Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

He turned the television on and lowered the volume until it provided only the slightest of background noise, then picked up the copy of his new contract from his cluttered desktop. It contained all the usual contingencies: a personal-appearance clause in which Richard was asked to guarantee that he’d never gain weight, that he would be obligated to endure both medical and surgical options if necessary to keep his lustrous hair. A further rider prohibited him from profiting from endorsements, while a disturbingly vague “morals clause” suggested that nearly any misbehavior could result in termination.

Underneath the contract were the two discs Don Keene had given him, the greatest hits of a retiring local icon. Inside the jewel case, Richard found a folded piece of paper in what he assumed to be Don’s handwriting: Good. You’ve already proven that you’re willing to do your homework. Disc one is a career retrospective. Disc two is all local, all recent. Watch them in order, please. Call me when you’re done.

The disc player whirred to life, and a saturated color video appeared, a man standing in front of a building, wearing a gray suit, a beige trench coat belted at the waist. “Jack Shea reporting tonight from Paris.” He wore combat fatigues in tiger-stripe camouflage. “From the Mekong Delta with First Marines, this is Jack Shea reporting.” From San Clemente, from the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach. A denim jacket and khakis at a free concert in Golden Gate Park. From the Pentagon. From the campus of Kent State University. From the Johnson Space Center in Texas. From Cape Canaveral. Then from the same spot, now called Cape Kennedy. From Plains, Georgia. The picture wobbled a bit. Jack Shea was wading through three feet of muck on a city street somewhere, the familiar floodscape of rescue boats and dogs barking on rooftops and helicopters hovering over the scene. Shea held the microphone cord out of the water as he spoke. Forecasts said the damage from Hurricane Agnes was expected to be almost insignificant. But the first storm of the Atlantic season stalled last night over the mid-Atlantic region, and residents in this corner of northeastern Pennsylvania awoke this morning to a Susquehanna River eight feet past flood stage, and the city of Wilkes-Barre under two feet of water. Richard used the remote to speed through the stories at double time, from NATO headquarters in Brussels, from Tel Aviv, from Jerusalem, from Cairo, from the Sinai Peninsula, from Camp David, from the Golan Heights (each time appearing on camera wearing a beige safari jacket and a powder-blue shirt dotted with sweat). Jack Shea watching President Carter walk the route of his inaugural parade. Reporting via satellite from Phnom Penh. Jack Shea, reporting live from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in the early hours of Three Mile Island. It was history’s cavalcade, Jack Shea reporting.

And there it was. The sudden jolt of memory.

Richard pounded the Play button, let the video resume at normal speed.

Jack Shea standing on the tarmac of a military airstrip in Guyana, in the immediate aftermath of Jonestown, narrating the video as the panel truck pulled up and the elected gunmen of the People’s Temple opened fire on the escape plane. Wounded in the firefight: an NBC News cameraman, reporters from the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner. Dead: one member of Congress, four departing Temple members, one congressional aide. Even in Jack Shea’s reports, they didn’t mention Lew by name.

Jack Shea in his safari jacket and, behind him, the gray-and-white United States Air Force jet that would be used to repatriate the bodies. A pair of corpsmen wheeling the aluminum caskets up the cargo ramp of the jet. Jack Shea began, They came from the tree line —gesturing toward the edge of the airfield— shouting for the visitors to stop. Members of the People’s Temple, asking to be taken home. Followed by a second jeep, this one filled with gunmen intent on letting no one leave.

Jack Shea’s voice-over narrating filmed helicopter shots, the famous shot of corpses linked arm in arm. A quarter century on, and Richard found he could recite the narration from memory: They came in search of a new life in a new land, a place they thought might be nirvana. What they found instead can only be described as hell.

Richard shook his head, tried to force out the memory.

He hit the Forward button. Jack Shea in Geneva, talking about the Iranian revolution. Jack Shea at the Winter Olympics, 1980. And then, the longest cut, Jack Shea calmly walking across the street to stop a robber, as cool as any television detective. He’d even paused to stub out his cigarette first. He watched that scene, thirty-one seconds of it, again and again, Jack Shea handing the purse back to a grateful old woman; Richard imagined her purse filled with coupons and an uncashed Social Security check and lipstick and tissues and wild-cherry Life Savers, his mother’s purse. He didn’t even realize that he was tearing up until he had to blot at the corner of his eye.

Nor did Richard remember turning off the disc or the television, but he had, falling into the elastic narrative of an unplanned and nightmare-riddled nap.

THE EMERGENCY plan for Panorama Airlines involved deploying a series of response teams, each armed with duties and procedures sanctioned by consultants and executives who had extensively gamed every scenario. Each responder had received special training in crisis management, grief counseling, bilateral negotiating tactics, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, first aid, federal privacy laws, and martial arts tactics of leverage and hand-to-hand self-defense. The enemies of orderly airport operation are unanticipated crowds, gossip, and speculation.

It fell to the Angel Team to clear the terminal—locate the stricken and grieving, then discreetly usher them out of the sight line of passengers who were waiting to board a passenger jet of the exact make, model, and vintage as the one that had just fallen from the sky. They herded the family members and friends into the controlled and sterile environment of a conference room; here, sustained by doughnuts and watery coffee, the bereaved could listen to the news or seek comfort in the waiting platitudes of members of the clergy from every imaginable denomination. This part of the plan was executed nearly simultaneously at the departure and arrival airports.

The airline itself required answers, and ideally before anyone else had them. Getting the information first meant staying ahead of the story. This was where the Go Team—mostly midlevel executives from the flight-operations division—came in. They worked with federal investigators to determine exactly who was on board the flight, whether they had checked a bag, and where they had been headed, preparations for the messy business of notifying the family.

The general counsel had produced great sheaves of memoranda outlining the desirable qualities that members of each team should possess; Angel Teams were without exception men because they conveyed a competence and an authority that strangers responded to in predictable ways. Prematurely gray hair was seen as an asset.

The requirements to be part of an Adam and Eve Team were more flexible, written in familiar human resource jargon; members should be self-starters, levelheaded, willing to work unpredictable schedules. The general counsel kept secreted in his safe printouts of correspondence from a consulting psychologist who claimed that the grieving were much more likely to confront people with obvious flaws in their skin, hair, teeth, or nails; inside the company, it was a widely known fact that members of Adam and Eve Teams needed to be attractive, proportionate, with a body mass index within the range defined as generally healthy. Finally, written in pencil at the bottom of a yellow legal pad, a page that would be produced as documentary evidence in at least two lawsuits that sprang from the crash of Flight 503, a final quality added by the general counsel himself: Needs to be good in a crisis.