Best of 2023: Thrill Ride - the Magazine, #4.5

By M. L. Buchman, E. Chris Ambrose, C. Dan Castro and 8 more

Thirteen tales of excitement and adventure from Thrill Ride - the magazine: Year One.

Tales of honor and betrayal, of amazing women and unexpected partners.

Conquer villains, cheer for thieves, battle espionage, and question everything you think you know about keeping alive.

Hang onto your seat and take the plunge!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Buchman Bookworks, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 22, 2024
• ISBN: 9781637211656

M. L. Buchman

USA Today and Amazon #1 Bestseller M. L. "Matt" Buchman has 70+ action-adventure thriller and military romance novels, 100 short stories, and lotsa audiobooks. PW says: “Tom Clancy fans open to a strong female lead will clamor for more.” Booklist declared: “3X Top 10 of the Year.” A project manager with a geophysics degree, he’s designed and built houses, flown and jumped out of planes, solo-sailed a 50’ sailboat, and bicycled solo around the world…and he quilts.

Book preview

Best of Thrill Ride 2023

BEST OF THRILL RIDE 2023

Thrill Ride - the Magazine

EDITED BY M. L. BUCHMAN

Buchmann Bookworks, Inc.

Contents

Editor’s Introduction

Dead People Happen

M. L. Buchman

The Manky Head

E. Chris Ambrose

T Is For Titus…

C. Dan Castro

The Tegan Doctrine

Kelly Washington

Stark Shadows

Dixon Hill

The Backwoods

Shells Legoullon

Vanishing Act

E. Chris Ambrose

Tipping the Porter

Kim May

The Waiting Room

B. A. Paul

Too Many Idiots, Too Few Boats

David H. Hendrickson

Fallen Sky

M. L. Buchman

Right Hand

Blaze Ward

Rules of Retreat

Brendan DuBois

So, What’s Next

About the Editor

Editor’s Introduction

M. L. BUCHMAN

Choosing the best stories of Thrill Ride - the magazine Year One turned out to be far less difficult than I’d feared…and more difficult too.

A year ago, in early 2023, I worked closely with every one of these authors to shape and hone their tales, or, in a few lovely cases, simply to say Thank you.

The easy part: glancing down the title list a year later, certain stories simply leapt back to memory. Even after all the words I’ve worked with this year, my own and the 2024 submissions, it was easy to recall how much I enjoyed reading one particular tale or another.

The hard part: winnowing all those happy memories down to an acceptable baker’s dozen of thirteen tales. I juggled and fussed, and finally went with the ones that had excited me the most as both an editor and a reader.

Dead People Happen in which I wrote my first-ever Jackie Malloy story, simply makes me laugh. I loved writing that story and couldn’t resist including it.

E. Chris Ambrose’s also added a welcome light note with her tale in which the great prize is The Manky Head.

T is for Titus… by C. Dan Castro took us into a tale that would make Edward Gorey proud.

I still find Kelly Washington’s The Tegan Doctrine to be both hopeful, and a bit chilling view of the extremes a malfunctioning government might drive us to.

Dixon Hill took us to a place far darker than I ever like to read. But he did it so well and memorably that I included his walk through Stark Shadows in this Best of selection.

In a far-lighter (a welcome note after that prior tale) join Shells Legoullon as she uncovers the secrets hidden in The Backwoods.

I included a second tale from E. Chris Ambrose because I was waffling so much about which of hers I liked better. I finally realized that I was the editor and included both, including this magician’s Vanishing Act.

Kim May’s startling ability to take us to strange and interesting places, leads us under the historic streets of Portland, Oregon where Tipping the Porter takes on a whole new meaning.

B. A. Paul sits us down in The Waiting Room and leaves us to stew they’re in the murk of past deeds.

When David H. Hendrickson is being funny (often), he achieves a delightful level of the ridiculous. Mix that with powerful writing and an incoming hurricane, and you’ll discover why Too Many Idiots, Too Few Boats is actually the real problem.

