Breaking Point

by Dana Haynes

  He shook her proffered hand. “That’s a peculiar name.” He climbed into the sedan and closed the door.

  Adrienne Starbird paused, whispered, “Oooookay…” and circled the car. Then she climbed in.

  “I can take you to the site.”

  “I need to change first. Take me to the terminal.”

  She shrugged, did as he asked.

  * * *

  Five minutes later, Peter Kim emerged from the men’s room in a natty Martin Gordon suit, white shirt, and a narrow tie, raincoat over his arm. Adrienne had been expecting an NTSB windbreaker and baseball cap.

  They returned to her vehicle and she drove around the terminal building.

  “What’s the situation on the ground?”

  “State police have a helo in the vicinity. They report an airliner is down in the Helena State Forest. It apparently landed on its side and sheared off both wings. They report a forest fire, too. And they can see survivors. First responders are at the scene or should be any minute.” She checked the dashboard clock to confirm that. “It’s a Claremont VLE.”

  “Souls?”

  “Unknown.”

  Peter checked his watch. “Why ‘unknown’? Plane’s been on the ground for three hours. Surely we have the manifest.”

  Adrienne Starbird shrugged. “We’ve contacted Polestar headquarters in Cincinnati. They’re reporting some kind of computer malfunction. They’re trying to get us a manifest.”

  “Unacceptable,” he said. “I’ll let our intergovernmental liaison deal with it. I need my primary team on site as fast as humanly possible. Do you have helicopters for us?”

  “Yes. I’ve arranged for three to ferry your group out.”

  That news satisfied him, so Peter said nothing.

  “Here.” He handed her a business card. “We use specialized communication units, but they tie in to the cell-phone system. This is my number. You stay here and handle getting my people to the site. Call me and let me know when they’re inbound.”

  “Okay.” She circled the terminal building. A helipad came into view with a vehicle parked in the center that could be called a helicopter. But only just. Peter showed the first sign of emotion.

  “What is that?”

  “Aerospatiale Three One Three,” Adrienne said, smiling at Peter’s horrified expression. “Circa, oh, I’d say 1960. Trust me, they fly.”

  Peter said, “I wasn’t even born in 1960.”

  CRASH SITE

  “Fellas? Everyone? Hold up!”

  Kiki lowered Tommy’s head to a pillow she’d made out of a stray, cushioned computer case. She stood, waved her arms over her head, her busted ribs bitching her out.

  The just-arrived paramedics turned to her. “Kathryn Duvall. National Transportation Safety Board. Look, this is a potential crime scene. Leave everything where you find it.”

  The EMT nearest her touched her arm gently. “We know. We’re trained for this. Let’s get you sitted down, ma’am.”

  Kiki gently lowered herself onto a stump. The medic knelt and used long-nosed scissors to cut her pant leg from the cuff to her midthigh.

  * * *

  The well-lit scene grew even brighter as a television station’s helicopter took position overhead. A microwave truck from KXLH arrived ten minutes later and got footage of paramedics, two-by-two, carrying stretchers back down to the waiting ambulances.

  TWINS PINES

  Art Tibbits, mayor of the town closest to the fire, played poker with the managing editor of KPAX TV in Helena. He found the guy’s phone number and called, glancing at the red-and-white art deco clock in his kitchen. He hated like hell calling at three in the morning but he had an idea.

  “Um … yeah…?”

  “Stan? It’s Art Tibbits, from out in Twin Pines.”

  “Um … okay?”

  “Stan, an airliner crashed tonight. Helena State Forest, not five miles from my town.”

  “Holy crap!”

  “The way I figure it, national media will be here by dawn. I figured you’d want to know so’s you could—”

  “Yeah, yeah. No kidding, Art, really. Thank you. I’ll get a crew there now. Hey! I owe you!”

  “Tell them I’m putting together a staging area for the media in the old Save-More Store on Main. It’s wired for the Internet and there’ll be plenty of coffee.”

  “We owe you! Thanks.”

  Art Tibbits hung up the phone. He stood for a moment. He’d been mayor of this town for twelve years and a resident for sixty-two. He loved Twin Pines. But it was dying. Everyone knew it.

