Skibird, page 17
“If you remember anything else that might save your skin, you will call me immediately, Petrov.” He hung up before the man could respond.
Then he pressed the intercom to his new major. “Get me everything you can on an American air-crash investigator named Miranda Chase. I need it in thirty minutes.” He clicked off before the major could complete saying, Yes sir.
Turgenev rocked back in his chair. He could delay his report to Murov for as much as one hour. He had best know much more by then.
He had a thought and called back Petrov. “Which way was the plane headed?”
“South.”
“Nothing more than that? Southeast? Southwest? Christ, man, from Progress Station almost everything is south in Antarctica.”
He hung up on him as the man babbled that he hadn’t thought to check so minor a detail.
Back to the major, “And get me a detailed map of all of the research stations in Antarctica, all countries.” Again he didn’t wait for a response.
Fifty-eight minutes to Murov. The man was notorious for always being in his office. There was no question that with the recent events, he’d be there in an hour.
He had no one to call. No one to text, Am now Lt. Col. with inside office in Lubyanka Building. He wished he did so that he could ask her advice.
A brief image of the dangerous Aloysha in that role, with his secrets in her clutches, almost made him laugh. At the moment he would trust to his own instincts.
Fifty-seven minutes to Murov. Twenty-seven until the major had to deliver on Miranda Chase.
Which meant he had twenty-six minutes to ransack Nikolas Romanoff’s office and try to learn what else the man had been up to while commanding the Antarctic stations.
35
“Well, that was fun!” The captain had returned from the cockpit now that they were aloft.
Holly had felt the shift from climb to cruise far sooner than she’d expected. She been aboard LC-130 Hercules when they were doing a hard climb, and this bird hadn’t been.
“Why the low altitude?” Habit had her raising her voice over the four big engines, the American military didn’t waste load capacity on sound insulation. The bare metal ribs of the hull structure were spaced a few feet apart up the length of the plane. Between most pairs were tucked heavy-duty apparatus: water (thirty person-days, refresh 1x per month), food (sixty person-days), raft kit (deployable, radio batteries refresh 1x per year), and on and on.
“First trip to Antarctica, lassie?”
“Not a dog, mate.” She did her best to look completely at ease on one of the fold-down seats mounted along the side of the cargo bay, which experience had taught her was physically impossible. But no way was she giving him the upper hand in anything.
“Woof,” the big man answered with a sly grin that said he was flirting but not seriously. “Captain Antony Capra of the 109th Airlift Wing at your service. And, yes, I’m distantly related to the Italian film director, so give me a break on that. Everyone calls me Cap since I was a kid in command of my first tricycle.” Again that brief flash of a smarmy smile. “You know about the short climb, we topped at fifteen thousand. But you’re missing something…”
Holly didn’t mind the tease, but she honestly didn’t know what she was missing.
Miranda apparently did, as always. “Vostok Station lies in an area commonly referred to as the Pole of Cold. It lies above eleven thousand feet and is one of the coldest places on Earth.”
“You’re shitting me.” How had this happened to her? “Dammit. I want immediate transport back to under that nice warm quilt at your house. How cold?”
“Well, that’s the issue, lassie,” the captain had latched onto that, a choice she’d break him of soon. “A warm day there makes Siberia look like a tropical paradise. Current temperature is minus forty, which is the same in Fahrenheit and Celsius. Expected high of a balmy minus thirty-two, that’s Fahrenheit. Smashed a lot of high heat records this last year—hit minus fourteen once. Hottest ever.”
“And freezing is the issue,” Miranda put in. “His fuel is AN-8, especially formulated for the polar regions. But despite that, AN-8 begins gelling into wax crystals at minus seventy-two. Temperature typically drops at a rate of five-point-four degrees per thousand feet of altitude. At minus forty on the ground, his fuel will freeze at roughly seventeen thousand feet—six thousand feet above Vostok.”
“That would be bad,” the captain agree easily.
“Yes, that would be bad,” Miranda nodded.
“It’s why those small Basler-converted DC-3s and Twin Otters are so popular down here. Mechanical controls. No major hydraulics to freeze. So, anyone want to tell me what’s so important that I’m traveling empty across the whole continent to ferry you folks to the Pole of Cold?”
“In and back out. No leaving us there.” Holly looked at the four men who had silently shifted close to listen, “And not only us, mate.”
Cap offered a thoughtful nod.
Before she could jab at him—she definitely wanted to knock him down at least a few pegs—Mike eased forward.
“We’re posing as an Antarctic Treaty survey team. All stations are supposed to be open for inspection by any other treaty signatory.”
“And you’re looking for what?”
“This for starters,” Miranda handed over her tablet.
On it was a split screen. One was the long green tube resting on the ice with the missile’s nose visible at the open end. The other was a shot of the cruise missile in flight.
“A five-hundred-kilo RDX warhead with a range over twenty-five hundred kilometers.”
“I know what a Kalibr is.” Captain Antony Capra was finally completely serious. “On The Ice? Here? Antarctica?”
“The one in the tube there, mate? Part of a set of four we destroyed… What the hell time is it anyway?”
