“So, after all that good news, is there anything you can say to cheer us up, Trent?”
Chapter 7
IN FLIGHT, YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK
The column of smoke stabbing the azure sky from the crash-induced forest fire was visible as soon as Clark leveled the Jet Ranger at four thousand feet above ground level, the angular rays of the descending sun casting an elongated shadow to the east over the highest ridges of the Yellowstone Caldera. The flame front from the new fire was being whipped and shepherded steadily northward in the arms of the southern wind, growing ominously as it progressed, eating its way through the lodgepole pines and Douglas fir and the stately ponderosa, but the dark, cylindrical monolith of smoke was rising strangely, ascending vertically for many thousands of feet. It loomed, Clark thought, like a giant exclamation point above the dot of scorched forest that held the remains of Ship 86, at once impossible to ignore and easy to follow.
There was another flurry of radio transmissions in his headset, calls and answers coordinating the urgent progression of the firefighting fleet in and out of West Yellowstone. The fires east of Jackson Hole were growing steadily, and tomorrow would be even more intense.
Weary of the distraction, Clark reached up to the control panel and lowered the VHF radio volume, hoping to leave the muffled whump-whump-whump of the rotor blades and the high-pitched whine of the turbines as the only noises in his mind.
He knew there could be other helicopters already in the area, and missing a call from one of them could be dangerous, but he had his breaking point, and the noise had surpassed it. Nevertheless, he dutifully keyed the transmitter and called out his location and altitude in the blind.
Clark closed his eyes momentarily, letting the vibrations course through him, drowning out the almost overwhelming feelings of profound loss and confusion that had risen from nowhere to snap at his resolve in the past hours. This mission was as obscure as he felt. Unfocused. Upset. Unsure.
He made a small correction in the course, feeling the ship respond instantly, and was thankful for his ability to fly choppers. The Jet Ranger was like an extension of him, a natural connection that let him fly like most people breathed, the seemingly chaotic rhythms of the small galaxy of moving parts a well-understood concerto responding to his very touch in ways that fixed-wing pilots seldom understood. The flight controls of most fixed-wing airplanes had to be physically moved to affect the flight path. But a rotorcraft, Clark was fond of explaining, was as different from a fixed-wing aircraft as females were from males. Like most women he’d known, helicopters responded best to those who touched them gently, and they were equally intolerant of inattention.
To meld with a helicopter and produce the crude mechanical equivalent of a hummingbird’s maneuverability, a pilot gently held the cyclic—the control stick rising from the floor—and merely thought his ship left or right, up or down, forward or backward, his feet similarly caressing the pedals controlling the left and right movement of the tail rotor. It was a delicate ballet in three dimensions, an intricate dance of feet, fingers, and thought accompanied by what, to the pilot, were the sweet mechanical murmurings of a living metallic bird speaking her language clearly and steadily, a constant monologue in her pilot’s ear on the never-ending battle to best the wind and gravity with fuel and fury.
A sudden patch of turbulence caught the Jet Ranger and tested his skills for a moment, the ship settling down again just as quickly, as the weird Yellowstone landscape unfolded below in amazing detail through the Plexiglas. The steam of a hundred geysers rising in the distance off to his left and the carpet of green beneath were a natural expression of the contradictory geo-thermal hell roiling just below the park’s crustal surface—the Yellowstone Hot Spot—the natural volcanic blowtorch that had progressively cut a path from the Pacific Coast to present-day northwestern Wyoming over millions of years of crustal movement. The North American tectonic plate had been the one in motion, moving slowly west at about the speed of a human fingernail growing. The hot spot had merely continued to pump molten magma from the earth’s mantle, changing and scarring the surface that was slowly passing above.
And in Yellowstone’s case, a vast, little-understood matrix of natural plumbing ferried superheated groundwater from the furnace below to the surface in the form of geysers, fumaroles, mud holes, hot springs, and other sulphurous discharges. It was nature and it was natural, unlike the forest fire Clark was looking at ahead of the Jet Ranger.
About eighteen miles to go, he thought, checking the GPS and remembering what navigating an airplane had been like before the network of GPS satellites had been launched. Dead reckoning was the basic phrase, and his father, an Air Force colonel, had been a taskmaster at the basics of how wind corrections, combined with speed and time and careful record keeping, would tell you almost precisely where you were.
A side gust bounced the Jet Ranger, triggering a momentary slapping sound as the rotor blades sliced through the strong crosswind and settled down.
I miss you, Dad, Clark thought, the genesis of at least some of his upset suddenly becoming clear: the looming sight of the scorched and blackened crash site just ahead. Seeing it earlier from the cockpit of Tanker 84 had tugged at a locked door in his mind, a closet stuffed with awful memories of another crash site, a catastrophic melding of mountain and metal on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula in 1975 that had killed his father, Colonel William “Sax” Maxwell, and eleven others. The exhausted pilots of an Air Force C-141, returning home to McChord AFB from a wholly unnecessary trip to Southeast Asia, had accepted a descent from a controller. But the controller had made a lethal mistake they were too tired to catch: five thousand feet was too low to clear the ridge of a peak called Mount Constance. At the last second, the investigators figured, the crew had seen the onrushing granite and yanked the nose up, but the big Lockheed thundered into the rocks less than three hundred feet below the summit, killing all aboard fewer than fifty miles from home.
