Final Approach (19 page)

Finally his narrative reached the fatal turn to the runway.

Timson stared at the wall for a few seconds before beginning, his voice slow and metered. “I was fairly close in, so I rolled into a tight right descending turn, planning to keep the turn going until I rolled back to wings-level on final. I was on the right airspeed. I figured the windshear we had gotten into before was several miles to the north, and moving east. Anyway, everything was fine until about two-thirds, maybe three-quarters of the way around. My … my memory's still fuzzy, but I remember trying to keep the nose up and the turn going, and it wasn't working. The nose was dropping and we were sinking fast. I had full power—I was trying to turn and pull up, but it wasn't responding.”

Timson's sad eyes fixed Joe's, an almost pleading look on his face, made even more pathetic by the bandages swathing his head. “I tried … tried to get her up, but something wasn't working.”

“You mean the controls weren't working?” Joe asked, the specter of control failure hovering over Timson's words.

“Well … I'm not sure I can say the controls weren't responding, but the plane wasn't responding. She kept sinking, the nose down.”

“Could it have been windshear, Captain?”

“Maybe. It kept dropping. I don't know. It's a fuzzy memory, a—I hate to say it—panicked memory, you know? You're trying everything you can, and it's not working. I had the stick controller full back, and the nose wasn't coming up fast enough.”

“But it
was
coming up?” Joe asked.

“Well … I don't remember how we hit the other airplane, but I seem to recall my nose was up then, so it must have been … a question, you know, of how fast she was coming up. I know it wasn't enough.”

“Captain, I have to ask you this: Could you have been demanding too much of the airplane in that turn to final?”

“I … don't follow you,” he said. Joe watched Timson's eyes for defensiveness or a flicker of anything. Someone fabricating a story would look away in response to a question like that. Timson did not.

“If there was no wind and no malfunction of any sort, would the Airbus 320 be able to make the turn to final that you were demanding of it with that airspeed? In other words, are you sure you were within the airplane's performance envelope?”

“Oh.” Timson grimaced and nodded, still engaging Joe eye-to-eye. “No question. I've flown turns like that before. She can turn even tighter than that. There was no … I mean, yes, she could have done it. I don't know why she didn't.”

Andy took over then, taking Timson through it once again.

“To recap, Captain,” Joe began at last, “you can't tell us whether the flight controls failed to follow your commands, or the aircraft was affected by windshear, or both?”

“I'm sorry … I can't. I only know she wasn't doing what I was telling her to do all the way down. All the way to … ah … impact.” Timson looked down and squinted his eyes closed for a second, shaking his head, his wife moving in to comfort him.

Joe had started to get up, but then sat down again. “One other thing. When you found the aircraft wasn't responding, who was at the controls?”

“I was flying.”

“All the way down?”

“Yes.”

They left it at that, Andy and Joe adjourning to a nearby family waiting room for a quick discussion.

“He seems to be trying hard to remember, I'll give him that,” Andy began. Joe nodded.

“But what does this give us, Andy?”

“Goddamn near nothing. The plane pitched down and started descending, and he doesn't know why. Could be windshear. Could be control malfunction. Could be radio interference.”

“How?” Joe's retort was too loud, and a bedraggled young mother holding a dirty two-year-old glanced up from her chair, startled by his voice. Joe apologized with a wave of his hand before continuing, his eyes wide open and flaring at Andy. “You've seen the parameters. You'd need a transmitter the size of a ship!”

“Do we really know how much wattage it would take for such a radio, Joe? Do we really know how big a container it would take? There are a lot of military radars in the world, and many of them are portable.”

Joe stared at Andy and shook his head. “I guess I see your point.”

“Too soon, Joe. We gotta deal with what we've got.”

“Which is nothing.”

“Well …”

Joe looked up at him suddenly. “I mean it. We've got nothing. Can you rule anything out based on what that poor guy just told us? I mean, not that it's his fault that he can't give us an answer.”

