Marine One (14 page)

JEAN CLAUDE MARTIN gave us all the time we wanted. But first he had to "express himself." He simply could not understand how in the American judicial system it was possible for Hackett to hand me several pieces of paper and show up the following week with a court reporter and videographer to take his deposition. None of this was allowed in France. It was clearly intended to harass him and WorldCopter.

I agreed. I told him that was exactly the purpose of the depositions. And the harder we fought and more we made of it, the more we were playing into Hackett's publicity-seeking hands. The more annoyed we got, the happier he was going to be. I told President Martin that since Hackett gave us virtually no notice, and we hadn't much time to prepare, Hackett would have to be satisfied with the answers he got. He only got to do this once.

From the top down, WorldCopter had
zero
faith in the American justice system. They all reminded me that the reading of the Michael Jackson verdict was on live television throughout France. Not because they expected great justice, but because it was like watching a circus. And there was absolutely no doubt in their minds, and I mean
no
doubt, that Michael Jackson would get off.

I think American juries get it right 90-plus percent of the time. I had no such confidence in other judicial systems, especially those that let judges decide everything, like the French system. I had seen enough tyrannical American judges to doubt whether tyrannical French judges or tyrannical British judges would somehow be remarkably fair and come up with the right result. I trusted juries. Sure, they could get it wrong, so could I, so could WorldCopter, so could a French judge. We all can get it wrong. But in federal court, where we were in this case, you had to get a unanimous jury. In my experience, a unanimous jury rarely got things just flat wrong.

Once we calmed Jean Claude down, the preparation went well. Toward the end of the discussion, after reviewing the corporate structure and the government contract for the building of Marine One, President Martin sat back and looked at the ceiling, then down at me. "Will I be required to testify at trial?"

"Probably. Hackett will try to use this videotaped deposition against you, but if you're there in person, with nothing to hide, it's much to our strength. I would like you to testify about the contract and WorldCopter's entry into the American military market by a bid for Marine One. I definitely plan on calling you."

The next day President Martin was the first witness. Even though Martin spoke English as well as I did, we asked for an interpreter. He needed his own language to express himself properly. It also makes for a record, through the videotape, of exactly what was said in French. Also present at the deposition were Kathryn; the WorldCopter America general counsel, Tripp; Rachel; Hackett, and two people from his office; plus the court reporter; the videographer; and the translator; as well as a second translator hired by WorldCopter to check on the translator hired by Hackett.

Jean Claude did brilliantly. Hackett pressed him about the contract, the security, all the things he had been banging his drum to the press about, even the dramatic completion of the three Marine One helicopters ahead of time and under budget. Hackett tried to find weaknesses or create them, but he couldn't touch Jean Claude. Watching Hackett during the deposition was interesting. He clearly had not expected us to produce the president at all, let alone the week he was noticed, let alone the first day. Hackett seemed slightly dazed. He had brought Bass and the paralegal with him overnight in his private Gulfstream jet, and they all looked bleary-eyed.

We let Hackett go all day. We let him ask wide-ranging questions on multiple topics. He didn't advance his case at all. He learned some unpleasant facts, and that WorldCopter was not going to roll over and write him a huge check.

As the week progressed, the rest of the WorldCopter witnesses did almost as well. They were ready in spite of the short preparation time. They knew the accident, knew the helicopter, they knew how it had been built, they knew the documents, and they knew the contract. Hackett didn't really know any of it. He was just there to beat up on WorldCopter witnesses and intimidate them, and failed, not that he would agree with that assessment. He was unburdened by self-doubt.

At the conclusion of each deposition, as we sat in various restaurants on the outskirts of Paris with the WorldCopter officers, their confidence grew. They realized that Hackett was swinging wildly and missing. They realized that he was not much of a threat at this stage because he didn't know as much as he thought he did. The conclusion began to form that his early aggressive stance had been a huge miscalculation.

