Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

The traffic at Cabin John was bad, but not as bad as it could have been, backing up only to the River Road area. Once they got into Virginia and onto the Dulles access road, there were only a few private cars and a dozen or so steel-gray Washington Flyer cabs to weave through. Davis rolled to a stop in front of the chain-link gate by Hangar Three ten minutes before they were scheduled to meet Lund. He identified himself and his passenger to the airport police officer with the clipboard and gave the reason for their visit. The officer scanned down the top sheet of paper and flipped to a second. He scowled and repeated the process, shaking his head again the nearer he got to the end of his list.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Davis, but I don’t see your name on the roster,” he said. “You sure you got the right day?”

“Of course I’m—” Davis started, but Marshall cut him off.

“I’m United States Senator Harold Marshall, and I know what today is, and I know Vernon Lund, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, is expecting us. I won’t be delayed.” He waved in the general direction of Hangar Three. “Go call whoever you have to, but get us in there!”

“Senator, I’m not trying to be difficult. I simply don’t find your names,” the officer said. “I’ll check. Please, stay in the car, and Mr. Davis, sir, please turn off your engine.”

The officer walked toward the gate, then turned back when he continued to hear the car engine running. He caught Davis’s eye and pointed to the car. Then he crossed his hands at the wrists, an aviation signal to cut the engine.

Davis swore as he moved to comply. “What the hell does he think I’m going to do, ram the damn gate? How am I supposed to run the damn air conditioning?”

He and Marshall sat glumly without further words. The police officer was back in about three minutes, nodding. He stuck his head down beside Davis.

“I’m sorry, Senator,” he said directly to Marshall. “There was a mix-up on the roster sheet. Mr. Lund is expecting you. A car is on the way out to lead you in. It will have a sign on the back that says, ‘Follow Me.’ Be just a minute, sir.”

Marshall nodded curtly. “How quaint,” he whispered.

Lund was effusive in greeting Marshall, less so in acknowledging Davis. The aide guessed their earlier meeting, and perhaps his disastrous encounter with George Ridley, were still eating at him. Lund apologized profusely to Marshall for the mix-up at the gate. Marshall wouldn’t let it go.

“If you can’t make an appointment with a United States senator without screwing up, how are you supposed to keep something as large and complex as the Sexton investigation on track?” he demanded.

Davis stopped listening and turned his attention to activity in the hangar.

The place was enormous, but every available square foot of floor space was in use to reconstruct the crushed jetliner. Jagged, blackened pieces had been set down in approximately the positions they’d occupied when the Sexton was whole. But sections, and sections of sections, were missing, either vaporized in the flames or sent off to a laboratory for closer inspection. The impression was of a skeleton from which some bones had been vandalized, lying spread-eagled, unable to muster the substance to live again.

Around the floor, men and women, singly and in small groups, bent over pieces of the debris, examining them, jotting notes, sometimes carrying a small something off to be observed under magnification. Davis marveled that out of the mess of the accident, so much of the jetliner had been found and identified.

The exception, he noticed suddenly, was the starboard engine. The port engine was there, detached from the wing, but resting on the concrete floor. The disfigured tail engine and what was left of the vertical stabilizer lay on the floor. But the starboard engine, the one that had wrenched itself from its mount, was gone.

“Excuse me,” he interrupted as Lund was finishing his final defense of his own competence. “Where’s Number One engine?”

“In the back,” Lund said quickly, openly grateful to have the subject changed. “We’re in the final stages of examination.”

“I’d like to see it,” Davis said, then remembered this was Marshall’s tour. “Ah, Senator, I assume you want to take a look.”

Marshall nodded. “That’s my primary mission here.”

“This way, Senator,” Lund said with a nod to Davis indicating he was invited, too. “Be careful not to touch anything. We don’t want to alter the evidence, but beyond that, some of this metal is very sharp, and we wouldn’t want you hurt in the line of duty.”

Davis saw Marshall roll his eyes. This guy Lund was a real dork.

“When will you be shipping the engine back to Converse?” Marshall asked as they walked down special pedestrian lanes marked with bright yellow tape.

“As soon as we’re finished examining it here. Unless lawyers start filing liability suits and get the hangar sealed before we get the engine out.”

Even mangled, the C-Fan was awesome in size. It towered over the three men, intake gaping like the open maw of a giant whale. Most of the fan blades were missing, their stumps looking like jagged, broken teeth. Beyond them, Davis could see some of the engine’s turbine machinery still in place, although the front compartment had been removed. The littered bench behind the engine held most of the missing pieces.

“It’s hard to tell exactly,” Lund was saying to Marshall as they inspected an area of missing fan blades. “Some undoubtedly were broken by the bird strike. The others broke on impact with the runway. We found pieces of blades all over the place.”

“And what’s this?” Marshall had moved to the side of the engine. He raised his hand above his head and ran his fingers along a rupture in the sheet metal.

“Be careful, that’s very sharp,” Lund warned. “The ingested debris smashed a turbine disk. A section of the disk breached the pod. That’s it right over there.”

Marshall looked pointedly at Lund. “Did a flaw in the disk cause this accident?”

Lund nodded. “I know what you’re asking me, Senator. I don’t know the answer.”

“Converse deserves an answer,” Marshall said. His voice was cold. “A whole fleet of airplanes with this engine has been grounded, causing Converse a great deal of embarrassment and very possibly some financial loss. The company deserves to know, once and for all, that there are no peripheral issues here, that a bird strike was the sole cause of the damage to the engine, and that there is no pattern of turbine disk problems.”

“I think the NTSB has come as close as it can to saying that.”

“You haven’t said absolutely this disk did not break due to a manufacturing defect.”

“We still don’t know. We suspect, but we don’t know for certain. That probably is a determination that won’t be made for some time, particularly because we have to factor in the disk that cracked in Seattle and that godawful thing over Kansas City.”

Exasperation was written all over Marshall’s face. “Let me put it another way,” he suggested. “If the broken pieces of blade hadn’t penetrated the turbine compartment, could this aircraft have survived the bird strike?”

Lund shrugged. “That would be pure speculation, Senator,” he said. “But surely there is reason to think that with damage limited to the loss of a few blades, the crew should have been able to stop the airliner without serious damage.”

“Jesus,” Marshall whispered. He stared up at the ragged breach in the pod’s skin for a full minute. “The Converse people aren’t happy about this at all.”

“I’m sure,” Lund replied.