Breaking Point (12 page)

“Oh, me of all people. Yes, Peter, I know you better than anyone. And … well, I don't want you to go.”

He snorted an unkind laugh. “This is my first crash as Investigator in Charge. It will get off to a bad start if I don't actually go to the crash.”

He added four ties, matching pocket squares. Peter and Janice had had this discussion before. Several times before. He could repeat her lines.

“I just think Pete needs you right now. Needs a father figure.”

That stopped him. “Kids who need a father figure don't have a father. He has one. And thanks to my laptop and camera, he'll see me. Every night. I'll be able to check his homework.”

“Will you be able to attend the Little League games?”

“Janice!” He closed the bag. “Look. This is my job. This is what I do.”

“You're a civilian engineer working for the navy. This isn't your job. This is … I don't know. This is an obsession with you.”

“Okay, that's it.” He inhaled, held it, exhaled. “Honey? I will call. I will come home on weekends. I will be a good father. Okay?”

She sat on the bed and chewed her right thumbnail.

Peter waited. “What?”

“I think we need to talk. About, you know. Us. Our family.”

Peter sat, too. He took her left hand. “Our family is fine. It is. Honey, I have to go.”

He stood, gathered his bags, and walked out of the bedroom, internally marveling at his wife's singular timing.

HELENA NATIONAL FOREST

The state police helicopter radioed in the unbelievable news: a midsize airliner, sans wings, was lying on its side amid the trees, and survivors appeared to be ambulatory.

Eight ambulances from Helena scrambled to the all-call, beginning their trek into the mountains. Sheriff's units screamed down Highway 287, heading east, lights casting ice and lava in the night sky. Paul McKinney, chief of police of Twin Pines, led the procession, steering wheel in one grip, radio in the other, arranging for on-duty personnel to head to the forest and off-duty personnel to replace them in town.

He set aside the car radio and used his cell phone to call Art Tibbits, mayor of Twin Pines. He checked the dashboard clock: nearly 1:00
A.M.
Friday.

“Hello?” Art's voice sounded groggy and thick. Paul McKinney explained the situation quickly.

“Damn!” The mayor sounded awake enough now. “Okay, thanks for calling. Rescue teams are likely to need a staging area, you think?”

The chief drove with one hand. “Makes sense.”

“Okay, I'll call, see about getting one of the closed businesses opened up.”

“Thanks, Art.” The chief hung up.

*   *   *

The three hunters who arrived first wanted to help, but Kiki had managed to get all survivors out of the fuselage. “Well, I could drive some folks into the city,” one of them offered.

“Look, this man is a doctor.” Kiki knelt in the leaves, Tommy's head in her lap. “If he were awake, he'd know if these people can travel. But I just don't know.”

The three friends stood, uncomfortable, wanting to help but not knowing how.

Kiki wiped tears from her eyes. “Can one of you guys check the skid path?”

The hunter just back from Afghanistan scratched his head. “Ma'am?”

“The path behind us. Before the plane skidded to a halt. We're missing the wings, which means we're missing the engines. And that's where the fuel was … is. I'm worried about a fire.”

One of his high-school buddies thumped him on the chest. “C'mon, dude.”

It was
something to do.
That's all they were asking.

DULLES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

Three of the Go-Team leaders lived or were working close enough to the D.C. area that it made sense to drive to Dulles and take an NTSB charter jet to Montana. Beth Mancini, the intergovernmental liaison, waited at the airport for Dr. Lakshmi Jain and Gene Whitney to arrive.

Dr. Lakshmi Jain was a New York City resident who, as luck would have it, was in Washington, D.C., testifying before a Health and Human Services subcommittee. Each of the essential subunits of the so-called Go-Team had a leader, and the leaders were on a rotating on-call list. Dr. Jain just happened to be at the top of the list for the pathology team.

She would oversee the postmortems and the injured. In a truly bad crash, some of the most vital evidence ends up inside the victims. It's precision work, and the tense, reserved Jain was perfect for the job.

*   *   *

Beth hopped into the hangar's bathroom to pee, checked herself in the mirror; as always, not satisfied with her weight. At thirty-five, she was just about willing to admit she'd never be a twig. She blew mousy brown hair away from her eyebrows in despair.