Miranda Chase, the autistic air-crash investigator, is one of my favorite creations. But even among all I’ve written about her, sometimes a story simply clicks and makes me smile. Fallen Sky is one of those.

Blaze Ward’s fast-driving Brit takes a right-hand-drive car out for a serious chase through the city streets south of Seattle. Hang onto your seat edit in Right Hand.

And finally, after that lighter note, I turned to master storyteller Brendan DuBois for his all-too-possible view of the future of military engagement in Rules of Retreat.

This volume gave me happy chills when I saw how it had come together. I hope it does the same for you. Wishing you all the best.

M. L. Buchman

North Shore, MA, USA

March, 2024

Dead People Happen

M. L. Buchman

About M. L. Buchman

USA Today and Amazon #1 Bestseller M. L. Matt Buchman has 70+ action-adventure thriller and military romance novels, 125 short stories, and lotsa audiobooks. PW says: Tom Clancy fans open to a strong female lead will clamor for more. Booklist declared: 3X Top 10 of the Year. A project manager with a geophysics degree, he’s designed and built houses, flown and jumped out of planes, solo-sailed a 50’ sailboat, and bicycled solo around the world…and he quilts. More at: www.mlbuchman.com.

Why I wrote this story

I rarely start with the title, but this time I did. The title and an article I’d read a few months ago that approximately a thousand passengers die every year during commercial airplane flight from heart attacks alone. It’s one of the unavoidable realities. It’s estimated that there are almost ten thousand flights aloft at any given time, with estimated numbers between 0.5 and 1.3 million people aloft at any given moment. So, guess what? In the air, dead people happen.

The second element I needed was a heroine. Almost all of my stories and novels start with the heroine, she was actually the last to arrive in this case. I wanted someone new and fresh. There is a very small, very clandestine, and very real intelligence agency that goes by many names but has only one purpose. It serves to gather widely disparate data from every source for the exclusive use by Special Operations Forces. This is actually a much more meaningful phrase than it might first appear. In the US military, SOF really means the three Tier One Assets: Army’s Delta Force, Navy’s DEVGRU (commonly and mistakenly known as SEAL Team Six or ST6), and the combat controllers of the Air Force’s 24th STS. So, what if she’d been one of those.

The third element was the plane. My first major heroine, Emily Beale, flew Black Hawk attack helicopters. My next one, Miranda Chase, loves the speed of her jets. I decided this new heroine was in no real hurry to be anywhere, traveling in one of my favorite aircraft.

The Douglas DC-3, one of the most manufactured planes in history, isn’t particularly fast, but its amazingly reliable. It flew in WWII and it is still a fixture in places like drug running and Antarctic transport. I’ve never flown on one, but if I ever make it to the South Pole (still high on my bucket list), it would probably be aboard one of these planes. My wife and I even talked briefly about selling everything and buying a used one. We’d outfit it as a flying home, I’d get my pilot’s license renewed, and we’d be off on adventures. We didn’t do it (being broke at the time only added to the modicum of common sense), but I certainly looked into it. So, I had the plane.

After that, all I needed was the villain…

Dead People Happen

M. L. BUCHMAN

Five a.m. Too much information already, so I didn’t look at the caller ID when answering. If I’d know who it was, I’d have answered anyway.

Malloy! blasted out of my phone.

Mackinac! I hadn’t heard from Henri McKenzie since he’d left the service four years back, more than enough to completely wake me up. And self-preservation in my earlier life had taught me how to wake up fast.

Most folks didn’t know about my Army past. Five-eight still-slender brunettes didn’t exactly fit the infantry picture in folks’ heads, which had worked a hundred percent to my advantage during my years in the field.

We’d met decades ago on Mackinac Island, and I’d never called him anything else. The place is a sweet little resort where Lake Huron and Lake Michigan slid together to cut Michigan in two. It had done that millennia before Michigan gave up Toledo to Ohio and grabbed the Yoop—UP, Upper Peninsula—from the Wisconsin Territory. It was part of a deal to achieve statehood, even a state-in-two-parts, in time for a big federal payout. To this day, the Yoopers were uninspired by the move—showing their disdain as a strong presence as loyal Green Bay Packer fans, dissing the Detroit Lions at every game. Not that the Packers needed much assistance to consistently crush those Michigoons.

