Crashers (5 page)

He said, “Been doing this long, have you.”

She smiled. “I've got all the dates and sales, with receipts, in a folder in the bedroom.”

Jack laughed, downed his drink in a gulp. “Aye, and that was a stupid question. I apologize.”

“Forgiven.”

He glanced around. There were no knickknacks in her apartment. A few photos, but they looked generic. Nothing was out of place and nothing showed a “feminine hand.” It was a stopping point, not a home. Given any trouble, he realized, she could ghost from this place in a heartbeat, mourn nothing left behind. He liked that. A lot.

Unbidden, he grabbed the bottle and drank directly from it. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand and Daria noted scar tissue on the tips of his fingers.

“Now, about that good time . . .” Jack purred.

Daria finished her drink. “Go back to your mates, Jack. Tuck them into bed with visions of nine-millimeter angels watching over them.”

Jack stood his ground. And Daria stood hers. Jack smiled and she smiled. And Daria got the sense that, had she quivered, had she demurred, he'd have grabbed her. But in the end, he nodded and set down the bottle and accepted the cheap duffel bag she gave him to carry his guns in. And said his gentlemanly goodbyes and slipped out the door.

Daria was just a little disappointed about how it went down, but there you are.
Land of milk and honey,
she thought.
Bloody lot of good it does you if you can't handle lactose and you've diabetes to boot
.

She watched him walk toward Crescent. When he was a good distance away, Daria slipped out of her stilettos, poured a much healthier drink, and dialed a ten-digit number from memory.

“Em,” she said when the line hissed. “Zero, zero, nine, dee.”

A male voice chuckled. “How's everyone's favorite gunrunner tonight?”

“A mark just left. Calls himself Jack. He bought four guns and ammunition.” She described the make and model of the weapons.

“Okay,” the voice said. “You're amazing. We really do appreciate this, Ms. Gibron. Are you okay? Anything you need?”

A good hard ride by a man who looks like our Jack,
she thought. “No. I'm fine. He was positioned right for the CC camera. I'm fairly sure you'll get a good ID.”

“No worries, ma'am. You hit your panic button, the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms team is at your door. You have a good night now.”

She hung up.

 

The man calling himself Jack checked his watch. Ten till ten. He walked three blocks to Edinburgh Avenue, found a pay phone. He fed it, looked up a number scribbled on the inside of the paper wrapper from a stick of gum. The phone rang three times. When the recording machine came on, he hit the 5 button to play back messages.

A scratchy, long-distance voice on the machine said, “Did you watch the news? Did you like what you saw? If so, you sweeten up my offshore account and I'll drop the next jet in less than seventy hours.”

Oh, fuck yes, the man calling himself Jack said. He'd liked it just fine. He unfolded a piece of notebook paper in his shirt pocket, studied the long string of letters and digits linked to a Cayman Islands account.

TOMMY TOMZAK WISHED THE NTSB jacket he'd borrowed were lined. The temperature was dropping fast. He had ditched his tie in the helicopter and would never see it again. He'd stuffed a box of thin plastic gloves in his right-hand jacket pocket and would swap them regularly throughout the night. He had a plastic garbage bag in his left-hand pocket, where he'd stuff the used, soiled gloves rather than dump them on the ground.

By ten o'clock, many of the easily moved patients were away, leaving only the more seriously wounded; the ones who would require triage on the ground before being moved. Tommy checked a note he'd written to himself. The jet had smashed to the ground at 8:41. They'd gotten the “easy gets,” the ambulatory patients, out in under an hour and a half. That was remarkable.

Also, because he was there to direct traffic, the first responders hadn't messed up the evidence. In the months to come, that could prove crucial.

There's no reason on earth this has to be Kentucky all over again,
he told himself.

Fire trucks and police cruisers were training more than twenty high-energy lights on the field. The wild array of low-to-the-ground light sources threw monstrous, stretched-out shadows every which way. Tommy's team
slogged through the field, which wasn't as muddy as he'd feared, toward the gigantic tail section. Bits of shrapnel and luggage lay everywhere. As they drew closer, they could hear the crackle of burning grass on the perimeter of the gouge and the moaning of victims. Tommy had been lucky enough to miss a famed 737 crash near Pittsburgh, in which the jet had nosed into the ground at full throttle. Not only were there no survivors, there were damned few identifiable body parts. The entire scene had been a schmear of ex-plane and ex-human, and the teams had worked in full biohazard suits, since blood-borne pathogens could have been anywhere.

