Every five minutes, Radford’s pager went off: notification of a piece of wing here, a section of the tail there, bodies and fuel and wires and more bodies. He formed questions while they slogged ahead. What did the pattern of injuries show? How did that pattern explain the nature of the explosion? Where were the passengers seated? Trust the process, Radford thought.
Ulrich groaned. He’d worn the wrong clothes for fieldwork. The blue-mesh covers long gone, his dress shoes were mud covered. Bug bites glowed on his neck. A day into the investigation, the man already looked beaten and broken.
“I want theories,” he said, talking as much to the soy stalks and insects as to Radford. “I don’t want explanations and hunches.”
Radford began to understand the complexity of what lay ahead. This plane had shattered into a million pieces at thirty thousand feet, and now those pieces were buried in dirt on hillsides and at the bottom of ditches. Short of clear-cutting every wheat field in Sedgwick County, he didn’t know how the hell they’d gather everything together.
“Fuck,” Ulrich said, swatting at his neck.
Fifty feet away now, the crumpled nose cone lay sideways. It was an eerie sight. Enough of that section of the plane remained intact and recognizable that it looked almost new, but transformed as this grotesque fragment, like a decapitated head in a basket, minus the guillotine. The field reeked of manure and jet fuel. If they didn’t get the bodies out soon, the smells would only get worse. As he approached, Radford noted the absence of burn marks on the nose cone’s aluminum skin. It lay on its side, like a child’s Lego carelessly left on the floor. He thought of Wendy, of home. He tried to forget that among the dead out here were eleven children.
“This is ridiculous,” Ulrich said. “Why couldn’t they have choppered us in here?”
“It looked more accessible from the ground,” Radford said.
“I’m going to need clean clothes,” Ulrich said. “God damn it, I’ve got a press conference in two hours.”
Ulrich lived for the media. His whole demeanor, even his voice, changed when he was talking to a reporter. And for the foreseeable future, he would be the public face of the Pointer 795 investigation, handling the press, coordinating the daily progress meetings, teleconferencing with D.C. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe keeping Ulrich high and dry would make the day-to-day work more bearable. Just in front of the nose cone, a large drainage ditch blocked their way. The ditch contained foul, brown-green water. A swarm of mosquitoes skimmed the murky surface.
“No way,” Ulrich said. “I’m not wading through that.”
Radford spotted a section of wood fencing nearby. He placed two boards over the ditch to form a makeshift bridge. As he crossed, Ulrich’s phone rang, providing an excuse for his boss to remain on the other side of the ditch while Radford approached the wreckage.
“It’s Kansas,” Ulrich said, almost shouting into his phone. “Not the goddamn Indian Ocean. Find me those black boxes!”
Radford was suddenly aware that Lucy Masterson, another member of the Go Team, was approaching on his left. Her pants and shoes were spotless. In her left hand, Lucy carried three plastic evidence bags with small fragments of metal inside. She glanced at Ulrich and rolled her eyes.
“You geniuses forget how to read a map?” she said. “There’s an access road from the north. Five minutes of preparation saves an hour of effort.”
“Ulrich is the biggest horse’s ass in the entire stable,” Charlie said.
“Yeah,” Lucy said. “But it’s his rodeo.”
Lucy Masterson had started at the NTSB a few months before Radford. She was one of the few female aviation investigators. In Iraq, she’d flown navy helicopters, and from what Radford had been told, she didn’t rattle under fire. Compact, almost masculine in her attire, Lucy was an attractive woman if you looked past her bulldog attitude and personality. She kept her hair short, wore little makeup. Except for pearl earrings and an occasionally warm smile, you might not even notice her gender. Radford liked her, even though they were essentially competing for the next promotion. She was also unencumbered: no partner, no children, nothing to worry about apart from the work.
“The son of a bitch is right though,” Lucy whispered. “No reason we shouldn’t have found the boxes by now.”
