Breaking Point (14 page)

Hector pointed to the steel box. “This is one of them,” he said, then pointed thirty feet to his right, to Teresa Santiago, who was down on her haunches in exactly the same position Hector had been in, over another steel box.

“That's Teresa Santiago. She has the flight data recorder,” Hector told the deputy marshal. “Mine goes to Portland, Oregon. Please—”

“Yes, sir,” the blond man cut in with a small smile. “We know the procedure. Can you sign this?”

He handed Hector a clipboard. With a signature, Hector gave up his legal possession of the box.

*   *   *

Teresa Santiago watched Hector Villareal sign a sheet on a clipboard. The tall, ruggedly handsome Jack Goodspeed jogged up to her, also watching Hector.

“U.S. marshal?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I guess. I didn't expect them to get here so soon.”

Tall and rangy, with a distance runner's legs and long fingers, she was physically the opposite of Hector. His neatly trimmed hair contrasted to her own wild mop. She had kinky lightning bolts of black hair that hung to the middle of her back, a leather string trying to keep that mane in check while stray, jagged shards of bramble-hair hung into her eyebrows.

“Fast is good,” Jack said. “That should help.”

A veteran flirt, Teresa winked at him and threw an arm over his shoulders. “Ah. I know you want to play pick-up sticks with all your shiny new toys.” She gestured to the debris field. “But our black boxes will whisper their secrets to us long before you get this plane out of the forest.”

HELENA REGIONAL

Gene Whitney's voice came through, loud and clear: “First, um, Isaiah Grey's dead.”

Beth Mancini sat on the edge of Adrienne Starbird's desk, feet in the chair, and hugged her knees to her chest, eyes squeezed shut.

“Peter told me. You knew him better than I did. I am so, so sorry.”

“Yeah. He was … He had a wife.
Has
a wife.”

Beth said, “I'll contact her.”

“Okay.”

Beth waited. All she heard was static. “Gene?”

“Um, sorry. I poked around in the fuselage and found the flight crew's copy of the manifest. Right now—and these are early, early numbers—we're looking at twenty-six souls, estimated eighteen dead, eight survivors. From all accounts, Tomzak and Duvall ran the rescue. The site's goddamn pristine.”

Beth said, “Crew?”

“Two and two,” he said, meaning two pilots and two flight attendants. “None of them made it.”

“Okay, thanks. Gene? I am sorry.”

He said, “Yeah,” and rang off.

Beth dialed 1.

“This is Kim.”

CRASH SITE

Peter stood on his rocky outcrop, hands in his pockets, observing. He had touched nothing. He had hardly spoken. His team seemed good, solid.

His ear jack chimed. “This is Kim.”

“It's Beth. Gene gave me the rundown. Were you and Isaiah close?”

“No,” Peter said. “One crash together. Oregon.” He didn't need to elaborate. That crash was legendary within the NTSB.

“I've set up the All-Thing for eleven on Saturday. There's no way we could get the stakeholders to Montana today.”

“Acknowledged.” He checked his watch; a bit past seven. For all Peter cared, they could have the damn thing on New Year's Eve. He considered the meeting of every conceivable stakeholder a monumental waste of time.

He rang off as Jack Goodspeed, the airframe-team leader, jogged over. A strapping, affable guy with jet-black hair worn short and a perpetual smile, Peter thought he looked like he'd played football in college and likely dated the homecoming queen. Upon arriving, he'd jogged east with a bright LED flashlight snugged into his palm, checking the debris trail. Now he was back, shaking his head.

“It's pretty much a straight line of wreckage, boss. Goes back a little better than a mile. You can see where both wings sheared off.”

“The engines?”

“The one closest to us looks pretty chopped up. The other one's where the fire started. I couldn't get close enough to see it.”

Peter nodded. “The fire?”

“Somebody dug a firebreak, quarter mile back there. The fire's not a threat right now but that could change quick. One option is for us to stay out here, get as much info out of that bird as we can before our luck turns. Besides, it'll be light soon.” The day had dawned but the state forest remained in shade behind a mountain range to the east.

Peter said, “We've got the black boxes. There isn't much else to do until our teams are assembled. Get the others. We're heading in. I want everyone up and briefed by ten hundred.”

