Final Approach (11 page)

She had watched Joe Wallingford with growing admiration as he assembled the staffers and went over a short, concise list of priorities and assignments. Each staff member was to head up one or another of the investigatory groups, but there were immediate things to be done, and areas to emphasize.

“As fast as possible,” Joe was saying to one of them, “I want the flight and voice recorders out of the Airbus. We have allegations of sabotage of an airliner with a sophisticated electronic flight-control system, and most of you know there have already been worries that strong electronic signals might interfere with such a control system. The FAA has issued guidelines to keep the Airbus 320 a minimum distance away from powerful microwave transmitters and other such radio sources, so we'll need all the information we can get about that, as well as about the so-called mystery car somebody saw leaving the cargo area.”

“God, Joe, is sabotage really a possibility?” Barbara Rawlson, chairman of the systems group, was shaking her head and looking incredulous.

“Who knows, Barb. Let's just make sure we account for the entire flight-control system quickly. Were there any strange devices? Could anyone have tampered with it? That sort of thing.”

Joe looked at some notes on a steno pad before continuing. “Now, of course we've also got the horrifying possibility that something went wrong in the side-stick controls or the flight-control computers, and the plane crashed itself.”

“Why horrifying, Joe?” Susan asked. It was the first question she had managed, and Joe seemed slightly startled, though pleased.

“Well, the Airbus is very sensitive to this type of problem. They went way out ahead of everyone with this new electronic-control technology in the 320, and they would be horrified themselves if anyone started seriously thinking that with so much redundancy and so many backups, the flight-control system could malfunction. They insist it can't happen, and so far we've no reason to believe otherwise.”

“Until now.”

“Well, maybe until now. Maybe not,” Joe said, looking Susan in the eye long enough so that she found herself averting her gaze, a reaction which puzzled her. He was in his element here, she knew, and she was only learning. Perhaps that was it, but it made her feel insecure and vulnerable, and she had spent her professional life fighting vulnerability.

“Okay,” Joe continued, turning back to Barbara, “we have windshear, possible sabotage, possible flight-control malfunction, and as always, possible human error of some sort, which is Andy's bailiwick. Andy, what's the status of the crew?”

Andy Wallace had functioned as Joe's right-hand man many times before, even when he held an equal position to the other staff members on field investigations. Joe could always rely on him. No political backstabbing, and no laziness. Andy was always ahead of the game.

“The captain of the Airbus is named Richard Timson, chief pilot for North America and a staff vice-president. He survived with a bad concussion and some internal injuries, plus a damaged hand. He's in serious condition, but he'll make it. The doctors tell me it will be tomorrow at the earliest before he can talk to us.”

“How about the copilot?”

“Fighting for his life. Massive cranial damage.”

They covered several other items before Joe tapped the table with his pen and gave them all an exceptionally serious look. “Warning: I expect and demand that each and every one of you, and those people from the airline, FAA, ALPA, Airbus, and so on who are assigned to your groups, go absolutely by the book when around the wreckage. That means gloves at all times, hard hats when appropriate, and absolutely no chances taken.
You
may not mind slicing your hand open, but consider that the piece of metal which bites you may carry blood cells from an accident victim infected with AIDS, or some other disease. I will not tolerate any risk taking. Understood?” Joe looked sequentially at everyone but Susan, each staff member nodding in turn.

“Okay. It's now 9:10
A.M.
The main organizational meeting is at 2
P.M.
, and Susan has agreed that we'll hold a preliminary press briefing at noon in the main ballroom. Keep your phone charged and on, keep me informed, especially about the rescue out there, and let's get moving. We've got a major puzzle to solve, and I guarantee political pressure will be flowing in on this one.”

Joe stood up and Susan caught his arm. “Political pressure?”

