The President's Plane Is Missing

by Robert J Serling

  “But the FBI has scotched that not-going-to-Boston business,” Madigan reminded. “So while the elevated shoe apparently belonged to an impostor, the impostor could not have been Senator Haines. It also occurs to me, Warner, that the shoe could have been owned by one of the legitimate passengers or a crew member.”

  “I doubt it, Mr. Vice President. I didn’t discuss this in any detail with my boss, but I got the impression he’s convinced nobody on the plane wore such shoes. Anyway, there’s one way to find out once and for all whether Senator Haines was on Air Force One.”

  “You tell me,” the Vice President said curtly, irritated because he hadn’t been advised of the shoe discovery.

  “Sir, could you ask the FBI if the fingerprints on the mystery body were those of the senator? That should settle it once and for all.”

  Madigan stared at Goldberg. Then he decided that he’d finally better confirm this himself. He rang the intercom buzzer connected with Mrs. Hahn’s desk. “You stay put, Warner. I’ll get Reardon on the phone and—Mrs. Hahn, get the FBI director for me, will you? Tell him it’s urgent.” The Vice President and the reporter sat in silence, waiting for the call to go through. They were so engrossed in their thoughts that both started when Mrs. Hahn’s metallic and impersonal voice came over the intercom. “I have Mr. Reardon for you, Mr. Vice President. Line 2.”

  Madigan picked up the phone and charged straight to the point. “Mr. Reardon, has anyone thought to compare the fingerprints on that unidentified body with those of Senator Haines?”

  Goldberg fervently wished he could hear what was being said at the other end. Madigan was frowning in open anger.

  “Goddammit, Reardon, I asked you a question and I don’t want questions in return. I want answers. Never mind why I want to know. It’s sufficient that I asked. Now, how about those fingerprints?”

  The Vice President, his face still peevish, listened while Goldberg strained to hear from four feet away. Madigan’s fretful expression dimmed slowly into a look of disappointment strangely blended with relief. “Thank you, Mr. Reardon. I apologize for snapping at you. Afraid my nerves are a bit on edge. This is a terrible strain, you realize, I’m sure. Good-by.”

  Madigan hung up. He looked at Goldberg and shook his head. “I’m sorry, Warner, but you can go back and tell your boss he’s way off base. Reardon says one of the first things they did was to compare Bert Haines’s file prints with the fingerprints on that body. They didn’t match.”

  Gunther Damon took the news glumly, his journalistic coup of the century falling apart like an overcooked turkey. DeVarian, Pitcher and Goldberg felt sorry for him, although Pitcher, it must be added, also was feeling sorry for himself. Exclusives were rare on the aviation beat. Pitcher’s last supposed one had been several years ago when he wrote flatly, quoting the usual “well-informed sources,” that Lockheed would win the supersonic transport, design competition. The very next day the FAA announced that Boeing was the winner. Pitcher had expected to get fired.

  “It’s part of the game, Pitch,” Gunther had reassured him. “Don’t take it too hard. Maybe you’d just better cultivate some well-informed sources who are somewhat better informed. Who the hell did you get it from, Lockheed?”

  “Somebody at FAA,” Pitcher had said sorrowfully. “I won’t trust that sonofabitch from now on if he tells me the sun rises in the east.”

  The memory of that black day still sat in Rod Pitcher’s guts like the burning aftertaste of a Mexican dinner. Ever since then he had yearned for a chance to make amends to Damon, IPS and himself. The Senator Haines story had assumed all the mammoth proportions of retribution, revenge and requital, even though there was a tiny demon of conscience occasionally reminding him it was Damon’s hunch that had sent him to the airline boarding lists in the first place.

  Now, as the four men sat in DeVarian’s office masticating the import of Goldberg’s conference with the Vice President, the aviation editor decided that maybe it was time to stiffen Damon’s spine.

  “Look, Gunther, there’s still something screwy about that Boston flight. No matter what Warner found out from Madigan, there are too many holes in it.”

  “Holes? What holes?” Damon rasped. “One, Haines’s wife saw him take the plane. Two, even if he didn’t, it wasn’t him on Air Force One anyway. There goes our ball-game, Pitch. The only thing with holes is our lousy solution.”

