The President's Plane Is Missing

by Robert J Serling

  He did not confine his interests to political history, either. He was a walking encyclopedia on the Indian wars and any flight taking him over Arizona featured brief cabin PA lectures on the Apache nation that had once ruled the land flashing under their wings. He was as familiar with such Apache chiefs as Mangas Coloradas, Victorio, Cochise, Geronimo and Chato as he was with the lives of American Presidents. In fact, on this sunny Wednesday morning, he was letting First Officer Bill Culbert fly the Los Angeles-Albuquerque leg so he could deliver one of his discourses on the greatness of the Apache tribe, with its courage and fierce pride. Plus the belief it might take his passengers’ minds off the Air Force One story.

  “The present Fort Apache Indian Reservation is a few miles to the south,” he was telling the passengers. “Unfortunately we’re on jet route J78, which runs a bit too far to the north for us to see the reservation area. On the right side of our aircraft, however, are the famous Pink Cliffs of Arizona . . .”

  Culbert, who in spite of himself always got interested in what his captain was saying, instinctively glanced out the cockpit window on his side as if he were one of the curious passengers. In that second of automatic reflex, just before he turned back to his controls, his eyes caught a glint of metal far below.

  “Kelly, I just saw something. Sunlight on metal, I think.”

  “Turn her a bit. Maybe I can spot it.”

  The 707 banked. Ormsbee shook his head. “Whatever it was, I missed it.”

  “Maybe we’d better take another look, Kelly. When we left LA, they still hadn’t found that plane yet. Maybe . . .”

  “Hell, it could be anything. A tin roof on a farm shack for all we know. But I’m not taking any chances. We on the Albuquerque Center frequency?”

  “All tuned.”

  ‘Albuquerque Center, this is Midwest 74. We’ve spotted what looks like reflected metal. We’re twenty miles east of Winslow on J78. Request permission to go down and take a closer peek.”

  “Midwest 74. There is no traffic below you. You are cleared to descend. Squawk ident for your present altitude, please.”

  “Identing.”

  “Okay, Midwest 74. Keep us advised, will you?”

  “Will do. Seventy-four out. Take her down, Bill. I’ll tell our customers what’s happening.”

  Culbert put the 707 into a steep, descending turn as Ormsbee pressed the PA mike button.

  “Folks, don’t be alarmed at this turn and our descent. We’ve sighted something that may be a piece of aluminum below us. As you know, the President’s plane is still missing and, just to make sure, we’re going down to take a closer look. This may delay our flight a few minutes but I’m sure you understand the importance. We’ll keep you posted. Thank you.”

  The descent from twenty-eight thousand feet was not abnormally fast, but Ormsbee told the flight engineer to reduce cabin pressure slightly so the passengers would feel no discomfort. “I’ll give you thirty degrees flap,” the captain said to Culbert.

  They found nothing on the first pass, screaming over the Pink Cliffs at three thousand feet from east to west. Culbert was disappointed and embarrassed. If his eyes had played tricks on him, this little excursion would cost the airline about seven hundred dollars in extra fuel consumption.

  “I could have sworn I saw something Kelly. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t give up. Let’s make a pass from west to east. Maybe we can pick up that same shaft of sunlight. If it is the plane, it must be buried under God knows what or the search planes would have seen it by now. You might have caught the reflection at just the right angle at just the right minute. You look and I’ll fly. Give me full flaps after we make our turn.”

  They completed a one-eighty and swept over the jagged terrain, wild and primitive in its unsullied beauty. Two thousand feet, now. Ormsbee closed the throttles until the air speed dropped to only one hundred and fifty-five knots. The 707 literally was crawling now.

  “There it is!” Culbert’s voice was almost a shriek. “Yeah, I saw that flash of light. We’ll go around again. Did you see anything resembling an airplane?”

  “Negative. Just the reflection.”

  On the next pass they found more than the reflection. At the foot of a cliff, impaled about halfway down a clump of tall, thick trees, was a large chunk of aluminum. They had to make two more passes before they got a good enough glimpse for Ormsbee to give Albuquerque the word.

