Lightning, p.11
Lightning, page 11
Sadie squeaked in surprise at the rude awakening. Holly was holding her around the middle, leaving her hindquarters to dangle. Her little doggie kicks had nothing to push against.
“Have you been terrorizing our Miranda?”
“Hey,” Andi handed her tablet computer to Miranda, then scooped Sadie out of Holly’s grasp. Making a cradle of her arms, she sat on Miranda’s chair arm. Miranda held the tablet in one hand and began picking individual dog hairs off her jeans with the other. A Shih Tzu didn’t shed much, but she picked up each hair individually and dropped it into the remaining ice of Mike’s ginger ale glass.
Susan noticed that Miranda didn’t move away to give Andi more room to sit, nor did Andi attempt to hold herself clear of Miranda. Was Miranda that comfortable with all of her team, or were they a couple? If the latter, they hadn’t given a single prior sign of it. Though they had shared that seat on the Humvee, that had struck her as expediency, as neither woman could weigh a hundred and ten.
Sadie snuggled down in Andi’s arms with a happy wiggle. At least until Holly reached across the aisle to place a fingertip atop Sadie’s nose. Sadie tried to free her nose, but Holly’s touch followed her every motion. Sadie became annoyed enough to try and nip Holly’s finger but couldn’t manage it.
“Ms. Harper,” Susan offered her best displeased command tone.
Holly continued the game for several more seconds before Andi raised an elbow to block her.
“You may,” Miranda said without looking up from checking to see if she’d missed any hairs.
“I may what?” These people were confusing the crap out of her.
Miranda almost looked directly at her, but not quite.
Mike came to Susan’s rescue, “Explain why we’re being whisked to Southeast Asia with an Air Force Commander riding herd on us.”
Finally. “I—”
“We’re not a pack of sheep or cows,” Miranda noted. “Why would she be riding herd on us?”
“It’s a—”
“Because we’re an unruly mob.” Holly signaled someone out of sight behind Susan and the steward came up beside her. “Any chance of a quick pint in this flying pub?”
“No, ma’am,” the steward replied. “We’re a military craft and don’t stock alcohol.”
“You’re joshing me, mate. This is a top-brass bird. Nothing set aside for the VIPs? I find that a fair stretch.” Her accent was shifting from light to broad Australian. “How about a spider?”
“Ew!” Mike and Andi said in unison.
“A spider, ma’am?” The steward was unflappable.
“Do you have root beer?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And vanilla ice cream?”
“Ice cream sandwiches.”
“Ace! Scoop the middle of the latter into a glass of the former and you’ve got a spider.”
“Ma’am would like a root beer float?”
“That’s what I’ve been sayin’, mate. Do your worst.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he departed with a smile after clearing up some of the detritus, including Mike’s dog-haired ginger ale glass.
Miranda held aloft one final dog hair, but couldn’t find anywhere to place it. Finally Mike took it from her, then surreptitiously dropped it to the floor when Miranda stopped looking.
Susan turned to try again with Miranda…who was now studying Andi’s tablet computer. Her motions said that she was editing something.
Mike caught Susan’s attention and winked. “You’ve lost her for a bit while she reads over what Andi and Holly wrote up about the JBER crash.”
She reached across and snatched away Andi’s tablet.
Miranda squeaked in surprise, sounding enough like Sadie to almost be funny.
The transition was instantaneous, but not in the way she expected.
Mike snapped out a sharp, “No! Don’t!”
Miranda didn’t look up or protest. Instead she placed her hands over her ears, shut her eyes, and bent down her head.
Andi shoved to her feet, tossing Sadie down on the seat behind Miranda’s and appeared ready to do battle.
Holly’s voice was very soft, chillingly so. “You’ll want to be handing that to Mike very slowly.” There was no hint of any accent at all.
“No,” Susan matched her tone for tone. “I have a major crisis awaiting us and I need your team’s attention to be focused exclusively on that.”
“You got our attention, mate. Now if you don’t want to make an abrupt exit of the aircraft at fifty thousand feet, you’ll hand that back.”
“I’ve faced down plenty worse than you over the years…mate.”
“No,” Holly almost smiled. “No, you haven’t.”
Susan was never able to fully reconstruct what happened next.
One moment she was in control of the situation—marginally, but in control.
The next, her head was spinning from where it had been slammed against the window. The tablet was gone from her hands. She was out of her seat and being walked toward the rear of the plane with an arm twisted painfully high behind her back.
They passed the couch, into the rear cabin, and into the small bathroom.
“You’re about to be sick as hell,” Holly’s voice sounded solicitous. “Not that I give a rat’s ass. Now lean forward.”
Susan had no idea how she came to be on her knees, but she puked violently into the bowl.
19
Clarissa was going quietly mad.
She’d go noisily mad if it would do any good, but a glare from Taz had informed her how inadvisable that would be. Clarissa could still feel where that blade had rested against her throat as if it was a line of embers that continued to burn there. A discreet peek in a hand mirror hadn’t revealed any mark but she could feel it nonetheless.
