Radford remembers reading about the story. The details seemed fake, an urban legend propagated on the internet. At first, he could find no hard evidence to verify its claims, but he also couldn’t debunk the story’s truth. Finally, after hours of digging through old news clippings online, he found the original article from Stars and Stripes.
“What happened to Sergeant Magee?”
“He bailed out of his plane from twenty-two thousand feet. Without a parachute.”
The congressman nods. Others pass notes to their interns.
“Magee,” Radford says, “fell through the glass roof of a train station in Saint Nazaire, France. He survived. When the German soldiers found him, he’d suffered little more than a few broken bones.”
Radford hears the cameras and reporters coming to life. What did Magee’s story represent to them? A precedent? Evidence that such a fall could occur?
“And who is Juliane Koepcke?”
Radford smiles.
“Miss Koepcke fell from a plane in Peru. The plane was struck by lightning above ten thousand feet. She was a teenager at the time. I think it was 1971.”
“She lived too?”
“She fell into a tree, climbed down, and then stumbled around in the rain forest for eleven days before they found her,” Radford says. “She only broke her collarbone. She published a book about it.”
A murmur spreads in the hearing room. The Alabama congressman then asks about Vesna Vulović, Nicholas Alkemade, and Ivan Chisov, men and women who survived falls from airplanes coming apart in midair. The congressman is smart, Radford thinks; he wants to buy the man a beer. Instead, he shares details about each case, cases he’s come to know well.
“So, I’ll ask again,” the congressman says. “Did you believe her story?”
“I didn’t want to believe it,” Radford says. “But the more I looked, and the more of these stories I found, the more I considered it plausible.”
“And you decided to do what with this information?”
“I decided to keep an open mind. That’s what the job demands. I let the possibility exist.”
“What possibility is that, sir?”
“The possibility of the impossible.”
14
“This fucking plane went full piñata at thirty thousand feet,” Shep Ellsworth said, sitting next to Radford in the state police cruiser. It was Sunday afternoon, and they were heading to the hospital where, the police said, the woman from the barn had been taken. “Why are you wasting my time?”
Radford didn’t reply. He’d never been in the back seat of a police car before. What was it his father used to say? Every good Irishman should spend a night in jail. The old man attributed that bit of working-class wisdom to Jack Kennedy, but Radford never verified the source nor lived up to the adage. Yet another reason he’d disappointed his father.
They passed two debris fields along the highway. Still-smoldering wreckage, yellow tape, police cars idling, red flags planted in the earth to indicate body parts. An hour earlier, the lieutenant governor arrived at the command tent to insist they reopen Highway 400, though few cars were visible on the straight, flat road.
“I need this distraction,” Ellsworth said, “like I need to be kicked in the balls by a horse.”
“You aren’t buying it?” Radford asked.
“Jesus,” Ellsworth said. “I know you’re new at this, but for Christ’s sake, use your brain.”
Ellsworth’s presence was toxic. Radford already hated the man. He was no better than a high school bully, constantly looking to put people down, and his outright cynicism made things worse. His attitude ruined what little flickers of camaraderie existed among the investigators. He even smelled bad, a mixture of oniony sweat and cigarettes. But he wasn’t wrong. As much as Radford hated to acknowledge it, a healthy dose of skepticism helped this situation make more sense.
Dickie Gray had told him to ask the right questions. But what the hell was going on? What had he seen? A hole in the roof. Splinters of wood. A mangled seat from the plane. How did those things add up to a passenger surviving such a crash? And why did it bother him so much? What happened in that barn?
The cop sped down the empty highway without turning on the siren. Wheat fields swayed in a light breeze on both sides of the road. Radford wrote down the time and date on his notepad, followed by: Investigating debris and possible injury in barn; Goddard, KS. En route to hospital to check on victim. In his training, he’d read about impossible things before. A baby found alive in the burnt wreckage of a Cessna 210. A cargo plane ripped through the roof of a house in Denver but somehow missed the sleeping woman. Could someone have fallen encased inside a piece of the cabin? Might she have floated down on a section of wing? Each scenario he came up with sounded more absurd than the last. No. Whoever the hell they’d found in the barn, she surely wasn’t a passenger on that plane.
