Start the Chase

Chapter 3

3

When her hands attempted to drift back to the steering yoke, she forced them onto her lap.

She had planned for this transition to joining the NTSB so carefully, each step laid out and reviewed until it was as clear as an air route in her head. She’d even drawn it up as if it was a flight plan for her life.

Miranda had completed both of her masters degrees in June. She’d spent the next ten weeks working on her Aircraft Maintenance Engineer course. Two weeks had been allowed on Spieden Island, as the family home was the only place she could be truly alone. For two weeks she done everything she could to prepare herself for this next phase.

Joining the NTSB was going to be her first job and it was the one thing she needed to do perfectly. Perfectly, or more people might die like her parents.

She had never in her life not been studying.

Her very first memory was of herself and her father in the family garden. He’d been installing a bronze sculpture covered in letters. It was like a wavy piece of paper, on edge, but thick and as tall as she was.

“You’ll learn to read this, Miranda. It’s a secret code and we’ll work on it together until it’s done.”

He’d been wrong, but not unfairly. Death had taken him before they’d broken any of the codes hidden in the sculpture.

Now she was going to her final school, the brand-new NTSB Academy.

Would they teach her what to do after a crash was done crashing?

Yes.

Yes, they would.

Granted, she had arrived on this scene as the actual pilot of the plane crash. Had other NTSB investigators arrived at the site of a crash this way? A quick mental review didn’t bring any to mind.

Retrieving her Toshiba Satellite laptop from her flight bag, she booted to the index she’d made of every NTSB report. She hadn’t cross-indexed them based on the inspector first being the pilot of the crash, but she tried several searches of her notes with no results.

Of course, she wasn’t technically an NTSB inspector yet.

However, she knew what came next.

The crash investigation.

That would require warmer clothes.

She slipped out of her left-hand seat and into the copilot’s right-hand one to open the door.

Outside, the air was a cold slap as she stepped out onto the grip strip on the wing. A light breeze drifted needles of snow against her cheeks. She shut the cabin door behind her to keep the snow out.

Her breathing was still fast, but she had no way to judge if that was due to the crash or the unexpected altitude. The highest point on her island was under four hundred feet above sea level. She had been flying in an unpressurized cabin at twelve-five for nearly two hours, so perhaps it was the crash.

Or perhaps it was the quality of the air, not its thinness.

It was so different here. Off the Pacific, the wind blew fresh as if it had just been created for her alone, scrubbed by its five-thousand-mile journey over seawater. Here there was a sharp Arctic clarity to it that made her want to breathe deeply and fill her lungs with its edgy chill.

She turned to her father to tell him about it, but he wasn’t here. He’d been dead for seven years but she couldn’t break the habit.

Dad was the one she’d always turned to when she’d learned something new. Perhaps because he had always pushed her to learn new things. Mom had taught her how to do things: dress, eat, ignore bullies (or at least survive them).

Mom was all about the day-to-day parts of life.

Dad was the imagination. Sam Chase had been a…a…fountain of imagination. Metaphors had always been a challenge for her and Miranda was particularly pleased with that one.

Olivia Holmes Chase had been… But she couldn’t find a good comparison for Mom.

Miranda had barely heard of the NTSB when they’d died in the explosion and crash.

But since that day, it had become her life’s blood. The sole focus that allowed her to handle everything else that was happening around her. With Tante Daniels’ help she’d gotten through life. With her father’s imagination still driving her, she’d graduated high school three years early, earned her dual masters in Materials Science and Aeronautical Engineering, and successfully found a job at the NTSB.

A job that was supposed to start in three days with classes at the Academy.

Now was the time of transition. She was twenty and would be twenty-one by the time she completed her studies at the Academy. It was time to stop learning and start doing.

She checked her watch. Billings, Montana was supposed to be passing beneath her wings in the next four minutes.

Except that was the original Flight Plan. Now it had to be revised.

After Billings, it would be another thirty-seven minutes to…

Recognizing the loop that her mind was entering, she used one of the tools Mom had taught her.

“WWDD?”

A Steller’s Jay fluttered down to perch on the plane’s upright rudder. Its dark blue body and black head stood out starkly against the snowy backdrop and the white rudder top. She had some trail mix, but she’d left it inside the plane. If it was like the Steller’s Jays on her island, any effort to fetch the food would spook it away.

“What would Dad do?” she asked it instead of feeding it.

It considered Miranda’s question, rubbed its beak on either side of the rudder, then offered its loud call of, “What! What! What! What! What!” Birding guides insisted that the call was “Chook” but it had always sounded like “What” to her. Her father had agreed, saying that was a correct call.