  “Albuquerque Center, this is Midwest 74. We may have something. It appears to be a fairly large chunk of a horizontal stabilizer. Off a T-tail, too. Should we stick around?”

  “Midwest 74, any sign of other wreckage?”

  “Negative. Just the one piece. It’s in a bunch of trees at the base of a cliff. You’ve got to be right on top of it before you can see it.”

  “Stand by, Midwest 74. We’ll contact search headquarters. Suggest you fly a circular pattern around the area until we can get some instructions. What’s your altitude?”

  “We’re at two thousand and we’re gulping fuel. Can we circle at five, please?”

  “Cleared to climb to five, continue your pattern. Stand by.”

  Albuquerque reported back in less than three minutes, although to Ormsbee and Culbert it seemed like thirty.

  “Midwest 74, Albuquerque Center. There’s an Air Force helicopter and two Civil Air Patrol planes en route to your present location. Search headquarters requests that you stay in your area and when you spot ’em, lead them to the wreckage. The search planes are on this frequency to facilitate air-to-air communications. Acknowledge.”

  “Roger, Midwest 74. And we have one of those CAP boys in sight right now.”

  “Thanks, Midwest 74. We hope this is it. Good show. Let us know when you’re ready to resume cruising altitude and course. Over.”

  “Midwest 74.”

  Ormsbee informed the passengers of the situation, and added he assumed they wouldn’t mind too much if the flight stayed around a few minutes longer while the search planes identified what appeared to be aircraft wreckage. They led a CAP Cessna over the clump of trees and listened while the CAP pilot told Albuquerque, “Looks like it’s part of a large aircraft but we’ll let the chopper make sure.” The helicopter arrived a few minutes later and hovered directly over the trees. The voice of its pilot echoed metallically on the Albuquerque frequency.

  “If you airline guys are still listening, you deserve the first word. It’s most of a Condor’s horizontal stabilizer. We are shifting to search headquarters frequency. Many thanks, Midwest.”

  Captain Kelly Ormsbee, who loved history, had just helped make it.

  They still had to find the rest of Air Force One and this took them another two hours. It was a mile and a half from the portion of stabilizers sighted by the airline crew, strewn, torn and twisted, over the bottom of a deep gorge. The first helicopter to find it radioed the reason why it had taken so long to learn Air Force One’s fate.

  “Most of the wreckage is buried under mud and silt,” he advised search headquarters. “That storm must have washed half of Arizona’s soil on top of it.”

  “Any sign of life?”

  “Negative, sir. No survivors as far as we can tell. Can’t see any bodies, for that matter. The gorge is pretty narrow but I think we can get down to the surface. Stand by.” Every man at headquarters had the strange experience of feeling relief mixed with dread. They slumped into chairs or paced aimlessly and restlessly around the room.

  “Search headquarters, this is Air Force chopper 32. We’re at the bottom.”

  A hundred eyes were fixed on the radio set.

  “We see a couple of bodies. Nobody could have lived through this mess.”

  The Air Force general in charge of search operations grabbed the microphone away from the sergeant handling communications.

  “This is General Dunbar. Are you damned sure there are no survivors?”

  “General, this bird is in a hundred thousand pieces. If anybody walked away, he’d have to be
Jesus himself.”

  “The bodies . . . what kind of shape are they in? Are they identifiable?”

  “Mac’s out looking at them, sir. They appear to be badly burned. Here’s Lieutenant McCorckle now, General. I’ll put him on.”

  “McCorckle, sir. I could find only two bodies. They’re in pretty bad shape. I. . . I couldn’t see anything of the President.”

  “Go out and look again, McCorckle. McCorckle?”

  “This is the other pilot, General. McCorckle’s outside. Getting sick.”

  The general stifled an oath and instead clucked sympathetically. “I know it’s rough, son, but we’ve got to know if the President’s dead. Keep looking until we get some rescue equipment there.”

  “I hope you have some mountain climbers handy, sir. This gorge is two hundred feet deep and almost perpendicular.”

  “We’ll get ’em if we have to. Stay there until further orders. Major Bogley?”

  “Here, sir.” A lean, sober-faced officer approached Dunbar.

