by Ward Larsen
“The pilots want to talk to you.”
* * *
It was entirely new for Davis: living in a state of dread. When Diane died it had been straightforward, a dour state trooper at his door with one crushing sentence. There’s been an accident, sir. This was altogether different, a metered process of torture. Every ringing phone and doorbell sufficient cause for a coronary.
“Up front?” he asked.
Stacy the Good nodded.
Davis knew it was against the rules for passengers to enter the cockpit during flight. He also knew that some captains still allowed common sense to rule. He had introduced himself to the pilots on the ground, and established that he and the skipper, a former C-130 driver, had more than a few friends in common from active duty days. The cockpit door unlocked and Davis pulled it open.
The flight deck was much brighter than the cabin, and he squinted as his eyes adjusted.
“Come on in,” said the captain, whose name was Mike. “Take a seat.” He pointed to a fold-down jumpseat behind the two crew positions.
Davis pulled and pushed the thing into place, and then wedged his wide shoulders between the port and starboard bulkheads.
“Have you heard anything new?” Davis asked.
“No,” said Mike. “But we just sent that message you requested. We figured you’d want to be here if a reply came through.”
“Yeah, I would. Thanks.”
“Sorry about your daughter, Jammer,” said Ed, the copilot. “That’s gotta be the worst news a guy can get.”
“Like you can’t imagine. What’s our ETA?”
“Two hours to landing in Bogotá. We’ll go straight to Customs. We already called ahead to explain your situation—told them you were a special emissary of the United States Office of Foreign Aid. You know, like you might be delivering a big check or something.”
Davis grinned for the first time in eight hours. “Thanks,” he said, “that should get me through the gauntlet.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. His back and shoulders felt knotted, like a shirt that had been twisted into a rope and left to dry in the sun. “So what are you carrying down below?” he asked.
“Below?” Mike queried.
“Well, yeah. You’re clearly not moving passengers, so I figured you must have a belly full of diplomatic freight or mail. I was told this is a regularly scheduled State Department run.”
The two pilots swapped a look. “State Department? Nah, those guys have their own air force, although we do run occasional contracts for them. This is a private jet, and today’s load manifest is basically you.”
Davis was surprised. “Maybe the return leg back to D.C. is a full boat.”
Mike shrugged. “Could be, but you know how corporate flight departments work. They don’t tell us anything. We just answer the phone, try to show up on time and sober.”
A communications alert sounded, and on the navigation scratchpad a single word flashed to life: MESSAGE.
The pendulum of Davis’ situation went on a hard downswing. He watched Ed call up the message, and they all read it at the same time: FROM LG AT NTSB. NO NEW DEVELOPMENTS. CONTACT IN BOGOTA COLONEL ALFONSO MARQUEZ.
Davis blew out a sigh, then combed his fingers through his short brown hair.
“They still haven’t found any wreckage,” Ed offered. “That’s good. Maybe the jet lost an engine and diverted to some grass strip in the middle of nowhere.”
A depressing silence followed. Captain Mike typed .89 into the Mach window of the flight computer. “That’s as fast as we can go without peeling the paint off. Why don’t you go back in the cabin and get some sleep.”
“I will,” Davis said, knowing perfectly well he would not.
THREE
Davis didn’t sleep. Instead he stared out the window and checked his watch. He ignored a Forbes magazine in a sidewall pocket. He beat the hell out of his armrests. The coastline came into view an hour later, but it meant they were still four hundred miles from Bogotá. Positional awareness—the curse of being a pilot/passenger.
