Condor

Prologue-1

Prologue

Spieden Island, Washington

1 hour ago

(9 p.m. Pacific Standard Time)

“Favorite airplane?”

“Oh, c’mon, Jeremy, ask a real one. We all know Miranda’s favorite plane,” Holly chided him.

“My F-86 Sabrejet,” Miranda answered with an easy certainty that she at least knew this one answer. For twenty years she’d flown the old jet and knew it as well as the back of her hand. She liked its familiarity. Just as she liked the familiarity of this house. She’d grown up here.

She knew all its ways. The way the old wood creaked when the Pacific Ocean storms roared over Vancouver Island and slammed into the San Juans. The way the air didn’t smell of the sea, but rather so fresh it seemed as if no one had ever breathed it before.

The high-vaulted living room with its beach cobble hearth, dark beams, and Douglas fir walls could seat twenty comfortably, four as it did now, or be cozy for just one as it usually was.

It was slightly uncomfortable having visitors to her island, thereby decreasing her favoritism for her house over her jet if one were to expand the parameters to “favorite place at this moment in time.”

No, not uncomfortable. Merely…unfamiliar. Yes, that was a better way to think of it. Even though it was only Friday night and the rest of the chill March weekend loomed uncertainly ahead. Despite the new descriptor, she remained uncertain of her preparations to entertain them.

“Ehhhh!” Holly made a rude sound like a plane’s stall-warning buzzer. “So not on, Miranda. It’s not your Sabrejet.” Holly’s Australian accent was even thicker than usual as she sipped her second beer of the evening.

Before Miranda could respond that she knew her own mind—which she wasn’t always sure of, though she was this time—Jeremy raised his hand.

“Wait! I know. I know!”

“Don’t have to raise your hand, buddy.” Mike winked at Miranda from his armchair near the fire. He sat as neatly as ever—a slim, elegant man with short dark hair, a dress shirt, and custom-tailored slacks.

Miranda sat on the sofa with Holly. Actually, she sat on the sofa whereas Holly slouched so low she was almost horizontal—her feet on the coffee table, sticking her toes out toward the fire. Her socks didn’t match.

“It’s any plane that hasn’t crashed,” Jeremy proudly announced his answer.

While the others laughed and nodded, Miranda considered. The four of them were the lead crash investigation team for the National Transportation Safety Board. Yes, any plane that was fully functional was a very good thing.

But still, she liked her old Sabrejet very much.

“Jeremy’s favorite site investigation tool?” Mike called out.

Holly giggled.

Miranda had no idea why.

Holly whispered to her, “Can you figure him picking out a single favorite tool?”

“Oh,” Miranda understood the joke now but had learned that laughs that came too late were better not laughed at all.

Jeremy always had a bigger field pack than the other three of them combined.

“That handheld military-grade thermite torch he used to slice evidence out of the old DC-3’s wreckage,” was Miranda’s estimation. He had been particularly enamored of its ability to melt quickly through steel though it was no bigger than a two-D-cell flashlight.

“His hammer,” Holly suggested. “The one he actually offered to that colonel who wanted to bust up his phone for constantly giving him bad news of more planes that had carked it.”

Jeremy Trahn blushed brightly enough that it could be seen by the firelight.

“No, his program for reading Cockpit Voice and Data Recorders, even if he isn’t supposed to have one. He secretly wishes he was James Bond,” Mike ribbed him.

“No,” Holly shook her head hard enough to flutter her rough-cut blonde hair over her shoulders. “He wishes he was Q, Bond’s equipment geek.”

“No,” Jeremy spoke up a little hotly, “but he wishes you both had fallen into the ocean and been eaten by orcas on the way here.”

“You’d have been fish food right along with us.” Mike accurately pointed out. He had flown the three of them out to her island in Washington State’s northern Puget Sound for the weekend.

Holly was the one who’d suggested the spring solstice was a good excuse for a party. Though this March was chilly enough that “spring” didn’t come easily off the tongue yet.

“Whale food,” Jeremy corrected, then mumbled, “Would’ve been worth it.”

There was a brief silence in which the only sound was logs shifting in the fireplace. Miranda watched the curious turbulence patterns as the sparks rose up the chimney.

“What is your favorite tool, Jeremy?” Because now she was curious.

He looked down, and she was afraid that she’d somehow embarrassed him even further than Mike and Holly had.

Then he reached for his shirt pocket and pulled out a pen.

“A pen, mate? Fair dinkum?” Holly turned to Mike. “Have you ever seen him even use a pen? Everything in the world is on his tablet.”

Mike just shook his head.

Miranda could remember three instances. They’d been together as a team for almost six months, yet three was all she could recall.

“You gave it to me on the first day I joined your team. It’s everything I ever dreamed of.”

“Miranda’s pen?” Mike scoffed.

“Being on Miranda’s team,” Jeremy said softly.

Holly, who never looked touched, looked touched. She turned to Miranda.

“He’s so damn sweet,” she whispered, but loudly enough for everyone to hear. “Can we keep him?”

Miranda didn’t know why she wouldn’t. He was an exceptional airplane systems specialist despite his youth.

“Holly’s favorite soccer team?” Mike asked in a sudden, bright tone, completely changing the mood.

“The Australian Matildas,” they all called out in unison. Their four Matildas baseball hats were all lined up on the mantel.

This time Miranda was fairly sure that her timing was right when she joined in on the laughter.