Stepping back out into the dark, her cell vibrated. The LED screen showed it was a few minutes shy of 3:30
A.M.
Eastern—then answered. “Hello?”

“Beth?”

She smiled. Despite the hour, Delevan Wildman always called the liaison before a major investigation.

“Hey, Mr. Wildman.”

“You got yourself good crashers, girl?” A sixty-eight-year-old black man from Tennessee, Delevan Wildman could get away with
girl
.

“Yes, sir. We'll do you proud.”

He chuckled, a low, musical sound. “That's what I like to hear. How many souls?”

“Twenty-six. Remarkably low. It's a Claremont VLE, seats sixty-five.”

“Okay. Peter Kim is IIC.”

Standing outside the hangar, she watched her pilot do a walk-around of the Citation X. “He sure is.”

“That man is as smart as you and as tough as me. He's tenacious and will follow the evidence where it leads. But in my life, I've never met a fella more full of himself and lacking in what you young folks call
the human touch.
”

In the distance, she saw a very large man step out of a taxi, then haul out a suitcase and a backpack. “Yes, sir,” Beth said. “He can be a handful.”

“This is his first crack as Investigator in Charge. Don't rightly see how that's going to make him any sunnier.”

She smiled. “I'll handle him, sir. I'll keep the locals out of his hair and the media at a safe distance. I'll make him look good.”

She heard the low, lyrical laugh again. “My money's on you, girl. I'll back you up.”

“Thank you, sir.” She recognized the big man approaching her as Gene Whitney, one of her section chiefs.

“You have the passenger manifest yet?” Del asked.

“No.” Her annoyance crept into her voice. “Polestar is having trouble with their computers. I'm hoping to get the manifest before we reach Montana.”

“All right, then. Good luck out there.”

Beth said, “I'll take it. Bye,” and hung up. She reached out to shake Gene's hand but he was busy getting Tums out of his pocket. She didn't know him well but others described him as dour and not terribly communicative. Good at his job, though. This would be their first crash together.

“Gene Whitney. You're Beth. Hi.” Now he shook her hand. He winced and chewed four of the stomach pills. “Let me guess: Del Wildman's famous pep talk?”

She said, “Yeah. He's worried about Peter Kim being IIC.”

Gene nodded. “Me, too. The problem with being a really smart prick is, end of the day, you're still a prick.”

*   *   *

Gene Whitney was a former military and commercial pilot. His job would be to study the flight crew, the grounds crew, the air traffic control crew, and to see if anyone had screwed up.

Not that many people chose to lie to Gene Whitney. The muscles that had earned him a full-ride football scholarship to the University of Kansas had long ago turned into fat, but he still looked disproportionately large, as if somehow he took up more space than his three-dimensional body should. He also wasn't that friendly. He lived alone, didn't pal around with anyone, and worked hard to keep it that way. He would fly to Montana, like the rest of the team leaders, do his damn job, write his damn report, and fly back home. Go-Teams almost always generate after-work cliques: the poker players, the golfers, the people who were in a foreign state or country and wanted to turn off-hours into minivacations. Gene Whitney wasn't those folks. He'd do his job, then he'd head home.

*   *   *

Beth Mancini called her aide, who would be pulling an all-nighter getting the teams ready, and asked him to check on an ETA for the passenger manifest.

*   *   *

Peter Kim had cut a deal with his employer, the U.S. Navy: he'd be ferried to the site of the crash on board an F-15E Strike Eagle and would be the first team member on site.

Jack Goodspeed, the airframe team leader, flew commercial out of Salt Lake City. He'd arrive second.

Teresa Santiago caught a flight north from Albuquerque. It would be Teresa's job to supervise the flight data recorder, one of two “black boxes” on board the Claremont VLE.

Hector Villareal, who'd focus on the cockpit voice recorder, was coming in from LAX.

And Reuben Chaykin, powerplant-team leader, was standing in a line at O'Hare as Beth, Lakshmi, and Gene lifted off the tarmac at Dulles.

