Gryphon, page 2
“I’m Tad Jobson. That’s short for Tad Jobson. Pop wasn’t big on fancy names. He claims it comes from me being just a small tad of a thing when I was born. Mama has more than a few things to say on that any time he brings it up—most of ’em along the you-try-passing-a-watermelon-out-of-your-body-and-see-how-you-feel lines. Either way, I’m your new rotorcraft specialist.” He flashed a big smile.
Miranda turned into an absolute statue long enough for Tad Jobson to look up and around at him and Holly.
When she snapped back to life, Tad didn’t jump, but he sure twitched.
“I…have a…” Miranda stopped again, stuttering like a robot with a short in its power supply. No, her team didn’t have a rotorcraft specialist—anymore. Even after months, Mike knew that Miranda hadn’t integrated Andi Wu’s abrupt departure from the team and her life.
“Mr. Jobson—” Mike started.
“Tad.”
“I’m Mike Munroe.” His handshake didn’t crush down on Mike’s as he’d expected. “Why don’t you have a seat for a moment? Eat some lunch.” He had to get Tad away from looming into Miranda’s personal space. He was back far enough for a normal person, but that wasn’t Miranda.
Mike noticed something else. It was still a new factor, but he was getting to know it better and better.
Meg the dog had come up out of a deep sleep the second her mistress had frozen. Short enough to do so, she stood before stepping out from under Miranda’s chair. Mike snagged the handle on the back of Meg’s therapy-dog harness and lifted the gray Glen of Imaal Terrier. Not as easy as it looked as she was a solid little scamp. As soon as she was high enough in the air, she stepped forward and Mike released her onto Miranda’s lap.
After a long few seconds, one of Miranda's arms came around the little dog. And then, as if nothing had happened, she picked up her fork and inspected her plate. Carefully avoiding the grilled langoustines that Mike had placed neatly around the edge of the plate, she twirled up a forkful of the olive oil-and-lemon pasta—without mushrooms—and began eating.
“What the…?” Tad had sat in the only open seat at their table. The seat next to Holly.
Mike hadn’t thought that through very well, had he?
Miranda set down her fork and turned the noise-canceling function back to high. He knew she’d now be able to ignore anything below a shout. As usual, Jeremy remained utterly oblivious to everything except the three Japanese engineers beside him.
Mike turned to Tad. “We recently lost our rotorcraft specialist. Miranda was very close to her.”
“Well, that had to suck the big one.” He glanced at the oblivious Miranda, then raised his eyebrows like a shrug. At least he’d taken her preference for another woman in stride. Andi had made an amazing couple with Miranda, until Andi’s betrayal six months earlier that had shattered everything and nearly destroyed the team.
“It did and it does. For all of us.”
Tad raised his hands just in time for a waiter to place a luncheon plate before him. “Hands off on the topic. Reading you five-by-five, buddy.” Another glance at Miranda to which she didn’t react. “And the rest of it?” He had the decency to lower his voice despite the headphones.
“You ever work with an autistic, Jobson?” Mike kept his voice steady to avoid attracting Miranda’s attention. He had better luck at that than at keeping the testiness out of his voice.
Holly’s raised eyebrow said he did even worse than he thought.
Meg looked up to drive the point home, but Miranda didn’t and that was all he cared about at the moment. She cut off a tiny piece of the grilled prawn, then held it out to Meg. After sniffing it carefully, Meg ate it, confirming its acceptability with a rapid wag of her stub tail and perking of her ears.
Miranda cut off an even smaller piece and tried it herself.
The rest of the prawn disappeared quickly enough between the two of them, and it never touched the pasta.
“With an autistic? Nope.” If Tad took offence, he did a good job of hiding it. “My kid brother’s a raging ADHD, does that count? Taught me a passel o’ serious patience early on. Oh, and my gunner was way on the OCD side of things. Didn’t bother me any ’cause it meant he triple-checked everything, and I do mean everything, probably even wiping his ass. But when it be my ass depending on his missiles flying true, I’d have let him do it fifty times to keep him happy.”