The black boxes were in fact orange in color and two in number: the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder. The first would contain a record of all Pointer 795’s systems the moment before it came apart: engine thrust, fuel levels, avionics, electrical systems. The cockpit voice recorder saved communications between the pilots during the flight. Both would yield critical clues once they were found, a task Radford would have preferred to gathering bodies. Together, he and Lucy walked the last few paces toward the nose cone. Twice she bent and gathered pieces of metal from the mud, slipping them into evidence bags and marking the locations on her electronic map.
Behind them, a man Radford didn’t recognize crossed the makeshift bridge with Ulrich. From the sidearm holster and the suit coat, Radford figured him to be FBI.
“We’re not going to get into a pissing contest over this,” the man said. “Until you can definitively rule out a bomb, this is a crime scene and we have the lead.”
“You really think a bomb did this?” Radford said. He didn’t suspect a bomb. The explosive patterns were wrong, and the likelihood of sneaking a bomb on a plane was low. But he immediately knew he already had violated Gray’s first principle: You’re never smarter than the evidence. He should’ve kept his mouth shut. There was so much to learn, so many nuances of the work that he didn’t yet understand. The FBI agent turned and looked at Radford with a dismissive glance.
Were it not for the gaping hole where the cockpit door should be, the plane’s nose cone was remarkably intact. Puckers in the aluminum skin revealed impact forces, but whatever decapitated the plane in flight made the cut cleanly and decisively. Several panels below the windscreens had blown clear. Radford grabbed his flashlight and took off his windbreaker.
“I’m going in,” he said.
“Be careful,” Lucy said. “I’m not crazy about its structural integrity.”
Wedging through a narrow opening into the cockpit, Radford stopped cold. The destruction was staggering. The cramped space, no larger than a closet, smelled coppery, earthy, almost sweet in an eerie way. Several interior panels had ripped away from the ribbing. Insulation and wires dangled like viscera. He poked his head farther inside, where four of the six cockpit windscreens were blown out. Sharp smells—fuel, metal, the faintest odor of bodily waste—greeted Radford as he shone his light on the cathode-ray instrument panel. All the screens were shattered. Fluid oozed from the throttle column, which had snapped off from its attachment braces and hung at an odd angle. He carefully pushed aside a fallen metal hatch. Behind it, more wires and cracked metal pointed toward the copilot’s lifeless body, still strapped in his seat.
Jack Delacroix, Radford thought. In the briefing he’d read that morning, the notes said Delacroix was a father, a husband, a former high school teacher who’d finally landed his dream job at Pointer Air six years ago. Delacroix’s left arm had been ripped from the shoulder socket. His femur protruded through his blue uniform pants. Petechial hemorrhaging in the man’s cheeks and nose indicated that he didn’t have time to don his oxygen mask. His skin was ghostly blue, cyanotic, that was the medical term, Radford remembered. But despite the obvious blunt trauma, there were no burns, no char. In the port station, where the captain’s body should’ve been, an empty seat raised more questions that would need answers. Radford flicked off his light and shimmied back through the small opening.
Ulrich was on his phone. “Find me those black boxes,” Ulrich said. “Stop pussyfooting around.”
“Copilot, strapped to his seat inside,” Radford said to Lucy, who offered her hand to help him down. “Longitudinal sheering. Most of the starboard station is gone.”
“Captain?” Lucy asked.
&nbs
p; Radford shrugged. Finding the copilot’s body was important. It was like finding a corner piece of a jigsaw puzzle. But where was the captain’s body? Why wasn’t he in his seat? What did that mean? For all the questions Radford asked, he worried more about the hundred other ones he hadn’t thought to ask.
Lucy crawled into the cockpit with a tech. They needed to photograph the copilot’s body before it could be taken out. Radford thought about the man’s wife, about his kids. No, all the classes, all the study, none of it had prepared him for this.
Coming down the access road, Shep Ellsworth, another member of the Go Team, suddenly appeared. He stood near a crumpled fuselage panel ripped from the nose. A structural engineer and former marine fighter pilot, Shep Ellsworth now sported a beard and a ponytail. Shep had joined the agency right after 9/11. He was notorious for being a cold, cruel human being. But he was also brilliant, an investigator cut from the same cloth as Dickie Gray. He might well have been the smartest investigator at the agency, but he possessed an outright antagonism toward authority as well as toward his colleagues. The beard, the ponytail, the forearm tattoos, Ellsworth bucked the bureaucratic image. Radford hated to acknowledge it, but he admired the man’s confidence. Radford had to prove himself in the field, and working in Ellsworth’s shadow wouldn’t make that any easier.