  “I’ll give you one hole,” Pitcher insisted. “Haines caught that Eastern flight for which he had confirmed space, yet he was listed as a no-show. Why?”

  “Warner explained that,” DeVarian said. “Or rather, Madigan did. The Vice President figures he decided, probably at the last minute, to travel under an assumed name. He ignored his own reservation and used another.”

  “Why?” Pitcher repeated.

  “Madigan has the idea that the senator was up to some shenanigans,” Goldberg broke in. “Like a shack-up job with some babe. He didn’t say this in so many words, but he sure implied it. His alternate explanation is that Haines didn’t want the airline to fuss over him and he wanted to travel incognito.”

  “There’s your other hole,” Pitcher said.

  Damon was beginning to feel the stirrings of reborn hope. “Elucidate, Pitch.”

  “If he was going off on some sin trip, what alibi would he have given his wife? She went to the airport with him. She saw him get on the plane. She watched it take off. What was she doing when he walked up to the ticket counter to claim a reservation under a different name?”

  “Maybe she was in the ladies’ room,” Goldberg snickered. “Maybe we should ask her,” Damon suggested.

  “Ask her if she was in the ladies’ room?” DeVarian said. “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I think we’re grasping at proverbial straws. We started out with circumstantial evidence that an impostor was substituted for the President, and equally circumstantial evidence that the President’s brother could have been the impostor. The former possibility still is very much alive, but the latter has been exploded. All this speculation about Bert Haines and the Boston flight is a pure waste of time—because even if we could prove he didn’t go, we know now that he wasn’t on Air Force One. I suggest we all get back to work.”

  “That’s for me,” Goldberg said. “My God, it’s after two. My Senate colleagues will be ready to castrate me. Anything else, Gunther?”

  “No. Thanks, Warner. Sorry I took up your time with a cruddy wild goose chase.”

  “Don’t mention it, boss man. I liked playing detective. And it was quite an experience seeing Fred Madigan in the Oval Room. You know, he might not turn out to be such a bad President.”

  “Frederick James Madigan,” Damon scowled, taking out his frustration on the absent Vice President, “has all the initiative and originality of a robot.”

  “That’s not fair, Gunther,” Goldberg protested. “You didn’t observe him on the job like I just did. He was damned decisive. Boy, you should have heard him chew out Paul Reardon.”

  DeVarian was amused. “Madigan chewed out the FBI director? I’d sooner believe that he talked back to that Amazon wife of his.”

  “Chewed him out good, believe me.”

  “About what?” Damon asked.

  “Well, I didn’t hear both ends of the conversation. Only Madigan’s. When he asked Reardon whether the fingerprints on the mystery body had been checked out as belonging to the President’s brother, Reardon apparently didn’t answer him right away. He asked some question of his own, like why did Madigan want to know, and our Freddie nearly blew his head off. No, sir, Gunther, the Vice President can be tougher than you think.”

  ‘Tougher, maybe. But still stupid.”

  “History will tell,” Goldberg said airily and left. “Guess I’d better go over to the CAB,” Pitcher announced in a resigned voice. “I haven’t checked route applications for a couple of days.”

  “I know,” Damon said. “We got two callbacks today. They’re on the message spike. One says how come we mis
sed Bonanza’s filing for a Phoenix-Seattle route and I forgot the other.”

  Pitcher was properly indignant. “Hell, Gunther. It’s not my fault I missed those. I was at Andrews—”

  “I know, Pitch. I’m not blaming you. Stay in touch with the desk. Never know when we’ll need you.”

  After the aviation writer departed, DeVarian rose and walked over to pat the crestfallen news superintendent on his shoulder. “Sorry, Gunther. And I honestly mean it. I’m sorry. I thought we had something hot too.”

  “Yeh,” Damon said morosely. “Well, I suppose if we had a dollar for every story that didn’t pan out, we could retire. Poor Pitch. I think he could smell the Pulitzer prize. He was really gung ho on that no-show angle.”

  “Good man, Pitch. A trifle insecure, isn’t he?”

