Crashers

 

 

 

 

 

 

CRASHERS

 

 

 

DANA HAYNES

 

 

 

 

 

 

MINOTAUR BOOKS
NEW YORK

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

 

CRASHERS
. Copyright © 2010 by Dana Haynes. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

 

www.stmartins.com

 

Design by: Philip Mazzone

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Haynes, Dana.

  Crashers / Dana Haynes.—1st ed.

        p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-312-59988-1 (hardcover edition)

  ISBN 978-0-312-67656-8 (first international trade paperback edition)

1. Aircraft accidents—Investigation—Fiction. 2. Government investigators—Fiction. 3. United States. National Transportation Safety Board—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.A84875C73 2010

  813'.54—dc22

2009046155

 

First Edition: July 2010

 

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To Don and Shirley Haynes.
Landy, Mary, Tyler, and I voted you Best Parents Ever.
The vote was 2–2 but a tie goes to the runner.

This book would never have been written if it hadn't been for Jonathan Harr's fabulous article “The Crash Detectives,” in the August 1996 issue of
The New Yorker
. Some works of journalism stay with you forever.

DENNIS SILVERMAN AND MEGHAN Danvers woke up almost simultaneously.

As the rest of Portland, Oregon, was getting ready for dinner or making the commute home, Dennis and Meghan rolled out of their beds. They had never met and would never meet. They were just two people waking up in Portland, Oregon, on a sunny and glorious late-afternoon Monday in March. Dennis, in the spendy, gentrified Pearl District, third floor of a confectionary factory turned into half-a-million-dollar condos. Meghan, in the Residence Inn at Portland International Airport.

Dennis had been so keyed up, he'd slept barely three hours. He started his day by scanning a half-dozen blogs on his homemade laptop, while he downed two Red Bulls and two Snickers, his traditional breakfast. MTV played in the background but he hardly noticed. He was so nervous, his hands shook. And every time he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, he grinned.

This was going to be a day. A hell of a day. A day people would remember. A day the media whores would recount on its anniversary and people would ask: where were you when you heard?

Meghan awoke to the sound of a travel alarm. She drank bottled water she'd set out the night before, then went to work on one
hundred crunches, one hundred push-ups with her bare feet up on one of the hotel-room chairs. CNN played in the background but she hardly noticed.

She showered, called her husband, James, in Reston, Virginia. They talked for exactly two minutes about nothing in particular. The baby was fine. The weather was crappy in Virginia. March 7, and there was black ice everywhere. Meghan pushed aside the hotel-room curtains and squinted into the lovely evening, the sun peeking over the West Hills, illuminating the radiant Mount Hood to the east, topped year-round in snow.

They said “I love you” and hung up.

Ninety minutes later, Meghan Danvers found herself standing in the shadow of her very own jet airliner. It wasn't “hers” hers, but she was the pilot and the senior officer, so, as far as she was concerned, the mammoth Vermeer 111 was all hers.

She breathed in the slightly salty tang of the Columbia River, just a little to the north, and studied the wispy hints of clouds that dotted the sky.
One octa,
she said to herself: only one eighth of the way toward being overcast.

“It's a looker.” Russ Kazmanski noted the boss's attention on the sky.

“Sweet,” Meghan said. She wore the navy Eisenhower jacket and matching trousers of CascadeAir. Tall and willow thin, the uniform hung nicely on her athletic frame. Russ wore the same, although he was short and paunchy, and she doubted that he had ever ironed his trousers.

“Almost no wind up top,” she said. “Day like this, must be what it's like flying in outer space.”

Russ squinted up at her, smiling. He knelt in the shadow of the landing gear of the colossal 111, about the size of a Boeing 737. Above their heads, the retractable gangplank of Terminal C4 began inching out, touching the skin of their four-engine wide-body. “You a NASA wannabe, Skip?”

“Damn straight.” Meghan canted her head, running her hand through her hair, which she wore tightly cropped. She was African American; Russ was white. It dawned on her that less than one generation ago, no white pilot—especially one eleven years her elder—would have called a black woman “Skip.” “Stewardess,” maybe.

He grinned. “No kidding?”

“I almost made the program, eight or nine years ago. I never told you that?”

“Nope.” The laptop at Russ's knee chimed. It sat on the cool, gritty tarmac, its infrared emitter aimed at a portal in the underbelly of the jet, ten feet directly over his head. The emitter, shaped like a penlight and shining in the invisible range, was attached to the laptop by a gooseneck flex tube. The underbelly portal was marked
GAMELAN
. “They screwed up, not taking you. You'd've been a hit with the Flash Gordon set.”

