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47
The first thingMiranda was aware of was the low drone of one…no, two Allison T-56 turboprop engines. So, she was on a C-2 Greyhound. The sound of four T-56s on a C-130 Hercules would be completely different. Even through the heavy earmuffs.
The second thing was that she was leaning on Andi’s shoulder. She had no trouble identifying that. They’d been together for less than a month, but its shape against her cheek was so distinctive that she could easily recreate it in 3D mapping software.
The third thing was a warm lump in her lap.
The dog!
She jolted upright and looked around.
She, Andi, and Sadie were in the front row seats to the starboard side of the Greyhound’s cabin. The two pilots sat only a few feet in front of them. To the port side sat Commander Susan Piazza. And behind her was—nothing! No more seats, simply an empty cargo bay.
“Where are they?”
Andi reached across to flick on the intercom on Miranda’s headset. She repeated her question. The C-2 was too loud to comfortably converse without the headsets.
“Holly and Mike are continuing to work the F-35. You said there was something important, so we decided that they would stay and keep working on it. We all hope that was the right decision.”
Miranda would much rather have them here with her. Her team was now broken into little pairs spread across the globe. It felt fragile and tenuous, as if she’d lost pieces of herself.Knowingintellectually that she’d get at least two of them back…didn’tfeelany better.
She hated the aftermath of an episode. They were so rare now that each one was like…sticky glue dragging her back to her childhood. Even coming up with the metaphor didn’t make her feel any better.
Andi handed her a bottle of orange juice and a plastic-wrapped roast beef sandwich. The last meal she could recall had been in the captain’s cabin, but she had no idea when that had been. Maybe crashed blood sugar had been part of the problem.
She knew it wasn’t but it sounded better that way.
And she was hungry.
After glancing to Susan for permission, she fed a sliver of the roast beef to Sadie. Rather than begging for more, Sadie licked her nose several times before walking out of her lap, across Andi’s, and jumped across the narrow aisle into Susan’s.
After Miranda finished the sandwich, she felt a little better. The comfort of doing something routine, no matter how unusual the environment. Outside the window, the predawn light was finally erasing the last of the stars. They were still racing over the unending water of the South China Sea. Daybreak.
She hoped that today would be a better day.
Then she remembered where they were headed and doubted it would be.
“A meeting.” It was pointless to ask if she had to attend. That decision had been taken out of her hands. Next time she’d have to fight back harder against the darkness so that she could maintain some say in her own future.
“Yes, in Brunei. Have you ever been there?”
“No. Their worst helicopter crashes were all before my time except for two rather obvious military crashes. Their only significant airplane crash was a German Dornier that killed ten while I was still in high school.”
Andi laughed that friendly laugh of hers. “I haven’t been there either.”
The humor eluded Miranda as usual, but the feeling of inclusion didn’t. It was a curious paradox that she was only now learning to accept about Andi: Miranda didn’t need to understand her to like being around her.
“What is happening with the KC-46 crash?”
“We sent in the report. And they’ve reported back that the black box concurs with our initial findings. The training flight crews were too busy discussing possible emergency procedures at each step of the landing process to understand that they were actually entering into one. When the proximity alarms kicked in, the pilots assumed it was done by the trainer. They wasted too much time determining that the alarms were real, not simulated.”
“Oh, that’s a relief.”
Susan looked at her with narrowed eyes. “It’s a relief that they screwed up and crashed a three-hundred-million-dollar plane?”
“No. It’s a relief that we are now relatively certain of the cause.” Miranda wasn’t sure why she had to explain that.
Thankfully Andi did. “You aren’t a flier, Commander Piazza, so perhaps you wouldn’t know. The Sterile Cockpit rule is supposed to apply at a level that neither of the crews nor the onboard trainer managed properly. During critical flight stages, the only discussions allowed in the cockpit relate to that stage of flight—thatspecificstage. We will have to recommend to the Air Force that their training be amended to clarify that during a landing, they mayonlydiscuss that specific landing, and not any hypothetical problems about ageneralizedlanding.”
At least Miranda could stop worrying about that crash for the moment. She made a note to recommend review of all FAA and military Sterile Cockpit training language.
Then she made a second note to retrieve her own plane from the hangar at JBER. She didn’t like this scattered feeling at all.
Before Susan could ask anything else distracting, she asked about the crash in Washington, DC.
Andi shrugged. “I haven’t heard from Taz or Jeremy in a while.”
Miranda flipped over to the pilot’s intercom and asked for permission to place an air-to-shore call. They gave her the code to synchronize with the onboard systems.