When they’d arrived at the NTSB headquarters, the offices were all dark, no surprise in the middle of the night. The gaudy facade of the International Spy Museum spread most of its red glow toward the street and did little to light the NTSB’s offices across the square. This far from the core, traffic had been breaking up and starting to move by the time they arrived.
But Jeremy and Taz wouldn’t leave headquarters, not to circle the city and go out to Langley. They had immersed themselves in the NTSB recorder lab.
She’d been here only once before, to help interpret the recovered voice recorder audio for Clark’s final flight three weeks ago.
Hearing his few words captured by the cockpit voice recorder had haunted her dreams on and off since. Often she sat up alone in the darkness on the verge of calling out his name. It was becoming quite annoying and she wished that her dreams or subconscious or whatever would shut up and go away.
Walking the shadowed halls of the NTSB less than a month later echoed with ghosts and her own spiked heels.
Jeremy dove into the black box data recovery process. She hadn’t seen the early, mechanical part of the process before. What should have been exciting, or of at least consuming interest, wasn’t. It was slow, tedious, and infinitely boring to watch.
She considered heading out to Langley, but it was no better than here for what she needed to do. Also, they were less than a half mile from the White House if she was called in. Yes, this would do nicely for now.
“Where’s the nearest conference room with secure comms?”
Once she finally had enough of Jeremy’s attention to receive an answer, she turned to Taz.
“You call me the minute you goddamn find anything, Cortez, or I’ll string your boyfriend up by the balls and you by your tiny ears.”
Taz gave her the finger. At least they knew where they stood with each other.
Clarissa left Rose to keep an eye on them because she didn’t have the clearance for what came next.
For the next several hours, Clarissa escalated every operative she could. Instructions began filtering out to agents in China, Russia, India, and Iran. She also woke them up in friendly countries: France, the UK, Japan, and Israel.
The challenge? She didn’t know what she was looking for. Had the aircraft carrier suffered a terrible accident or been attacked? Had the man who killed Ramson been a solo psychotic, a religious fanatic, or being blackmailed so they had no other option?
Without knowing anything, it was hard to know how wide to cast the nets. And some of them were one-time nets, embedded sleeper agents who, once they’d broken cover, would have to be extracted. It took years to replace those kinds of assets.
It was a risk, but she cast as wide as she could except for the sleeper agents.
But to the local informers she dangled the ultimate prize: a US passport and a lifetime income.
By the time she was done reaching out, the first influx of return reports had begun—revealing nothing of interest.
20
Susan stared at herself in the mirror of the C-37B’s lavatory. No lump on her head, though one of her temples was distinctly sore where it had hit the airplane’s window.
No real pain in her gut. She knew how the latter had been done, though she’d never actually seen it—or experienced it. The gut punch had been abrupt rather than deep. Just enough for her stomach to decide something very bad was going on and it was time to abandon ship. The lingering soreness reminded her of aching stomach muscles after a case of food poisoning rather than of playing punching bag to an Australian Special Operations soldier.
She rearranged her clothes as well as she could with the aid of the tiny mirror before stepping once more into the cabin.
The rear cabin of the aircraft had two couches that could be converted into beds.
Holly sat on one, elbows on knees, fingers interlaced.
The privacy door to the rest of the plane was closed.
Susan didn’t need an invitation to know what happened next; she sat down across from Holly.
“Nice punch,” she rubbed her stomach.
“Thanks. I’m sorry, but I had to stop you on two accounts.”
“Care to explain before I have you arrested for assaulting an officer?”
Holly’s smile barely touch her lips. “Good luck with that: Australian forces, retired. Besides, you really want my help, trust me.”
“Okay, I’ll at least listen.”
That, oddly, earned her Holly’s nod of approval and she sat back in her seat.
“First, you were on the verge of throwing Andi Wu into a military mindset with your misguided target of her girlfriend.”
“It would be nice if someone was of a military mindset here.” At least girlfriend explained some of the dynamic between Andi and Miranda, though not all of it.
Holly finally leaned back at ease, just as she had the instant before Susan had lost track of what happened and been escorted out of the forward cabin.
Susan tried to mirror Holly’s casual posture but there was still a tightness in her gut. “So, educate me already.”
Holly stared at her so long that she became aware of every single noise in the plane. The well-insulated engines, the occasional creak of the interior fixtures, the minor sliding tone shifts from being airborne rather than parked on the ground. The windows showed the aching depth of stratosphere-blue above a hazy sea lost in the lower troposphere. If there were voices beyond the closed door, she couldn’t pick them out.
“How much of our files did you read?”
“All of them.”
“Including Captain Wu’s attacks of PTSD?”
No, she hadn’t seen anything about that, at least not in the crappy files provided by the AIB. Or quite why she’d left the 160th SOAR.
“That was the piece of her military mode I really didn’t want you triggering. Setting her off can deep-six Miranda badly and we need her to function right now.”
Susan was horrified. She’d seen men and women, damned fine ones, knocked out of the service with PTSD. Done enough volunteer work with such disabled vets when she was on leave that she knew some would never again be able to toe the line properly, not even in civilian life.
“No, that would never be my intent.” That Andi was out on an active team at all was a huge statement of strength.
