresponsive. Entering hard spin.” With just the outermost engine running at full power on the right wing, that was becoming dangerously accurate.

  “We’ve got about thirty seconds,” Gutz said calmly. But he didn’t bring any of the other engines back online—that would have been cheating. Ronny Gutierrez hadn’t come by his nickname only because of his surname. He was a stone-cold flier in any situation. Stone guts. Tango had always liked that about his best friend.

  Tango keyed the onboard intercom.

  “All hands! All hands! Abandon the aircraft. I repeat. Abandon aircraft immediately.”

  18

  Even knowing what was coming hadn’t fully prepared Rosa Cruz for the sudden pitch change when Gutz took out the observer plane. It slammed her against her safety harness so hard that it knocked the breath out of her.

  For half a second she froze in fear.

  No.

  Her newly discovered fetus wasn’t at risk. Still too small to be harmed, even by such a hit. Her PSR, Pink S
tick Revelation, was less than forty-eight hours old. No one knew.

  Then the Ghostrider pitched nose down and entered a hard spiral.

  At the controls for the M102 Howitzer, Pierre yelped.

  “We’re going down?” He cried out sharply enough that her eardrum hurt.

  “Big, brave master sergeants with over a dozen years in the service are not supposed to squeal like little schoolgirls.” She knew it was a faked emergency and couldn’t resist the opportunity to tease her fellow gunner.

  “Well, excuse me, Tech Sergeant Rosa. It’s my first-ever crash.”

  “Oh, then squeal away.”

  “No, you’ve broken the mood now.” He sniffed in a deeply offended way as he safetied his weapon.

  She matched him move for move. She half suspected that he’d squealed completely for her benefit. He looked like a tough guy—the kind that came from a longshoreman’s bar, not UC Berkley. His nose was even crooked. Every time she asked about it, he had a new story.

  A grandma I was helping cross the street took umbrage at me feeling her up and smacked me with her purse. But she was a seriously hot octogenarian.

  Doc took one look at my face when I was born and decided this would be an improvement. It did add to his dangerously capable look.

  I did this dive off the high board in school. You should have been there to see. It was just beautiful. But I was paying too much attention to Mary Beth McAllister’s bikini cleavage and dove before I got to the end of the board. Landed nose-first right on the end. She was even less interested in my nose going where any man’s would want to after that. Blood! Snot! He’d made gushing motions as if it had been a geyser’s worth.

  The spiral was getting harsher than she’d expected.

  “I think we’re in real trouble.”

  “No shit, Tech Sergeant Rosa.” Pierre could always make her laugh.

  Tango totally tapped her wild animal fantasies.

  Gutz, however, was like a long pull on a bottle of good tequila—the burn slow, deep, and powerful.

  She’d hinted once or twice about a threesome, but neither alpha bull liked the idea at all. Now she didn’t know which one the birth control had failed on, or how to explain it to either of them.

  Now the baby was going to choose for her.

  She and Pierre had fun flirting, but there was one critical thing he didn’t know about her that the other two men did.

  Rosa was one of the three people on the plane who had sworn their allegiance to three-star Lieutenant General Jorge Jesus Martinez.

  19

  Tango’s call of “Abandon aircraft!” galvanized Pierre into action.

  Before Rosa knew what was happening, he’d unsnapped her harness—without even copping a feel he’d declared as his heart’s truest desire in such a jovial tone that even her normal high-alert guy-dar didn’t mind. Dragged to her feet, they were slammed against the starboard hull by the plane’s spin. At the last second he twisted to take the brunt of the blow. She landed chest-to-chest hard against him, driven together by the pressure.

  “Tech Sergeant Rosa,” he always said her name that way, this time with a heavy dose of surprise. “I’m forced to question your timing if this is going to be the moment that you finally throw yourself at me.”

  In a moment that should be full-blown panic on his part, and carefully displayed panic on hers, he still flirted.

  But he didn’t leave her time to respond.

  He pushed off the hull against the pressure of the spin’s centrifugal force. Keeping a hold on her arm, he dragged her up-pitch across the plane’s cargo bay to the forward personnel door.

  They arrived as the four gun operators and the sensor tech were donning their parachutes.

  Pierre released the emergency door handle and opened the door. The roar was deafening. The hot California sea air slammed in and buffeted them against each other.

  Pierre grabbed his parachute from the emergency rack.

  No—he held it to her like an evening coat to slip her arms into. Only then did he pull another for himself. Hard to imagine Gutz or Tango doing that for her.

  The plane’s death spiral was getting worse.

  The gunners began dragging themselves against the force of the spin, and then over the threshold to get clear of the plane. The long looping flight scattered the gunners widely into the air.

  What would Pierre be like as a lover?

  She actually regretted that she wouldn’t have a chance to find out.

