Marine One (3 page)

WE CROSSED TWO hills and ravines. At the top of the third hill we looked down and could see the crash site. A flame was angrily burning in the pouring rain right in the middle of the wreckage. It hissed and sputtered like the eternal flame on another president's grave in Arlington.

The firemen and investigators at the accident scene must already have determined the flame was no threat. Extinguishing it would probably destroy more evidence than would be justified by the effort.

The site was full of people in blue nylon jackets with NTSB or FBI or SECRET SERVICE letters you could see from two hundred yards away. Some firemen were clearly debating whether the NTSB was right to let the flame burn.

I tried to see under the massive green tarp. From where we stood our view was partially blocked, but we could see a lot more than the helicopters circling overhead. I could see three bodies lying next to the wreckage. They were badly burned. I got a sick, brassy feeling in my mouth as I wondered whether I was looking at the burned body of the president of the United States. It was a disturbing image and a disturbing thought. Rachel saw me looking at the bodies. "Is that all of them?"

"I don't think so. I think there were seven people on the helicopter."

As we got closer, we could see that the damage to the dead was even more horrific. I wondered if they'd suffered, if they'd survived the crash and simply burned to death. In many helicopter accidents the occupants had only minor injuries but died in the fire. What a horrible way to go.

We trudged down through the mud and trees and approached the yellow caution tape that established the perimeter a hundred yards from the center of the crash. They didn't want anyone stepping on pieces of wreckage and burying them in the mud. A woman stood in the middle of the wreckage with her thick blond hair pulled back in a braid that went halfway down her back. I nodded toward the woman and said to Rachel, "There she is."

"Who?" Rachel asked.

"Rose Lisenko, the NTSB's investigator in charge-the IIC-for this accident."

Rose had seen us and was extremely concerned that someone was approaching her accident site. She hurried over to the caution tape and looked at me. "No press."

"I'm not with the press, Rose."

She looked at me more carefully as the rain dripped down her face. She wore no hat, no hood, and used no umbrella. Her incredibly thick hair absorbed 80 percent of the rain that was hitting her head but it was now saturated. The rain oozed out of her hairline onto her face and neck. She was maybe five feet four, thin, and not unattractive, but she had a hard face and dark eyes. She didn't want to be distracted, and whatever it was I wanted, she didn't want any part of it. "Do I know you?"

"Mike Nolan. I'm an attorney-"

"No attorneys here.
Absolutely no attorneys."

She probably assumed I was a plaintiffs' attorney who had showed up to find out how to sue someone. "I'm here for WorldCopter. They asked me to come out."

"They're here already, and they don't need any help. Thanks for dropping by." She turned and walked back toward the crash site.

Rachel looked at me with concern. I bent under the caution tape and walked right behind Rose. Rachel followed.

Rose turned around. "You think this is a game, sir? This is a controlled site! We're investigating Marine One here, not some student-pilot accident. If you stay here, I will have you
arrested
," she said angrily.

"I'll do whatever you say, Rose, but I've been requested to be here by WorldCopter. You know a party to an investigation can have whoever they want on their team."

She was already on to something else in her mind. She didn't have time for an argument. She threw her hand at me in disgust. She walked back to a group of NTSB investigators huddled under several umbrellas trying to examine photographs of a WorldCopter similar to Marine One.

I handed my camcorder to Rachel. "Videotape everything. I've got several tapes and three extra batteries in that bag. Use it all."

"Don't you want me to take photographs? You told me to bring my camera."

"Absolutely. Photograph everything. Do both. We can't have too many pictures."

I saw a man with a WorldCopter jacket and gestured to him. He approached. "Hi, I'm Mike Nolan. I'm supposed to talk to Marcel."

"Yes, he's right over there," the man said in perfect English.

"What's your name?"