He had been to Colombia once before, a brief stay in Cali to interview the family of a pilot who’d been killed in a crash. As was often the case, that meeting had been awkward all around, Davis’ carefully couched questions leading to nothing but agony and tears. He’d gained little useful information that day regarding the captain of the mishap flight, a man who had landed his jet half a mile short of a Bahamian runway. In the Bahamas, a half mile short puts you in the Atlantic Ocean every time, and that’s where they’d found him, strapped neatly into his seat under thirty feet of emerald-blue water, a crustacean’s jackpot. So Davis had sat in the parents’ kitchen, turning a coffee mug by its handle, leaving unaddressed that their only child was suspected of flying for a drug lord, and that the six hundred pounds of uncut cocaine hydrochloride found in the cargo bay would likely result in a subsequent visit by the Bahamian police. On that day, the loss of a son whose confidence exceeded his skills was enough. Davis’ last trip to Colombia had indeed been awkward.
This one had the makings of a catastrophe.
The view gradually changed, becoming a framed oval of green forest and rising mountains. This was the top of the Andes, seventeen-thousand-foot peaks that divided the Pacific Ocean from the headwaters of the Amazon. It was rugged terrain to say the least, and combined with the dense vegetation made for the kind of topography that could make a small jet disappear for months. Even years.
Davis wondered if he could handle not knowing for a prolonged period of time. Every day chipping away at hope and giving new false leads. He’d been drifting in no-man’s-land for only eight hours, yet already felt like he was coming undone. He imagined himself hacking through the jungle with a machete in hand, tattered clothes and a full beard. If it came to that, he would do it. Anything to find his daughter.
As the Gulfstream slipped through the final miles, Davis’ thoughts were not his friend. In a classic case of self-reproach he tried to recall his last words to Jen, and decided it had been a fatherly warning about the lamentable morals of young Colombian men. Characteristically paternal. Characteristically regrettable. He searched for something more positive, trying to remember the last time he’d seen her smile.
The engines throttled back and the descent began. Stacy the Good came back one last time, and was saying something about a seat belt when he found himself staring at a birthmark on her forearm. Jen had a birthmark on her right ankle. Would it come to that? he wondered. Identifying marks and dental records?
Davis was not customarily a reflective person, not prone to guilt or hollow regrets. Yet at that moment he felt himself spiraling into an emotional vortex, a death spin that seemed unrecoverable. He was rescued by Captain Mike’s voice on the cabin speaker.
“Landing in ten minutes, Jammer.”
* * *
Customs was indeed a gentleman’s affair. The Gulfstream parked in front of a fixed-base operator, or FBO, where two uniformed officials greeted Davis and the crew, and went through the motions of an inspection. Davis presented his passport and expedited visa, and within ten minutes he was walking toward the FBO’s executive lounge.
Waiting for him there on a red carpet runner was Colonel Alfonso Marquez.
He was a small man, perhaps five foot six and slightly built. There was a tightly trimmed mustache under a regal nose. He had olive skin and coal-black eyes. Give the man a metal helmet and a horse, Davis imagined, and he’d make the perfect conquistador. They introduced themselves, and the name “Jammer” seemed to throw Marquez off his stride. The colonel said it twice to be sure he had the pronunciation right, the first consonant something between a Y and a J.
The moment their handshake broke, Davis said, “Have you found anything yet?”
“No,” said Marquez. “I have a car outside. Let’s get underway, and I will tell you what we know on the way to headquarters.”
The car was a Ford sedan, a standard-issue Colombian Air Force item with green lettering an
d official service emblem on the door. The emblem was drawn like a coat of arms, the main element being a burgundy bird that Davis thought looked like a turkey vulture. He supposed the artist had intended something more noble, a bird of prey as opposed to a carrion eater.
He took the front passenger seat while Marquez drove, which in itself told Davis something. A full colonel in a place like Colombia would typically warrant a driver. It could be that Marquez liked doing things himself. Or possibly he saw a driver as a waste of manpower. Those reasons Davis liked. On the other hand, the colonel could be a professional outlier, a senior officer stripped of his perks. In a small air force the specter of career politics had to loom large, so a billet in air accident investigations might be just the place for an O-6 who’d reached the top rung of his promotion ladder.
