Sole Survivor (19 page)

Finally Joe focused his attention on the first page, and Barbara watched over his shoulder as he followed the text with one finger to allow her to see where he was reading.

Sounds of First Officer Santorelli returning to his seat from the lavatory. His initial comments are captured by the overhead cockpit microphone before he puts on his headset with the boom mike.

SANTORELLI:
Get to L.A. (unintelligible), I’m going to chow down on so much (unintelligible), hummus, tabbouleh, lebne with string cheese, big plateful of kibby till I bust. There’s this Armenian place, it’s the best. You like Middle East food?

Three seconds of silence.

SANTORELLI:
Roy? Somethin’ up?

Two seconds of silence.

SANTORELLI:
What’s this? What’re we…Roy, you off the autopilot?

BLANE:
One of their names is Dr. Louis Blom.

SANTORELLI:
What?

BLANE:
One of their names is Dr. Keith Ramlock.

SANTORELLI:
(with audible concern) What’s this on the McDoo? You been in the FMC, Roy?

When Joe inquired, Barbara said, “The 747-400s use digitized avionics. The instrument panel is dominated by six of the largest cathode-ray tubes made, for the display of data. And the McDoo means MCDU, the multifunction control and display unit. There’s one beside each pilot’s seat, and they’re interconnected, so anything one pilot enters is updated on the other’s unit. They control the Honeywell/Sperry FMC, the flight management computer. The pilots input the flight plan and the load sheet through the MCDU keyboards, and all en route flight-plan changes are also actuated with the McDoos.”

“So Santorelli comes back from the john and sees that Blane has made changes to the flight plan. Is that unusual?”

“Depends on weather, turbulence, unexpected traffic, holding patterns because of airport problems at the destination…”

“But at this point in a coast-to-coast flight—little past the midpoint—in pretty good weather, with everything apparently ticking along routinely?”

Barbara nodded. “Yeah, Santorelli would wonder why they were making flight-plan changes under the circumstances. But I think the concern in his voice results more from Blane’s unresponsiveness and from something unusual he saw on the McDoo, some plan change that didn’t make sense.”

“Which would be?”

“As I said earlier, they were seven degrees off course.”

“Santorelli wouldn’t have felt that happening when he was in the lavatory?”

“It started soon after he was off the flight deck, and it was a gradual, really gentle bank. He might have sensed something, but there’s no reason he would have realized the change was so big.”

“Who are these doctors—Blom and Ramlock?”

“I don’t have a clue. But read on. It gets weirder.”

BLANE:
They’re doing bad things to me.

SANTORELLI:
Captain, what’s wrong here?

BLANE:
They’re mean to me.

SANTORELLI:
Hey, are you with me here?

BLANE:
Make them stop.

Barbara said, “Blane’s voice changes there. It’s sort of odd all the way through this, but when he says, ‘Make them stop,’ there’s a tremor in it, a fragility, as if he’s actually in…not pain so much but emotional distress.”

SANTORELLI:
Captain…Roy, I’m taking over here now.

BLANE:
Are we recording?

SANTORELLI:
What?

BLANE:
Make them stop hurting me.

SANTORELLI:
(worriedly) Gonna be—

BLANE:
Are we recording?

SANTORELLI:
Gonna be all right now—

A hard sound like a punch. A grunt, apparently from Santorelli. Another punch. Santorelli falls silent.

BLANE:
Are we recording?

As a timpani of thunder drummed an overture in the east, Joe said, “He sucker-punched his copilot?”

“Or hit him with some blunt object, maybe something he’d taken out of his flight bag and hidden beside his seat while Santorelli was in the lav, something he was ready with.”

“Premeditation. What the hell?”

“Probably hit him in the face, because Santorelli went right out. He’s silent for ten or twelve seconds, and then”—she pointed to the transcript—“we hear him groaning.”

“Dear God.”

“On the tape, Blane’s voice now loses the tremor, the fragility. There’s a bitterness that makes your skin crawl.”

BLANE:
Make them stop or when I get the chance…when I get the chance, I’ll kill everybody. Everybody. I will. I’ll do it. I’ll kill everybody, and I’ll like it.