“What did you fly?” Holly spoke for the first time since his arrival. Her Australian accent wasn’t too broad, but it wasn’t her normal accentless tone either. She’d pulled out her playful accent without tipping over into mocking or dangerous.
It was a rare balance, one she typically reserved for him. His own prawns weren’t sitting nearly as comfortably in his gut as they were in Meg’s and Miranda’s.
“Zulus,” Tad answered as he bit off an entire langoustine and chewed on it. “Tight fit for a dude like me,” he flexed his massive shoulder muscles, “but I managed.” Also, like Holly, he managed to talk around his food without garbling his words. Perhaps it was a military trait.
Mike had to think for a moment. Zulu for Z? That rang a bell. Oh, Zulu Cobra, the AH-1Z Viper attack helo—the thin one with the pilot seated above and behind the gunner. Only one outfit flew those, but which one? Army? Navy? Marine Corps. Bingo!
The conversation had flowed on without him. Tad and Holly were trading place names, half of which he didn’t recognize, the other half that he knew were the horror spots of the globe.
Ex-Marine, except there was no such thing according to a Marine. Which meant Mike had to be careful how he asked the next question.
“Why did you stop flying?” Without meaning to, Mike cut them off in mid-laugh over what crap passed for food at yet another African place with far too many vowels for the number of consonants involved.
Tad tapped his left ear as he twirled a load of pasta and secured it to his fork with another massive chunk of prawn. “Blew it out. Wasn’t even in my bird. Riding a cougar that was supposed to be getting me out of theater when it caught an IED. Big one, lost three, jostled me pretty good. Damn loud, I’ll say that much.”
“A cougar?” Mike clamped his jaw shut. Too late.
“MRAP,” Holly answered for him. “Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle,” as if he were a simpleton. “An IED is—”
“I know what the hell an MRAP and an IED are, Hol.” She was buying into the whole Tad-the-underplayed-hero thing. Three dead. But jostled him. Damn loud. “Crap!” He was not jealous. It wasn’t in him. Jealousy meant attachment and he’d sworn off that the day he’d turned nine and watched his parents die from the back seat of that car wreck.
Holly looked at him askance. He never swore—once a Catholic orphanage inmate, always a Catholic orphanage inmate—and she knew it.
“What other types of rotorcraft have you piloted?” He ignored her and kept his focus on Tad.
“More than a pilot, I’m a jumper. Old man was an Army helo mechanic down to Mother Rucker.”
“Fort Rucker, Alabama,” Holly injected helpfully. “That’s where Army ACE is—the Aviation Center of Excellence for training their helo pilots.” She was lucky Miranda was seated between them or her shins would be hurting. Holly knew what it was from the same source he did. As a former Army Night Stalker pilot, the world’s best, Andi had told them all plenty of stories about ACE.
“I followed in Pop’s mechanic footsteps but went Marines. Sometimes feels that if it’s got a rotor, I’ve spun a wrench on it. Then some up-and-up spotted me doing the shakedown flight test when I might’ve been fooling around a bit; slammed me straight into Warrant Officer School and combat pilot training. Next thing I know I’d jumped from working the line into seats—hell of a shock for a wrench like me. Pop near enough burst his buttons though, so all to the good.”
He took a moment to wash down his latest mouthful with iced tea, then kept right on talking like he’d be glad to talk about himself until Armageddon struck and the four horsemen trampled him underfoot. Maybe even then.
“I spent most of ten years in the Zulu Cobras before that IED knocked me sideways. Got shuffled off into air safety for the rest of my tour, but neither of us were real hot on me re-upping. Watchin’ my buddies go aloft while my ass stayed parked on the ground was worse’n a roll of cheap toilet paper and a case of the runs. So, with the old ear gone and me outta the Corps, NTSB made some sense. Anything else you wanna know?” Tad said it easy, casual. No hint of threat or annoyance.
Mike wanted to see the man’s ID, but Holly looked at him like he was the one being a total shit.
Had she missed what he’d said, the single most important thing? I’m your new rotorcraft specialist. That meant he’d been assigned to Miranda’s team.
And no one hated change more than an autistic.
Holly and Tad turned back to their war stories.
At the moment? He’d give Miranda a run for her money on disliking change.
