Fire Flight

by John J. Nance

  “Don’t worry about him! Seriously. It is so over.”

  “Okay.”

  “Tonight was the proverbial last straw.”

  She extended her hand, and he held it gently for a few moments before backing away with a wave and pushing through the door, forcing himself not to stare as she moved up the stairs and disappeared into the corridor.

  Chapter 11

  WEST YELLOWSTONE AIRPORT, MONTANA

  At half past two A.M., Clark gave up trying to sleep.

  There was an old-fashioned windup clock by the bed, and the ticking alone had become loud enough to rattle the windows of the sparsely furnished room. He rolled upright and sighed, feeling the bite of the cold air as the covers slithered off his unclad body. His mind was flatly refusing to relax, and it was too late to take a pill or even consider alcohol.

  This isn’t supposed to happen to me, he thought. Pilots were notorious for being able to sleep anywhere, dropping into a REM state on demand. But all he’d been able to drop into was restlessness.

  There had been a fog, he decided, obscuring his thoughts all evening. A warm, feminine, enjoyable fog to be sure, but while Clark had indulged in Karen’s presence, a deep part of his brain was working away in frenetic silence, and the focal point was the right wing of what had been Tanker 86. Now he found himself standing barefoot on a cold pine floor searching for his pants.

  I’m gonna be walking wounded all day, he told himself, knowing all too well what that tenuous state of consciousness felt like. He’d flown with crushing, cumulative fatigue too many times over the years. Sometimes the memory of how exhaustion felt was enough to trump a bout of insomnia.

  But not tonight.

  It took almost an hour to shower, shave, dress, and stumble into the little kitchen for coffee and the proper breakfast he refused to shortchange. His favorite of three fried eggs, over easy, and half a package of crisp, smoked bacon had been derided as a “heart attack on a shingle,” but his cholesterol was well within limits, and there were certain things in life he refused to give up.

  Like women, he thought, though over the last four years he could have been mistaken for a practicing monk for all the feminine companionship he’d had.

  The dishes rinsed and the kitchen shipshape, he was in his truck by four-thirty A.M. and parking at the field five minutes later. His black, six-year-old Chevy pickup would be all but invisible in the predawn darkness, he figured, and that was good. Best not to be too conspicuous.

  Clark turned on a tiny pencil light and fished around in his flight bag for a larger flashlight and a tool kit. He left the bag on the front floorboard and pulled his parka on against the chilly mountain air, taking care to lock the doors manually and avoid triggering the loud chirp the antitheft device made when activated with the remote.

  The northwestern end of West Yellowstone Airport’s north-south runway was the location of Stein Aviation’s facilities. Jerry’s home base featured a more or less continuous asphalt ramp running from the small Operations shack past the two hangars to the south, paralleling the runway.

  Jerry Stein had built a loft office for himself inside and along the back of his largest hangar, rather than put it in the Operations shack building, where he’d be too easily accessible to the pilots. Several of the Stein Fleet were on the other side of the runway on the Forest Service ramp, but two of the DC-6Bs were parked in front of the Stein hangars on the west side, and there was a long gray row of other flyable and nonflyable aerial hardware parked wingtip to wingtip on the grassy area just to the south of Hangar Two. The lines of old aircraft loomed like metallic ghosts in the gloom and the shadows, most of their bulk shaded by the hangars from the few sodium vapor lights on the north side.

  Hangar One was ablaze with lights and maintenance activity, and Clark could see Tanker 84 still inside. Tanker 88, his favorite, was sitting in front of Hangar Two now, which was a good sign. Perhaps the bird was ready to return to service. Two other Douglas airplanes in various states of repair and reliability were also lined up in front of used-up ex-Navy P2V Neptunes.

  Clark walked quietly toward the aircraft, crunching through the grass while considering the dark ironies.

