Crashers (8 page)

“Good. I'm good. You?”

“Good,” she said. “I'm good, too.”

There was a space of about two feet between them, plus the ghosts of an affair that had ended badly and spawned enough guilt to light up a small city. They'd spent six months together in Kentucky, not quite two years ago, investigating the crash of an Alitalia Airbus. They'd hit it off right away and soon were making plans to get breakfast together to go over their findings, or just to chat. Later, they'd begun meeting before the nightly “postmortem”—when the crew leaders got together to reveal what they'd learned that day. Eventually, they were going out for coffee after the postmortem, and, inevitably, it became a sexual thing. They were both young (Tommy was five years her senior), both attractive, both single. It was as natural as walking.

But six months became eighteen months as the investigation stretched out and no answer appeared. The Go-Team's frustration began to manifest itself in a variety of unhealthy changes. Team members began showing up late for meetings. They snapped at one another. They burned out. Kiki and Tommy had been no different. Tommy, who'd sworn off booze shortly after his college years, started drinking again.

By the time the investigation team was disbanded, their romance had become indelibly linked to the Airbus investigation. And as one had failed, so, too, had the other. They'd turned to quarreling or simply annoying each other. And one night they agreed mutually to call it quits. Neither of them had seen or spoken to the other since.

Now, here they were in the weird, harsh light thrown by the emergency vehicles, their shadows stretching for yards, their breath misting. Kiki used her open palm, fingers spread, to sweep long, sandy-red hair away from her eyes. She breathed into her other fist, which she could barely feel. “Well, this has been fun. We should talk like this more often.”

Tommy nodded, embarrassed. “Sorry. I'm tired. And I puked.”

“You always puke.”

“Yeah.”

“Look,” she said, and rested a strong hand on his forearm, being careful to avoid the bloodstains. “Let's just get through this thing. We were friends once. We're still friends. Cool?”

He made a fist. She did, too, and they bumped knuckles. “Cool,” he said. “Susan must be glad as hell to have the Sonar Witch on this team. I got a bad feeling this one's going to go south on you.”

Kiki thought,
On you?
but let it slide.

“Don't be pessimistic. I've looked over the section rosters. We've got a solid team. We'll get this thing.”

He nodded, feeling the exhaustion like a scrim, covering everything, making things hazy. He'd been up for twenty-two straight hours now and had been on the scene for closing in on eight hours. “Then let's start with some good news: they found your CVR.”

He cocked a thumb in the direction of a pennant that marked the location of the cockpit voice recorder. It lay near the tail cone. He could see Kiki brighten up.

“Cool!” She started jogging in that direction, revealing an easy athleticism that Tommy remembered well. “Take it easy, boss. Get some rest!”

Tommy thought,
Boss?

John Roby walked over to him, wearing a thick, quilted parka under his NTSB jacket. Tommy grinned when he saw him. “You look like the Michelin Man.”

John moved to hug him, then noticed the grisly bits on his turnout. They settled for a handshake. “Bloody cold out here, innit. How're you, mate?”

Tommy said, “Given the given . . .” and shrugged.

“Yeah.” John shrugged inside his massive coats. “You done good, protecting the site. Pennants up, the firefighters haven't poured water over everything. Nicely done.”

“Thanks, man. You've got bomb duty?”

“Yeah, but not for long. Have a butcher at that.”

Tommy never got John's rhyming slang and had stopped trying years ago. John pointed to the fuselage. “There's some charring on the outside but it's all up and down, not horizontal. See? That came from the fires in the field. Nothing was aflame before the crash.”

“Bomb coulda been inside.”

“No. I'd smell it if there were an explosive. You'll see. The cadavers won't have any soot in their noses, their lungs. This wasn't a bomb.”

“You're the expert.” Tommy yawned.

John thought maybe it was a trick of the low, harsh lights, but he didn't remember Tommy looking so pale and drawn.

“Come on,” he said. “Susan set up a hotel. Dunno where, but Kiki likely does. And Susan's called one of those fucking Allthings for the morning.”

