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examination. The plane had hit the ground with such force that it appeared to have literally exploded. At least a dozen personnel were picking through these remains, cataloguing them. It was a mammoth task. There weren’t many whole sections left intact.
    I made my way to what would have been the cockpit. There was a lot of dried blood on the pieces. That figured. The human body is really just a big bag of water. When it hits the ground at over one hundred and fifty miles per hour, it bursts.
    “You right there, mate?” said a voice behind me. The man wore the uniform of a Royal Air Force squadron leader, except his accent was about as English as mine. Australian. I’d come to recognize the accent after a stint in Afghanistan, where Australia’s Special Forces, the Special Air Service, were deployed. Those boys were smart and very tough. I owed my life to half a dozen of them.
    “Special Agent Vin Cooper,” I said, flashing him my OSI creds.
    “Wayne Roach.”
    I recognized the name. Roach was heading the crash team investigating the wreckage. He was looking for cause. His was the signature on the report I’d read.
    “OSI. Not the local branch, I take it?” he asked.
    “Flew in this morning.”
    “You working with that Masters chick on this?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Lucky man. She’s a spunkrat. Young to be a major, too. Rumor has it she can suck-start an F-16.”
    That gave me an interesting perspective on Masters. She had a reputation. Also, this guy thought her meteoric rise through the ranks had something to do with qualities other than those for which officers usually received promotion. I didn’t add to the conversation, which might have made the squadron leader nervous. Parts of the services are, in some ways, even more PC than private enterprises.
    He cleared his throat and said, “You read the preliminary?”
    I nodded. “You’ve had a couple more days with this since you and your team did the initial write-up. Got anything to add?”
    “Yeah, as a matter of fact.”
    I followed the squadron leader to a bench covered with various items of metal and fiberglass. Roach was short and bald, and the crotch of his pants appeared to get sucked up his butt as he walked, springing off his toes with each step. His uniform was a size too small for his frame, which didn’t help. Maybe he was getting fat and didn’t realize it. Or couldn’t accept it.
    Hanging on the wall behind the bench was a large photograph of the smiling, relaxed General Scott standing next to his sailplane. The aircraft’s wingspan was a tad under sixty feet. The nose where the pilot sat was small and bulbous, with a large Perspex bubble canopy. Now, only shards of the glider remained—slightly more than what remained of the general, according to Masters’s report. I ran my eyes over the individual pieces spread out across the floor and found it difficult to imagine that this was the aircraft in the picture. Roach picked up an aluminum bracket.
    “I can tell you now that General Scott’s plane was sabotaged.” He held up a piece of metal. “Check this out.”
    Sabotage meant murder. I didn’t bat an eyelid at the news, though once the folks Stateside heard it, the shit would definitely fly. “What is it?” I asked.
    “The wings of the glider slide off and on to make transporting it from field to field possible. That makes this piece crucial. It’s the bracket that clamps the main wing spar to the fuselage.” Roach pulled the clamp apart and the top section split into two separate pieces across a fine, ragged crack. “That’s not supposed to happen, by the way,” he said. “This is seven-oh-seven-five—aircraft-grade aluminum alloy. It’s light and, as you might expect, extremely strong. At least, it’s supposed to be.”
    He passed me a black-and-white photo. “What’s this?” I asked.
    “A photo,” he said, being a wiseass. “Well, actually, it’s called a macrograph—makes it easy to see the metal’s crystal