Final Approach

by John J. Nance

  “Then the system has to change, Dad, because that’s dumb.”

  Walter Calley had been shocked to the depth of his being that moving across Louisiana farmland at night in mid-October could be so damned difficult. He had left the old barn after sundown Tuesday evening, confident his Army survival training was enough. But by midnight he was ready to give up the trek and look for a car to steal.

  He must survive, he knew that. The knowledge he had in his head about Congressman Larry Wilkins, his friend and surreptitious employer, must survive. It would scandalize the nation and probably make their dream of becoming a true force in American politics come true. As Senator Joe McCarthy had accidentally done for communism by making commie hunting unfashionable for twenty years, the assassination of Larry Wilkins might make white supremacist bashing unacceptable for a decade. He had a mission, perhaps a historic mission, and he would carry it out. Important thoughts like that had kept him going, but at 12:25 A.M. Wednesday morning, the sight of an old Ford pickup parked at the top of a sloping driveway by a remote farmhouse was too much to resist.

  Walter watched the farmhouse for a half hour before slipping slowly into the yard, carefully getting in the truck by slithering through the open passenger window. There was no key in the ignition, but he could feel the wires behind the dash. If he could locate the right ones …

  The bright light that exploded in his face caught him totally off guard. He had heard no one approaching.

  “Freeze, bub! What the hell are you doin’ with my truck?”

  The owner of the farm had a 12-gauge leveled at him. You don’t argue successfully with a 12-gauge, Walter reminded himself, carefully opening the door with his hands in view. “Don’t shoot, I can explain.”

  He began to do so, and the farmer, having no love for official Washington, listened, almost believing the filthy, mud-caked man before him was running from injustice, rather than escaping the law. The offer of money, however, was what got his full attention at last.

  “Look, I was going to leave you several hundred dollars just to borrow the truck. I’ll give you four hundred dollars if you’ll let me use it.” Calley saw the man relax a bit. “Let me carefully reach in my satchel here—I’ve been carrying my things in this fish creel, hold on.” He diverted his eyes down to the bag, searching with his right hand and watching to make sure he had what he was reaching for. In his peripheral vision, Calley saw the barrel of the shotgun slowly drop toward the ground, the farmer at last removing his finger from the trigger guard, shifting the gun to rest position. Walter Calley had been hoping for exactly that reaction, and as he looked up and smiled at the man, he lashed out with his right foot, catching the stock of the shotgun and flinging it harmlessly off into the dirt several yards away as his right hand pulled the .357 magnum from the bag in one fluid motion, leveling it in the old man’s face before he had a chance to react. “Don’t!” Calley told him.

  The farmer saw he’d been tricked and froze, waiting for the click of a hammer. The man’s son, standing silently in the shadows of the porch some 10 yards away, saw only the glint of a lethal gun barrel aimed at his father’s head. His Winchester 30-30 had already been cocked, and a bead drawn on the thief’s head minutes before as his father had crept forward to surprise the intruder. There was no hesitation now, and no contest as a single shot rang out, the bullet finding its mark just forward of Walter Calley’s left ear, destroying his brain and removing most of the right side of his head instantly.

  Nearly a half hour passed before the farmer and his son recovered enough from the shock to call the sheriff.

  By noon Wednesday, Forrest Rogers and the members of what had been Larry Wilkins’s inner circle of advisors, friends, and supporters had heard the details of Calley’s death. It had taken only an hour to identify the body—Calley’s driver’s license was stuffed in his undershorts—but the story didn’t hit the state news wires until midmorning. By 10 A.M. someone in the state patrol had backtracked and found the Camaro, partially explaining the mystery police-car-tire shooting of Monday morning. What the county and state police couldn’t figure out, however, was why the man was running in the first place. There were no wants or warrants in the computer, the FBI had no knowledge of him, and other than the shot-out tire and what appeared to be a stolen license plate, his actions were a mystery.

  “An obscure electronics engineer from a defense contractor in Kansas” had been the line used on New Orleans stations all afternoon.

