AUTHOR'S NOTES: The hardest thing about this story is writing the air combat scenes. I watch an episode, grab what I can, and then map it out. Hopefully it looks good when translated on the written page.
I've also done far too much research on how to curse in French and Arabic for this chapter. The autopsy scenes I admit I borrowed from Clive Cussler on; I was afraid to look up "murder by suffocation" on the internet. The NSA is probably following me as it is.
Yooper Air Combat Range
Upper Michigan Peninsula, United States of Canada
11 May 2001
It was a beautiful day for air combat, Coco Adel thought, then squirmed a bit in her seat to try and get comfortable. Though the Royal Air Force had been able to rush out another Jaguar for Ruth Lionheart—a Jaguar now without a pilot—the Republic of Iraq's Air Force was not quite as well equipped. Although it had been ten years since Saddam Hussein had been deposed, making it much easier to get aircraft, they still didn't have the resources. Coco's Mirage F.1-her beloved Gianduja, named for the Italian chocolate she loved—was still some weeks away from being repaired, so she was borrowing Jaune Arc's Mirage 2000. A generation newer than her Mirage, she was enjoying flying it. It was far more responsive to her touch; too responsive, she thought, which could be a problem in a dogfight.
She glanced to her right. Yatsuhachi Daichi in his F-2A was out there, both assuming an expanded section. They would be visible on radar as two aircraft, but Coco liked the flexibility of the fighting pair. She missed having Fox and Velvet in their Tornado, which could feed radar contacts to them while she and Yatsuhachi kept the radars off. In any case, this was a 2V2 fight, but Coco still felt a bit naked.
"Coco, contact, two bandits at eleven o'clock low."
"Roger. Lock 'em up." It wasn't terribly sporting if both of them killed Creamer Flight in less than ten seconds, but Coco wasn't interested in giving the TV reporters a show. She'd nearly punched one of them the day before, who got too close to Ruth's memorial. The radar quickly locked on, faster than her older Mirage; that part she liked. "I've got the bandit on the left."
Yatsuhachi clicked the mike twice in response. A second passed, and an audible beep in her helmet earphones told her Coco had a lock. Sucks to be you, Creamer, she thought, and pulled the trigger. "Coco, Fox Three!" Her wingman repeated it a second later. The datapod that substituted for the actual missile fed its targeting information back to Beacon.
"Tally-ho, eleven o'clock low," Yatsuhachi called. "One F-16, one Mirage. They're breaking left." His voice was calm, but it would take an extinction level event for Yatsuhachi to get rattled.
"Roger, I got them!" She was waiting for Range Control's call, but her hopes were dashed a half-second later. "Coffee, Range Control, missile shots trashed." Damn, she thought morosely. Coco followed the two specks that were Creamer Flight, as they not only broke hard to avoid the shot, but descended and disappeared behind a ridge. The hard deck had been waived for this flight as well in the interest of realism, and at the request of Creamer. Coco, who loved to work down low, had no objections.
"Yatsu, float left, you have the lead." She put her Mirage into a shallow dive, and saw the F-2 make a hard left break. She gave it a moment, then snapped the stick hard left to follow. To her surprise, the Mirage 2000 did a snap roll that threw her off for a moment, a precious second she had to waste getting back ahead of her aircraft. She got back on track, and saw Yatsuhachi's blue-painted F-2, now pulling out low—and from behind the ridge popped out the gray Mirage F.1 of Emerald Sustrai. "Yatsu, break right!" she called. "Emerald's pulling lead on you!"
Yatsuhachi threw the F-2 to the right, using his better turning performance to throw off Emerald's shot as she called out a hasty, and futile, Fox Two. The Mirage turned into the F-2, and then reversed as they entered a horizontal scissors. Coco kept her eyes on them, but also looked for Mercury's F-16. Her eye caught movement and her radar warning reciever shrilled for her attention as the F-16 suddenly shot out from behind another ridge and climbed straight at her. She hated to do it, because it meant taking her eyes off her wingman, but Coco broke hard into Mercury, ruining his shot. He shot past on her right side. "Yatsu, engaging Mercury!" she puffed out as she went hard right to follow, the G-suit squeezing her.
"Emerald, Fox Two!" was her only answer.
"Range Control. Yatsu's a mort."
"Ayreh feek!" Coco snapped, a rather vile Arabic curse. Mercury was now breaking right, but she popped her speedbrakes and chopped the throttle a bit, keeping him out in front, settling into perfect parameters for a Sidewinder shot. Coco retracted the speedbrakes and accelerated. She checked her mirrors for a second, then the RWR display beneath her heads-up display; both showed clear. Her gunsight settled on the F-16 as Mercury lit his afterburner and climbed. "Big mistake," Coco growled, because now the Viper was perfectly outlined against a blue sky, with the Sidewinder sniffing nothing but its exhaust. The practice Sidewinder growled and her finger caressed the trigger.
"Emerald, Fox Three on the Mirage!"
