The Disappeared Girl

by Martin J. Smith

  Krug gestured to the fountain behind them. “We know the water in the fountain has a unique mineral profile, distinct from the three rivers we can see. Therefore—” He waited a meaningful beat. “You get what I’m saying, Mr. Christensen?”

  “You don’t take anything on faith.”

  “Faith gets you in trouble. Faith gets you Sasquatch and Area 51 and the Tooth Fairy. That’s not what I’m about.”

  “Understood.”

  “I solve puzzles, Mr. Christensen. That’s what an old air crash investigator like me is trained to do. We pick up pieces, look at them every which way, try to fit them together. If a piece is missing—and pieces are always missing—so be it. The puzzle is never finished, never will be finished. The best we can do, then, is put together as many pieces as we can. That’s as far as we go. Everything else is speculation. That’s how I approach these things.”

  Christensen folded his arms across his chest. “But sometimes, can’t you get enough pieces in the right places that suddenly it’s clear what you’re looking at?”

  Krug reached for the handle of the suitcase. “Let’s go sit,” he said, and moved toward a bench on the Monongahela side.

  “So I’ll assume you’re not here on faith, right?” Christensen said.

  Krug nodded.

  “Therefore—” Christensen let the implication hang a moment, until they reached the bench. “There must be some reason you agreed to meet with me. Can I ask what that was?”

  If Christensen read it right, Krug’s smile spoke of grudging respect. Krug finally reached for his hand, and they shook.

  “You might have a puzzle piece I’ve never seen before,” he said.

  “Might,” Christensen repeated. “That smells like a leap of faith to me.”

  Krug sat down on the bench and rolled the suitcase close. “You said something yesterday, on the phone. I’m not sure how you’d know that particular detail unless—well, I was curious, to tell the truth. And you didn’t sound like one of the usual head-case bizarros.”

  “You’re trying to flatter me, aren’t you?”

  Christensen expected a laugh, but Ray Krug didn’t smile.

  “Like I said, I get a lot of calls.” Krug nodded into the Ohio River distance. “Especially the last couple of weeks after what they pulled out down near McKees Rocks.”

  “What detail did I mention?” Christensen asked.

  Krug bent down and unzipped the suitcase and lifted an accordion file folder from inside. Inside that, the tabs of manila file folders were arrayed with military precision, each labeled in Krug’s neat printing. He walked his fingers along the tabs until he came to one labeled “BW/Sachs.” He tugged it out and laid the file on his lap, cagey and mute.

  “Who’s BW Sachs?”

  “A woman.”

  “Any particular woman?” Christensen pressed.

  “A witness on the bridge.”

  “What bridge?”

  “Homestead High Level. She was on her way home from work at the time of the crash. BW—that’s shorthand for ‘Bridge Witness.’”

  Krug folded the file open. The top page was neatly typed narrative, and Christensen strained his eyes for some clue to what it was. In the center of the page was a bright band of text highlighted in yellow. Krug hesitated, then lifted the page and handed it to Christensen. Two other pages were stapled to it but folded back. The page’s running head said, “Statement/BW Sylvia Sachs.”

  “Interviewed her myself a few years ago,” Krug said. “She’s not a major player, and I didn’t figure she had much to contribute. But something you said yesterday was a lot like something I remember from when I typed up this affidavit.”

  “That’s why you agreed to meet with me?”

  “Read it.”

  Christensen looked at the highlighted paragraph. “Traffic was dead stopped. People were honking, getting nasty, wanting to get moving. Nobody understood why we were just, you know, sitting there. That’s when I saw the plane coming in low. I mean, real low. Least I figured it was a plane. It was almost dark, but there was this bright light, like a headlight, underneath it, on its belly.”

  Christensen looked up.

  “Keep reading,” Krug said.

