Honor Flight by M. L. Buchman

Author:M. L. Buchman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Buchman Bookworks, Inc.

8

She pushed to her feet and continued working forward. It was just her and the sergeant now. His men were occupied with removing the passengers from the upper area and removing the first rows of coffins.

“Wait a second,” Sergeant Peters called to her.

Miranda continued forward as the sergeant turned to look back.

“Something’s not right here. There are more coffins than I have on my manifest.”

Miranda liked being methodical, but she could see that the coffins ahead of her, the last row directly beneath the cockpit high above, were scorched on the ends facing the rear rather than the fronts as all of the others had been.

She was so intrigued that she almost fell out of the plane—straight down.

A massive hole had been punched through the decking and the hull in the center of the second-to-foremost row. There was no coffin in this one spot of the otherwise uniform rows that stretched from bow to stern.

The coffins to either side had lost their chains and been flipped over and away to land against the sides of the hull.

Straight down was a two-story drop. The gap was created by where the rounded nose of the plane had ridden up on the face of the control tower as it destroyed it. Below her she could see the wall that was probably all that remained of the structure.

“Christ!” Again the supernatural invocation. This time from the sergeant.

Oh! A curse.

Commonly used to express anger, surprise, frustration, sadness, woe, as well as reverence. How was she supposed to differentiate which emotion was intended? A single emotion should be attached to a single word. It would make life so much easier.

“Somebody shot the plane.”

“Possibly, Sergeant Peters, but unlikely. Note the direction of the damage. The perimeter of the puncture is bent downward.”

Miranda considered the sergeant’s unlikely scenario of someone outside shooting the plane. It was possible that a small inward hole had been made by an explosive shell penetrating the hold from below. Then, once inside, exploding dynamically enough to punch the outward hole thus masking all evidence of its initial inward passage.

“An anti-tank guided missile, such as a Javelin, has a two-stage warhead; the first would blow a hole in the outer layers of armor—or in this case the airplane’s hull. Because of its lack of armor, the first stage would probably penetrate the cargo decking as well, prior to igniting the second stage. The second stage would be very destructive. I see no signs of the initial upward blast from the first stage, and the payload on a Javelin would have caused significantly more destruction.”

“So, what exploded? A coffin?”

“Quite likely.” Miranda looked again at the neat rows and the one un-coffined space. “Yes.”

“I was joking.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re something else, ma’am.”

“Something else? Compared to what?”

The sergeant just shook his head.

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