I reminded them that the NTSB still believed it was WorldCopter's fault, his experts would so testify, and a jury was likely to believe Hackett. All we had done was to blunt his first attack. To win the case we had to find the real cause, or WorldCopter was going down just like Marine One.

Kathryn shared our cab to de Gaulle airport. She was invigorated. She wanted a meeting as soon as possible with all our experts, all the attorneys, criminal
and
civil, and WorldCopter's employees involved in the investigation. Kathryn wanted to walk through the case soup to nuts and come up with a global to-do list. I called Marcel on my BlackBerry from the cab; he thought we should have the meeting at WorldCopter headquarters outside Washington, in the hangar where the Marine One helicopters were assembled.

We flew back to the States overnight and met the next morning after we had cleaned up. The hangar was deathly quiet. WorldCopter had been forbidden from touching any of the Marine One helicopters until the Justice Department's investigation was concluded. I walked around the assembly and inspection area with Marcel, Kathryn, and Rachel looking at the spotless facility. We were acutely aware that in ordinary circumstances we could never be there. No one was allowed near the helicopters, let alone the assembly and repair facility, without the required Yankee White security clearance. But the day after Marine One crashed, all those at WorldCopter had had their clearances canceled, and every helicopter was immediately suspect.

We walked by one of the undelivered Marine One helicopters, which sat in the middle of the hangar in perfect condition surrounded by a Plexiglas security wall. It had completed its assembly and inspection and was due to be delivered the day Marine One crashed. It sat untouched behind the Plexiglas wall ever since. I wondered if we could learn anything from that helicopter, but nothing occurred to me. Since the accident, all maintenance had been transferred to the Marine Corps at Quantico, Virginia, and Andrews Air Force Base. And it wasn't coming back to WorldCopter until, according to the Pentagon, they were "cleared" by the Justice Department.

That wasn't likely to happen anytime soon. After Justice demanded documents and unlimited access, and after I'd thrown a little tantrum, WorldCopter had essentially agreed to whatever they wanted. We told them we were ready to provide all documents they wanted-they were entitled to have them anyway by contract. Once again, our cooperation seemed to throw them off a little bit. We told Justice we would get the documents to them in sixty days, and they had accepted that. They had also said that they would wait to interview individuals until after they had received all the documents requested in their subpoena and after they had reviewed the depositions Hackett took. That was fine with us. It gave us additional time to prepare.

The consensus of the group was that Justice was waiting for the final NTSB report. That could take two years or longer, long after the trial. Until then, Justice was focused on clearances and people building Marine One without them.

All our experts were there when we arrived. After the usual greetings and some ambitious coffee consumption to hit the jet lag, we got down to business. Kathryn had asked for the meeting, but I was as anxious as she was to see where everyone was. I wanted to brainstorm theories and find out what the hell happened to Marine One. Pretty simple concept, but nothing about the theories in this case was simple. The WorldCopter investigators wanted to blame the pilot, our pilot expert wanted to blame the weather, and Wayne Bradley wanted to blame the NTSB, his former employer, for trying to hang it on WorldCopter without enough evidence.

I asked Bradley to set up his computer with a projector and pull up the wreckage photos. He explained what he saw in the bent metal, the forces necessary to bend the charred remains of the helicopter. He brought up the next slide. "Look at this!" It was a close-up, a macro photo of some piece of metal. I couldn't tell what it was. "These are the threads in the nut of the blade that separated. It is interesting, but not good enough." He said to Marcel, "We need to get this nut into a scanning electron microscope." Marcel nodded and made a note.

Bradley looked at everyone else. "Second, we've
got
to find those tip weights. I don't think they are far away. If my theory is correct, then those tip weights are somewhere near the accident scene. If they came out on impact with the ground, then they're nearby. We've got to find them; we've got to get them."

Kathryn contemplated for a moment. She leaned forward on her elbows and pushed her hair back from her face. "Mike, maybe I'm missing something. How does finding the tip weights help us?"