“Twenty-four-hour sun will do that to you,” Cap’s voice was drifty as he kept contemplating the image.
Cruise missiles could be set to kill a lumbering plane like a Skibird as easily as they could destroy a research station.
“Time Zones are weird here below the sixtieth parallel south, too. Two a.m. for Zhongshan or Vostok. Heard you came from Davis, where it would be three in the morning. For this crew, it’s eight a.m. McMurdo and South Pole time. Your call kicked us aloft about eight p.m. last night.”
“Three a.m. here? Not where my brain is. How about Seattle?”
Cap stared at the ceiling for an eyeblink. “I’m thinking noon.”
“No wonder I feel so wide awake.” The two hours of sleep she’d managed at Zhongshan hadn’t begun to make up for anything. “Well, we killed off a whole set of those missiles between breakfast and lunchtime yesterday. There were also a number of cases of the Willow surface-to-air chappies.”
That took the last of the wind out of Captain Antony Capra’s sails. Weapons like the Willow served only one purpose—killing planes.
“Sorry to tell you, pal. Yes, on The Ice. Russian aircraft.”
“And the five of you are planning to stroll into a Russian Station to see if they’re in a mood to kill you?” He looked aghast. He’d also stopped calling her lassie.
Holly shrugged, then nodded. “Got it pegged about square on, mate.”
36
“No! No! And no! What part of no don’t you understand?”
Miranda wished the captain wouldn’t shout; it made him hard to ignore. At least he was fighting with Holly and not her.
“The no part!” Holly snarled at him. And her voice was softer, which was nice. Not dangerous-soft—yet—though getting there.
Should she warn the captain how hazardous it could be if that happened? No, best to stay out of it and not draw attention to herself.
“My people are not getting off the plane. That’s final.”
“Look, mate, if we do a razzle dazzle move, they won’t be able to lock down fast enough to hide anything from us. Four teams of three: one of us, one of your crew, and one of these good old boys.”
“Aren’t you forgetting someone?” Daiyu said softly.
“No, you’ll be leading one of the teams. I know that I can’t separate Andi from Miranda in a situation like this. Frankly, I’d rather Miranda stayed on the plane, but I know that won’t happen either. Andi, if Miranda gets hurt on your watch, I’ll be far more pissed than I am at Captain Antony Freaking Capra.”
“Not gonna happen,” Andi reassured her.
That was nice to know. Add protection to efficiency. Now two reasons that Andi was convenient to be in a relationship with.
The captain and Holly continued their argument.
The US Marshals were listening but also checking over their weapons.
Miranda wondered if that was another part of efficiency. Andi was a retired Special Operations Forces soldier, there would be no better protection to have constantly at her side. Only by keeping her mouth clamped firmly shut throughout the Zhongshan tour had she managed not to blurt out her question to Andi.
Was there more?
More than efficiency and convenience?
How was she supposed to know?
To distract herself from the question and the ongoing fight, Miranda began calculating the most likely energy propagation of the explosion at the Whoop Whoop Skiway. The givens of four Kalibr cruise missiles, four cases of Willow SAMs, and no remaining jet fuel were insufficient to account for what had happened. Adding what Holly had called a couple caseloads of F-1 hand grenades hadn’t significantly altered the math.
In reviewing the feeds from Mike and Holly’s helmet cams, she saw two more crates in the cargo bay she’d have liked to know the contents of. But neither Mike nor Holly had focused on them. They’d found the missiles and the MANPADS, then stopped looking.
Working the energy equations backward, to calculate the scale of those crates’ contents, was proving difficult without a detailed model of how glacial ice fractured. Oh! She pulled out her phone.
“Thank God!” Holly snarled at the plane’s captain. “Now you’ll have the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs on your arse.”
“When it’s a safety issue, nobody overrules me about my crew.”
The phone started ringing.
“Fine, how about her good friend President Roy Cole? You planning on telling your Commander in Chief that you aren’t in the mood?”
The captain twisted to look at Miranda with narrowed eyes.
Miranda turned to stare at Andi’s boots. That placed her back to the captain.
On the third ring, it was answered.
“’Lo?”
“Hello, Taz. Is Jeremy available?”
“What?” Holly shouted in the background. “You’re supposed to be calling Drake or—”
Miranda plugged her other ear so that she could hear Taz.
“He’ll be back in a minute.”
Miranda glanced at the second hand on her watch. There was a silence. She hadn’t been speaking but maybe this particular a silence could also mean it was her turn. “Um, did you solve the commuter crash?”
“An utterly ridiculous effort. We spent five days tromping around the swamp, chasing off crocs and mosquitos that were twice their size.”
“I was unaware of any bigger than the Australian elephant mosquito. It can only grow to one-point-three inches. An Alligator mississippiensis can grow to nearly six meters.”
Taz laughed. “God I’ve missed you, Miranda. Okay, not that big, but plenty aggressive. Remind me never to meet one of those elephant types.”
“It wouldn’t matter. They live on sap and the larvae of their biting cousins. They don’t bite people.”
