Final Approach

by John J. Nance

  “I need to get my people in motion,” Joe said at last as he straightened up. “Can we get the Gulfstream?” The image of the FAA’s twin-engine turboprop Gulfstream I and the newer pure-jet Gulfstream III flashed across his mind’s eye. Both were kept just a few miles away, in the FAA’s hangar at Washington National Airport, and the FAA was bound to help the NTSB with such emergency transportation.

  “Well …” The duty controller looked embarrassed. “Our illustrious associate administrator has standing orders that we can’t commit either Gulfstream without his personal approval, so we’re trying to chase him down.”

  “He doesn’t have a Bellboy?”

  “He does, but he keeps turning it off. We think he’s at a late dinner. Should have him on the line in a few minutes—I hope.”

  Wallingford paused for a second, considering the difficulty of getting the Go Team to Kansas City without one of the FAA airplanes. The last commercial flights of the evening had all left National already. If they had to wait for the next one, the team wouldn’t be able to get there until late morning, and that was too long to wait.

  “Tell him we really need it.”

  “No problem, I’m sure. I’ll try to set up a three A.M. departure, and I’ll call you on the beeper again if we can’t meet that deadline. We’ll take care of Mr. Associate Dictator Caldwell.”

  Joe thanked him and took the briefing sheet, heading for the door and his office. There were nine Go Team members to notify, plus one Board member, after which he would begin the process of contacting the various so-called interested parties. North America Airlines, Airbus Industrie, the FAA, the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), and the engine manufacturer would have to be called, and each would be sending preselected employees to join the NTSB team. Joe looked at his watch as he pushed open the door to the stairwell. It was going to be a sleepless night.

  Senator Kell Martinson had stood in shock beside his car for what seemed an eternity, but in fact was less than five minutes. Fire and destruction lay before him everywhere, it seemed. There was no way to prepare for what had just happened—the mind-numbing realization that the steep turning approach (which he had thought a bit odd) had been a suicidal maneuver.

  Cindy was in that inferno somewhere. He stared dumbstruck at the burning wreckage as he tried to grasp that horrid reality. His aide—his lover—had been on board that airplane.

  The panicked feeling of being in exactly the wrong place at the wrong moment overtook him—a hunted feeling, like the mindless, urgent need a child feels suddenly to flee a dark and scary room. Kell jumped behind the wheel and put the car in drive, roaring past the startled figure of a man who had to leap to one side to get out of the way. Heading the car toward the security gate, he braked to a halt for a few seconds to let it open, then raced through, clawing for the anonymity of the highway. He had to get out of there. Get back to Kansas. Get to the house in Salina.

  Rich Carloni angrily twirled the dial again, searching in vain for a radio station with news of the crash. Only the potpourri of rock music, elevator music, country music, and talk shows spilled from the speakers. Disgusting! Without a phone or a two-way, he had no idea what was happening ahead as he raced up the freeway toward Kansas City Airport, and the apprehension over how to proceed once he got there was knotting his stomach. It was one thing to pick up the remains of two or three people smashed into hamburger by a private plane crash—he’d already done that several times in his eight months as an accident investigator with the Board. It was another thing entirely, however, to deal with a major airline crash—something he’d never experienced.

  The exit ramp for the airport was coming up fast, more visible now that the heavy rain had stopped. The windshield wipers began an awful squawking sound, and Rich snapped them off as his mind raced forward to the question of where to go on the airport property. Should he drive first to the tower, or should he go through one of the gates directly to the scene? He decided on the latter. The airport police would be the primary controlling agency for now.

  He rocketed through an intersection near the Marriott, ignoring the stop sign, heading for one of the entrances to the airport ramp where he braked to a halt long enough to flash his ID at the officer who had just arrived to guard the gate.

  “I’m from the NTSB. Where will I find your chief?”

