Page 5 of Gryphon

“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.

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