James Huston - Marine One

Jean Claude did brilliantly. Hackett pressed him about the contract, the security, all the things he had been banging his drum to the press about, even the dramatic completion of the three Marine One helicopters ahead of time and under budget. Hackett tried to find weaknesses or create them, but he couldn't touch Jean Claude. Watching Hackett during the deposition was interesting. He clearly had not expected us to produce the president at all, let alone the week he was noticed, let alone the first day. Hackett seemed slightly dazed. He had brought Bass and the paralegal with him overnight in his private Gulfstream jet, and they all looked bleary-eyed.

We let Hackett go all day. We let him ask wide-ranging questions on multiple topics. He didn't advance his case at all. He learned some unpleasant facts, and that WorldCopter was not going to roll over and write him a huge check.

As the week progressed, the rest of the WorldCopter witnesses did almost as well. They were ready in spite of the short preparation time. They knew the accident, knew the helicopter, they knew how it had been built, they knew the documents, and they knew the contract. Hackett didn't really know any of it. He was just there to beat up on WorldCopter witnesses and intimidate them, and failed, not that he would agree with that assessment. He was unburdened by self-doubt.

At the conclusion of each deposition, as we sat in various restaurants on the outskirts of Paris with the WorldCopter officers, their confidence grew. They realized that Hackett was swinging wildly and missing. They realized that he was not much of a threat at this stage because he didn't know as much as he thought he did. The conclusion began to form that his early aggressive stance had been a huge miscalculation.

I reminded them that the NTSB still believed it was WorldCopter's fault, his experts would so testify, and a jury was likely to believe Hackett. All we had done was to blunt his first attack. To win the case we had to find the real cause, or WorldCopter was going down just like Marine One.

Kathryn shared our cab to de Gaulle airport. She was invigorated. She wanted a meeting as soon as possible with all our experts, all the attorneys, criminal and civil, and WorldCopter's employees involved in the investigation. Kathryn wanted to walk through the case soup to nuts and come up with a global to-do list. I called Marcel on my BlackBerry from the cab; he thought we should have the meeting at WorldCopter headquarters outside Washington, in the hangar where the Marine One helicopters were assembled.

We flew back to the States overnight and met the next morning after we had cleaned up. The hangar was deathly quiet. WorldCopter had been forbidden from touching any of the Marine One helicopters until the Justice Department's investigation was concluded. I walked around the assembly and inspection area with Marcel, Kathryn, and Rachel looking at the spotless facility. We were acutely aware that in ordinary circumstances we could never be there. No one was allowed near the helicopters, let alone the assembly and repair facility, without the required Yankee White security clearance. But the day after Marine One crashed, all those at WorldCopter had had their clearances canceled, and every helicopter was immediately suspect.

We walked by one of the undelivered Marine One helicopters, which sat in the middle of the hangar in perfect condition surrounded by a Plexiglas security wall. It had completed its assembly and inspection and was due to be delivered the day Marine One crashed. It sat untouched behind the Plexiglas wall ever since. I wondered if we could learn anything from that helicopter, but nothing occurred to me. Since the accident, all maintenance had been transferred to the Marine Corps at Quantico, Virginia, and Andrews Air Force Base. And it wasn't coming back to WorldCopter until, according to the Pentagon, they were "cleared" by the Justice Department.

That wasn't likely to happen anytime soon. After Justice demanded documents and unlimited access, and after I'd thrown a little tantrum, WorldCopter had essentially agreed to whatever they wanted. We told them we were ready to provide all documents they wanted-they were entitled to have them anyway by contract. Once again, our cooperation seemed to throw them off a little bit. We told Justice we would get the documents to them in sixty days, and they had accepted that. They had also said that they would wait to interview individuals until after they had received all the documents requested in their subpoena and after they had reviewed the depositions Hackett took. That was fine with us. It gave us additional time to prepare.

The consensus of the group was that Justice was waiting for the final NTSB report. That could take two years or longer, long after the trial. Until then, Justice was focused on clearances and people building Marine One without them.

All our experts were there when we arrived. After the usual greetings and some ambitious coffee consumption to hit the jet lag, we got down to business. Kathryn had asked for the meeting, but I was as anxious as she was to see where everyone was. I wanted to brainstorm theories and find out what the hell happened to Marine One. Pretty simple concept, but nothing about the theories in this case was simple. The WorldCopter investigators wanted to blame the pilot, our pilot expert wanted to blame the weather, and Wayne Bradley wanted to blame the NTSB, his former employer, for trying to hang it on WorldCopter without enough evidence.

I asked Bradley to set up his computer with a projector and pull up the wreckage photos. He explained what he saw in the bent metal, the forces necessary to bend the charred remains of the helicopter. He brought up the next slide. "Look at this!" It was a close-up, a macro photo of some piece of metal. I couldn't tell what it was. "These are the threads in the nut of the blade that separated. It is interesting, but not good enough." He said to Marcel, "We need to get this nut into a scanning electron microscope." Marcel nodded and made a note.

Bradley looked at everyone else. "Second, we've got to find those tip weights. I don't think they are far away. If my theory is correct, then those tip weights are somewhere near the accident scene. If they came out on impact with the ground, then they're nearby. We've got to find them; we've got to get them."

Kathryn contemplated for a moment. She leaned forward on her elbows and pushed her hair back from her face. "Mike, maybe I'm missing something. How does finding the tip weights help us?"

I looked at Bradley, who waited for me to answer. "NTSB says-implies, really-that the tip weights came off and started the crash sequence. So the tip weights from that blade can't be at the crash site. They'd have to be miles away, if they got thrown off. So if they are there, right where the helicopter hit, then they came off when it hit the ground and couldn't have caused the crash. If we find them there, we can prove that. That right, Karl?"

Karl Will nodded. He cleared his throat. "It's a question of sequence, Kathryn. If you jump off a train early, you can't be on it when it gets to the station."

Kathryn nodded. "But the NTSB didn't find any tip weights. They've got to be turning over every rock."

Will nodded again. "They are. And so are we. If we went out to the scene fifty years from now, I guarantee you we'd find part of Marine One. When these kinds of things happen, you can't ever find everything. We have to try to find what they didn't."

"If your theory is right," she noted.

"Exactly," Will said.

Kathryn glanced around at everyone. "Well, if it wasn't the tip weights, if that didn't cause the accident, what did? What's our theory?" She looked at Holly. "You're the piloting expert, right?"

"Yes."