  At 12:45 the tape had arrived at Forrest Rogers’s home, a routine delivery with the bills and the rest of his mail. He had summoned the others immediately. Forrest refrained from opening it until they had come. With Walter dead, only the tape would tell the tale.

  The weather had clouded over and cooled down, so his wife had started a fire in the den fireplace, and Forrest had perched himself in front of it to wait for the others—who arrived just before 2 P.M.

  He shooed his wife out then and closed off the room as the six men settled into sofas and chairs. Forrest pulled the tape from the brown padded mailer and put it in the recorder. There was no note.

  He had, Walter Calley’s voice told them, called Larry Wilkins on Friday afternoon when he had seen what was going on at the plant near Leavenworth. The main tracking test module, a huge container, had been put on an oversize flatbed. He wasn’t supposed to know, but a fellow worker had confirmed it was to be flown to somewhere in the Pacific from Kansas City Airport that night for operational testing.

  Wilkins had been ecstatic, Calley said. He had suspected the Brilliant Pebbles people all along of trying to destroy the main Star Wars program for un-American reasons. They had forged a bipartisan agreement not to test components of either system, and here was apparent proof the agreement was being broken—and flagrantly at that! They would never risk moving the thing if they weren’t going to test it, Wilkins had told Calley, deciding at the same moment to fly to Kansas City to see for himself. “He was going to get a cab,” Calley’s voice continued, “go close enough to see, and if it was what I said it was, he was going to take pictures and call the national media right from there and embarrass the hell out of them. But then the plane crashed and killed him, and the second I heard—I stayed at home in Leavenworth—I knew our call had been tapped. I had made the horrible mistake, you see, of calling Larry from my office at the factory, ’cause I was so excited. So someone obviously overheard and knew they couldn’t allow Larry to catch them, so they ordered him dead. There’s no question. It was an assassination.”

  Calley had paused in making the tape, and he could be heard clearing his throat and focusing on the next step. “Now, if anything happens to me before I get there, you’ve got to expose all this. Please. For Larry’s sake, for the movement, for the country.”

  The tape ended and the group sat staring at each other before Bill Hawkins broke the silence.

  “What have we got here?”

  Ed Trelonas shook his head in disbelief. “We ain’t got shit.”

  There was a collective sigh of astonishment as Hawkins spoke up again. “That little idiot! We’ve told the whole country we had proof. Hell, if anyone had overheard his call to Larry, it would’ve been a damn sight simpler to just cancel the shipment than kill an airplane full of people! I agree, we ain’t got shit, but we do have a hell of a problem now. What do we tell the press and the feds?”

  All six men exploded into simultaneous, animated, urgent discussion, the future of their political influence, the credibility of their public announcements—everything—hanging in the balance.

  “They’ll think we’re neo-Nazi freaks and loonies, seeing ghosts in the woodwork. There’s no damn conspiracy here, except what we jumped to ourselves, thanks to that dead idiot Calley.”

  “Hey,” Forrest Rogers said, “at least let’s mourn the poor guy. I’ve known him for years. Walter was a good man. Too intense, maybe, but will someone here please remember he got his head blowed off trying to bring us a warning, as crazy
as it was?”

  Several of the men looked at Rogers, remembering his willingness to abandon Calley—or worse—the day before.

  All but one of them settled back into various chairs, leaving Bill Hawkins warming himself in front of the open fireplace. “Well,” he said at last, “we’re looking at this all wrong. Who knows Calley had no evidence? Calley’s dead. We don’t know that he put everything he knew on that tape, now do we? Maybe there was more. I mean, either he really had something more or he was a raging paranoid, and I don’t think the guy was a paranoid. So, what we do is publicize the truth as we think we see it. We publicize his death. This man Calley had the key to this assassination, we say, but he got killed before he could tell what he knew. He knew it was an assassination, but he got assassinated himself.”

  “You do that, someone may go after that farmer and his kid.”