  In moments, it was just the two of them rapidly buddy-checking each other’s harnesses. She’d gone along with the farce of her escape. But there were only moments left. The ocean was getting very close.

  What would her next choice be if she hadn’t sworn to follow the general?

  But she had. For reasons that, she reminded herself, were good and valid ones.

  Pierre snugged the harness across her chest—above her breasts. Most asshole jokers tried to snug it below them, which always hurt like hell when the chute opened.

  Yet, a stupid plastic stick with a small pink cross had changed her world entirely. She wasn’t used to all the thoughts her Pink Stick Revelation had stirred up in the last forty-eight hours.

  She wouldn’t change her career-ending choice. But she’d like to know…

  “Just this once,” she shouted over the wind’s roar screaming in through the open door.

  “Excuse me?” They were each holding onto the door frame with one hand and the other’s harness with the other. Checks were complete.

  She grabbed his hand, shifted it onto her breast and used the wind’s leverage to drive them together so that she could kiss him.

  Pierre convinced her that she’d been missing out for the six months they’d been flying together. Missing out bad!

  Even this simple contact aroused everything in her—the animal, the lover, and the something deeper. The mother? Yikes! Scary-ass thought. But there anyway.

  “Sweet Jesus, Tech Sergeant Rosa. I’ll definitely see you later. But I have to go help the pilots.”

  “No, wait. I—”

  Pierre used the leverage of his hand still filled with her breast, and the leg driven between hers—she hadn’t even noticed when he’d done so, but could feel herself pushing against his thigh—to leverage her out into the slipstream.

  A flail, and she managed to grab the doorframe at the last second. The wind slammed her hard against the hull. She couldn’t hear the release, but could certainly feel when her left shoulder dislocated.

  She tumbled backward away from the plane. It continued to soar away, in a long southbound loop as she fell.

  Mierda! Not the plan.

  Out of options, she yanked the ripcord with her good right hand and was slammed hard in the crotch by the harness. Between that and the screaming pain in her shoulder, it knocked every bit of need Pierre had aroused in her right out of her system.

  Every bit of physical need.

  A glance aloft. Parachute was full and flying clean. The ocean was still a few hundred feet below.

  But her brain was still in high gear.

  Which one of the three men would make the best father? That was a question she’d never asked herself before. Now that she had, the answer was pretty damn obvious.

  There was only one problem.

  She was supposed to be the third person left on the plane, not Master Sergeant Pierre Jones.

  20

  The spin was still pulling hard as Pierre stumbled up the ladder to the cockpit level. It was raised eight feet above the main deck, tucked inside the upper curve of the nose.

  The two pilots were sitting in their seats as calmly as if nothing was happening.

  “All clear. Let’s go!” He held onto the handrail several feet behind the pilots’ seats and shouted above the roar that echoed through the plane. Between the big engines and the open door just at the base of the cockpit ladder, he could barely hear himself.

  Tango might have said something like, “A
bout time.” But Pierre couldn’t have heard that right.

  Rather than yanking off his harness, Gutz reached forward to the control cluster.

  Pierre wasn’t a pilot, but he’d been aboard planes for his entire Air Force career. Gutz unfeathered the props on three of the engines. Suddenly the doomed Ghostrider was flying perfectly. It eased out of the spin less than fifty feet above the shining waves.

  To the airmen who’d parachuted into the water, it would appear that the plane had gone down out of sight.

  “Good. Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Tango eased back in his seat.

  The plane was fine.

  They were…stealing the goddamn plane?

  It was the only thing that fit.

  While he’d been briefly enjoying the best feel-up ever—despite the flightsuits and parachute harnesses—the pair of pilots had been hijacking two hundred million dollars of airplane.

  Pierre slapped for his sidearm, but he’d lost it somewhere in the rough and tumble of getting Rosa to safety. A quick scan around revealed that the only handy weapons were the pilots’ sidearms.

  Bad gamble, Pierre.

  Tango shouted over his shoulder. “Close the goddamn door, Rosa. We’ve got a long flight, my favorite piece of poontang. And Tango is so gonna nail you with his monster harpoon. I’m gonna fuck you right up against your console the whole way to base.”

  Gutz twisted hard to stare at Tango.

  Blind shock. Easy to see in profile from his position behind them.

  Pierre had known that Rosa slept with Tango Torres. Apparently she’d also slept with Gutz Gutierrez without letting on to either one. And now she’d kissed him like she meant it? What the hell?

  “First in front, then behind, then I’ll give you primetime Tango right up your perfect ass.” Torres kept checking over the flight instruments, wholly unaware of his copilot’s attention.

  Gutz’s shock slid over to fury.

  Frozen in the aisle two steps behind the seats, Pierre saw the motion.