Helsinki Airport, Finland

11 hours earlier

(10 p.m. Eastern European Standard Time)

Captain Dmitri Voskov hunched against the March chill and wished he was anywhere else. No matter where he shifted, the hard-blown ice pellets, which only looked like a light snow flurry, kept stinging his frozen cheeks as if he was being shot by a porcupine-quill gun.

Instead, all he could do was try to stay out of the wind and watch as his plane was loaded—the heavyweight champ for cargo hauling.

Known as “Condor” in the west, his Ukrainian Antonov AN-124-200 Ruslan could carry up to a hundred and sixty-five tons in a single load. Its lone big brother, the AN-225 Mriya “Cossack” didn’t really count as there had only ever been one in existence.

For dinner, he’d gone to the restaurant along the Helsinki Airport cargo road for a change of pace from their own onboard cooking. The smell—like week-old cooked cabbage—should have warned him, but he’d been hungry and cold enough to go in anyway. The meat soup could have been century-old reindeer hide—it had certainly tasted like it—and the waitress had been a dour battleax. Not even any fun flirting to break up the monotony.

At least there was no deadhead this time. As a specialized cargo-hauler-for-hire, too often they flew empty from a delivery to the next pickup.

Here in Finland, they’d dropped off a geothermal power generator built by the Brits and were picking up a load of Russian helicopters—helicopters that defecting Russian pilots had delivered into Finnish hands. No surprise that the Finns were handing them over to the Americans, so greedy for examples of Russian technology. He hoped that they’d gotten the better of the Yankees in whatever trade deal they’d worked out.

His real mistake was delaying at the restaurant too long over scorched coffee and the last slice of Brita-kakku pie, which was even worse than it sounded. The fluffy layers supposedly soaked in light cream were like sludge soaked in white grease.

The loadmasters had started the loading while he’d been at dinner. Now, it was near midnight, his gut was roiling with the heavy meal, and he couldn’t get to the cockpit.

Much of the Condor’s design had been taken from the American’s C-5 Galaxy, but made bigger. Dmitri rubbed his hands together to no effect, then jammed them back into his pockets. he just wished the designers had provided flight deck access during loading.

The four-engine cargo jet was a massive open tube. At the rear, a ramp folded down from behind towering clamshell doors. In front, the nose swung up like a king-sized garage door to expose the front ramp. The Condor could even kneel—lowering its front landing gear to facilitate drive-on loading.

However, during loading, the stair up to his cockpit home was cut off. That left him to stand in the biting cold and watch his loadmasters do all the work.

All he could do was look longingly up at the nice warm living area four stories above him. He should be kicked back on his bunk, sleeping or watching a Scarlett Johansson movie (he had every one of them, at least all the ones she was blonde in, and most of Jennifer Lawrence’s, even The Hunger Games when she wasn’t blonde).

“How much longer, Portnov?”

“You whine too much, Captain.”

“Fine. When we’re done, I’ll just leave you here to freeze your ass off.”

“Then who would unload your helicopters in America?” Portnov slapped him on the back and returned to loading the next helo into the Condor. A painfully slow process even with two of the best loadmasters in the business running the loading team.

Of course, the least gouge in his hull could ground them for a week. And if everything wasn’t perfectly balanced fore and aft, he’d crash on takeoff.

Dmitri paced back and forth because it was that or die cold in Helsinki, which sounded like a bad movie that he wanted no role in. He was always amazed at the volume Portnov managed to move in and out of their plane. Somehow it looked so effortless when Portnov was the senior loadmaster.

Damn but this took longer than a Ukrainian spring.

With its nose raised, his plane looked like a whale’s maw gobbling up anything they fed it.

He glared across the field at the now darkened restaurant along the cargo road. She was long gone, but right now even that dour battleax looked like a better option than this.

Helsinki Airport

23 minutes later

Elayne Kasprak, her most commonly used name, had watched the whole operation since the Antonov AN-124 had landed before she’d decided on her approach. It was the return of the captain—conveniently unable to retreat to his flight deck—that gave her the solution to boarding the aircraft.

It had taken less than five minutes to liberate an airport security car from the Helsinki motor pool. Acquiring a uniform had been harder. Finding a real guard who was small enough that she wouldn’t look ridiculous in his uniform had taken almost twenty minutes. She hoped that the guard woke up before he froze to death in just his long underwear—the one bit of attire she hadn’t needed. If he didn’t, that was his problem.

On her return, the captain was still there, trying to huddle out of the wind and not even pretending he was in charge. Perfect.

She parked her clearly marked vehicle close, but not too close. Visible, but in the shadows. Elayne planned her walk carefully. Casual, friendly. Not some sexy slink.

Just a cop on patrol…and just as bored as you. Bored enough to just hang out and watch a mundane loading process.

“Hyvää iltaa,” she wished him a good evening in Finnish.

“Tak?” Ukrainian.

She was fluent in Ukrainian, and very conversant in six other languages, but he’d know that her Ukrainian accent was too Russian. With the tensions there, she didn’t want to arouse suspicions.

“Good evening?” she asked in intentionally awkward English.

“Ah! Good evening.” He finally focused on her face and most of his shivering went away.

Elayne knew why she’d originally been recruited by the SVR. The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service needed beautiful spies, especially ones petite enough to appear completely unthreatening, even if she’d proven time and again that she could take down nine out of ten men courtesy of her Spetsnaz colonel father’s years of tutelage.

But she’d also been raised by a submarine engineer mother. With her own degree in aviation engineering—Elayne’s original life’s plan—her assets had proven attractive to the SVR, and more than just the physical. She’d quickly found her niche as a military aviation specialist for the foreign intelligence service.