Marquez began an in-briefing in confident, albeit accented, English. “You may not be familiar with how we run investigations here in Colombia, so I should explain my authority. Most accidents fall under the watch of our Special Administrative Unit of Civil Aeronautics. In unusual circumstances, however, the air force can be asked to take over an inquiry.”
“And this investigation is unusual?” Davis asked.
Marquez shrugged. “I can tell you I was surprised when the order came for me to take control … especially since there is no confirmation yet that we even have a crash.”
Davis wasn’t sure if the military’s involvement was a good or a bad thing, but it did carry one implication: interest in the incident had reached a high level in Colombia. He envisioned government ministers and generals, all pushing and pulling. Favors given and markers called in. In the end, Davis knew there was one primary determiner of any investigation’s success: the investigator-in-charge. For better or worse, the man sitting next to him was the most important person in his and Jen’s world. “What can you tell me about the flight in question?” he asked, trying not to let his concern bleed through.
“The aircraft is a small regional jet, an ARJ-35, registration number HK-55H. On board were twenty-one passengers and three crewmembers—two pilots and a flight attendant. The flight departed from the passenger terminal on the other side of this airfield at 20:21 last night. It was a regularly scheduled flight bound for Cali. The proposed flight time was one hour, but after twenty minutes, on the far side of the Cordillera Oriental, what you would call the Eastern Andes, the aircraft began to lose altitude. Repeated attempts by the air traffic controllers to contact the flight went unanswered, and at 21:06 both the primary and secondary radar returns were lost.”
“Simultaneously?” Davis asked. The primary return was a simple echo measuring range and bearing, while the secondary return was an electronic handshake, working through the aircraft’s transponder, that included data such as altitude and call sign. The two returns could be decoupled, however, as proved in a number of incidents, including Malaysia Air Flight 470, if the transponder became inoperative or was disabled.
Marquez said, “Yes, early information suggests that the signals were lost at the same moment.”
“Was a search initiated right away?”
“Of course. Our air force has begun an extensive campaign to locate the wreckage.”
“Wreckage? Doesn’t that assume the worst case?”
Marquez briefly locked eyes with Davis. “You have a daughter named Jennifer Davis?”
Davis turned his gaze to the window. “So they told you about that.”
“You must admit it is irregular … taking part in an inquiry in which a close relative was on board.” When Davis didn’t respond, Marquez rubbed his chin with his free hand, resulting in a sandpaper noise that implied it had been a long day. “I must ask you, Mr. Davis—do you think you can pursue this investigation with a clear mind?”
“Honestly … no. But I can pursue it in a way that will get answers. Isn’t that what we both want?”
Davis sensed the colonel eyeing him critically, in the way he might regard a corporal whose uniform was out of regulation. “Very well,” said Marquez. “I will take you at your word.”
* * *
The sun was a bronze semicircle on the hazy horizon when Marquez steered into the parking lot of what looked like an abandoned corporate flight department. In front was a simple two-story office block, square edged and colorless, and behind that lay a parking apron for small jets, the whole affair connected to the more vibrant tracts of El Dorado International Airport by an arterial system of service roads and taxiways. The parking lot was sprinkled with vehicles that looked familiar, six or seven sedans, each the same shade of green and with the same maroon vulture—probably half the staff cars of the Colombian Air Force.
Marquez parked next to the building’s entrance, and said, “Welcome to our headquarters. As you can see, we have already given it a name.”
Davis saw a makeshift sign stenciled over the entrance: El Centro. No translation necessary. Inside would be people who’d been up since dawn, stirring and breathing life into a place that had been dead the day before. The colonel led Davis inside, and what he saw there supported his theory that the building’s previous tenant had been an air taxi operator or corporate flight department gone to insolvency. A scuffed operations desk was backed by empty wall mounts where monitors had been, and next to these were a pair of empty whiteboards that would once have held schedules and notices. All of it was being resurrected by Marquez’ crew. Davis saw a hastily arranged communications center, wires and transceivers and handsets, all nested haphazardly. Tiny green lights and a distinct electrical odor suggested most of it was working, and a young enlisted woman was busy making connections. Banks of bright fluorescent tubes hummed and fluttered, overpowering the workspace in a cascade of white.
