Ghostrider

Prologue-2

Now the training paid off. She slapped the supervisor-call switch. Then, pulling up the plane’s filed flight plan, Missy began studying the sector chart.

Kenneth hurried over and patched in his headset beside hers, “What are we looking at, Missy?” As always at work, his tone was completely professional. They’d had dinner together after last night’s shift—the third in as many weeks. He’d been charmingly roundabout with how he’d propositioned her over dessert of brandied chocolate mousse and herbal tea.

She’d turned him down; he was her boss after all. She also had a boyfriend, technically. Vic was very unhappy that she’d left LA, even for the nice promotion offer from Denver Center, and they weren’t on speaking terms at the moment. It was becoming clear that he was more upset about having to pay all of the apartment’s rent than about her actual departure.

“We have a depressurization emergency on military flight Shadow Six-four. Which is listed as…” she inspected the record, “…an AC-130H. Is that the C-130 Hercules?” She didn’t typically interact much with the military planes and was still learning them.

Kenneth whistled softly. “A for attack, C-130 for Hercules airframe, but the H isn’t for Hercules. It’s actually for the Spectre variant. It means that it’s a very nasty gunship with side-firing guns, big ones—like a 105 millimeter howitzer,” he held up a clenched fist to demonstrate the bore of the latter, as if she didn’t know that 105 mm was over four inches across. He couldn’t help himself but to include the extra information.

She’d heard him do that with everyone. And it helped calm her down. Still, she pushed her coffee cup to the very edge of her station.

“Do you know its V-max airspeed? They’re descending at two-eight…two-nine…now three-zero-zero knots.”

“V-max on the standard C-130 is three-twenty. But on the H variant, I think it’s just two-sixty.”

“They’re in major trouble.” She mumbled out as she searched for any problems along their flight path. There was… “Holy s**t!”

Crap! Now that would be on the tape forever if there was a future investigation. And if she couldn’t help them soon, there would be.

She keyed the radio right away.

“Shadow Six-four, this is Denver Center. Be aware your current airspeed is very high. Also your direct line of descent includes seven of the fourteeners.” They stood in a tight cluster barely southwest of Aspen, Colorado.

“Fourteeners?” Was the plane’s radio operator’s voice more strained? She couldn’t tell. The military pilots were even more resolute than the airline pilots. It was the private pilots of general aviation who panicked all the time.

She hadn’t known the word fourteeners either until Kenneth had told her about them over last night’s dinner. Out-of-state pilots weren’t used to mountains reaching that elevation, or the weather systems the mountain peaks generated for thousands of feet higher.

“Mountains over fourteen thousand feet tall. What’s your status?” She checked her map for the nearest airports. She needed one big enough. Oh. Maybe… “Kenneth, the Hercules is designed for short-field landings, right?”

He shot a thumbs up into her peripheral vision without interrupting. Kenneth wasn’t giving her any corrections, so she must be on track. She appreciated his oversight though. This was escalating too fast in many ways.

She keyed her mike. “Shadow Six-four, can you divert to Aspen or Glenwood Springs Airport? Each are roughly twelve miles from your current location.”

“Total LOC. Negative divert.”

Total Loss of Control.

They were falling through twenty-five thousand feet at over three hundred and fifty knots, four hundred miles an hour.

“Roger, Six-four.” She looked away from the radar to Kenneth. What could she say from the ground to help the pilots? They’d know they were doomed. This was a cargo plane, not a fighter jet—it wouldn’t even have ejection seats.

Kenneth cricked his neck to the side for a moment, then shrugged a little helplessly.

“Denver Center. Status, Six-four?”

“Negative control. Negative recovery.” His voice was dead calm. There was a pause, a sound she’d never be able to identify, then he said, “Aw, fuck.” He sounded more ticked off than scared.

She hailed him again, but there was no response.

Eleven seconds later, two new radar images appeared alongside the plane.

“That’s the wings,” Kenneth whispered softly. “Ripped off the plane.”