  The officer took a close look at the identification card before answering. “Go between these two buildings, sir, then turn left on the grass in front of the parallel taxiways. Be careful, that’s where most of the wreckage is, on both surfaces. You’ll see several squad cars right there. Captain Baldwin is in there somewhere.”

  “Thanks.” Rich accelerated through the gate, following the instructions until he had passed between the two hangars, suddenly finding himself nose-to-nose with an incredible mass of burning wreckage and mangled metal. “Jesus Christ!” His words had been spoken out loud, but they drowned in the tidal wave of sounds that met his ears now—the noise of frenzied activity amidst the macabre scene before him.

  There was debris strewn everywhere. Debris and bodies. He could see several in his headlights before he swung the car to the left, following the grassy strip adjacent to the taxiway as instructed until the police cars came into view. He put on the parking brake and got out, thoroughly shaken, as one of the officers came over with a questioning look, appearing surrealistically in his headlights out of a swirl of smoke.

  “Who are you?”

  “Carloni from the NTSB.” The answer took extreme effort. Half his consciousness was captured by the scope of the wreckage, which seemed to be everywhere.

  “Good. Chuck Baldwin, airport police.” The man extended his hand and Rich shook it weakly. “Okay, Carloni, this is your show. I’ve got eight men out here, and three more coming in. Command post is in North America operations at the terminal for right now. Tower is the backup. I’ll brief you on the frequencies available on our hand-held radios, the ambulance and injured situation, et cetera, as you want it. I assume this will bring in a team from Washington?”

  “Yes. Yes it will. They’re, uh, probably on the way. I don’t have an arrival time.”

  Baldwin waved his Kellite flashlight toward the south end of the field. “The plane that was landing? A few got out from the front section, which broke off—the first-class section forward. Nothing but bodies down in this area. The plane it hit was back at the other end on the hammerhead. We’ve got more survivors out of that one. Both pilots, a couple of flight attendants, about two dozen passengers.” Baldwin paused, noting the glazed look in Carloni’s eyes. “You with me? I know this is a hell of a mess …”

  Rich looked at the airport police captain for a moment, trying to overcome his shock and think clearly. This wasn’t a crash, it was a holocaust. What in the world should they do first?

  “Hey? Your name is … Carloni?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Snap out of it, Mr. Carloni. You’re in charge. My department is here to help, but something this big … well, I’m not going to make the decisions on something this big with the NTSB here. So, what do you want us to do?”

  The officer was dead serious, and intimidating. In his early fifties, probably ex-military, in control and waiting for an intelligent answer from the shorter, twenty-nine-year-old federal hotshot standing before him. Rich was the one legally in command, and the one expected to swing into action. But he had never felt so inadequate, alone, and out of place.

  “Is this the newsroom?” The voice was deep and gruff, but the words were clearly enunciated.

  “Yes.” The reporter said it sharply. With a major story breaking in Kansas City, all she needed was another time-wasting phone call.

  “Did anyone on that airplane from Washington, Flight 255, get out alive?”

  “We don’t have that information yet, sir. Who is this?”

  “Don’t matter. Listen carefully: this crash wasn’t no accident.”

  She froze for a second, wondering if this was a p
rank. “What do you mean by that? What do you know?”

  “The whole story. I heard them plotting it. D’you know that Congressman Larry Wilkins was on that airplane?”

  The reporter hadn’t known that. Wilkins had been in office less than a year and was already widely disliked on Capitol Hill. He was a determined right-wing extremist with a scary agenda trying to masquerade as a responsible Republican, but it was standard knowledge he had grown up with a white supremacist philosophy. He had built a small empire of car dealerships while being groomed for politics by a shadowy collection of powerful, wealthy Southerners based in New Orleans—a group with ties to elements as diverse as the Ku Klux Klan and Lyndon La-Rouche’s rabid crowd. But somehow, for some strange combination of reasons she couldn’t fathom, Wilkins had scrubbed his public image well enough to win election from one of the Louisiana districts.