"Jeff Turner, vice president of operations for WorldCopter U.S. "

We followed him to where the other WorldCopter people were congregated. I looked at the wreckage up close for the first time. The fire had consumed most of the aluminum skin of the aircraft. Small pieces were identifiable, but most of what remained was a piled, blackened tangle of magnesium, aluminum, composites, and steel. The tail rotor had somehow survived nearly intact. It was attached to part of the tail boom and stuck up from the ground about eight feet. Just high enough for the blades to not touch the ground. It was eerie.

Suddenly the scent of burned flesh pierced my consideration of the scene. I had smelled burned flesh before. It's the kind of thing you never forget. While in the Marine Corps I had had the unfortunate experience of investigating two accidents. Both had been caused by pilot error and had resulted in the pilot and many others being-as Tom Wolfe would put it- "burned beyond recognition." The NTSB workers were sifting through the wreckage still looking for the other bodies or what pieces of them they could find. I saw a flash of white in one section of the debris that looked to be the back of a skull with the scalp burned off.

I looked up into the rain, blocking with my hand to try to see the trees through which the helicopter had plummeted. Most were tall oaks and hickory, with some pine. They were well over fifty feet tall and hardy. Branches that the blades had cut through lay around the wreckage. The leaves were still green and the cuts were fresh, but there weren't that many of them. The helicopter had come almost straight down. To me that meant it had lost power. The pilot might have tried an autorotation, where you use the rotor blades as an air brake to slow the fall of a helicopter that has lost power. It's something you practice from the first day of helicopter training, but that doesn't make it easy, especially at night, especially in a storm. The pilot might have lost power, descended in an autorotation, and misjudged his height above the ground. Possible, but really unlikely. This helicopter had three engines. It obviously had fuel because the fuel was still burning. The odds of losing power in all three engines simultaneously were about zero. It could have been contaminated fuel, or fuel-line blockage, but again, with Marine One, the best-maintained and best-protected helicopter in the world, I doubted it. Something else had happened.

Jeff was walking away from the bodies. "Jeff, I'll be right there," I said, peeling off and walking toward the tarp and the bodies, which had been laid side by side. Secret Service agents were standing around the bodies. I looked at every part of every body. I couldn't stop myself. I looked for identifying clues. But I had finally gotten close enough that one of the Secret Service agents came over to me and put his hand on my chest. "Who are you?"

I didn't have a badge or jacket or any other identification. Rachel stood about eight feet behind me. She continued to film everything, including the bodies. The same Secret Service agent that had me in his sights looked at her. "Put the camera down." While still touching my chest, he glimpsed over his right shoulder. "Greg! Watch this one."

Greg immediately came over and stood in front of me and began asking me questions, while the first Secret Service agent walked to Rachel. "Give me the camera."

"It's not mine."

"I didn't ask you who owned it. Give it to me."

"We're investigating the accident."

"Nobody videotapes a deceased president."

So one of the three bodies
was Adams.

Rachel looked at me for guidance. I gave her a slight nod. She spoke to the agent, "Just take that tape. I need to record other parts of the wreckage, I won't record the bodies." She looked at the camera on both sides, turned it over, unable to figure out how to eject the cartridge. She looked at me for guidance. I put my hands up to the Secret Service agent, indicating I was backing away, and went back to Rachel.

I took the camera, ejected the tape, and handed it to the Secret Service agent. "We won't videotape the bodies. You have my word."

He glared at me and returned to his position, slipping the tape into his pocket.

I walked back over to the agent named Greg and stood beside him. He looked at me suspiciously. "What are you doing here?" he asked.

"I'm an attorney with WorldCopter."

He nodded. "They're going to need one."

He was probably doing what everyone else in the country was doing. Assuming it was the company's fault: either they built a shitty helicopter, or they let some maniac who didn't have a security clearance sabotage the helicopter and kill the president. Either way, we lost.

"You may be wrong about that, but we'll save that for another day."

I went back over to Turner. "What do you have so far?"

He gestured me farther away from the Secret Service agents. I motioned for Rachel to walk with us. We stood near the yellow tape on the uphill side of the wreckage by ourselves. Turner said, "Helicopter's completely destroyed. But one thing…" He looked around at the others investigating the accident and glanced over at the nearly intact rotor blade that I had seen on the television screen.