Nine seconds after that it impacted Snowmass Mountain, a fourteener, at twelve thousand five hundred feet, the very top of the ski area.

Missy looked down at the checklist. She managed to get her finger on the phone number for Mountain Rescue, but she couldn’t make out the numbers.

“I can’t see to call them. I can’t, Kenneth. I—”

He rested a hand on her shoulder and picked up the phone himself. Brushing aside where her tears had blurred the number on the call sheet, he dialed and called out the search teams.

They pulled her off the console and sat her in a small conference room. One of the assistant supervisors conducted the post-incident interview, recording and noting down everything she could recall. When they gave her a fresh mug of coffee, the scent actually made her puke into the wastebasket until she was a weeping, shivering mess.

The assistant super was nice enough to say that it happened all the time after a bad one. He was also nice enough to not mention her weakness when Kenneth checked in on her during breaks in his own round of interviews. Though she could see from his extra sympathy that Kenneth knew.

Fifty-three seconds.

First-call to crash was just fifty-three seconds. That fast—thirteen people lost their lives. She couldn’t get around the fact. How could life suddenly be so short?

When they were done, when all of this was done and the investigation was over, Missy knew one thing. She was so done with Vic.

She also knew the pilot’s final comment, that one final moment when his humanity had slipped past all of his military training, would haunt her for the rest of her life.

Aboard Shadow Six-four

Elevation: 27,000 feet

(23 seconds before impact)

As soon as Lieutenant Colonel Luis Hernandez broadcast the final report from aboard the diving plane—“Negative recovery. Negative control.”—he released his seat harness.

The plane wasn’t quite in freefall, so he fell into the yoke and flight console. “Aw, fuck.” Like it was going to hurt anything now other than his ego. The plane was safely past recovery and no one was left aboard to see anyway.

He pulled off his headset and began climbing uphill through the Hercules’ cockpit. He moved fast in the near freefall. Two of the thirteen bodies scattered strategically through the plane had ended up in the aisle and he was forced to crawl over them. They were wearing his and Danny’s dog tags. They were also close to their build and coloring just in case anything survived the crash. Hopefully not, they weren’t that close because no way did he look like the fake Luis. Homely bugger.

He continued aft quickly, having to struggle to shake off the memory of the last time he’d done this. He’d crawled over the bodies of his own crew when his C-130 Hercules had been shot down in Afghanistan due to insufficient fighter support in a war they never should have been in. He’d fought the plane all the way down—been one of the few to make it. He came to, crawling from body to body looking for other survivors.

At least this time, neither the iron stench of hot blood nor the stinging kerosene of burning Jet A fuel permeated the air. Everyone except he and Danny had been dead before they boarded this flight.

The ladder down to the main cargo deck was easier to navigate. They were in true freefall now and he could just pull himself along it.

Major Danny Gonzalez had left the forward passenger door open after popping it at thirty-nine thousand feet. Though, Luis supposed, his copilot was just Danny now. Their military rank was one more thing they’d all agreed to leave behind along with the dead.

Luis shrugged into the parachute rig.

He took a moment to ensure that he was oriented properly and then grabbed the bottom edge of the door. It wouldn’t do to fling himself out of the plane and straight into the massive four-blade propeller of the Number Two engine spinning at a thousand RPM.

The fuselage twisted sharply and he almost lost his grip as it began to tumble.

Looking out into the darkness once more, he saw that the propeller was no longer an issue—the entire wing had ripped off.

The temperature was a b***h though.

Even on a warm June evening, ten thousand feet above Aspen was damn cold. Be lucky if he didn’t have frostbite by the time he got down. But no time to pull on a balaclava—the ground was coming up fast.

He still made a point of flinging himself downward as he exited, just in case the tail was still attached.

As soon as he’d ejected, he opened his black tactical ram-air chute. It was for night insertions deep behind enemy lines, and, like his specialized clothing, had the radar signature of a bird—a small one.