  “No,” Hawkins continued, “we don’t blame it on them. Poor old Walter was running from his pursuers, and he made a fatal mistake. It was the people that were chasing him caused him to try to steal that man’s truck. Wasn’t the farmer’s fault. But the FBI or whoever—we can pin this on the FBI and the CIA if we do it right—they pushed him and chased him. Same boys that got Larry were after Walter, right?”

  Rogers was nodding. “I guess. But Bill, what about the tape?”

  Bill Hawkins reached over and took the cassette out of the recorder, looked it over carefully, and tossed it into the fire, turning back to Rogers with a puzzled expression.

  “What tape was that, Forrest?”

  As the word of the strange shooting in a farm driveway in Louisiana was slowly spreading toward New Orleans on Wednesday morning, Joe Wallingford was leaving the elevators on the eighth floor of the FAA building in Washington, headed for his office.

  “Joe … wait a minute.” The voice came from behind him and Joe turned, recognizing the pleasing form of Beverly Bronson as she ran toward him down the central corridor which bisected the NTSB’s floor.

  “Have … whew, I’m out of shape … have you seen this?” Beverly thrust a sheet of paper with the FAA logo at the top into his hands. It was a press release, dated Wednesday morning and cranked out by someone a few floors distant in the same building, announcing that the FAA was asking the FBI to investigate the apparent theft of the cockpit voice recorder in Kansas City and the separate theft of the tower tape. In addition, it said, the possibility that the North America crash had been caused by purposeful radio interference was to be probed by a joint FAA-FBI task force.

  “Jesus Christ! What is he doing?” Joe shook the release in Beverly’s general direction.

  “Who?”

  “Caldwell. This bears the fingerprints of Bill Caldwell.”

  “What, exactly, is going on, Joe?”

  “Later, Bev.” Joe thanked her and stormed off to his office to dial Caldwell’s number. According to his secretary, he was out until late afternoon, and no, she was not authorized to communicate his whereabouts, even to the NTSB. He slammed the receiver down then and headed for Dean Farris’s office instead, finding the NTSB chairman in a grand state of excitement, a copy of the same press release in his hand.

  “Joe, what do you know about this?”

  “Mr. Chairman, we’ve never formally told Bill Caldwell a thing about the missing CVR—I’m assuming this came from him—but everybody on the investigation team knows the CVR is missing, and that certainly includes the FAA members. And, David Bayne and his people know. Theft is a dim possibility, but none of us can see how or why it could have been done. And, dammit, there’s no way the FBI needs to be publicly dragged into that particular question at this point. We could use them on the other item, though.”

  “He’s trying to get our goat, of course,” Farris said, slamming his copy of the release on his desk. “Trying to picture us as incompetent … make an end run around us and get the FBI to do his dirty work in finding whether one of our people leaked that tape. What he’s trying to do most of all, though, is protect his control-tower people by creating a diversion.”

  Farris looked up suddenly, a mental tumbler finally falling into place. “What other item?”

  “The electronic box in the 320 wreckage. Barbara Rawlson’s team found a small electronic device of some sort, radio-related, in the flight-control wreckage of the 320. Airbus says it isn’t supposed to be there. Might be a smoking gun, might not.”

  “I hadn’t heard. Does the media know?”

  “Not yet. I told Andy to keep it very quiet. They were working on it last night. Apparently it’s pretty smashed up.”

  “I want to know the second you figure out what it is. Now, how about the tower tape?”

  “I talked to Nick Gardner,” Joe began, “and he assured me the tape wasn’t out of his possession and he knows nothing about it.”

  “You believe him?”

  Joe shrugged. “I have to.”

  “Convince Caldwell he’s innocent, then,” Farris said, pacing.

  “I’ve already tried to get an appointment with him as you asked. He’s out, though, or hiding behind his secretary.” Joe sat down in one of the large, leather wing chairs placed before Dean Farris’s desk, but Farris kept prowling the office.

  “Wonderful.” Farris mumbled the words as he faced the picture window and looked out across the Mall.

  “There is,” Joe began, “something I probably should have told you involving Caldwell.”