We were both airline brats who summered on the island. My dad owned a mid-West regional with serious growth potential, and Mackinac’s held a sizeable chunk of a major freight airline. Two teens, a thousand-meter island airport, family planes to fool around on, sailboats when we got bored with being in the air. Each other’s best buddy in many ways for many lovely young summers.

Jackie, what are you up to these days? I knew that tone and it wasn’t a past-friends-with-benefits kind of ask coming my way. Wouldn’t have used my first name if it had been.

You can’t be calling me for money. Dad had been bought out by one of the majors. Before he and Mama retired to the Bahamas, they left me and my twin sister the bulk of it. Sis had taken her share to found a ten-city jet flight school and charter service, I’d banked mine, figuring to wait until I feel inspired.

But Mackinac made me look poor. When his parents died in a house fire, he’d left the military. Yeah, we signed up together too, though into different services—and in his first move as a civilian he’d cashed out his piece of the airline. It almost took the carrier under to pay off his share.

He’d turned around and plowed his capital into PBA—Pure Business Air. He’d taken a couple of Boeing 787 widebodies and hollowed them out, tossing economy, economy-plus, and business class out on the tarmac.

First Class was relegated to the rear for those only able to afford ridiculous luxury, fine meals, and high-speed internet bounced through satellites. Executive Class rode to the smoother and quieter front of the aircraft. Their seats were pre-configured to the passenger’s body measurements. On-board assistants could facilitate a letterhead redesign, a session with the on-board masseuse, or a secure teleconference with a Prime Minister. The forward chef, of course, was French.

No, not that. I need a favor.

The man who could buy anything asking me for a favor couldn’t be a good sign.

You were an Army intel investigator, right?

Few folks knew I’d been in intel. Only half an instant before I sliced into him did I recall that Mackinac was one of them. We’d joined at the same time, but he’d been snagged by a recruiter selling him on the real-men SEAL track. Much to my surprise, he’d made it too. Not SEAL Team Six, properly called DEVGRU, but into the regular SEAL teams, which I didn’t know he’d had in him.

Dad thought I’d served in Army aviation. Sure, I could fly almost anything, because I often needed to. Mama wasn’t fooled, of course. But then I never could get anything past her.

I was. You’ve never told anyone, right? Put a little fear in my voice like they’d spank me for admitting even that much. Last he knew was when I stationed at the 207th in Vincenza, Italy. Now there was a hardship assignment—all those pretty Italian men to play with. I’d gone three more steps up since those days. All the way to the top.

Nobody outside of the Secret Army of Northern Virginia knew the truth of my service. And, yes, that’s an actual nickname for the two hundred of us who made up the deepest intel group in the US military. Beneath the guise of ever-rotating official names, we called ourselves the Intelligence Support Activity, or simply The Activity.

Two decades in and six months out, I was still busy enjoying my freedom. Hadn’t thought about hopping up to Mackinac Island in a long time, but now Mackinac’s call reminded me of the good times there…

Was. That’s good. That’s good. I’ve got a minor problem and I need someone with serious skills to look into it.

Retired, Mackinac. Done.

Uh-huh. Right. That’s even better. Where are you? Mackinac had never been good at listening. Not to me, not to anyone. If he wasn’t so successful, it would be easier to be annoyed. He’d been splashing ads for his new airline across the inside of every flight magazine from FLYING to Condé Nast Traveler. I kept up so that I could talk at family meals. My Activity day job hadn’t cut it as a conversation starter with anyone cleared below Top Secret - SCI, sensitive compartmentalized information.

Mackinac’s ad budget must match his plane budget, though maybe not. In addition to long-haul business luxury, he also kept a fleet of feeder bizjets—again outfitted as executive class—at each destination in case you really wanted Paris instead of the main hub of Heathrow, or to party in Bangkok after a meeting in Kuala Lumpur.