And Colonel Sax Maxwell had been the senior navigator.
Clark shook back the memory and nudged the Jet Ranger to the left, watching the wisps of smoke from the center of the wreckage as he set up an approach into the wind, slowing and descending at the same time, his left hand working the collective downward bit by bit. There was a momentary worry about whether a restricted area had been declared by the FAA around the crash site, but he dismissed it as unimportant and brought the ship to a hover three feet above a charred clearing a hundred yards or so from the main impact point, letting the Jet Ranger settle onto her skids.
There were two other helicopters at the site, both off to the east where numerous vehicles and fire trucks had made it in across country from the nearest access road. Clark waved at a small group of men as he secured the helicopter and took the key, trudging through the acrid aroma of freshly charred grasses and burning wood to reach them.
A park ranger whose duties had never included dealing with air attack firefighters stepped forward, his hand up.
“Sir, I need to know who you are and what you’re doing landing here,” the ranger said, not unkindly.
Clark held out his aircrew I.D. card from Stein Aviation and offered his hand, which the ranger shook.
“Okay, Captain Maxwell. That takes care of the who.”
“I’m here for the owner, Jerry Stein. I don’t need to touch anything, but I’m kind of the director of safety, and I’ll be working with the NTSB. Are they here yet?”
The park ranger shook his head no, launching into an excessively detailed report on when an NTSB team was expected to show up. “We’re just keeping the wreckage safe for now, as per their instructions by phone, but—”
“I’m just going to walk around it.”
“Well—”
Clark raised his hand, palm up. “I’m involved in the investigation, remember? I’m not touching anything or even kicking tin. Just getting a feel for it. So, if it’s okay with you…”
The ranger pointed back
to the northwest. “We found the wing over there about a mile.”
“I know. I saw it earlier from the air.”
“Yeah. It’s pretty gruesome. The bodies are burned beyond recognition, y’know?”
“I can imagine.”
They stood in uncomfortable silence for a few moments before he spoke again.
“I heard this was an old airliner before they made it into an airtanker,” the ranger added.
“Yeah. They can carry a lot.” Clark was feeling increasingly antsy to be free of the man. The young ranger had obviously seen too much and was having his own problems dealing with it.
“You ever flown in one?” the ranger asked.
Clark sighed and looked at him, realizing he was only in his late twenties, his eyes somewhat sunken and distant.
“This was a DC-6B. I was supposed to be at the controls of this aircraft, but they switched airplanes at the last second.”
The ranger looked him in the eyes for the longest time, Clark’s words finally taking root as he backed away a step and inclined his head toward the main wreckage. “I’m so sorry. I understand.”
Clark nodded without comment and stepped away, walking slowly toward the initial point of impact, noting the various shapes and identifiable shards, including the crushed pilot seats with what remained of his two colleagues blackened and shapeless.
He didn’t linger.
The special stench of charred airplane and burned flesh triggered its own revulsion, and he walked to the far side to sit on a blackened log, looking back at the crushed and shattered cockpit and trying to imagine his body there in place of Maze’s.
If he’d been at the controls when the wing fell off, he would have been no more able to save them than Jeff had been.
Somehow he’d planned to find the right wing attach points and examine them, but the impossibility became painfully apparent as he let his eyes wander over the twisted metal. Finding the right piece in that mess—let alone interpreting the damage correctly—was far beyond his knowledge, even with his airplane and power-plant mechanic license, also known in the vernacular as an “A&P.” He could see the general area of what had been the right wing root, or shoulder of the aircraft. But beyond that, the experts at the NTSB would have to answer the question of why a plane supposedly inspected with unprecedented thoroughness could fall apart just a few hundred hours of flight time later.
And just how many flight hours had it been since that inspection? Clark wondered. He recalled the Hobbs meter on Tanker 84 indicating that about 180 flight hours had elapsed since the inspections. Tanker 86 might have had a few more or a few less hours on it, but there was no way a wing in danger of failing wouldn’t have been discovered if the inspections had been done right.
They must have botched the inspections. Or maybe Jerry found a confederate willing to cook the books and sign off on a damaged structure.
No, he reminded himself. The inspections had been performed by Sandia Labs with the Forest Service’s maintenance inspectors breathing down their necks. And Jerry was slippery, but not crazy.
So, if the inspections were adequate, and there were only 180 hours of flight time on the bird since the inspections, and since that isn’t enough to produce new cracks dangerous enough to take off a wing, then what else? What got you, Jeff, if not Jerry’s bargain-basement approach to maintenance?
Clark looked around, wondering if Jeff’s spirit could be sitting nearby, looking with the same detached wonder at the same scene.
What’s the matter with me? Clark thought. He wondered why he’d come in the first place—and was startled at the answer that suddenly seemed so obvious. He was, he realized, still looking for closure in his father’s death so many years before.