  “It was coming fast, but there was no engine noise, I guess because it was out of gas. Just this kind of whistling sound. People were getting out of their cars, pointing up at it. Somebody was screaming, ‘Run! Run!’ I rolled down my window because it was fogging up from my breath, but there was no time for me to get out and run. Tell the truth, I never thought it would hit the bridge. It wasn’t like it was in a dive. The front part was up. If anything, I thought it might clip one of the streetlights. It seemed like forever, but it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds before it cleared and went on toward the river. When it passed over, the shadows of the streetlights did this little do-si-do, you know, from the light shining down and moving past. It’s funny the things you remember.”

  Nothing else was highlighted, but what he’d read was enough. “It’s the same thing my daughter described: the streetlight shadows,” Christensen said.

  Krug nodded. “I knew I’d heard that somewhere. After you and I talked, I dug this out of my files.”

  “Was this ever—” Christensen stopped, thinking. “Could Melissa—that’s my daughter—could she have ever read this somewhere? Was it ever published?”

  “Never. Far as I know, nobody but me ever talked to her, this Sachs woman. She’s dead now—died last year; she was in her 80s, I think—but I’ve never found any record of her in any documents anywhere.”

  “Do you have this interview transcript on your website?”

  Krug shook his head. “Like I said, she’s a minor player. Just a puzzle piece that didn’t seem to fit anywhere, so I set it aside. But I remembered what she’d said, and when you told me your girl had said something almost exactly the same, and that she saw those streetlight shadows from above the bridge, I wondered if maybe we should get together.”

  Christensen watched an ersatz sternwheeler riverboat churn past, heading for its dock on the south side of the Mon River. He had the odd sensation of imbalance, as though he’d stepped too close to a high ledge. Still, he moved one step closer.

  “Do you mind answering some questions, Ray?” he said.

  Krug checked his watch. “I have an hour. I’ll tell you what I know to be true, what happened with this particular flight, but don’t ask me to go beyond that.”

  “Clear enough.”

  Christensen took a moment to organize his thoughts. He had an hour, but wanted every detail in that file box. Somewhere in there may be additional pieces to Melissa’s own bewildering puzzle. “Let me start at the beginning, then, with the flight itself, where it originated,” he said. “I saw it mentioned on your site, but you didn’t really—I mean, where the hell is Bullock Air Force Base?”

  Chapter 11

  The lens was three hundred millimeters and heavy, so Guerra propped one elbow on the railing of the Fort Pitt Bridge and bent to the camera’s eyepiece. Tourists do not carry cameras like this, he knew, but he was not worried about being seen. He did not know either of the men, not personally at least, and had retreated to this spot perhaps a quarter mile away, high above the Monongahela River, overlooking Point State Park. It was safe enough, but so far not helpful. He needed to hear them.

  He had followed the one, Christensen, from his house in Shadyside, trailed him as he parked, and made his way toward the fountain. Now he was curious: Why does a man meet another man in a public place at 10:00 on a weekday morning? He could tell from the way they shook hands, their body language on the bench beside the river, that they were strangers. And yet they had talked now for fifteen minutes.

  He stood up straight to give his back a rest. Morning traffic on the roadway behind him had thinned, and now the cars and trucks rumbled by him much faster than when he’d first arrived. A knot of people was approaching from his left, led by a striking young woman in
a dark suit and running shoes. The sight made him smile. She had taken the Duquesne Incline from the top of Mount Washington and was hiking across the bridge to her Downtown office job. But these American women—it was always about comfort, not style. That had been one of the hardest things to get used to, but in recent years he, too, had begun wearing these shoes, because they helped ease the pain in his joints. He waited until she was close, then bent to the eyepiece again. He snapped the shutter as the small group moved past him and left a subtle wake of cologne and hair gel.

  He focused again on the men on the bench. What troubled him most was the accordion file the stranger pulled from his black rolling bag. If it was heavy enough to be on wheels, it probably was full of papers. If it was full of papers, what could they be? He watched as the man in the ball cap selected a thin file from the box and presented it to Christensen, who seemed to read it aloud with more than a little intensity. They talked more, stared at the river, talked, stared. Christensen would say something, and the stranger would respond. A question, then an answer, he guessed. For thirty-five minutes, the pattern stayed the same.