  “He was on 255? From Washington? How do you know?”

  “I just do. And he’s dead, isn’t he?”

  She hesitated. The word from Kansas City was that no ambulances had made Code 3, lights-and-siren runs from the wreckage of 255. That seemed to indicate that no one got out, but it was too early to confirm. That was not reliable information.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, he’s dead. The airplane was brought down. I can’t tell you exactly what it was they monkeyed with in Washington, but I can tell you it weren’t no accident.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Forget it, little girl, I told you it don’t matter who this is. Just remember what I told you.” The line was dead in an instant, but it took her nearly a minute to replace the handset, carefully and slowly, as if it were a snake. Her editor was 20 feet away, framed by the plate-glass window at the Cable News Network facilities in Atlanta, which occupied several floors of a spectacular glass-and-steel office-hotel complex known originally as the Omni. Their newsroom overlooked the enclosed courtyard, contained within a soaring atrium.

  The reporter made her decision, walking briskly to her editor, who listened intently before picking up a phone to consult with his boss at home, all three of them trying to decide whether to sit on the call, report it to the authorities, or report it to the world.

  “How could it be sabotage? One landing airplane hit another one on the ground!”

  “I don’t know. All I know is what he said … that it wasn’t an accident … something about monkeying with the airplane in D.C.”

  “Was Wilkins really on board?” The editor swung around, addressing a young man several desks away. “Jerry? Call Wilkins’s AA in Washington at home. You have the number?” The man nodded, already digging for the name of the congressman’s administrative assistant—AA in political shorthand.

  The editor turned back to his reporter, three more staffers now gathered around them. “Even if he was on the airplane … even if he’s dead … unless somebody can tell us this is an unnatural crash, I don’t see how we can use it.”

  Through the din of background noise in the newsroom a young woman hurried toward the editor’s desk holding a freshly ripped page of Associated Press wire copy, her approach unnoticed until she placed it in his hands.

  “Thanks.” He looked at the copy and whistled softly. “Oh boy! Either our mystery man’s been active, or something else is going on. Listen to this:

  “Washington, D.C.—Among the victims reported to be on North America Flight 255, which crashed into another North America flight Friday evening in Kansas City, was a highly controversial U.S. congressman recently elected from Louisiana. Congressman Larry Wilkins, a self-described ultra-conservative and past associate of Lyndon La-Rouche, was en route to Kansas City to deliver a speech, according to his office. Wilkins’s fate has not been confirmed, but an anonymous phone call to wire service offices within an hour of the crash alleged that the crash was not an accident. The caller claimed that Mr. Wilkins’s flight was deliberately sabotaged by a person or persons who intended to assassinate him. The FBI has been notified of the phone call, and has begun an investigation. There is no word yet from the FAA or the NTSB on the possible causes of the crash, but …” et cetera, et cetera.”

  The editor looked up at his companions, silently polling the group.

  “Everyone’s gonna be airing this now. We’d better go with it.”

  Pete Kaminsky had fought the paramedics off for what seemed like an eternity as they appeared from nowhere and tried to put him in an ambulance ahead of his passengers. At one point he had spotted Jean, her uniform shirt drenched in blood, her arm hanging limp, yet still working with people. He had helped get her into an ambulance, trying to stem her violent shaking, a result of exposure, pain, and the trauma of what she had experienced, hugging her for reassurance before they closed the door. Finally there was no one left to help, and he had to succumb to the medics, the numbing ride to the hospital as unreal as what had come before, his admission to the emergency room another fight—there were other patients to treat before him.

  “Captain, you’re bleeding at the forehead, you may have a concussion, and you could have internal injuries.”

  “Take care of the others first.”

  “Sir …”

  “I’m okay. I’ll wait.”

  Behind him were two gurneys covered with sheets, one bloodstained. Pete realized their occupants were beyond help. A team of doctors and nurses was working feverishly on someone to his left, a crash victim who had gone into cardiac arrest.