“Good to know. Anyway, we recovered every bit of that stupid plane before medical autopsy got back to us. Pilot was stone drunk. Probably passed out at the wheel by the flight profile. Not a thing wrong with the plane. Thankfully, it was a deadhead run, so the only person he killed was himself. Better off dead. Cleanse the gene pool.”
Miranda considered the appropriate response. “At least you figured it out.” She hoped that was better than pointing out that cleansing an eight-billion-person gene pool by an individual units was such an inefficient methodology that it would never be practical.
“We did. What are you working on?”
Miranda checked her watch and counted backward from four. At zero, she spoke up, “It’s been a minute. Is Jeremy back yet?”
“It was a figure of speech, Miranda, not a precise prediction. But…Oh! Not far off. Jeremy!” she called out. “Miranda’s calling for you.” The sound quality changed indicative of a switch to speakerphone.
“Miranda! How are you? Is it too late to fly out to join you for Christmas?”
She didn’t know where she’d be for Christmas. “Um, maybe. I need something as soon as you can.”
“Sure, what is it?”
“I’m attempting to model an explosion inside the cargo hold of an Ilyushin-76, an older one based on the instrumentation. I’m so sorry, I don’t have the hull number or aircraft ID.”
A serious oversight. She’d have to recheck all of the videos to see if it had been visible anywhere. Though either side of the fuselage had been pressed against the sides of the crevasse and the name plate on the cockpit’s console had been covered in blood and body parts. Perhaps it was okay that she’d missed it.
“Its fuselage was caught twenty meters down a crevasse, which had a top width of sixteen meters and an estimated width of one meter at a depth of a hundred.” At least that where the other wing had caught after ripping off both engines during the fall. “True bottom is unknown.”
“Uh…” But apparently he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Taking the silence as an invitation to proceed, she proceeded to describe the most likely sequence of the explosions and her most accurate reconstruction of the aftermath.
“Wow. What’s the material of the crevasse? Basalt, sandstone, granite…”
“Ice.”
Again one of those long silences that Miranda didn’t know if it was up to her to fill.
“Ice?” Jeremy finally asked, solving the problem for her.
“Yes.”
“Ice frozen over rock?”
“No. Only ice.”
“Um, Miranda, where are you?”
“I’m on an LC-130H Skibird en route from Zhongshan Station to Vostok Station. I’m sorry I can’t be more accurate than that without bothering the pilot.” Which she definitely didn’t want to do at the moment.
“Vostok. Like the one in Antarctica?”
“Yes.” She couldn’t think of what else to say.
Again, as always, Jeremy knew what to do. “Where was the explosion?”
“One-point-three kilometers due east of Whoop Whoop Skiway, about two hundred meters north of the midpoint. It’s hard to be certain of that in the snow. My problem is that I can’t make the math work for the force of the explosion. I’m sending you my calculations, though I haven’t been able to access any seismography data, which may not be relevant because I don’t know about—”
“—wave propagation through ice with air gaps caused by crevasses. Also the transmissibility speed—”
“—of sonic waves through an inconsistent crystalline structure.” Jeremy was the only person ever who she could have broken conversations with and not lose her place. Andi’s thoughts were too different. They made her think harder, making it difficult to maintain the thread. Holly and Mike’s thinking were too foreign and their interruptions always sidetracked her completely.
“Anything else?”
“There are at least two objects that weren’t identified in the cargo hold. I included the images but I doubt if they’re sufficient for more than basic size calculations. I’m trying to back calculate what they might have been as they definitely enhanced the explosion.”
“Russian?”
Miranda considered. It had been a Russian plane, but might someone else have placed the unknown objects on that plane? Was that why Daiyu was so interested in the cargo? Or had the Kalibr weapons been a sufficient motivation to dispatch her?
Occam’s Razor stated that, lacking other givens, the simplest answer was the most likely.
That would imply that the crash of a Russian aircraft in Australian territory was sufficient for the Chinese to send in an individual, exactly as it had been sufficient to send in Holly and the rest of Miranda’s team. That conclusion implied that Daiyu was not specifically investigating an additional package placed on the aircraft by the Chinese.
“Yes. Russian.”
“Okay, I’ll get back to you.”
“Sooner would be better.”
“I’m on it, Miranda.”
“And about Christmas?”
“Yes?”
“I don’t know where we’ll be.”
“I guessed that. Be careful, Miranda.”
“Okay.”
Miranda hung up and didn’t hear anything else. People were no longer arguing over the deep roar of the big Allison T-56 engines. She liked the deeper, steadier sound of the Collins Aerospace eight-bladed propellers that had replaced the old four-blade Hamilton systems. They had also cut maintenance for blade-seal failures from thirty-six hours to two. She wished she’d been a part of that recommendation.
She turned on her phone’s camera, flipped it to view her own face, then raised it to look over her shoulder.
The captain had gone forward to his cockpit, which was a relief for several reasons. A tall black woman from the plane’s crew was listening in, but not speaking. Daiyu and her own teammates were talking with the four US Marshals in hushed voices.
Miranda turned off her phone.
37
“How long?” Vice President Sarah Feldman asked as she strode into the Situation Room.
Drake rose to his feet. “Not long enough. I should never have agreed to this.”