  “Who isn’t? Any guy who doesn’t feel a twinge of insecurity at one time or another has the insensitivity of a Gestapo agent.”

  “That include you, Gunther? You’re the most self-assured person I’ve ever known.”

  “That includes me, Stan. Some night I’ll get bombed with you and I’ll tell you all about my self-assurance. It’s about as permanent and solid as ectoplasm.”

  “How about tonight? I’d be perfectly willing to tie one on tonight. Might do us both some good. You’ve been putting in a few eighteen-hour days and I’m not far behind you.” Damon was tempted, mainly because he was feeling sorry for himself. Then he decided he didn’t want DeVarian’s company tonight, even though he usually enjoyed the bureau chiefs patient, calm appraisals of life’s problems. “Thanks, Stan, but I’ll cry on your shoulder some other time.”

  “Okay, Gunther. Any IPS matters you want to discuss?”

  “Nope. And if there were, I’d rather discuss them tomorrow. I think I’ll go back to my desk and contemplate my navel, like Buddha. They tell me it’s good for the soul.” He strode into the noisy newsroom and reached the immediate conclusion that he would rather contemplate Lynx Grimes, who was wearing a V-necked white blouse and a tight-fitting skirt that seemed to mold itself to her slim thighs like cellophane wrap clinging to the top of a jar. His resolution never to socialize with female employees wavered, tottered and collapsed.

  For the first time since That Night, the bureau’s crisis-fed pace had slackened. It was the time of the day, partially. Midafternoon at IPS normally saw a slowing down of activity. Most congressional hearings are held in the morning, and staff concentration was shifting from the P.M. report for afternoon newspapers to the layout for the next morning’s papers. And further, Damon realized, the Haines story itself had reached a strange kind of impasse, as if history had paused to catch its breath. It seemed incredible, but there was not a single story coming in on a dictation phone at this minute and Lynx Grimes had taken advantage of the lull to peruse the contents of the office bulletin board.

  These consisted of the posted work schedules for the next two weeks, two Gunther Damon edicts on overenthusiastic expense accounts, a mimeographed notice from New York Personnel proclaiming that hospitalization insurance premiums were about to go up again, and a letter to DeVarian from an IPS regional sales manager in Denver extolling the performance of the Washington bureau on a House committee hearing two weeks ago involving the selection of a dam site in eastern Colorado.

  “. . . and as you know, Stan,” the letter added, “the client who asked for good coverage has been threatening contract cancellation and this terrific response to his request probably saved our necks.”

  Gunther reread the letter over Miss Grimes’s shoulder, thinking cynically that saving IPS’s neck also saved the salesman’s commission while contributing nothing to the financial well-being of the reporter who had covered the three-hour hearing against the competition of three AP and two UPI newsmen working in convenient relays. There would be other letters from the business side, Damon knew, and they would not be complimentary. He had assigned most of his limited manpower to the various phases of the Haines story, deliberately ignoring coverage of news that was secondary to the President’s disappearance but still major to individual newspapers.

  Lynx turned around and smiled at him, a smile provocative in its faint touch of shyness. “I was just reading the bulletin board,” she explained unnecessarily, as if she had to justify her being away from the bank of dictation phones.

  “It’s a quiet day, for a change,” Gunther observed. “Haven’t had a chance to talk to you much, Lynx. How’s it going? How do you like your job?”

  “I like it fine, Mr. Damon. It’s certainly been exciting these past few days. Even being a dictationist, well, I felt I was part of it. It kept me from thinking about promotion to reporter, and that’s quite an accomplishment.”

  She grinned as she said this, and Gunther liked her grin. It was spontaneous, completely natural and transformed her plain if regular features into the beauty of a happy child. If she’d only wear make-up and knew how to apply it, he thought, she’d be a veritable knockout. Sans any cosmetics, she still was damned attractive. All of a sudden he felt bashful, an affliction which not only surprised him but worried him. He was about to ask her for a date, and he should be the stern, paternalistic executive bestowing the favor of his attentions on a lowly dictationist. Instead, his heart was pounding in both anticipation and fear of being turned down.

  “Uh, Lynx, I was wondering if, uh, you had any plans for this evening.” Inwardly, he scolded himself for stammering out this first stage of the invitation, for his lack of glibness and smoothness when he wanted to be so casual and offhand.