She smiled at the kneeling man. “Why, Kazmanski. That's the sweetest thing anyone's ever said to me.”

Russ made a fist and blew into it. It had hit fifty-two today, but with the sun going down, the temperature was getting ready to fall like a Warner Bros. anvil.

Russ Kazmanski had been the copilot with Meghan Danvers for a week now, running a three-legged pattern from PDX to LAX to Sea-Tac and back again. They were two days away from a four-day layover in Los Angeles, before starting the rotation all over. Russ had enjoyed his week of flying the right-hand seat with the skip and looked forward to staying on this assignment.

“What's the FDR say?” Meghan asked, and knelt, too, to get a better angle on the laptop screen linked by microwave to the flight data recorder. There was a solid, almost masculine quality to her movements, Russ noted. Like most pilots, she exuded confidence. Both kneeling, it was easier to speak over the sounds of the food-services truck that had just arrived.

“Nine hundred and seventy-one telltales are green-for-go,” he said, tapping the keyboard at his feet, which was reading information from the Gamelan flight data recorder. “And we got two yellow. No reds.”

“The yellows?” Meghan craned her neck to see from Russ's angle.

“Nothing major. The Gamelan says we need to have one of the nodes of the transponder looked at within the next seven thousand five hundred miles, or five cycles.” A cycle is one leg of a journey; a takeoff, flight, and landing. “Also, we got a little blip on the port elevator. The box says check it within seven cycles.”

Meghan shook her head. “That is the damnedest thing I've ever seen.”

“No shit.” Back in the day, checking out almost 2,000 systems would've taken a weekend. The new flight data recorder being released by Gamelan Industries made the preflight check in twenty minutes. Russ began disassembling the transmitter. “Let's hear it for technology. This gadget is made right here in Portland, you know.”

He closed the laptop, picked it up. His knees popped as he stood straight.

“Okay, I'm on the walkaround,” Meghan said. “You want to start on the preflight?”

“I'm on it.” He glanced around, admired the cerulean sky and the snowy slopes of Mount Hood. They were an hour away from sunset and the mountain glowed like it was radioactive. “I could retire here.”

“Tell me that when it's raining,” Meghan Danvers said, and began walking around her three-story-tall bird.

Dennis Silverman didn't bother hiding. He drove his Outback off the interstate and into the rest area. Harsh white lights on very tall poles illuminated the blacktop area. The only other vehicles in sight in were two double-long truck-and-trailer rigs, a handful of RVs and campers, and one dilapidated Volkswagen Bug with a couple of twenty-somethings in tie-dyed shirts and raggedly cuffed jeans, leaning on the hood and poring over a badly folded map of the Pacific Northwest. They looked like they'd just stepped out of 1972.
Proof of a fold in the time stream,
Dennis thought.

He was about equal distance between Portland and Salem, the state capital. A serrated copse of Douglas firs separated the rest area from I-5 but did a poor job of keeping down the drone of highway traffic. Dennis had come here many other times in the last few months. The first few weeks, he'd parked at one end and waited, then at the other end for a little while. He'd finally found exactly the spot he needed. He checked his waterproof, pressure-proof watch; he'd gone online twice that morning to make sure his watch was on the money. He had used a U.S. Navy Web site to confirm the time. There was very little room for error in this game.

Satisfied, he strolled to the rear of the Outback, opened the hatch, and pulled out a laptop computer and a device that looked like a long microphone attached to a short tripod. He returned to the front of his SUV and hiked himself up onto the hood, feeling the heat of the engine through his trousers. He set up the tripod on the hood next to him, attached it to the laptop via a USB port, popped the lid, and booted up. The twenty-somethings had stopped trying to read the map and were making out. The truck drivers cared for little that happened outside their cabs. If the RV crowd was paying attention, Dennis couldn't tell. And he wasn't all that concerned anyway.

A couple of squirrels were nosing around, three parking spaces away.
Dennis dug a Ziploc bag out of his REI ski jacket and sprinkled walnuts on the ground. Three more squirrels hopped in his direction.

As the laptop screen began to glow, he grinned and removed his wire-rimmed glasses, cleaning them on the untucked bottom of his
Farscape
T-shirt, which hung below the ski jacket. He'd thought about dressing up for the occasion, knowing something momentous was about to happen, even if no one else did. It's important to look businesslike when you're about to change history. But in the end he left the house with his one suit, one dress shirt, and one tie hanging forgotten from the hook on the bathroom door. He'd made it halfway to the rest stop before he remembered. He smiled, realizing that when he told the story of this day, he'd be wearing a really sharp suit.