Airframe (2 page)

"Okay," Greene said. "I'm on my way."

He grabbed his badge and his cell phone and went out the door. As he passed Karen, the receptionist, he said, "Have we got anybody at the international terminal?"

"Kevin's there."

"Beep him," Greene said. 'Tell him to get on TPA 545, inbound Hong Kong, landing in fifteen.

Tell him to stay at the gate—and don't let the flight crew leave."

"Got it," she said, reaching for the phone.

Greene roared down Sepulveda Boulevard toward the airport. Just before the highway ran beneath the runway, he looked up and saw the big Transpacific Airlines widebody, identifiable by its bright yellow tail insignia, taxiing toward the gate. Transpacific was a Hong Kong-based charter carrier. Most of the problems the FAA had with foreign airlines occurred with charters.

Many were low-budget operators that didn't match the rigorous safety standards of the scheduled carriers. But Transpacific had an excellent reputation.

At least the bird was on the ground, Greene thought. And he couldn't see any structural damage to the widebody. The plane was an N-22, built by Norton Aircraft in Burbank. The plane had been in revenue service five years, with an enviable dispatch and safety record.

Greene stepped on the gas and rushed into the tunnel, passing beneath the giant aircraft.

He sprinted through the international building. Through the windows, he saw the Transpacific 8

jet pulled up to the gate, and the ambulances lined up on the concrete below. The first of them was already driving out, its siren whining.

Greene came to the gate, flashed his badge, and ran down the ramp. Passengers were disembarking, pale and frightened. Many limped, their clothes torn and bloody. On each side of die ramp, paramedics clustered around the injured.

As he neared the plane, the nauseating odor of vomit grew stronger. A frightened TransPac stewardess pushed him back at the door, chartering at him rapidly in Chinese. He showed her his badge and said, "FAA! Official business! FAA!" The stewardess stepped back, and Greene slid past a mother clutching an infant and stepped into the plane.

He looked at the interior, and stopped. "Oh my God," he said softly. "What happened to this plane?"

GLENDALE, CALIFORNIA

6:00 A.M.

"Mom? Who do you like better, Mickey Mouse or Minnie Mouse?"

Standing in the kitchen of her bungalow, still wearing her jogging shorts from her five-mile morning run, Casey Singleton finished making a tuna sandwich and put it in her daughter's lunch box. Singleton was thirty-six years old, a vice-president at Norton Aircraft in Burbank. Her daughter sat at the breakfast table, eating cereal.

"Well?" Allison said. "Who do you like better, Mickey Mouse or Minnie Mouse?' She was seven, and she ranked everything.

"I like them both," Casey said.

"I know, Mom," Allison said, exasperated. "But who do you like better?'

"Minnie."

"Me, too," she said, pushing the carton away.

Casey put a banana and a thermos of juice in the lunch box, closed the lid. "Finish eating, Allison, we have to get ready."

"What's quart?"

"Quart? It's a measure of liquid."

"No, Mom, Qua-urt" she said.

Casey looked over and saw that her daughter had picked up her new laminated plant ID

badge, which had Casey's picture, and beneath that C. SINGLETON and then in large blue letters, QA/IRT.

"What's Qua-urt

"It's my new job at the plant. I'm the Quality Assurance rep on the Incident Review Team."

"Are you still making airplanes?" Ever since the divorce Allison had been extremely attentive to change. Even a minor alteration in Casey's hairstyle prompted repeated discussions, the 9

subject brought up again and again, over many days. So it wasn't surprising she had noticed the new badge.

"Yes, Allie," she said, "I'm still making airplanes. Everything's the same. I just got a promotion."

"Are you still a BUM?" she said.

Allison had been delighted, the year before, to learn that Casey was a Business Unit Manager, a BUM. "Mom's a bum," she'd tell her friends' parents, to great effect.

"No, Allie. Now get your shoes on. Your dad'll be picking you up any minute."

"No, he won't," Allison said. "Dad's always late. What's your promotion?"

Casey bent over and began pulling on her daughter's sneakers. "Well," she said, "I still work at QA, but I don't check the planes in the factory any more. I check them after they leave the plant."

'To make sure they fly?"

"Yes, honey. We check them and fix any problems."

"They better fly," Allison said, "or else they'll crash!" She began to laugh. "They'll all fall out of the sky! And hit everybody in their houses, right while they're eating their cereal! That wouldn't be too good, would it, Mom?"

Casey laughed with her. "No, that wouldn't be good at all. The people at the plant would be very upset." She finished tying the laces, swung her daughter's feet away. "Now where's your sweatshirt?"

"I don't need it."

"Allison—"

"Mom, it's not even cold!"

"It may be cold later in the week. Get your sweatshirt, please."

She heard a horn honk on the street outside, saw Jim's black Lexus in front of the house. Jim was behind the wheel, smoking a cigarette. He was wearing a jacket and tie. Perhaps he had a job interview, she thought.

Allison stomped around her room, banging drawers. She came back looking unhappy, the sweatshirt hanging from the comer of her backpack. "How come you're always so tense when Dad picks me up?"

Casey opened the door, and they walked to the car in the hazy morning sunshine. Allison cried, "Hi, Daddy!" and broke into a run. Jim waved back, with a boozy grin.

Casey walked over to Jim's window. "No smoking with Allison in the car, right?"

Jim stared at her sullenly. "Good morning to you, too." His voice was raspy. He looked hung over, his face puffy and sallow.

"We had an agreement about smoking around our daughter, Jim."

"Do you see me smoking?"

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"I'm just saying."

"And you've said it before, Katherine," he said. "I've heard it a million times. For Christ's sake."

Casey sighed. She was determined not to fight in front of Allison. The therapist had said that was the reason Allison had begun stuttering. The stuttering was better now, and Casey always made an effort not to argue with Jim, even though he didn't reciprocate. On the contrary: he seemed to take special pleasure in making every contact as difficult as possible.

"Okay," Casey said, forcing a smile. "See you Sunday."

Their arrangement was that Allison stayed with her father one week a month, leaving Monday and returning the following Sunday.

"Sunday." Jim nodded curtly. "Same as always."

"Sunday at six."

"Oh, Christ."

"I'm just checking, Jim."

"No, you're not. You're controlling, the way you always do — "

"Jim," she said. "Please. Let's not"

"Fine with me," he snapped.

She bent over. "Bye, Allie."

Allison said, "Bye, Mom," but her eyes were already distant, her voice cool; she had transferred her allegiance to her father, even before her seat belt was fastened. Then Jim stepped on the gas, and the Lexus drove away, leaving her standing there on the sidewalk. The car rounded the comer, and was gone.

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 die 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 undipped 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.

BURBANK AIRPORT

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6:32 A.M.

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.

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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—