3
“Who’s he?” Jeremy asked as they were moving from lunch back to the lecture hall.
“She. Her name is Meg.” Miranda nodded toward the dog trotting close by her side in her bright red Therapy Dog vest.
The delegates from Germany and Australia were nearby, moving from the ballroom back toward the main session room, speaking in their foreign tongues. Years of working with Holly hadn’t prepared her for the curiosity of male delegates from the Australian Transportation Safety Bureau speaking in a soft Strine. The logic that men as well as women would, didn’t decrease her surprise each time one spoke.
None of them were close enough for her to worry about them tripping on Meg. That was good.
Jeremy laughed. “I know that, Miranda. The big guy who joined our table at lunch? I was talking to the team from JAXA, the Japanese Aerospace guys, when he came in, I guess. Remember the Epsilon S engine that blew up and the H3 that had to do a programmed self-destruct in flight a couple months before that? The engines are really giving them trouble. I made a few suggestions on what to look at and they wrote them down. It feels so cool when I can help out like that. Don’t you think so?”
She made an agreeing sound, and that seemed to pacify him for the moment. She’d found that simulated concurrence often bought her a moment to consider conversational content. It feels implied emotional content, something Jeremy would know that she never understood. But in his excitement, and he was always excited by something, he rarely remembered such details.
JAXA’s recent engine issues were intriguing. Should she leave the NTSB? After all, her original reason for making air-crash investigations her Special Interest when she was thirteen had proven to be utterly false. Her parents hadn’t died the way she’d been told. Or even, she now understood, particularly cared about their only child except in some unconstructive intellectual way. Did that make her angry? Sad? Frustrated? Why did there have to be so many different emotions?
She wished she could ask Andi, but Andi was gone.
Maybe…
Miranda veered to the side of the foyer, out of the smooth stream of the delegates changing conference center rooms. There were predictable flow eddies near the two restrooms, primarily the men’s as they predominated in air-safety investigation roles—though there were enough women, typically members of various airlines’ air-safety programs, at the conference to create a typical holding pattern outside the women’s facilities as well.
She checked the primary corridor’s pattern when she arrived at the side of the foyer, seeing that her departure had created only minor turbulence in the overall hallway flow.
Meg had followed her effortlessly as usual. Jeremy joined her after nearly walking square into the lead safety manager for JetBlue.
“Why are there so many emotions, Jeremy? Why can’t there just be the basic five I learned as a child?” They’d come to rest in the unlikely shadow of a potted palm tree placed along one side of the hall. The pictures on the walls were mostly of Iceland’s geothermal and volcanic features, making a curious contrast.
What if she pretended it was Hawaii?
No. Hawaii had a very different type of volcanology, shield volcanism rather than Iceland’s steeper and more violent stratovolcanoes. Images of erupting stratovolcanoes amid potted palm trees didn’t make any more sense in Hawaii than it did here in Iceland. Perhaps in Indonesia?
“Five emotions?” Jeremy squinted at her.
“My parents had a chart for me to point at how I was feeling, or I’d look in the mirror to try to figure it out: happy, okay, sad, worried, and upset—big smile, small smile, no smile, frown, and tears. A neat continuum that made emotions much easier to comprehend.”
“Well, the five are useful for general categorization, but there’s more.”
She opened her personal notebook to the four pages of pasted-in charts of emojis and identifying words. “This is out of control.”
“But,” he waved a hand to the southwest. “Taz is at home with our Amy. I miss them both so much, which makes me sad. Having a child, Miranda, is so beyond awesome that I can’t wait for her to talk so I can ask what she’s thinking. She’s only four months old, but I can see her learning every second of the day. Every time I hold her, I’m so happy that it’s a wonder I don’t self-destruct like Japan’s H3 rocket engine. It was so hard to leave her, to miss a single day, but Taz said I had to come to the conference to see you and get out from underfoot,” he imitated Taz’s Latinate tones. “Which made me happy to see you and laugh at Taz’s joke.”
“But those are all covered by my five.”
“Well, you didn’t mention excited. Aren’t you excited about being here? Aren’t you pleased with Meg the superdog?”