  And in the room beside him a young doctor in a rumpled tuxedo was working on someone Pete could barely see. The patient was wearing a white shirt with epaulets and stripes on the shoulders—a male, judging by the exposed arm. The man was alive, but quiet and unconscious, if Pete had overheard the doctor correctly. He realized with a curious, cold feeling in his stomach that the man had to be one of the pilots from the Airbus. He tried to lift up on one elbow, a sharp, stabbing pain protesting the action. Straining, struggling, trying to count the stripes on those epaulets through the door and past the rapidly moving figures working to save the man’s life, Pete lifted himself even higher, the pain reaching new levels that he was determined to ignore. The doctor moved aside at last, only to be replaced by the starched white frock of a nurse, who finally stepped away herself for a split second, leaving Pete a clear view of the shoulder stripes on the patient’s torn shirt, the stripes which represent a pilot’s rank.

  There were four. It was the captain of Flight 255. Thank God, Pete said to himself. At least Dick had made it.

  As Pete Kaminsky was being coaxed into the ambulance just after midnight, a member of the airport fire department was positioning himself with a fire hose to wash down spilled and unburned jet fuel near the mauled tail section of the 737 which had been partially crushed and folded and had separated from the main fuselage. Most of the fuel-fed fire had incinerated seats and occupants in the main fuselage during the minutes following the impact of the marauding Airbus. The tail had not burned, but the twisted structure that had been the aft cabin area bore little resemblance to an airplane, with jagged pieces of aluminum jutting everywhere, reflecting in staccato bursts the red-and-blue flashes from the galaxy of rescue-vehicle beacons, the ruined section seemingly lost in the noise of engines and shouted orders that obscured what the fireman now thought he heard from within.

  The man laid down the nozzle of the hose and moved forward, ear cocked, sure what he had heard was an echo. But it got louder as he approached, the sound of someone, a female, trying to yell for help but not managing much volume above the din surrounding them. He selected a likely foothold—a punctured gap in the silver skin which formed a wall before him—and tried to mount it, but there was no handhold that wouldn’t slice through his heavy gloves, and he had to back off.

  The voice was definitely there now, and definitely female, coming from somewhere within the twisted jumble of metal. He stabbed the beam of his powerful flashlight at the mess but could see nothing. One thing, however, was now certain: someone was ali
ve in there. Someone they had all missed before.

  “Hang on! I hear you! I’m coming!” He screamed the words as loudly as he could while dashing around to the other side, playing the flashlight through the wreckage, spotting seat fabric and what looked like a limp arm deep within. Obviously not the source of the voice. At last he found a foothold and a handhold, clambering up as carefully as he could, shocked at the razor-sharp edge on the metal stringers. Against his better judgment, he quickly tossed his fire hat away in order to maneuver his head through the twisted structure, wiggling and dodging and climbing steadily until the voice seemed close enough to track. He shone his light once again into the interior, into what appeared to be an impossible cage of shredded metal reeking of jet fuel just waiting for an ignition source. Why it hadn’t already burned, he couldn’t understand. Apparently the fire in the main section had been kept away by the wind.

  There. To the right of a greenish piece of serrated metal, a face, a moving face, eyes staring back at him, pleading in the process.

  “Can you hear me?”

  There was a long pause, and then an answer, as if the owner of the voice couldn’t quite believe someone had finally come.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you injured?”

  “I … we can’t move. There … we’re … six of us here. All hurt. Several are unconscious, bleeding badly. One may be dead, I can’t tell … he’s not moving or talking. We can’t move. My leg’s trapped. There’s a piece of metal in it, and I can’t get free. I’m afraid to try. Please … please get us out. You’re going to have to come in, though.”

  “Okay, I’m going to get help here immediately.”

  “Mister …?”

  “Yes. I’m here.”

  “We’re all soaked in gas.”