Rich shook his head in disgust. “Would you believe North America sent a paint-sprayer crew out here before dawn to paint out their name and logo?”
“Standard procedure,” Joe replied with a snort. “Every airline lists that in their emergency response checklists as one of the most vital duties.”
“Unbelievable,” Rich said quietly. “As if people will be too stupid to know whose airplanes crashed here. I had the cops escort them out of here—at least until the survivors are rescued, for God’s sake!”
They got out then, walking toward the glut of firemen and other emergency personnel standing restlessly around the wreck, many of them holding fire extinguishers—a fire-fighting-foam truck mere feet away, its nozzle manned and ready to shoot fire suppressant onto the wreck—and the survivors—at the first hint of a spark.
A tired and dirty chief, whom Joe estimated to be six foot four, stood with a walkie-talkie, exuding authority but saying nothing before they approached. Joe introduced himself, and the chief explained the frustrating difficulty of having to use great care to pull away the heavier structural pieces, cutting others, all with a hydraulic tool called the Jaws of Life, which was designed to work in such conditions, its gasoline generator placed a safe distance from the flammable wreckage.
“You can’t use torches or saws, right?”
“You’ve got it. We light a cutting torch or create sparks with a saw, we’ll lose all of them in there. We have to be damn careful using Jaws, too, foaming the area we’re working in.”
“How are they doing in there?”
The big man looked at Joe, a look of great sadness and empathy. “God, it’s been hard. There are six of them. One was dead by the time they were discovered. At least he’s not moving, but we haven’t been able to get a stethoscope in yet. The one who kept yelling and finally got herself heard is a young college girl, I think in her twenties, who’s got a … a … metal rod literally through her leg, impaling her. She’s unbelievable. She’s been guiding us in calmly. One of the doctors managed to get several hypos of morphine in, and she’s worked on her seatmates, a seven-year-old boy and his four-year-old sister, who’re both in bad shape. We may lose them.”
“How about the others?” Susan asked.
“A husband and wife. She’s unconscious; he’s been hysterical and in pain, trying to get to his kids, and afraid he’s going to lose his wife. He’s not cooperating at all. The two little kids are his. We think his wife may be close to death, but until a doctor gets in there, we can’t tell.”
Joe turned away and nearly fell over a tall man in a business suit who had appeared unannounced behind them. The fellow extended his hand, identifying himself as an FBI agent assigned to investigate the accident.
“Where do you want to talk, Agent … was it Jamison?”
“Yes sir. Chet Jamison. I’ll ride back with you.”
The startlingly loud report of brittle metal reaching the breaking point filled the air suddenly, and all eyes whirled back toward the wreckage in apprehension.
Deep within the aerospace prison which held her, Linda Ellis heard the noise as a distant sound which forced her mind back toward reality as she opened her eyes and stared at the gray daylight filtering in, a bit more of it now, she thought, than before. The morphine had made her head feel fuzzy as it dulled the pain, and she had to struggle to think as she watched the outlines of worried rescuers laboring behind the jungle of metal, so close yet still out of reach. There had been a noise … one of them was saying something, and she strained to pay attention.
“Hang in there, Linda. We’ve got another major piece out of the way. We’ll be able to get a doctor in there in a few minutes.”
Linda looked to her left at the contorted face of the little girl in the middle seat. Linda had been in an aisle seat, the little girl … what was her name? Jill. That was it. Jill was four, and her brother was seven. Jill had been in the middle seat. Their parents were across the aisle … somewhere. Too much debris separated them. Linda had tried to reach the father, who kept yelling. She had tried to give him the hypodermic needle with the painkiller, but she couldn’t get her arm through.
Jill was unconscious again. With a start Linda felt for her wrist and found a pulse. The brother—she had forgotten his name again—was holding his sister’s shoulder and crying softly. Jill closed her eyes and repeated the same phrase she had clung to for so long. “I will survive this. We will survive this. We will survive this!”
It was so cold. So very cold. The men trying to reach them had a machine blowing warm air into the area, but it wasn’t enough. She had tried to think of fires and fireplaces, imagine herself in front of the family fireplace in Austin or on a sunny beach, but it didn’t work. She was freezing, and Jill’s father kept yelling that they were all going to die of hypothermia.
At least she had found the milk. Her eyes had hurt so badly from the fuel that covered her, but part of the wreckage holding her prisoner was from the plane’s galley, and there had been an unopened milk carton by her side. She had poured it in her eyes—rubbed the milk in her eyes—and they felt much better. God had sent her the milk. That meant she was supposed to survive. She had to survive. It was her duty. The milk carton proved it.
“How much longer?” She heard Jill’s father yell the question, and the same answer as before came back from the faceless forms above. “Soon.” Always soon. Soon was becoming an eternity. The fuzziness returned and the University of Missouri sophomore felt herself surrendering to it. She would sleep awhile. Soon they would be out, and safe.
5
Saturday morning, October 13
North America 135 was the first Saturday flight in from Dallas, a point not lost on most members of the media, who had positioned themselves to meet it. Passengers with no connection to the crash and grieving family members alike emerged from the jetway unprepared, blinking into the confusing glare of TV lights, a forest of camera lenses recording their varied expressions.