  The slurry-bombing Neptunes had been grounded six months before because their wing spars were cracking horribly and were essentially beyond repair. But the old DC-6 fleet had shown no such problems. Jerry, he’d been told, had sent every one of his DC-6Bs somewhere down south for the extensive inspection of the wing boxes, the attach points, and the wing spars—inspections required by the Forest Service. Reportedly, the entire fleet had been given a clean bill of health. Of course, there was no “thumbs up” from the FAA, since they more or less let the Forest Service make the airworthiness decisions on airtankers under contract to the government. All the pilots were disturbingly aware that the FAA’s original approval was no more than a paperwork exercise. Undoubtedly, the guts of the old DC-6s had not been seen in decades by a real live FAA inspector.

  Clark had tried hard not to question the quality of the inspections. After all, they’d been done under a Forest Service arrangement with Sandia Labs and there were stringent federal laws about honest record keeping for airplanes. There was also an unspoken acceptance of the opinion that Jerry Stein wouldn’t be stupid enough to lie about a critical safety matter so easily verifiable as a major, federally required inspection series—especially when his business was on the line and so financially tenuous.

  Clark stopped beneath the belly of the closest DC-6B and snapped on the flashlight, playing it along the aging and dented metal fairing that covered the point where wing and fuselage came together.

  The tool kit he had wasn’t sufficient. There were a host of partially rusted screws securing the metal cover beneath the wing, and removing them would take a substantial screwdriver and more time.

  And suddenly that fact chilled him.

  Clark looked more closely at the screws, trying to convince himself that they had definitely been removed during the previous year.

  He couldn’t. Some looked as if they hadn’t been touched for years, let alone removed. He moved quickly to the other wing, coming to the same disturbing conclusion.

  Clark leaned against one of the large main tires for a moment, almost in shock. If these panels haven’t been removed, no inspection’s been done! And there’s no way they would have pencil-whipped the inspection, so…I’m missing something.

  He moved quickly to the next DC-6B. This time the flange panel did appear to have been freshly removed and resecured on one side. Yet the other side appeared untouched.

  Clark realized he hadn’t come out here to find something wrong. He’d come out to fill in the blanks and find comforting confirmation that his worries were unfounded, maybe even silly. Why wasn’t that happening?

  I’ve got to look inside those panels, he concluded. There would be a risk of discovery by one of Trent’s people and the prospect of mildly embarrassing questions, but that was a small worry at best. After all, he was one of the pilots and a licensed aircraft mechanic himself. It wasn’t completely outlandish to think he’d want to be prowling around just before dawn with a tool kit and a flashlight. He was lucky they weren’t locked in a hangar, since security had been considerably tightened in the wake of 9/11.

  The thought of trying to explain what he was doing made him smile.

  Yeah, Jerry, when I can’t sleep, I come out and inspect your airplanes. There’s this recurring nightmare that I’m really an undercover FAA inspector!

  Clark looked around again, taking a deep breath of air redolent with the fumes of aviation gasoline, fire retardant, and engine oil. Even the tires of the old Douglas fleet were detectable by their aroma, and it was a comforting mix even in the frosty night air.

  He took his largest screwdriver to the smallest of the flange panels, working up a sweat as he glanced over his shoulder to see if his flashlight had attracted anyone’s attention.

  Really impressive security on this field! h
e thought, equally aware that somewhere near the Forest Service complex there was a guard prowling around watching for anyone trying to fool with the airtanker fleet. As far as Jerry’s ramp goes, I could be out here planting bombs or loosening bolts and no one would have a clue.

  The thought crossed his mind that he should have brought gloves. He was leaving clear fingerprints every time he touched the old Doug’s belly.

  The last screw finally surrendered its grip with a squeal of protest, dropping past his hand as a last act of defiance to fall in the dirt. Clark wrestled the panel from its encrusted attach points and laid it on the ground. He climbed a small, rickety step ladder he’d found on one side of the DC-6B, balanced himself, and thrust his head and torso inside the cavity, working his arm and hand inside as well. He played the flashlight around the most critical structure of the airplane, where the wing and body met. The wing was fastened to the massive, beefy wing box with very large metal pins, but Clark knew that, like every other piece of advanced metal alloys in the structure of a modern aircraft, the pins as well as the flanges could deteriorate, corrode, crack, or otherwise give up their strength while no one was looking.