What? Coco's mind shouted as she instinctively went into a break, but she had hesitated a half-second, long enough to check a RWR display that was still clear.
"Range Control; Coco's a mort. Creamer wins."
"Shit." Coco leveled out and rocked her wings as the other Mirage flew past. She leveled out as Creamer Flight disappeared in the distance. Yatsuhachi joined up for the flight back. "Well, that sucked," she groaned.
"Shigata ga nai," Yatsuhachi radioed back. Nothing to be done. Coco sighed and looked at the clock on the instrument panel. Twenty-two seconds. Not unusual for a dogfight, but she was getting tired of losing. "Hey, Yatsu," she called out. "Go to Channel Three." She switched frequencies, off the one Range Control used and one that was discreet enough the controllers wouldn't listen in. "I have an odd request."
"Sure."
"Drop back into trail and lock me up with your radar. Like you were going to pop me with an active."
There was silence for a moment, but then Yatsuhachi replied, "Roger," and did as he was asked. She watched the RWR display, and the expected strobe came on, along with the aural warning. "Thanks," she told him. "Rejoin and go back to Channel One." She went back to their formal channel. "Range Control, Coco. Are you sure about that last missile shot?"
The controller paused. "Roger that, Coco. Clean shot."
Something's wrong here.
They landed at Beacon fifteen long minutes later. After they'd taxied in and parked, Jaune placed the ladder and came up as she raised the canopy. "You got my plane shot down," he said, smiling to let her know it was kidding.
"Something's wrong with this fucking airplane," Coco snarled back. She left the power on and gestured angrily for Jaune's crew chief, a tall Frenchman. Jaune swung off the ladder as the chief clambered up, and winced as Coco let him have it. The crew chief wasn't having any of it, and both of them swapped French insults as Coco powered off the Mirage. They were still at it as both climbed down. Jaune put his hands up defensively. "Easy, easy!" he exclaimed. "What's the problem here?"
"The problem," Coco snapped, "is that there's something wrong with your fucking airplane!" She slapped the side of the Mirage angrily. "Emerald locked me up and killed my ass with a radar shot, and the fucking RWR never even showed it! Yatsu locked onto me on our way back and it worked just fucking fine! Bordel de merde!" Coco was proud of the fact that she could curse fluently in four languages—English, Arabic, French and Kurdish.
"There is nothing wrong with this airplane!" the crew chief shot back. "I and my crew check it quite thoroughly before we let anyone take off in it. I guarantee that there's nothing wrong with that equipment!"
"Then you explain it, ya kalb!" Technically, an officer was not supposed to cuss out an enlisted man, but she was banking that the Frenchman didn't know she'd just called him a dog.
She was wrong. He stripped off his gloves, threw them at Coco's feet like he was challenging her to a duel, and climbed up the ladder, jumping into the seat. He switched on the internal power and began running a diagnostic. Jaune and Coco waited on the side of the hardstand, joined by the enormous Yatsuhachi; Jaune always wondered how the biggest Japanese person he'd ever seen fit into the F-2. They heard the Mirage power up, power down, then power up again before the crew chief shut it off. He climbed back down the ladder. He went up to Coco, towering over her. "Captain Adel. I ran a diagnostic twice on the RWR. It's working perfectly. There is nothing wrong with Crocea Mors, and quite frankly, I don't appreciate you inferring that I would send you up with a bad aircraft. With all due respect, Captain Adel, ta gueule." Coco was startled at that: the chief had just told her to shut the fuck up. He stormed off, around the aircraft.
Coco's fists balled, but Yatsuhachi put a hand on her shoulder. "Coco, stop it," he said.
"He insulted me!"
"He had a right to. If he'd said you were a poor pilot, would you not have reacted the same?"
Coco stared after the chief, who was now opening an inspection panel and motioning the rest of the ground crew over. She slowly let out a breath. Yatsuhachi was right: a pilot blaming the maintenance crew for the pilot's own faults was one of the worst things a fighter pilot could do. She took off her helmet, handed it to Jaune, and walked over to the maintenance men; Jaune followed. "Chief," she said. He said nothing, but glanced back. "I'm sorry. I was out of line."
The crew chief stopped his work, and nodded. "Yes, ma'am." It was both apology and acknowledgement.
Honor satisfied on both sides, Coco retrieved her helmet from Jaune and put it under her arm. "I don't understand," Jaune said.
"Emerald shot me down with a radar missile shot," she explained. "And it never showed up on my RWR. I didn't even see her." She looked at Yatsuhachi. "Did she do the same thing to you?"
Yatsuhachi laughed. "No, unfortunately not. She forced me out front by going idle and boards—" he used the terminology for going to near idle thrust and throwing out the speedbrakes "—and nailed me with a Sidewinder. She was below and behind when she shot you down."
"Explains why I didn't pick her up visually," Coco mused. She motioned them to walk with her. "I want to go back to the auditorium, Jaune," she said, "because somehow Emerald locked onto me with her radar and I didn't even know it—and neither did your Mirage."