This liner hadn't augured in, it had pancaked in. That made all the difference in the world.

“What the hell is this field?” Tommy asked, glancing around. “It looks like the world's biggest lawn.”

“We grow grasses all over Marion County,” an emergency medical technician told him. “Grass is a profit crop around here.”

“And you're not saying
grass,
as in primo shit, right?”

The med tech smiled grimly, nodded, too, as if to say, Thanks for the gallows humor, I appreciate the effort.

They found a body fifty feet from the tail section. It was a torso and two arms and one leg. No head. It wore an orange-and-black sweatshirt with the Oregon State University logo and blue jeans with tube socks and Nikes. Tommy marched past it, knowing that one of the NTSB officials heading their way would be bringing the flags that would be mounted beside each dead body.

The next body was a child, maybe age eight. A girl. She had a butterfly barrette in her blond hair. A very large section of her abdomen was missing.

Two more bodies, both female. They found an arm farther on. The arm wore a Mickey Mouse watch. Later, another team member would note that the watch was still ticking, the time exactly right.

Tommy heard moaning and sprinted ahead. The EMTs hustled to keep up with him, their flashlights bobbing in the night. The burning grass helped to illuminate the scene but, thankfully, wasn't burning enough to endanger them.

Tommy knelt. It was a man, in his eighties, lying on his back, eyes open and wide, mouth open and moving but with little sounds coming out. The man probably had false teeth but they were missing. His hair stood askew, at all angles. He was belted into a seat. The back hinge had snapped, and the seat lay flat like a dentist's chair, the safety belt still around the man's
lap. In his hand was a paperback copy of a Grisham novel, clutched like a life raft in the Atlantic. One of his legs was badly broken, the bone exposed just above the knee. From the nasty angle of his foot, his ankle was broken, too.

Tommy had a penlight, which, along with a Swiss army knife, he carried at all times. He shone the penlight in the man's eyes, one after another. “Can you hear me, sir?”

“Wh-what . . .” The man was in deep shock.

Tommy stood. “Broken leg, broken ankle. Bleeder at the knee. No obvious damage to the head, neck, or chest. The seat's too heavy to carry and it won't support his legs, or I'd suggest using it as a backboard. Switch him to a litter.”

Two EMTs hustled to follow orders. Others had leapfrogged ahead of Tommy and had found their own injured.

Tommy knelt by a woman who was doubled in two, holding her stomach, her chin and mouth covered with vomit. She was sobbing, bucking as if in seizures.

“ 'S okay,” Tommy crooned. “ 'S all right, ma'am. Here we go.” He gently probed her abdomen, stopped when she hissed in agony. “All right. Hang on. We'll get you out of here.”

“M . . . m . . . m . . .” The woman struggled to stop sobbing, to speak.

Tommy said, “Shh. Hey! Get a litter over here. We've got a possible ruptured spleen.”

Behind the oncoming EMTs, Tommy could see the first commandeered Winnebago arrive; his field hospital was taking shape.

“M . . . my d-daughter . . .” The woman on the ground spit the words out between sobs.

“Shh. We'll find her. You'll be okay.”

They started loading her onto a litter.

Tommy moved to the next shape groaning in the grass, a man with neither leg attached below the knee.

SUSAN TANAKA DOWNSHIFTED AND zipped past a Porsche like it was standing still. She was on Interstate 95, outside Chester, Pennsylvania and was moving at thirty miles over the speed limit.

Susan would have looked like an early-twenty-first-century version of Emma Peel, if Mrs. Peel had been five-two and Asian American. Today she wore a black leather peacoat she'd purchased in Milan, a black pencil skirt, a metallic-gold ribbed sweater, and calfskin boots imported from Gucci. She was a size-two petite and could get away with the look. People tended to make fun of her fashion-plate sensibility. Susan didn't mind: she gave money to the United Way and National Public Radio, she adopted dogs from the pound, and she usually fed her change into those Special Olympics canisters at the checkout lane. And for doing all that penance, she indulged in her single greatest passion: she shopped.