I looked at Bradley, who waited for me to answer. "NTSB says-implies, really-that the tip weights came off and started the crash sequence. So the tip weights from that blade can't be at the crash site. They'd have to be miles away, if they got thrown off. So if they
are
there, right where the helicopter hit, then they came off when it hit the ground and couldn't have caused the crash. If we find them there, we can prove that. That right, Karl?"

Karl Will nodded. He cleared his throat. "It's a question of sequence, Kathryn. If you jump off a train early, you can't be on it when it gets to the station."

Kathryn nodded. "But the NTSB didn't find any tip weights. They've got to be turning over every rock."

Will nodded again. "They are. And so are we. If we went out to the scene fifty years from now, I guarantee you we'd find part of Marine One. When these kinds of things happen, you can't ever find everything. We have to try to find what they didn't."

"If your theory is right," she noted.

"Exactly," Will said.

Kathryn glanced around at everyone. "Well, if it wasn't the tip weights, if that didn't cause the accident, what did? What's our theory?" She looked at Holly. "You're the piloting expert, right?"

"Yes."

"What do you think?"

Holly was on the spot. "I'm not really sure. We've got an incredibly talented pilot, but he sounds like he hated the president. I flew the simulator like Mike here did and didn't really learn very much. He flew very well. The FDR and CVR don't help us that much either. So at this point, I'd say he was unprofessional, but I don't see any hard evidence of pilot error."

Kathryn frowned. "What does his professionalism have to do with it? Why do we keep talking about that?"

Holly looked at me to see if she was to say what she and I had been talking about. "Well, if the pilot hates him enough, maybe he does something… to stop the presidency. Not saying that happened, but we have to consider it. There have been other examples. EgyptAir, SilkAir, others. The pilots almost certainly committed suicide and took hundreds with them. I don't see that here, not for sure, but it could be homicide. Something we have to think about."

Kathryn was speechless. "Is that what you think actually happened?"

"I'm just saying I don't rule anything out until there's proof it's wrong."

Kathryn looked at me. "What else hasn't been ruled out?"

"Well, there's some talk of hydraulic failure, but I'm not buying that. I'm just not seeing it based on the way this helicopter was flying. The idea that he was shot down or otherwise had an impact with another airplane or anything else, like a bird, I think that's a nonstarter. I don't buy it. I'm with Holly. I don't trust Collins. And why did the flight data recorder suddenly quit? Did he pull the circuit breaker? It's near the hydraulic pump, which he may have thought was failing, but maybe he pulled that circuit breaker too. Maybe he was trying to make it look like an accident. And why was President Adams in such a big damn hurry? Why did he want to get to a meeting at Camp David in the middle of a thunderstorm? And why fly? The Secret Service wanted him to drive, but he refused.
Why?
I think if we can answer that question, we may make a lot more progress."

Kathryn shook her head. "How will that tell us what happened to the helicopter? I don't want to get distracted by political considerations. Unless you're saying someone didn't want him to get there-someone not on that flight-that would mean somebody attacked the helicopter and the NTSB and FBI have clearly said there's no evidence of that. So don't waste your time with that. The answer is in the metal and the wreckage."

"I agree, Kathryn. But if we find out why he was going there, it certainly won't hurt. I just like knowing everything about an accident.

"Anyway, we need to get these folks into the hangar and finish their examination of the wreckage."

Marcel shifted. "Yes, one thing that the NTSB told me while you were in Paris."

"What?"

"They are going to finish the wreckage access, close access, as they are ready to finalize the group reports."

The entire group was alarmed.

"What does that mean?" Tripp asked.

Marcel replied, but looked at Bradley for confirmation. "It means the reports from the groups: engine group, airframe group, operations group and the like are done. They are finished and are preparing their reports to submit to the NTSB so they can put them in their final report."

This was all wrong. Way too fast. "Did you think the groups were done?"

"No," Marcel said.

"Who says the groups are done then?" I pressed.

"Rose."