Havoc

Chapter 1

1

“Okay if I place a call?” Holly pulled out her phone.

“You’d need a sat phone from here to—” Dani glanced back.

Holly waggled her satellite phone at her.

“Sure, go ahead.” Then she turned to the copilot. “Quint, plot me a course to Johnston. Then get a call in to operations and find out what a minimum stress descent looks like—make it a quick one.”

“Roger that.”

Holly dialed, then studied the back of the first officer’s head while it rang.

Quint? Quint Dermott? That actually fit. He’d been a skinny kid of twelve when she was a still-gawky sixteen-year-old who’d left town after being thrown out by her parents. He’d certainly shaped up very nicely—all handsome, broad-shouldered, and Australian.

“This is Miranda Chase. This is actually her, not a recording of her.”

“Hey, her.” Holly could feel herself relaxing, even if Miranda was three thousand miles away in Seattle, it made Holly feel better just to hear her voice.

“Where are you? Passing over Johnston Atoll? Can you see it? I’ve always wanted to go there.”

“Funny you should mention that. I expect that I’ll be seeing it real soon now—up close and personal like.” Then she explained their situation.

“The runway is not authorized for use. Not even for emergency landings.”

“Good, they can come arrest me if we survive. Warm cell, three squares a day, bolted solidly to terra firma—I could get down with that. Besides, that’s part of the fun of an emergency, you get to break all sorts of rules.”

“I was never particularly good at breaking rules. Are you with the pilots?” Holly could hear the fast rush of computer keys.

“Yes.”

“Speakerphone.” Miranda was also never one for the niceties of conversation.

She continued as soon as Holly had switched over and called for Dani and Quint’s attention.

“Temperature at Johnston Island Airport is eighty degrees; winds are east-northeast at seventeen so you’ll be landing on Runway 23 with an elevation of two meters above mean sea level. Barometer is currently 29.96. Visibility is reported at ten miles in light haze.” She continued with their best rate of descent for minimum wing-loading stress, proceeded to tell them what landing configuration to select right down to flaps and airspeed, and might have told them every detail of the approach if Holly had let her.

“If I don’t die, Miranda, I’ll give you a shout on the mobile to let you know.”

“I’ll get the team in motion.” Because, of course, Miranda would want to investigate the cause of the crash, whether or not they died. “If it’s going to be a water landing, call me and we’ll mobilize the Coast Guard.”

Which was surprisingly thoughtful for Miranda. Holly knew that Miranda’s ASD—autism spectrum disorder—made it extremely hard for her to think about people.

“Though I wouldn’t hold out much hope for recovering the aircraft if it does go into the ocean. The abyssal plain comes within a few kilometers of the atoll and is principally below the four-thousand-meter mark. Recovery from those depths is exceedingly difficult.”

So much for thoughtful. Thoughtful about the plane anyway. Miranda’s parents had died in the 1996 crash of TWA 800, which was recovered from a hundred and thirty feet of water just off Long Island, New York—not thirteen thousand feet off a remote Pacific atoll. She’d have been sure to remain very well-educated on the complexities of deep-water recovery operations.

“That’s an extremely unlikely type of double event, breakaway and then an uncontained turbine failure in the same engine. If anything, the opposite would be more typical, but an ES is an exceedingly rare event. That’s remarkably interesting. It is difficult without a more recent inspection of the skin buckling, but based on your initial description…” there was another sharp rattle of a computer keyboard. “Models are projecting a nineteen percent chance of losing the wing on gear-down and an eighty-two-point-five percent chance of losing the wing during the landing.”

“Thanks. I’ll hopefully be in touch soon, Miranda.”

“Okay. Bye.” And she was gone.

“Who the hell was that?” Dani snapped out, but Holly noticed that she was flying exactly on the profile Miranda had recommended.

“She’s the NTSB’s top air-crash investigator.” Holly considered what a lame statement that was to describe her. “She’s…unusual. But she’s also rarely wrong.”

Miranda, despite all her oddities, was also her friend.

It was going to really suck if she herself died, because neither she nor Miranda had a whole lot of those.