Final Approach (6 page)

“I'm … I'm so … sorry. I'm so sorry! I tried … I …”

Mark Weiss looked up at Pete with an expression beyond description—beyond anguish—the broken remains of something small and plastic in his hands, a scarred and twisted model of the F-15 fighter bearing a hand-printed name on the side which was still barely readable: “Millennium Falcon.”

3

Friday, October 12 Washington, D.C.

A flowing river of colored leaves surged across the divided roadway in front of him on a wave of autumn wind, the late-evening landscape painted by the soft brush of greenish streetlamps and the glare of incandescent headlights as Joe Wallingford turned onto the Suitland Parkway, headed for home. It was 11:25
P.M.
and he was mentally exhausted. Fridays at the National Transportation Safety Board tended to do that to him—the usual last-minute rush punctuated by a thousand unplanned interruptions. He supposed it was the same in any business.

Joe accelerated and headed east, his mind chewing over the raging battle among the staff. He would have to convince the Board members to use some incendiary testimony from a New England commuter crash, and he hated the process—and hated politics. Nineteen years of such nonsense was making him cynical. He knew the symptoms.

Joe reached over and switched on the radio, tuning it to an easy-listening station. The window should be down, he told himself. Can't enjoy a night like this with the window up. He worked the crank, feeling the cool breeze flood the car, breathing the aroma of fall and forests along the tree-lined suburban motorway. It was a beautiful evening, and surprisingly so. The city looked magnificent. He had noted that as he pulled out of the garage at 800 Independence ten minutes ago and turned toward the stark white facade of the U.S. Capitol bathed in spotlights, the sound of wind-blown leaves scraping lightly over concrete filling his ears as he paused at the curb, waiting for traffic that wasn't there—luxuriating in the empty streets.

Joe took the exit ramp to Branch Avenue, mentally reminding himself of the comforting fact that his packed bag was in the trunk behind him. He had “the duty” for the next few days. If there was an aviation accident significant enough to require a Washington-based investigation, Joe would lead the “Go Team” as the IIC—the investigator-in-charge. And as always, if he needed the bag, it was ready to go in an instant, packed with duplicates of almost everything he had in his bathroom at home. He had adopted the habit of acquiring two of everything many years ago when he first joined the NTSB. It had been a family joke: don't ever give Joe just one tie or one shaver. Give him two of everything—one for home, one for the infamous bag. Before their divorce, Brenda had done just that. In fact, he corrected himself, she still did, sending him two little electronic alarm clocks for his birthday back in June.

The inviting thought of a crackling fire, the leaves blowing across his patio, and a Moselle wine he had been saving caused him to smile. That was an evening to look forward to—but the beeping noise that began coursing through his consciousness at that exact moment was not.

Joe shook his head, sighing disgustedly before launching an emphatic “Damn!” at the road ahead. He reached to his side and found the offending electronic device, pushing the silence button harder than necessary. The rest of the world called them pagers or beepers, but NTSB Go Team members had been carrying them for decades, and still used the original name: Bellboy. Whatever you called it, Joe thought, they were a damned nuisance that could shatter a relaxed evening in an instant.

Joe spotted a phone booth along the road ahead and stopped to call the FAA command post, hearing the first details of what had just happened in Kansas City. He reversed course immediately.

Within twenty minutes he was back in the basement parking lot beneath the FAA building, the return trip a barely remembered sequence of blurred images, the terrible situation unfolding in Kansas City on his mind, a scene of broken airplanes and broken bodies, images in gruesome detail which were all too familiar from past experience. There was no question about scrambling the Go Team. This accident was obviously too big and too important to be left to any of the NTSB's undermanned, underfunded field offices.

Joe draped his topcoat over the first chair by the door as he entered the FAA command post on the ninth floor at flank speed, a nod of recognition greeting him from the sole occupant, an FAA technician he knew only as Wally.

“What do we have so far?” Joe asked.

