Millennium (2 page)

“Mr. Smith?” It was the night-shift operator at the Board, a woman I’d never met.

“Yeah, you got him.”

“Please hold for Mr. Petcher.”

Then even the hiss was gone and I found myself in that twentieth-century version of purgatory, “on hold,” before I had a chance to protest.

Actually, I didn’t mind. It gave me a chance to wake up. I yawned and scratched, put on my glasses, and peered at the chart tacked to the wall above the nightstand. There he was, C. Gordon Petcher, just below the chairman and the line that read “GO-TEAM MEMBERS—Notify the following for all catastrophic accidents.” The chart is changed every Thursday at the end of the work day. The chairman, Roger Ryan, is the only name that appears on every one. No matter what happens, at any time of the day, Ryan is the first to hear about it.

My own name was a little further down the list in the space marked “Aviation Duty Officer/IIC,” followed by my beeper number and the number of my second home phone. “IIC,” by the way, is not to be read as “two-C,” but as “Investigator In Charge.”

C. Gordon Petcher was the newest of the five members of the National Transportation Safety Board. As such, he was naturally a little suspect. Those of us hired for our expertise always wonder about new Board members, who are appointed for five-year terms. Each has to go through a trial period during which we decide if this one is to be trusted or endured.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Bill.”

“That’s okay, Gordy.” He wanted us to call him Gordy.

“I was just talking to Roger. We have a very bad one in California. Since it’s so late and the accident is so big, we’ve decided not to wait for available transport. The JetStar is waiting for the go-team to assemble. I’m hoping it can take off within an hour. If you—”

“How big, Gordy? Chicago? Everglades? San Diego?”

He sounded apologetic. That can happen. Breaking really bad news, you can feel that somehow you’re responsible for it.

“It could be bigger than Canary Islands,” he said.

Part of me resented this new guy speaking to me in agency shorthand, while the rest of me was trying to digest an accident bigger than Tenerife.

Outsiders might think we’re talking about places when we mention Chicago, Paris, Everglades, and so forth. We’re not. Chicago is a DC-10 losing an engine on takeoff, killing all aboard. Everglades was an L-1011, a survivor crash, bellying into the swamp while the crew was troubleshooting a nose-gear light. San Diego was a big, grinning PSA 727 getting tangled up with a Cessna in Indian Country—the low elevations swarming with Navajos, Cherokees, and Piper Cubs. And Canary Islands…

In 1978, at the Tenerife Airport, Canary Islands, an unthinkable thing happened. A fully-fueled, loaded Boeing 747 began its takeoff while another 747 was still on the runway ahead of it, invisible in thick fog. The two planes collided and burned on the ground, as if they’d been lumbering city buses in rush-hour traffic instead of sleek, lovely, sophisticated flying machines.

It was, or had been until I got the phone call, the worst disaster in the history of aviation.

“Where in California, Gordy?”

“Oakland. East of Oakland, in the hills.”

“Who was involved?”

“A Pan Am 747 and a United DC-10.”

“Mid-air?”

“Yes. Both planes fully loaded. I don’t have any definite numbers yet—”

“Don’t worry about it. I think I’ve got all I need right now. I’ll meet you at the airport in about—”

“I’ll be taking a morning flight out of Dulles,” he said. “Mr. Ryan suggested I remain here a few more hours to coordinate the public affairs side of things while—”

“Sure, sure. Okay. See you around noon.”

*    *    *

I was out of the house no more than twenty minutes after I hung up. In that time I had shaved, dressed, packed, and had a cup of coffee and a Swanson’s breakfast of scrambled eggs and sausage. It was a source of some pride to me that I had never done it faster, even before the divorce.

The secret is preparation, establishing habits and never varying from them. You plan your moves, do what you can beforehand, and when the call comes in you’re ready.

