Final Approach (26 page)

Bayne sat down, aware of the four highly paid people on guard and watching his every move, taking time to place his leather briefcase on the credenza with precision before picking up his telephone to pass a few assignments to his secretary, carefully avoiding for a moment any further acknowledgment of their presence. Swiveling around at last, he removed a yellow legal pad from the top drawer of the desk and unscrewed his fountain pen, placing an elegant pair of half-frame reading glasses on his nose before looking up. “As you know, yesterday we came under takeover attack. We'll get to that in a minute. First, I want us to get completely up to speed on the Kansas City accident. Proceed, Ron.”

As senior vice-president/operations, Ronald Putnam had no illusions about David Bayne. They had been professional and personal friends for years, but only Bayne was in charge at North America. In his presence, high corporate title and six-figure salaries were golden shackles binding one to David Bayne's will, and since Friday's crash in Kansas City, his will had concerned damage control.

“In a nutshell,” began Putnam, looking intently at his notes, “it looks like either direct sabotage, or some sort of accidental radio interference with the flight controls. Internal flight-control failure or pilot error are a distant third and fourth.”

“Based on?”

“Based on the latest information from our people participating in the investigation on the NTSB team.” Ron Putnam related the news of the electronic device found on the remains of the Airbus's flight controls the previous evening, and the impassioned claims of Wilkins's supporters to produce proof of sabotage in two days.

Bayne sat back for a second, digesting the information. “I had already twisted some tails in Washington to get them moving on the sabotage theory when it looked like the NTSB wasn't taking it seriously over the weekend, but I can't say even I really believed it. Now you're telling me this does seem to be a reality. Sabotage?”

Ron Putnam shifted uneasily in his chair and nodded as Bayne drummed his fingers on the desk, looking at the eastern end of the room at an original Alexander Calder painting on the wall—one he had acquired for a fraction of its value from the bankrupt Braniff International headquarters before anyone started keeping close track of the hapless airline's assets. North America had shed no tears for Braniff; its 1982 demise simply boosted their business. And bringing that artifact of fabled Braniff chairman Harding Lawrence into the First International Bancshares Building was a deeply satisfying move for Bayne. Two hundred years ago on this spot, he thought, any fierce Comanche warrior would have had the same sense of pride and accomplishment displaying the scalp of an enemy on his tent pole.

“Okay,” Bayne said suddenly, “sabotage, radio interference, or pilot error. Any more?”

“We've also got to consider equipment failure. You know, the flight controls suddenly failed, that sort of thing.”

“I could live with sabotage, and even equipment failure,” Bayne said, “as long as it was design failure and not our maintenance that's at fault. But we sure don't want radio vulnerability or pilot error.”

“We don't want any of it! David, we have eighteen other A320s and more on order,” Putnam pointed out. “If we start indicating that the electronic flight-control system is unreliable and prone to failures, whether by design or due to ground interference, we might end up with a mass grounding, not to mention a battle royal with Airbus.”

“Good point. What's the story on the pilots? What could they have screwed up?”

“Dick Timson, according to John Walters, is adamant that he did not fly the airplane into the ground, into windshear, or do anything else wrong. Timson says the aircraft pitched over as he approached the runway, despite his inputs. That's all anyone has to go on right now since our copilot, Don Leyhe, is in a coma, and the NTSB team cannot locate the cockpit voice recorder.”

“What? Why not?” Bayne had moved forward in his chair.

“It just doesn't seem to be there. They're still looking. Until they find it, all we have is Timson's word and memory.”

Bayne fixed him with an inquisitive gaze. “What's wrong with that? Isn't he trustworthy?”

“Far as I know, David. But memories can be rearranged by concussions, and Timson has a skull fracture. The only worry is this: the flight recorder seems to indicate—according to John Walters—that the controls could have been pushed forward, then pulled back before impact. Dick Timson's memory doesn't click with that, though, and no one can figure out why a sane man would do such a thing.”