  “Where’s that FBI disaster team? They’ll have to go to work on fingerprints if things are as bad as those pilots say.”

  “The FBI men already are boarding choppers, sir.”

  “Good. Well, you can pass the word to Washington. No survivors. Wait a minute. Better make that ‘no apparent survivors.’ And call in the press.”

  Vice President Madigan got the word from Newt Spellman at 2:30 P.M. Washington time, “the word” being strained through a sieve of accumulated tension and fatigue. Spellman had not been home for two days and had managed to grab only a couple of two-hour naps at his office in that time.

  “What do you think I should do now?” Madigan gulped. “Am I supposed to take over or what?” Spellman stepped quickly into the breach that divided the Vice President’s mild panic from his firm desire not to let panic seep out into the public view.

  “I think, sir, it’s best for you to come immediately to the White House. General Coston’s already here, talking to search headquarters. Any further word will be given to him first almost directly from the crash site itself.”

  “If you think I should, I’ll come right away.”

  Spellman hesitated a second, then decided he might as well prod Madigan into assuming at least partial authority for some of the more delicate and difficult details. “One more thing, Mr. Vice President..

  “Yes?”

  “If I may take the liberty, sir . . . I’d like to suggest that you ask the Chief Justice, the Cabinet and the congressional leaders of both parties to join you at the White House.”

  “Newt, don’t you think that would be a little presumptuous on my part?” Madigan said rather curtly and even sharply. “Particularly the Chief Justice. Dammit, I’d feel like a ghoul. They haven’t found the President’s body yet and may not for some time.” That, Madigan added to himself, was just what Harry Truman might have said. Maybe he liked the sound of “President Madigan,” but nobody was going to know it until he put his hand on that Bible.

  Spellman was properly and diplomatically apologetic. “Sir, I don’t believe anyone could accuse you of being presumptuous if you did what I suggest. To tell you the truth, the reporters are bugging me about some of the legal ramifications. And I figure it would be a good idea if you and Chief Justice Van Dyke could talk to them.”

  “Legal ramifications? What legal ramifications?”

  “Well, sir, as you indicated yourself, the President’s body might not be found for quite a while. The press wants to know, to put it bluntly, if it’s necessary to have the . . . the corpus delicti, so to speak . . . before you can be sworn in. They’re pointing out there are no precedents for this situation . . . nothing like this ever happened before.”

  “They’re right about that,” Madigan said grimly. “Well, okay, Newt. But I’ve got a little better idea. You call the Chief Justice and tell him I suggested he meet me at the White House. That way, it doesn’t look as if I’m, uh, pressing. How’s that strike you?”

  “All right, sir. And the congressional leaders?”

  “I’ll have Oscar phone all of them so you don’t have to bother with anyone but Van Dyke. I know you’re busy and pretty upset, my boy.”

  “Thank you, sir. I appreciate your understanding and your cooperation.”

  Madigan thought, as he hung up, that Spellman sounded a little sarcastic. Supercilious Jew. He buzzed on his intercom for his administrative assistant, who entered almost immediately as if he were attached to a rope the Vice President had yanked suddenly.

  “Yes, Chief?”

  “Oscar, call the majority and minority leaders on both sides. Also the Speaker. Tell them—wait a minute, ask them —to join me at the White House in one hour. Make it, let’s see, two forty-five. You can tell them we’re all meeting with the Chief Justice to discuss some, ah, legal ramifications. And by the way, Oscar...”

  “Yes, Chief?”

  “I take it you won’t mind being the new presidential press secretary?”

  CHAPTER SIX

  The legal ramifications totally escaped the heartsick men working at the desolate crash site.

  General Dunbar, who regarded the press with the same degree of suspicion he would have displayed toward a visiting delegation from the Soviet Air Force, at first refused to let reporters into the area. Their bellows of anguished rage were heard—via frantic calls to their Washington bureaus— all the way to the Pentagon. Dunbar, in turn, was told by General Coston to amend his. decision at least to the extent of allowing some press representation at the scene.

  “Goddammit, Bob!” Dunbar exploded. “We’ve got enough troubles finding wreckage and bodies without a bunch of newspapermen tramping all over the place. And those TV guys—the bastards’ll try to take over the whole operation!”