The transcript rattled in Joe’s hands.

He thought of the passengers on 353: some dozing in their seats, others reading books, working on laptops, leafing through magazines, knitting, watching a movie, having a drink, making plans for the future, all of them complacent, none aware of the terrifying events occurring in the cockpit.

Maybe Nina was at the window, gazing out at the stars or down at the top of the cloud cover below them; she liked the window seat. Michelle and Chrissie might have been playing a game of Go Fish or Old Maid; they traveled with decks for various games.

He was torturing himself. He was good at it because a part of him believed that he deserved to be tortured.

Forcing those thoughts out of his mind, Joe said, “What was going on with Blane, for God’s sake? Drugs? Was his brain fried on something?”

“No. That was ruled out.”

“How?”

“It’s always a priority to find something of the pilots’ remains to test for drugs and alcohol. It took some time in this case,” she said, as with a sweep of one hand she indicated the scorched pines and aspens uphill, “because a lot of the organic debris was scattered as much as a hundred yards into the trees west and north of the impact.”

An internal darkness encroached on Joe’s field of vision, until he seemed to be looking at the world through a tunnel. He bit his tongue almost hard enough to draw blood, breathed slowly and deeply, and tried not to let Barbara see how shaken he was by these details.

She put her hands in her pockets. She kicked a stone into the crater. “Really need this stuff, Joe?”

“Yes.”

She sighed. “We found a portion of a hand we suspected was Blane’s because of a half-melted wedding band that was fused to the ring finger, a relatively unique gold band. There was some other tissue as well. With that we identified—”

“Fingerprints?”

“No, those were burned off. But his father’s still alive, so the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory was able to confirm it was Blane’s tissue through a DNA match with a blood sample that his dad supplied.”

“Reliable?”

“A hundred percent. Then the remains went to the toxicologists. There were minute amounts of ethanol in both Blane and Santorelli, but that was just the consequence of putrefaction. Blane’s partial hand was in those woods more than seventy-two hours before we found it. Santorelli’s remains—four days. Some ethanol related to tissue decay was to be expected. But otherwise, they both passed all the toxicologicals. They were clean and sober.”

Joe tried to reconcile the words on the transcript with the toxicological findings. He couldn’t.

He said, “What’re the other possibilities? A stroke?”

“No, it just didn’t sound that way on the tape I listened to,” Barbara said. “Blane speaks clearly, with no slurring of the voice whatsoever. And although what he’s saying is damn bizarre, it’s nevertheless coherent—no transposition of words, no substitution of inappropriate words.”

Frustrated, Joe said, “Then what the hell? A nervous breakdown, psychotic episode?”

Barbara’s frustration was no less than Joe’s: “But where the hell did it come from? Captain Delroy Michael Blane was the most rock-solid psychological specimen you’d ever want to meet. Totally stable guy.”

“Not totally.”

“Totally stable guy,” she insisted. “Passed all the company psychological exams. Loyal family man. Faithful husband. A Mormon, active in his church. No drinking, no drugs, no gambling. Joe, you can’t find
one person
out there who ever saw him in a single moment of aberrant behavior. By all accounts he wasn’t just a good man, not just a solid man—but a
happy
man.”

Lightning glimmered. Wheels of rolling thunder clattered along steel rails in the high east.

Pointing to the transcript, Barbara showed Joe where the 747 made the first sudden three-degree heading change, nose right, which precipitated a yaw. “At that point, Santorelli was groaning but not fully conscious yet. And just before the maneuver, Captain Blane said, ‘This is fun.’ There are these other sounds on the tape—here, the rattle and clink of small loose objects being flung around by the sudden lateral acceleration.”

This is fun.

Joe couldn’t take his eyes off those words.

Barbara turned the page for him. “Three seconds later, the aircraft made another violent heading change, of four degrees, nose left. In addition to the previous clatter, there were now sounds from the aircraft—a thump and a low shuddery noise. And Captain Blane is laughing.”

“Laughing,” Joe said with incomprehension. “He was going to go down with them, and he was laughing?”