Her Miata was Bluetoothed to the max, giving her global positioning capability as well as worldwide cell-phone service. Just in the last year, the comm system had become standard for all NTSB Go-Teams. The other section leaders couldn't use them in the air, of course, but several of them had been delivered to an FAA official at Portland International Airport. As soon as the section chiefs arrived, they'd be linked up.

Another unit was traveling via helicopter from PDX to Legacy Good
Samaritan Hospital, to pick up two emergency-room physicians who'd volunteered to staff Tommy's makeshift field hospital. Susan smiled as she smoked a Nissan Z car, passing on the right. According to the report she'd just received from her assistant, Tommy was using RVs as a field hospital. Brilliant. Illegal as hell, of course. The police might be able to commandeer private vehicles, but the NTSB sure couldn't and the sheriff's office was working at Tommy's behest. Susan sensed that there would be administrative hell to pay, maybe from Del Wildman himself, her boss and director of the NTSB. If that came along, she'd handle it. In the meantime, Tommy was saving lives, minimizing the catastrophe. She'd take that trade-off.

Saving lives isn't the domain of the Go-Team. The job, simply, is to find out why an aircraft crashed, then to make recommendations to the six-member board to keep other aircraft from suffering the same fate. Maybe the team would recommend that a part be added to the construction, or removed. Maybe they'd find a bomb and recommend some new airport safety procedure. Or maybe, like Tommy's last Go-Team assignment, they'd work for eighteen months and come away empty-handed. It happened. Flyers like to say that an airliner is two hundred thousand parts flying in close formation. Not all the parts are vital, but many are. Many can cause catastrophes only if they fail in tandem. That's called a binary problem: if part A works fine but part B fails, the plane won't fall from the sky. If B is okay but A fails, no problem. But if A and B both fail, the plane hits the earth.

Sometimes it doesn't take two malfunctions; it takes three. Or four.

Sometimes the part that fails is called the pilot.

The permutations were endless. Susan had heard a mathematician well schooled in chaos theory talk about infinite paths in a finite space. She knew that a crash investigation could take on that sort of mythical, never-ending life of its own.

Susan hoped that CascadeAir 818 wasn't going to be one of those.

She was still a mile from Philadelphia International Airport, traveling at eighty miles an hour, when her communications unit, designed for use by NTSB Go-Teams, chirped. She was wearing an ear jack and a voice wand, attached by a thin wire to a transmitter on her belt. The actual satellite phone sat on her matching bags in the passenger's seat. She toggled the belt device. “Tanaka.”

“Susan? Tommy.”

“You got your headset already?” That had been quick.

“Yeah, thanks. And a team of volunteers just got here from PDX and the FAA. They've got the flags, sticks, the outside markers; everything.”

Almost every major airport in the United States has a storeroom tucked away in some corner, filled with crash-investigation equipment from the NTSB. The supplies include hundreds of pennant-shaped flags on short wire rods that can be shoved into the ground. Red flags mean dead bodies; green are injured who need to be moved; yellow are injured who can't be moved. Blue flags represent important findings, like the black boxes or obvious bomb debris.

The volunteers from the Federal Aviation Administration and the Portland International Airport personnel had been trained how to mark the circumference of a crash scene. As soon as they got started, they realized that the fire crews from adjacent cities, towns, and rural fire districts had begun the project already, outlining the scene with helmets and boots and flashlights and even lunch buckets.

“That's great news,” Susan said, and skittered out from behind a semi, nearly shoving a delivery van off the freeway. She shot forward, snuggled back into the slow lane, crept past a Saturn, then swung out and pulled away. “What's it like?”

“Ah, we got two major sections down and separated. The fuselage split just aft of the wings. One wing's missing; damned if I know where. I just finished triage on the tail-section passengers.”

“How many survivors?”

“I don't know. Twenty, maybe. Do you have a manifest yet?”

Susan had the information stored as a Word document on her Black-Berry. She activated it. “Ah . . . Okay, one captain, one copilot, three attendants, a hundred and forty-one registered passengers. That's one forty-six souls, if everyone got on board.”