Crashers (7 page)

“Oh! I heard about that on my commute! My God, how many are dead?”

“We don't know yet.”

“Well, how many rooms will you be needing?”

Susan said, “All of them.”

“Um. Excuse me?”

“We need every room you have available. Book them for three weeks, please. And as other people move out, I'll take those rooms, too.”

“Um . . . ah, well, yes . . . I see. This isn't really the high season and we are a rather large hotel, Ms. Tanaka. We have seventy-three empty rooms now and—”

“Perfect. I'll take them. How many total rooms do you have?”

“Two hundred and twenty-four, but—”

“Excellent. We'll take them all as they become available. My assistant is faxing you a credit-card authorization now. Good day.”

The fuselage had ended its journey at about ten degrees nose-up. The landing gear hadn't been deployed, and the avionics deck had been flattened on impact. Consequently, the opening was only about five feet off the ground. Tommy Tomzak and his two volunteers could step right into the wreckage with only a little help. Once there, they would have to walk uphill to the front of the plane.

The fuselage also was twisted to the left, so the ceiling of the passenger deck faced the eleven-o'clock mark, the floor at five o'clock. Walking up the aisle would be difficult, especially since they'd have to keep ducking every time an exposed wire sparked.

Tommy and the volunteers waited until firefighters scrounged up three yellow overalls for them, plus thicker gloves than the disposables they'd used so far.

The plane had cracked in two just aft of the wings, at row twenty-seven. The seats for rows nineteen through twenty-seven had been dumped out of the plane and had been found earlier in the field, with no survivors.

Rows eighteen through one were left in place. And almost immediately, the rescue party realized that they weren't going to find any survivors. The bodies were everywhere, some still in their seats, others sprawled. Men, women. Children. The big paramedic turned around after a dozen steps, marched back, and puked out the back of the aircraft. He knelt at the edge, eyes locked on the grass so he couldn't see the shocked, white faces of his cohorts, feeling ashamed. He heard Tommy draw up behind him and realized he was going to get his ass chewed, in front of his friends no less, for so unprofessional a display.

Tommy knelt beside him, gripped the edge of the vessel, and threw up, too. They knelt side by side, panting. The paramedic and Tommy made brief eye contact, nodded their understanding.

“Hey,” Tommy said to the crews standing in a semicircle outside the ship. He pointed to their vomit. “Find a stick or something. Mark that.”

Tommy and the medic returned to the woman paramedic, who nodded to them both. They went back to surveying the abattoir.

When they reached first class, Tommy was surprised to see sky ahead. The nose had sheared off; he hadn't done a walkaround before entering, which is standard operating procedure. He kicked himself for that. An engineer would have thought of that.

The cockpit and more bits of the fuselage lay in the field about thirty
yards farther on. The cockpit was crumbled and scarred, and Tommy might not have recognized it if he hadn't known what he was looking for.
So much for either pilot walking away,
he thought.

He walked back through the darkened corridor of death, trying to touch as little as possible but still having to support himself because of the angle of the path. The thighs of his waterproof firefighter's outfit were soon smeared with blood and viscera, from supporting his weight by leaning against seats.

Tommy leaned over to the right-hand-cabin sidewall—starboard, he corrected himself. The fuselage was pocked with holes. He could stick his fingers through some, his fist through others. The metal and bits of thermo-formed plastic around the edges of the holes were curved inward. They'd sustained an impact from outside, and probably while in flight. Weird.

The air masks had deployed, too. Some of the corpses still wore them. They'd had time to realize they were doomed.

“Let's get the hell out of here,” he said, his voice echoing eerily in the tube-shaped space. The others nodded, eyes wide. They headed back toward the tail section. Tommy stopped, played his flashlight along the bodies. On his left sat a decapitated male in seat F, nearest the window. An infant and a woman in seat E, both of them mangled by debris and unrecognizable. In seat D, the aisle seat, was a teenager with massive blunt-force trauma to his torso.

Tommy swung the flashlight to the other side of the aisle. Seat C, an elderly woman, eyes and mouth wide open as if cut down in midscream. In seat A, he found a bloody pulp that looked to have been a woman, but the body was far too damaged to make that assessment, though she appeared to have been wearing a dress.