“It wasn’t anything you’d think of as a
mad
laugh, either. It was…a pleasant laugh, as if he were genuinely enjoying himself.”

This is fun.

Eight seconds after the first yawing incident, there was another abrupt heading change of three degrees, nose left, followed just two seconds later by a severe shift of seven degrees, nose right. Blane laughed as he executed the first maneuver and, with the second, said,
Oh, wow!

“This is where the starboard wing lifted, forcing the port wing down,” Barbara said. “In twenty-two seconds the craft was banking at a hundred and forty-six degrees, with a downward nose pitch of eighty-four degrees.”

“They were finished.”

“It was deep trouble but not hopeless. There was still a chance they might have pulled out of it. Remember, they were above twenty thousand feet. Room for recovery.”

Because he had never read about the crash or watched television reports of it, Joe had always pictured fire in the aircraft and smoke filling the cabin. A short while ago, when he had realized that the passengers were spared that particular terror, he’d hoped that the long journey down had been less terrifying than the imaginary plunge that he experienced in some of his anxiety attacks. Now, however, he wondered which would have been worse: the gush of smoke and the instant recognition of impending doom that would have come with it—or clean air and the hideously attenuated false hope of a last-minute correction, salvation.

The transcript indicated the sounding of alarms in the cockpit. An altitude alert tone. A recorded voice repeatedly warning
Traffic!
because they were descending through air corridors assigned to other craft.

Joe asked, “What’s this reference to the ‘stick-shaker alarm’?”

“It makes a loud rattling, a scary sound nobody’s going to overlook, warning the pilots that the plane has lost lift. They’re going into a stall.”

Gripped in the fist of fate punching toward the earth, First Officer Victor Santorelli abruptly stopped mumbling. He regained consciousness. Perhaps he saw clouds whipping past the windshield. Or perhaps the 747 was already below the high overcast, affording him a ghostly panorama of onrushing Colorado landscape, faintly luminous in shades of gray from dusty pearl to charcoal, with the golden glow of Pueblo scintillant to the south. Or maybe the cacophony of alarms and the radical data flashing on the six big display screens told him in an instant all that he needed to know. He had said,
Oh, Jesus
.

“His voice was wet and nasal,” Barbara said, “which might have meant that Blane broke his nose.”

Even reading the transcript, Joe could hear Santorelli’s terror and his frantic determination to survive.

SANTORELLI:
Oh, Jesus. No, Jesus, no.

BLANE:
(laughter) Whoooaaa. Here we go, Dr. Ramlock. Dr. Blom, here we go.

SANTORELLI:
Pull!

BLANE:
(laughter) Whoooaaa. (laughter) Are we recording?

SANTORELLI:
Pull up!

Santorelli is breathing rapidly, wheezing. He’s grunting, struggling with something, maybe with Blane, but it sounds more like he’s fighting the control wheel. If Blane’s respiration rate is elevated at all, it’s not registering on the tape.

SANTORELLI:
Shit, shit!

BLANE:
Are we recording?

Baffled, Joe said, “Why does he keep asking about it being recorded?”

Barbara shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“He’s a pilot for how long?”

“Over twenty years.”

“He’d know the cockpit-voice recorder is always working. Right?”

“He should know. Yeah. But he’s not exactly in his right mind, is he?”

Joe read the final words of the two men.

SANTORELLI:
Pull!

BLANE:
Oh, wow.

SANTORELLI:
Mother of God…

BLANE:
Oh, yeah.

SANTORELLI:
No.

BLANE:
(child-like excitement) Oh, yeah.

SANTORELLI:
Susan.

BLANE:
Now. Look.

Santorelli begins to scream.

BLANE:
Cool.

Santorelli’s scream is three and a half seconds long, lasting to the end of the recording, which is terminated by impact.

Wind swept the meadow grass. The sky was swollen with a waiting deluge. Nature was in a cleansing mood.

Joe folded the three sheets of paper. He tucked them into a jacket pocket.

For a while he couldn’t speak.

Distant lightning. Thunder. Clouds in motion.