Airframe (3 page)

Down at the end of the street, she saw the hunched figure of her neighbor Amos, taking his snarly dog for a morning walk. Like Casey, Amos worked at the plant. She waved to him, and he waved back.

Casey was turning to go back inside to dress for work, when her eye caught a blue sedan parked across the street. There were two men inside. One was reading a newspaper; the other stared out the window. She paused: her neighbor Mrs. Alvarez had been robbed recently. Who were these men? They weren’t gang bangers; they were in their twenties with a clean-cut, vaguely military appearance.

Casey was thinking about taking down the license plate when her beeper went off, with an electronic squeal. She unclipped it from her shorts and read:

She sighed. Three stars signaled an urgent message: John Marder, who ran the factory, was calling an IRT meeting for 7
A.M.
in the War Room. That was a full hour before the regular
Morning Call; something was up. The final notation confirmed it, in plant slang—BTOYA.

Be There Or It’s Your Ass.

Rush hour traffic crept forward in the pale morning light. Casey twisted her rearview mirror, and leaned over to check her makeup. With her short dark hair, she was appealing in a tomboyish sort of way—long limbed and athletic. She played first base on the plant softball team. Men were comfortable around her; they treated her like a kid sister, which served her well at the plant.

In fact, Casey had had few problems there. She had grown up in the suburbs of Detroit, the only daughter of an editor at the Detroit
News
. Her two older brothers were both engineers at Ford. Her mother died when she was an infant, so she had been raised in a household of men. She had never been what her father used to call “a girly girl.”

After she graduated from Southern Illinois in journalism, Casey had followed her brothers to Ford. But she found writing press releases uninteresting, so she took advantage of the company’s continuing education program to get an MBA from Wayne State. Along the way, she married Jim, a Ford engineer, and had a child.

But Allison’s arrival had ended the marriage: confronted by diapers and feeding schedules, Jim started drinking, staying out late. Eventually they separated. When Jim announced he was moving to the West Coast to work for Toyota, she decided to move out, too. Casey wanted Allison to grow up seeing her father. She was tired of the politics at Ford, and the bleak Detroit winters. California offered a fresh start: she
imagined herself driving a convertible, living in a sunny house near the beach, with palm trees outside her window; she imagined her daughter growing up tanned and healthy.

Instead, she lived in Glendale, an hour and a half inland from the beach. Casey had indeed bought a convertible, but she never put the top down. And although the section of Glendale where they lived was charming, gang territories began only a few blocks away. Sometimes at night, while her daughter slept, she heard the faint pop of gunfire. Casey worried about Allison’s safety. She worried about her education in a school system where fifty languages were spoken. And she worried about the future, because the California economy was still depressed, jobs scarce. Jim had been out of work for two years now, since Toyota fired him for drinking. And Casey had survived wave after wave of layoffs at Norton, where production had slumped thanks to the global recession.

She had never imagined she would work for an aircraft company, but to her surprise she had found that her plain-spoken, midwestern pragmatism was perfectly suited to the culture of engineers that dominated the company. Jim considered her rigid and “by the book,” but her attention to detail had served her well at Norton, where she had for the last year been a vice-president of Quality Assurance.

She liked QA, even though the division had a nearly impossible mission. Norton Aircraft was divided into two great factions—production and engineering—which were perpetually at war. Quality Assurance stood uneasily between the two. QA was involved in all aspects of production; the division signed off every step of fabrication and assembly. When a problem emerged, QA was expected to get to the bottom of it. That rarely endeared them to mechanics on the line, or the engineers.

At the same time, QA was expected to deal with customer support problems. Customers were often unhappy with decisions they themselves had made, blaming Norton if the galleys they had ordered were in the wrong place, or if there were too
few toilets on the plane. It took patience and political skill to keep everybody happy and get the problems resolved. Casey, a born peacemaker, was especially good at this.

In return for walking a political tightrope, workers in QA had the run of the plant. As a vice-president, Casey was involved in every aspect of the company’s work; she had a lot of freedom and wide-ranging responsibility.

She knew her title was more impressive than the job she held; Norton Aircraft was awash in vice-presidents. Her division alone had four veeps, and competition among them was fierce. But now John Marder had just promoted her to liaison for the IRT. This was a position of considerable visibility—and it put her in line to head the division. Marder didn’t make such appointments casually. She knew he had a good reason for doing it.

She turned her Mustang convertible off the Golden State Freeway onto Empire Avenue, following the chain-link fence that marked the south perimeter of Burbank Airport. She headed toward the commercial complexes—Rockwell, Lockheed, and Norton Aircraft. From a distance, she could see the rows of hangars, each with the winged Norton logo painted above—

Her car phone rang.

“Casey? It’s Norma. You know about the meeting?”

Norma was her secretary. “I’m on my way,” she said. “What’s going on?”

“Nobody knows anything,” Norma said. “But it must be bad. Marder’s been screaming at the engineering heads, and he’s pushed up the IRT.”

John Marder was the chief operating officer at Norton. Marder had been program manager on the N-22, which meant he supervised the manufacture of that aircraft. He was a ruthless and occasionally reckless man, but he got results. Marder was also married to Charley Norton’s only daughter. In recent years, he’d had a lot to say about sales. That made Marder the
second most powerful man in the company after the president. It was Marder who had moved Casey up, and it was—

“… do with your assistant?” Norma said.

“My what?”

“Your new assistant. What do you want me to do with him? He’s waiting in your office. You haven’t forgotten?”