“So, you read the Air Force’s files on us.” Holly didn’t ask.
The Navy’s files were very sparse regarding this team, so she’d asked for the AIB’s. The US Air Force’s Accident Investigation Board had been the most likely to have interactions with civilian air-crash investigators.
“I won’t ask how many of those were compiled by a waste of space named Major Jonathan Swift. I will suggest that you never mention his name around this team. Just a friendly word of advice.”
That was certainly news. Major Swift was the one who had personally transmitted the files to her. Oh! This team obviously knew him, which meant he had been a field investigator. Yet he was now the one flying a desk and this was the team sent to crash-site investigations, at least tacitly, by the President himself.
“Yes, that was my source.” She nodded for Holly to continue. Susan wanted to see where this led before she made any decisions.
“Shit! Next time I see him, I’m gonna fold that asshole into a tiny ball, stuff him down a dunny, and invite all me mates over for a right proper piss up. His report describes Miranda as dangerously unstable and me as a psychopath?”
Susan again nodded.
“Maybe I can convince Drake to flush his ass.”
“Drake? I still can’t believe you folks call the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the President by their first names.”
“Only Miranda does in person. He’s Jon’s uncle. No nepotism. He’s the one who grounded Jon’s ass after the last fiasco that nearly got the lot of us killed, followed by his fuckups at the Vice President’s crash investigation.” Holly rubbed at her face. “Okay, I’ll lay this out once. You’re clearly smart enough to get it.”
She’d been so ineffective over the last several hours as she tried to find some handle to understand and control this team that she’d begun to doubt her skills. It wasn’t an ability she’d doubted very often in her career.
“I’m only a psychopath if you’re an asshole, otherwise I’m as sweet as a brown desert mouse.”
Susan couldn’t stop her laugh at that.
Holly shrugged her guilt. “Okay, sweet and me aren’t real mates, but as long as you don’t mess with Miranda or Andi, I couldn’t care a mouse’s hind end.”
That seemed unlikely. “What about Mike?”
“He’s a grown boyo, can tend to himself. Always a little too cocksure, though I do my best to keep him in the place such men belong.”
“You and I may match there. Men are wonderful, but mostly at arm’s length.”
Holly looked out the window over Susan’s shoulder long enough for her to turn and look as well, but there was nothing there except the sky darkening toward sunset. It didn’t take a genius to see that Mike was a topic that was causing Holly some discomfort.
“Miranda?” she prompted when the silence continued to drag out.
Holly’s attention snapped back fast. Yet she waited for Susan to speak first.
“If she’s not Major Swift’s unstable to the verge of psychotic, then what is she?”
“Thought that would have been obvious to someone like you long ago.”
“She’s autistic. I get that. I don’t have much experience with the disorder, not enough to judge how disabled she is.”
“Wipe that fucking word from your vocabulary. On the autism spectrum. Fuck disorder! Miranda is not disabled. She’s an absolute genius at a level folks like you and me will never understand. But the world-at-large and people-in-specific? They’re a complete mystery to her. No, they’re a swamp of infinitely variable sucking mud that she constantly struggles to forge a path through. And she does that by applying an awesome hyperfocus.”
“So when I snatched her tablet…”
“…you dumped her straight into the deep end of the swamp.”
“Is she going to be okay?”
Holly shrugged. “Mike and Andi are good for her. Better than me. My role is more…” she flexed her hands in and out of fists.
“…physical.”
“Aye.” And once again she leaned forward, elbows on knees, and stared down at her hands.
Susan’s chagrin ran deep. She’d been treating this team’s peculiarities using Major Swift’s reports as a guide. No wonder nothing she’d done had worked with them.
But it wasn’t that simple. She’d tried to speak with Miranda several times only to have—
“You bitch! You’ve been managing me the whole time.”
Holly offered that shrug again without looking up.
“That’s why you sat down across from me. After I waited patiently through that analysis of the KC-46 crash at JBER, you balked me every time I tried to talk to Miranda.”
Yet another shrug.
“You do that again and I’ll—” Susan certainly wouldn’t be challenging a Spec Ops warrior herself, “—sic Sadie on you. She has very sharp teeth.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, Commander.” But Holly’s mood didn’t lighten for even a moment.
“Okay, why?”
Holly started that shrug, caught herself, but didn’t look up from her hands. “Nothing in those reports about how I transitioned from SASR (Special Air Service Regiment down in Australia) operator to NTSB, was there.”
No point in denying it. There wasn’t.
“Not a whole lot of folks know this outside of the regiment.” Holly again stared out the empty window as she spoke. “I lost my team. Sole survivor. Not my fault—I know that now—but my commanders weren’t impressed at the time.” Then she made a face somewhere between a grimace and half smile. “Especially as I gave them little choice in the matter. I also probably shouldn’t have attacked the unit commander at the funeral in an attempt to take all of the guilt on myself. At least that’s how Mike explained it to me. Mostly fits.”
“So you jab at authority every chance you get.” Susan would be angry if Holly’s pain wasn’t so clear to see. She wondered if Holly could see it herself. “No matter how stupid that is?”