But Dr. Jain walked up at that moment. “Peter? I don't know about the airframe, but I want to get all of the bodies out of here, in case the fire turns.”

“All?”

“Absolutely. It wasn't a full flight. And I definitely want to autopsy every one. I can't do that if the forest fire expands.”

Peter blinked. “It's seven
A.M.
, in the middle of nowhere. Where would we even secure eighteen cadavers?”

“Excuse me?” A stocky man with a doughy, Irish face, in a bomber jacket and police hat, stepped up. “Paul McKinney. I'm chief of police, next town over. Twin Pines. Not five minutes away from the ambulance staging area. You need to store bodies?”

Lakshmi Jain said, “Yes, please.”

“The mayor just called me, said he's set up a market, went bankrupt a month ago. Plenty of storage, and it's ice cold in there.” Secretly, McKinney was wondering what had magically happened overnight to the lead in Mayor Art Tibbits's ass. He'd never seen the mayor mobilize anything bigger than a backyard barbecue.

Lakshmi turned to Peter. “Perfect. I've spoken with the paramedics. The fire could change direction today.”

Jack said, “I'm with her, boss. We got bad clock here.”

Peter nodded, turned to McKinney. “Chief, we're going to need help getting these bodies out of this field and transporting them to your town.”

In response, McKinney reached up for the police radio clipped to his epaulet. “McKinney to base. Over.” To Peter, Lakshmi, and Jack, he said. “I'll whistle up something.”

Jack said, “If Lakshmi's staying, I want to help Reuben get as much of the avionics off the flight deck as we can. Same as the bodies: if the fire whips around, we'll lose a lot of evidence.”

Peter agreed. It seemed that his people, or at least some of them, wouldn't be getting any rest. But he had to admit, he liked their professionalism.

HELENA REGIONAL

The supervisor for Helena Regional's air traffic control tower paged Adrienne Starbird, suspecting she had pulled an all-nighter due to the crash. “Adrienne? We've got seventeen chartered flights booked for Helena tomorrow and more being filed every few minutes. And not small ones, either. Last two were a Gulfstream 550 and a Challenger S.E. What in the world is going on here?”

*   *   *

Adrienne Starbird took the question to Beth Mancini, who was using her office. “It's the All-Thing,” Beth said, rubbing at a kink in her neck. “Everyone who had a hand in putting that plane together is going to want to help us figure out how it came apart. And I mean everyone. The airframe manufacturer, the wing manufacturer, the engines, the avionics, on and on. Then we get into Polestar Airlines and the pilot's union and the flight attendant's union.”

Adrienne said, “And they're coming here?”

“Yes. My boss invented this event and dubbed it the All-Thing. Basically, we take two or three hours in the first few days to figure out who the players are. Establish a roster. Then, and I know this is counterintuitive, we actually take them up on the offer to help. If you've got a mental image of foxes guarding a henhouse, you're right on the mark. But when it comes to doing a full postmortem on, say the flight deck avionics package, we're going to need the experts of Acme Avionics or whoever it turns out to be. Which means your tower will receive a lot more flight plans in the next few hours.”

HALCYON/DETWEILER, DUPONT CIRCLE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Liz Proctor's new aide, Donny, handed her three manila envelopes and a cup of coffee. “Our friends in Islamabad have asked for twelve MKK-17s,” he said, following her into her office.

Liz frowned. “Going fishing?” The MKK-17s were Halcyon's helicopter gunships, rigged for antisubmarine warfare. They were outfitted with both extremely low-frequency sonar and sonobuoys. “India's not going to like that.”

“True.”

She set the first folder on her oak desk and opened the second.

Donny gave her the highlights. “A Turkish Cypriot suicide bomber took out five people in a terminal at Larnaca International last night using—”

Liz said, “Suicide bomber in Cyprus? Jesus, Donny.”

“I know. That's an escalation. No one saw it coming. I talked to my guy at the CIA. He says MI-6 has people on site now and they're sharing … for once. The Nicosia station chief is moving assets into position.”

