Ghostrider - M. L. Buchman Page 0,27

cannister.

“So, hit us with your conclusions. Then we’ll see if they pan out.”

“Not conclusions; incomplete hypotheses.” Miranda toyed with the regulator of the EBS cannister that she still held as she sought a way to explain what looked so clear in her head. “I need to clarify beforehand, the best-fit scenario has a distinct problem in that it is inherently illogical.”

Holly shot her a thumbs-up as if that was a good thing. Jeremy and Jon both nodded for her to continue. Mike knelt by Jeff and whispered to him, “She means that her ideas don’t make any sense, but she thinks she knows what happened anyway.”

Jeff nodded hard in sudden understanding and waited.

“The airplane, despite a probable origin at the Davis-Monthan boneyard—”

“Actually, it’s still officially there,” Jeremy chimed in. “I checked the logs against the aircraft number on the tail and the cockpit. It’s still recorded as being in storage on site.”

“Which means we need to have a little chat with Colonel Arturo Campos,” Holly snarled out. She’d never liked him. Miranda had…briefly.

“—despite the plane’s origin at the Davis-Monthan boneyard, it reported a depressurization event last night—”

“At precisely three a.m. according to Denver Center,” Mike added.

It had taken her over six months working together for her to accept their interruptions without losing track of her own thoughts, but rather allow her team to add to them on the fly. It was disconcertingly like having part of her brain be external to her head.

She reached for her notebook to log the curious image for future consideration, then spotted Jon’s smile that seemed like it knew more than it should. She decided that making the note wasn’t important enough to interfere with her consideration of the crash scenario. Besides, she was unlikely to forget the externalization of her thoughts with the constant reminders the team provided.

“If that depressurization event was caused by the opening of the passenger door at—”

“—thirty-nine thousand feet—” Mike inserted again. “Oh, then it would be deliberate.”

“Who would deliberately tank a nice old gunship?” Holly appeared disgusted. “Know more than a few ex-mates I wouldn’t have minded targeting with a Spectre if someone had just given me the use of one. That’s as dumb as doing a dance on a dingo’s tail.”

Miranda forged ahead. “The cockpit has bodies, but not in their chairs. And there’s no messy blood,” she nodded to Jeff to acknowledge his contribution.

He tried to stand up even taller than his four-foot-five.

“So we can theorize that the corpses were dead before the crash. But the perpetrators of the crash assumed too little evidence would remain for that to be ascertainable. This crash was deliberately created to make us all assume that the named passengers aboard are dead so that the Air Force would not pursue their whereabouts while they carried out a very different mission. I would surmise that it is one not authorized by the military establishment.”

“Whoa!” Jon gasped out. “I didn’t think about the last part of that.”

So she stopped.

He narrowed his eyes at her. “Not whoa, just…whoa!”

Holly delivered one of her trademark punches to Jon’s arm, causing him to stagger aside. “Not whoa like stop, Miranda. Whoa is also an exclamation of surprise.”

Jon punched Holly back. Her attempts to avoid flattening Jeff sent her careening into Mike, and he barely kept them both from going to the charred ground.

Then Jon smiled. “What she said. Keep going, Miranda. I think you’ve got it right so far.”

“You hit a girl?” Holly practically roared as she regained her balance.

“Nah!” Jon winked at Miranda.

What was it with people winking at her and giving eye rolls as if she understood some hidden message?

“Unless Ms. Holly Harper is admitting to actually being a girl…rather than a royal pain in the ass.”

“Pain in the arm,” Holly grinned at him. “I ain’t kicked your behind yet to be a PIA, jet jockey.”

“Don’t tempt me…girl. You were saying, Miranda?” Then he turned his back on Holly with what Miranda estimated to be a certain degree of rather foolish lack of caution.

She waited a moment, but Holly didn’t take advantage of the situation.

“If the people were already dead, then who was flying the plane?” Jeff looked puzzled.

“Exactly the correct question,” Miranda acknowledged. “I would conjecture—”

Holly kicked Jon in the behind, but not too hard. Jon didn’t turn, instead muttering, “Total PIA!” and grinned.

Miranda did her best to ignore them both.

“—that the copilot removed his EBS cannister from its holder by his seat and was using it to breathe when he opened the personnel