“I remember Timson,” Bayne said somewhat absently. “Tough old bird, as I recall.”

“Yes sir, he is. Ex-Marine, all business, stern disciplinarian, and the best contract dismissal record in the business. If Dick fires someone, they stayed fired. He's been good for the pilots—keeps them in line, despite the constant grumbling from the pilots' union.”

“He was qualified, wasn't he? Timson, I mean.”

“Yes …”

“I hear hesitation. Why?”

“Well, on his first approach to the airport, Timson flew into windshear and almost hit the ground. They got as low as forty feet.”

David Bayne's fingers began drumming his desk. “How do you recommend we play this? Can we save face for public consumption?”

“Okay, one possibility, but any friends we have in Washington are not going to like it. You all heard that the control-tower tape was leaked and played nationwide yesterday? Okay, it shows the controller did
not
warn our crew about windshear. He used the word
gusty
, but that's it. We could try to pin this on the FAA as a major contributing cause for failing to give them adequate weather information. In fact, the flight recorder readings probably rule out windshear … but we're sandbagged any other way. If it's a problem with the flight-control system, what do we do with our other 320s? They could end up grounded for an extended period. But if it's pilot error or negligence—for instance, if Timson overbanked the airplane or somehow flew it wrong—then we're in big trouble because
he
is
us
. Even if its simple sabotage, we look weak and ineffectual in security. If we can at least dilute the blame by pulling the FAA into this, barring any sudden revelation we haven't considered, I think it's our best course of action.”

Bayne was looking toward the far wall and thinking it over. Putnam decided to push a bit harder. “The point is this: if we sit around here and don't aggressively sell our view that ATC is responsible or that they are contributorily negligent, we'll end up holding the bag all alone. Especially with this NTSB chairman, who is well known for blowing with the prevailing wind, and who's not terribly interested in attacking the FAA, which is a finger, so to speak, of the political hand that feeds him in this administration.”

“Okay,” Bayne began, “I agree we should try to get the FAA in the barrel with us if we can. Anyone violently object?”

No one objected.

Bayne shifted in his chair, preparing to get to his feet. “All of you, keep me informed constantly on this. I'll think about what we should do on the Hill, if anything. Mark, you want to stay a few minutes? Let's go over some options. There are at least a few arms I haven't twisted lately. The rest of you, general corporate staff meeting in the boardroom at ten
A.M.
Come prepared for battle. We lose this one, we're all out of a job.”

For David Bayne the day progressed in a whirlwind of calls and planning meetings, the time slipping by until Connie reminded the chairman that it was 4
P.M.
, and he was expected elsewhere. He responded by abruptly ending a meeting to exit for the elevators and the garage below, wheeling his Mercedes into downtown Dallas traffic a few minutes later under stormy gray skies and surprisingly mild temperatures, which had hovered in the sixties all day.

He was northbound through the toll plaza on the Dallas North Tollway almost before realizing it, his mind absorbed by planning strategy for the battle to come, but slowly shifting to more important things. There were, in fact, more important aspects of life than staying at the office, even in a crisis, and it had taken him most of his forty-eight years to realize that. But family matters and family meetings had now become the dominant priority on his calendar.

The next few weeks were likely to be hell. His airline was in deep trouble as an independent company, and he was going to have to maneuver and wheedle and scheme his way out of it if he wanted to stay in command. The investment bankers in New York who had placed him in control of North America were gathering like a war council in Manhattan even as he drove away from the office. He would join them there in the morning, leaving on the 6
A.M.
flight to Kennedy, and helicoptoring to downtown New York City.

It was a shame he couldn't have positioned the company to avoid this, but the crash had triggered it, dropping the stock price at a delicate moment. David Bayne knew why North America could be an attractive takeover, even if they weren't rich. Like the callous dismemberment of Eastern Airlines by Frank Lorenzo's Texas Air, North America could be broken up into profitable little airline operations and sold off. That—and the coveted order positions on new aircraft coming off the production line at Boeing, Airbus, and McDonnell Douglas years before they could be obtained otherwise—made North America a target.