  She inspected him with the wary surprise of a deer trying to decide whether to eat from the outstretchced hand of a coaxing human. “No, no particular plans, Mr. Damon. I was just going home and—”

  “I thought you might like to have a drink with me after work,” he said hastily, afraid to let her utter any further word that might be stretched into a possible alibi for a refusal.

  “I’d like to very much,” she blurted with disarming frankness.

  “Good.” Gunther Damon felt like whistling. “Suppose you meet me in the lobby when you get off. What time is that—six?”

  “Seven,” she repeated in a voice that suddenly dipped a tone lower, as if feminine eagerness had just encountered feminine caution.

  “Seven it is, Lynx. We’ll go over to the Willard Room across the street. See you then.”

  He watched her move gracefully toward the dictationists’ desks and then caught himself, hoping that nobody on the day desk had observed the brief session. He wondered if maybe he should tell her to meet him at the Willard instead so no IPS staffer would see them go out of the Press Building lobby together. No, he was being overprotective although he was not quite sure whom he was protecting— himself or Lynx. The hell with the staff and IPS and his own rules of professional vs. social conduct. He was, he admitted, expectantly happy and he also was uncomfortably aware that seven o’clock was one hour before his normal quitting time and about three hours earlier than his departure routine for the past few days.

  “Mr. Damon.” The voice of Mrs. Strotsky, the switch board operator, intruded on his cogitations. “Mr. Colin’s calling you from the Pentagon.”

  He returned to his desk and picked up his phone. “Damon.”

  “Chet Colin here. Say, do you suppose you could shoot Rod Pitcher over here in a hurry?”

  “He’s at the CAB, Chet, or should be any minute now. What’s up?”

  “The Air Force says it’ll announce at three-thirty its preliminary findings on the crash.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  At precisely three-thirty Rod Pitcher and approximately thirty other reporters were handed a mimeographed Air Force release, along with an announcement that General Coston would hold a briefing in fifteen minutes. That gave the press a scant quarter hour to digest the accident report, and their hasty scanning made them grateful that a briefing was scheduled. For those with little aeronautical background or knowledge, it made painful reading.

&n
bsp; DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

  Public Information Office Release AF-10384

  Department of the Air Force For Immediate Release

  Investigation of the crash of the presidential aircraft near Winslow, Arizona, has proceeded to the point where preliminary findings may be made public.

  Based on all the evidence to date, the Air Force Board of Inquiry has determined that the probable cause of the accident was the unfavorable interaction of severe vertical air drafts and large longitudinal control displacements resulting in a longitudinal upset from which a successful recovery was not made. The Bureau of Safety of the Department of Transportation concurs in this tentative finding.

  The aircraft, an Amalgamated Condor was equipped with a Fairchild flight recorder. The recorder sustained some fire and impact damage, but data were obtained from a readout that still is in progress. Unfortunately, examination of the cockpit voice recorder, which was more severely damaged and burned, produced no information.

  The flight recorder data indicate that the trip was routine up to the point when the aircraft was given permission to climb in order to avoid severe thunderstorm activity directly in its path. Its altitude at the moment it was cleared to climb was 43,000 feet. The flight recorder data show that, as the climb was begun, the aircraft was in light to moderate turbulence. Heavier turbulence was then encountered for approximately three minutes, followed by a sharp and abnormally rapid increase in the rate of climb to approximately 9,000 feet per minute until the altitude peaked at 47,285 feet.

  In the next seven seconds, altitude was lost at an increasing rate accompanied by a shift from positive G forces to negative G forces until the aircraft struck the ground.

  The main wreckage area was located at the bottom of a gorge twenty-two miles east of Winslow. Destruction from impact and subsequent fire was total and there were no survivors. The aircraft impacted almost vertically. A section of the tail containing one elevator was found approximately one and a half miles east of the principal wreckage area. Another elevator was located more than two miles east of that area. An inspection of the latter component and of the tail section, including the other elevator, gave positive evidence that structural failure of both elevators occurred. This was attributed to excessive loads exceeding their design strength.