Kansas’s flatlands spread out on all sides. A landscape devoid of contrast. Every few miles, a copse and a few modest homes marked the next town, with its requisite Casey’s General Store or the neon lights from a Kwik Shop gas station. After that, only crossroads interrupted the otherwise vast expanses of empty space. They were lucky. Had this plane exploded over Wichita, the destruction on the ground might well have been worse. Instead, the debris rained down over crops, not daycares; metal shards sliced into dark loam instead of shopping malls. A few cars had been damaged on the highway, but with little more impact than a spring hailstorm might’ve caused. If someone had been hit with debris in the barn, she’d become the first casualty from the fallout.
“Why am I here?” Ellsworth said. “I have real work to do.”
“I’m just following orders,” Radford said.
“I need a shower,” Ellsworth said. “I need a hot meal, a goddamn drink.” He leaned forward and spoke to the cop driving. “Hey, take me to the Holiday Inn by the airport. If my friend wants to waste his time, that’s his prerogative. I’m punching out for the day.”
Radford felt foolish. He wanted to call Wendy. Hell, he wanted to be with her. He’d barely said goodbye to her. They were supposed to meet with a real estate agent this week. She was filling out forms and preference checklists. She’d have to postpone that now or, worse, go it alone and saddle him with more guilt. The cruiser sped east toward the city. He closed his eyes and tried to picture his future with Wendy, but that once-solid idea had become wobbly of late. How had they lost that certainty?
He thought again of his father, and wondered what Martin would say about a woman falling from the sky.
“I’m done too,” Radford said to the cop. He wasn’t about to become the laughingstock of the investigation on the second day. The Falling Woman had to be a hoax. “Take us both back to the hotel.”
15
The first thing Monday morning, Radford drove to the old Cheney High School gymnasium, where the makeshift morgue was filled with the remains of the dead. A steady stream of ambulances, vans, and buses delivered black body bags from the scattered debris fields into a highly orchestrated maze. The state medical examiner from Topeka slept in the basketball coach’s office and showered in the boys’ locker room.
Arriving victims were tagged as soon as they were rolled in. On a whiteboard, propped up beneath the CHS Cardinals scoreboard, written in huge block numbers, was 123—the number of passengers and crew on Pointer 795’s manifest. Below that number, written in red, was the tally of positive IDs. For Radford, 123 was the only number that mattered. There were 123 sets of husbands and wives, relatives and friends, sons and daughters, all of whom needed closure. Radford saw the number 123 in his sleep.
For everything else, for the growing chorus and clamor of news stories about a possible survivor, Radford simply blocked it out. Only the number mattered, not what had happened at the barn. As far as he was concerned, the woman in the barn was not his problem.
As the head of the survival factors working group, Radford would lead the disaster management team, compris
ing pathologists, dentists, X-ray technicians, criminal investigators. Several times a day, a body was transported from one of six large white refrigerator trucks parked outside the gym. A tech logged the bodies into the database by numbers: Passenger 1. Passenger 37. Crew member 3. Then lab techs pushed the rollaway gurneys and ushered the bodies through the long, deliberate process of identification. Red Cross volunteers accompanied each body, from the moment it left the refrigerated truck until it returned hours later. The volunteers smiled and wore blue ribbons on their lapels. Except for the grim black bags, the scene might’ve resembled a blood drive.
Depending on the condition of a body—sometimes only a leg, a section of torso—they moved from dental exams to X-rays to fingerprinting to autopsy, a journey that might take up to three days to complete. Some IDs were easy. Some bodies were in good shape, and photos could be shown to next of kin. Sometimes a body had a distinct tattoo; sometimes a man’s wallet was still in his pocket; sometimes an engagement ring was engraved. But if a positive identification couldn’t be made within three days, the process became more complicated. At that point, outside labs became involved, and the identification could take months.
