Lightning, p.22
Lightning, page 22
“Where are they?”
Andi reached across to flick on the intercom on Miranda’s headset. She repeated her question. The C-2 was too loud to comfortably converse without the headsets.
“Holly and Mike are continuing to work the F-35. You said there was something important, so we decided that they would stay and keep working on it. We all hope that was the right decision.”
Miranda would much rather have them here with her. Her team was now broken into little pairs spread across the globe. It felt fragile and tenuous, as if she’d lost pieces of herself. Knowing intellectually that she’d get at least two of them back…didn’t feel any better.
She hated the aftermath of an episode. They were so rare now that each one was like…sticky glue dragging her back to her childhood. Even coming up with the metaphor didn’t make her feel any better.
Andi handed her a bottle of orange juice and a plastic-wrapped roast beef sandwich. The last meal she could recall had been in the captain’s cabin, but she had no idea when that had been. Maybe crashed blood sugar had been part of the problem.
She knew it wasn’t but it sounded better that way.
And she was hungry.
After glancing to Susan for permission, she fed a sliver of the roast beef to Sadie. Rather than begging for more, Sadie licked her nose several times before walking out of her lap, across Andi’s, and jumped across the narrow aisle into Susan’s.
After Miranda finished the sandwich, she felt a little better. The comfort of doing something routine, no matter how unusual the environment. Outside the window, the predawn light was finally erasing the last of the stars. They were still racing over the unending water of the South China Sea. Daybreak.
She hoped that today would be a better day.
Then she remembered where they were headed and doubted it would be.
“A meeting.” It was pointless to ask if she had to attend. That decision had been taken out of her hands. Next time she’d have to fight back harder against the darkness so that she could maintain some say in her own future.
“Yes, in Brunei. Have you ever been there?”
“No. Their worst helicopter crashes were all before my time except for two rather obvious military crashes. Their only significant airplane crash was a German Dornier that killed ten while I was still in high school.”
Andi laughed that friendly laugh of hers. “I haven’t been there either.”
The humor eluded Miranda as usual, but the feeling of inclusion didn’t. It was a curious paradox that she was only now learning to accept about Andi: Miranda didn’t need to understand her to like being around her.
“What is happening with the KC-46 crash?”
“We sent in the report. And they’ve reported back that the black box concurs with our initial findings. The training flight crews were too busy discussing possible emergency procedures at each step of the landing process to understand that they were actually entering into one. When the proximity alarms kicked in, the pilots assumed it was done by the trainer. They wasted too much time determining that the alarms were real, not simulated.”
“Oh, that’s a relief.”
Susan looked at her with narrowed eyes. “It’s a relief that they screwed up and crashed a three-hundred-million-dollar plane?”
“No. It’s a relief that we are now relatively certain of the cause.” Miranda wasn’t sure why she had to explain that.
Thankfully Andi did. “You aren’t a flier, Commander Piazza, so perhaps you wouldn’t know. The Sterile Cockpit rule is supposed to apply at a level that neither of the crews nor the onboard trainer managed properly. During critical flight stages, the only discussions allowed in the cockpit relate to that stage of flight—that specific stage. We will have to recommend to the Air Force that their training be amended to clarify that during a landing, they may only discuss that specific landing, and not any hypothetical problems about a generalized landing.”
At least Miranda could stop worrying about that crash for the moment. She made a note to recommend review of all FAA and military Sterile Cockpit training language.
Then she made a second note to retrieve her own plane from the hangar at JBER. She didn’t like this scattered feeling at all.
Before Susan could ask anything else distracting, she asked about the crash in Washington, DC.
Andi shrugged. “I haven’t heard from Taz or Jeremy in a while.”
Miranda flipped over to the pilot’s intercom and asked for permission to place an air-to-shore call. They gave her the code to synchronize with the onboard systems.
48
Taz’s phone rang the moment before she handed it over to the Situation Room security team. No cell phones were allowed past the outer security door.
She glanced behind her, but the West Wing lobby was a crush of people hurrying from task to task.
There wasn’t much of a corner to step to in the small security foyer, but she did so. Jeremy and Rose also stepped aside with her, offering some buffer before she answered—more carefully this time.
“Hello?”
“Hi, it’s me, not a recording of me.”
“Hi yourself, Miranda. Are you okay?”
“I seem to be.”
“I’m so glad. Did Holly ‘kill the bitch’ like she promised?” There was a long silence that Taz had learned meant puzzlement. “There was some Navy puke of an officer that Holly was going to kill for me.”
“Oh.”
“Not literally.” They’d left the team less than a week ago and already she was forgetting the rules.
“Figuratively kill someone?”
Taz felt herself smiling, “Close enough.”
“Andi,” Miranda asked Andi as an aside, “what ‘Navy puke of an officer’ was Holly going to figuratively kill? Taz wants to know did she do it and keep her promise?”
Taz couldn’t hear Andi’s response.
“Oh, you mean Commander Susan Piazza. No, she’s here with us. But why would you kill her figuratively? And if you did, literally, I think it would greatly upset her dog.”