The doctor performing the autopsy on Ruth Lionheart was a civilian one from Madison; neither the USAF nor the US Navy had coroners at all bases. By the time Rissa Arashikaze came to the morgue, he had already done most of the work—not that she knew much about autopsies, though killing large numbers of people had left her with a lot of knowledge about bodies and how they worked, or, at least, how they stopped working.
The doctor, a middle-aged man with the unlikely name of Butcher—"I've heard all the jokes," he had told Rissa when they met—consulted his chart. "I think you've wasted your time coming here, Miss Arashikaze," he said. "Miss Lionheart here was in excellent health. In fact, I'd say that she's the healthiest dead person I've ever met."
Rissa tried to ignore the fact that this cute young Faunus that lay naked on the slab in front of her had most of her internal organs in bags on the long metal tray next to her. She still looked like she was smiling, like the whole thing was a colossal joke that everyone wasn't in on yet. "That's why I'm here, Doctor. Healthy people just don't die."
"Sometimes they do. Something we've missed, maybe. I haven't looked at her brain yet. An undiagnosed tumor, or a blood clot."
Rissa felt a little sick at that; she didn't want to be there when that happened. She looked at the chart, and the death certificate. "Let me go by the numbers here, Doc. Make sure I'm not missing anything. Official cause of death?" It was still blank on the certificate.
"That's just it. I don't know yet. She died in her sleep." He stood over the body, hands on hips, as if angry that Ruth was not telling him how she died.
"Then let's just say, for argument's sake—and so I'm not wasting my time here—that she was murdered. Never mind the why, just the how."
Butcher circled the slab, slowly. "Captain Ozpin thought that might be the case, so I tested her blood. There were barbituates in her system, but no more than what you'd find with sleeping pills. And though she had been drinking, her blood alcohol content was nowhere near drunk. In fact, I doubt she'd even had enough to give her a buzz. Yes, you can die from mixing sleeping pills with alcohol, but usually it's in much higher doses of both."
"Any other toxins?"
"Not a one. Didn't see any injection sites, either."
"Nothing under her fingernails?"
"Nothing. Not even dirt. She looks to have kept herself pretty clean."
"Would you mind if I looked?"
Butcher motioned for Rissa to do so, and she went to work. She checked under the fingernails for puncture sites, but there was nothing. She checked every orifice below the neck, as much as she wished she didn't have to, but there was nothing there, either. She lifted the left arm and looked closely at the armpit. "What are you doing that for?" Butcher asked.
"Old KGB trick. Insert a metal rod under the armpit while the subject is sleeping—especially if they're drugged. The rod goes straight through into the heart, and the victim bleeds out into the torso. No puncture wounds, though." Rissa gently let the arm down. "There wasn't any evidence of sexual activity, was there?"
"None."
That left out everything below the neck. Next Rissa checked the ears, which were clean, then went through the hair. It took half an hour before she was satisfied. She looked up the nose. When there was nothing there either, it left the mouth. "Any bite marks on the tongue?" she asked.
"Not that I could see."
Damn, Rissa thought, maybe Oz and I really are just jumping at shadows. She levered open the mouth and used a flashlight to look inside, checking the tongue, the back of the mouth, and the sides. She was about to give up when she saw it. "Doc, look at this."
He bent over. With a gloved hand, she pointed at Ruth Lionheart's gums. There, faint but present, was bruising. "I'll be a son of a bitch," Butcher said. He peeled back her lips, and there was paleness there, paleness that wouldn't be there on a healthy young Faunus.
"Did they bring down the pillows that were on her bed?" Rissa asked. She carefully checked the body's throat; there were no ligature marks.
"Yeah, right here." He walked over and grabbed one of the pillows, in its evidence bag. Rissa put on fresh gloves, tore open the bag, and looked at the pillow. Then she placed it over Ruth's face, careful not to let the fabric actually touch the corpse. "I don't suppose you've got a magnifying glass?" she asked.
Butcher smiled, reached under the tray, and held one up. "I'm a bit old fashioned."
Rissa smiled back, took the magnifying glass, and carefully scanned the pillow. "I think I got it." She handed the glass to him, carefully keeping one finger where she wanted him to look. "What's that look like to you? It's faint, but it's there."
He looked. It took him a moment, but then he slowly nodded. "Bite marks. They wouldn't be seen by the naked eye, but they're there." He set down the magnifying glass, stared at Rissa for a moment, then walked over to his briefcase. He pulled out a fifth of Tennessee whiskey. "I think we need this." She agreed. Both took a swig, straight from the bottle.
"Your conclusions, Doctor?" Rissa asked. She already knew the answer, but she wanted it to be official.
"Paleness on the gums, bruising on the gums, faint but present bite marks on the pillow." Butcher shook his head sadly at the corpse. "You poor, poor girl. You were suffocated to death."