Airframe (24 page)

“Okay,” he said, “we should have it up in a second.”

He led Casey into one of the editing bays. It was a medium-size room with a comfortable couch along the back wall, beneath movie posters. The editing console wrapped around the other three walls of the room; three monitors, two oscilloscopes, and several keyboards. Scott began punching the keys. He waved her to a seat alongside him.

“What’s the material?” he said.

“Home video.”

“Plain vanilla high eight?” He was looking at an oscilloscope as he spoke. “That’s what it looks like. Dolby encoded. Standard stuff.”

“I guess so …”

“Okay. According to this, we got nine-forty on a sixty-minute cassette.”

The screen flickered, and she saw mountain peaks shrouded in fog. The camera panned to a young American man in his early thirties, walking up a road, carrying a small baby on his shoulder. In the background was a village, beige roofs. Bamboo on both sides of the road.

“Where’s this?” Harmon said.

Casey shrugged. “Looks like China. Can you fast-forward?”

“Sure.”

The images flicked quickly past, streaked with static. Casey glimpsed a small house, the front door open; a kitchen, black pots and pans; an open suitcase on a bed; a train station, a woman climbing on the train; busy traffic in what looked like Hong Kong; an airport lounge at night, the young man holding the baby on his knees, the baby crying, writhing. Then a gate, tickets being taken by a flight attendant—

“Stop,” she said.

He punched buttons, ran at normal speed. “This what you want?”

“Yes.”

She watched as the woman, holding the baby, walked down the ramp to the aircraft. Then there was a cut, and the image showed the baby in the woman’s lap. The camera panned up and showed the woman, giving a theatrical yawn. They were on the aircraft, during the flight; the cabin was lit by night lights; windows in the background were black. The steady whine of the jet engines.

“No kidding,” Casey said. She recognized the woman she had interviewed in the hospital. What was her name? She had it in her notes.

Beside her at the console, Harmon shifted his leg, grunted. “That’ll teach me,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“Not to ski black-diamond runs in chowder.”

Casey nodded, kept her eyes on the video monitor. The camera panned back to the sleeping baby again, then blurred, before turning black. Harmon said, “Guy couldn’t turn off the camera.”

The next image showed glaring daylight. The baby was sitting up, smiling. A hand came into the frame, wiggling to get the baby’s attention. The man’s voice said, “Sarah … Sar-ah … Smile for Daddy. Smi-le …”

The baby smiled and made a gurgling sound.

“Cute kid,” Harmon said.

On the monitor, the man’s voice said, “How does it feel to be going to America, Sarah? Ready to see where your parents are from?”

The baby gurgled and waved her hands in the air, reaching for the camera.

The woman said something about everybody looking weird, and the lens panned up to her. The man said, “And what about you, Mom? Are you glad to be going home?”

“Oh, Tim,” she said, turning her head away. “Please.”

“Come on, Em. What are you thinking?”

The woman said, “Well, what I really want—what I have dreamed about for months—is a cheeseburger.”

“With Xu-xiang hot bean sauce?”

“God
no
. A cheeseburger,” she said, “with onions and tomatoes and lettuce and pickles and mayonnaise.”

Now the camera panned back down to the kid, who was tugging her foot into her mouth, slobbering over her toes.

“Taste good?” the man said, laughing. “Is that breakfast for you, Sarah? Not waiting for the stewardess on this flight?”

Abruptly, the wife jerked her head around, looking past the camera. “What was that?” she said in a worried tone.

“Take it easy, Em,” the man answered, still laughing.

Casey said, “Stop the tape.”

Harmon hit a key. The image froze on the wife’s anxious expression.

“Run it back five seconds,” Casey said.

The white frame counter appeared at the bottom of the screen. The tape ran backward, streaking jags again.

“Okay,” Casey said. “Now turn the sound up.”

The baby sucked its toes, the slobbering so loud, it almost sounded like a waterfall. The hum inside the cabin became a steady roar. “Taste good?” the man said, laughing very loudly,
his voice distorted. “Is that breakfast for you, Sarah? Not waiting for the stewardess on this flight?”

