Thunderbolt

Chapter 1

1

Davis-Monthan Air Force Base outside Tucson, Arizona, lay at the far corner of her assigned West Pacific region for the National Transportation Safety Board.

It comprised the greatest concentration of military aircraft anywhere in the world. There were over three thousand of them parked in the storage area alone. Hundreds more were associated with the operational side of the busy Air Force base.

Miranda’s approach circled her over acres of mothballed F-4, F-15, and F-16 fighter jets tucked tightly nose-to-tail. Ninety-six B-52 Stratofortress bombers snuggled up beside a hundred and twenty-three KC-135 aerial refueling tankers but no fuel hoses passed between them any longer. A hundred and nine Army Black Hawk helicopters sat beside seventy Navy Sea Stallions and another ninety-six Marine Corps Cobra attack helos—all sweltering in vast arrays.

The most important thing to her was that these were all aircraft that she didn’t have to ever worry about. Parked in Davis-Monthan’s two-thousand-acre high-desert storage yard, they would all be unfueled and sealed tight. Many would have their engines and even their flight instruments removed.

There would be no crashes requiring an NTSB investigation among these aircraft. The dry desert air preserved them from all other types of harm until they were either remobilized or scrapped.

It was strange seeing the planes disassembled by man rather than by impact, fire, collision, or the many other causes that usually brought her to the site of an airplane’s sudden removal from service.

Davis-Monthan was also a busy airfield with many aircraft in the pattern—some bound for missions, some for training.

It was the home of the 355th Wing. The resident operations units included most of the Air Force’s A-10 Thunderbolt IIs as well as: Air Force Pararescue, an Electronic Combat Group that flew the EC-130 surveillance planes, and the Arizona Air National Guard’s fighter jets.

It was a very busy place.

And apparently one plane that hadn’t survived to add to the flurry or they wouldn’t have called her in.