The Falling Woman: A Novel

by Richard Farrell

  “Lookee there,” Martin said, climbing out of the car and shielding his eyes from the sun.

  A great roaring beast was sucking air from the sky itself. A moment later, Charlie spotted it, a black dot, low, coming fast out of the east. Two thick, oily exhaust trails streaked the sky. A split second later, the air exploded around him. The lumbering jet screamed low over their heads, so low that Charlie could almost see the pilot’s helmet. The ground shook as the jet climbed, banked left, leveled off, and then banked sharply right. Martin was still tracking the jet as it disappeared into the sky, dark trails diffusing in the air.

  “You know what that one was?” Martin asked his son.

  Charlie nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said. “That’s an F-4 Phantom.”

  His father lifted him up onto the car. Charlie worried that he’d dent the roof, but as soon as he turned, he spotted the Blue Angels on the tarmac. Six blue Hornets with insignia-yellow numbers painted on their tails. They were magnificent even while at rest, parked in a precise row, each plane’s fuselage polished to a mirror’s sheen. He studied the jets, noting the position of the wings, the way the sun glistened on the canopies, the blue wooden chocks nestled beneath the planes’ tires.

  For the rest of the morning, they walked among static displays of aircraft. Charlie waited patiently in long lines for his turn to gaze into each plane’s cockpit. All those dials, switches, and instruments, a world still completely foreign to him. He knew every plane, from the vintage World War II Spitfire to the Harrier jump jet, from cargo planes to an AWACS. Every half hour, another plane would take off and go through a routine of maneuvers over their heads: rolls, loops, ballistic climbs. Charlie watched them all carefully, noting which planes flew faster, which turned sharper, which could climb higher and which could land shorter. More jets flew, mock dogfights, parachutists with smoke streaming from their ankles, the smell of jet fuel and hot dogs, and the roar of the next thundering jet starting up. He was mesmerized, and the Blue Angels still hadn’t flown.

  By lunch, they walked back to the car and Charlie dragged his father’s cooler into the shade of a hangar. He wanted to go back and see more planes, but Martin flopped down in the shade and shoved a beer into a paper bag. He told Charlie to grab a Coke from the cooler. Two six packs of beer floated in icy water, along with a single can of soda.

  Behind the hangar, away from where all the air show jets were parked, a pair of navy Corsairs taxied past. The attack jets’ cockpits were open at an odd angle. Charlie stared at the pilots with a mix of admiration and awe. One pilot’s gloved hand rested casually on the side of his jet. The jet’s gray fuselage was festooned with shark teeth near the cavernous intake at the plane’s nose. At low power, the engines sounded like a shriek, more keening whistle than thunder. As they taxied past, the pilot spotted Charlie and lifted his gloved hand in a greeting. The boy was so stunned he didn’t even wave back.

  Martin reached into the icy water, snagged another beer, and sat down on the cooler.

  “What do you say, sport?” he asked. “You wanna call it a day?”

  Charlie’s stomach heaved. For a split second, he thought he might vomit. The Blue Angels weren’t scheduled to fly for another two hours, and his father was already trying to leave.

  “Can we stay a bit longer?” he asked.

  “I don’t want to risk getting stuck in traffic again,” Martin said. “Let’s not be like all these other assholes.”

  Charlie tried to appear nonchalant, but inside, he wanted to explode. He had never loved his father more than he had that day, but he’d never hated him more than he did at that moment. He thought about running away, disappearing into the crowd.

  “I haven’t seen the C-5 yet,” Charlie said, indicating the massive gray cargo jet parked on the south side of the base. The plane’s nose had been retracted so that people could walk through like it was a tunnel.

  “You go, sport,” Martin said. “But be back here in twenty minutes. I’ll start packing up.”

  Charlie wondered if he really could disappear, get away from his father. He thought of heading off toward the first-aid tent, perhaps feigning an illness. But then he thought about the long drive home, about what would happen back in Aberdeen. His father’s rage would linger, spreading across their family like a storm. But he’d come here specifically with the dream of seeing the Blue Angels. He glanced out at the flight line. The six blue-and-yellow jets, lined up wingtip to wingtip, would soon perform, but he’d be on his way home. Quietly, reverently, with the serious purpose that only a ten-year-old boy can muster, he committed himself to do whatever it took in life to fly with those men.