  “I know you can’t let them get in the way,” Coston said soothingly. “But they’ve got their job too. We’ve discussed the problem here and we think there are two alternatives. Let them appoint their own pool representatives, not more than four or five men, and we’ll allow these pool reporters to remain at the crash site. Or we’ll take the whole bunch of them to the scene just once, give them a chance to see what’s going on and what the place looks like, and then make them stay at search headquarters. If they pick the latter, we’ll promise to keep them informed via a press liaison officer of anything we find. How’s that sound?”

  “There’s a third alternative,” Dunbar snarled. “We can tell them to go to hell.”

  “That we can’t do, Bailey. Call a press conference and lay it on the line. They can choose themselves between a permanent pool or a one-shot visit.”

  Dunbar, with misgivings, called in the reporters at his Winslow command post. He was a huge bear of a man built along the lines of a pro football tackle with bristly, close-cropped hair.

  “I’ll give it to you guys straight,” he said gruffly. “Washington says there can be some coverage at the crash site. I’ve been ordered to give you a choice between two arrangements—we’ll take three guys in plus one TV cameraman, let them stay as long as they want, and they’ll pool whatever develops with all of you back here. Or you can all make one trip into the area, watch for about an hour and return to search headquarters where you’ll receive briefings on whatever develops. It’s up to you.”

  There was an unfriendly silence at first, then a mushrooming murmur of protest climaxed by Malcolm Jones raising his voice above the others.

  “General Dunbar, speaking for IPS, we’d never accept either alternative unless you can give me some compelling reasons why we should.”

  The question gave Dunbar the opening through which he fired his carefully mustered argument.

  “I’ll be glad to give you a few compelling reasons, all of you. One, that plane is scattered over a couple of hundred yards of mud with most of the wreckage and bodies buried. The gorge is long but narrow. There isn’t room enough for our guys to work if we let fifty or sixty reporters and a bunch of cameramen wander around. Sec
ond, this entire operation has only two purposes—to find and identify the body of the President and those of the others, and to find out what the hell went wrong with that aircraft. To fulfill those purposes requires a carefully planned technique of systematic searching and plain digging. Anyone at that site who isn’t directly engaged in the aforementioned systematic operation is just getting in the way. And, third, there was classified material on Air Force One—such as War Codes. I’ll admit none of you are likely to be Commie agents, but I wouldn’t let my own mother get a three-second look at some of that stuff. Have I made my point, Mr. Jones?” Jones was silent briefly as he digested what for Bailey Dunbar was a full-blown speech.

  “General, could you leave us for a little while and let us talk this over among ourselves?” he said finally.

  “I’ll give you fifteen minutes,” the general replied.

  He came back in exactly fifteen minutes to find the room still noisy with protests but markedly less in volume and number. Jones was the press spokesman.

  “General Dunbar, we haven’t exactly taken a vote but I think the majority is willing to go along. We’ll take the pool arrangement.”

  “Okay. Who goes on the pool?”

  “One man from each of the three wire services. The networks will flip a coin for the pool cameraman, and he’ll also shoot for the newsreels. We would, however, like assurances that the Air Force will set up some kind of communications facilities so the pool reporters can get all developments to headquarters as fast as possible.”

  “Can do. Any questions? No? All right, flip that coin. My helicopter leaves in five minutes. And for you lucky guys going—brace. You’re going to poke your noses into a corner of hell.”

  Malcolm Jones, a bull-necked man in his early fifties with homely, rather simian features, had spent twenty-seven years in newspaper work. In that time he had covered fires, murders, wars, revolutions, suicides, tornadoes, hurricanes, riots and a presidential assassination. He had approached this assignment with the gnawing dread of a combat soldier advancing into the teeth of a well-protected machine gun emplacement. His uneasiness was more than merely a matter of fearing a gory scene of death. He feared even more the implications of what he was about to see, the knowledge that it meant the swearing in of another President minutes, even seconds, after the news was flashed to Washington. An oath of office solemnly administered to a man who would immediately assume awesome authority and massive problems, neither of which he was equipped to handle.