Marquez led him to a large topographical map of Colombia that was tacked to a wall. He drew two fingers along a red-tape line. “This is the proposed route filed for TAC-Air Flight 223.”
The line struck fifty miles west out of Bogotá, carrying over the rugged foothills of Sumapaz National Forest. Then, not quite halfway to Cali, the red line went to dashes and a green search box was drawn.
“This is isolated country,” Marquez continued, “very mountainous. The terrain is severe, and on the other side of the range lies jungle, some of the most dense in our country—which is to say, some of the most dense in the world. As I’m sure you know, a small aircraft can disappear in a place like this with little trace.”
“True,” Davis said as he studied the map, “but it depends on a lot of things.” He was relieved to be on familiar ground. For the first time in ten hours he was being productive, and felt an undeniable comfort in the mechanics of his job. “If the airplane was moving fast, or if it struck the forest at a low angle, we could expect a significant scar on the canopy. Fire is a near certainty, and that can be seen from satellites. Do you have any infrared imagery yet?”
“No,” Marquez lamented. “I made a request through defense ministry channels this morning, but nothing has come. There is commercial imagery, of course, but that is expensive and often has poor resolution. Getting recent images could also prove difficult.”
“I’ll call Washington and see what I can do. What about pings from an ELT?” he asked, referring to the emergency beacon that would be giving off a locator signal if the airplane had indeed crashed.
“We’ve been listening, but there is nothing yet.”
Davis thought this strange, but also comforting. “I think we should consider other scenarios. Is it possible the airplane diverted to an alternate airport and nobody has heard about it yet?”
Marquez eyed him steadily for a moment.
Davis waited patiently for an answer.
“There were no thunderstorms in the area last night to have caused such a diversion.”
“They might have diverted for a mechanical problem. What about the aircraft’s history? Have you checked the maintenance logs for discrepancies? Have there been any repairs recently or service issues?”
“
We have people going over them now. There was an MEL for an inoperative anti-ice system on the port engine.”
MEL stood for minimum equipment list. Commercial aircraft were designed with built-in redundancies, allowing them to be dispatched for passenger flights with certain inoperative components, although often with operational restrictions. Everything was spelled out in the airline’s approved MEL manual for that type of aircraft. The anti-ice system Marquez was referring to was designed to counter buildups of atmospheric icing on engine fan blades.
“Engine anti-ice,” Davis said. “That could be pertinent.”
“As I said, there was no significant weather in the area.”
“Significant doesn’t matter. The CFB-22 engine is particularly susceptible to fan blade icing. I think there was an advisory circular sent out to operators last year.”
Davis saw the colonel stiffen ever so slightly, but he relented. “Yes, it bears looking into. Our first order of business, however, is to find the airplane.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
Marquez crossed the room to a desk, and pulled a cell phone and charging cable from a drawer. “This is for you. A woman from the embassy stopped by and left it for you this afternoon.”
Davis took the device in hand. It was a satellite handheld unit that looked inordinately expensive, exactly the kind of thing the United States government would buy. “The U.S. Embassy? They came and left this for me?”
“Your government can be very efficient.”
“Is that what you think?” The phone was already powered, and Davis searched the contacts section but found nothing preloaded. It was either new or had been scrubbed clean. “Maybe I should give it a try,” he said.
Marquez excused himself to an adjoining room, leaving Davis alone. He typed in Larry Green’s number from memory and initiated a call. Twenty seconds later Green answered.
“It’s me, Larry. I’m in Bogotá.”
“Outstanding. Any news yet?”
“No, nothing.”
“What about the guy in charge, Marquez?”
