Final Approach

by John J. Nance

  “Joe, I was trying to catch you.”

  “Beverly. How are you? Thanks, by the way, for the clippings.”

  “You’re welcome, and I’m fine. Joe, I have to ask you, why were you in the Hart Building this morning?”

  The question froze Joe in his mental tracks. Did Farris have spies on the Hill? Had something happened? Had Kell gone public already? Oh, Lord, now what?

  “Uh, what prompted that question, Beverly?”

  “I was there on business and saw you go by in a rush, and I wasn’t aware of anything going on involving Senate business and us right now other than a few inquiries I’m working on.”

  Joe just looked at her, trying to show a calm countenance, disturbed that they had stopped on a lower floor and several chatty FAA employees had carried their conversation into the elevator.

  “Beverly, I was simply dropping in on a friend of mine.”

  “Oh? Who was that, Joe?”

  Her voice was friendly and her tone warm, but the lady wanted to know why the head of the aviation accident division was snooping around in her territory. Joe knew she worked closely with Farris, although he had long since discounted the rumors of how close. She must know of his suspension and reinstatement on the North America case. She must know he was madder than holy …

  The doors opened again and more people entered, pushing Beverly against Joe as they stood at the back of the elevator. Under different circumstances a lovely person to be pushed into, Joe thought, but not now. Definitely not now!

  Her voice was low, almost intimate, but her intent was deadly serious. “Joe, I’m sorry to pry, but I’m responsible for keeping the Board in balance in the eyes of the Hill. If any of our people are engaging in outside forays, for whatever reason, it is my business.”

  “I’m well aware of your position, Beverly, but a personal call is a personal call. Don’t worry about it.”

  “This person, was he in Senator Baccus’s office or Senator Martinson’s?”

  Joe looked at her with a scowl. “What’d you do, follow me down the hallway?”

  “No, but when I saw you, those were the offices you were heading toward, and Martinson worries me because of his subcommittee, and because I know you’ve had him over here a few times lately. Dean knows too, and is none too happy, as I think he told you. Joe, you aren’t going off campus, are you?”

  Strange way to put it, he thought, still frowning as the doors to the main floor opened and everyone but Joe and Beverly and one FAA staffer got off. “You going to the garage, Beverly?”

  “I am if you are. Would you please tell me what you’re up to?”

  “I should probably let you think I am up to something. It might be fun to get known as a man of mystery around here. But at the risk of disappointing the ranking colonel in Dean’s KGB, I was there simply to chat as a friend with the senator and to see Cynthia Collins, Martinson’s AA, who, it so happens, was originally booked on North America Flight 255 into Kansas City, but missed it.”

  The door opened to the basement garage and Beverly made no move to leave. Joe caught the door and held it open. “I had promised another mutual friend I’d discuss the situation as we currently know it, just for her personal use, and for his part, the senator has simply been curious to know more about how we work. That’s why he was over here.”

  “Okay. That’s no problem, then. I know Cynthia, but I didn’t know that had happened. Sorry to pry Joe. By the way, that wasn’t fair. I am not Dean’s KGB!”

  He stepped out and looked at her silently, trying to keep a disapproving look on his face, letting the doors shut between them without a word before heading for his car. He would have to call Cynthia and warn her about a potential inquiry. Good Lord! One solitary visit in the past ten years to the Senate office complex and the NTSB’s governmental affairs officer is standing outside the door!

  At the same time Beverly had been engaged in cross-examining Joe, Bill Caldwell had arrived in Dean Farris’s office, finding the chairman on the phone and making it clear he would wait in his office until Farris was through. Farris hurried to finish the call. “What’s up, Bill?”

  “I just want to confirm something. You and I have been able to have some pretty frank, and I think useful exchanges over the years, Dean. But I want to make absolutely certain—and I apologize if you consider this so obvious as to be presumptuous—that whatever we say to each other regarding government business is privileged information which will never be divulged to others.”

  Farris shrugged and puffed out his cheeks. “Sure Bill. No problem. I don’t discuss what we talk about.”

  “If we’ve made requests of each other in the normal course of business, you know, person-to-person, those requests are equally privileged, right?”

  “Of course. What’s the problem? Something bothering you?”

  Caldwell’s mind rapidly calculated the odds of Farris remembering his phone call about Miami Air. He would certainly remember the North America calls, but Miami Air was some time ago. Farris got to his feet and wandered around his desk to face Caldwell, a friendly expression on his face. “You worried ’bout calling me on the Miami Air thing, Bill? Hell, all you did was tell me they were headed up by friends of yours and that’s why you knew they were well-managed. Nothing wrong with that.”

  Dammit, he had underestimated Farris. “I would not use the word worried, Dean, but conversations like that, just like some of your questions to me, could be misinterpreted by others despite being perfectly proper and legal.” Caldwell knew there must be something Farris had asked, some favor, some information, something which would compromise Farris as well. But he couldn’t think of anything on the outer limits of propriety. Nothing usable, at least.

