Crashers

by Dana Haynes

  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.

  9

  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.

  THIRTY THOUSAND FEET OVER WISCONSIN

  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.”

  “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.”

  FORWARD SECTION

  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.

  STAGING AREA

  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.

  THIRTY THOUSAND FEET OVER MINNESOTA

  “Valence Airfield.”