Where was I? It was a good question that I couldn’t answer right away.

Uh, I wasn’t sure where I was and had to think about it a bit. I called the back suite of my converted Douglas DC-3 home. I’d gone for the Basler BT-67 upgrade. The long-range tanks, single-pilot glass cockpit, and higher speed had all been big selling points. The extra four feet of cabin space had closed the deal.

But living in an airplane, it sometimes took a bit to remember where I’d landed. I looked around. The cabin windows were shuttered, but the pre-dawn light filtered in from the cockpit door I’d forgotten to close last night.

Last night. Sunset at a beach bar with…

Oh, yeah, Key West. The place was a weird mix. Okay, weirder than I’d expected. In April, it was a whole lot of spring breakers who’d bagged off the rest of the semester to play on the beach. And an equal number of old hippies still stuck here fifty years after their own forever-after spring break, now grumbling about the young punks clogging up the beach they no longer left the bars to enjoy. Perfectly aged to a mellow forty, I fell through the gap in the middle.

Excellent! He’d always been a bit of a Bill-and-Ted fan. How fast can you be in the Bahamas?

Mackinac… I don’t know why I was arguing. I was planning to head over to visit the parents anyway. Forty-five minutes. Fifty if you want me showered first.

Okay, I’ll reroute the flight—Miami to The Bahamas.

Wait. What the hell’s going on, Mackinac? He was always leaving out the important bits because his brain had already thought he’d had the conversation and he’d long since moved on.

I’ve got a dead person on the Beijing-Miami flight. I was supposed to be on the flight too, but I had to stay in Beijing at the last minute, so I need someone to deal with it for me. Quietly, so Grand Bahama instead of Miami. They’ll be on the ground by the time you get there. Really appreciate this. I’ll owe you. And he was gone.

I thought about it as I dug around for a clean pair of shorts and a Hawaiian shirt that didn’t have beer poured on it last night by a twenty-something who had me laughing at his pass for all the wrong reasons. At least entertainment was cheap in Key West.

Not hard to figure out how I’d been the one to catch the call. Mackinac didn’t just need help with corpse logistics; he needed to keep it dead quiet—hence the islands rather than Miami. It was Pure Business Air’s third-ever flight. Dead people happen in the air, not that airlines liked to talk about the roughly thousand a year going down by heart attack alone. But Mackinac had generated so much publicity to launch his new airline that he might make front-page news if word leaked out.

I hoped their pilot had a damn good tailwind ride on the jet stream because pushing past Miami out to The Bahamas left Beijing eight thousand miles behind, several hundred miles farther than the 787’s rated max range.

***

They’d built six hundred Douglas DC-3s before WWII took over the production lines. By the time they were done building the military twins of my plane, C-47 Skytrains, sixteen thousand of them were aloft in every corner of the globe. Flown by college boys no older than the spring breaker who hit on me last night, the names and nose art had been utterly predictable: Bombshell Babe, Legs, Pure Heaven, Southern Babe, Honey Bunny, Passion Wagon. Some of the women painted on either side of the nose sported superhero capes, most wore far less.

Naming my upgraded 1939 DC-3 had taken some serious thought. I wanted to honor those who’d flown her in the past, but men as a breed were so crass.

Wonder Woman wearing a one-piece crotch-breaker that required a Brazilian wax job wasn’t my idea of a good-time image.

Finally, even though she was blonde and I was a half-Latina brunette, go Mama, I named her Supergirl and had the original 1959 art painted on my bird’s nose: skirt to mid-thigh, covered to her wrists and collarbone, and a flowing red cape down to her heels. She might be the only nose-art crusader in history to wear more than a cape.

And it fit me too. I had Latina built into my gene pool. In a hijab, instant Arab. I was fluent in Dad’s English, Mama’s Spanish, and had added Arabic, Farsi, and Pashto along the way. Practice had taught me that, with a wig and contacts, in ten minutes I could pass as a blue-eyed blonde with a nice tan—five if I was pressed. Might have to get myself a red cape some day.

