Crashers (6 page)

“Understood. We've stopped to get some water and to rest. I've got med techs working the forward section. I'm going to go check on them here in a— What?”

Susan could hear everything Tommy said but not much of the background noise. He sounded tired and he still had a hell of a night ahead of him. She checked her watch. It was two in the morning, Eastern Standard; 11
P.M.
Pacific.

“Here you go,” he said to someone. “Thanks. Susan? I've signed for the supplies, the volunteers are getting going. I borrowed an NTSB jacket, so for now, nobody knows I quit.”

“Um. Right.” She took the off-ramp at fifty-five miles per hour.

“Who're the section chiefs?”

“We've got Walter Mulroney on structures and Peter Kim on power plant. Do you know them?”

“Sure. Mulroney's good. He'll be your IIC?”

No, you thick Texas hick. You're the Investigator in Charge!
“We'll see, Tommy. The team's still coming together. Oh! John Roby's coming.”

She could hear the smile in Tommy's voice and guessed it was the first time he'd smiled in hours. “He's crazy but he's usually right. Also, he's a cop. Retired or not, we may need his creative eye for villainy.”

She named several other section chiefs. Most he knew, some he didn't. There are many volunteers sprinkled around the nation who work for Go-Teams, but it's a small community. Most “crashers” know one another, at least by reputation.

“Hey, who's on CVR?” he asked.

Susan winced; Tommy rarely missed details, and the cockpit-voice-recorder specialist is a key player. She said, “Kiki,” and left it at that.

“Ah,” Tommy said.

“Okay, I'm here. I'll be in the air as soon as I can. Keep it together, Tommy.”

“Okay,” he said. “See ya.”

 

The next time Tommy stopped long enough to gulp bottled water and glance at his wristwatch, an hour had passed.

It was 12:05
A.M.

The NTSB uses midnight-to-midnight to define a day. Even though the jet had only been on the ground since 8:41
P.M.
Pacific, it was officially Day Two. The thought made Tommy's stomach roll. The clock wouldn't stop ticking.

It hadn't in Kentucky. It had ticked and ticked and ticked for eighteen months. He felt a sour taste in his mouth and feared that he was about to puke.
Thank God I didn't let Susan rope me back in,
he thought.

Slipping his ear jack into his shirt pocket, Tommy found the two ER doctors from Good Samaritan already at work, figuring out the order of patients they'd see in the recreational vehicles turned MASH unit.
Stop thinking about Kentucky,
he told himself.
Fuck Kentucky. This is Oregon. Get this done.

Tommy introduced himself to the ER doctors.

“This should work,” said the younger of the two men, a trauma surgeon
with thoracic credentials. He patted the side of the RV lovingly. “I've never heard of it being done.”

“Me neither, but we've already got a dozen people who can't be moved much. I figure you guys get them stabilized here, it'll mean that much less traffic at the actual hospitals. Good luck.”

He left them, grabbed a restocked med kit from one of the EMTs, finished the last of the Gatorade someone handed him, and started jogging toward the front half of CascadeAir Flight 818.

He glanced up. Four helicopters from Portland TV stations hung in the air, capturing it all.

He looked at his luminous watch again. Midnight and change. They'd off-lifted more than a dozen survivors and transferred eight to the field hospital. How many more were waiting for him up front?

 

Not many. There were far more deaths in the front of the plane than in the aft sections.

Tommy could smell charred flesh and fresh vomit from the EMTs, as well as the acrid stench of electricity and burned plastic. He hadn't reminded the med techs to avoid the high-voltage lines. Just because the engines were off didn't mean that all batteries were dead. He hoped they'd have enough common sense to realize that.

The fuselage loomed over him, blotting out the stars. Everything was cocked at a fifteen-degree angle, one wing and its crushed engines on the ground, the other wing mysteriously missing. The lower deck, where cargo and avionics were stored, had been crushed, its contents spewed throughout the field. The inside of the vessel was dimly limned by the arc lights set up by the sheriff's troopers, a quarter mile away at the field hospital. Every time a cable sparked, it sent a harsh flash of pure white light into the belly of the beast. With each flash, Tommy caught a quick glimpse of a face, eyes and mouth wide open, or a severed limb or a splotch of body fluid. He didn't really see them at the moment of the electrical arc, but the afterimages burned into his eyes and bored into his brain.