Wally filled him in on the details, confirming that the NTSB's field man, Rich Carloni, was driving to the scene from Kansas City, the death toll would be fearful, and the airline's operations control center in Dallas was in gear and waiting for the NTSB's call. “They're assembling their team to join you in Kansas City.” Wally paused to take a deep breath and check some notes on an ink-covered legal pad.

“Lord.” Joe shook his head. “You know we almost scrambled the team to Florida this afternoon?”

“Yeah, I heard about that. Boeing 737, older version, blew a hole in its cabin south of Key West?”

“Correct. But it was a cargo flight—Miami Air was the carrier—and they got it down safely. The NTSB chairman decided not to send us. We'll have our regional office do the report.”

“Ah, one other thing.” Wally seemed hesitant, and the pause caught Joe's curiosity.

“Yeah?”

“When I talked to the tower controller, at first he kept saying he—the 320, I suppose—flew into a microburst. Then he corrected himself and said they didn't have a clue what happened. The Airbus was turning to a visual final approach and just lost it. I asked him about the windshear, and he says ‘I'm probably wrong … forget I mentioned it.'”

“You know his name?”

“A fellow named Sellers, Carl Sellers. He sounded terrified.”

Joe nodded. “How
about
the weather?”

“There were thunderstorms in the vicinity, and windshear had been reported. I don't have details though.”

“Thanks for that much, Wally. It just might be significant.”

Joe realized he had been leaning on the edge of the man's desk, energetically rubbing his forehead, his muscular, almost wiry body slumping slightly from fatigue. There would be no time to shower and change before heading for the airport, and that bothered him. Joe cared about his appearance, the result of never being quite handsome enough to just coast on good looks. With his green eyes and ruddy complexion, his dark hair cut short and carefully combed, his penchant for crisp shirts and pressed suits made him an imposing figure in a sea of slightly wrinkled clothes and striped ties.

“I need to get my people in motion,” Joe said at last as he straightened up. “Can we get the Gulfstream?” The image of the FAA's twin-engine turboprop Gulfstream I and the newer pure-jet Gulfstream III flashed across his mind's eye. Both were kept just a few miles away, in the FAA's hangar at Washington National Airport, and the FAA was bound to help the NTSB with such emergency transportation.

“Well …” The duty controller looked embarrassed. “Our illustrious associate administrator has standing orders that we can't commit either Gulfstream without his personal approval, so we're trying to chase him down.”

“He doesn't have a Bellboy?”

“He does, but he keeps turning it off. We think he's at a late dinner. Should have him on the line in a few minutes—I hope.”

Wallingford paused for a second, considering the difficulty of getting the Go Team to Kansas City without one of the FAA airplanes. The last commercial flights of the evening had all left National already. If they had to wait for the next one, the team wouldn't be able to get there until late morning, and that was too long to wait.

“Tell him we really need it.”

“No problem, I'm sure. I'll try to set up a three
A.M.
departure, and I'll call you on the beeper again if we can't meet that deadline. We'll take care of Mr. Associate Dictator Caldwell.”

Joe thanked him and took the briefing sheet, heading for the door and his office. There were nine Go Team members to notify, plus one Board member, after which he would begin the process of contacting the various so-called interested parties. North America Airlines, Airbus Industrie, the FAA, the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), and the engine manufacturer would have to be called, and each would be sending preselected employees to join the NTSB team. Joe looked at his watch as he pushed open the door to the stairwell. It was going to be a sleepless night.

Senator Kell Martinson had stood in shock beside his car for what seemed an eternity, but in fact was less than five minutes. Fire and destruction lay before him everywhere, it seemed. There was no way to prepare for what had just happened—the mind-numbing realization that the steep turning approach (which he had thought a bit odd) had been a suicidal maneuver.

Cindy was in that inferno somewhere. He stared dumbstruck at the burning wreckage as he tried to grasp that horrid reality. His aide—his lover—had been on board that airplane.