  He poured a splash of bourbon into a coffee cup, then filled it with coffee. He turned to the plat of the downtown core he kept taped to his kitchen cupboard at eye level. It showed a city center, if you could call it that, five blocks wide by seven blocks deep. There were roughly 130 commercial buildings downtown and he’d penciled Xs into 61 of them. Those were the vacancies.

  Timber had built Twin Pines. And the timber industry today was a ghost of its former self.

  Art Tibbits had seen an air accident once. It was in Boise. A plane had skidded off the tarmac. No one had been injured, but he remembered that a federal agency had set up shop and run operations for weeks. What had they been called? He could see their blue windbreakers in his head, plain as day.

  NTSB. That’s right. They were the NTSB.

  He went to his eight-year-old Dell, booted it up, and googled the letters.

  HELENA REGIONAL

  Peter Kim’s ancient chopper arrived at almost exactly the same moment as the NTSB charter touched down at Helena Regional. Beth Mancini stood in the aisle, BlackBerry to one ear, the other cupped in her palm, and shouted, “What?… Say again!”

  “We finally got the manifest! From the Claremont!”

  “Rick? It’s really noisy here. Did you say we got the manifest?”

  “Yes!” her aide bellowed from the office in Washington.

  “Okay, ship me a pdf as soon as—”

  “Beth? It’s bad!”

  “What?”

  “It’s bad! We got people on board! Isaiah Grey, Leonard Tomzak, and Kathyrn Duvall! They were on the goddamn Claremont!”

  15

  PETER KIM WALKED TO the on-its-side fuselage, a Maglite the length of a police baton over his shoulder, lighting the way. When he got close to the scene, he found six paramedics lifting three people on stretchers.

  “Hang on.” He showed them his badge. “Peter Kim, NTSB.”

  The paramedic nearest him said, “What, again?”

  “Listen, please! It’s vital that you do not move any—”

  “Dude, it’s cool. Your partner gave us the lecture.” He knelt; another medic did, too. They counted silently to three, then hoisted a stretcher into the air.

  “Partner?”

  Kiki Duvall, on the stretcher, reached out, took his hand. Her voice was muddy with morphine. “Oh, Peter … Oh my god, Isaiah’s dead.…”

  The men carried her away, Peter thinking, Wait. I know her. From the Oregon crash. It’s what’s-her-name.

  * * *

  A mile from the crash scene, the fire staggered to the west, with plenty of fuel to burn along the path but too little wind to spread sideways. It remained a thin, ruler-straight path of destruction, heading toward the firebreak created by the three hunters.

  * * *

  Throughout the night, Go-Team leaders arrived and took the offer to be airlifted by antique helicopters to the crash scene.

  Beth Mancini didn’t go. Adrienne Starbird, ops manager for Helena Regional, gave up her own office for Beth. Not knowing what sort of office space awaited her, Beth had taken her office with her in the form of a backpack overstuffed with a tablet computer, extra batteries, a plug-in charger, and a portable printer that doubled as a fax machine.

  She also whipped out a laminated to-do list, drawn up by Susan Tanaka, and went into full-scale attack mode: hotel rooms for her team, morgue space for the bodies, transportation, a place to stor
e the pieces of the Claremont VLE—a space large enough that, if necessary, Jack Goodspeed’s airframe team could reassemble the turboprop airliner. A full reconstruction often wasn’t necessary but you never knew going in.

  Two of her three aides were back home in Washington. They had begun the process of contacting the right people from the various businesses and agencies who would be called in to help: Claremont Aeronautics, Bembenek Company (maker of the engines), Polestar Airlines, the pilot’s union, the mechanic’s union, Leveque Aéronautique, Limited. Plus law enforcement officials from the city of Helena, Lewis and Clark County, the state of Montana, and—because of the unusual crash site, a state forest—the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

  Beth decided she could wait until morning to get someone to book the main auditorium at the Burton K. Wheeler Memorial Conference Center for the All-Thing: Delevan Wildman’s storied enclave, in which representatives of all the companies, agencies, and organizations would have a chance to introduce themselves and to discuss ways they would be participating in the coming investigation. Which, past being prologue, was likely to take anywhere from one to two years to complete.

  Well, last year’s infamous seventy-hour investigation into the Oregon crash—crashes—being the exception to the rule.