CRASH SITE

Kiki knelt on the forest floor, Tommy's head in her lap, his hair spiky with blood. She held Isaiah Grey's lifeless hand in hers. One of the hunters had brought her a bottled water, the lid pried off. She wiped her cheeks with a sleeve bunched up into her fist. She poured water onto the sleeve in her fist and began cleaning the blood off Tommy's skull.

*   *   *

The three hunting buddies circled the fuselage and immediately saw the glow of fire in the distance. About a mile away, a straight line of fire moved toward them on a highway of fuel. Trees had caught fire, too. The friends hauled ass back to their Jeep, retrieved the shovels they had used to put out their campfire the dusk before, and ran back toward the blaze, to create a firebreak of freshly dug soil.

They then jogged back to where Kiki was. “You called it, ma'am,” Justin Oakes said. “It looks like you left the first engine about a mile east, and it's on fire. Fire's more or less heading in a straight line. Stinks of gasoline. We built a firebreak between us and the second wing.”

Tommy's now-clean head rested in Kiki's lap. He had stopped bleeding. One of the hunters picked up a piece of thermoformed plastic the size of a Frisbee.

Kiki said, “Hey? Can you put that down, please?”

The hunter blinked, then set the thing down where he'd found it. “What is it?”

Kiki shrugged. “I don't know. It doesn't matter. A crash team is coming. Every piece of this plane, where it landed, its condition: it all means something.”

The guys looked at one another. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. It's what we do.” She patted Tommy's shoulder gently. She took Isaiah's limp hand again and kissed his knuckles.

*   *   *

The ambos couldn't drive into the forest so the EMTs grabbed med kits and stretchers and hiked in the last half mile. The going was only slightly uphill and relatively easy for the athletic crews.

The first EMT on the scene radioed back to Helena at 2:15
A.M.
, “Get a fire crew up here. We got smoke in the air.”

*   *   *

Tommy wove in and out of consciousness. At one point, as the shouting paramedics arrived, he opened his eyes and said, “Kiki?”

“Hey.”

“We in trouble?”

“Shh. No, baby.” She rubbed her knuckles over his cheek. “We're safe.”

“Okay.” His eyes fluttered. “Don't tell Mom…”

Kiki surprised herself by releasing a short, tight little laugh. She felt the laugh turn to a sob but also felt a strange gratitude that Tommy, even in delirium, could make her laugh.

HELENA REGIONAL

At better than sixteen hundred miles per hour, Peter Kim's Strike Eagle chewed up the distance nearing northwest. The gunship hit Montana airspace around two in the morning and the pilot was given permission to land at Helena Regional.

*   *   *

“You're NTSB?”

Peter Kim walked from the Strike Eagle to a sedan that awaited him. A tall woman in jeans, dusty boots, and a Montana State sweatshirt stood by the sedan. Her black hair was pulled back into a complicated braid and she wore no makeup.

Peter wore an air force jumpsuit and carried a suit bag over his left shoulder. He checked his TAG Heuer: it was going on 2:30
A.M.
mountain.

“Yes.”

The woman opened the back door of the sedan and Peter tossed both of his bags in. “Peter Kim, Investigator in Charge. I'll be running the show.”

“Adrienne Starbird,” she said. “Operations manager for Helena Regional. I'm your liaison to the airport.”

He shook her proffered hand. “That's a peculiar name.” He climbed into the sedan and closed the door.

Adrienne Starbird paused, whispered, “Oooookay…” and circled the car. Then she climbed in.

“I can take you to the site.”

“I need to change first. Take me to the terminal.”

She shrugged, did as he asked.

*   *   *

Five minutes later, Peter Kim emerged from the men's room in a natty Martin Gordon suit, white shirt, and a narrow tie, raincoat over his arm. Adrienne had been expecting an NTSB windbreaker and baseball cap.

They returned to her vehicle and she drove around the terminal building.

“What's the situation on the ground?”

“State police have a helo in the vicinity. They report an airliner is down in the Helena State Forest. It apparently landed on its side and sheared off both wings. They report a forest fire, too. And they can see survivors. First responders are at the scene or should be any minute.” She checked the dashboard clock to confirm that. “It's a Claremont VLE.”