"What?"

"That blade. The threads look stripped, but the blade is almost completely intact except for the end cap and the tip weights."

Rachel frowned and asked, "Can we go look at it?"

Turner considered her request. "Yeah, but act like you're just curious. I'll come over and explain it to you."

Rachel walked away looking around, taping the entire scene with the video camera, then stopped near the blade. She videotaped it, stopped taping, and called out to us, "What about this?"

We walked over to the massive rotor blade, perhaps thirty inches across and forty feet long. Titanium shaft, composite core, and carbon-fiber skin on the outside. The shaft had a yellow-painted stripe near the attachment end that would tell us which of the seven blades this one was. Each had a different color ring: the blue blade, red blade, yellow blade…

I asked Jeff, "What do you make of it?"

"Come down here." He motioned, indicating the end of the blade away from where it attached to the helicopter. "Look at the end."

It was bare, with something of a concave look the entire width of the blade surface. I could see immediately what Jeff's concern was.

Rachel was puzzled. "The end looks odd."

"You know what tip weights are?" I asked her.

"Not really."

"They're little washerlike things that you stack onto those bolts there at the end. The end cap covers that and the rest of the end of the blade. You know the tiny weights that get tapped onto the rims when you get new tires for your car? To balance the wheel? Same idea. It's to balance a spinning surface. If a blade is out of balance, the entire helicopter vibrates. If it's bad enough, the helicopter comes apart."

Rachel looked at the size of the blade, glanced back at the wreckage where the main rotor head lay in the middle, and asked, "How do you balance it?"

Jeff said, "The Golden Blade."

"What's that?"

"Every blade is built to the same specs. But it's impossible to make two things exactly alike, to the thousandth of an ounce. So we balance every blade against the same master blade. The Golden Blade. It sits in a room all by itself and is never touched or modified in any way. It stays attached to a spinning rotor head, and every blade that comes in has to run in perfect balance and tracking with the Golden Blade. We adjust it by adding small tip weights. If they balance against the Golden Blade, they'll balance against each other."

Rachel asked, "So why is this blade here?"

Jeff looked at me with what I took to be extreme concern, maybe just short of fear. "Looks like it came off in the air."

Losing a blade in midair would almost certainly be the manufacturer's problem. A couple of things could cause that to happen that wouldn't be, but those were extremely unlikely.

I asked him, "Wouldn't the blade vibrate itself to death? Wouldn't it have thrown parts all over the countryside?" I stared at the blade, trying to listen to what it was saying. "And after coming apart in the air it just happened to land right where the rest of the helicopter crashed? I'm not buying it."

He said, "Me neither. But it sure came off somehow, and it's not as beat to death as the others, which are still attached."

I walked to the end of the blade where it would have attached to the helicopter. Jeff and Rachel followed me. I asked, "What about the threads? Are they stripped?"

"They look like it, but I can't say for sure. Have to put it under an SEM." A scanning electron microscope. He put his hands deeper into his parka. "I don't think I need to tell you how bad this is going to be for WorldCopter if we threw a blade in a storm and killed the president."

I didn't respond. The answer was more obvious than the question.

Just then another man with WorldCopter printed on the front of his raincoat approached the three of us. Jeff said to me, "Mike, let me introduce to you Marcel. Marcel is the chief accident investigator for WorldCopter. Have you met?"

"No. Hello, Marcel." I extended my hand and he shook it vigorously.

Marcel said, "Thank you for coming, Mr. Nolan. We thought we would have much difficulty from the NTSB, but they've been very cooperative. We are able to work freely." He had a heavy French accent and was trying to be optimistic and upbeat, but the weight of what he was doing was evident on his rain-covered face. "Come over here, I want to show you something."

We followed Marcel to the main part of the wreckage. We stopped under the corner of the tarp. Marcel looked around nervously as he watched the government inspectors sifting. We followed his gaze and saw others walking up the hill looking over every square foot for any other evidence that wasn't in the central area.