Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

“It’s all part of the grim reality. But not to worry, I can’t take you to the plane anyway. Just to the field.”

“How? It’s off-limits.”

“You can go with me.”

“The IIC won’t approve.”

“Probably not. That’s why I’m not asking him.”

“Let’s do it.”

They went in McGill’s official car. The guard at the gate by Hangar Three looked closely at Pace’s credentials and frowned.

“He’s with me,” McGill assured him. “Consider him under escort.”

“Yes, sir,” the guard said and waved them through.

They drove more than three-fourths of the way down Runway 19-Right, stopping well short of the main wreckage, in an area filled with little red flags on wires stuck in the ground. Each flag marked a piece of debris. The concrete runway beside their car was deeply gouged.

“Let’s see what we’ve found,” McGill said as he stepped gingerly into the grass. Pace followed. The investigator crouched beside one flag and picked up a tangled mass of wires.

“A piece of the electrical harness,” he said. “Might have come from the broken wing.”

“How’d it get here?” Pace asked.

“Well, let’s speculate,” McGill suggested. “The main wreckage skidded to a stop in the grass off the end of Nineteen-Right, down there.” He nodded to Pace’s left. “The tip of the right wing hit the runway about fifty yards back up that way.” He pointed to the reporter’s right. “You saw how messed up the concrete is by the car?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s where the engine and wing section were torn from the fuselage,” McGill said. “They bounced once—that’s the big gouge in the ground beside you—then cartwheeled and came to rest over there. They burned until the fuel in the wing cells was spent.”

“So the runway right here is where she actually went over on her side,” Pace said.

“This is it,” McGill confirmed. “You just walked across it.”

“God, that’s eerie. You ever get used to it?” Pace asked, recalling his own discomfort as he watched the immediate aftermath of the accident.

“Never. And I never want to,” McGill said.

Pace nodded at the wires in McGill’s hand. “How did that get here?”

“Dunno. It probably fell out of the wing when it hit here.”

“And all these flags mark other stuff that fell out?”

“That’d be my guess.”

“Jesus, what a mess.”

Across the grass, a man yelled, “Hey, Mike, can you take a look at something for me?”

McGill turned and waved. “Be right there.” He turned back to Pace. “Wait for me. Soak up some atmosphere while I’m gone. Don’t touch anything.”

Pace strolled among the flags, careful not to step on anything. He couldn’t begin to identify the scraps. How anyone could piece it all back together was beyond imagining.

Fifteen minutes passed, and McGill still was deeply involved in conversation with another investigator. Pace headed for the car to make notes on what he’d seen. It would make excellent descriptive material. Near the edge of the grass, he kicked something that felt like a stone. He glanced down and saw a metal ball rolling through the matted sod.

“Shit,” he muttered, concerned that he’d disturbed a piece of evidence. But there were no little red flags in the area. He picked up the ball and saw a second one a foot away. He scuffed around in the grass, and within minutes he’d spotted three more, five in all.

He had no idea what they were, but since they weren’t marked, they probably weren’t important. He slipped the ball he’d picked up into the side pocket of his sport coat, intending to show it to Mike. But when McGill came running up to the car a few minutes later, Pace was deep into writing dramatic notes, and the metal ball was forgotten.

“I’m sorry I’ve got to cut this short, hotshot, but Vern Lund’s looking for me, and he’s all agitated about something.”

“No problem,” Pace replied. “This was very helpful.”

After leaving McGill, Pace spent a useless hour prowling around Dulles, more for inspiration than information. He checked with his office, but neither the Sexton nor the Converse public-relations people had returned his calls. He felt frustrated about the bird-strike angle. It was his exclusive at the moment, but Pace hadn’t the faintest hope it would survive the evening’s NTSB briefing. It would be nice at a time like this to be a television journalist—to go on the air with a special report and give the world the big scoop that some off-course seagull had brought down a modern jetliner. Now there’s a defense system for you. Jonathan Livingston Starwars. Then again, the bulletin would interrupt an afternoon soap, and viewers, instead of being grateful for the news, would be pissed at missing what Monica said to Kelly about Natalie.

Con Phillips at the FAA told Pace the accident and incident reports on the Sexton fleet would be available for all media in half an hour. Pace was stuck at Dulles at least until after the briefing. He asked Phillips to put a set of documents in an envelope and leave them for a Chronicle messenger who would be sent to pick them up.

“No problem,” Phillips said. “They aren’t worth rushing back for.”

“Well, so much for a Saturday lead,” Pace complained. “Anything else going on?”

“We’ve listened to the tapes of transmissions between Flight 1117 and controllers,” Phillips said. “There’s not a lot there, either. The Sexton was cleared for takeoff, the captain rogered the clearance and said he was rolling. Thirty-eight seconds later he called back to the tower and started to say something, but he stopped, and that was the last we heard. If anything else was said in the cockpit, it was said without the pilots keying the radio mike.”

“You releasing a transcript?”

“If you want it, I’ll stick it in the packet with the A-and-I reports.”

“What about the cockpit voice recorder? It’s active when the cockpit mikes aren’t.”

“The NTSB will sit on ’em for sixty days. I’ve heard nothing to the contrary.”

Pace called Wister. While waiting for the national editor, he considered the A-and-I reports. They must be duds. If there was anything in them, the FAA would hold them back to prevent speculation. Public documents are public, but some are more public than others.

He told Wister of the bird-strike speculation, including the expectation that Lund would make it public at his 6:30 briefing. He asked Wister to send a messenger to get the reports from the FAA, promising to be back in the office in time to go over them before the early deadline. The intriguing bits of information, he said, would be the FAA tower tape transcript and the investigative detail he’d picked up at the crash scene with Mike. Wister said he’d have the library research bird-strike problems and have the clips in Pace’s computer when he returned.

The reporter bought a large cup of black coffee and carried it to the observation deck above the main terminal building. He was surprised to find Justin Smith there.

“Mr. Smith comes from Washington,” Pace cracked. “I liked that movie.”

“What brings a nice boy like you to a lonely place like this?” Smith asked.

Pace chuckled. “Hopin’ to pick up some reporting tips from the master.”

“Good thing you didn’t say ‘old master.’”

They leaned on the railing, gazing south toward the site where grim work continued on the wreckage. Pace sipped his coffee.

“I’m thinking about changing beats, Justin,” he said.

Smith’s eyebrows shot up. “God’s name, why?” he asked. “Way you’ve been knockin’ off exclusives, you should feel great about your work.”