Page 80 of Air Force One (Miranda Chase #16)

“Do I have to?”

Andi nodded. “Who else? You’re the one who figured it all out.”

“No television cameras?”

“We talked about this, Miranda.”

Miranda covered her face with her hands.

They had. How did she keep forgetting? She’d even written it in her notebook so that she wouldn’t.

Since she never forgot anything, that must mean her subconscious was blocking it, which wasn’t saving her at the moment.

They stood backstage of the Pentagon’s PLC2 auditorium but she could feel them lurking out there, just waiting to pounce on her like…

nasty…evil…leopards! Except you could trust a leopard to do leopard things, like chase and eat other animals. People like these couldn’t be trusted.

“After this, no more television cameras, okay?”

Andi pulled her hands down, held them until Miranda opened her eyes, and nodded.

“Ever. Promise?”

“I’ll do my best.”

If Andi’s best wasn’t good enough, then no one could do better. She could only hope that her skills sufficed. “Come with me?”

“Anywhere.”

For the second time in as many weeks, out in the world, television screens everywhere were flashing with a bright red Breaking News banner. She could only hope it didn’t break her. An analogy! They weren’t as tricky as metaphors, but she was encouraged at finding one.

Maybe, with Andi beside her, she could do this. Maybe.

She tried calming breaths. It didn’t help. She tried picturing baby bunnies safe and snug in their bunny den—and imagined a stoat with a camera strapped to its head invading the safety of their underground lair. When she—

“The longer you wait to start, the longer until you finish.”

“That’s true!” Once again, Andi had the right of it. She looked down at Meg, “Are you ready?” She wagged her tail and grinned. Miranda could always rely on Meg too. She turned on her heel and hurried to the podium with her dog close beside her.

Andi followed her out of the wings onto the stage, wearing the same uniform she’d worn at their wedding to stand beside Roy and await Miranda’s arrival. As this was sort of the wake for Roy, it seemed appropriate. She stopped two steps back and two to the side, dropping into a parade rest stance.

As long as she was nearby, Miranda didn’t care if she stood on her head. That image almost made her smile.

Almost, until she looked at the room.

She faced the two hundred-and-fifty-seat auditorium, counting quickly though she already knew how many should be here—eighty-three seated military personnel.

Curiously, it was the exact number who had died aboard Air Force One.

Also, just another one-third of a person and it would be exactly one-third full.

Was thirty-three-point-two percent capacity more rational that thirty-three-point-three repeating forever?

She’d never liked numbers repeating forever; they were so untidy.

So this was better than the implied yet deceptively false elegance of one-third capacity.

Miranda put up the first slide.

“My name is Miranda Chase, I’m the NTSB Investigator-in-charge for the investigation of the crash for SAM 29000, flying as Air Force One at the time of the incident.

We ask that you keep your questions until the end as the first part of this conference is being nationally televised.

You will be informed when the cameras are turned off. ”

Just in case anybody had a question, she purposely didn’t look up to check for raised hands.

“On December 18th of last year, President Roy Cole decided to travel on a final goodwill tour as President. On January 3rd of this year, his aircraft departed for the hastily arranged tour. Hastily, but including all standard security protocols.” She clicked to a map showing the final flight route.

“His aircraft’s engines all failed two hundred kilometers from land.

Unable to make landfall, Air Force One crashed into the ocean fifteen kilometers offshore of Delaware, killing both the plane and all hands aboard. Everyone knows this much.”

There were no sounds from the audience. With the lights focused on her, she wouldn’t be able to see a raised hand anyway, even if she could bring herself to look up from the podium. That functioned as a satisfactory safeguard.

“The engines failed in reverse sequential order at precise thirty-second intervals: Four, Three, Two, One. There was no reason for them to have done so that could be attributed to any normal factor such as: fuel contamination, ice formation in fuel filters, manufacturing faults, bird strikes, or…” Miranda looked at the long list she’d made of known causes of engine failures.