She sipped the coffee. Donny was twenty-seven and a total hottie. Blond hair, tall and slim, and favored Hugo Boss trim-fit shirts. Liz Proctor could have licked him. It didn't hurt that he had a master's in public administration and a doctorate in foreign policy and an IQ slightly higher than that of the Vulcan High Council.

“Okay, I need face time with Deitrich, before noon,” she said, doffing her jacket. “Who's good on Cyprus. Jennings?”

“Jennings's water broke last night,” Donny said, smiling. “Sorry. I'll get Craig Sutter up here.”

“Okay.” Liz looked at the third manila folder, opening it.

“Manifest from that crash in Montana.”

Wow, he was good. She had forgotten all about it by the time she'd made the commute in. “Anyone interesting?”

“Unfortunately, yeah. A guy on the payroll. Subcontractor vetted by Mr. Tichnor's office. An Andrew Malatesta. Near as we can tell, he and … Liz? Are you okay?”

Her cheeks were burning. She made a hand gesture toward the door and Donny didn't hesitate. The moment the door closed, she sat and dialed Barry Tichnor's extension. The line rang twice. Liz heard the click of a receiver being lifted and didn't wait for Tichnor to identify himself.

“What the fuck, Barry? Seriously! What the fuck!”

CRASH SITE

The sun was close to rising from behind the mountain range but the forest remained dark.

Reuben Chaykin had flown from Chicago to take command of the powerplant team. He stood at the empennage end of the downed plane and stared forlornly to the east, at the fire that had started with the portside wing and engine and had chewed its way due west—straight as a Texas highway—to the starboard wing and engine.

The Claremont featured those two engines, two starter generators for direct-current power, three transformer units in the cargo deck, and three nickel-cadmium batteries. They, along with an engine-driven AC generator to supply variable-frequency power, made up the allied powerplant of the Claremont aircraft. It was Reuben's job to see if something within the powerplant had brought down the plane.

Much of his “evidence” was a fiery, mile-long mess. This was going to take a long, long time. Many months.

Reuben Chaykin was a squat, muscled little bantam of a man with a half-moon of hair the color and texture of steel wool. He wore half-glasses at the end of his nose, attached to a lanyard around his neck. He stood there, hands jammed into the back pockets of his dungarees, and sighed deeply.

Teresa Santiago, the flight data recorder expert, threw an arm over his shoulder and gave him a little hip check.

“You're powerplant?” She stood five inches taller than Reuben and they were both in their early forties.

“Yeah,” he admitted.

“Bummer.”

He removed his glasses and let them hang against his chest from their lanyard. “You're tellin' me.”

The tall, curvy Latina bombshell and the morose Jewish fireplug made a sharp contrast. “How's your black box look?”

“Pristine. U.S. marshal's already been here and gone.”

“This could be an easy catch for you,” Reuben said, and shrugged, turning again to the fire trail.

“Yeah. But I think you're well and truly screwed.”

He signed yet again. “I am so fakaktah.”

Jack Goodspeed jogged in their direction. He'd been around to the belly side of the plane to see if the pilots had deployed the retractable tricycle-style landing gear. They had not.

“Reuben? Peter gave us the okay to try to get the avionics suite out of the cockpit. As much as we can, anyway.”

Reuben said, “You're worried the wind will change direction, that fire biting us in the ass?”

“Yeah. You?”

Reuben gave his signature sigh. “Sure. God hates me. Why not?”

*   *   *

Chief Paul McKinney got the superintendent of the Twin Pines/Martins Ferry Unified School District out of bed. “Chip, I want to borrow your buses. All of them.”

“Um … sure.” The superintendent sounded half asleep. “When?”

“Now.”

Chip Ogilvy climbed out of bed so as not to wake his wife. “Paul? What's going on?”

“A midsize aircraft crashed into the state forest, couple miles outside of Twin Pines. The damn thing started a forest fire. The feds are here, and they want to transport these people into town as quickly as they can.”

Chip agreed, hung up, called his director of transportation, and got the buses rolling. It was early August and the buses weren't in use anyway.

Paul knew Chip well enough to know that he would have said no if the request had been to transport eighteen dead bodies. That's why Paul had worded it
these people.

CLANCY, MONTANA