Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

“I’m just doing my job, mister,” the man said.

“You like pulling me away from a lady who lost her brother out there?” the reporter snapped. “Some great fucking job.”

They rode together in strained silence back to the main terminal. The security man escorted Pace off the bus and pointed him out to the gate attendant. Pace was a marked man, and any attempt to get back to Kathy would be futile.

He found himself alone in the darkened rear half of the terminal and considered stopping for a drink at the bar at the far end of the passenger lounge. But the bar was closed, as was the Diplomat Restaurant to its right. The International Cafe, a mostly mediocre cafeteria, was open and doing a brisk business, but Pace didn’t think it was worth the short walk to pay too much for substandard coffee. Instead, he found himself riding an escalator down to the ground-level commuter airline concourse, then walking past the fountains and the colorful posters hung as sirens to faraway lands. He stopped briefly at the bronze bust of John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State from 1953 to 1959 and the man for whom the airport was named. A plaque above the bust noted the airport had been dedicated by President John F. Kennedy in 1962. It was such a long time ago.

Two solemn men in business suits with Federal Aviation Administration IDs hanging from the breast pockets brushed by Pace as he contemplated the bust. One inserted a key into the security slot above the call buttons for an elevator. Pace’s aimless wandering had delivered him to the base of the airport control tower. When the elevator doors opened, a passenger with a face the color of wet chalk emerged in front of the two officials waiting to get on. Without even glancing at Pace, the man who had come from the tower walked quickly up the corridor, past the siren posters, toward the escalator to the second level. He was halfway there when a light winked on in that portion of Pace’s brain reserved for journalistic instinct.

It took a few seconds for him to catch up, and he fell into step with the man slightly behind and off his left shoulder.

“Excuse me,” Pace opened.

There was no response. The two of them kept walking in a direction that had purpose to the ashen-faced man, but not to Pace.

“Excuse me, could I talk to you for a second?”

The man halted so abruptly Pace almost bumped into his back.

“What?” the man asked impatiently. Pace gauged him to be in his mid-thirties, although his pallor made him appear older.

“I’m sorry to bother you. My name is Steve Pace. I’m the aviation writer for the Chronicle. I saw you come out of the tower, and I’d like to ask a few questions.” He tried to make the request sound like a simple one to fill.

The man shook his head. “I don’t have anything to say to the press. No offense, but I…” His voice trailed off, and he held his hands up in front of his chest, palms out, as though trying to ward off an evil spirit. Then he shook his head again and walked off.

Pace followed and tried once more. “Look, I don’t want to cause problems for you. I’m trying to get information on what happened to the 811. I know you’ve probably told your story a dozen times already. I’d appreciate it if you’d tell it once more, to me.”

The controller shook his head.

Pace pressed a little harder. “If you’re worried about getting mucked up with the FAA or the NTSB, I’ll protect you. I won’t use your name.”

The ashen-faced man stopped and confronted Pace at the bottom of the escalator, his feet spread, his body balanced like a fighter’s. His eyes glinted in anger. “You don’t know my name,” he challenged. “And I can’t get mucked up with anybody if I don’t talk to you.”

“Barry Raiford,” Pace said flatly.

Raiford went a shade paler. Without taking his eyes off Pace’s face, he slipped a hand inside his coat to a shirt pocket and came out with a pack of Marlboros containing two survivors. One was about to go.

“Do we know each other?” Raiford’s belligerence was gone, replaced by concern. Pace thought his hand shook slightly as he lit the tobacco.

The reporter nodded toward Raiford’s left chest, where an FAA identification card, complete with name and photograph, hung from the controller’s jacket pocket. He saw Raiford wince. Pace knew from his own experience that after you wear plastic credentials for a while, you tend to forget they’re there.

“So what now?” Raiford asked sarcastically. “I tell you everything I know or you make something up and put my name on it?”

“No blackmail. I’d like to hear what you saw. This city lost a lot of friends and relatives out there, and people want to know how it happened. Pilot error? Mechanical failure? An act of God? Are there other categories?”

Raiford’s shoulders slumped. “Not here,” he said. He ground the half-used Marlboro under a scuffed loafer and headed for a secluded space under the escalator, next to a set of locked double doors that led to a parking area for baggage and mail carts.

Pace followed. He hadn’t been in Washington long before he learned to accept the collective paranoia of its civil servants. Many liked talking to the media. They were willing, even eager, to discuss each other’s mistakes, real or perceived—so long as their identities were protected. Pace accepted the system as a fact of life. It gave each of them a sense of being more than a splinter in one of the planks on the vast ship of state.

Once Raiford assured himself they were hidden from others walking to or from the tower, he asked Pace, “What do you want to know?”

“Where you were and what you saw.”

“And if I told you I wasn’t there and I didn’t see anything?”

“The look on your face when you came out of the tower says that would be a lie.”

Raiford shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his slacks and stared at his shoes. Long moments passed, and Pace knew the man was looking beyond the floor, into a nightmare, and was living it again.

“The fucker came apart,” the controller began in a hoarse whisper.

Pace grabbed for his notepad and pen. “What came apart? The airplane?”

“The taxi was ordinary enough.” Raiford hadn’t heard the question. The story would come in its own way. “She stopped at the end of the runway, and the crew did the normal run-up. They said they were ready. It didn’t sound like anything was wrong. We gave them takeoff clearance and the winds, and she started rolling. Routine.”

Raiford paused. Pace forced himself to be patient.

After a minute, Raiford took a deep breath and started again. “She seemed to be having trouble rotating, uh, you know, getting airborne. I see so many airplanes take off and land, I get a feeling for timing, ya know? She was on the ground too long. I kept waiting for the nose wheel to come up. I kept thinking she would rotate or abort. Maybe they tried to abort. I couldn’t tell. Maybe they reversed engines, and that’s when it happened.”

Raiford stopped again.

“What happened?” Pace urged softly.

The controller looked up from his shoes. There were tears in his eyes. “It disintegrated. The right engine started coming apart. It was on the far side of the plane from where I was, but I had glasses, ya know, and I was watching it, and I could see the pieces of metal flying all over the place. Then the plane veered off to the right and tipped over. A big section of the wing, I guess maybe most of it, snapped off and took the engine with it. The whole thing went flying through the air. Then the right main gear collapsed. It fell on its side and exploded.” Raiford’s voice started to shake. “Shit, I felt so helpless. I was standing up screaming for somebody to help them. Can you imagine anything so stupid? I was standing in the tower cab screaming at the airplane! I guess I was screaming at myself. I should have called them about that engine before.”