She hadn’t thought to alphabetize them or order them by frequency of occurrence.

She closed her eyes and changed her planned speech without opening them to look at her notes, “…or any other known direct cause.”

Then she opened her eyes and peered at the page. Nothing essential had been skipped. It shortened the time she had to stand here by approximately nineteen seconds. That was good.

“The precision of the thirty-second intervals was indicative of a non-systemic cause. I’ve been asked to keep this simple. That request itself was not complex as the ultimate cause itself was simple as well.”

There were several chuckles from the audience, though she was unsure as to why.

She glanced back at Andi, who tipped her chin upward.

Miranda tried it…a couple times. “Oh, you mean like keep going?”

Andi nodded to more laughter.

“Okay.” Miranda tapped the next slide. “Two alterations were made to both of Roy’s and now Sarah’s VC-25A aircraft during their most recent maintenance cycle prior to the incident.”

“Presidents,” Andi whispered to her.

Miranda turned to her, “Yes, I meant the Presidents. I don’t think I know any other Roy personally and the last Sarah I knew was in horse camp the summer before my parents died and were buried in TWA 800’s crash.”

“Never mind,” Andi’s whisper barely reached her.

“You know I’m not good at that.”

Andi nodded and then did the chin tilt thing again.

“Oh, right.” There were yet more laughs, again she didn’t understand why, so she went to the next slide.

“During that maintenance, this line of code was inserted into the airplane’s command-and-control stack.

For those of you who can’t read even such simple computer code, it sets a number of parameters when the aircraft’s systems are booted up.

If these parameters are met, it runs an infinite-loop command into the key control chips successively in each engine at thirty-second intervals.

In lab tests, identical chips exhibited a mean failure time of nineteen seconds with a standard deviation of only two-point-four seconds to overheat and reach failure.

On SAM 29000, the VC-25A operating that day as Air Force One, it initially appeared to be little more than a series of burned-out chips with merely a curious timing coincidence.

This would indicate that there’d been a manufacturing fault in the chips. ”

She put up a photo of SAM 28000 still parked in the Andrews Air Force Base hangar.

“The next time SAM 28000 was powered up for maintenance, the attack code was uncovered.”

The tech sergeant who had died shortly after Air Force One’s crash had been the first clue—at least to the others. Their attempts to explain it to her had left Miranda with a headache. She didn’t put it in the presentation because she still didn’t understand it.

“The parameters,” Andi whispered.

“Oh, right,” she selected the next slide.

“They were actually quite simple. First, the aircraft had to be flying at over thirty-thousand feet; it was flying at forty. Second, it had to be doing so at least three hundred kilometers downrange from departure on an overseas route, placing it over two hundred kilometers offshore. And third, it required a true state from this section of code,” she brought up another slide.

“Which is a little more complex. It is voice recognition software that had to register a back-and-forth radio call including the phrase Air Force One. The aircraft would never be called that unless the President was aboard. This was clearly a case of sabotage with intent to harm Roy or Sarah.”

When she paused this time, there was no laughter or other noise.

Actually, it was an ideal environment for testing the qualitative measure of a room being so quiet that you could hear a pin drop.

She almost pulled out her notebook to remind herself to bring one if she ever presented a national broadcast like this again.

Then decided that she’d rather not do one again—ever.

“This concludes a verbal summary of the detailed report that I will be submitting to the Air Force Accident Investigation Board and the NTSB. I will add a strictly personal observation that will not be included in my report: whoever did this to Air Force One is a very bad person.”

This time she had no doubt that she could have heard a pin if she’d had one to drop.

“The last thing,” Andi prompted.

Miranda hadn’t forgotten, but she’d been reluctant to put up the last slide as she wasn’t the one who’d done it.

The guilty have been identified and arrested.

“This ends the national broadcast.”

She couldn’t gauge the sounds of the audience this time. It sounded like a gasp of relief from a few individuals, which didn’t make any sense.