Thunderbolt

Chapter 3

3

Except she wasn’t.

Colonel Campos himself flew them out into the immense US Air Force training area of the Barry M. Goldwater Range. Almost three million acres of Sonoran desert was reserved for bombing and dogfight practice. It was bigger than the state of Connecticut.

“We isolated the section with the area of the crash, so please try to ignore the other aircraft.”

The significance of that statement didn’t become clear until the Huey UH-1N helicopter’s rotor had slowed to a stop.

Racing close to the sparse desert grasses of the softly rolling terrain, attack jets appeared to be very busy. Far above, a pair of F-35A Lightning IIs were engaged in an intense mock air battle of hard maneuvers—at least Miranda hoped it was mock. In the distance, she saw a trio of HH-60G Pave Hawk rescue helicopters flying low and fast.

Then she saw a s***h of rounds firing from the helos’ side-mounted miniguns. An old vehicle parked in the desert convulsed as hundreds of rounds slammed into it.

She counted seconds.

Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven…

And there was the heavy buzz saw sound. Even at a distance of two miles, the Minigun was so impressive that she felt decidedly unsafe.

She glanced at the other members of the team and tried to read their expressions.

Mike, the team’s personnel specialist, was looking very alarmed as he always seemed to be around the military. But he was, as he claimed, the very best at interviewing people.

Holly barely glanced over to see what was happening. She’d probably become inured to such sounds from her years of service as an operator for the Australian SAS Special Operations Forces.

Jeremy was watching the dogfighting Lightnings far above with a rapt expression, leaning into the curve as the F-35 did a hard bank and climb. It was a surprise he didn’t fall over with how far he leaned.

Thankfully there was at least one person other than herself focused on the task at hand.

Colonel Campos pointed back toward the base. “I’ve grounded all of the A-10s until you can tell me what happened here.”

That was a significant statement. A third of all the Air Force’s remaining A-10s were based here. That meant over eighty aircraft were presently grounded.

A high priority indeed.

Miranda didn’t like to start with the crash itself as it biased her view of what had happened, but it was such a curious sight that she couldn’t help herself.

The A-10 sat on the desert as if it had been planted there.

Not parked, because its landing gear wasn’t extended. Instead the plane looked planted so that it lay belly-flat on the ground…partly into the ground. Like a flowerpot left sitting in the garden too long and the garden had grown up around it.

Everything on the long Air Force gray-white fuselage appeared to be intact.

Perhaps if they waited long enough it would sprout.

This particular plane had an angry shark’s mouth and eyes painted on the nose around the GAU-8/A Avenger rotary cannon. On an A-10 Warthog, the shark face was roughly as common as the warthog face for reasons no one had ever been able to explain to her.

“Is the pilot okay?” Mike asked a question she’d never have thought to.

“Yes, his ejection seat is over there,” Colonel Campos pointed at an orange flag a few hundred meters to the west—directly beyond the plane’s nose as he had ejected up and out. “We didn’t touch it except to disarm and remove the seat’s backup firing system. It’s safe to approach now.”

He’d been both thoughtful and meticulous. A very pleasant change from most of the overly self-assured pilots she’d met.

Jeremy jumped right in. “The pilot will be an inch shorter the rest of his life, but that happens from ejections.”

“It what?” Mike looked aghast.

“The average ejection is between twelve and fourteen g of vertical force on the spine. Most of that spinal compression is non-recoverable. The older systems can fire even harder and they often broke the pilot’s backs as well, though rarely catastrophically. Almost everyone in the modern era who had to eject has survived, even many at supersonic airspeeds.”

Miranda thought about her Sabrejet, which had one of the oldest ejection seat designs still flying. A broken back didn’t sound like something she’d enjoy.

Jeremy continued with the history of ejection seats from the first-ever, used by Luftwaffe test pilot Helmut Schenk in 1942. That was if one ignored Everard Calthrop’s patented design, but never built, compressed-air ejection seat from 1916—and…

Miranda noticed the colonel rub his wrist.

No, he was brushing at the watch he wore. It was a simple man’s watch—with a distinctive red barrel.