  Radford thought about the long-ago air show at Patuxent River as the NTSB jet descended before dawn at Wichita’s Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport. He remembered staring out the back window of his father’s car, watching white smoke from the Blue Angels’ jets mark the bright Maryland sky. He wondered if Martin would be proud of him now, if he’d done enough to be worthy of the old man’s approval now that he was investigating his first major plane accident.

  Radford rebuckled his seat belt. Near the front of the plane was the man who’d be leading the investigation into the crash of Pointer 795, Gordon Ulrich, “Gordo” as he preferred to be called.

  In every way, Gordon Ulrich was the polar opposite of Dickie Gray. Short, stocky, nervous, and talkative, Ulrich never shied away from reminding his investigators that he’d graduated from MIT. A nonpilot, Ulrich had made rank at the agency with an unrelenting reliance on statistical analysis. Where Dickie Gray talked about intuition and experience, Ulrich relied on data and numbers. Career advancement over culture. At the agency, he was reviled, but respected too for his brilliance.

  “Our first priority is to secure the accident site,” Ulrich said as the jet taxied toward a hangar.

  It was 5:00 a.m., and Radford hadn’t slept at all. With him on the plane that morning was the rest of the NTSB Go Team, an advance cadre of investigators rushing to figure out why a 737 apparently had exploded. Most were only now waking up. Ulrich spoke over the noise of jet engines spooling down.

  “Document everything,” he said. “It didn’t happen if it isn’t documented.”

  He thought of Gray’s advice. Ask the right questions. In no small way, Radford was getting his shot because of Gray. Only on Gray’s positive recommendation would he be leading the survival factors working group, a huge step forward in his career if he didn’t screw it up. He’d be collecting evidence, finding bodies, identifying the remains of 123 passengers and crew, which, from the initial indications, would be scattered over miles of Kansas prairie farmland.

  But inexplicably, Gray had been left off the Go Team. Radford had no idea why. That decision seemed like a fatal misjudgment, leaving behind the most experienced investigator at the agency. Whatever analytical talent Ulrich possessed, whatever brilliant minds he’d studied with, Ulrich lacked the very thing Gray possessed in spades: wisdom. Radford had plenty of questions about why Gray had been left off this investigation, but right now, more important questions needed to be asked. The answers waited, scattered in the smoldering wreckage on a Kansas prairie. Ulrich stood up and cleared his throat.

  “All right ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “Last night a plane exploded, and over a hundred people are dead. This is what we train for. This is why we get up in the morning.”

  11

  An hour later, dawn broke over Kansas. Radford sat in the cramped back seat of a state police helicopter, scanning the ground below, where the smoldering wreckage revealed no discernible pattern. A piece of wing blocked the passing lane on Highway 400. A landing gear strut had wedged into a fallow cornfield. Aluminum panels littered rooftops. In Lake Afton, seat cushions, luggage, and a human torso bobbed atop the water’s surface, while wires and the port engine casing washed up onshore. Every thirty seconds, police scanners crackled with reports of more wreckage and body parts. Near Murdock, jet fuel had sloshed onto a clapboard farmhouse,
where fire crews sprayed the adjacent outbuildings with foam. Elsewhere, hot spots burned like signal fires across the open prairie.

  In his lap, Radford held a chart. He was marking the debris fields with a red pen, but the chart was already stained with so many red dots that it seemed useless to continue.

  He had never seen anything like this spectacle of ruin. The destruction was not just staggering; it was unimaginable.

  A quarter mile off the port skid, a pile of debris smoldered along the edge of a road. They circled the wreckage several times. The young Kiowa pilot said nothing as he held the helicopter in a tight orbit. To the west, a piece of the downed plane’s tail assembly lay shattered in mud. Radford could identify the Pointer Airlines blue-and-gold paint on the rudder.

  “Not many pieces of wreckage larger than hay bales,” Ulrich said over the intercom. Radford only nodded.

  “How do you get used to this?” the Kiowa pilot finally asked.

