Ghostrider - M. L. Buchman Page 0,18

a noise like a haunting ghost. “There’s something spooky about the plane. Don’t be telling Miranda that it’s the wrong plane, mate. She’ll snap off your head faster than a saltie chowing down on a chihuahua.”

“A what on a—”

“Big nasty crocodile in Australia,” Jeremy explained.

Jon unkeyed the mike.

“Of course,” Holly came back with her accent even thicker, “none of the three of us is so shit-for-brains that we’d tell her something like that in the middle of an investigation.”

“Now who needs to watch their on-air language?”

“I’m Australian. I’m allowed. Anyway, we’re leaving that one for you to explain to her.”

“Well, she’s not answering,” Jon was going to throttle the whole team if they kept this up.

A silence stretched out long enough for Jon to become aware of a bird call that…sounded as if it was very upset about finding its home burned up.

Jeremy reached for his radio. Resigned, Jon gave it to him.

“I’ve got at least another hour here,” he reported to Holly. “I have to go through two more engines and I want to look inside the port wing.”

Holly took a moment to answer. “Mike’s almost done cutting free the black boxes. Nothing much to learn here without collecting every single scrap and rebuilding it. We’ll climb up and make sure nothing happened to Miranda. Meanwhile, this is a plane crash and our job is to investigate it. Finish what you’re doing.”

“Roger that,” Jeremy made a show of returning the radio to the pouch on the side of his pack rather than returning it to Jon.

It was enough to bring his sense of humor back as he turned to help Jeremy once more with the engine investigation.

9

“What kinda gun has such a big rifle barrel?” Jeff did indeed ask numerous questions as his father had implied, but as he listened to the answers and appeared to be absorbing them, Miranda found no dissatisfaction in the process.

She glanced at the barrel and other remains of the gun still attached to it. “It’s from a 40 millimeter L/60 Bofors autocannon.” That finally told her what variation of C-130 Hercules plane it was. An AC-130 gunship.

“Autocannon? That’s like an automatic cannon?”

“Yes.”

“It automatically shoots cannonballs? Like a pirate ship?” His streams of questions were curiously logical from a certain point of view—a person filled with infinite curiosity and only limited experience. Once she’d realized that, she’d discovered an ongoing interest in what he’d ask next.

“Forty-millimeter shells. That’s about an inch and a half across. But yes.” Miranda had never been fascinated by weapons. She could use them, her father had insisted, but only to put down a suffering animal on her island.

“Cool!” Then Jeff knelt in the char to stare into the open end of the barrel.

“Don’t do that!”

Jeff froze and looked at her. “Oh, right! Just like my .22, I gotta make sure there’s no round in the chamber. I never thought of that on a cannon. I thought they were different. Do you think pirates ever looked into their cannons?”

“Not while they were loaded. Not unless they wished to become dead pirates.”

“Right. Whups, I looked in a cannon just as it fired. Ker-Pow!” He splatted his palms against his face, covering his eyes as he staggered in a small circle. “Where’s my head? Where’s my head?” Then he shifted to inspect the Bofors’ feed armature. “So how do I check that?”

“You have to wait for a professional.”

“But you know how, don’tcha?”

She did. All of the rounds that had been in the feed had exploded in place, shredding the mechanism designed to handle and load a hundred and twenty, foot-long, two-pound shells every minute.

The mechanism to release the feeder from the firing mechanism in case of a jam was still sufficiently intact to operate. Between them, they were able to open the breech. A round still sat in the firing chamber.

She slipped it out and showed it to Jeff.

“Oh man. Please don’t tell Dad. He’d be all angry if he knew I’d almost looked down a loaded barrel.”

“I’ll try not to.”

He looked up at her cautiously. “You’ll try? That doesn’t sound like much of a promise.”

“I sometimes say things I shouldn’t. I try to stop myself, but I’ll be too late and it just comes out.”

Jeff nodded. “I do that. Like you want to gobble up the words after they’re gone.”

Miranda liked that image, but couldn’t think how to do it. Jeff reached out a hand for the shell and she handed it to him.

“Wow! That weighs more than my rifle.”

“If you