Crashers (4 page)

Once the helo was on the ground, Tommy unbuckled, gave the pilot a thumbs-up, and leaped out. He dashed across the grass, flagged down two of the state-police officers, and flashed them the badge he had never bothered to throw away when he resigned. “Dr. Leonard Tomzak, NTSB,” he
lied. “We got federal authority over any airplane- or train-crash site. You fellas okay with that?”

One of the troopers eyed him critically. “You're a doctor?”

Tommy nodded. “Pathologist. Are we cool?”

The trooper shrugged.

“Good. I've got to organize the rescue teams but I'm dressed like a fucking civilian. You guys have the badges and the guns and the cool hats, you come with me.”

“Sure,” the trooper said. He was happy to be able to do something. Anything.

A woman in work boots, jeans, and a Royal Navy sweater was standing nearby and overhead them. Her hair was pitch black and pulled back into a ponytail. “You're NTSB?”

Tommy said, “Close enough,” but she hardly listened.

“Thank God! Angela Abdalla, Portland International Airport. We're supposed to oversee the rescue ops, but I've never, um . . .”

She waved blindly toward the wreckage. Tommy suspected that Angela Abdalla was petrified even to look in that direction.
Smart lady,
he thought.

“I have,” he said. “I don't want to be stepping on anyone's toes, ma'am, but I'm glad to help, at least until the Go-Team is assembled.”

Angela shook his hand, her almond-shaped eyes glittering with tears. “Thank God, Doc—”

“Tommy,” he cut in. “Come with us.”

“Here.” She shrugged out of her NTSB windbreaker and handed it to Tommy. It fit well enough, and it made him look like the guy in charge. Angela accepted the coat he had borrowed in its place.

Tommy, Angela, and the troopers moved toward the cluster of fire trucks and ambulances just as the first foray of rescuers were about to head out into the field. Tommy leaped up onto the hood of a fire department incident-command station wagon, the shock absorbers making the car bounce under his weight. Every eye turned in his direction as he held up his folding pocket ID.

“I'm Dr. Tomzak, National Transportation and Safety Board. I'm gonna need y'all to follow my orders. All right?”

“Maybe later, bub.” One of the paramedics surged to the front of the group, holding a med kit in one beefy hand and a litter under the other arm. He wore a baseball cap backward. “Write a memo. We got work to do.”

“Officer,” Tommy said, “arrest his ass.”

The troopers didn't move, but neither did the paramedics. The guy with the battlefield litter said, “Are you shitting me?”

“Please listen to him!” Angela Abdalla pleaded.

Tommy nodded, understanding where the paramedic was coming from. “Sorry, folks. I've seen three major airliner crashes. I'm a pathologist now but I did two tours in the army as a field surgeon and before that I did my ER rotation at a downtown hospital in Baltimore. I've set up triage units from Kuwait to Kentucky. I know how to do this. Anyone else want to be in charge, or you want me to do it?”

It didn't take the crews long to figure out which they wanted.

“Good,” Tommy shouted over the sounds of traffic and sirens and the hiss of burning grass. “We're gonna find three kinds of patients in there. And, God willing, maybe a fourth. Type one is the wounded. Ambos, you'll get them out of here as fast as we can. Type two is the dead. Don't move them. Repeat: do not move the dead unless it's to get to a wounded patient. Type three is the badly wounded and traumatized. How far are we, timewise, from trauma hospitals?”

An ambulance driver answered first. “When the plane crashed, half the rubberneckers on the highway slammed into each other. There's snarl-ups to the north and south. We'll have to use back roads. That puts Salem Hospital at least forty minutes away. Portland's nearest hospital is Meridian Park but it doesn't have trauma status. And it's an hour away.”

Tommy shook his head. “We got enough birds to fly out the wounded?”

“There's only three Life Flight helos in Portland,” a paramedic answered. “Salem doesn't have any.”

Tommy rubbed the back of his neck. When dealing with the critically wounded, time was one of the biggest X factors. He watched an Itasca motor home crawl by in the molasseslike traffic. He turned to one of the troopers.

“All right. Okay. Ah, tell your people to commandeer the next couple three mobile homes or recreational vehicles that pass by. They've got beds, water, and electricity; like it or not, they're about to become a MASH unit.”