  “Well, don’t worry, Bill,” Farris said, obviously enjoying the situation and understanding none of it. “I have a high threshold of pain. They’ll never torture it out of me.” Farris was laughing and Caldwell forced himself to act equally lighthearted as he shook the chairman’s hand and left, even more worried than he had been before.

  Friday traffic was always terrible inside the Beltway, but given a little snow and slush to spice things up, it became a nightmare. For once, however, Joe didn’t care. His mind was somewhere else as he poked along in bumper-to-bumper intimacy with the majority of bureaucratic Washington, heading southwest over the Potomac with only a vague idea of where he intended to go. The Fourteenth Street Bridge behind him, Joe headed toward Alexandria on the George Washington Parkway, diverting to a fast-food drive-through for a chocolate shake he knew he shouldn’t have before continuing on. There were Christmas decorations everywhere now, but they didn’t register on his consciousness. Driving sometimes was the best relaxation, the anonymity giving him time to think, yet there was a place he loved to go, especially on moderate spring or autumn days, which this decidedly was not. The Army’s Fort Belvoir, near Mt. Vernon, with its wide boulevards and central parade grounds. It was snow covered now, of course, but a welcome sight. Joe parked across from the headquarters building of the Army Corps of Engineers, cinched up his topcoat, and began walking, thoughts of Susan mixing with the memory of his impulsive visit to Kell Martinson’s office and the encounter with Beverly Bronson. Her report, he figured, had already reached Dean. There was much to worry about, so why wasn’t he worried? Joe ran the various threats and concerns and problems and challenges past his mind’s eye again, expecting his stomach to tighten and his mood to change. Neither happened. Strange, he thought. It couldn’t be his growing feeling that he had found a true and powerful ally in Kell Martinson, despite the warnings that his protection was limited. There was something more making him happy and content and confident and optimistic all at once, and when all other possibilities had been exhausted, there was only one left.

  Joe looked back to the east through the old oak trees lining the parade ground, his car a distant speck, his footprints marking a meandering path through the snow. It was beautiful here, he thought. He would bring Susan her
e in the spring.

  22

  Friday, December 14

  It took an article in Time to push John Tarvin over the edge. The investigation of the North America crash had stalled, it said, with the NTSB focusing its attention on the role of the copilot only because they had nowhere else to turn—the inquiry into possible radar interference with the airplane’s flight controls frustrated by government and military stonewalling. The accident, in other words, would never be solved—unless John Tarvin came forward, or so he reluctantly decided.

  He had tried to go through the normal channels at his defense-contractor company, but they didn’t want to listen—nor, apparently, did the NTSB or the FAA. If the government wouldn’t hear him out, then he would go instead to the institution most affected by the tragic events of October 12: North America Airlines. Early Friday he drove to Kansas City International Airport to talk to a startled North America station manager, who immediately put him on a flight to Dallas, where he was met at the airport and whisked to the downtown headquarters of the airline.

  By 11:30 A.M. John Walters had been pulled away from a meeting to listen to John Tarvin. Irritated at the interruption and upset at the presumptuous move of the Kansas City manager in sending the man to Dallas, Walters bustled in to give the affair a maximum of five minutes. Within two minutes, however, his attention had locked on nothing else but Tarvin’s words.

  It had been wet and chilly that Friday night, Tarvin told him, and he was cold as he waited in the cab of the mobile radar vehicle for the Air Force loadmasters to start the loading procedure, but he wasn’t supposed to idle the unit’s huge diesel engine just to keep warm. So he had plugged the unit into an aircraft ground electrical outlet instead. With electricity supplied to his cab, he could operate a small electrical heater and keep from freezing. It was all very routine—until he tried to turn on the master ground power switch.

  “I got the wrong switch, I guess. I wanted to power the electrical panel for my cab, but I got hold of the master switch for the radar module instead. I could see everything dim instantly—the power it was sucking out of those lines must have been incredible. Even the sodium-vapor floodlamps around the ramp flickered and dimmed too, and I nearly broke my finger turning the switch off. It was only on for ten seconds or so. I don’t know why a circuit breaker didn’t blow somewhere.”

  “When did the crash occur?”

  “Within a few seconds … no more than, say, fifteen seconds. It seemed like almost, you know, immediately. I was so shocked! We all ran forward to see. I didn’t think about that switch and the reaction until much later—a week later—when I heard the news people talking about the radar unit, some saying it may have caused the crash, and the Air Force swearing it wasn’t on. Well, they’re right to a point. It wasn’t supposed to be on.” Tarvin looked at John Walters with a tortured expression. “Then later they started talking on the news about this strange power interruption, and I knew exactly what had caused it. Immediately, I knew. I went to my supervisor, told him the story. He told me to forget the whole thing, that I had done nothing that could have affected the airplane. About a week later I asked to talk to him again, and both he and his boss took me into an office and said to drop it immediately, and that if I didn’t, I would be fired. They said that if I went to anyone else, I would be prosecuted for giving away classified information. I signed an oath, you see.” The man lowered his head and rubbed his temples, looking up at last. “I don’t want to do anything wrong, but I can’t live with this, and they don’t want anyone to know. I told them the NTSB must be told, and they told me the NTSB and FAA already knew. I guess they had all decided it didn’t occur, so they wanted me to shut up.” Tarvin stopped and sighed deeply. “I didn’t mean to turn it on, but, I did. The power it took was so great …”

  Walters got a cassette recorder to tape Tarvin’s account, ordering a secretary to type it up for his signature and sent him then to a nearby hotel at company expense with an escort of two lower-ranking executives with orders to keep Tarvin in sight and under control.