“You got your hopes too high, Joe.” Andy saw Joe nod finally, as he leaned forward in the chair, elbows on his knees, face cupped in his hands.

“You're right. The pressure is skewing me off center. I know better. What we have is simply preliminary.”

“We need the CVR. That's next.”

“No, the flight recorder is next. The readout should be in this morning. Maybe that can tell us something about the windshear question. Then if Barbara ever finds that damn CVR box …”

The two men stood in silence for a moment, Andy's thoughts drifting to the range of human emotions that went on daily in hospital waiting rooms: life and death and the sudden loneliness—emptiness—that people faced in such a place, the struggles to accept unacceptable realities, the silent screams and quiet desperation. How many times had the selection of dog-eared, ragged magazines been stared at by people who hadn't seen a word or picture? A hospital was where one went to face the realities more easily ignored in other places. And the reality faced by Joe Wallingford and Andy Wallace was that there might be no easy answer to the Kansas City disaster.

What, for God's sake, had happened out there on final approach?

8

Monday, October 15

The sullen, disheveled man who had paid for his sandwich and Coke with a twenty-dollar bill had worried her, even more so when he failed to scoop up the ten-dollar bill that was part of his change. To the 7-Eleven clerk, that was too much money to just forget—especially when she saw Jimmy Lansing, a city policeman she knew, approaching her counter. She liked Jimmy and wanted him to think of her as honest and honorable—as well as sexy.

“Dammit, Jimmy! That fellow left his money.” She was holding the bill and looking outside, hoping he'd offer to help.

The policeman glanced at the car pulling out of the lot and smiled at her as he laid down the exact change for a bag of potato chips. “I'll catch him and give it back, darlin'. Probably be a new experience for him—cop stops you to give
you
money. Don't see that every day.” He laughed and she looked properly pleased.

It took six blocks of Alexandria's main drag to catch up with the man, but the officer was grinning and looking forward to scaring—then pleasing—the man behind the wheel. He reached over and flipped on his rotating blue-and-white beacons, then hit a burst on the electronic siren just for good measure, his foot poised over the brake for the inevitable shocked slowdown before he pulled over.

Instead, the sound of squealing tires and massive acceleration just ahead caught him by surprise as the cream-colored Camaro burned rubber southbound. Officer Lansing hesitated a second in shock, then fell into established procedure, flooring his patrol cruiser in pursuit and radioing to his dispatcher to report a developing high-speed chase.

“That sumbitch is going to try to outrun me!” he said out loud as the speedometer passed 80, still accelerating. The Camaro was weaving now around slower traffic, and Lansing had to anticipate his car's reaction to do the same. The city limits were coming up fast, and once again he radioed, reporting position, direction, speed, and the request for state help.

A confused county sheriff's car on a different frequency had pulled up to a stop sign leading onto the highway as the Camaro flashed by.

“Thank God he looked left first and saw me coming!” His speed was pushing 100 now. If the sheriff's car had jumped in front, the results would've been fatal. Instead, the deputy pulled in a distant third and slammed
his
pedal to the floor.

“Thirty-four, we've notified the state, they're on the line and relaying. Keep after him and we'll let you know when to break off.”

“Thirty-four, ten-four.” His voice was an octave higher now, it seemed. Chases were always adrenaline pumpers, though this one was basically straight and level—a speed contest the Camaro seemed to be winning.

Lansing's car was topping out at 120, bouncing and trying to become airborne, the slick road threatening to release the tires to an uncertain, high-speed fate, and he backed off a little. The Camaro was having the same trouble, and Lansing had already watched him fishtail around one tight curve in the distance as he continued to pull away. There was yet another curve coming up, but the brake lights on the Camaro told the story—the driver had seen it in time and was around and off again, still pulling away.

Walter Calley had never taken a high-speed, high-performance driving course, but he knew he had a well-tuned fast car, and he was going to use everything it could give.