Both men rolled their eyes. They stood near one of the massive plastic coolers of medical supplies that the EMTs had brought. Tommy knelt and began stuffing supplies into his med kit. “Yeah, you head on out.”

“You're knackered, mate. You should come along.”

“Can't,” he said, standing. Kiki joined them and handed Tommy a bottled water. “I'll follow you, soon as we get the pilots' bodies out of the flight deck.”

“D'you have to do that now?” John asked.

“Yeah.”

Kiki looked at Tommy's face and didn't like what she saw. “You're running on fumes,” she said. “You've done a great thing here. This is the cleanest crash scene I've ever seen. The rescue teams were on tight rein, and we're going to appreciate that for weeks to come. Come on. Get some rest.”

“Thanks. But I'm gonna get the pilots' bodies. It's . . .” He thought about it for a second, then turned and peered into the field. “I want to see them.”

Kiki touched his arm. “If I know you, you're going to want to stay on and handle their autopsies, too.”

He laughed. Kiki always could peg him. “This ain't your average autopsy situation. The local MEs are going to want to help, and thank God for that. But if they start hacking away before they understand NTSB protocols, they could contaminate the bodies, screw up the chain of evidence.”

She nodded.

“ 'Sides, I want to do the pilots before the wolves start howling.”

Kiki and John understood. In any major crash, people started asking about pilot error almost from the first moment. It just made sense: the various manufacturers assumed that their technology couldn't fail so dramatically, thus the pilot must have screwed up.

Go-Teams had learned to rush toxicology tests on the pilots; that is, whenever a sufficient amount of the pilots' bodies can be identified. Until alcohol and drugs could be ruled out, the media would steadfastly report that they hadn't been ruled out yet. Through no malice of their own, reporters would begin the process of maligning the cabin crew. A quick tox test could put a stop to that.

It hadn't happened like that in the Alitalia crash in Kentucky because the
plane had nosed in. It had taken weeks to find enough body parts to DNA test for identification, and then to test for drugs or alcohol. By that time, decay made any such tests inconclusive.

Kiki patted his arm. “Go get 'em, tiger. I'll wait here. We'll head to the hotel together.”

“Okay,” he said, truly appreciating it. He took a swig of water and headed back into the field of grass.

 

Tommy Tomzak gathered his paramedical team. They looked as tired and brittle as he felt. Everyone stood on the asphalt of the blocked-off, northbound slow lane, in the space between two fire trucks. It was close to 5 
A.M.
; the sun would be up soon.

“We're done with the first job,” Tommy told them. “The survivors are away. I gotta tell you, we broke some kind of NTSB record for evac'ing the wounded. Y'all done good.”

There was a smattering of applause and backslapping. Most of the med techs who'd arrived the night before had departed with the victims. About one in four had stayed behind to cart wounded away from the site. Now, as the sky began to lighten behind Mount Hood, the fatigued group guzzled bottled water and coffee and Gatorade. Some sat on the ground, others rested on the running boards of the fire trucks. Tommy sat on the bumper of a cherry-picker truck.

“Next is phase two,” he said. “We gotta get the dead out of here in the same orderly manner as the living. The number-one thing we can do for these people—both the living and the dead—is to figure out why this bird crashed, and to see that it doesn't happen again. So far, we've left the crash site immaculate, and that's going to help a hell of a lot.”

Beyond Tommy's field of vision, yet another helo landed in the area that the state police had roped off and designated “the LZ,” the landing zone. Susan Tanaka stepped out of the glass-canopied bird.

“I'm gonna help retrieve the first two bodies but then I'm leaving you on your own,” Tommy said. The paramedics didn't look happy about that, but nobody spoke. “It's the same rule as before. Touch as little as possible. Don't move any of the artifacts unless you have to. If you move something, tie a yellow ribbon around it and try to put it back where it was. Are the moon suits here yet?”

Someone sang out, “Suits are in the AMR incident commander's van,
over there. We only got five of 'em. They set up a bleach-and-water-decon station back there by the pumper truck.”