When Supergirl and I swooped into Grand Bahama International Airport, one of only two airports in the country with enough runway to land and relaunch Mackinac’s 787, it felt wrong. Mama and Dad had settled out on Eleuthera island, another three hundred kilometers along the way. I tried to never land at the big airports anywhere. GBIA felt like I’d come to the islands without actually coming to the islands.

I also wasn’t a big fan of this particular airport for other reasons. A DC-3 passenger plane had died here in 1980, taking thirty-four people into the ocean depths with it. In 2000 its military twin, a C-47 cargo conversion, had died here too, killing the two crew. I’m not superstitious, but the twenty-year cycle was past due and I didn’t want my Supergirl to be any part of it. Even worse, back in 2019, Hurricane Dorian had put the entire field six feet underwater. It wasn’t hurricane season now, but this airfield gave me the creeps.

The PBA 787 was impossible to miss. Mackinac had painted them very similarly to the black-and-gold of our tasteless ex-President’s personal 757—the one that he could no longer afford to fly. He now flew in an eight-seater that could barely cross the Atlantic—from New York.

The PBA bird dominated the west end of the service area. The pilot hadn’t parked at the terminal or over in the general aviation area, instead perching on the small tarmac area directly in front of the airport fire station, which I was betting the teams didn’t appreciate.

A fuel tanker truck was feeding the big bird, probably only enough to hop back to Miami. And with the posh clientele on board baking in the hot tropical sun, I'd wager I didn’t have long—Mackinac would not delay them more than he absolutely had to.

I went with the flow and rolled Supergirl onto the dead-grass verge out of everyone’s way. DC-3s thought rough field landings were standard fare; parking on one must feel like home to my sweet bird.

A coroner was carefully racking some tubes of blood into his case on the back bumper of an ambulance parked close by the plane’s stairs. The sheet-covered corpse lay on a stretcher ready to be rolled into the open doors. So, my work here was done before I arrived. Corpse, off plane, brush hands together, fly on to see the folks.

A Bahamian customs guy was hovering about the foot of the stairs, unsure what to do as no one except the corpse was deplaning. He was so relieved to stamp my arrival on my dual-citizenship passport that I could only laugh. Story goes that Sis and I were conceived here—out on a Cat Island beach—so Mama had decided we should be born here as well. Though not on the beach, which was a pity as it would have made a good story. Sometimes told it that way.

I declared the weapons in my secure locker, kept quiet about the locker that couldn’t be accidentally found without disassembling Supergirl, and we were good to go. I may have failed to mention the ceramic blade tucked into my belt buckle, but I can’t imagine why he’d care—x-ray machines sure didn’t, not that I carried it through security scans. Flying in Supergirl kept me clear of all that noise. We had very little to do with civilian terminals at airports.

Coroner didn’t have much to say, until I nudged him a bit. A pair of US C-notes wasn’t a bribe in the Bahamas, it was a polite tip.

She—

I glanced down at the sheet-covered corpse lying beside us. I’d missed that detail, though I could see it now. All my training about not making assumptions and I’d been caught out after only six months away from service. I’d have to watch out for that.

—illustrated all the classic symptoms of TTX poisoning.

Not a natural death then. I thought I knew my poisons, but TTX was a new one on me.

Tetrodotoxin, nope, still no clue, exists in several marine animals, as well as a Costa Rican frog and a California newt. Though pufferfish are the most common source for human ingestion.

Now I was with the program. Pufferfish, fugu, was a Japanese delicacy that, if prepared wrong, killed the gourmand.

Is the on-board chef still alive?

The coroner furrowed his brow at me.

"Japanese tradition says that if a chef’s patron dies of fugu poisoning, they are supposed to commit seppuku, ritual hara-kiri, at the table with their chef’s knife. It’s an atonement and honor thing."

He did not do so in this case. The coroner was unimpressed with my bit of folklore. Blood work is very hard to test for TTX, requiring mass spectroscopy before it breaks down, but I will try as it is the best symptomatic fit.