Among the first wave, Bill Deason, a harried-looking man in his thirties, emerged with only a topcoat, read the Gate 10 sign quickly, and turned right, hurrying past several gates before finding the appropriate door he had noted on his hastily copied instructions. He pushed his way inside, past a departing priest, and immediately spotted his brother-in-law sitting alone near a corner in the club room. Mark Weiss heard his name as Bill approached and nodded weakly, both of them standing for a few seconds in awkward silence before Bill hugged Mark, a gesture that at any other time might have been embarrassing to the two men, but in the pain of the moment was merely a background to the tears cascading from both faces.
As the passengers continued to flow into the terminal from the Dallas flight, a North America executive emerged with a contingent of other airline personnel behind, each escorting family members of those lost or injured in the crash. Two buses waited at the curb, exhaust fumes curling around their undercarriages in the moisture-laden air, one bound for the hospital with the relatives of survivors, the other with instructions to proceed to a nearby hotel, where the airline would help make arrangements for such painful tasks as body identification and shipment.
When the other passengers had all emerged, a lone figure stepped out of the jetway, her face a haunted study in panic and grief, her clothes stylish but hastily donned. She wore the telltale signs of tears instead of makeup and carried only a handbag, and to one curious reporter, there was something strange and wrenching about the nervous self-consciousness with which she tried to move across the gate area as anonymously as possible, avoiding both of the buses and heading instead for a taxi stand, where she disappeared quickly into the first cab in line. Mrs. Richard Timson repeated the name of the hospital to the cabby and sank back in the seat, her mind racing—her badly injured pilot husband some 12 miles away. The taxi sped toward the freeway past the airport hotel where at that moment Joe Wallingford was beginning the task of organizing the NTSB’s search for the answer to the burning question on everyon
e’s mind: Why?
In the small conference room at the Marriott, Dr. Susan Kelly was fighting hard to concentrate—to keep the awful images of the crash site from controlling her mind and her feelings. The agony of the kids in the wreckage kept pulling her away. She had not seen their faces, of course, but she could feel their agony. This was not what she had imagined accident investigation would be.
She had watched Joe Wallingford with growing admiration as he assembled the staffers and went over a short, concise list of priorities and assignments. Each staff member was to head up one or another of the investigatory groups, but there were immediate things to be done, and areas to emphasize.
“As fast as possible,” Joe was saying to one of them, “I want the flight and voice recorders out of the Airbus. We have allegations of sabotage of an airliner with a sophisticated electronic flight-control system, and most of you know there have already been worries that strong electronic signals might interfere with such a control system. The FAA has issued guidelines to keep the Airbus 320 a minimum distance away from powerful microwave transmitters and other such radio sources, so we’ll need all the information we can get about that, as well as about the so-called mystery car somebody saw leaving the cargo area.”
“God, Joe, is sabotage really a possibility?” Barbara Rawlson, chairman of the systems group, was shaking her head and looking incredulous.
“Who knows, Barb. Let’s just make sure we account for the entire flight-control system quickly. Were there any strange devices? Could anyone have tampered with it? That sort of thing.”
Joe looked at some notes on a steno pad before continuing. “Now, of course we’ve also got the horrifying possibility that something went wrong in the side-stick controls or the flight-control computers, and the plane crashed itself.”
“Why horrifying, Joe?” Susan asked. It was the first question she had managed, and Joe seemed slightly startled, though pleased.
“Well, the Airbus is very sensitive to this type of problem. They went way out ahead of everyone with this new electronic-control technology in the 320, and they would be horrified themselves if anyone started seriously thinking that with so much redundancy and so many backups, the flight-control system could malfunction. They insist it can’t happen, and so far we’ve no reason to believe otherwise.”
“Until now.”
“Well, maybe until now. Maybe not,” Joe said, looking Susan in the eye long enough so that she found herself averting her gaze, a reaction which puzzled her. He was in his element here, she knew, and she was only learning. Perhaps that was it, but it made her feel insecure and vulnerable, and she had spent her professional life fighting vulnerability.
“Okay,” Joe continued, turning back to Barbara, “we have windshear, possible sabotage, possible flight-control malfunction, and as always, possible human error of some sort, which is Andy’s bailiwick. Andy, what’s the status of the crew?”
Andy Wallace had functioned as Joe’s right-hand man many times before, even when he held an equal position to the other staff members on field investigations. Joe could always rely on him. No political backstabbing, and no laziness. Andy was always ahead of the game.
“The captain of the Airbus is named Richard Timson, chief pilot for North America and a staff vice-president. He survived with a bad concussion and some internal injuries, plus a damaged hand. He’s in serious condition, but he’ll make it. The doctors tell me it will be tomorrow at the earliest before he can talk to us.”
“How about the copilot?”
“Fighting for his life. Massive cranial damage.”