He watched the plane continue down. Less than five seconds after he had his chute deployed and stable, the Hercules impacted at twelve thousand feet atop a high peak. It was supposed to plunge into the back-country wilderness beyond, but it didn’t really matter. At almost five hundred knots, the destruction was more than sufficient.

As rigged beforehand, one of the rounds of 105 mm ammunition for the big howitzer—the main weapon of the AC-130 series of gunships—ignited on impact.

In a single moment, the other eighty rounds lit off.

The combination of all of the forty-two-inch-long, thirty-three-pound rounds igniting simultaneously unleashed sixteen hundred pounds of high explosives in the heart of the plane.

If there had been anything left of the fuselage, it was now shattered. Probably the top of the mountain as well by the scale of the blinding fireball that lit the surrounding mountains like daylight. He hoped that no one was looking in his direction for the one moment he was starkly lit against the night sky.

The wings landed farther down the slope, bursting into flame when the fuel tanks breached. The conflagration spread rapidly upslope. In minutes, any remains of the plane would be engulfed as well.

Perfect.

Then the shock wave caught up with him.

Shit!

“Didn’t think of that one, did you, Luis?”

For a thousand feet of descent, he could do nothing but curse and flail as the shock wave dragged him wherever it wanted to.

Once it cleared, he was amazed to still be holding the control toggles. The wonders of stark terror.

He hadn’t jumped much since Basic, just enough to stay qualified. But the loud roar of the wind had to be a bad sign. Yanking on the toggles didn’t seem to do much either.

Not daring to let go in case he couldn’t find the handles again, he almost snapped his own neck from nodding hard enough to flip down his night vision goggles. He managed it just in time to see what was happening above him.

“s**t!” He didn’t have a parachute. He had a ripped-up mess of tangled nylon. It looked as if half the chute was missing and the rest was snarled.

He yanked the cutaway. The general was going to be pissed if someone spotted the errant chute, but Luis was out of options.

One side of the risers released, but not the other.

Falling sideways.

Dragging the main chute along off his right shoulder.

Glance down.

Out of time.

Deploy the reserve and pray it didn’t snarl in the crippled main. It came out clean and almost gutted him with hard deceleration.

He was well past Snowmass, but nowhere near the Aspen car racing track where Danny and their motorcycles would be waiting.

Down below there was no sign of anything except sharp peaks and deep valleys.

The wind still seemed too loud. Up above, two-thirds of the reserve was drawing clean, the last third was fighting with the trailing main—and losing.

“Two thirds has gotta be better than nothing, right?”

A massive edifice loomed up in front of him.

Colonel Hernandez cleared the sharp crags of Willoughby Mountain with feet to spare.

Down the backside, the colonel wasn’t in freefall, but his training had taught him that any attempt to slow the chute would only make the entanglement worse.

He hit the scree slope at a forty-five-degree angle. Luckily for him, the head-sized boulders gave way rather than his legs.

But it didn’t stop there.

The whole slip face let go. The field of a million rocks began to slide and tumble.

For a brief few seconds, with the support of the collapsing chute, Luis Hernandez managed to dance along the top of the stone avalanche.

He fell.

Rolled once.

Made it back to his feet.

But that single roll was his undoing. The three sets of parachute risers, two from the reserve and one from the main, had wrapped around his upper body like the old cartoon of tying a villain to a chair with a hundred feet of rope.

Unable to move his arms, his balance didn’t last another full second.

He remained conscious for the next two hundred feet of descent as eleven and a half thousand tons of rock swept him toward the valley floor. As he tumbled and rolled, his body acted like a fisherman’s reel, winding the parachute’s riser lines tighter and tighter around him.

At three hundred feet below his initial point of landing, one of the risers sliced off his head. It was all that saved him from being killed by the rocks.

At the base of the scree slope, the mountain built a burial mound—wider than four school buses parked end to end, and over three stories high.

Lieutenant Colonel Luis Hernandez’s head, body, and parachutes were near enough the bottom of the pile that the general wouldn’t have to worry. No one would ever spot the errant chutes or the man it had killed.