How can you tell that from a corpse? Strictly professional interest as TTX was one I’d never studied.

The flight attendant’s description was sufficient. He needed no tip to send his initial notes to my phone.

The customs man was still hanging around and I’d have to be blind to miss the nerves.

I’m not blind.

He had a problem that he didn’t know how to offload—or he had to pee something fierce. The fuel truck was disconnecting, so I knew I was running out of time, but I sidled over to him.

Is that her passport? He’d practically wadded it up in his hands.

In answer, he shoved it at me.

Chinese passport. Evelyn Ping. Photo showed wide, frank eyes and shaggy brunette hair as if she’d just fallen out of a 1970s sitcom. Birth place Beijing, though she looked Texas right down to the gaudy gold necklace. If she could afford to fly PBA, might even be real gold.

Hold it…Evelyn Ping?

The man nodded.

No wonder Mackinac was freaking out. I knew the face, though it took a moment to place it. Twenty years back it belonged to Evelyn Miles of Oklahoma City.

A false ID in the middle of what was now an accidental-death investigation. What had Mackinac gotten me into?

She’d been in the 207th Military Intelligence Brigade with me—before she lost her security clearance, never did manage to find out why. What the hell was she doing with a Chinese passport under another name?

One of the 787’s engines behind me restarted.

I held up the passport in question, and the agent stepped away. No way he wanted it back.

I peeked under the sheet. Yeah, definitely Evelyn Miles, though she had looked better—being dead didn’t agree with her at all. Still had the gold necklace and diamond earrings, so robbery was probably off the table.

Doubled back to the customs guy for an exit stamp in my own passport, then I sprinted up the stairs before they rolled them away.

Now I was headed to Miami, the tenth busiest airport in the US—nothing but tourists. How was this possible? I’d only been in the country for eight minutes.

***

I ended up in 5B, Evelyn’s old seat.

The flight attendant was quite upset by that, or as emotional as her charming British accent and perfect complexion could manage. Even on my best day, I couldn’t match that perfect combination of sweet and polite that had been built into her very bones.

She wasn’t, however, flustered by my sudden boarding seconds before she closed the door, but rather that my seat was not properly adjusted. She fussed with the small tablet extracted from her pocket, and I could feel the seat shape-shifting, morphing like an alien glomming onto my body.

Evelyn had been a robust five-eleven, not counting the three-inch heels I’d noted poking out the south end of her death shroud. It left my five-eight and sneakers dangling awkwardly in the air. That was cured fast enough, but the attendant was still unhappy with fit of my headrest by the time she had to strap in herself for departure.

I’d had lovers who weren’t half as good a fit as this chair. Maybe I’d make Mama happy and marry it—what with no permanent man yet on my horizon. Besides, Sis had already produced the cutest twins it had ever been Dad’s and my joy to spoil; I didn’t see any reason for giving her a chance to retaliate. Maybe I’d just hijack the chair, install it on Supergirl, and live happily ever after.

I scanned the passengers in my immediate vicinity. My sneakers, printed with the periodic table of elements—I’m a nerd, so sue me—shorts, and a vintage Hawaiian shirt weren’t the norm, but neither was I actually undressed. As usual, I fell through a gap in the middle.

The passengers had the expected split. Predominantly business suits so expensive they had barely been eased during a sixteen-hour flight. And un-predominantly, the I’m-too-rich-to-care thousand-dollar jeans and twice-that Ferragamo or Bally hoodies that weren’t fooling anyone. As if the Randolph Engineering shades, and Breitling and Panerai wristwatches weren’t a dead giveaway.

Most had become bored with me the moment I’d sat down.

Three eyed me with very distinct expressions.

A stunningly handsome in the un-predominantly category had a definite boy-toy look to him. Evelyn’s squeeze-for-hire? I didn’t remember much about her; we’d only overlapped by a few months. But I remembered her taste for pretty-boy Italians had exceeded even mine. And she’d been gorgeous enough to cut a swath.

A