Chinook

Chapter 1

1

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Jeremy looked at the card he’d just drawn.

“Your poker face sucks. You know that, right?”

“So helpful, Mike.” The game’s rules kept evolving, but there was no question that the B-1B Lancer bomber was the greatest suck of an airplane card—and truly appropriate for such a sad aircraft. When he’d taken Miranda’s list of aircraft and remade them into a card deck, he’d arranged them by coolness factor. Actually, by how he guessed Miranda would grade each one before making a few adjustments of his own.

What he hadn’t planned on was how often he drew the deuce of combat planes. This definitely required some rethinking.

“Whatever,” he laid down the card and rolled his dice. He needed at least a four to keep the plane aloft.

A one.

He augered in. Too many total crashes, and he was out of the game before it had really begun. The game needed some major rethinking.

While the others battled it out, he headed to the kitchen.

Miranda’s island home still wowed him every time they were invited here. The big house, built of stone and timber off the land, looked like a smaller version of the grand timber lodges that were dotted all over the Northwest.

It had been built as a hunting lodge perched in the center of long and slender Spieden Island. In the 1970s it had been made into a big game resort with hundreds of imported species. The zebra and other African imports were long since removed, which was too bad as he’d like to have seen them up close. But deer, sheep, and hundreds of exotic bird species still populated the island, though they were no longer hunted. Two miles long and half a mile wide, it was half conifer forest and half grassy meadow completely surrounded by a steep, rocky shore.

The August sunset, striking reds and golds over Vancouver Island across ten miles of Puget Sound, seemed to fill the house to bursting. It warmed the fir-clad walls to a luster almost as warm as the fire crackling in the beach-cobble hearth.

He fished a beer out of the fridge, then leaned back against the maple-and-cherrywood island to watch the others. The big kitchen filled this whole end of the great room, definitely a cook’s kitchen. On a good day, he could make Toll House chocolate chip cookies—by following the recipe on the back of the bag.

Mike was the real cook of the team, and he always made it seem like so much fun when he was doing it.

Miranda often ended up as his assistant, even though they all were on her team. She spent almost as much time putting everything perfectly back into place as she did cooking, but her autistic nature seemed to like doing that, so she too enjoyed herself. The rest of them were a disaster in the kitchen and were typically banned.

The others were gathered around one end of the vast oak-slab dining table that could easily seat twenty in the middle of the room.

The team wasn’t invited here often, but he looked forward to it every time.

With a cry of triumph, Holly slammed down a card atop one of Mike’s. “That’ll teach you to stick your aircraft up my business, mate.” Her Australian accent was running thick tonight, so she was clearly enjoying herself. The fact that she and Mike had been sleeping together for the last six months “but we are so-oo not a couple,” seemed to only enhance her glee in attacking him at every turn.

Their constant battling seemed to suit them, but that wouldn’t be his choice.

Miranda and Jon were also a couple, though he’d never been comfortable with seeing them together—even on opposite sides of the card table. She was the best plane-crash investigator in the entire NTSB, and Jon…really wasn’t. He was a nice guy, but Miranda deserved better.

That he himself got to work with her was beyond cool. And that she now trusted him to draft many of the team’s reports was simply unbelievable.

She always added things he’d never thought to, of course, but still she let him create those first drafts. If he could just be half as good as her someday…

Yeah, that was never going to happen.

Mike tossed his cards into the middle of the table with no sign of the frustration that Jeremy knew he would’ve shown, instead offering an easy laugh. He then rose from the table, circled to Holly, and leaned down to really kiss her.

Instead of shoving him away as she usually did, she grabbed him by the neck and kept him pinned in place. When Mike finally broke free, they were both smiling like a couple of lunatics, as if somehow convinced they each had just won their battle.

“You two have serious issues.” Captain Andi Wu, formerly of the Night Stalkers and now the last and newest member of the team, gathered up the deck and began shuffling.

“Like you and the sheep!” Holly shot back.

“Somebody coulda warned me.”

“Nope,” Mike, Holly, and Jon said practically in unison. Miranda sat quietly as she usually did during banter, just watching the others.

When Andi had stepped down from Miranda’s sleek little Cessna Citation M2 jet onto the grass runway, a mouflon sheep had nosed forward to sniff her. Standing a meter high at the shoulders, it hadn’t had to strain to sniff her face-to-face. Its great horns curved almost a full circle around to its jaws.