Meg looked up at them and wagged her tail at the mention of her name.
“And saddened or even annoyed by some of the safety methodology failures that we’ve been hearing about?”
“I guess.” Would she be down-frown sad if she left the NTSB? In September of last year, the NTSB had signed an agreement with the FAA stating that the NTSB would lead aerospace accident investigations only if someone was hurt or property unrelated to the launch was damaged. In other words, hands off if anything technologically interesting occurred.
She’d been with the NTSB for twenty years, half her life. Would she have to leave its familiarity to join the FAA to work on the newer problems? She didn’t like the sound of that.
“Anyway,” Jeremy looked around, then leaned closer. “Who was the guy at the table?”
“Rotorcraft,” there was a sharp tightness in her throat and her stomach roiled. Was it the langoustines she’d eaten? Miranda looked down at Meg, who had taken the opportunity to lie down and fall asleep at the base of the potted palm’s pot in her usual position (on her back, legs in the air). Her prominently displayed belly didn’t appear to be bothering her. Was the discomfort an emotion? None of the faces on her reference chart showed choking and she didn’t have a mirror handy to check her own face even if it did. Did she need a Heimlich Maneuver? No, her breathing was overly rapid but functional.
“Rotorcraft? Like replacing-Andi kind of rotorcraft? Took them long enough.”
Miranda looked up from Meg, almost to Jeremy’s eyes.
“I mean it. None of us was ever a tenth as good at those as she was. If this guy’s at all decent, you need him.”
There was a look on Jeremy’s face. His eyes aimed upward, but not as if he was looking at something and there was an odd twist to his mouth. Wistfulness? She studied the pages of her still open personal notebook. Yes, it was the only one that fit his facial pattern.
“What are you feeling wistful about, Jeremy?” she asked to test her hypothesis.
“Oh,” he looked down at her and she looked aside quickly.
Knowing that her eyes were hidden from others by the reflective sunglasses helped less than she’d hoped. They might be looking at their reflections, but that still lined up their eyes with hers. In fact, they watched their reflections more intently than they’d ever looked at her eyes. And she saw their eyes. She sighed and took off the sunglasses, tucking them carefully into the pocket of her vest that she’d dedicated to their use.
“I just miss being on your team, Miranda. I mean, Taz is happier in Washington, DC. And I love the problem-solving needed at the NTSB Headquarters lab. But I miss…you.”
Did she miss him? “Yes. Not as much as Andi, but I miss you too.”
He laughed again. “Good to know. So, he’s rotorcraft, but who is he?” Jeremy hooked a thumb back towards the banquet room.
“He’s the Big Bad Wolf,” a deep voice said so close behind her that she leapt away. After tripping on Meg, who gave a sharp yelp of surprise at the rude awakening, Miranda would have landed on the floor if she hadn’t run into Jeremy first. She managed to remain upright, but he tumbled backward into the palm tree, landing sprawled across the big pot with his butt planted in the plastic ivy covering the dirt.
“Whups! Sorry, buddy.” Tad lifted Jeremy back to his feet as if he weighed less than Meg, who was up on all fours and snarling at Tad.
“What the hell?” Holly grabbed Tad’s shoulder and yanked him away. He almost dragged Jeremy over Meg before letting go of Jeremy’s arms.
“Ow! Shit, woman.” Instead of collapsing in pain as most people did when Holly did one of her vice-grip things, Tad reached up and peeled her hand off his shoulder. “Got a good grip on you.”
“I’ll grip your damn face off!”
“About time,” Mike whispered from close behind Miranda, almost making her leap again.
“Just chill, woman. You on that hair-trigger all the time?” Tad rubbed at his shoulder.
Mike answered for her. “Count on it. Now, what did you just do?”
“Surprised them is all. Heard Jeremy asking about me, chimed in with my Big Bad callsign. My squad tagged me as the Big Bad Wolf when I told them about being typecast in a high school play. They were doing Into the Woods. Let’s just say I tried out cause Little Red Riding Hood was one hot chick—dark as midnight with hair bleached to match the summer sun. Turned out well for me, I can tell you that.”