  Radford didn’t know. He didn’t even want to speculate. He’d trained for this, studied, worked grueling hours, read books and journals and accident reports. But below him was the real thing, the ultimate test. None of the accidents he’d seen before were this extensive. Nothing he’d studied in training videos or read in old case files prepared him for such carnage: broken pieces of airplane littering golden winter wheat fields, bodies floating in catchment ponds.

  He asked himself, Am I ready?

  “What we knew so far,” Ulrich said, “is that last night Pointer 795 came apart in midair and showered its contents over a massive swath of south-central Kansas.”

  The helicopter hit a thermal, forcing the contents of Radford’s stomach upward.

  They crossed a highway overpass and approached a larger section of fuselage. A black crater in the earth marked a large impact point. Seats and body parts were visible on the ground. Radford added more red dots to his chart. Such devastation was hard to put into any context. Reconstructing this accident would be like building a house of cards in a hurricane.

  “These early hours are the toughest,” Ulrich said. Radford wondered if his boss was trying to sound confident. Was he trying to convince himself he was up to the challenge too? Radford wished Ulrich would just shut up. “It looks like pure chaos. But we’ll make sense of this.”

  “How?” the helicopter pilot asked.

  “It’s all about the data,” Ulrich said. “We pick up the pieces and organize the sequences.”

  Radford bit down on the side of his cheek. “What’s the old joke?” he said, trying to comfort himself as much as the young helicopter pilot. “How do you eat an elephant?”

  “Right now, I need to find a spot to establish the operations center,” Ulrich said, cutting Radford off before he could deliver the punch line.

  The truth was, Radford had no idea how this accident would ever make sense.

  “We’ll need highway access,” Ulrich said, “and space for a temporary morgue.”

  “You might as well have set up back in Wichita,” Radford said. He estimated the accident zone covered forty square miles.

  The young pilot tapped the windscreen and pointed toward what appeared to be a rest stop. The helicopter banked left toward the road, where no cars moved.

  “The entire highway’s shut down,” the pilot said.

  “We haven’t ruled out terrorism,” Ulrich said.

  Radford wondered if a bomb could’ve caused this. The screening measures throughout U.S. airports were rigid, and the likelihood of slipping a large enough explosive on a plane was far exaggerated in the popular consciousness. But if not a bomb, then what? They would need to demonstrate that some other factor was responsible, and given the positive safety record of airliners, he had no earthly clue what that might be. Planes just didn’t blow up in midair, not anymore.

  On the horizon, swirling black smoke trails rose, pushed along by steady southwesterly winds. The scene looked like something out of a B-grade apocalyptic movie. The pilot cycled the collective, slowing them into tight orbit, two hundred feet over the truck-stop parking lot.

  Cars and trucks had been abandoned along exit ramps and breakdown lanes. How many were dead on the ground? How the hell did this happen? Radford’s thoughts filled with questions. He thought of Dickie Gray back in D.C. Gray should be here.

  Radford cringed when his boss twisted his body around to make eye contact with him in the back seat. “This look like a good spot?” Ulrich asked. What the hell could he say?

  Radford shook his head. Nothing about the scene was good.

  How would this carnage affect him? Would he carry pieces of this day for the rest of his life? He thought of Wendy back in Virginia. He’d wanted this chance to prove himself as an investigator, to prove himself to his wife as much as to anyone else. He’d said the words to her: “I want to be someone you’re proud of.” But now that he was here, he felt like an impostor, a fraud.

  Ulrich signaled with his thumb: take us up.

  A thousand miles in either direction, at the departure and arrival airports, hundreds of families began gathering. News of the disaster arrived overnight. Lives forever altered. Children waking up as orphans, wives as widows. Devastation echoed like thunder across the plains. An airliner crash was a spectacle. Every media outlet, every TV channel, every newspaper in the world would soon carry pictures, stories, rumors, and tales of what was just now coming into view. And Radford was here now, at the center of it. “Almost a decade without a major,” Gray had said at the Irish pub. A streak he’d hoped to take with him into retirement. Gray’s lifework. And the poor bastard couldn’t even be here to help figure out what had happened.

  Radford folded the chart as the helicopter zoomed west, tracking over power lines toward more wreckage in the distance.

