Page 16 of Air Force One (Miranda Chase #16)

“Is she alive?” Sarah leaned over the desk to look down at Miranda lying on the floor.

Though she had no idea why she was asking about Chase’s condition after witnessing the horror on the screen.

It certainly wasn’t a distraction she needed, no matter that her psyche had latched onto it as the lesser of two evils.

A moan answered her question.

“What happened, Miranda?” Andi had Chase’s head in her lap. Her dog kept trying to lie on Miranda’s chest and Andi had to keep pushing her off so that Miranda could breathe.

“Fifteen kilometers from shore,” she managed a whisper. “Parents.”

“Oh!” Andi must have noticed everyone else’s attention. “Uh, her parents’ plane went down fifteen kilometers off Long Island in 1996. The similarity must have been a shock.”

“It was.” Miranda sat up slowly, resting her head briefly against Andi’s shoulder and petting her dog into silence.

“Though it shouldn’t have been now that I think about it.

They died on a CIA mission in Russia and their bodies were secretly planted aboard after the crash to mask that.

I find it interesting that I didn’t recall that in time once I noted the parallel of Roy’s plane crashing onto the continental shelf the same fifteen kilometers to sea as TWA 800. ”

Sarah didn’t know if this was some tall-tale, screwed-up signal deep in Miranda’s odd brain, or a very unlikely truth. Trust her had been one of Roy’s last instructions. She didn’t make it easy.

Miranda glanced at the screen and then stood with Andi’s help.

“Congratulations, Madame President.”

“Congratulations?” Madame President? She supposed that much was accurate, but—“Con. Grat. U. Lations?” Her voice rose to a shout, something she prided herself in never doing—except with her two useless ex-husbands.

Miranda ducked behind Andi, then peeked out over her shoulder before hunkering lower because Andi was two inches shorter. “Isn’t that the correct thing to say to someone who has just become President? I’m unsure of the social protocols.”

“No. No!” Sarah answered before Andi could speak, then managed a quivering breath, but still couldn’t release her clenched fists. “Maybe he is still…”

Miranda was shaking her head.

“…alive?” The pleading tone that slipped into her voice was wholly unintentional.

Miranda pointed at the screen behind her without turning or moving out from behind Andi.

The same screen she’d barely glanced at before offering her congratulations.

“Note the fixed position of the tail in the helicopter’s camera.

That indicates that the fuselage was breeched.

This is not a submarine with multiple airtight compartments.

If it hadn’t been breached, it would exhibit sufficient positive buoyancy and currently be floating on the surface or at least bobbing about. The cabin is flooded.”

Sarah looked at the screen. If not for the helicopter’s view, it would seem as if the airplane’s tail section did bob about in the waves and Miranda was wrong.

But it didn’t. The aftermost tip of the vertical tail rudder was exposed in each trough…

but buried by each peak. From the stable viewpoint of the USCG helo, the tail remained fixed at the center of the screen and the water moved up and down past it.

“There is also debris on the water…” Miranda still didn’t need to turn, apparently having captured everything in a single gestalt, “…and a body. I’ll begin my investigation now. Would you like to ask the helicopter pilot to recover any floating evidence, or should I do so?”

Evidence! That was a dead person out there. A whole plane full of dead people. And she called it evidence? Sarah waved a hand at her weakly, signaling she could go.

Miranda turned partly away, then turned back. “You’ll want to find a Supreme Court justice and make an official broadcast that you’re in control of the government.”

Sarah could only nod. She wasn’t thinking that far ahead, but Miranda Chase was. “Did you think this all through just now?”

“Oh no. It was because Roy was at my house when he announced Vice President Clark Winston had been murdered.”

“At your house?”

“Yes. Though it burned down in a forest fire since then, so you can’t make your announcement from there. But you don’t appear to recall, he stated that urgency was essential at the time.”

Finally, Sarah’s mind cleared enough to think.

She had been there for that broadcast. Back then she’d been the newly appointed National Security Advisor, still dazzled by the wonder of it all, which seemed a lifetime ago.

They’d all stood together in Miranda’s living room on her private island in the Pacific Northwest: President Cole, General Drake Nason, and the core five members of the President’s protection detail.

And of them all, she and Miranda were now the sole survivors.