Ghostrider - M. L. Buchman Page 0,21

good questions?”

“Maybe,” Jeff grinned up at Holly.

Miranda fished out her badge and placed it so that it faced outward.

“I’m Miranda Chase. Investigator-in-charge for the NTSB.”

“Well, I’m glad we got that cleared up,” Holly joked.

Mike was laughing as well for some reason.

Miranda ignored them both and pointed at the steel pipe Holly had tied her rope to. “That’s the barrel of an M102 howitzer. And we also found a Bofors L/60 autocannon, or the remains of one.”

“That confirms it,” Holly nodded to Mike.

“What?”

“From down at the wing, Jon was whining that something was wrong. Must have picked up on it being an AC-130 gunship rather than a standard Hercules.”

“All that’s missing is the GAU-12 Equalizer rotary cannon.”

Holly shrugged. “We crossed paths with the remains of a 20 mm Vulcan cannon.”

Miranda looked at her in surprise. “That’s—”

“What’s all that stuff mean?” Jeff asked.

“It means that the plane that crashed here wasn’t one that should be flying anymore. That it still has the Vulcan cannon means that it was an old gunship and they were all retired by 2001.”

“You mean another plane crashed, too?” Jeff’s panicked tone was back.

“You’re thinking is upside down. Maybe this will help.” Holly grabbed him by the ankles and hung him upside down. “Do you always ask so many questions?”

Jeff’s panic turned to a half giggle.

“It means,” Holly explained still holding Jeff aloft, “that this plane isn’t one that should have been flying. That’s all. It’s still the plane what planted its nose here so hard. Got it?”

Jeff nodded from his inverted position. “Got it.”

Mike stepped in and grabbed Jeff around the waist to set him back on his feet.

“Remember to keep thinking upside down.” Holly’s order earned her another giggle.

Miranda let her mind consider the surrounding area.

Right side up or upside down, there was only the one reported crash.

But it was a plane that shouldn’t have been seen outside of a storage boneyard.

So where had this gunship come from?

12

When Miranda had raised her question about the gunship’s origin, Holly had shrugged.

“Like I told that guy panting on your trail, a crash is a crash.”

The guy…? Miranda shoved the thought aside as irrelevant.

Holly was right.

But the more Miranda investigated this crash, the less sense it made.

They found the very nose of the cockpit by following the trajectory of debris.

It had survived more or less intact. Its second landing—after the initial crash and then the brief flight due to the explosion—had plowed through a perimeter fence of orange plastic mesh. Jeff said it was there to stop people from skiing down the wrong side of the peak and into a dangerous wilderness area with avalanches and cliffs and things.

Past the fence, the cockpit section had tumbled down a rocky slope that had severely battered the exterior but left the interior surprisingly intact. It had landed nearly right side up. Out its missing windows towered the true peaks of Snowmass and the Maroon Bells mountains reaching another two thousand feet higher than the top of the Cirque where the plane had crashed.

They’d checked that it was firmly wedged and wouldn’t be falling off any cliffs before Miranda led the way aboard. This section was surprisingly intact. The ladder itself was badly warped, but still usable.

The view when she stepped into the cockpit was somewhat surreal.

Without the windshield glass, it was a disconcertingly clear sight from inside the plane. Both mountains were still snowcapped and close enough to imply imminent impact—if the Hercules could still have flown.

The QAR, quick access recorder, in the dashboard had survived. She extracted it for Jeremy to analyze when he joined them. Everything was…

“What’s missing?” It had been one of her father’s favorite questions. He trained her how to see what wasn’t there as much as what was.

Holly came up and looked over her shoulder. “Other than the bodies?”

“Other than the bodies.” There were yellow tags marking where Mountain Rescue removed the two bodies of the pilots.

The two of them looked over everything, but Miranda could see that Holly didn’t know what it was either.

She pictured the cockpits she’d investigated at other crashes. There were few signs of fire that swept through the interiors of so many crashes, but that was not definitive.

The only burns were the scorch marks of the initial explosion that had launched the cockpit through the fence and down the slope. None of the brush fire had reached here over the back side of the Cirque’s crown.

“When Dad shoots a deer, it can be really messy.” Jeff had been playing with the