Tommy nodded. He didn't know what AMR stood for but didn't ask. The bright white biohazard suits were designed for work in dangerous, uncontrolled field conditions. The gloves were thick and impervious to punctures from needles, broken glass, or nails. The shoes had rubber treads for traction in dirt and mud. They came in two varieties: biosafety levels three and four. For this kind of operation, level three would probably be fine, which meant that Tommy wouldn't have to schlep an air tank around.

Now that he'd been inside the front section of the jet, he had no intention of letting anyone else in there without a full suit. He debated making them dig out the level-four suits with the self-contained breathing apparatus, but decided against it. The fuselage was coated with blood and viscera on every surface, but that didn't mean a high likelihood of aerosol-vectored agents. Getting blood on an open wound is one thing; breathing in a rare virus is a heck of a lot less likely.

“Please pick five people for the front section; people who've worked biohazard before. The rest take the tail section and the grounds. I need two volunteers to help me get the pilots out of the cockpit.”

No hands went up. The female paramedic with the masculine haircut and multiple earrings said, “Um, have you seen the cockpit, sir?”

“The name's Tommy. And yeah, I saw it.” He knew what they meant and they knew he knew. But he was going in anyway. The woman EMT raised her hand. Another hand went up, too.

“Thanks. All right. Get your second wind and plenty of liquids. Except you guys getting into the moon suits.”

Everyone laughed, getting the joke. It was battlefield humor, the kind that keeps soldiers sane.

Tommy stood, his body aching. “And, folks? Nicely done.”

Once the cockpit voice recorder was on its way to Portland, Kiki Duvall had little to do but wait. She stood in the field and jammed her hands into the back pockets of her faded, boot-cut jeans. The smell of the crash scene and the voyeuristic, almost hedonistic gawking of the passersby were making her queasy. She couldn't imagine staring, slack-jawed, at such a sight. If
it hadn't been her job, she'd have averted her eyes from the slaughter in the field of grass.

No,
Kiki quickly corrected herself.
Staring at a crash scene is human nature.
She'd have been as curious as any of the drivers inching past. If she hadn't been a curious individual, she probably wouldn't have joined the navy two days after high-school graduation.

John Roby stepped out of the back of an oversized, multiincident ambulance, big enough for four gurneys stacked two-by-two. He waved her over.

“Get your fancy tape recorder airborne, did we?”

“I'll get a digitized version for an MP3 player before noon,” Kiki said. “Let's hope the insides of that baby are in as good condition as the outside.”

“Let's.” John nodded toward the ambulance. “Someone I'd like you to meet.”

The back doors were open. A man sat on a stretcher, staring into a plastic coffee cup that he held in both hands, resting on both knees. He didn't seem injured. For that matter, he didn't even seem bothered.

“Meet Bernard Weintraub,” John said. Being British, he put the accent on the first syllable of
Bernard.
“According to our Tommy, Mr. Weintraub was assigned to seat ten-B.”

Kiki almost said, Of what plane? before it hit her. “He looks okay.”

“Yeah. Passengers on either side of Mr. Weintraub are dead. Those in front and in back, as well. Seated amid a sea of death, and the lucky bastard hasn't a scratch on him.”

The man still hadn't moved. He stared into the depths of the coff ee cup like a diviner studying the eddies in a crystal ball.

“Why is he still here?”

“No room in the ambulances or helicopter for a man with no injuries. Plus, Tommy thought he might snap out of it and tell us a bit about what happened.”

Kiki said, “Tabula rasa?”

“Beg pardon?” John smiled up at Kiki, who was a good four inches taller.

“Blank slate. A fugue state; walking catatonia.”

“You know the oddest things for a wee slip of a girl.”

From anyone else, the sexist comment would have earned a rude retort. But the “wee slip” part gave away John's weird sense of humor. Kiki had garnered a reputation on more than one naval base's coed basketball
team as a power forward not to be screwed with in the paint. She could box out with the best of them. Now, though, she nudged him with her elbow and rolled her eyes.

“No. I've chatted with your lad here. He's in shock, but coherent. I wouldn't mind if the Sonar Witch gave him a listen.”