“Don’t worry about it, Miranda. I’ll talk to Holly when we’re done and straighten it out.” And she’d find out why the hell Holly hadn’t done as she’d promised.
“She’s not here.”
Taz listened to the sound in the background. Inside an airplane, military by how loud it was. And Holly hadn’t stuck by her side like glue? Now Taz had a new target, a tall blonde named Holly Harper was gonna get her ass kicked the next time they met.
She took a calming breath, it seemed to be the day for that. It helped the same amount all of the others hadn’t.
“What was your question, Miranda?”
“Which question?”
“The one you called me about?”
“Oh, that. Yes. What is the status of your DC crash investigation?”
Taz should have known. “It wasn’t an accident. It was an intentional crash. So the NTSB is done. We’ll stay involved, but it’s Homeland Security’s problem now. A kamikaze flight with an Air Force Gulfstream as the bomb.”
“Oh, that’s a relief. No, wait. I’m not supposed to say that, am I?”
Taz had no idea why not. “Whatever you say, Miranda.”
“Oh, okay. I guess I’ll ask Andi… Oh, she says it is okay to be relieved that it was murder and not an accident… Wait, maybe it wasn’t. Or…” Miranda collapsed into confusion.
Taz knew to pick up the pieces quickly. “The possible target appears to be a Senator Ramson, head of the Senate Armed Services Committee. I have his wife Rose with me.”
“And Jeremy?”
“And Jeremy is here too,” Taz confirmed.
“Tell him… Uh, tell him…I said…Hi.” And she was gone.
Taz stared at the silent phone, then looked up at Jeremy. “She says, Hi.”
Jeremy laughed aloud. “Well, it’s nice to know she’s back to normal.”
Taz thought about it and decided that was good news.
Now she could return to worrying about what the hell was going on. Why was she walking into the Situation Room for the first time in nineteen years of service?
49
The flight to Brunei was almost on the ground before Susan woke up. Figuratively, not literally. The latter would have required that she’d been asleep, by now a luxury past imagining.
No, what she woke up to was that she should have made different choices on the aircraft carrier. She looked across the C-2 Greyhound’s aisle at Andi and Miranda.
They sat with their heads close together. She was in the same intercom loop they were but she might as well not have been. They were discussing the remains of the F-35C and its crash on the carrier in terms she didn’t begin to understand.
“A stress factor analysis along these shear lines in the shock pistons should provide an accurate method of calculating the force of impact.”
“No, we have to integrate the rate of shock absorption across time, though probably only to the millisecond scale for this scenario. We then would factor that like this.” And Miranda tapped a few quick notes into her computer.
“Right. Okay. Then we can start estimating…”
Susan tuned them out.
It was a language as unique as her own. If she began speaking with them about sociometric analysis of group cognition, their eyes would probably cross as badly as hers were now. Of course, after more than thirty years of hands-on training, she rarely had to reach back into her formal education.
But was it safe to interrupt them?
Normally such a question was easy to consider. A simple estimation of present-tense irritability compared with the message’s relative priority. But Andi and Miranda appeared perfectly calm. Except in this case, that wasn’t any measure of the kinds of reactions an interruption might engender.
So she settled on a bit of subterfuge.
Susan nudged Sadie awake, gave her a good scritch in apology for interrupting her nap, then waved her across the aisle. Sadie leapt the aisle and landed in Andi’s lap, who placed a free hand lightly on her back without looking up. Her mother had kept Shih Tzus so, of course, she was completely comfortable with one.
Sadie looked back and Susan signaled her to keep going.
Sadie clambered out from under Andi’s hand, walked over Miranda’s left arm, sat in her lap, then stared up at Miranda’s face and began to wag her tail furiously.
Miranda’s initial action was to withdraw her hands completely. That broke her connection with the keyboard. Which was a good start.
But neither did she pet Sadie.
Instead, she stared straight down, her face mirroring Sadie’s in some way Susan couldn’t identify.
She waited another fifteen seconds to ensure Miranda’s break from her structural calculations.
“I’ve truly never seen her like someone as much as she likes you, Miranda.”
“I do find it rather surprising…and not nearly as upsetting as I’d initially imagined.”
“Well, I’m glad, but I still get my dog back when all of this is over. Don’t forget.”
“I won’t,” Miranda still hadn’t looked aside.
“There are a few things we need to discuss before we land.”
“I’m not looking forward to this,” Miranda appeared to tell the dog.
“I know. There are a few rules we need to discuss.”
“That’s good, I like rules. It would make life so much easier if there was a practical, standard set of rules.”
“It would, but then getting people to adhere to them becomes the next challenge. We have laws at global, national, state, county, and city levels, yet we have a large number of rulebreakers.”
“Like the man who flew the C-20C Gulfstream III into the George Hotel and killed a senior member of Congress.”
“Umm, yes.” Susan had heard only a few mentions of something happening in DC. How or who had… Didn’t matter. She didn’t need to know.