One of the cops said, “Is that legal?”

Tommy shrugged. “The fuck should I know?”

The cop shrugged, too.

“Good. Firefighters, we're not going to dump water on this scene unless something blows up but good. That'll just make slogging through the mud harder, and it might hurt the wounded. Instead, I need you guys to
set up a perimeter. Start walking this field and all the adjacent fields. Both sides of the freeway. If you find any type of debris from the crash, mark it with something. One of your helmets, a flashlight, a flare—anything. We're establishing the field of play and we need to know its exact dimensions.”

Several of the firefighters cast glances at one another.

Tommy raised his hands. “I know: this sounds like scut work. You guys are used to being the lifesavers. Believe me, what you're doing will be pretty damn important in the weeks and months to come.”

The firefighters agreed.

“Okay, let's do this. Half of the paramedics, follow me to the tail section. The rest of you, go ahead and try to drive your rigs a little closer to the main fuselage. Not too close. Don't go in. Check for survivors in the field, but don't go into the fuselage till I say it's cool. Another thing: I've got a feeling the captain dumped his fuel, but there's still a hell of a lot of stuff that can burn on these ships. And this is important: we're looking for two boxes, about the size of truck batteries. They're the black boxes. No matter what all y'all might've heard, they ain't black. They're bright orange. Sing out if you find them.

“One last thing: you people are professionals. You've seen it all, the worst of the worst. But there's going to be some shit here that you've never seen before and, God forbid, you shouldn't ever have to see again. If it gets to you: good, you're still a human being. Puke if you have to: I'm a canoe maker, and I always toss my cookies at these things. Just try to mark it somehow. Everything in this field is evidence, even your dinner. Got it?”

They got it.

“Good. Questions?”

A firefighter raised his hand. “You said we might find a fourth kind of person?”

“Right. The uninjured. It's rare, but it happens. More questions?”

The EMT in front, the one who'd challenged Tommy's authority, said, “Canoe maker?”

“Think about how you carve out a canoe from a tree. Now think about autopsies.”

The guy said, “Oh.”

“More questions? Okay, folks, let's do this.”

The time was 9:10
P.M.

Dennis Silverman found an International House of Pancakes that was open twenty-four hours a day. He took the home-built laptop in with him and ordered blueberry pancakes because, well, it said
pancakes
in the name, so it seemed rude to order anything else. Another customer had left a copy of
USA Today
and he tried to concentrate on the stories, while a cacophony of sirens rose and faded continually from Interstate 5.

At 9:30
P.M.
exactly, Dennis went outside to the pay phone and fed quarters into the slot. He dialed the number he'd memorized. It was long distance. The phone rang three times, then an answering machine clicked on. No greeting, just the elongated beep.

“Did you watch the news?” Dennis said. “Did you like what you saw? If so, you sweeten up my offshore account and I'll drop the next jet in less than seventy hours.”

He hung up.

A jetliner in Vancouver, British Columbia, waited a full ninety minutes for John Roby to land and switch planes before taking off for PDX. Airline officials are quick to help get NTSB officials wherever they have to go, no questions asked, although, secretly, few pilots liked having the investigators on board. It seemed like tempting the fates, somehow.

John was eager to get to the scene. As an explosives-and-fire expert, he could collect tons of data just by standing on the scene, lifting his nose to the sky, and sniffing. The smells of a crash site are essential clues.

 

Walter Mulroney, an ex-Boeing chief engineer, was a big-boned, rangy Kansan with wind-raw skin and permanent wrinkles in the leathery areas around his eyes. He looked more like a farmer than a man holding a doctorate in aeronautical engineering. He would be heading up the structures team.

The plane that had gone down was a Vermeer, not a Boeing. Made on the other end of the continent, in North Carolina, Vermeer was Boeing's major American rival. Even though he had worked for Boeing, Walter was
pretty sure he could rebuild any Vermeer from the ground up. It might not be necessary; usually, a complete reconstruction isn't. But if they needed one, he was the best man for the job.

As Tommy Tomzak was leaping onto the hood of the incident-command vehicle, Walter was carrying his single suitcase with him up the ramp of a DC-10 at the Lawrence airport, en route to Denver and then on to Portland. In the bag were several changes of clothes, his NTSB wind-breaker and ball cap, and his well-worn Bible, King James Version.