So they had found him! How wasn't important. Getting away was. He didn't know police procedure, but there would surely be someone waiting up ahead, a roadblock or whatever. But if he got off on a country road that they knew and he didn't, he'd be fried.

“Lord, Lord, Lord … what do I do now?” The words were yelled into the empty interior of his speeding vehicle as he watched the oncoming police car in his rearview mirror. The only answer, he concluded at last, was lying beneath the seat—his .357 magnum.

Calley slammed on the brakes, slowing below 40 before throwing the wheel to the left against an empty two-lane road, reversing course just like a Hollywood stunt driver—and nearly breaking his neck in the process. The Camaro staggered onto the shoulder, threatening to careen off into a deep ditch. Calley fished for the gun as the police car bore down on him. The cop wouldn't be expecting this, he thought, but where was the gun? “
Where the hell is that gun?
Oh God! Oh God, no!”

The police car was less than a quarter mile away now. The cop had spotted him and was braking, fishtailing as he decelerated, trying to figure out what was going on.

He felt the gun's handle, then lost it. Mere seconds left! He had to have time to aim. There wouldn't be a second chance!

Finally! The butt was there, he clawed at it, bending a fingernail back to the quick and not caring, finally grasping the weapon and coming up, opening the door, and leveling the barrel at the oncoming car at the very last minute, sighting through the crack in the door jamb where the oncoming cop couldn't see what he was trying to do.

The front and rear sights aligned with a point in midair in front of the police car as Calley forced himself to wait the few split seconds until the car was in the right position and still going fast enough.

He had already cocked the hammer. All that remained was a steady pull on the trigger, keeping the sights aligned, waiting for the narrow target to come into view.

“There!”

The trigger seemed to travel back for an eternity before the kick of the .357 shoved his hand up, the raised barrel of the lethal gun obscuring the sight of the police car, which was still traveling at over 60, a new squealing noise now betraying the instantaneous loss of the right front tire—which had been his target. As he had figured, the policeman had no time to do more than fight the car for control, fight to keep it out of the ditch, which was a battle he was losing. Calley jammed his accelerator back to the floor and flew past the out-of-control cruiser as it hit the shoulder of the highway, kicking up an enormous cloud of dust and debris as it went over the side and into the ditch. Only then did he see the county sheriff's car also in a four-wheel skid, trying to avoid hitting the police cruiser as he too decelerated.

There had been several crossroads about a mile back. If he could reach one of them before he was spotted again, he had a fighting chance. The road seemed clear behind as his speed shot up to 110 again, his eyes searching the highway back toward Alexandria for oncoming police units and the rearview mirror for signs of the sheriff's car. For some reason it wasn't back there. The deputy must have stopped to help his colleague.

Jamming the brakes to the floor again, he wrestled the car around the 90-degree turn to the side road, almost losing control, hoping against hope he could disappear around a bend and behind a grove of trees before anyone spotted the maneuver.

The road ahead was little more than a country lane, winding among fields and bayous, and he looked frantically for someplace to run, someplace to hide. Down a small draw and across a creek the open entrance to a hay field and a ramshackle barn with its roof half-gone seemed the best hope. He raced through the gate and bounced across a pasture right through the door of the structure, aiming for a compacted haystack in one corner and driving full bore into the middle of it.

Calley wrestled the door open, carrying the gun, and worked against time to finish covering the car with the moldy, rainsoaked hay, climbing then amidst creaking timbers to an upper loft where he could lie on his belly out of sight and watch the road. There were no farmhouses or farmers around he could see. Maybe, just maybe, his wild entrance had gone unobserved.

Thank God he had sent the tape. The old place seemed light years away now. There was little chance he would ever see it again. He knew that instinctively. Whoever was really after him—whoever was determined he wouldn't live to tell what he knew about Friday night, the crash, and what he had seen in his employer's plant in Leavenworth—wouldn't silence him as long as Forrest got the tape.

Unless, of course, Forrest was part of it too.