Thunderbolt

Chapter 2

2

Miranda put her F-86 Sabrejet down right on the numbers designating Runway 12, the very first safe position to land past the threshold. Flying mostly from the short field of Spieden, she wasn’t in the practice of wasting runway length. At Davis-Monthan, she had to taxi well down the thirteen-thousand-foot runway to reach the first taxiway turnoff.

“Your team is awaiting you at Hanger 9,” Ground Control informed her.

They were?

But that wasn’t possible.

She’d given them the use of her Mooney M20V Ultra, which was the fastest single-engine light plane built, but it still traveled at less than half the speed of sound. It was very disorienting to discover that they’d already arrived from their base in Tacoma, Washington, less than a hundred miles from her own home.

She had anticipated a minimum of three hours lead time to organize herself and inspect the wreck.

Why doesn’t anyone understand that a wreck needs to be approached slowly? So much pressure to go directly to the disaster itself.

Spheres.

That was the way to do it.

Weather, terrain, debris extent, the debris field itself… Each of these were best considered separately, working inward—rather than jumping to the remains of the downed aircraft and eventually the individual systems and failures.

It made perfect sense to her and she didn’t understand why nobody else understood that.

Now she’d suddenly have people around her from the first moment. People who didn’t think that the human factor was the last, innermost sphere.

So many investigators began with personnel. Pilot, controller, and mechanic errors were common accident causes, but there was no point investigating those until inspection of the accident had created a coherent contextual framework upon which to base interviews and other data-gathering strategies.

Even her own team didn’t understand, except perhaps Holly Harper. But it was often hard to tell what she understood.

How had her crew arrived first?

There were no such things as time warps.

Yet her Mooney did indeed sit close by Hangar 9. She confirmed the manufacturer’s tail number—definitely hers. Someone had once told her it was bad luck to rename a boat or ship, so she hadn’t altered the Mooney’s registration. It was a ship of the air after all, and that was danger enough.

For her Sabrejet, she’d had to replace the military designator with a civilian number, so that had been okay. Not her willful choice, but a mandated rule of law.

And no bad luck yet, so maybe that wasn’t a real problem.

She looked for some wood to knock on. It seemed to be protocol to knock on wood whenever luck was mentioned. Or was it only at the mention of bad luck? She hadn’t observed sufficient demonstrations of the practice to draw a definite conclusion. The Sabrejet’s interior was metal and a few pieces of plastic—no wood. She reminded herself to find some to knock on as soon as possible.

In the shadow of the hangar, she could see a military man in fatigues. An officer by the insignia on his sleeves. When she rolled close enough, she could see the birds on his collar points. Why was a bird colonel standing with her three team members? They were all watching her so intently that she almost taxied straight into the side of her parked Mooney.

Why did she always mess up when people were watching her? Focus, girl. Focus.

Cycling down, Miranda completed the shutdown checklist, opened the canopy (she was so short that she didn’t have to duck as it rolled backward), and climbed onto the ladder an airman had hung on the side of her jet.

She was so rattled by their impossible arrival that she’d descended halfway down before she recognized it. It was an authentic Sabrejet ladder with the single hook at the cockpit and the two supports in exactly the right place. Usually she was lucky to have a painter’s A-frame ladder placed unsteadily to the side. Of the nine thousand, eight hundred and sixty produced airframes, the remaining fifty were in museums or civilian hands and most of those no longer flew.

“They told me you’d be arriving in an F-86, so I had the boys dig out the right ladder,” the colonel introduced himself with his explanation. “Arturo Campos at your service, ma’am. I’m the commander of the 355th Wing here at Davis-Monthan.” He had sun-complected skin, dark curly hair cut military short, and just a hint of a Mexican accent.

Miranda had something else to figure out first and turned to her crew.

“How did you get here first?”

Jeremy looked down and Mike shuffled his feet.

Holly smiled. Or was it a smirk at the other two?

“Mike flew us down to Vegas,” she answered in that thick Australian accent of hers.

It seemed thicker than normal for reasons Miranda couldn’t understand. “Why?”

“Well, apparently Mike wanted to lose some money. Jeremy wanted to get thrown out of a casino for counting cards in Blackjack. Then—”

“But it’s so easy,” Jeremy jumped in with his normal enthusiasm. “I really don’t understand the game. How complex can it be, even with a four-deck shoe? Counting cards just isn’t all that hard. It seemed like easy money to me. Then I just—”

“Some of us,” Holly cut him off. “We just stick with the poker table.”

“Okay.” Miranda assumed that had some significance. Oh. That’s why Holly was probably smiling so much.

“You did well.”

Holly started to speak, but Miranda had already shifted her attention to the colonel who was now glaring at her.

“Why am I being met by a full colonel?” She tried to suppress her alarm, but was sure that she did a poor job of it. Major General Harrington had been forcibly retired a month ago—for reasons that had nothing to do with anything so trivial as his greeting an NTSB investigator with a pistol aimed directly at her face.

“One of my planes just went down on the training range and I want to know why. I heard that you’re the best there is, Ms. Chase. So I’m the one who sent for you.”

Miranda decided that this was a much more comfortable greeting than being threatened with a handgun at a range of less than two meters.

Just to double-check, she glanced at the structural specialist of her team.

Holly nodded that everything was okay just enough to tip the brim of her yellow Waltzing Matildas hat—her favorite Australian women’s soccer team. The hat Holly had given her was—

“I’m sorry. I left my cap on the mantel back home.”

“What?” Colonel Campos seemed to think that he had some part in the conversation.

Holly pulled the one off her head, freeing her long blonde hair from its impromptu ponytail out the back, and handed it over.

Holly had insisted that it was important that the entire team wore them on each investigation and they had—five major investigations now in the last three months and many minor ones.

Miranda had learned that one didn’t argue with Holly and expect to win. But with the rush to beat this morning’s fog off the island—and Dillinger sounding sunrise with a shrill gobble at both two and four a.m.—she’d left her own behind.

“But what about you?” Holly’s hair and fair complexion now shone brightly, uncovered in the hot sun.

Jeremy Trahn and Mike Munroe had remembered theirs and she felt worse for forgetting her own.

Mike offered his to Holly, which she pretended not to see.

“I’ve another in my kit, no worries,” Holly offered a friendly shrug, her thick Australian accent now familiar enough to be soothing rather than jarring.

Miranda tugged the hat on and felt better about being in the proper uniform. She exchanged her flightsuit for her NTSB vest and hung her badge facing outward from the front pocket.

Once she was assured that all her tools were in place, she turned to the colonel who was watching her closely.

“What?”

He smiled easily. “You’re not what I expected, Ms. Chase.”

She was never what anyone expected, least of all herself. Unsure what else to say, she decided to keep it simple.

“I’m ready.”