Dean Koontz - Sole Survivor

After another half minute of silence during which she gathered her thoughts and decided how much to tell him, Barbara said, ‘When you arrive with the Go-Team, the first impression is always the same. Always. The smell. You never ever forget the stench. Jet fuel. Smouldering vinyl and plastic — even the new blended thermoplastics and the phenolic plastics burn under extreme conditions. There’s the stink of seared insulation, melted rubber, and… roasted flesh, biological wastes from the ruptured lavatory holding tanks and from the bodies.’

Joe forced himself to continue looking into the pit, because he would need to go away from this place with a new strength that would make it possible for him to seek justice against all odds, regardless of the power of his adversaries.

‘Ordinarily,’ Barbara said, ‘in even terribly violent crashes, you see some pieces of wreckage large enough to allow you to envision the aircraft as it once was. A wing. The empennage. A long section of fuselage. Depending on the angle of impact, you sometimes even have the nose and cockpit mostly intact.’

‘In the case of Flight 353?’

‘The debris was so finely chopped, so gnarled, so compacted that on first look it was impossible to see that it had been a plane. It seemed to us that a huge portion of the mass must be missing. But it was all here in the meadow and scattered some distance into the trees uphill, west and north. All here… but for the most part there was nothing bigger than a car door. All I saw that I could identify at first glance was a portion of an engine and a three-unit passenger-seat module.’

‘Was this the worst crash in your experience?’ Joe asked.

‘Never seen one worse. Only two others to equal it — including the Pennsylvania crash in ninety-four, Hopewell, USAir Flight 427, en route to Pittsburgh. The one I mentioned earlier. I wasn’t the IIC on that one, but I saw it.’

‘The bodies here. How were they when you arrived?’

‘Joe…’

‘You said no one could have survived. Why are you so sure?’

‘You don’t want to know the why.’ When he met her eyes, she looked away from him. ‘These are images that haunt your sleep, Joe. They wear away a part of your soul.’

‘The bodies?’ he insisted.

With both hands, she pressed her white hair back from her face. She shook her head. She put her hands in her pockets again.

Joe drew a deep breath, exhaled with a shudder, and repeated his question. ‘The bodies? I need to know everything I can learn. Any detail about this might be helpful. And even if this isn’t much help. it’ll keep my anger high. Right now, Barbara, I need the anger to be able to go on.’

‘No bodies intact.’

‘None at all?’

‘None even close to intact.’

‘How many of the three hundred and twenty were the pathologists finally able to identify. to find at least a few teeth from, body parts, something, anything, to tell who they were?’

Her voice was flat, studiedly emotionless, but almost a whisper. ‘I think slightly more than a hundred.’

‘Broken, severed, mangled,’ he said, hammering himself with the hard words.

‘Far worse. All that immense hurtling energy released in an instant. you don’t even recognize most of the biological debris as being human. The risk of infectious disease was high from blood and tissue contamination, so we had to pull out and revisit the site only in biologically secure gear. Every piece of wreckage had to be carted away and documented by the structural specialists, of course

— so to protect them we had to set up four decontamination stations out along the gravel road. Most of the wreckage had to be processed there before it moved on to a hangar at Pueblo Airport.’

Being brutal to prove to himself that his anguish would never again get the better of his anger until this quest was completed, Joe said, ‘It was pretty much like putting them through one of those tree-grinding machines.’

‘Enough, Joe. Knowing more details can’t ever help you.’

The meadow was so utterly soundless that it might have been the ignition point of all Creation, from which God’s energies had long ago flowed toward the farthest ends of the universe, leaving only a mute vacuum.

A few fat bees, enervated by the August heat that was unable to penetrate Joe’s chill, forsook their usual darting urgency and travelled languidly across the meadow from wildflower to wildflower, as though flying in their sleep and acting out a shared dream about collecting nectar. He could hear no buzzing as the torpid gatherers went about their work.

‘And the cause,’ he asked, ‘was hydraulic-control failure — that stuff with the rudder, the yawing and then the roll?’

‘You really haven’t read about it, have you?’

‘Couldn’t.’

She said, ‘The possibility of a bomb, anomalous weather, the wake vortex from another aircraft, and various other factors were eliminated pretty early. And the structures group, twenty-nine specialists in that division of the investigation alone, studied the wreckage in the hangar in Pueblo for eight months without being able to pin down a probable cause. They suspected lots of different things at one time or another. Malfunctioning yaw dampers, for one. Or an electronics-bay door failure. Engine mount failure looked good to them for a while. And malfunctioning thrust reversers. But they eliminated each suspicion, and no official probable cause was found.’

‘How unusual is that?’

‘Unusual. But sometimes we can’t pin it down. Like Hopewell in ninety-four. And, in fact, another 737 that went down on its approach to Colorado Springs in ninety-one, killing everyone aboard. So it happens, we get stumped.’

Joe realized there had been a disturbing qualifier in what she had said: no official probable cause.

Then a second realization struck him: ‘You took early retirement from the Safety Board about seven months ago. That’s what Mario Oliveri told me.’

‘Mario. Good man. He headed the human-performance group in this investigation. But it’s been almost nine months since I quit.’

‘If the structures group was still sifting the wreckage eight months after the crash. then you didn’t stay to oversee the entire inquiry, even though you were the original IIC on it.’

‘Bailed out,’ she acknowledged. ‘When it all turned sour, when evidence disappeared, when I started to make some noise about it… they put the squeeze on me. At first I tried to stay on, but I just couldn’t handle being part of a fraud. Couldn’t do the right thing and spill the beans, either, so I bailed. Not proud of it. But I’ve got a hostage to fortune, Joe.’

‘Hostage to fortune. A child?’

‘Denny. He’s twenty-three now, not a baby any more, but if I ever lost him…

Joe knew too well how she would have finished that sentence. ‘They threatened your son?’

Although Barbara stared into the crater before her, she was seeing a potential disaster rather than the aftermath of a real one, a personal catastrophe rather than one involving three hundred and twenty deaths.

‘It happened two weeks after the crash,’ she said. ‘I was in San Francisco, where Deiroy Blane — the Captain on Flight 353—had lived, overseeing a pretty intense investigation into his personal history, trying to discover any signs of psychological problems.’

‘Finding anything?’

‘No. He seemed like a rock-solid guy. This was also at the time when I was pressing the hardest to go public with what had happened to certain evidence. I was staying in a hotel. I’m a reasonably sound sleeper. At two-thirty in the morning, someone switched on my nightstand lamp and put a gun in my face.’