Casey tried to listen between the man’s sentences. To hear the sounds of the cabin, the soft murmur of other voices, rustle of fabric moving, the intermittent clink of knives and forks from the forward galley …

And now something else.

Another sound?

The wife’s head jerked around. “What was that?”

“Damn,” Casey said.

She couldn’t be sure. The roar of ambient cabin sound drowned out anything else. She leaned forward, straining to hear.

The man’s voice broke in, his laugh booming: “Take it easy, Em.”

The baby giggled again, a sharp earsplitting noise.

Casey was shaking her head in frustration. Was there a low-pitched rumble or not? Perhaps they should go back, and try to hear it again. She said, “Can you put this through an audio filter?”

The husband said, “We’re almost home, honey.”

“Oh my God,” Harmon said, staring at the tape.

On the monitor, everything seemed to be crazy angles. The baby slid forward on the mother’s lap; she grabbed at the kid, clutched it to her chest. The camera was shaking and twisting. Passengers in the background were yelling, grabbing the armrests, as the plane went into a steep descent.

Then the camera twisted again, and everybody seemed to sink in the seats, the mother slumping down under the G-force, her cheeks sagging, shoulders falling, baby crying. Then the man shouted, “What the hell?” and the wife rose into the air, restrained only by the seat belt.

Then the camera flew up in the air, and there was an abrupt, crunching sound, after which the image began to spiral rapidly. When the image became steady again, it showed
something white, with lines. Before she could register what it was, the camera moved and she saw an armrest from below, fingers gripping the pad. The camera had fallen in the aisle and was shooting straight up. The screams continued.

“My God,” Harmon said again.

The video image began to slide, gaining speed, moving past seat after seat. But it was going aft, she realized: the plane must be climbing again. Before she could get her bearings, the camera lifted into the air.

Weightless
, she thought. The plane must have reached the end of the climb, and now it was nosing over again, for a moment of weightlessness before—

The image crashed down, twisting and tumbling rapidly. There was a
thunk
! and she glimpsed a blurred gaping mouth, teeth. Then it was moving again, and apparently landed on a seat. A large shoe swung toward the lens, kicked it.

The image spun rapidly, settled again. It was back in the aisle, facing the rear of the plane. The briefly steady image was horrifying: arms and legs stuck out into the aisle from the rows of seats. People were screaming, clutching anything they could. The camera immediately began to slide again, this time forward.

The plane was in a dive.

The camera slid faster and faster, banging into a midships bulkhead, spinning so it was now facing forward. It raced toward a body lying in the aisle. An elderly Chinese woman looked up in time for the camera to strike her in the forehead, and then the camera flew into the air, tumbling crazily, and came down again.

There was a close view of something shiny, like a belt buckle, and then it was sliding forward once more, into the forward compartment, still going, banging into a woman’s shoe in the aisle, twisting, racing forward.

It went into the forward galley, where it lodged for a moment. A wine bottle rolled across the floor, banged into it, and the camera spun several times, then began to fall end over
end, the image flipping as the camera went all the way past the forward galley to the cockpit.

The cockpit door was open; she had a brief glimpse of sky through the flight deck windows, blue shoulders and a cap, and then with a crash the camera came to rest, giving a steady view of a uniform gray field. After a moment, she realized the camera had at this point lodged beneath the cockpit door, right where Casey had found it, and it was taping the carpet. There was nothing more to see, just the gray blur of carpet, but she could hear the alarms in the cockpit, the electronic warnings, and the voice reminders coming one after another, “Airspeed … Airspeed,” and “Stall … Stall.” More electronic warnings, excited voices shouting in Chinese.

“Stop the tape,” she said.

Harmon stopped it.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

She ran through the tape once more, and then did it in slow motion. But even in slow motion, she realized, much of the movement was an indistinguishable blur. She kept saying, “I can’t see, I can’t see what’s happening.”

Harmon, who had by now become accustomed to the sequence, said, “I can do an enhanced frame analysis for you.”

“What’s that?”

“I can use the computers to go in and interpolate frames where the movement is too fast.”

“Interpolate?”