  The interior bay looked dusty and undisturbed, as if thousands of hours of flight time had followed the last major inspection. Supposedly, eddy current boxes and X-ray devices had been shoved inside this space just a few months before. There was really no other way to carry out the inspections without opening the bay. So where was the evidence of the big inspection of the pins and the wing box?

  Clark carefully lowered himself out of the bay and snapped off the flashlight. He stood there for a few minutes, sampling the darkness and the quiet, his mind accelerating the creepy feeling that he’d stumbled onto something truly sinister. Ten minutes earlier, Clark thought, the possibility of being discovered poking around in the dark was merely the stuff of mild embarrassment. Now he was sufficiently spooked to wonder if he could be in danger.

  No! Not possible! he told himself. It made no sense that major inspections the Forest Service had mandated could have been bypassed and the paperwork falsified. People were sent to prison for such things.

  Of course, he had yet to actually see the paperwork listing the inspections. Maybe it wasn’t falsified at all. Maybe it never existed.

  Clark felt a cold rush spreading through his bloodstream as he considered the possibility that the wings on the DC-6B he was supposed to have flown—the one that killed Jeff—might not have been inspected after all.

  But what about Tanker 88, he wondered, the one he loved to fly?

  I’m going to be out there pulling g’s in a few hours, he reminded himself. This is doing nothing to make me feel better! Have we all been lied to? How could Sandia have been fooled?

  His mouth was very dry all of a sudden. He carefully replaced and resecured the flange panel, and returned the step ladder to its previous resting place before moving quietly toward the hangars. Maybe the answer was in the maintenance logs. At least the logs would show officially what inspections had been done. At least they’ll show what Jerry claims was done, Clark mused.

  The thought was not reassuring.

  There was a wooden stairway leading to Trent Jones’s office on the second floor of the wooden structure built inside the maw of Hangar One. To reach it, he would have to walk across an expanse of brightly lit hangar floor.

  There was, however, a door on the back side of the hangar, out of sight and behind the office. Clark quietly circled the back of the structure and tried it, relieved to find it unlocked. He slipped inside and stood in the shadows for a minute, tracking the mechanics as they labored frantically to get Ship 84 ready to fly again. Somehow, he noticed, they’d managed to secure a new engine mount for number four and were in the process of mating a fresh engine to the wing.

  When he was sure no one was paying attention, he moved into the light and climbed the stairs, trying to look casual. The office door was unlocked, and he entered quickly, keeping the lights off and watching through the blinds for several minutes to make sure no one had noticed his entry. When he was sure, he locked the door and moved to the file cabinets, using a small penlight to look for what he needed.

  Each aircraft had a large file section devoted to the records of its entire maintenance history. For a fifty-year-old aircraft, it translated to a large quantity of paper, although he could see that separate, thin bound maintenance logbooks had been established for the last few years for each one.

  The DC-6B he had just inspected on the darkened ramp was Tanker 74, and he pulled the book from the file cabinet and set it on the floor, careful not to let the light of the tiny flashlight hit the windows as he turned the pages.

  The aircraft had been taken to a maintenance facility in Fort Lauderdale, he saw, a place called Southlight Aviation, a shop he’d never heard of. They had performed and logged all the required inspections, made some repairs, and signed them off. One wing pin had been replaced, another machined to get rid of corrosion, and there were even negatives of the X rays of the attach points and bolts appended to the file. The paperwork, in other words, was in order.

  Clark looked closely at the flight hours at the time of inspection and checked it against the currently logged flight time.

  One hundred fifty-five flight hours since the inspection.

  The cold feeling in the pit of his stomach returned. There was no way the dirt and dust he had seen in that alcove of Tanker 74 could have accumulated in only one hundred fifty-five hours.

