Nelson DeMille - Night Fall

Both of us knew we had crossed over the line that separates lawful and assigned investigation from unlawful and freelance snooping. We could stop now, and probably get away with what we’d done since the memorial service. But if we went to Calverton, and if we kept following this trail, we’d be unemployed, and indicted.

Kate asked me, “Did that gentleman mention that Liam Griffith and Ted Nash did a follow-up interview?”

I nodded.

“Did you find his eyewitness account compelling?”

“He’s had five years to work on it.”

“He had barely sixteen hours to work on it before I interviewed him, and he was still a bit shaken up. He had me convinced.” She added, “I did eleven other interviews with eyewitnesses. They all basically corroborated one another’s testimony, and none of them even knew the others.”

“Yeah. I understand that.”

We continued on for about twenty minutes, the oldies station cranking out songs that connected me to high school dances and hot summer nights on the streets and sidewalks of New York, a time before airport metal detectors, a time before planes were blown out of the sky by people called terrorists. A time when the only threat to America was from far away, not as close as it seemed to be getting.

Kate said, “Can I turn that off?” She shut off the radio and said, “A few miles from here is Brookhaven National Laboratory. Cyclotrons, linear accelerators, laser guns, and subatomic particles.”

“You lost me after laboratory.”

“There’s a theory-a suspicion-that this laboratory was experimenting with a plasma-generating device that night-a death ray-and that was the streak of light that took down TWA 800.”

“Well, then, let’s stop there and ask them about it. What time do they close?”

She ignored me, as usual, and continued, “There are seven major theories. You want to hear about the underwater methane gas bubble theory?”

I had this disturbing image of whales in an underwater locker room lighting farts. I said, “Maybe later.”

Kate directed me along a road that led to a big gate and a guardhouse. A private security guard stopped us and, as at the Coast Guard station, ignored me and glanced at Kate’s Fed creds, then waved us on.

We entered a large, almost treeless expanse of flat fields with a few large industrial-type buildings here and there, lots of floodlights, and at least two long concrete runways.

In my rearview mirror, I saw the security guard talking on a cell phone or walkie-talkie. I said, “You remember that X-Files episode where Mulder and Scully go into this secret installation and-”

“I do not want to hear about the X-Files. Life is not an X-Files episode.”

“Mine is.”

“Promise me you won’t make any analogies to an X-Files episode for one year.”

“Hey, I didn’t bring up the plasma death ray or the methane gas bubble.”

“Turn right over there. Stop at that hangar.”

I pulled the Jeep up to a small door beside the huge sliding doors of a very big aircraft hangar. I asked Kate, “How are we breezing through these guard gates?”

“We have the proper credentials.”

“Try again.”

She stayed silent a moment, then replied, “Obviously, this was pre-arranged.”

“By who?”

“There are people… government people who aren’t satisfied with the official version of events.”

“Sort of like an underground movement? A secret organization?”

“People.”

“Is there a secret handshake?”

She opened the door and started to get out.

“Hold on.”

She turned back to me.

I asked, “Do you belong to this FIRO group?”

“No. I don’t belong to any group except the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

“That’s not what you just said.”

She replied, “It’s not an organization. It has no name. But if it did, it would be called ‘People Who Believe Two Hundred Eyewitnesses.’” She looked at me and asked, “Are you coming?”

I shut off the engine and headlights and followed.

Above the small door was a light that illuminated a sign that said AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

She turned the door handle, as though she knew it would be unlocked, and we entered the huge hangar, which had a polished wooden floor that made it look more like a gymnasium than an aircraft hangar. The front half, where we stood, was in darkness. But at the rear of the hangar were rows of fluorescent lights. Beneath the lights was the reconstructed Trans World Airlines Boeing 747. Kate said, “This is where Grumman used to build the F-14 fighter, so it was a good place to rebuild the 747.”

We stood in the darkness and stared at it. For one of the few times in my life, I was speechless.

The white-painted fuselage gleamed in the lights, and on the ripped aluminum of the left side, facing us, were the red letters ANS WOR.

The forward section and the cockpit were separated from the main fuselage, the reconstructed wings lay on the polished wooden floor of the hangar, and the tail section sat to the right, also separated from the main fuselage. This is how the aircraft had come apart.

Strewn across the wooden floor were huge tarps, on which lay bundles and tangles of wires and other debris, which I couldn’t identify.

Kate said, “This place is so big, people used bicycles to get around quickly and save time.”

We walked slowly across the hangar, toward the carcass of this giant machine.

As we approached, I saw that all the glass had been blown out of the portholes, and I could see now the separate pieces of the aluminum skin that had been meticulously pieced together, some huge, the size of a barn door, some smaller than a dinner plate.

The midsection, where the center fuel tank had exploded, was the most damaged, with large gaps in the fuselage.

About ten yards from the aircraft, we stopped, and I looked up at it. Sitting on the floor, even without its landing gear, it was as high as a three-story building from belly to spine.

I asked Kate, “How long did this take?”

She replied, “About three months, from beginning to end.”

“Why is it still here after five years?”

“I’m not sure… but I hear unofficially that a decision has been made to send it to a junkyard for recycling. That will upset a lot of people who still aren’t satisfied with the final report-including relatives of the deceased, who come here every year before the memorial service. They were here this morning.”

I nodded.

Kate stared at the reconstructed aircraft. She said, “I was here when they began the reconstruction… they built scaffolds, wooden frames, and wire netting to attach the pieces… The people working on it started calling it Jetasaurus rex. They did an incredible job.”

It was hard to take this all in-in one respect, it was a giant jetliner, the sort of object you didn’t have to study to know what it was. But this thing was somehow greater than the sum of its parts. I now noticed huge, scorched tires, twisted landing struts, the four mammoth jet engines sitting in a row away from the aircraft, the wings sitting on the floor, the color-coded wires everywhere, and the fiberglass insulation laid out in some sort of pattern. Everything was labeled with tags or colored chalk.

Kate said, “Every object here was examined in minute detail-seventy thousand pounds of metal and plastic, a hundred and fifty miles of wire and hydraulic lines. Inside that fuselage is the reconstructed interior of the aircraft-the seats, the galleys, the lavatories, the carpeting. Everything that was brought up from the ocean, over one million pieces, was put back together.”

“Why? At some point they must have concluded that it was a mechanical failure.”