“The computer looks at the first frame, and the frame following, and generates an intermediate frame between the two. It’s a point-mapping decision, basically. But it will slow down—”

“No,” she said. “I don’t want anything added by the computers. What else can you do?”

“I can double or triple the frames. In fast segments, it would give you a little jerkiness, but at least you’d be able to see. Here, look.” He went to one segment, where the camera was
tumbling through the air, then slowed it down. “Now here, all these frames are just a blur—it’s camera movement, not subject movement—but here. See this one frame here? You get a readable image.”

It showed a view looking back down the aircraft. Passengers falling over the seats, their arms and legs streaks from swift movement.

“So that’s a usable frame,” Harmon said. She saw what he was driving at. Even in rapid movement the camera was steady enough to create a useful image, every dozen frames or so.

“Okay,” she said, “do it.”

“We can do more,” he said. “We can send it out, and—”

She shook her head. “Under no circumstances does this tape leave this building,” she said.

“Okay.”

“I need you to run me two copies of this videotape,” she said. “And make sure you run it all the way to the end.”

The RAMS team was still swarming over the TransPacific aircraft in Hangar 5. Casey walked past to the next hangar in the line, and went inside. There, working in near silence in the cavernous space, Mary Ringer’s team was doing Interior Artifact Analysis.

Across the concrete floor, strips of orange tape nearly three hundred feet long marked the interior walls of the TransPacific N-22. Crosswise strips indicated the principal bulkheads; parallel strips were placed for each row of seats. Here and there, white flags stood in wooden blocks, indicating various critical points.

Six feet overhead, still more strips had been pulled taut, demarcating the ceiling and upper luggage compartments of the aircraft. The total effect was a ghostly orange outline of the dimensions of the passenger cabin.

Within this outline, five women, all psychologists and engineers, moved carefully and quietly. The women were placing articles of clothing, carry-on bags, cameras, children’s toys, and other personal objects on the floor. In some cases, thin blue tape ran from the object to some other location, indicating how the object had moved during the accident.

All around them on the hangar walls hung large, blowup photographs of the interior, taken on Monday. The IAA team worked in near silence, thoughtfully, referring to the photos and notes.

Interior Artifact Analysis was rarely done. It was a desperation effort, seldom yielding useful information. In the case of TPA 545, Ringer’s team had been brought in from the start, because the large number of injuries carried with it the threat of litigation. Passengers literally would not know what happened to them; assertions were often wild. IAA attempted to make sense of the movement of people and objects within the cabin. But it was a slow and difficult undertaking.

She saw Mary Ringer, a heavyset, gray-haired woman of fifty, near the aft section of the plane. “Mary,” she said. “Where are we on cameras?”

“I figured you’d want to know.” Mary consulted her notes. “We found nineteen cameras. Thirteen still and six video. Of the thirteen still cameras, five were broken, the film exposed. Two others had no film. The remaining six were developed, and three had shots, all taken before the incident. But we’re using the pictures to try and place passengers, because TransPacific still hasn’t provided a seating chart.”

“And videos?”

“Uh, let’s see …” She consulted her notes, sighing again. “Six video cameras, two with footage on board the aircraft, none during the incident. I heard about the video on television. I don’t know where that came from. Passenger must have carried it off at LAX.”

“Probably.”

“What about the flight data recorder? We really need it to—”

“You and everybody else,” Casey said. “I’m working on it.” She glanced around the aft compartment, laid out by tape. She saw the pilot’s cap lying on the concrete, in the corner. “Wasn’t there a name in that cap?”

“Yeah, on the inside,” Mary said. “It’s Zen Ching, or something like that. We got the label translated.”

“Who translated it?”

“Eileen Han, in Marder’s office. She reads and writes Mandarin, helps us out. Why?”

“I just had a question. Not important.” Casey headed for the door.

“Casey,” Mary said. “We need that flight recorder.”

“I know,” Casey said. “I know.”

She called Norma. “Who can translate Chinese for me?”

“You mean, besides Eileen?”

“Right. Besides her.” She felt she should keep this away from Marder’s office.