  Question, answer.

  Question, answer.

  He was about to put away the camera when the stranger suddenly stood up. The man thrust both of his arms straight out to his side, like wings, and angled them as if he were flying a wide, banked turn. When he finished it, he lowered both arms. But only for a moment. He then took his right hand and raised it high into the air, palm down. He turned his left hand palm up and extended that arm out to the side. The gesture that followed was unmistakable. His right hand descended slowly, very slowly, at an angle of perhaps thirty degrees until one palm met the other. When his hands touched, the stranger clapped once and let his hands erupt in a flurry of upward motion. He was mimicking an explosion or—and he felt this possibility more than he thought it—the final impact of an airplane ditching on its belly and disappearing into a geyser of water.

  Chapter 12

  Ray Krug sat back down, his story apparently done. Christensen watched a formation of empty coal barges move upstream, shoved along by a squatty tug. There was much he didn’t understand, and one huge leap of logic. But from the moment Krug told him that Bullock Air Force Base—where the flight originated—was a small American installation near Buenos Aires, Argentina, Christensen’s questions had poured out in a torrent.

  “Go back,” he said. “So they’d refueled at Langley for the final leg, then discovered they had a leak of some kind when they were banking in for their approach over Martinsburg, West Virginia?”

  Krug nodded. “The copilot noticed the warning light right after that turn, but it took them maybe ten minutes to isolate the problem. All that’s on the tower communications recording, but I only transcribed what came later. They may find the cockpit recorder in the wreckage they just found, but there’s not a snowball’s chance they’ll get anything from it after this long in the water.”

  “So by the time they were approaching Pittsburgh, they knew it was critical?”

  “Yes. Again, this from the tower data.”

  Christensen tried to imagine the choices the flight crew faced at that moment, with dusk creeping over the clouds below and a fuel emergency of the first order. “So they knew they had to put it down as fast as they could.”

  “Correct.”

  Clearly, from that direction, the doomed plane would have been much closer to Allegheny County Airport in West Mifflin than to the National Guard base near Greater Pittsburgh International Airport. “They were heading right toward county airport,” he said. “It was practically on the way to where they were heading.”

  “Correct.”

  “So why didn’t they just land there?”

  Krug smiled. “I can’t answer that. The transcript does suggest a possibility—”

  “It makes no sense.”

  “Not now, it doesn’t. It was a bad call, obviously, but a very deliberate one. Why? We’ll never know for sure.”

  “What’s your guess?”

  “Don’t go there, Mr. Christensen. I don’t. But the full transcript—I assume you’ve read it on the website?”

  Christensen hadn’t seen the need. “If it doesn’t have the answer—”

  “I said the reason they didn’t land at county wasn’t clear. But what happened in the minutes before, it’s pretty illuminating.” Krug reached again into his file box, walked his fingers along the tabs, and pulled one labeled “Tower Transcript.” He folded open the cover and handed it over.

  The first line was gibberish to Christensen, an incomprehensible sequence of numbers and letters and capped acronyms. From the context, he assumed one number, 1734, was the time of day the conversation was recorded—5:34 in the afternoon expressed according to the twenty-four-hour military clock.

  “Let me set the scene for you,” Krug said. “I’m basing this on weather data and air maps as they existed at the time. Again, no guesswork here. This is what we know. The pilot’s name is Captain Robert Archer, USAF. Copilot’s name is Daniel Blackman, also USAF. On the transcript, TWR is the control tower at the county airport; TWR2 is the tower at the National Guard base near Greater Pitt. At first Archer—the pilot—thinks he’s talking to the tower at the National Guard base. They’re coming in above a three-thousand-foot ceiling, maybe forty-five miles east of Pittsburgh. They’ve already spotted the fuel problem, and they’re planning to follow the ground beacons home. By the time this transcript picks up, Blackman, the copilot, is starting to get worried. They’ve got a bigger leak than he first thought.”