  Farris whirled, his face a picture of interest. “Oh?”

  He related the Sunday phone call from Caldwell pressuring Joe to assure him flight-control failure wasn’t involved in the crash, as well as the fact that he had not called the FAA associate administrator back as yet. “I was waiting to see if the issue resolved itself, and if not, I was going to talk to you first.”

  “Were you, now? And just when would that have been?” The sarcasm dripped from his words, and Joe knew he was defenseless.

  “I promise you I was not about to give him anything until we talked. I, uh, figured it was a ploy to put pressure on us—and on me—to make a critical decision he could blame on us in the event it was wrong.”

  “Did he tell you to keep the call confidential, Joe?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you complied, of course!” Farris had gone from upset to anger, and it was directed squarely at Joe Wallingford.

  “No … look, that was Sunday,” Joe explained hurriedly. “Monday we were going to talk to the captain. I figured the interview might clear up what happened enough so that I could tell you about the call, and then, with your approval, tell Caldwell to back off, that the idea of grounding this plane was ridiculous. I was not going to call him back without talking to you. I hadn’t even seen the data recorder results at that time, and …”

  The chairman glared at Joe as he made a fist of his right hand and pounded it into his left palm. “Goddammit, Wallingford, you work for the NTSB, not the FAA. Any extracurricular contacts from other high government officials you will relay to me immediately, is that clear? Damn you! You let me get blindsided!”

  “I don’t understand. How could you have been blind-side—”

  “When Caldwell called me after the tower tape was leaked—before I called you—he was in a monumental rage, but he didn’t say anything about the CVR, or about messing around in our investigation with talk of grounding the A320, or about his surreptitious call to you. Since I didn’t know any of that—since you left me up here in the dark—I had to sit here and let him yell at me. I would have had some things to chew on him about if you’d filled me in. Damn!”

  “His call had nothing to do with the tower tapes. That was Sunday.”

  Farris had paced behind his desk again. Now he turned to Joe, his hands clasped behind him in professorial fashion, his head down and shaking from side to side as if dealing with a hopeless idiot. “Joe, Joe, Joe.” He looked up with an exasperated expression. “You’re way out of your league with someone like Caldwell.”

  “
Hey, I didn’t call the man.” Joe was struggling to control rising anger mixed with apprehension.

  “You’re a technician, Joe. Caldwell’s a politician and a Machiavellian administrator. You’re no match for him.”

  “God knows I’m not trying to be. I know I’m a technician. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to be.” That was more emphasis than he intended, but it didn’t matter. Farris was ignoring his answers anyway.

  “Whenever Bill Caldwell interferes down here, he’s up to something. There are always hidden meanings. For one thing”—Farris waved the press release at Joe—“he’s trying to control events here and show everyone on the Hill that the FAA under Bill Caldwell is not going to be slow in properly investigating a possible assassination. He’s trying to outflank us at every turn, and when he hears about that device you found …” Farris sighed disgustedly. “That’s why I’ve got to stay on top of the political climate around this town, to keep us protected as a board—to keep you innocent little technocrats protected from the real world so you can do your work. If I don’t see which way the wind is blowing, we’ll all get blown away by it.”

  Joe looked at Dean Farris with amazement. He really did believe his was a political position. Susan was right. But he was also, as she had pointed out, the boss. And Joe’s professional life was in his hands. “Mr. Chairman, I apologize if I should have told you about his call immediately—”

  “Damn right you should have.”

  “Do you still want me to go talk to him, when I can catch him in, that is?” Joe asked the question hoping the answer would be no, but Farris surprised him.

  “Yes, Joe, I do. Tell him to back off on the threats regarding the 320’s flight-control system, that he doesn’t understand how delicate things are at the moment and he’s going way out on a limb. Don’t, for God’s sake, tell him about the new find.”

  “He may already know,” Joe replied.

  Dean Farris stopped, his long arm and bony finger still aimed at Joe. “You do agree there’s no justification for grounding, don’t you?”