The panicked feeling of being in exactly the wrong place at the wrong moment overtook him—a hunted feeling, like the mindless, urgent need a child feels suddenly to flee a dark and scary room. Kell jumped behind the wheel and put the car in drive, roaring past the startled figure of a man who had to leap to one side to get out of the way. Heading the car toward the security gate, he braked to a halt for a few seconds to let it open, then raced through, clawing for the anonymity of the highway. He had to get out of there. Get back to Kansas. Get to the house in Salina.

Rich Carloni angrily twirled the dial again, searching in vain for a radio station with news of the crash. Only the potpourri of rock music, elevator music, country music, and talk shows spilled from the speakers. Disgusting! Without a phone or a two-way, he had no idea what was happening ahead as he raced up the freeway toward Kansas City Airport, and the apprehension over how to proceed once he got there was knotting his stomach. It was one thing to pick up the remains of two or three people smashed into hamburger by a private plane crash—he'd already done that several times in his eight months as an accident investigator with the Board. It was another thing entirely, however, to deal with a major airline crash—something he'd never experienced.

The exit ramp for the airport was coming up fast, more visible now that the heavy rain had stopped. The windshield wipers began an awful squawking sound, and Rich snapped them off as his mind raced forward to the question of where to go on the airport property. Should he drive first to the tower, or should he go through one of the gates directly to the scene? He decided on the latter. The airport police would be the primary controlling agency for now.

He rocketed through an intersection near the Marriott, ignoring the stop sign, heading for one of the entrances to the airport ramp where he braked to a halt long enough to flash his ID at the officer who had just arrived to guard the gate.

“I'm from the NTSB. Where will I find your chief?”

The officer took a close look at the identification card before answering. “Go between these two buildings, sir, then turn left on the grass in front of the parallel taxiways. Be careful, that's where most of the wreckage is, on both surfaces. You'll see several squad cars right there. Captain Baldwin is in there somewhere.”

“Thanks.” Rich accelerated through the gate, following the instructions until he had passed between the two hangars, suddenly finding himself nose-to-nose with an incredible mass of burning wreckage and mangled metal. “Jesus Christ!” His words had been spoken out loud, but they drowned in the tidal wave of sounds that met his ears now—the noise of frenzied activity amidst the macabre scene before him.

There was debris strewn everywhere. Debris and bodies. He could see several in his headlights before he swung the car to the left, following the grassy strip adjacent to the taxiway as instructed until the police cars came into view. He put on the parking brake and got out, thoroughly shaken, as one of the officers came over with a questioning look, appearing surrealistically in his headlights out of a swirl of smoke.

“Who are
you
?”

“Carloni from the NTSB.” The answer took extreme effort. Half his consciousness was captured by the scope of the wreckage, which seemed to be everywhere.

“Good. Chuck Baldwin, airport police.” The man extended his hand and Rich shook it weakly. “Okay, Carloni, this is your show. I've got eight men out here, and three more coming in. Command post is in North America operations at the terminal for right now. Tower is the backup. I'll brief you on the frequencies available on our hand-held radios, the ambulance and injured situation, et cetera, as you want it. I assume this will bring in a team from Washington?”

“Yes. Yes it will. They're, uh, probably on the way. I don't have an arrival time.”

Baldwin waved his Kellite flashlight toward the south end of the field. “The plane that was landing? A few got out from the front section, which broke off—the first-class section forward. Nothing but bodies down in this area. The plane it hit was back at the other end on the hammerhead. We've got more survivors out of that one. Both pilots, a couple of flight attendants, about two dozen passengers.” Baldwin paused, noting the glazed look in Carloni's eyes. “You with me? I know this is a hell of a mess …”

Rich looked at the airport police captain for a moment, trying to overcome his shock and think clearly. This wasn't a crash, it was a holocaust. What in the world should they do first?

“Hey? Your name is … Carloni?”

“Yeah.”

“Snap out of it, Mr. Carloni. You're in charge. My department is here to help, but something this big … well, I'm not going to make the decisions on something this big with the NTSB here. So, what do you want us to do?”