“That’s my question,” she told the jay since her father wasn’t here to make suggestions.

It repeated the call, then was gone in a quick flutter of dark wings.

Sam Chase had always pushed her to understand why things worked the way they did.

Cryptographic codes had been only one aspect his codebreaking lessons. Math, probability, even card games had been added on to that.

When he’d taught her to hunt, it had included weeks of study: everything from gun safety to ballistics and loading her own rounds.

Flying wasn’t only about the navigator and pilot roles, but also the mechanic’s. That had extended into the new satellite-fed GPS system. For her tenth birthday, he’d given her a receiver and used that as a springboard for lessons in space launch and orbital mechanics.

What would her father do?

He’d want to know the same thing the NTSB would want to know: what had gone wrong with his airplane that had caused it to crash in the Idaho wilderness?

Now that her path was clear, she opened the baggage hatch and pulled out heavier clothes. Uncertain of Washington, DC’s winters, she’d packed her heavy winter gear from when Dad had taken her winter hiking on Hurricane Ridge on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula.

Like most of her clothes, she hadn’t outgrown them. She’d reached five-two by the age of twelve. The two inches she’d grown since hadn’t affected the size of her parka.

A quick check, obviously there was no one to watch her change.

Absolutely no one for twenty or thirty miles.

The girls’ locker room for gym class had always been one of her horrors. It was one of the main reasons she’d worked so hard to finish high school three years early—that and her need to start making sure plane accidents didn’t kill any of her friends’ parents. If she’d had any friends.

Sitting on the wing, she also donned snow pants and boots.

Then she pulled out her prized new possession. How many hours had she spent considering the accumulated clues contained within the various NTSB reports?

It would be the first time she’d worn it other than in front of the mirror.

Taking a deep breath, she pulled it on.

The custom vest was tight, especially over her parka, but that was okay, she liked the pressure, the sureness of its embrace.

She checked the pockets one by one: notebooks, two micro-recorders, anemometer, voltmeter, a variety of pliers and other small tools, even plastic evidence bags and numbered markers for photographs.

Finally she looped the leather badge holder over her neck. She didn’t have an official ID to store in it yet. That worried her. She had called ahead to ascertain the proper dimensions before purchasing the holder, but the ID itself wouldn’t be issued until she arrived at the new job.

She reached over her back to rub the six-inch reflective-yellow letters there: NTSB.

Was it wrong to wear the vest before she actually started her employment?

But she couldn’t figure out how to proceed with the investigation without the vest.

Hoping that it didn’t get her into trouble with anyone, she left it on.

Yes. Miranda Chase was definitely a different person in the vest than out of it. For the first time since her parents’ death, she once again belonged to something bigger than herself.

Motivating herself had always been a challenge. There were whole years where her life would have been far easier and all of them would have been more comfortable if she never left her bedroom. But not living up to her father’s standards wasn’t an option. He and Mom had both always made her successes so important that she’d never wanted to disappoint them.

Tante Daniels had taken some of that role, that and not wanting to disappoint her parents even if they were dead. Now there would once again be a group where excelling was something more than getting good grades. It would be making aviation safer for everyone—one crash at a time.

And it was time to focus on this crash.

She carefully folded her lightweight flying jacket and stowed it with her luggage.

Closing the hatch, she stood once more on the wing.

The Steller’s Jay hadn’t returned, but she’d answered his question anyway. Miranda knew what to do now.

She was a crash investigator and her plane had crashed. It was time to investigate it. For her initial inspection she would follow the same route as a preflight inspection.

Step One per Section Four Page Two of the Pilot’s Operating Handbook specified that a preflight began with the cockpit settings.

Everything was already set properly for the inspection, except that the gear was raised.

She started her pocket recorder. It made a satisfying click and she could see the tape begin to spool in the microcassette.

“Crash of Mooney M201, tail number N353CV approximately eight statue miles east southeast of Trapper Mountain, Idaho. Incident date 19 September 2003 at approximately 0815 hours Mountain Standard Time.” She backed up the tape and replaced the last part with “between 0815 and 0828 hours Mountain Standard Time.”

She glanced inside once more through the cockpit window.

“Following preflight instructions, all systems in the cockpit are off. The gear is retracted as it was a belly landing. Proceeding to Step Two.”

The second step was to inspect the instrument static air port along the starboard side of the tailcone.

She stepped off the wing onto the snow and plunged into deep powder up to her waist.

After some internal debate, Miranda turned off the pocket recorder, and backed it up to just before her sharp squeal of surprise.