He smiled at her and nodded. “Through experience I've learned that unless we find a clear-cut reason, all the parties are going to start jockeying for self-protective positions. Airbus will hope for pilot error or windshear, the airline will vote for anything that doesn't reflect on them, and everyone else will be protecting their own turf. It always happens, and it does nothing but interfere with what we're here to do.”

“Which is find out what happened.”

“Exactly. Not lay the blame.”

For her would-be rescuers, noon came rapidly, but for Linda Ellis, time had stretched into an agonizing eternity, a purgatory of sorts, though more light had fallen on them now. Jill's mother was dead. Linda had never seen her, but her husband had at some point checked for his wife's pulse and realized there wasn't one any longer. His anguished shriek was even louder than his previous noisy protests and oaths of frustration. His chest was apparently pinned so firmly that he could move even less than Linda. She felt for him, but she had long since decided that when they got out of this and recovered, she was going to tell him what she thought of his whining behavior through the long hours.

Those thoughts now evaporated as his sobbing touched her deeply; the tragedy that had overtaken his poor family was completely unbearable.

Jill was still alive. God only knew how, Linda thought. Her blood loss must have been stemmed by some sort of clotting or cauterizing action, but logic dictated that she shouldn't have lasted twenty minutes with such severe injuries. Linda had given her another morphine shot, struggling against her own rising agony to turn far enough to reach her little arm. Her brother, Jimmy, was easier—he could hold out his arm for Linda to reach. She had sung to them for awhile earlier, until she too drifted off again, a tendency she was trying to fight now that their rescuers had almost broken through. There were several more metal bars in front of her, but already a doctor was wiggling his way toward them, and at long last he was beside her, his face next to her ear as he assessed little Jill's condition, deciding that they would have to do some emergency surgery right there before moving her an inch.

The doctor told Linda they would cut the bar impaling her leg on both ends and pull her out in a crane-mounted sling with the thing still in place, then remove it in the hospital. Her neck hurt too, but she wiggled fingers and toes on command, and the doctor seemed relieved.

“In ten minutes or so, Linda. In ten minutes. It's just about over.” She felt herself beginning to believe him. For so many hours they had lied gentle, desperate lies to her, but now maybe she could believe they'd make it. There was open gray sky above them now, and plenty of warm air, and even an intravenous needle in her arm she had barely noticed.

The North America air cargo manager had barely begun to accept the scope of the disaster, which had isolated his cargo ramp overnight. All the taxiways leading to the one operational runway were covered with debris from the shattered North America flights. No airplanes could get in or out, which meant he also had to deal with the continued unwanted presence of a gigantic Air Force cargo plane in front of his building. The morning, in other words, had been doubly bizarre even before the phone rang. Now there was a high-ranking military commander on the other end asking for the commander of the cargo jet outside, as if military aircraft didn't have communication radios. Hugh Billingsly wrote down the telephone number and headed outside. He would have loved to examine a C-5, the free world's largest airplane, but the Air Force people who had materialized the previous evening to load and guard the airplane were in no mood to be giving tours. One of the tired and humorless young air policemen fingered his M-16 and watched Billingsly carefully while his partner delivered the message to the cockpit some four stories above the concrete. No one was being allowed within 100 feet of the giant transport.

Within five minutes a thoroughly fatigued young Air Force major appeared in the doorway, returning with Billingsly to use his telephone. The major stopped dialing suddenly and looked at his host apologetically. “I, uh, wonder if you could step outside the office for a few minutes, sir?”

It was his office, but Billingsly complied, even more puzzled.

“Major Archer here in Kansas City, Colonel.” The number had finally answered. No identification of where it was, or what it was, other than somewhere in the Washington, D.C., area. The slip of paper had said “Call Colonel Wallace.”

“You're blockaded, they tell me,” the colonel said.

“Yes sir. The crash left debris spread over both taxiways and Runway 19 out here. I've been after the airport manager almost hourly over one of the radios to get the runway cleared off so we can taxi by, but he can't move until the NTSB gives the okay, and I'm told they may take days.”

