Raider

Chapter 1

1

Mike might be sitting in the luxury of his usual leather armchair in the office, but he was definitely feeling crowded into a corner.

“I’m just saying that we didn’t find anything mechanical,” Jeremy Trahn waved at the big television screen on the wall. He was operating it from his workbench, which took up one whole end of the office.

He’d been adding to his toolset over the six months since Miranda had set up the team’s high-security office, walled off in the back of her airplane hangar. Now there was little that the labs at the National Transportation Safety Board’s Washington, DC, headquarters could analyze better. None of Miranda’s team went into even the Seattle office anymore. Everything they needed was here.

What had started as a comfortable office space six months ago now looked well lived-in. Jeremy’s cluttered tool bench at one end of the spectrum, and Miranda’s meticulous rolltop antique desk at the other.

He’d expanded the kitchenette enough that he could cobble together a decent meal when they were working long hours and the airport restaurant was closed. Other than that, it was about comfortable seats arranged to face a lovely view.

Out the office’s one-way windows lay a view of the quiet runway at Tacoma Narrows Airport and a stunning vista of the snow-capped Olympic mountains. Which reminded him all too much of their entire last week’s investigation.

Between the windows hung a large monitor screen.

But he didn’t want to look at that.

Jeremy had loaded a list of everything they’d been able to verify about the crash itself. For emphasis, Jeremy used a pen on his connected tablet to make a checkmark in front of each item on the long list of each system and structural test.

“Doesn’t mean the cause isn’t there. The debris field covered most of a mile.” And it had been damned cold.

That was Mike’s main memory of the site investigation. Eight August days at six thousand feet walking an Alaskan glacier on Denali’s eastern slope. North America’s tallest peak rose over twenty thousand feet above nearby Anchorage and created its own weather systems—none of them comfortable. There was gray with fierce winds driving horizontal ice needles into every exposed bit of skin, and there was an aching blue with a cold so biting that it kind of killed the wonder of it all.

They’d only left Alaska yesterday because an early storm dropped three feet of fresh powder over the investigation site. There wouldn’t be anything to see until spring, if then, so they’d finally come back to the office in western Washington.

It had been past midnight last night when they’d crashed—no other word to describe their exhaustion—at the team house in Gig Harbor. Nobody had so much as moved before lunch. Now they’d come to the office to analyze what they’d learned.

Clarity? So not.

Mike still felt muddle-headed from the six-hour night flight down the coast. His joints still ached though they’d returned to the pleasant late summer of Puget Sound. If this was how old age felt, he was retiring to Hawaii before he hit thirty next year.

High on Denali hadn’t been the cozy cold of Aspen. A quick one-hour jaunt in his company’s little Beechcraft plane. Especially nice when he was dating someone. They’d carve up the slopes during the day and carve up the sheets in some firelit lodge each night. He’d loved that plane—the last business asset he’d had to forfeit shortly before he finally found a position with the NTSB.

The personal office that Miranda had built in her hangar at Tacoma Narrows Airport was physically both warm and comfortable. Except he wasn’t getting a whole lot of comfort here. With Jeremy insisting that it wasn’t his systems, and Holly claiming there was no sign of any structural failure, everyone was pointing at pilot error.

The atmosphere inside the warm office was just as chilly as a glacier on Denali.

He pulled out his phone, opened the fireplace app, and propped it where only he could see the cheerfully crackling flames. That felt a little better on the warm part. Now if he just had a little spray bottle for woodsmoke scent…

But Jeremy didn’t let up for a second, arguing for the sanctity of his beloved mechanical systems.

To his right, Holly slumped on the couch with her feet on the coffee table. One of her socks had a hole in it so that her big toe stuck out. The other sock didn’t match. Socks weren’t the sort of thing that Holly Harper ever cared about. Her jeans, t-shirt, and polar fleece vest showed just how rough she was on her clothes.

Miranda was, as usual at this stage, keeping her thoughts to herself. She sat neatly upright in the padded armchair to his left. At a slight five-four, she could curl up and sleep in that chair—if she ever stopped moving.

She cared for her own looks about as much as Holly cared about her socks. Her clothes were always neat and of the very best quality. But her longish brunette hair was always a slightly disorganized ruffle sometimes hiding half her face, or falling loose from where she’d tucked it behind an ear. She was wired so tightly that even sitting still she seemed to buzz. She was as near opposite Holly as could be found.

“You know, mate…”

He and Holly had both been on Miranda’s team for a year—on-again off-again lovers for the last half of that—and still her smooth Australian Strine just slayed him. And that lovely long body. She’d chopped her gold-blonde hair at the jawline, probably with the big knife she habitually wore at her thigh. He suspected that she’d done it because he’d mentioned how much he’d liked it down past her shoulders. But that was Holly. It still looked perfect.

“This is a two-aircraft collision,” Holly continued. “Those are almost always pilot error. In fact, it’s usually both pilots in error. You know that, Mike.”

He did know that. “But that doesn’t mean it’s right this time.”

Two planes—a DHC-6 Series 100 Twin Otter, with a solo pilot and two thousand pounds of fresh-caught silver salmon out of Fairbanks, and a one-pilot-plus-seven-passenger sightseeing tour in a Piper Navajo out of Anchorage—had collided near the towering pinnacle of Denali.

And everybody was pointing the finger at him. Or at least his specialty of “human factors.” But it felt personal.

“You want my list?” he nodded toward the offending screen.