He noticed her attention, “I don’t wear ties very often.” Then he turned away with an odd look on his face.

She knew that the Martin-Baker Tie Club had been founded by the company for all pilots saved by an MB ejection seat—all received a tie, clip, patch, and certificate. The watch could be purchased separately, but only by club members. Even partly underwritten by Martin-Baker, they cost thousands of dollars apiece. They were designed to be tough enough to survive a second ejection.

There was something about his expression… But with his back to her, she couldn’t look again to see what it might mean.

Instead, she turned back to the plane.

It was curious that it had landed flat despite the pilot’s ejection. The seat had landed close by. Perhaps the pilot had guided it to a nearly safe landing and then ejected at the last moment as a precaution. Choosing what was called a zero-zero ejection—zero altitude-zero speed—was a very dangerous choice. A last-second tumble could disorient the ejection more than the seat’s rockets could compensate for.

She waved Holly forward while Jeremy continued his discussion with Mike about record ejections: Mach 3 at over eighty thousand feet from an SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, underwater from an A-7 Corsair jet fighter after it had fallen into the ocean off the side of an aircraft carrier…

It made the space between her shoulders itch.

Maybe it was time to replace her F-86 Sabrejet’s seat.

It might be original equipment, which she preferred, but it was getting very hard to find someone to service the old seat. And it was a first-generation design—not that far advanced from the German originals. Maybe it was time to call Martin-Baker for a retrofit of some fifth-generation protection.

The crash.

Focus on the crash.

Determining the extent of the debris field was a trivial task in this case. Several of the bombs from the A-10’s hardpoints had been scrubbed off as the low wings had scraped across the desert. Flags, noting where each had landed, were scattered where the bombs had finally come to earth without exploding.

A long furrow marked the plane’s smooth contact with the desert, like the trail left by a toboggan through fresh snow.

She and Holly set off to scout the edge of the debris field. Except for the bombs—which had been removed—only a few bits and pieces had come off the plane.

Everything else was intact.

Miranda almost enjoyed the quiet and the gentle desert breeze. Together, they identified stray bits and pieces, but with only the occasional word between them until they were nearing the end of the circuit around the debris field.

“This should be easier than skinning a roasted tiger snake,” Holly said once they’d completed their walk around the debris-field perimeter. “Though there is one thing this girl finds all sorts of puzzling.”

Miranda liked that she didn’t need to respond aloud to Holly. She could simply glance her way and wait.

Sure enough, Holly continued, “Why did they call the best NTSB investigator in the business for a simple crash? Not much like we need some aboriginal Elder wise in mysterious ways of the world to see what happened. Got too low or the engine died, and…splat!”

“Something took over the controls.” The colonel had watched them walking the perimeter and, Miranda recognized, he had awaited them at exactly the point they would have completed their circuit of inspection.

“Some…thing?”

The colonel nodded.

“But…” Miranda pictured the A-10’s systems. “The North American A-10 Thunderbolt II has a two-tier redundant hydraulic control system, and a mechanical control if both of those fail.”

“You know your aircraft, Ms. Chase,” Colonel Campos tipped his head politely, then winced and straightened slowly.

“Possible conflicts in the hydraulic systems?” Jeremy stepped in. “That might create the sensation that something else was controlling the aircraft. If there was an over- or under-pressure, it might easily be perceived as an unresponsive system…”

“Especially to a younger, less experienced pilot,” Mike managed to get a word in edgewise, which was hard to do with Jeremy.

“…They might feel that the aircraft was behaving in a way that they would perceive as something else controlling the aircraft. Then—”

“Jeremy,” Holly stopped him with a soft-spoken word. She was the only one who could. Mike’s and her own attempts rarely succeeded.

When Jeremy had the bit of his systems specialty between his teeth, he was very hard to slow down. But this enthusiasm made him easy to forgive. Twenty-five and a genius, Viet-American with an accentless voice of the Pacific Northwest, and the excitement of she didn’t know what.

“Let the colonel actually speak, buddy. You learn more that way,” Holly chided him.