“Oh, right.” The truth was, she had forgotten. Some nephew of the Norton family was working his way through the divisions. Marder had assigned the kid to Casey, which meant she’d have to babysit him for the next six weeks. “What’s he like, Norma?”

“Well, he’s not drooling.”

“Norma.”

“He’s better than the last one.”

That wasn’t saying much: the last one had fallen off a wing in major join and had nearly electrocuted himself in radio rack. “How much better?”

“I’m looking at his resume,” Norma said. “Yale law school and a year at GM. But he’s been in Marketing for the last three months, and he doesn’t know anything about production. You’re going to have to start him from the beginning.”

“Right,” Casey said, sighing. Marder would expect her to bring him to the meeting. “Have the kid meet me in front of Administration in ten minutes. And make sure he doesn’t get lost, okay?”

“You want me to walk him down?”

“Yeah, you better.”

Casey hung up and glanced at her watch. Traffic was moving slowly. Still ten minutes to the plant. She drummed her fingers on the dashboard impatiently. What could the meeting be about? There might have been an accident, or a crash.

She turned on the radio to see if it was on the news. She got a talk station, a caller saying, “—not fair to make kids wear uniforms to school. It’s elitist and discriminatory—”

Casey pushed a button, changing the station.

“—trying to force their personal morality on the rest of us. I don’t believe a fetus is a human being—”

She pushed another button.

“—these media attacks are all coming from people who don’t like free speech—”

Where, she thought, is the
news?
Had an airplane crashed or not?

She had a sudden image of her father, reading a big stack of newspapers from all over the country every Sunday after church, muttering to himself, “That’s not the story,
that’s
not the story!” as he dropped the pages in an untidy heap around his living room chair. Of course, her father had been a print journalist, back in the 1960s. It was a different world now. Now, everything was on television. Television, and the mindless chatter on the radio.

Up ahead, she saw the main gate of the Norton plant. She clicked the radio off.

Norton Aircraft was one of the great names of American aviation. The company had been started by aviation pioneer Charley Norton in 1935; during World War II it made the legendary B-22 bomber, the P-27 Skycat fighter, and the C-12 transport for the Air Force. In recent years, Norton had weathered the hard times that had driven Lockheed out of the commercial transport business. Now it was one of just four companies that still built large aircraft for the global market. The others were Boeing in Seattle, McDonnell Douglas in Long Beach, and the European consortium Airbus in Toulouse.

She drove through acres of parking lots to Gate 7, pausing at the barrier while security checked her badge. As always, she felt a lift driving into the plant, with its three-shift energy, the yellow tugs hauling bins of parts. It wasn’t a factory so much as a small city, with its own hospital, newspaper, and police force. Sixty thousand people had worked here when she first came to the company. The recession had trimmed that to thirty
thousand, but the plant was still huge, covering sixteen square miles. Here they built the N-20, the narrow-body twinjet; the N-22, the widebody; and the KC-22, the Air Force fuel tanker. She could see the principal assembly buildings, each more than a mile in length.

She headed for the glass Administration building, in the center of the plant. Pulling into her parking space, she left the engine running. She saw a young man, looking collegiate in a sport coat and tie, khaki slacks, and penny loafers. The kid waved diffidently as she got out of the car.

“Bob Richman,” he said. “I’m your new assistant.” His handshake was polite, reserved. She couldn’t remember which side of the Norton family he was from, but she recognized the type. Plenty of money, divorced parents, an indifferent record at good schools, and an unshakable sense of entitlement.

“Casey Singleton,” she said. “Get in. We’re late.”

“Late,” Richman said, as he climbed into the car. “It’s not even seven.”

“First shift starts at six,” Casey said. “Most of us in QA work the factory schedule. Don’t they do that at GM?”

“I wouldn’t know,” he said. “I was in Legal.”

“Spend any time on the floor?”

“As little as possible.”

Casey sighed. It was going to be a long six weeks with this guy, she thought. “You’ve been over in Marketing so far?”

“Yeah, a few months.” He shrugged. “But selling isn’t really my thing.”

She drove south toward Building 64, the huge structure where the widebody was built. Casey said, “By the way, what do you drive?”

“A BMW,” Richman said.

“You might want to trade it in,” she said, “for an American car.”

“Why? It’s made here.”

“It’s
assembled
here,” she said. “It’s not made here. The value added’s overseas. The mechanics in the plant know the
difference; they’re all UAW. They don’t like to see a Beamer in the parking lot.”

Richman stared out the window. “What are you saying, something might happen to it?”

“Guaranteed,” she said. “These guys don’t screw around.”

“I’ll think about it,” Richman said. He suppressed a yawn. “Jesus, it’s early. What are we rushing to?”

“The IRT. It’s been pushed up to seven,” she said.

“IRT?”

“The Incident Review Team. Every time something happens to one of our planes, the IRT meets to figure out what happened, and what we should do about it.”

“How often do you meet?”

“Roughly every two months.”

“That often,” the kid said.

You’re going to have to start him from the beginning
.

“Actually,” Casey said, “two months is pretty infrequent. We have three thousand aircraft in revenue service around the world. With that many birds in the air, things happen. And we’re serious about customer support. So every morning we hold a conference call with the service reps around the world. They report everything that caused a dispatch delay the day before. Most of it’s minor stuff: a lav door jammed; a cockpit light failed. But we track it in QA, do a trend analysis, and pass that on to Product Support.”

“Uh-huh …” He sounded bored.

“Then,” Casey said, “once in a while, we hit a problem that warrants an IRT. It has to be serious, something that affects flight safety. Apparently we’ve got one today. If Marder’s pushed the meeting up to seven, you can bet it’s not a bird strike.”