Andi’s yelp had spooked the sheep, making it bolt and sending her stumbling backward until she landed in the grass.

His own first run-in with the island’s big sheep had been far less dramatic, and at a safer distance, so he shouldn’t feel superior. But he did.

It still wasn’t fair how Andi had just stumbled into being part of the team. But there she was, dealing out the cards, then leading the attack on Jon now that he and Mike were out of the game. Like it was women against men or something.

Jeremy had worked for years to make sure he had every necessary credential. Dual masters in Fluid Dynamics and Advanced System Topology Modeling from Princeton—which he’d managed when only two years older than Miranda herself had earned her two masters degrees at twenty.

And despite a dozen big-firm offers, he’d applied only to the NTSB, hoping that he might at least meet Miranda Chase someday. That he’d been assigned to her team was still the best day of his life.

Whereas Andi? She’d been thrown out of the military—because of PTSD according to Mike, which meant honorably, but still. And while Jeremy had taken and aced every single course at the NTSB Academy, she’d completed less than half before she’d been assigned to Miranda’s team out of the blue.

Keeping Captain Wu from edging into his skills area sucked.

Ever since the sabotage and explosion of a CH-47F Chinook had almost killed the team on their second major crash investigation a year ago, he’d been preparing for when they’d investigate another helicopter crash. He’d spent much of his spare time since then studying their mechanics and aerodynamics so that he could step in when Miranda finally got called to investigate one. He’d made sure he knew more than Holly, which was hard, or Mike, which wasn’t.

Nothing against Mike. He was the human-factors specialist so he knew very little about the aircraft themselves. Holly covered structures. His own niche was systems, and rotorcraft had a lot of those.

Then they’d finally had their first major rotorcraft crash, and Andi had swooped in from the 160th Night Stalkers—the Army’s secret helicopter regiment—like some sort uninvited ringer for the opposing team.

Now there she was, laughing with the group as if she actually belonged. Jon merely shrugged when Andi knocked him out of the game as well.

Mike, who’d hovered to watch the round, thumped Andi on the shoulder, then came into the kitchen area.

“Thinking mighty hard there, Jeremy.” Mike fetched his own beer. “Good thoughts, I hope.”

Jeremy blinked. “Uh, not so much.”

“Not good, my young Padawan. That’s not like you. Besides, thinking cheerful thoughts is much more fun.”

Jeremy tried to remember back a year to when he, Mike, and Holly had become Miranda’s new team. He’d been…naive.

“I was like some overeager puppy dog back then, wasn’t I?”

“Back when? Oh, before our unasked-for trip on Taz’s Ghostrider? Yeah, you kind of were.” Mike ruffled his hair.

Jeremy batted Mike’s hand aside, but Mike just laughed.

“My, how our boy has grown.” Then he pulled out a big skillet. “Everything changed all at once, didn’t it?”

Jeremy just grimaced.

While Mike rubbed allspice, salt, and pepper over a row of chicken breasts, he had Jeremy slicing onions, carrots, and a red bell pepper. Before Jeremy was done, Mike had the chicken sizzling in oil and had begun doing something with thin-sliced jalapeno peppers in a boiling sugar-and-vinegar mix.

He made it look so easy. But when Jeremy tried to remember Mike’s cooking later, it just turned into a blur.

Sure enough, in moments Mike was wielding a knife like it was another piece of his arm. Minced onions and garlic were soon sizzling in a heavy pot.

“Mexican rice.”

Which just reminded him again of Taz. He didn’t even know where in Mexico she’d been from.

“You never got closure,” Mike’s voice was suddenly serious. “That must be hard. When I lost my parents, at least I got to go to the funeral. I was nine, so what did I know, but it was a chance to say goodbye. Still, it’s been six months since she went down, Jeremy. Got to start letting go at some point.”

Jeremy took the onion and garlic skins to the small composting crock. At least he knew how to do that.

How to survive the memory of Vicki Cortez?

How to not see her every time he closed his eyes—her plane impacting the desert not two miles from where his parachute had landed? How to not feel and hear the explosion, so violent that he’d felt the shockwave across the wide stretch of barren desert?

That he couldn’t seem to do.