  She received a text from one of her three assistants that the mayor of Twin Pines, Montana, had called and offered a staging area for the Go-Team. Beth called in Adrienne Starbird and consulted with her.

  “Twin Pines? Closer to the crash but it’s a wide spot on the highway. I’d be surprised if it has five hotel rooms, total.”

  “Thank you,” Beth said, then touched the tall, dark woman’s sleeve. “Seriously. You’ve been great.”

  “And I can’t tell you how much I hate the fact that you’re here,” Starbird said.

  “Yeah. We get that.”

  She called Peter in the field using the team’s dedicated communication devices: satellite radios attached to their belts, with ear jacks.

  “We have an offer to set up headquarters in the nearest town, but the hotels will be back here in Helena.”

  “As will the bodies and the autopsies.” He sounded as if he were in the room with her, the transmission loud and clear. “No, we’ll work out of Helena.”

  “Okay. Hey: there are three crashers on board! It’s—”

  “I know,” he cut in. “Duvall and Tomzak are injured. Isaiah Grey died.” He sounded unemotional, a newscaster reciting facts of a story.

  “Oh, God. Oh, no. Are you okay?”

  Peter said, “Yes,” and disconnected the line.

  * * *

  At 4:00 A.M. exactly—6:00 A.M. in D.C.—just as Delevan Wildman was sitting down at his desk in L’Enfant Plaza, Beth called him and told him what she knew.

  * * *

  Gene Whitney hiked up into the crash site, breathing heavily. Peter Kim saw the big man from afar and gave him a quick head-bob greeting. Gene wore an earpiece with a voice wand, a communications rig clipped to his belt. Like the other team leaders, he wore boots, a blue windbreaker with NTSB stenciled on the back, and a matching NTSB baseball cap. Only Peter Kim stood out, in his two-piece suit and London Fog raincoat. Peter stood on a rocky outcropping twenty feet from the fuselage, hands jammed into his trouser pockets, Maglite in his coat pocket, and silently watched his Go-Team leaders arrive.

  Gene walked his way. “Coulda been much worse.”

  Peter nodded. He pointed to three rows of seats. “You worked with Isaiah Grey before?”

  Gene looked in that direction. After a few beats, he walked over, squatted next to Isaiah’s body.

  He stayed like that for a while.

  Eventually, Gene rose and walked thirty paces into the forest. When he was sure no one could see, he pulled out a flask of vodka and half drained it.

  * * *

  One of the EMTs turned to see Paul McKinney, Twin Pines’ chief of police, come running from the direction of the engines, wings, and the fast-growing fire.

  “How’s it look?”

  McKinney said, “Wind’s in our favor. The fire’s sticking to the path this thing dug.” He nodded toward the fuselage. “But, hell, that could change before dawn.”

  SUBURBAN WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Liz Proctor, director of the Aircraft Division of Halcyon/Detweiler and a member of Barry Tichnor’s so-called Infrastructure Subcommittee on Deferred Maintenance, walked on her treadmill, scanning the Washington Post and listening to National Public Radio. Reports were coming in from Helena, Montana, that a commercial airliner had crashed overnight.

  Liz finished her workout, drained the last of her ritual breakfast—a can of Coke Zero—then picked out a Donna Karan outfit for the day. She walked into the office, picked up her cell, and called Donny, her assistant.

  “Hey, it’s me. A commercial airliner went down last night in Montana?”

  Donny said, “I’m working on a manifest.”

  “Okay. See you in about twenty minutes.” She hung up.

  Halcyon was the nation’s largest military contractor. But almost every civilian airliner in the Western world carried some bits of Halcyon technology, be it in the airframe or avionics.

  Liz Proctor would have the specs for that particular aircraft by the time she got to the corporate headquarters.

  CRASH SITE

  Three hours later, Hector Villareal, a compact, neatly fit man in khakis and the requisite NTSB windbreaker and ball cap, knelt amid the debris near the gaping hole carved into the top of the Claremont. Between his akimbo knees sat a metal box, twenty-five-by-twenty-five-by-twelve inches. It was a vivid orange and known without any intended irony as a black box. It was one of two black boxes on the flight. Hector and Reuben Chaykin had just retrieved the box from the empennage, or tail cone, of the aircraft. They’d had to move the food carts and the body of Andrew Malatesta to get to it.