Holly shrugged as if she didn’t care.

Of them all, she’d been fairly well able to prove that the problem hadn’t stemmed from her structural specialty. No wings had broken off from metal fatigue, and no engines had fallen out of the sky detached from their surviving chunk of wing. No part of the tail’s empennage had failed on either plane—at least not from structural issues.

That left systems or human factors, and there was no convincing Jeremy that any systems failure could have caused the collision.

Flight recorders weren’t required on planes carrying fewer than ten passengers. So no evidence there.

The collision had been bad enough that the Navajo had exploded in the air, as evidenced by the burn patterns on the metal that had barely melted into the glacier’s surface when it landed, indicating that most of the burning had happened during the fall.

The body of the Twin Otter had impacted a quarter mile from one of its wings. But the ignition of the fuel in the one wing that had remained attached had ensured that the plane’s destruction was complete. The deep divot in the glacier revealed that the second plane had exploded on impact and burned in place. The cargo of fish had scattered uniformly in every direction like a silver salmon fountain.

Thankfully, the human bodies had been removed by the pararescue folks of the 212th Rescue Squadron out of Elmendorf before their team reached Alaska. That was at least one memory he hadn’t had to bring back to the hangar with him.

At least Miranda nodded for him to proceed, and that was all that mattered. She was always impartial and cared only about the facts.

The facts about people? Yeah, there was a good laugh. Capricious, demented, chaotic. How Miranda had avoided having any of those oh-so-normal tendencies was still beyond him. Maybe it was a part of her autism.

She might be challenged in so many ways, but she was the genius of air crashes—the very best in the entire National Transportation Safety Board. That he’d somehow lucked into being on her team was proof that there was a Fairy Godmother of Randomness at work in his life, a truth he’d always suspected before but never previously been able to confirm.

“First, both pilots were highly experienced. The Twin Otter pilot had made the Anchorage-Fairbanks roundtrip run roughly a hundred times a year for the last decade.”

“Complacency.”

He ignored Holly. “The tour operator had fewer hours but still over fifteen thousand, and you know that’s more than many pilots retire with. He was also a certified flight instructor: multi-engine, commercial, and instruments.”

“So he had some skills. He still smacked into another plane in broad daylight.”

“Scattered clouds. Thick enough that they’d both filed IFR rather than VFR plans. So they were flying by instrument flight rules, not visual flight rules over very remote terrain.”

“Then why were both planes off course?”

As to that? Mike didn’t have an answer. By their flight plans, they should have passed a mile apart.

“Instrumentation errors?”

All that mattered was that he knew it wasn’t pilot error. Both guys were mature career pilots, not Alaska bush-pilot boneheads.

Mike had uncovered nothing but glowing reports about both of them.

No depression.

No sleep deprivation.

No alcohol abuse.

One had left behind his high school sweetheart after twenty years together, the other a much younger but thoroughly pleasant second wife. The first wife had returned to the Lower 48 a decade before—the only one to not have nice things to say about him, most having to do with his choosing Alaska over her.

The meds between them included just one: a low-dose statin for the tour pilot’s high cholesterol.

The only prior noteworthy incidents were an engine failure on the Twin Otter due to a load of bad fuel three years ago, and a destructive bird strike on the Navajo. Both had landed safely.

The Twin Otter pilot flying the load of salmon had drunk a single beer with his pizza at Moose’s Tooth Pub & Pizzeria in Anchorage before his round-trip flight to Fairbanks. Mike had verified his wife’s statement not only with the purchase receipt but with a waitress interview. He was a regular and easily remembered.

Two hours each way to Fairbanks, and the other was only a three-hour tour. So neither pilot should have been overtired.

One late thirties, the other early forties.

Both pilots had passed their FAA medicals within the last six months.

Malicious intent was about all that was left. But that hadn’t fit either. The two pilots knew each other, but had few dealings.

He enumerated each point—again.

“Also, no survivors and no residents for thirty miles around, so no witnesses. No tourist’s phones or cameras were in video mode at the moments leading up to impact, so no help there. No black boxes in such small aircraft, so no cockpit voice record to review. I did the rounds of air traffic controllers, fellow pilots, and the like, but there wasn’t a single red flag.”

Both their lives were such open books that he’d only escaped the investigation on the high glacier for a single day to complete all of the interviews. The other seven days he’d done little more than be grunt labor for the other three. Which meant little need for the team’s human factors specialist—again.

Of all of their investigations over the last year, only two had traced to human factors—one stating it was his fault from the outset. It left his main role being little more than an intern for the other three team members.

The only definitive finding in the whole investigation had been an unending supply of frozen salmon scattered over a half mile of ice and snow. The pilots who ran them up to the site each day made a point of taking a couple coolers’ worth back on each trip. He himself had a pair of massive twenty-five pounders tucked away in the freezer at the house for the next time he fired up the barbeque.

Nope, Mike just couldn’t make the dual-error scenario fly. There were none of the telltale signs to indicate that was at all likely. The fault had to be with the planes.

“They shouldn’t have collided,” Miranda spoke for the first time since the whole review had begun.

“You didn’t find even one thing wrong with the aircraft?”

Miranda shook her head, “All damage that we observed could be directly tied to the collision itself. A team will be performing analyses on what was recovered, but I do not anticipate metallurgy or deeper analysis to reveal anything else.”

Mike sighed. Which left the Demon of Fickleness pointing directly at him. He’d take the Fairy Godmother of Randomness any day of the week.