Ah, God
.
This is going to be a bad one.

“Have y'all stayed outside of this thing?” he asked a med tech who was just rising from the hunched, back-twitching effort to dry heave.

“Yes, sir. Like you said, we don't know how dangerous it is.”

“Good. Here's the rundown: that's one big-assed hot zone. There's blood everywhere. Gather everybody, would you? Gimme that.”

He took the med tech's halogen flashlight. Inhaling deeply through his mouth, Tommy thumbed the light and shone it into the fuselage. The afterimages he'd glimpsed popped into view, all the colors washed out by the harsh light of the flash. Half of the interior seats had been ripped from the deck and scattered around the field. Greasy smears of blood had been daubed on every surface, glinting like oil. The dead were everywhere. Tommy walked sideways, circling the hulk at a safe distance, studying the scene within. He was going in there and he honest-to-God didn't want to.

Paramedics were jogging in his direction, awaiting orders. All resistance to an outsider telling them what to do had faded.

Someone was standing to Tommy's left, staring at the craft. Tommy glanced over. The man wore a suit coat and trousers, a white shirt and forest-green striped tie. His tasseled loafers and his cuffs were caked with mud. He was maybe fifty-five. He sure didn't look like a med tech.

“Sir?” Tommy said, praying that the guy wasn't a journalist who'd gotten onto the scene. “Are you supposed to be here?”

“No.” The man shook his head but didn't take his eyes off the ruined craft. “I'm really not.”

“If you're not part of the rescue effort, I'm going to have to ask you to leave.”

The guy still couldn't take his eyes off the ruin. He shrugged a little and said, “Sure.”

But he didn't move. Tommy flicked the beam of his light over the man's face. He was pale, eyes dilated, in shock. Tommy glanced back at the highway, saw the fire trucks and ambulances and police vehicles and incident-command vehicles and confiscated RVs. It didn't look like any other civilian vehicles had stopped.

He turned to the man who stared at the plane. “How'd you get here?”

The man nodded at the plane. The penny dropped and Tommy realized what the hell was happening. The man reached into his sports-coat pocket and withdrew the folder that contained his ticket and baggage-claim check. He handed them to Tommy.

“Um. Okay. Wow. These men are medics. Is it okay if they take a look at you, Mister—” He opened the folder and held it in the beam of light. “Mr. Weintraub?”

“Sure,” the man said. And stared at the plane.

Tommy told the nearest med tech what had happened. Mr. Weintraub didn't put up any protest when the medic turned him gently and escorted him to the triage staging area.

“Jesus Christ,” a paramedic hissed, and made the sign of the cross. “His hair isn't even mussed!”

Tommy looked at the ticket again. Seat 10-B. He tucked the ticket into his hip pocket. He played his flashlight around the ground and found a crumpled raincoat. He bent to lift it up and it was covered in gore. Explained how Weintrab looked so pristine.

“All right.” Tommy raised his voice, roused himself from shock. “Who's got hazmat training?”

Half a dozen hands went up.

“Any of you guys ever in the military?”

Three hands stayed up.

“See any combat?”

Two hands.

“Okay, it's the three of us. Everyone else, hang back.”

He turned to the two people whose hands were in the hair: a black man who looked like a linebacker and a woman, maybe five-five, with short-cropped hair and five rings in each ear. “There could be blood-borne pathogens on every surface in there but I don't want to drag out the biohazard suits if we don't have to. We also don't know how stable the craft is. It's going to be dangerous and it's going to be messy and it's going to be a little slice of hell. I'm not ordering you in, but I could use the help. Don't go if you don't want to. No questions asked.”

The med techs glanced at one another, then nodded to Tommy.

Tommy inhaled deeply and led the way, hoping no one noticed that his hands were shaking.

KIKI DUVALL AND PETER Kim arrived at Portland International Airport within ten minutes of each other and were escorted by airport police to a flight attendants' lounge. Each carried one piece of luggage. Peter's was sturdy and stylish and made of space-age polymers. Kiki's was a navy-issue duffel bag.

