Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

Pace shook his head and nodded to the south. “You’ve seen the carnage. Over the years, you’ve probably seen more of it than I have. I don’t know how you deal with it.”

“Don’t think about it, mostly. Not like I caused it.”

Pace smiled. “You mean it’s nasty work, but somebody’s gotta do it.”

“Somethin’ like that.” Smith turned around and leaned on his elbows, his back against the deck wall. “Somethin’ I probably shouldn’t tell you, but it could have a bearin’ on your decision to seek a new career,” he said. “I’ll be sixty-two in October. Already decided to retire early. Times management has talked to me about who’ll fill my slot. Your name keeps comin’ up.”

“ My name?” Pace was incredulous.

“Yep. Think you’re probably the best available.”

“Who thinks so, Justin? Management? You?”

“Both.”

“That’s nice, but it would be a hard jump to make.”

“Still,” Smith said, “even if you said no to the Times, management of your rag probably would offer you a hefty raise to stay put.”

“I don’t play those games,” Pace told him. “That’s coercion.”

Smith looked at Pace and grinned. “Not so. As they say in Texas, it’s bidness.”

“It’s nice to know I’m well thought of,” Pace said. “A lot can happen between now and October.” He looked up at the bright early-evening sky. The sun hadn’t yet set. “You know, I don’t even want to think about October,” he said. “The days start getting short. And they keep getting shorter until the end of December. It’s depressing.”

“What on God’s green earth does that have to do with takin’ a new job?”

Pace laughed. “Nothing. It’s just that I’m a day person, and April is my favorite month. Daylight Saving is here, and the days seem to go on forever. It lifts my spirits.”

“That mean you get all depressed on June 21st or 22nd, or whenever the hell the summer solstice is, ’cause the days start gettin’ shorter after that?”

Pace nodded. “Happens to me every time.”

“You kiddin’?”

“Nope.”

“Damn. Gonna tell my editors you’re a good aviation writer, but you’re fuckin’ nuts.”

They walked together down to the 6:30 briefing. The possibility of a job with the Times didn’t come up again.

As expected, Lund was upfront about the discovery of a “foreign material” in the Converse engine. He refused to say definitely it was a bird, although he came close.

“Why can’t you say it was a bird?” Jeffrey Hines of the Los Angeles Times demanded.

“Because it must be examined and tested to determine that,” Lund replied.

“Are there feathers?”

“A lot of the material was burned, but there appear to be feathers, yes.”

“Are there any creatures on this earth except birds that have feathers?”

“I don’t know of any.”

“Then it must be a bird.”

“That’s your conclusion, Mr. Hines. We are stating what we know. There was a foreign substance in the engine, and it appears to be the remains of a feathered creature.”

“But you are ruling out sabotage by terrorists using feathered plastic explosives?”

“I’m not ruling out anything.”

At that point the briefing fell apart. Hines told Pace later, as they left together, he hadn’t intended to have that impact.

“What I was trying to show is how ludicrous the bureaucracy can be,” he said. “He’s not going out on a limb and saying anything until he has seventy-two scientific reports to back him up, and the approval of his superiors to make a statement that means something. I’m going to try to get the paper to print the transcript of that exchange.”

“I’ve got the headline,” said Russell Ethrich of the Post. “NTSB gives Times the bird.”

“That’s not bad,” said Hines. “I’ll recommend it.”

“One very good thing came out of that little sideshow,” Pace offered. “I’m not going to be the only one in the room on Lund’s shit list.”

“Yeah,” said Hines. “Between the New York Post and me, we’re making you look like one of the good guys.” They parted at the front of the terminal building. “So what are you going to do, Steve?” Hines asked. “You going to say flatly it was a bird?”

Pace nodded. “I’m going to say flatly that Lund says flatly it might have been something with feathers. I’ll let the readers draw their own conclusions.”

“Going out on a limb again, huh?” Hines laughed.

“Have to,” replied Pace. “That’s where the birds are.”

There was yet another editorial conference in progress when Pace got back to his desk shortly after eight that evening, and he was glad he’d have a few minutes to read the FAA reports closely before he had to give Paul Wister an assessment.

The first document was the transcript of the 811 crew’s exchanges with air traffic control. Everything was normal until the tape picked up Captain Peck reporting, “Departure control, this is ConPac heavy—Stand by, we’ve got a problem.” There was nothing else.

Pace sighed and went to the next documents. The twenty-nine service-difficulty reports were so ordinary as to be boring: burned-out light bulbs, cracked plastic, loose wires—not a thing to hang a story on. There might have been more service difficulties with the 811 fleet than the FAA had on record. The reports were voluntary, and often airlines didn’t bother filing them.

He tossed aside the SDs and turned to the incident reports. They covered more serious problems, and reporting was mandatory. There were eight reports, spanning the Sexton’s six months of service. Two were obviously unrelated to the accident at Dulles. The first involved an emergency landing at Dallas-Fort Worth to get medical attention for a copilot with a burst appendix. The second was an unscheduled stop in Philadelphia to get help for a runaway toilet.

Hot damn.

The remaining reports were only slightly more interesting. One was a landing-gear malfunction the crew corrected by hand-cranking the wheels into the down-and-locked position. There was an incident involving the simultaneous failure of all eight on-board radios, requiring the crew to make a forced landing in St. Louis by encoding an emergency on the transponder and following light-gun instructions signaled from the tower.

Halfway through the reports Pace had found nothing that linked up with the previous day.

A fifth incident involved the failure of the 811’s main electrical bus, wiping out some of the electrical power to the cockpit. Like the bum radios, a partial electrical failure is a serious situation but not unmanageable for experienced pilots; the aircraft involved got down in Atlanta without damage or injury. Then there was an aborted takeoff resulting in minor damage. The abort was triggered by what was described as a power failure. There were no details. The last two reports described a cabin-pressure problem, relieved by a fast descent to a lower altitude, and an in-flight fire emergency caused by a shorted wire. The small fire—if it even could be called that—was smothered by the co-pilot.

Zilch, zippo, zero, nada, nothing. The declension of the verb form “to be screwed.”

The only incident that could possibly be tied to Dulles was the power failure. Pace remembered the controller, Raiford, told him ConPac 1117 seemed to have trouble gaining enough speed to rotate. Would that properly be termed a power failure? Pace thought not.

He looked back at that report. It was signed by Captain L. K. Junker. The aircraft was a TransAm 811-500, scheduled to fly from Seattle to Anchorage and then on to Japan. It was worth calling McGill. As TransAm’s chief pilot, he should be familiar with the incident.