And between these two was seat 10-B. The seat of Bernard Weintraub, who'd unbuckled himself, walked to the back of the plane, stepped out, and waited for the crews to arrive.

Tommy felt a chill sweep down his spine. He almost dropped the light. Pushing on, he and his two volunteers exited the charred hulk of the aircraft.

The PDX helicopter dropped off the first five section leaders and hurried back to the airport for more. Lower-level Go-Team members began showing
up, too; some to the field of grass in Marion County, others to their assigned stations at the NTSB labs in Washington, D.C., and Seattle.

Kiki Duvall, John Roby, Peter Kim, Isaiah Grey, and Walter Mulroney wore windbreakers with
NTSB
stenciled on the backs and over their hearts. These they wore over heavier coats or pleated vests, plus scarves and gloves. It was almost 1
A.M.
and very cold, hovering around twenty-eight degrees. Fortunately, it was neither rainy nor windy. Only later would they realize how unusual that was in March in western Oregon.

John strode out into the field immediately, leaving the others behind. Isaiah Grey sat on a big, plastic water cooler filled with emergency blood packs and began reading the initial report from PDX air traffic control. He grudgingly hauled out his reading glasses; at forty, Isaiah had just gotten his first pair of glasses and they galled him to no end. Like the salt-and-pepper splashes over both ears. Maddening.

Walter Mulroney studied the two pieces of the aircraft, limned in harsh white light that threw gaudy shadows across the manicured field. Folded his arms across his chest and squinted into the night, memorizing every detail of the fuselage and the one visible wing. His every breath plumed in the bright-white lights of the fire trucks.

Peter Kim made a beeline for a coffee dispenser set up near an ambulance. He brought back a cup. He hadn't asked if Walter wanted coffee and he didn't particularly care.

Walter said, “How are you?”

Peter Kim, never a conversationalist, shrugged.

“I'm a designated IIC. If you don't mind, I'll take point on this one.”

Peter doctored his coffee with creamer and sugar. “Makes sense. Where the hell's the other wing?”

They both turned as Kiki Duvall made a very theatrical
ahem.
“You boys missed a memo or two. Tommy Tomzak has been here all night. He's IIC.”

The engineers exchanged perplexed looks. “He quit,” Peter said. “After fucking up in Kentucky.”

Walter winced. “There's no need for the language, but Peter's correct. And even if he hadn't quit, they'd never let Tomzak run another investigation.”

Kiki turned to him, eyes narrowed, and shot the engineer a look that would have melted a battleship's plating. “It wasn't a botched investigation. It just wasn't solved.”

Peter nodded. “And thus, it was botched. Putting a pathologist—a jumped-up morgue attendant—in charge was a fiasco in Kentucky. He
has no idea how to handle all the complications of a crash investigation of this magnitude.”

“No?” Kiki swept unruly strands of sandy hair away from her face. “Look around. He seems to be doing all right.”

And with that, she wandered out into the field, in John Roby's wake.

Walter put in his ear jack and tapped numbers on the surface of the satellite-communication-control device. “Well, that's just nuts. I'm calling Susan.”

Peter blew on his coffee and said, “No.”

Walter frowned at him.

“Tanaka always had Tomzak's back. Even when Kentucky went south,” Peter said.

“So we should sit idly by while—”

Peter shook his head. “Wait till morning. Go over her head. Call Del Wildman.”

Walter smiled with approval.

“Valence Airfield.”

“Hello. My name is Susan Tanaka. I'm the liaison from the NTSB. My people are out there investigating that Vermeer One Eleven that went down.”

The joviality drained out of the Latino voice on the other end. “Yes, ma'am. Jesus, that's bad. Me and Danny went up in a Piper 'bout an hour ago and checked it out.”

“You didn't see the missing wing, did you?”

“No, ma'am, but we're going up again at dawn. You guys don't know where it is yet?”

“I don't know. I'm calling from the sidecar seat of a seven three seven; I'm not in Oregon yet.”