So I showered in the downstairs bath instead of the one by the master bedroom, because that took me through the kitchen where I could punch the pre-programmed button on the microwave and flip the switch on the Mr. Coffee, both of which had been loaded the night before, drunk or sober. Out of the shower, electric razor in hand, I ate standing up while I shaved, then carried the razor upstairs and tossed it into the suitcase, which already was full of underwear, shirts, pants, and toiletries. It was only at that point that I had to make my first decision of the day, based on where I was going. I have been sent on short notice to the Mojave Desert and to Mount Erebus, in Antarctica. Obviously you bring different clothes. The big yellow poncho was already packed; you
always
prepare for rain at a crash site. The Oakland hills in December presented no big challenges.

Close and lock the suitcase, pick up the stack of papers on the desk and shove them in the smaller case which held the items I always had ready for a go-team call: camera, lots of film, notebook, magnifying glass, flashlight and fresh batteries, tape recorder, cassettes, calculator, compass. Then down the stairs again, pour a second cup of coffee and carry everything through the door to the garage—left open the night before—hit the garage-door button with my elbow on the way out, kick the door shut and locked behind me, toss the suitcase and briefcase into the open trunk, hop in the car, back out, hit the button on the Genie garage-door picker-upper and watch to make sure it closes all the way.

Aside from picking a few items of clothes, it was all automatic. I didn’t have to think again until I was on Connecticut Avenue,
driving south. The house was all battened down because I kept it that way. Thank God I didn’t have a dog. Anyway, Sam Horowitz next door would keep an eye on the place for me when he read about the crash in tomorrow’s
Post.

All in all, I felt I had adjusted pretty well to bachelor living.

*    *    *

I live out in Kensington, Maryland. The house is way too big for me, since the divorce, and it costs a lot to heat, but I can’t seem to leave it. I could have moved into the city, but I hate apartment living.

I took the Beltway in to National. That time of night Connecticut Avenue is almost deserted, but the lights slow you down. You’d think the Investigator In Charge of a National Transportation Safety Board Go-Team on his way to the biggest aviation disaster in history would have a red light he could mount on top of his car and just zip through the intersections. Sad to say, the D.C. police would take a dim view of that.

Most of the team lived in Virginia and would get to the airport before me, whatever route I took. But the plane wouldn’t leave without me.

*    *    *

I hate National Airport. It’s an affront to everything the NTSB stands for. A few years back, when the news of the Air Florida hitting the 14th Street bridge first came in, a couple of us hoped (but not out loud) we might finally be able to shut it down. It didn’t turn out that way, but I still hoped.

As it was, National was just too damn convenient. To most Washingtonians, Dulles International might as well be in Dakota. As for Baltimore…

Even the Board bases its planes at National. We have a few, the biggest being a Lockheed JetStar that can take us anywhere in the continental U.S. without refueling. Normally we take commercial flights, but that doesn’t always work. This time it was too early in the morning to find enough seats going west. There was also the possibility, if this really was as big as Gordy
said, that a second team would follow us as soon as the sun came up. We might have to treat this as two crashes.

Everybody but George Sheppard was already there by the time I boarded the JetStar. Tom Stanley had been in contact with Gordy Petcher. While I stowed my gear Tom filled me in on the things Petcher either had not known or could not bring himself to tell me when we talked.

No survivors. We didn’t have an exact count yet from either airline, but it was sure to be over six hundred dead.

It had happened at five thousand feet. The DC-10 had gone almost straight down. The 747 flew a little, but the end result was the same. The Ten was not far from a major highway; local police and fire units were at the scene. The Pan Am Boeing was up in the hills somewhere. Rescue workers had reached it, but the only word back was that there were no survivors.

Roger Keane, the head of the NTSB field office in Los Angeles, was still on his way to the Bay Area and should be landing soon. Roger had been in contact with the Contra Costa and Alameda County Sheriffs offices, advising them on crash site procedures.

“Who’s running the show at LAX?” I asked.

“His name’s Kevin Briley,” said Tom. “I don’t know him. Do you?”

“I think I shook his hand once. I’ll feel better when Rog Keane gets to the site.”

“Briley said he was told to grab the next flight to Oakland and meet us there. He’ll be in L.A. a little bit longer, if you want to talk to him.”

I glanced at my watch.

“In a minute. Where’s George?”

“I don’t know. He got the call. We tried him five minutes ago and there was no answer.”