 

Peter Kim was a civilian engineer who worked for the United States Air Force. His specialty was the power plant, including the engines and the engine mounts. Living down in Pensacola gave him the greatest distance to cover, but that wasn't a problem. The air force agreed to fly Peter in a trainer all the way to Los Angeles, where he could catch a direct flight to PDX. He'd be among the first crew leaders to arrive.

 

In New Haven, Connecticut, Isaiah Grey kissed his wife, LaToya, goodbye.

“Go fight the good fight,” she said, helping him pack his dilapidated, mismatched luggage.

Isaiah checked himself in the hall mirror. African American and forty, he was as fit today as he had been in the air force. Lately, his close-cropped hair had begun to go salt-and-pepper above his ears. LaToya told him it was sexy, so he didn't do anything to stop it, but secretly, the gray hair annoyed him every time he looked in the mirror.

A former air force pilot—certified in fixed-wing jets and propeller aircraft as well as military-grade helicopters—Isaiah would be given the duty of handling the operations crew for the NTSB investigation. His arena would be the preflight and the flight itself.

 

Kathryn Duvall, known to everyone as Kiki, lived in San Francisco and had the shortest distance to travel. She was a former navy lieutenant, rotating out at the grand old age of thirty-three, with experience in submarines as an audio and sonar officer. In fact, she was one of the first five women ever to do long-mission service in an American sub. She'd garnered a reputation in the nuclear-powered fleet as a “sonar witch,” an officer who could see with her ears better than most humans do with their
eyes. Within five hours of her honorable discharge, she'd received a call from a complete stranger who identified herself as Susan Tanaka, offering her a job with the NTSB. That had been two years ago. Susan discovered early on in her career that submarine sonar jockeys made the best cockpit voice-recorder specialists.

 

Susan Tanaka had no real hope of the weather letting up in Washington, so she climbed into her candy-apple-red Miata and zoomed to Philadelphia, where, she was assured, the weather was calm enough to get a plane off the ground. Although she would be designated the intergovernmental liaison for this specific Go-Team, she'd be the last member to get to the crash site, a fact that made her drive like a maniac.

 

Other specialists were on the road or in the air that night. There were crews assigned to handle hydraulics, electronics, air traffic control, and operations, such as preparation and the flight itself. There were experts in reading maintenance records, and in transcribing the invaluable flight data recorder, which, with the cabin voice recorder, made up the so-called black boxes.

There also were crewmembers who would report directly to Tommy Tomzak and John Roby and Kiki Duvall and Walter Mulroney and Peter Kim and Isaiah Grey. In all, 120 experts were called out of their beds that Monday evening. Each of them was being called to a spot on the map they knew little or nothing about. No one knew exactly what they'd find when they got there. But they each had a job to do.

THE IRISHMAN CALLING HIMSELF Jack picked two Glock 9s, a Para-Ordnance .45, and the Colt Python from the stash in Daria Gibron's West Los Angeles cottage, plus four boxes of parabellum rounds. She told him the going price and he paid cash without haggling. Very un–Middle Eastern, no bargaining, but she didn't complain.

She offered him a vodka. He accepted.

“Selling guns on American soil,” he said, as she pulled the Grey Goose bottle from the freezer in the kitchen of her 1940s-style stucco cottage. “Please take this in the spirit it's intended, miss. That takes balls.”

She poured a fingerful in two mismatched glasses, handed one to him. They clinked their glasses. “It does at that.”

“How do I know they're any good?”

Daria picked up the Para-Ordnance. Keeping her eyes locked on Jack's eyes, she slid the full magazine from the beveled grip and jacked the single round out of the firing chamber. She pushed in on the recoil spring plunger and rotated the barrel bushing to free the spring and the bushing itself. She yanked back on the slide and removed the slide stop. Never taking her eyes off Jack, she pushed the slide forward and off the frame. She removed the recoil spring and its guide, pulled apart the barrel. Smiling, she spread out the stripped components of the automatic on her counter. Jack
dragged his eyes off her. The components were clean and well taken care of. He could smell cordite and linseed oil. Smiling and with his eyes locked on hers, he proved that he could quickly reassemble the automatic without looking, too.