He took the Royal Lane exit in far North Dallas, noticing for the first time that the cracked concrete walls and uncut grass of the exit were getting a bit seedy.

Once a railroad track had stretched along the same path. It was a branch line of the Cotton Belt, its engines filling the heavy air of Texas summer evenings with the mournful horns of half-empty passenger trains and the clatter of unused boxcars, the wheels of which used to crush pennies for him late at night. The ghostly procession still ran in his memory, rumbling endlessly through his childhood a few blocks from his family home, rattling and wailing south toward downtown Dallas, or north toward the switch with the main line at Addison.

David traveled south a few blocks on Preston to St. Mark's, the tough college prep school from which he had graduated with honors in 1960. His son, Sean, would already be battling his teammates in a football scrimmage his father had solemnly promised to watch.

There had been a time, he remembered with bitterness, when he hardly knew he even had kids. His daughter—now twenty-six, married, and gone—had slipped through his fingers, her life a mystery to him; his life, to her, a classic story of absentee parenting. David was determined not to make the same mistake with Sean.

He parked and walked to the edge of the field in a light raincoat, spotting the blond mop of hair as the boy took his helmet off for a second to adjust something.

“Dad! Hi!” Sean waved at him, his voice barely audible across the field, smiling as his father waved back.

David glanced back at the campus as the scrimmage resumed, letting his mind's eye see it as it had been when he wore the school uniform. He had enrolled his son two years ago when he was beginning the eighth grade. David, however, had entered from public school in the tenth grade—a scrappy kid of sixteen trailing a record of disciplinary trouble behind him from nearby Thomas Jefferson High School. He had been bored in public school, though he didn't know it at the time. His parents were neither particularly rich nor particularly brilliant, but they knew they had a problem with David, and someone suggested St. Mark's could straighten him out if they could afford it—which they managed somehow to do.

The memories always flooded back when he came to pick up Sean. Memories of taunting from the other boys, memories of instructors tougher and more demanding—and even abusive in their intellectual avarice—than most of the professors he'd encountered in college. Yet the institution had challenged him to a do-or-die contest of wills, the English-accented headmaster predicting quick failure. David had proven him wrong, improving steadily as he learned how to manipulate the school and best his tormentors—a collection of self-assured, snotty rich boys who sailed to classes each day in their Corvettes and Chevy 409s, exuding money and confidence, breezing through courses that cost David sleepless nights and endless weekends in the library. He had emerged determined to become rich and secure as fast as possible, with the resolve that he would never subject a child of his own to such a vicious environment of brutal competition. The first was achieved within a decade. The second crumbled to dust the day he was elected to his first corporate chairmanship and realized why he had been able to get there in the first place: the tempering St. Mark's had provided.

Few solid friendships had developed among his classmates. Instead, lasting alliances arose between strong competitors who had come to respect, though never quite trust, one another. They worked together in business, in civic affairs, and alumni activities, a type of elite among young Dallas business mavens—the second generation of homegrown successful businessmen where wildcatter oilmen had gone before.

“You see that tackle, Dad?” Sean had materialized by his side, and they talked over football techniques as they walked toward the car.

David headed the Mercedes toward Northwood Country Club, where they planned to work on Sean's golf swing.

“One of the guys told me the airline is under takeover attack, Dad.”

“He was right.”

“He claimed you'd be unemployed by the end of the week. Told me I'd be riding a bike to school and asking for a scholarship.”

“It's not that bad.” David chuckled. “I negotiated a large golden parachute when I came to North America. If a new owner throws me out, I could take at least four years to cry about it before even looking for a new position. And, with a takeover, the stock options alone could pay us several million. Don't lose any sleep over it.”