  Inside the well-padded box was a computer with an MP3 recording of the last half hour of the pilots’ lives. It was the CVR—cockpit voice recorder.

  Hector ran a hand over the steel box. It appeared undamaged. If so, it would tell them a great deal about the crash. Maybe everything.

  He used his palm-size Canon PowerShot to take photos of the CVR’s exterior.

  Hector had small hands and narrow fingers, his nails trimmed. His mustache and beard, too, were neatly trimmed.

  “Excuse me?”

  Still on his haunches, Hector turned to find a man in a fur-trimmed bomber jacket, jeans, and boots. “Hector Villareal?”

  Hector dusted off his palms, rose to his feet. “Yes?”

  The stocky man—blond with an army haircut—showed him a folded leather case and a federal shield. “U.S. marshal. I was told to find you.”

  That was standard procedure, although Hector was impressed by how quickly the deputy marshal had arrived to pick up the black boxes and deliver them to their destinations. In the case of the CVR, that meant the nearest contracted recording studio, where the MP3 player’s content would be uploaded to an NTSB Web site for Hector’s ears within just a few hours. The marshal’s job was to maintain the chain of custody, in the event that the crash turned out to be a crime scene.

  Hector pointed to the steel box. “This is one of them,” he said, then pointed thirty feet to his right, to Teresa Santiago, who was down on her haunches in exactly the same position Hector had been in, over another steel box.

  “That’s Teresa Santiago. She has the flight data recorder,” Hector told the deputy marshal. “Mine goes to Portland, Oregon. Please—”

  “Yes, sir,” the blond man cut in with a small smile. “We know the procedure. Can you sign this?”

  He handed Hector a clipboard. With a signature, Hector gave up his legal possession of the box.

  * * *

  Teresa Santiago watched Hector Villareal sign a sheet on a clipboard. The tall, ruggedly handsome Jack Goodspeed jogged up to her, also watching Hector.

  “U.S. marshal?” he aske
d.

  She shrugged. “I guess. I didn’t expect them to get here so soon.”

  Tall and rangy, with a distance runner’s legs and long fingers, she was physically the opposite of Hector. His neatly trimmed hair contrasted to her own wild mop. She had kinky lightning bolts of black hair that hung to the middle of her back, a leather string trying to keep that mane in check while stray, jagged shards of bramble-hair hung into her eyebrows.

  “Fast is good,” Jack said. “That should help.”

  A veteran flirt, Teresa winked at him and threw an arm over his shoulders. “Ah. I know you want to play pick-up sticks with all your shiny new toys.” She gestured to the debris field. “But our black boxes will whisper their secrets to us long before you get this plane out of the forest.”

  HELENA REGIONAL

  Gene Whitney’s voice came through, loud and clear: “First, um, Isaiah Grey’s dead.”

  Beth Mancini sat on the edge of Adrienne Starbird’s desk, feet in the chair, and hugged her knees to her chest, eyes squeezed shut.

  “Peter told me. You knew him better than I did. I am so, so sorry.”

  “Yeah. He was … He had a wife. Has a wife.”

  Beth said, “I’ll contact her.”

  “Okay.”

  Beth waited. All she heard was static. “Gene?”

  “Um, sorry. I poked around in the fuselage and found the flight crew’s copy of the manifest. Right now—and these are early, early numbers—we’re looking at twenty-six souls, estimated eighteen dead, eight survivors. From all accounts, Tomzak and Duvall ran the rescue. The site’s goddamn pristine.”

  Beth said, “Crew?”

  “Two and two,” he said, meaning two pilots and two flight attendants. “None of them made it.”

  “Okay, thanks. Gene? I am sorry.”

  He said, “Yeah,” and rang off.

  Beth dialed 1.

  “This is Kim.”

  CRASH SITE

  Peter stood on his rocky outcrop, hands in his pockets, observing. He had touched nothing. He had hardly spoken. His team seemed good, solid.

  His ear jack chimed. “This is Kim.”

  “It’s Beth. Gene gave me the rundown. Were you and Isaiah close?”