The Air Force had refused to let Colonel Maxwell’s ten-year-old son go to the crash site until the cockpit had been removed. But then access to Mount Constance in the Olympic Mountains of Washington State was denied even after the bodies were gone, and since the crash site was within a national park, the Air Force could make the order stick.
Mere hours after the crash, in the early light of morning, fog and cold had surrounded the grisly scene. The first rescuers to helicopter in quickly found the front portion of the C-141 broken away and deformed, but recognizable. The windscreens seemed mostly intact, and for a brief moment the first team member to shine a powerful flashlight inside had held a brief and futile hope that among the flight-suited human forms strewn around the interior, someone might still be alive.
But the impact had been unsurvivable, even for the two crew members ejected from the disintegrating cabin and found on the snowy slope.
It would be six years before Clark, as a young teen, could climb there on his own, camping for three days in a pup tent pitched at the exact point of initial impact. But that pilgrimage did not achieve the closure and communing he’d longed for ever since the dark hours after the crash. It was as if his father were still out there, still roaming in confusion, still needing his son to rescue him. It was as if little Clark were somehow responsible.
Clark shifted a bit on the log, aware part of it was still smoking from the fire. Overhead he heard the rumble of another airtanker returning to base to the northeast and glanced at his watch. He should get up, get back in the Jet Ranger, and leave. But he couldn’t make himself move.
There was a connection here. It was the closing of a circle, he thought, or somehow the conclusion of a mystery. But the details were confusing. Was there a link beyond the obvious between his father’s death so many years ago and this recent crash? This accident site he was visiting while the wreckage still smoked. The other had been forever barred to him by time and circumstance.
This crash should have been his last resting place, his remains crushed and burned. He should be dead. And somehow there was a symmetry between the two crashes that he couldn’t completely grasp, even though he knew instinctively that when he did understand it, the knowledge would be comforting.
And in that second the clouds cleared from his mind.
Something, indeed, was changing profoundly within him, as if another door had closed in his life, one he had struggled to shut for nearly three decades. Clark stood, his eyes on the blue of the smoky sky. Jeff Maze’s spirit was not here. Neither had his dad’s spirit been waiting for him on Mount Constance.
And suddenly it was all right to leave.
There was a small shard of aircraft aluminum near his foot, thrown from the main wreckage by the force of the impact. He glanced up to make sure no one was watching and picked it up, noting the small serial numbers on the twisted surface, before slipping it into the pocket of his flight jacket. He was well aware of the rules and the dangers to an investigation of removing or even moving anything, but this scrap was hardly part of the cause, he decided, and he needed a tangible piece of Tanker 86 as a touchstone of mortality.
“This is a piece of the airplane I died in,” he could imagine himself saying to startled friends in the future, waiting for their jaws to drop far enough before telling the rest of the story of fickle fate and unplanned redemption.
There was a small fluttering of something white flipping along in the wind, something torn from the body of the wreckage. Clark leaned forward and captured it, surprised to find a scorched business card in his hand. He peered carefully at the raised letters on the front, some of which had partially melted and run. But the name of what was apparently a bar or tavern was clear: LA ZORRA SECRETA.
He turned the card slightly to find a better angle in the sunlight. The name of the city was too blurred to read, but the country was still there: Colombia.
He shook his head. It must have been stuck deep inside a brain bag and forgotten. He wondered which of the pilots had been there over the years. Perhaps it had been an expansive vacation, and if it was a place Jeff had visited, Misty might have been there, too, and could tell him about it someday.
But then again, knowing Jeff, God only knew which female might have been partyi
ng with him at a bar whose name Clark roughly translated as “The Secret Vixen.”
He chuckled at the memory of the wild-man legend Jeff had loved to nurture, his smile fading just as quickly. He pocketed the scorched business card and walked back to the helicopter.
The return flight to West Yellowstone seemed to last only a fraction of the time it had taken to reach the crash site. For the entire twenty-five minutes his ears were filled with the soothing strains of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons through the MP3 stereo connection in his headset, while his mind played with the suddenly invigorating idea that somehow Karen Jones could be talked into meeting him for a beer. Her optimistic way of looking at everything was a balm he sorely needed right now.
He made a smooth, fast approach to the ramp against the wind and brought the Jet Ranger to a perfect hover just inches above the same spot where he’d found it. He sat there in the air motionless for almost a minute, blowing dirt and scraps of paper around on the ramp as he hovered with what appeared to be effortless ease. There were eyes peering from the windows of the Forest Service Operations building, and several people watching from beneath the P-3 across the ramp, and he enjoyed that. Clark knew he was showing off shamelessly, but he didn’t care. There were some things he could do that they couldn’t.
Tiring of the exhibition at last, he lowered the Jet Ranger to the tarmac.
Through the windows of the Stein Operations building across the runway he could make out what might be Jerry Stein engaged in some sort of meeting and paying no attention to his helicopter landing. Jerry is the last person I really wanted to see tonight anyway, he thought.
He locked the ship and took his flight bag, spotting two Forest Service men he didn’t recognize heading toward Airtanker Operations.
“Excuse me. Would you guys drop off this clipboard to Lynda at the desk?”
“Sure,” the taller of the two said, accepting the board with the attached keys.
Fire Flight Page 10