And here she was off track already. Or maybe not.
“There are numerous rules regarding behavior in Brunei. We will need to be very careful about not breaking any of them while we are guests there.”
“Do you have a list?”
“I do. I think that most of them you won’t break by your very nature. It isn’t near Christmas, so it’s illegality in public is of little consequence. Nor would pornography or alcohol be an issue.”
“It isn’t.”
“Drugs, even some prescription drugs, can be problematic as some are—”
“No. I don’t do drugs.”
“Not even when…?” Susan was unsure how to ask tactfully about the collapse Miranda had gone through.
“No, not even then,” she offered the smile of a rare sense of humor. “Prior to the hiring of my therapist, my parents kept me dosed on a variety of therapeutics. Tante Daniels threw them all away and taught me how to be myself.”
Andi looked horrified and squeezed Miranda’s hand tightly. So, they were a new couple to not have covered such ground yet.
“I suppose then that there are only two others. The first is that you two can not show any affection for each other.”
“Wait. What?” Andi twisted to stare at her. “Please tell me that doesn’t mean what I think it does.”
“No, it means exactly what you think it does. The Sultan has declared that LGBTQ, etc., is punishable with death by stoning.”
“Why that God damn—”
“And that’s the second one. Saying anything, and I do mean anything negative about the Sultan is incredibly illegal. Not even when you think you’re alone. Not even by yourself standing on a beach even though you think no one can overhear you.”
Andi continued muttering imprecations upon the Sultan’s head.
“No, Andi, don’t!” Miranda practically shouted. “We’re well within the waters of Brunei’s exclusive economic zone. I don’t want them to do anything to you.”
Susan had expected that Miranda would be the problem on this one. Instead it was Andi Wu who was livid at being told she was less than normal.
Andi blew out a hard breath, then patted Miranda’s hand. “For you, Miranda. I’ll do it for you.” Then she turned to Susan. “Just make sure that I don’t meet this Sultan. It won’t go well.”
Susan offered her a grim smile. She could definitely grow to like Andi Wu.
50
“Are you ready for this?”
Zhang Ru nodded. “Though I never thought I’d travel somewhere that made our own leader appear benevolent.”
“Each is strict in his own ways,” Liú Zuocheng appeared philosophical as their Boeing 737-800 taxied toward the terminal at Rimba Air Force Base. This plane had been outfitted as a strategic command center as well as a VIP transport. They could start a war from here if they had to. And they could do it in luxury.
“We have free education and—”
“Don’t try to lecture me, Ru. After secondary school, our higher education scholarships are terribly limiting—soon to be nonexistent. And free medical is almost fully abolished because it is our economic growth that must rule all. Here in Brunei, both are free for life. Their Gross Domestic Product per capita is four times ours and they live longer than we do. Do your homework before you speak again.”
Ru did his best to show no outward sign, but he would not soon forget the insult.
Instead, he stared out the window.
One of those American carrier airplanes was pulling up at the same moment they were.
They and the Americans both deplaned at the same time. A small royal guard was awaiting them by the terminal, but on the tarmac there were only themselves and the two planes.
He recognized two of the three people who deplaned.
Their fancy crash investigator and her Chinese assistant. Their clothes were smeared with oils and dirt as if they’d come directly from the crash investigation. He didn’t know the third woman, though he liked her looks. She wore a military uniform that showed sharp packing creases. If it weren’t for Zuocheng’s presence, perhaps he’d have a chance to find out how she looked out of it. The first two had knapsacks and the third had a small roll-on suitcase—and a dog.
A fuel truck rolled up to the old American plane and began spooling out a hose.
He wondered how many hours they’d have to wait for Drake to come from DC. Would they have a hotel room waiting? And would any of those three women—well, not the strange investigator—be interested in waiting with him?
He was about to approach when a third plane arrived.
It was like nothing he’d ever seen…outside of a few Artist Concepts. It looked as if its nose had been caught in the antique rollers of his grandmother’s washing machine mangle that had pressed it flat and long. It looked fast standing still, in a way that no jet in the PLAAF fleet ever did.
Gulfstream X-54B, he read on the side.
He’d never heard of the B variant. His latest report said that the A was still in development. Experience had taught him that could be years.
The door opened and Drake climbed out followed by a stunning blonde. She stood a as tall as he did with her pumps’ heels. The shimmer of her deep brown silk attire invited the eye to admire the woman. And there was a great deal to admire, from long legs to proud breasts a man could happily die in.
But even she couldn’t outshine the plane.
“Do we have anything like that?” Zuocheng asked softly.
“Not even on the drawing boards.” Though they damn well would once he returned to China. Gulfstream. A private company. It would be much more difficult to steal their plans than the military and government combined—there he could always buy the engineers he needed. Though none more useful than Su Bin. He had been most useful in stealing the plans to vastly accelerate the design of the new Xi’an Y-20 super transport. It was almost a pity when Ru had to throw him away and let the Americans lock him up.
The Gulfstream would be a very different challenge.