  Krug nodded to the pages in Christensen’s hand. “Read,” he said.

  Christensen began at the top of the first block of text.

  BLACKMAN: Hard to figure this loss rate, tower. Four minutes, five tops, if we take her straight in. But that’d be pushing it—must be a hose connection. It’s leaking like a couple of wide-open faucets.”

  ARCHER: Tower, passing New Alexandria now, vectoring left. Descending to 7,000.

  TWR: Roger, C-130. River beacon’s next up, maybe two minutes at your speed. You’ll be at 3,000 then, with decent visibility. Should see the city off to your right from there.

  ARCHER: We’re clear straight in?

  TWR: Affirmative. Confirm at River. From there you’re 90 seconds out.

  Krug was following Christensen’s eyes as they moved down the page, and picked up the narrative in his own words. “Keep in mind, once they break through the cloud ceiling, they’ll see the city dead ahead, the whole Mon Valley. So at that point they’ll know they’re heading into trouble.”

  ARCHER: 5,000.

  BLACKMAN (BACKGROUND): Seatbelts! Just a couple more minutes.

  “Right there, that exchange,” Krug said. “The copilot’s talking into the plane’s intercom. It makes no sense otherwise.”

  Christensen put his finger on the page to mark his place. “The intercom?”

  “Like on commercial planes. It’s how the crew communicates with other people on the plane.”

  Krug waited.

  “But if it was just the flight crew—wait, who would he have been talking to?” Christensen said.

  “The $64,000 question.” Krug tapped a finger halfway down the page in Christensen’s hand. “Now, you won’t pick this up from the transcript, but right here the pilot’s voice changes. These guys were pros, but right in here Archer’s voice gets this edge. You can hear it on the tape. He knows he’s goofed.”

  ARCHER: Tower, you said we’ll be 90 seconds out from the River beacon?

  TWR: Affirmative, C-130.

  ARCHER: That’s the beacon just east of the field?

  TWR: Correct. Vector on that. County airport’s just beyond.

  ARCHER: County airport?

  TWR: Affirmative.

  ARCHER: (Garble) Tower, we’re diverting. We’re looking for the USNG field.

  “Explain that,” Christensen said.

  Krug crossed his arms over his chest and looked away. “
What happened was, when they turned west for their approach, Archer started following a line of beacons from Martinsburg to Johnstown, then angled left to New Alexandria,” Krug explained. “He’s not familiar with the area, see? That line of beacons led him directly to the River beacon due east of the county airport, but all that time he’s thinking he’s headed for the National Guard base. This is where Archer figured out he’d been following the wrong goddamn beacon to the wrong goddamn airport.”

  “But you’d think—any port in a storm, right? “Christensen said.

  “You’d think so.”

  TWR: Clarify, C-130: Diversion is a viable option with your fuel situation? At your airspeed, you’re looking at another four minutes of flight time.

  ARCHER: That’s affirmative, tower. Diverting to the secure field. We mistook River beacon for Coraopolis.

  Christensen looked up. Krug was studying him intensely. “It makes no sense,” Christensen said.

  “An irrational and illogical choice,” Krug agreed. “Why?”

  Christensen read on.

  ARCHER: Tower, can you alert the tower at USNG?

  BLACKMAN (BACKGROUND): Gotta tell you, Cap—I’m not sure you understand—

  TWR2: We copy that C-130. We got you on the screen. What’s your situation?

  “That’s the National Guard tower,” Krug interjected. “A controller there is monitoring the transmissions. By this point, the plane has broken into smooth air below the cloud ceiling. Archer’s already diverted. The county airport’s just a fading hope to the left. Up ahead, the Downtown skyline. He’s practically flying right toward it.”

  ARCHER: C-130 here. We’re about five minutes out. Fuel level critical. You copy that?

  TWR2: C-130, you got 600,000 people between you and home. Swing wide around Downtown. Leave yourself an out.