  12

  They worked past nightfall on Saturday, and by breakfast on Sunday, they’d mapped the major debris fields, established a perimeter, set up a temporary morgue at the old Cheney High School field house. The critical first forty-eight hours were almost up. The more debris they gathered, the more bodies they found in those first two days, the higher the likelihood they’d have secured the most vital evidence. You’re never smarter than the evidence, Gray had told Radford. The first rule. But with each hour that passed, the scrutiny and pressure continued to build.

  The hordes of media—print, TV, streaming—relentless and uninformed, had arrived. They took over every motel room in southern Kansas and began spilling over into trucker motels in northern Oklahoma. Relatives were now arriving too, along with onlookers, curious farmers and truck drivers, high school kids and old men. Public spectacle mixed with private misery. Radford worried about the temptation to grab a piece of history. Hard to pass up a souvenir from a crashed plane. Hard not to pocket a scrap of aluminum, a rivet, a ball of wire. He knew that even body parts had been snatched before. He tried to block out the distractions and follow Dickie Gray’s second axiom: Ask the right questions.

  As head of the survival factors working group, Radford’s primary focus would be the bodies. With an in-flight breakup, many of the bodies were in pieces, though some were largely intact, still seated, with hands neatly folded in laps. What could explain how, earlier that morning, Radford had pulled a severed leg from a car’s windshield? How could the extreme violence of the accident so easily mingle the absurd and macabre at the same time? He concentrated on the work, not the grim reality of what he was seeing. So far, the biggest distraction was not the wreckage on the ground but the borderline incompetence of his boss.

  If Dickie Gray was a walking classroom, then Gordon Ulrich was a nervous vice-principal facing budget cuts. Despite his reputation as the agency whiz kid, Gordo appeared overwhelmed by the scope and complexity of the work. His primary concern seemed to be getting a clean shave before each press conference. He badgered his investigators, blaming them for the slow pace of the operation, for the lack of answers. He kept interrupting the all-important fieldwork by calling unnecessary meetings, f
illing their phones with useless texts, and micromanaging even his most experienced investigators to the point of mutiny. And this was only their second day in Kanas.

  What Radford couldn’t fully appreciate was the intense pressure Ulrich faced from D.C. How his bosses had to respond to questions from congressmen and senators, all of whom wanted answers now. Ulrich was simply the extension of the political will. Every move would be scrutinized, every facet of the operation watched and judged. This was the reason Dickie Gray had been left off the team. Twenty years ago, investigators could be mavericks and cowboys, but now appearances mattered as much as evidence. Now public perception drove the decisions made on the ground. These were all things Radford didn’t yet understand but would discover in time.

  So far, the only thing Radford knew with certainty was that an explosive decompression had ripped Pointer 795’s fuselage apart in flight. But as for a source, any number of things could’ve initiated the explosion. A bomb, a fuel-tank explosion, an engine coming apart and spraying its metal shards into fuel. Radford knew the answers would come eventually but Ulrich wanted results now.

  Later that morning, Radford and Ulrich went to investigate a report that the plane’s nose cone had been located. They stood near their rental car at mile marker 118 on Highway 400. Locating the pilots’ bodies was the most critical phase of Radford’s recovery operation. It should’ve been done yesterday, but thunderstorms and nightfall restricted their work. A bright, clear sky was overhead now, but the path into the field looked miserable. Dark, relentless clods of mud for as far as the eye could see.

  “We need to hire more crane contractors,” Radford said.

  “I’ll worry about the big picture,” Ulrich said. “You focus on your bodies.”

  Radford hoped the pilots’ bodies were waiting out in the field. Ulrich leaned against the car and slipped on blue-mesh shoe covers.

  They set out, swatting away bugs, alert for rat snakes and knee-shredding gullies. Five minutes in, and Ulrich already lagged behind, sighing and huffing with each labored step. The going was slow, but Ulrich’s whining made it tortured. Two hundred yards ahead, the plane’s nose cone finally came into view. Mud sucked at his boots as Radford crossed a furrow. For weeks, spring thunderstorms had dumped heavy rains, filling the reservoirs and catchments, soaking the emerging crops, and making the ground soft, doughy, and almost impassable. Flies and gnats swarmed. Rows of shin-high soy plants swayed in a light breeze, creating a dizzying effect.