George Sheppard is the weather specialist. We could take off without him, since his presence at the crash site wasn’t absolutely necessary.

And I was ready to go. More: I was aching to go, like a skittish
racehorse in the starting gate. I could feel it building all around me, and all around the nation. The interior of the JetStar was dark and calm, but from Washington to Los Angeles and Seattle, and soon all around the world, forces were gathering that would produce the goddamest electronic circus anyone ever saw. The nation slept, but the wire service and the coaxial cables and synchronous satellites were humming with the news. A thousand reporters and editors were being roused from bed, booking flights to Oakland. A hundred government agencies were going to be involved before this thing was over. Foreign governments would send representatives. Everyone from Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas to the manufacturer of the smallest rivet in an airframe would be on edge, wondering if their factory had turned out the offending part or written the fatal directive, and they’d all want to be on hand to hear the bad news as it happened. By the time the sun came up in California a billion people would be clamoring for answers. How did this happen? Whose fault is it? What should be done about it?

And I was the guy who had to provide those answers. Every nerve in my body was crying out to get in the air, get there, and start looking.

I was about to order the takeoff when a call came in from George, sparing me a decision that he’d surely have resented. He was having car trouble. He’d called a taxi, but suggested we’d better take off without him and he’d catch up later. I heaved a sigh of relief and told the pilot to get us out of here.

*    *    *

What’s it like on your way to a major airline disaster? Fairly quiet, for the most part. During the first hour I made a few calls to Los Angeles, spoke briefly to Kevin Briley. I learned that Roger Keane had boarded a helicopter and was surely at the DC-10 site by now. Briley was about to leave to catch his own flight to Oakland, where he would meet me at the airport. I told him to set up security.

Then some of the others made calls to Seattle, Oakland, Schenectady, Denver, Los Angeles. Each of the go-team members
would be forming his own team to look into one aspect of the crash, and each wanted to get the best possible people. Usually that was no problem. The grapevine operates quickly in a crash this size. Almost everyone we called had already heard; many were already on their way. These were people we knew and trusted.

But none of that took very long. After that first hour we were alone in the sky on the five-hour flight to Oakland. So what did we do?

Do you have any idea how much paperwork is involved in an accident investigation? Each of us had half a dozen reports in progress. There were reports to read and reports to write, and endless items to review. My own briefcase bulged with pending work. I did some of it for an hour or so.

Finally I wasn’t understanding what I was reading. I yawned, stretched, and looked around me. Half the team was asleep. That struck me as a fine idea. It was 4:30 in the morning, Eastern time, three hours earlier on the West Coast, and none of us were likely to get any sleep until well past midnight.

Across the aisle was Jerry Bannister, in charge of structures. He’s the oldest of us: a big man with a huge head and thick gray hair, an aeronautical engineer who got his start on the Douglas assembly line building Gooney Birds because the Army recruiter rejected him. He’s deaf in one ear and wears a hearing aid in the other. Looking at him, you’d think he was the biggest mistake the Army ever made. I’d put him up against a platoon of German soldiers any day, even at age sixty. He’s got one of those craggy faces and a pair of those giant hands that would make him look right at home in a machine shop. It’s hard to picture him at a drawing board or putting a model through wind-tunnel tests, but that’s what he’s good at. After the war he put himself through college. He worked on the DC-6 and the DC-8, among many others. He was sound asleep, head back, mouth open. The guy is almost nerveless; nothing rattles him. He collects stamps, of all things. He’s nutty about philately; once he starts talking about it it’s impossible to shut him off.

Behind him, his bald head gleaming in the cone of light from overhead, was Craig Haubner, my systems specialist. He would spend the rest of the flight filling page after page of his yellow legal tablet, bounce off the plane and out to the crash site and spend all day and into the night poking and peering into the wreckage, and return to the temporary headquarters still neat, alert, and full of energy. It was impossible to like Haubner—he wasn’t very good with people, and sometimes didn’t even seem to be human—but we all respected him. His ability to examine a bit of charred wire or bent hydraulic tubing and tell exactly what happened to it is little short of the occult.