By Monday, less than half of the bodies were positively identified, and many more were still coming in from the field. The current red number, 57, on the whiteboard was like a mark of shame.
“The pathologists need to start sending tissue samples out,” the state coroner told Radford. “So many of the bodies are burned or crushed beyond recognition. It’s going to be a slow process.”
“Keep at it,” Radford said. “I need that number to move.”
Across the street, where the high school’s new buildings stood, they’d set up risers and dark blue plastic tarps to block access to the old gym. They also roped off the field house parking lot, and armed sheriffs roamed the old campus to keep the public far away. But to hear laughter at lunch from high school students across the street, to hear the bells clanging on the hour, or coach’s whistles during afternoon practices—these things only added to the dreary nature of the work. Radford promised the coroner they would have a better facility soon. Then he thanked the techs, the assistant coroners, and volunteers before he copied the red number on the board into his notepad. That number had to climb, and climb quickly.
He spent the rest of the day in the field, wandering among wreckage and assisting in the gathering of body parts. The day was long, the work grueling and relentless, and the rewards only grim.
As the sun dipped toward the horizon, he climbed into a rental car and headed back to the Holiday Inn, the de facto headquarters for a growing army of investigators, FBI agents, and engineers. For the foreseeable future, this would be the routine. He would awake before dawn, grab a coffee and head out to the morgue, and then to the field. He’d work all day tagging debris, marking locations on maps, collecting the dead. Then each night, he would gather with the others in the hotel’s second-floor conference room for the daily progress meeting, or DPM. It allowed the investigators and police to compare notes. There were arguments, questions, frustrations, and complaints, but there was also laughter, stories of home, hints of progress.
“Why are we so far behind with the IDs?” Ulrich asked. He and Radford stood in the hall outside the conference room, called the Birch Room, an incongruous name since there was not a birch tree in sight.
“Most of the remains are grossly deformed,” Radford told Ulrich before the DPM began. “Heads and limbs severed, clothes ripped off, serious burns, traumatic crushing.”
“That’s not useful,” Ulrich said. “I can’t tell the press that. I need to reassure the public that we are doing everything we can.”
“This doesn’t happen overnight,” Radford said. “There’s a process at work here. I need time.”
“And I need answers,” Ulrich said. “Why was the captain not in his seat? Who was flying the plane? Jesus, Charlie, I don’t want excuses.”
That morning, they’d found the body of Bill Oakley, Pointer 795’s captain, a good two miles away from where the cockpit section had come down. Radford had no idea why the captain had fallen there, nor what the location might mean to the investigation.
“Why was there no Mayday?” Ulrich asked. “Help me out here. I need to tell the press something.”
“Tell them the lawyers arrived,” Lucy Masterson said, walking toward the conference room with Shep Ellsworth. Their pants and shoes were covered in mud.
“Blood in the water,” Shep Ellsworth said, retying his ponytail.
They all entered the conference room, which consisted of three tables in a horseshoe shape. Near the back of the room, a fourth table held plastic cups and a pitcher of water. By now, the investigative team had grown. More than a dozen investigators found seats around the table. Scattered among them were cops, engineers from Boeing, FBI agents, and firemen. They were all exhausted, filthy, and hungry after another fifteen-hour day in the debris fields. Ellsworth stood near the window, his tattooed arms folded across his chest. Ulrich was now on his cell phone at the head of the table. The air smelled like a football locker room after a long and grueling game. Radford was already down to his last clean underwear and socks. He needed to find a laundromat or go buy new clothes. There was just no time.
“Ulrich can’t find a few dollars in his budget for a carafe of coffee?” Lucy Masterson whispered to him.
Shep Ellsworth turned on the projector and waited for it to warm up. Ellsworth had discovered several sections of the ruined fuel tank on the sixth fairway of the Cherry Oaks Golf Course.