“Well, how can we help?” Like any flyer, anywhere, the guy on the other end of the line jumped at the chance to assist a downed aircraft.

“I'm told you've just built a new hangar, to be leased by UPS.”

“Yep. Finished it last month. They've run out of room at the Salem airport. We're closest and we just lengthened our runway last year.”

Susan noted the singular, runway. “UPS called my office, offered to loan their new hangar to us for wreckage and reconstruction. I want to clear that with you.”

“Outstanding. Anything we can do, name it. We've got some stuff stored in there now but it'll be empty by dawn.”

“What's your name?”

“Ricky Sanchez, ma'am. I kind of run the office here.”

“Mr. Sanchez, you've just become guardian of the Vermeer One Eleven. We appreciate your assistance.”

“Yes, ma'am!” the man boomed. Any pilot in the world would have sounded the same.

KIKI DUVALL STEPPED UP beside John Roby, who stood and sniffed the bitterly cold air. Short and stocky, his hair cut very short, muscles taut under pale skin, anyone in the world would have recognized him as a cop. He sniffed again. It should have been a beautiful, earthy smell, but it stank of fuel and burned rubber and burned flesh. Kiki couldn't take her eyes off the wreckage, less than two hundred feet away now. This was only her second airliner, although she'd also fielded a Learjet crash that had killed three.

She said, “My God.”

He suddenly slid his arm through her elbow and bussed her on the cheek. “Hallo, love. How've you been?”

“Doing good,” she said. “You?”

“Handsomer than ever. Tommy's here, you know.”

She froze for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah.”

They were quiet for a while. Kiki broke the silence. “I don't envy you boys. All I want to do is get my black box and get the hell out of Dodge. This one doesn't look pretty.”

John said, “You're thinking Kentucky.”

Kiki didn't reply.

“I shouldn't be here long, meself,” the Manchester native said, and
took a moment to squint up at the stars. He checked his watch. “What time zone is this, love?”

“Pacific,” Kiki said, and checked her watch. It was a Swatch that might have cost all of thirty dollars. John probably had paid as much for his as she had for her first car. John made more money in a year as a demolitions expert and consultant than he did in ten years as a deputy chief inspector for the Yard. And he liked to spend it as quickly as he made it. “It's about one eighteen.”

He adjusted the time on his Swiss watch.

“You think this will be fast work?” Kiki asked.

“Will for me. I'm the bomb man.”

“And?”

He sniffed the air again, just to be sure. “And there was no bomb,” he said, smiled at her, and began walking back toward the coffee urn he'd spotted on the bumper of a ladder truck.

It took Tommy's rescue teams the better part of three hours but, by 4:30
A.M.
, the last victims had been carted off, the “footprint” of the crash scene had been well documented by the firefighters, and all the Go-Team unit leaders had been assembled.

Realizing that there was terribly little they could do until sunrise, Susan Tanaka—calling from thirty thousand feet over Idaho—corralled them all to the hotel she had secured in the town of Keizer. Walter Mulroney, Peter Kim, and Isaiah Grey headed there to get some sleep. Kiki Duvall and John Roby stayed behind, just in case Tommy needed any help.

Just about the time that Susan's plane was landing at PDX, John looked up from a cup of particularly awful American coffee and saw Tommy Tomzak dressed in a firefighter's yellow outfit, trudging toward the staging area. John's eyes swept to the north and caught sight of Kiki Duvall moving to intercept Tommy. “This,” John murmured to no one at all, “should be interesting.”

Tommy and Kiki met halfway between the plane and the staging area. Kiki's bulky, high-top hiking boots were perfect for clomping through a field, but Tommy was wading around inside the too-large fireman's outfit, looking vaguely like an acrobat/clown from Cirque du Soleil.

“Hi,” Kiki said.

“Hey,” Tommy said.

They paused.

He added, “You look good.”

“Thanks. You look like crap.”

Tommy grinned and kicked at the soil with his boot. “Had better days.”

“You look exhausted.”

“That's just the exhaustion.”

Kiki laughed. “Seriously. How've you been?”