They covered several other items before Joe tapped the table with his pen and gave them all an exceptionally serious look. “Warning: I expect and demand that each and every one of you, and those people from the airline, FAA, ALPA, Airbus, and so on who are assigned to your groups, go absolutely by the book when around the wreckage. That means gloves at all times, hard hats when appropriate, and absolutely no chances taken. You may not mind slicing your hand open, but consider that the piece of metal which bites you may carry blood cells from an accident victim infected with AIDS, or some other disease. I will not tolerate any risk taking. Understood?” Joe looked sequentially at everyone but Susan, each staff member nodding in turn.
“Okay. It’s now 9:10 A.M. The main organizational meeting is at 2 P.M., and Susan has agreed that we’ll hold a preliminary press briefing at noon in the main ballroom. Keep your phone charged and on, keep me informed, especially about the rescue out there, and let’s get moving. We’ve got a major puzzle to solve, and I guarantee political pressure will be flowing in on this one.”
Joe stood up and Susan caught his arm. “Political pressure?”
He smiled at her and nodded. “Through experience I’ve learned that unless we find a clear-cut reason, all the parties are going to start jockeying for self-protective positions. Airbus will hope for pilot error or windshear, the airline will vote for anything that doesn’t reflect on them, and everyone else will be protecting their own turf. It always happens, and it does nothing but interfere with what we’re here to do.”
“Which is find out what happened.”
“Exactly. Not lay the blame.”
For her would-be rescuers, noon came rapidly, but for Linda Ellis, time had stretched into an agonizing eternity, a purgatory of sorts, though more light had fallen on them now. Jill’s mother was dead. Linda had never seen her, but her husband had at some point checked for his wife’s pulse and realized there wasn’t one any longer. His anguished shriek was even louder than his previous noisy protests and oaths of frustration. His chest was apparently pinned so firmly that he could move even less than Linda. She felt for him, but she had long since decided that when they got out of this and recovered, she was going to tell him what she thought of his whining behavior through the long hours.
Those thoughts now evaporated as his sobbing touched her deeply; the tragedy that had overtaken his poor family was completely unbearable.
Jill was still alive. God only knew how, Linda thought. Her blood loss must have been stemmed by some sort of clotting or cauterizing action, but logic dictated that she shouldn’t have lasted twenty minutes with such severe injuries. Linda had given her another morphine shot, struggling against her own rising agony to turn far enough to reach her little arm. Her brother, Jimmy, was easier—he could hold out his arm for Linda to reach. She had sung to them for awhile earlier, until she too drifted off again, a tendency she was trying to fight now that their rescuers had almost broken through. There were several more metal bars in front of her, but already a doctor was wiggling his way toward them, and at long last he was beside her, his face next to her ear as he assessed little Jill’s condition, deciding that they would have to do some emergency surgery right there before moving her an inch.
The doctor told Linda they would cut the bar impaling her leg on both ends and pull her out in a crane-mounted sling with the thing still in place, then remove it in the hospital. Her neck hurt too, but she wiggled fingers and toes on command, and the doctor seemed relieved.
“In ten minutes or so, Linda. In ten minutes. It’s just about over.” She felt herself beginning to believe him. For so many hours they had lied gentle, desperate lies to her, but now maybe she could believe they’d make it. There was open gray sky above them now, and plenty of warm air, and even an intravenous needle in her arm she had barely noticed.
The North America air cargo manager had barely begun to accept the scope of the disaster, which had isolated his cargo ramp overnight. All the taxiways leading to the one operational runway were covered with debris from the shattered North America flights. No airplanes could get in or out, which meant he also had to deal with the continued unwanted presence of a gigantic Air Force cargo plane in front of his building. The morning, in other words, had been doubly bizarre even before the phone rang. Now there was a high-ranking military commander on the other end asking for the commander of the cargo jet outside, as i
f military aircraft didn’t have communication radios. Hugh Billingsly wrote down the telephone number and headed outside. He would have loved to examine a C-5, the free world’s largest airplane, but the Air Force people who had materialized the previous evening to load and guard the airplane were in no mood to be giving tours. One of the tired and humorless young air policemen fingered his M-16 and watched Billingsly carefully while his partner delivered the message to the cockpit some four stories above the concrete. No one was being allowed within 100 feet of the giant transport.
Within five minutes a thoroughly fatigued young Air Force major appeared in the doorway, returning with Billingsly to use his telephone. The major stopped dialing suddenly and looked at his host apologetically. “I, uh, wonder if you could step outside the office for a few minutes, sir?”
It was his office, but Billingsly complied, even more puzzled.
“Major Archer here in Kansas City, Colonel.” The number had finally answered. No identification of where it was, or what it was, other than somewhere in the Washington, D.C., area. The slip of paper had said “Call Colonel Wallace.”
“You’re blockaded, they tell me,” the colonel said.
“Yes sir. The crash left debris spread over both taxiways and Runway 19 out here. I’ve been after the airport manager almost hourly over one of the radios to get the runway cleared off so we can taxi by, but he can’t move until the NTSB gives the okay, and I’m told they may take days.”
“That load must get out of there, Major. It’s due in Kwajalein, and it’s a security risk as long as it sits at a civilian airport.”
Final Approach Page 8