  Clark looked around for the copy machine, but the sound of voices outside the office caused him to stuff the book back in the file cabinet and dash to the window blinds.

  Two of the mechanics were arguing about something at the base of the stairs, one of them pointing up. Clark strained to listen, catching only a few words clearly. One of the men suddenly threw up his hands and turned to climb the stairs.

  Clark quietly unlocked the office door and moved to the back of the loft where a small closet stood partially opened. He paused to close the file drawer and squeezed inside the closet amid brooms and boxes, securing the closet door just as the mechanic bustled through the main office door.

  “Goddamned little prick!” the man muttered as he yanked open a file drawer and loudly rummaged inside for a folder he quickly located. He stood reading for a few moments.

  “YES! Just what I thought!” he said, closing the folder and stuffing the file back and slamming the drawer. His exit was just as hasty, and Clark could hear a triumphant announcement to his partner downstairs that he was right and his partner was wrong.

  Clark waited until their voices receded to the far side of the hangar before cautiously emerging from the broom closet to fire up the copier. He ran copies of the key pages he’d found listing the wing inspections for Tanker 74 as well as Tankers 88 and 84.

  The records for Jeff’s destroyed DC-6, Tanker 86, were missing.

  That’s logical, he told himself. Jerry or someone would have already pulled them for the NTSB.

  He waited until all the mechanics in the hangar had their heads in various pits and panels before slipping out and descending the stairs, the photocopies folded and stuck inside his parka.

  Back in his truck, he used the same penlight flashlight held in his teeth to illuminate the pages as he flipped through them, reading in far greater detail the same lines he’d barely spotted before.

  The inspections had all been done in the fall of 2002. Clark made note of the name and license number of the mechanic who had signed off on Tanker 74, and found it was the same signature that appeared in the other logs.

  Jorge Dominguez, and a five-digit license number, meaning he’s been around a long time.

  Clark glanced at the dashboard clock. It showed five-fifteen A.M., still an hour and forty-five minutes before show time. It was seven-fifteen in the morning in Fort Lauderdale. Probably too early, he thought, but worth a try. He pulled out his cell phone and punched in the number for directory assistance, wait
ing for an operator to find the number of the repair shop and connect him. When the process was complete, he sat listening to the number ring in Florida, fully expecting an answering machine.

  “Southlight,” a cautious voice answered, a Spanish-speaking accent distinctive in his pronunciation of the name.

  “Good morning. Jerry…Stein here, with Stein Aviation up in Montana. I need to speak to Jorge, please, if he’s in.”

  “Jorge?”

  “Yes…one of the mechanics. He does still work there, doesn’t he?”

  “We have no Jorge here, I think.”

  “Look, are you sure?”

  “I know many people named Jorge, señor…sir…but none work here.”

  “May I ask, are you an aircraft mechanic?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “And you have no knowledge of a Jorge Dominguez?”

  “Dominguez? Oh! You mean Jack Dominguez. We call him Jack, so I have forget his real first name is Jorge. Sorry.”

  “Is he there?” Clark asked, feeling instant relief.

  “No. Maybe by eight, I think. I can tell him you called, Mr. Stein.”

  “That’s not necessary. I’ll call back. Oh. One more thing. Mr. Dominguez did work on our DC-6B fleet inspection last fall, right?”

  “Yes. We all did. That was a big job. There was another federal agency involved, too.”

  “I know…do you happen to recall when we picked the airplanes up from you and flew them home?”

  “We were done in early October, I think, and the pilots flew all of them out the same week.”

  He thanked the man and punched the phone off, sitting in silence for a few moments to assess what he’d heard. So Dominguez did exist, did work for Southlight, and the mechanic he’d talked to remembered the fleet and the inspections. So far so good. But what did that prove? Maybe Southlight was a mill for falsified inspections. But that wasn’t possible with Sandia Labs present. Maybe, he thought, they’d just been sloppy and missed one of the bays.

  Or maybe he was misinterpreting the whole thing.