“Witness marks in the spar line up with similar marks in the fuel tank baffle,” he said, a picture of the mangled wing spar now coming into focus on the screen. As much as Radford disliked him, Shep Ellsworth knew his work. “The explosion on Pointer 795 sent this metal beam,” he said, pointing a laser, “through the center of the cabin like a supersonic harpoon shot through the belly of a whale. This created an explosive decompression in the cabin, and along with the ignited fuel . . . Boom!”
Ellsworth made an explosion gesture with his hands.
“Data from Kansas City air traffic control radar clearly shows the moment the flight began to come apart,” Lucy Masterson said.
She clicked a button and a digital map appeared. A moment later, a blue line tracked Pointer 795 in accelerated time—thirty seconds to the hour. From takeoff in Dulles, across the Appalachians, a slight jog north over the Ohio River, then arcing south again, over Indiana, Illinois, across the Mississippi, Saint Louis, until the blue line disappeared southwest of Wichita. Silence filled the room as the trace slowed and Lucy zoomed in on the avatar of the plane.
Radford loved the way that order slowly reasserted itself after so much chaos. He loved watching an investigation come together because even the worst disaster began to make sense. The process, the way the theories emerged, felt like an orchestra warming up. This was progress, how civilization itself had been constructed. This was the reason he loved this work. It demanded careful attention, energy stretched across months and years, commitment, care, and endurance. One piece at a time. One small step in front of the next. This was the only way to keep chaos at bay, the only way to create a story that would accurately explain what had happened. And Radford now had his part to play. Sitting in this room, with these men and women, he told himself he’d arrived, that he was, at last, doing the work he was meant to do.
“Nothing we will do in this room will bring back the dead,” Ulrich said. For someone so obsessed with statistics and data, he sounded more like a politician running for office. “Nothing can do that. But we’ll restore balance. We’ll make sense of tragedy.”
Ulrich looked around, almost like he was waiting for applause. None came.
“In the belly of the plane,” Lucy said, “jet fuel combusted, setting off a chain reaction beneath the plane that then spread rapidly toward the cabin, blowing open a gash in the pressurized hull, mixing fuel, spark, and air so that a massive fi
reball incinerated anyone sitting near the middle of the craft.”
Ulrich furiously scribbled notes, even though he should already have known the basic facts.
“You aren’t telling me the thing I need,” he said. “What caused the boom? Why wasn’t the captain flying? The press corps is eating me alive.”
“It takes time,” Lucy said. “Lightning, a wire arcing in the fuel cell, a fire burn-through.”
“A bomb?” an FBI agent asked.
“There’s no way to get a bomb into the fuel tank itself,” Lucy said.
“Within a few seconds of the ignition, the plane snapped into three large pieces,” she said. “The nose and forward third of the plane kept flying for twelve seconds, which explains the relatively condensed debris field near Belmont.”
It was staggering to imagine those twelve seconds, most of the passengers in the front of the plane still alive. The noise, the cold, the terror would have been overwhelming. His training had taught Radford to block out those thoughts, but with each passing hour, he seemed to be bothered by them more and more.
“The bodies from this section of the plane have been almost impossible to identify,” he said, trying to insert himself into the conversation.
“What you don’t have is a source of combustion,” an FBI agent said. “Like a bomb.”
“It’s still a possibility,” Ulrich said, glancing up from his notes.
The FBI agent pointed to a radiograph of a section of left wing.
“That looks like a pretty large fucking hole to me,” he said.
Radford still believed that the answer would be subtler than a bomb.
“Anything else?” Ulrich asked.
“Yeah,” Shep Ellsworth said. He glanced at Radford and smiled. “Where we at on Sasquatch?”
The room erupted in laughter, and Radford’s stomach dropped. He had summarily ignored the story since leaving the barn. He avoided watching or reading the news, distanced himself from the reports. Was he hoping it would just go away?
The Falling Woman: A Novel Page 8