  “We’ll take it from here, Mr. Tarvin,” Walters said. “The NTSB will need to talk to you too. You get some rest. We can talk tomorrow.” After we get the jump on things, that is, Walters told himself.

  As John Tarvin left the North America offices in Dallas, Walters placed a call to David Bayne in New York. Bayne was grateful to be rescued from a joyless meeting with the airline’s investment bankers which had droned on for hours. Things had been going badly in their attempts to find a way around corporate annihilation, and whatever the news from Dallas, the day was already a loss. The investment group trying to take over his airline was composed of circling financial sharks, looking to dismember the company for quick profit. Bayne’s only chance was to find a white knight—a friendly company willing to take a chance with billions of borrowed dollars to buy North America and save it as an independent entity. There were some possibilities, but North America, quite simply, was running out of time, and David Bayne’s erudite and professional overtures to the chairmen of the potential rescuing companies were becoming a bit shrill and urgent.

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Bayne? John Walters in Dallas. I’ve got everyone looking for Ron Putnam, and I’ll switch him into this call when we can find him.”

  “What’s up, John?” Visions of airplanes in pieces on the ground filled his mind’s eye. With such a buildup, the news must be terrible.

  “It might have been radar interference that brought down Flight 255 after all,” Walters told him, filling in the details of Tarvin’s galvanizing visit, and the implications.

  Ron Putnam was located in Tampa and hooked up to a conference call, the three of them urgently exchanging details and ideas.

  “I’ve got to tell you two,” Bayne said at last, “I’m very relieved, because I was getting damned worried that you fellows had lost control of your people.” Bayne said it almost light-heartedly, but his words chilled both Walters and Putnam.

  “What do you mean, David?” Ron Putnam asked, caution flags fluttering in his mind.

  “Well, I was beginning to think, after that disastrous hearing, that the mistake you two made in hiring and not supervising Timson had caused it all. I was about convinced he’d caused the crash, God knows how. But now, the flaws of our chief pilot will be eclipsed when this breaks … and I want this to break immediately.”

  “Shouldn’t we take this to the NTSB first, David? John’s got the man on hold here in Dallas.” Putnam’s voice sounded tentative.

  “Hell no! We’ve got the goods. Call a news conference and let’s go for it! That bastard Farris and his people can read about it in the New York Times. Or, better yet, call someone we want to cultivate on the Dallas Times Herald and give them an exclusive for their afternoon edition, then break it on the evening news for tonight. Don’t worry about the NTSB. They should have found this poor SOB before we did.”

  By 6 P.M. the nation was hearing North America Airlines’s senior vice-president Ron Putnam announce that new evidence had all but solved the crash of Flight 255. The phone calls began immediately between members of the NTSB and Joe’s staff in particular, lacing an urgent web of communication among startled people instantly venting feelings of outrage against North America. “The damned airline didn’t even have the common courtesy to call and let us know the media had this story!” Andy railed at Joe. “And I don’t even know who this man Tarvin is.”

  Within an hour of getting the news by phone from Joe, Dean Farris had told the IIC to do nothing while he, Farris, called David Bayne. Only John Walters could be located, however, and his attitude was disgustingly smug, in Farris’s estimation. He had been authorized, he said, to pass along the information on just who John Tarvin was and where he could be found, but the NTSB would have to ask their own questions.

  “You realize you people have breached traditional duty and courtesy in accident investigation by taking this to the media first, don’t you?” Farris was almost
sputtering into his home phone. “We have rules against this sort of thing, and you are a party to this investigation.”

  “Mr. Chairman,” Walters answered, laconically, “I did what I was told to do. You’ll have to take that up with my chairman, David Bayne. He apparently assumed you should already have known about Tarvin.” Take that, you sanctimonious bastard, Walters said to himself, his treatment at the hands of the NTSB at the hearing burning for redress.

  In different parts of the Washington, D.C. area, Joe Wallingford, Susan Kelly, Andy Wallace, and Barbara Rawlson—among others—sat stunned before their telephones and tried to adjust to this latest twist. As Joe had moaned to Andy, “I suspected it was the radar unit, but goddammit, this investigation keeps playing out on the national news! If we don’t like this conclusion, just wait another twenty minutes and someone will uncover another one.”

  Dean Farris called Joe back by 7 P.M., Washington time. “Joe, I want you to get someone to Dallas to talk to that man, but do not say anything to the media. I’ve talked to a very highly placed source in our government in the last ten minutes who assures me the man is mistaken, that the unit couldn’t have been transmitting anything harmful. They say North America went off half-cocked, and is going to look ridiculous.”

  “Andy’s already headed for the airport, Mr. Chairman. There’s a nine P.M. flight from Dulles to Dallas. He’ll be on it.”