“That load must get out of there, Major. It's due in Kwajalein, and it's a security risk as long as it sits at a civilian airport.”

“Sir, I
know
that.” He had been in touch with his command structure, MAC's 22nd Air Force command post at Travis Air Force Base in California, all night. Wasn't the man aware of that?

“Major, of course I don't want you to endanger your airplane, but we have to get that load out of there in the next few hours.”

“Sir, I'll coordinate with my leaders again at Travis, and they can talk to headquarters at Scott, but—”

“Major, we're the DOD customer, and the customer is telling you to get your ass in gear and find a way out of there. There are reasons for forcing this issue that I simply cannot go into over a nonsecure line. Do it safely, but do it. Is that clear?”

“Would the Colonel please tell me how?”

“Dammit, you're in command there. Use your head, use creativity, diplomacy, affrontery; beg, demand, or cajole, whatever it takes. Just get airborne.” The colonel chuckled sarcastically. “Hell, throw your weight around. You've got 750,000 pounds of it.”

“Yes
sir
, Colonel, sir. And how high would you like me to jump?” The reply was a bone-weary attempt at sarcasm in answer to the colonel's weak attempt at humor.

“All the way to Kwajalein.”

The colonel ended the call, and Major Archer stood there shaking his head in disbelief. How the hell was one lowly Air Force pilot going to force the NTSB and the manager of a major commercial airport to do
his
bidding? And why the hell was it so urgent? If there was a war going on, he wasn't aware of it. Whatever was in the hold of his airplane—whatever the huge, self-propelled vehicle with the oversized rectangular body contained—the contractor's people and the government officials responsible for it obviously wanted it out of Kansas City in a hurry, and with no fanfare. He could see their tactics clearly. If any feathers got ruffled in the process of forcing their will on Kansas City International, it would be the aircraft commander's fault. His fault.

Yet, he had his orders.

Joe watched the media people coalesce into an audience the moment Dr. Kelly mounted the platform at one end of the ballroom, a forest of cameras and microphones arrayed before her. They had talked urgently for ten minutes about what could and could not be said at this point. Joe knew she was nervous and trying not to show it, but she could handle it, he felt sure. That was the most valuable service a Board member could perform in the field: keeping the media focus off the staff.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, I'm Dr. Susan Kelly, one of the five Board members of the National Transportation Safety Board, and this is a very brief, preliminary news conference to acquaint you with our procedures and ground rules, and what we will be doing in probing the facts of this tragedy.”

The media ranks had grown by 2
P.M.
to nearly eighty, and it was a bit frightening. Susan worked on controlling the speed of her delivery, the tendency to rush being her lifelong reaction to public speaking.

“First, we are not here to make any quick determination of cause. We will examine wreckage, send some things for analysis, eventually authorize the removal and cleanup of parts now closing the north-south runway, and interview witnesses, but under no circumstances will any of us speculate about what might have happened. As you probably know, it could take upward of a year before we release any formal findings. The National Transportation Safety Board has a congressional mandate to find the probable cause in each air accident, and that is for one purpose: to prevent whatever happened from happening again. We are
not
here to assess blame.”

“So what do you have so far? Could this have been sabotage?” The voice came from a balding print reporter in the forward row.

“Well, all we have are the same basics that
you
have. We just got here a few hours ago. We will be investigating engines, structures, systems, operations, air traffic control, weather, human factors, maintenance and records, and any other aspect deemed important. These are the principal group divisions.”

A hand shot up in the middle of the throng, and Susan pointed to the man.

“Dr. Kelly, you mentioned air traffic control—is it possible this was a controller error?”

Susan looked at the crowded room, working to suppress butterflies. One false step—one false statement—and she would make herself look idiotic in the eyes of the professional staff. She was aware of Joe Wallingford hovering off to one side. He was Mr. NTSB among the staff, but she was the new kid in the executive suite, and winging it, despite all the preparation.