Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

“Maybe,” Sachs agreed. He moved back to the engine, beckoning Pace to follow him. He continued his thought. “But look here, around the stumps of the broken blades. There’s more blood. Out here, in the front of the engine, where the bird hit. It looks obvious to me.”

“When you know what you’re looking at, it’s obvious. To a casual observer—”

“Under no circumstance would you describe Terrell as a casual observer.”

Ken Sachs continued to stare at the engine’s front rim. Pace started to say something, but Sachs waved him quiet. So, for the next twenty seconds or so, Pace watched Sachs watching the engine. Finally, the NTSB chairman turned around slowly.

“I know what’s bothering me,” he said. “You helped me define it.”

Pace gave him a questioning shrug. “What?”

“This plane is doing 160 knots or more and here comes the hawk.” Sachs began pacing back and forth in front of the intake, his hands doing graphics for his speech. “Splat. Hawk meets spinning fan blades. End of hawk.”

“So?”

“A lot of the mass of the bird should have been dissipated by the initial impact, shouldn’t it? I mean, suppose you’ve got a twelve-pound bird to begin with. After the impact and the blade action, the pieces sucked in shouldn’t weigh anything more than a few ounces at most, and those should have been easily diverted around the turbine housing and out the back of the engine pod.”

Pace tried to anticipate where Sachs was going. “That’s been the question, whether the Converse diversion design works,” he said. “All of it, including the fan blades, should have been diverted—”

“No, no, no,” Sachs interrupted. “You’re not following me. The ingestion of the fan blades is something else. You’re talking about huge pieces of alloy. I’m talking about tiny pieces of bird. The dynamics of the fan blades would be on the opposite end of the scale from the dynamics of little pieces of flesh and bone and feathers.”

“And?” Pace waited.

“Most of the bird should have blown around the turbine housings, right?”

“I guess so,” Pace replied. “Yes.”

“Then why is there so much fucking bird gore in this engine?” Sachs asked. “Where in hell did it all come from?”

Pace stared at Sachs in silence for a moment. They were on the same track, at last. “Playing devil’s advocate,” he said, “what if the bird was somehow impaled on a broken blade, so it got sucked into the turbine area more or less whole, and then got shredded by a rotating disk?”

“Then why is there so much blood on the front of the intake?” Sachs asked, shaking his head. “The impact and the ingestion would have happened too fast for the bird to have bled all over everything like this.”

Pace looked back at the maw of the engine, at the unbroken fan blades hanging from their mountings. “Ken, where are the blades that broke away?”

Now it was Sachs’s turn not to understand. “I don’t know. They were recovered. They’ve got to be around here somewhere. Why?”

Pace moved off quickly, his head turning left and right. “Just help me find them.”

It was the easiest task of the afternoon. The splintered, shredded fan blades were stacked in a corner of the hangar, stored there without apparent purpose. Eventually they would be shipped back to Converse, where engineers would assess their failure and try to improve the blades’ design and, perhaps, their tolerance for bird strikes.

“Can I touch these things?” Pace asked excitedly.

“Tell me why?” Sachs ordered.

“Blood. I’m looking for blood. There’s blood all over the goddamned place, all over the guts of the engine, all over the surviving fan blades, all over the rim of the intake. There should be blood on these things, too, shouldn’t there? Somewhere in here are the blades the bird hit. Shouldn’t there be some trace of blood here?”

Sachs nodded, seeing exactly where Pace was leading. “Let’s look together,” he said. “They’re heavy as hell, and the edges are sharp as razors.”

The job took more than an hour, largely because of a dramatic interruption.

Pace and Sachs had examined about a third of the broken fan blades when Jim Padgett walked into the hangar. Sachs introduced him to Pace.

“I know who he is,” Padgett said coolly. “He has a phone call.”

“Here?” Pace asked.

“Right here,” said Padgett. “It’s your office.”

Pace took the call at an extension in the hangar. “I didn’t think you’d want to wait for this one,” Glenn Brennan said at the other end. “Dr. Jackson called for you. I was sitting at your desk when the call came. He is very agitated. He wants you to call him right away.”

“How’d you find me?” Pace asked.

“Paul knew where you could be reached.”

Pace smiled. And it was Paul, he thought, who’d given him all the crap about asking for comp time forty-eight hours in advance. He must have loved that little charade.

Pace took the number from Brennan and called the medical examiner. Jackson came to the phone immediately. “You still haven’t called the police,” he said.

“I haven’t had a chance,” Pace replied honestly. “From what you told me, there didn’t sound like much reason to hurry.”

“There is now,” Jackson said. “It tweaked me a little when you pointed out I’d only tested for poisons and not for anything that could make death look natural. So I thought about ways you could kill someone without being obvious. There aren’t many.”

Pace was listening intently. “And you found something?”

“I tested a few theories and, I found something. You remember the Von Bulow case?”

“Vaguely,” Pace said.

“Oh, well, that’s not important. But it’s what prompted me to test for insulin.”

“Insulin?” Pace asked. “That’s for diabetes. Justin didn’t have diabetes, did he?”

“No,” Jackson said. “But his bloodstream was loaded with insulin.”

“Paint me a layman’s picture, Doctor,” Pace said.

“In its natural form, insulin is produced by the pancreas and regulates blood-sugar levels. If your pancreas doesn’t produce insulin—or doesn’t produce enough—blood sugar goes up, sometimes way up, and the result after a period of time can be heart attacks, stroke, blindness, gangrene, any one of a number of pretty horrible side effects. That’s why diabetics take insulin, either orally or subcutaneously, so they get what they need that their bodies aren’t providing.”

“And?”

“If I were going to check your blood sugar, I would tell you not to eat or drink anything after dinner, and to come in for the blood test about eight or nine the next morning. That’s called a fasting blood-sugar. I would expect, under normal circumstances, to find anywhere from six to twenty-six micro-units of insulin in your blood. Justin Smith’s stomach was empty, suggesting he hadn’t eaten in six or seven hours. His natural insulin level should have been down near the fasting level. But when I checked, his reading was ninety micro-units per cc. That’s off the scale. Coupled with the needle mark on his arm, I would say he was injected with fifty to fifty-five units of insulin intravenously.”

“And that would—”

“You’re not supposed to take insulin intravenously,” Jackson continued. “That would make an overdose even worse. Fifty to fifty-five units would have dropped his blood sugar too low for the body to survive it. Within minutes of the injection, he would have gone into seizure and died.”

“You think that’s what happened?” Pace asked.

“With a reading of ninety micro-units on an empty stomach? Yes, I think that’s what happened. I’m certain enough that I would testify in a court of law.”