Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

Pace sighed. “I told you it was by accident,” he said. “It wasn’t marked as evidence. I still wouldn’t have taken it, but Mike had a sudden emergency and we scrambled to get out of there. I dropped the thing in my pocket without thinking.”

“I believe you,” Sachs assured him. “I didn’t mean to sound accusatory. But it’s evidence now—critical evidence.”

“I know.”

“Actually, I’m sort of glad you did pick it up.”

“Why?”

“Think about it,” Sachs said. “If you hadn’t seen that metal ball staring at you from the ashtray on your bureau for days on end, you might not have recognized the importance of the bearing balls you saw today in the hangar. Then where would we be?”

Pace shook his head. “You were right,” he said. “Even the naive get lucky.”

Steve Pace was impatient as hell when Ken Sachs called.

“Sorry it took so long,” Sachs said, “Our techs compared every bearing ball we had from the engine with the three we found in the grass and the one you turned in yesterday.”

“And they found…”

“Bingo,” Sachs said.

“Now there’s a scientific term for you.”

“Don’t be a smartass just because you solved the mystery for us.”

“Solved it?” Pace thought that a lot more credit than he deserved.

“You certainly led us to the solution.”

“Enlighten me, Ken.”

“The balls we found in the grass exactly matched the general scarring patterns as the balls that remained in the engine, pretty conclusive proof the bearing burned out,” Sachs said.

“Wait a second,” Pace said. “Walk me through this.”

“Sure. When I say the bearing burned out, I don’t mean it melted in the fire; I mean it was subjected to extreme and excessive friction.”

“By what?”

“I’m coming to that,” Sachs said. “You asked me to walk you through this, so be patient. The bearing is the apparatus that keeps a turbine disk rotating smoothly on a single plane. The disk rests on the balls within the bearing. When the bearing balls were damaged, the turbine disk lost support. In other words, it began to wobble. The wobbling generated enormous vibration, and finally the disk shattered. One wedge burst through the side of the pod, and a lot of smaller pieces ricocheted around inside, tearing up the guts of the engine. Eventually the vibrations tore the engine loose.”

“Where does all that get us?” Pace asked.

“It gets us to what caused the crash,” Sachs said.

Pace fairly snapped to attention in his chair. “You’re toying with me, Ken,” he said.

“Not deliberately. Bearing failure is something you’d normally attribute to age, but this engine had only 348 hours on it. It was a baby, in aviation terms.”

“And?”

“And so we had to go looking for another reason.”

“And you found it?”

“We found it. And it’s one of the most astonishing things I’ve ever heard. I’m going out of town for the weekend, and I’m not taking calls from reporters for the rest of the day, so you’ll have this story alone until we hold a press conference Monday morning. There are few other people who know the details. I’m certain none of them will talk to reporters.”

“So what is it?”

“The bearing burned out because it wasn’t being properly lubricated.”

“Well, I wouldn’t go back to that gas station,” Pace said. “You can’t get anything checked right at those self-service places.”

“Not funny, Steve,” said Sachs. “It wasn’t that nobody checked the oil, it was that somebody put contaminated oil in the engine.”

“What?”

Sachs continued. “Let me explain how the Converse Fan operates pertinent to this discussion. It isn’t lubricated like a car engine, where the oil sloshes around and eventually coats everything. In the turbine disk bearing, the oil is sprayed directly onto the bearing balls through a nozzle. Generally, it’s more efficient.”

“Generally?”

“It ceases to be efficient when the nozzle gets clogged.”

“With sludge? That engine was practically new.”

“Not sludge. A peanut shell.”

“Oh, come on!”

“I’m not kidding,” Sachs insisted. “It floored us, too, so we went back and interviewed everybody who touched the engine at Dulles. The service crew had been interviewed several times by the go-team, but when we went back, we knew the right question to ask. We wanted to know if every drop of oil that went into the engine was from cans freshly opened during the service work. It’s standard procedure to throw away partially used cans. It might sound wasteful, but the reason we do it is precisely to avoid what we have here. Procedure wasn’t followed in this case. One can of oil was opened, as best we can figure, about eleven hours before the ConPac service work. Only a few ounces were used from the can, and the service tech couldn’t bear to waste the rest so he put it aside. Incredibly, while the can was standing open with the filler tube stuck in it, somebody nearby was shelling and snacking on peanuts. A piece of shell drifted into the filler tube. When the oil was poured into the ConPac engine, it washed the shell in, too. If the shell had been smaller, it would have blown right through the lubricating nozzle harmlessly. But, tragically, it was too big and it stuck, blocking the flow of oil to the bearing.”

Pace felt weak. In the last incredible two months, this was the most incredible thing of all. “For the lack of a nail, the war was lost,” he mumbled.

“Exactly,” Sachs agreed. “A fucking piece of peanut shell.”

“Then there was nothing wrong with the Converse engine itself?” Pace asked.

“Nothing at all.”

Pace remembered something then, a question that lingered in his mind without an answer. It was a tidbit from his disjointed conversation with air traffic controller Barry Raiford on the afternoon Flight 1117 was destroyed. It had stuck in his mind, a factoid that refused to go away.

“Ken, back an eternity ago, on the day of the accident, an eyewitness told me he saw some smoke come from Number Three engine while the ConPac flight was still at the gate. You have any idea what that could have been?”

“Yeah, I remember from your story,” Sachs said. “I recall thinking at the time it was probably a backfire when Number Three was restarted after Captain Peck loaded the extra fuel. I don’t have any reason to think differently now. All the information we have, from the black boxes to eyewitness accounts, indicates that the engine was performing flawlessly. There’s no reason to think it would have done anything but continue to perform flawlessly for the rest of its life. The Converse Fan is a good engine. There isn’t a thing in the world wrong with it.”

Pace sat in silence for a span of seconds, deep emotions stirring and shoving aside any excitement he felt for the story.

“Then all of this,” he said slowly, “the crash, the cover-up, the murders, the payoffs… they were all for nothing?”

“Sadly, yes. The crimes committed to protect the reputation of the Converse Fan engine needn’t have happened at all.”

Summer had come in earnest to Washington, D.C.

Outside the Chronicle Building, early evening temperatures were in the upper eighties, and the humidity was stuck in the oppressive seventy-five-percent range. It was, all in all, very much like a sauna.

Ordinarily, Pace would have been grateful for the excuse to stay indoors, but this evening he would have preferred the sauna. He and Schaeffer were staying late for a meeting set up hours before by special request.