The difference in their luggage was reflected in their demeanor. Peter was a civilian working with the air force, but he'd taken on a military air. He had very little sense of humor. He thought of himself as a diligent worker and a stern father and a good American. He'd emigrated from South Korea at age three. Not by nature a gifted student, he had worked his tail off to get through high school and Stanford and into his air force job at Pensacola and into the NTSB. He cut no one any slack, least of all himself.

Kiki had been a naval officer and had rotated out as a lieutenant, but she was much more casual than Peter. She tended to wear jeans and sweatshirts and scuffed hiking boots. At five foot ten, she was a jock who liked to sail and play volleyball. After years of discipline as a submariner, she'd moved to San Francisco and lived a life of luxury as an audio consultant for the arts community, as well as occasional jobs for the NTSB. She had sandy-red hair, the tips bleached blond by hours spent muscling a skiff
through the Bay, pulled back into a ponytail with a simple rubber band. At thirty-five, she still had a sprinkling of freckles on her nose and cheeks.

She and Peter were the only people in Terminal C, with the exception of two janitors and Angela Abdalla, the airport official who had turned the crash site over to Tommy. She had stayed on the scene until around eleven, when it became obvious that the wounded were being evacuated in an orderly manner and safety crews had things well under control. The best thing she could do, after that, was to shepherd the NTSB crews into position.

She greeted them by shaking their hands. “How was your flight?”

“Better than the Vermeer's,” Peter said. He wasn't joking. “Shall we go?”

“Can we hold off?” she asked. “We've got another one of your guys coming in, about five minutes out, and a fourth member will land in about twenty-five minutes. We only have the one helicopter available tonight.”

“That's fine,” Kiki said and flopped down on a couch, picking up a discarded copy of
The Wall Street Journal.

“No, it's not.” Peter looked at his watch. “I want to get out there now. You can send the helo back for the others.”

Kiki rolled her eyes. “It's dark. They're still off-loading survivors. There were survivors?” She cocked a rust-colored eyebrow at Angela.

“Yes.”

“So what?” Peter said. “I want to see my engines.”

“Your engines will be there in an hour. We'll wait.”

“Who made you the boss?” he asked brusquely.

Angela Abdalla was getting more and more uncomfortable.

Kiki looked up from her newspaper and curled her legs up under her. She smiled languidly. “You're right. I'm not IIC. Neither are you. Call Susan and ask her if we should wait a half hour, so four section leaders can be on site, or if your needs outweigh everyone else's.”

Peter narrowed his eyes, and his lips went white. He wasn't used to being slapped down like that. Finally, with effort, he turned to Angela and granted her a single nod. Grateful, she rushed out.

Peter said, “I don't appreciate your tone.”

Kiki said, “Oh,” in the same way you'd react if someone in an elevator said, “My dog is a spaniel.” She went back to her paper.

 

John Roby, the bomb expert from England, Walter Mulroney, who would head up the structures unit, and Isaiah Grey, the ex-pilot who would lead the ops crew, arrived within a half hour, were given their communication
units, and were escorted out to the tarmac. Many of them had worked together at one crash or another. Other section leaders, including Susan Tanaka, the intergovernmental liaison, were still hours away.

It was 12:20
A.M.
Pacific.

There's a folding metal seat in the cockpit of Boeing 737s that can be used for a flight engineer or a visiting pilot or dignitary. The pilot let Susan Tanaka use the space, once she'd flashed her ID to the senior flight attendant. Neither the pilot nor the copilot was crazy about having a crasher in their cockpit.

She wore a headset, and the copilot had set up the secondary-communication array to the right frequency. Susan could talk to her staff in Washington, and they, in turn, could link her into the building's telephone system.

She heard a dial tone followed by ringing. “Chemeketa Inn, how may I direct your call?”

“Reservations, please.”

“One moment please.” Muzak. “Reservations.”

“Yes, I need to book some rooms. My name is Susan Tanaka and I'm with the National Transportation Safety Board. Our people are investigating that plane crash, just north of you.”