“They finally let you out of the dugout?” Ellsworth said. His breath smelled like coffee, cigarettes. “And the dyke too?”
He reminded Radford of a younger version of his father, the same inappropriate, cutting humor, the same cruelty toward the world, an utter disdain for anyone who didn’t see things the same way he did.
Begrudgingly, as if such a task were beneath him, Shep Ellsworth outlined the most likely time line for Ulrich. The FBI agent listened too.
“Pointer departed IAD at 0010 Zulu,” he said. “Vectored west. An hour or so later, they begin a series of course changes to avoid heavy weather.”
Radford imagined the crowded sky, all those jets jockeying for smooth rides while they zipped through an ever-narrowing gap in the storm front. Ellsworth’s tone remained detached, nonchalant, as if he were reading a grocery list, and not standing in a world of wreckage.
“What’s that all mean?” the FBI agent asked.
“They were trying to slip through a line of massive thunderstorms,” Radford said.
“Could that be the cause?” the agent asked.
“It’s possible,” Radford said.
“Listen to Encyclopedia Brown,” Ellsworth said. “And here’s his sidekick, Penny Parker.”
“Bite me, Shep,” Lucy said, emerging from the nose cone. A stain of blood or hydraulic fluid smudged her cheek.
“Lines up with the major debris,” Ulrich said. “Within ten to maybe fifteen miles. If we assume the plane held together for a while after the initial event.”
“No Mayday?” Radford asked.
Ellsworth glared at him but didn’t answer.
“We need those black boxes,” Ulrich said.
“We’ll get ’em,” Lucy said.
The key was to filter out emotion. You had to look past the raw carnage. You had to see the victims as bodies, as evidence. To look beyond the death and destruction. To picture order. To see the end, even in the havoc of the beginning. The key was to start asking the right questions. Radford wiped the smear from Lucy Masterson’s cheek with a handkerchief. He admired and appreciated her tenacious approach, but you had to expend your energy evenly. A major investigation might take two years to conclude. They were only into the second day.
From the access road, a frenetic-looking Willie Hernandez jogged toward them, violating another of aviation’s most sacred principles: never panic. Hernandez was the most junior member of the Go Team. The dumb son of a bitch already looked sick, like a frightened kid after a nightmare. He arrived at the nose cone sweating and out of breath.
Hernandez turned toward Radford, almost as if he’d forgotten where he was or why he’d come. For a moment, Radford worried the man might be cracking. The bodies, the wreckage, the sheer chaos, he knew it could overwhelm a person. Hernandez was a big muscular guy. Sometimes the giants cracked first.
“They found someone,” Hernandez managed to say.
“What?” Lucy asked.
“What the Christ are you babbling about?” Ellsworth said.
“They found a passenger,” he said. “She’s alive.”
13
U.S. House of Representatives Panel Investigating Pointer Airlines Flight 795 (Second Session):
Radford clears his throat. An aide delivers another pitcher of cold water, and he immediately fills the empty glass. He takes a sip, glancing down at his detailed notes.
“The report was that they’d found a passenger alive,” he says.
“What did you do upon hearing this news?”
“I commandeered a state cop and his car, and raced toward the barn in Goddard where she was said to have been found.”
“At that moment, Mr. Radford, what did you think you’d encounter when you reached the barn?”
“The details were sparse at best,” he says. “In those early hours, very little provided context. You grope about in the dark for a long time. That’s why we don’t speculate. That’s why we gather evidence.”
“Answer the question, sir. What did you expect to find? What did you think you were walking into?”
“A woman was found alive in a barn,” he says. “Along with debris. I didn’t know why the assumption was that she’d fallen from the plane. That story made no sense. I assumed the woman was injured on the ground, in the barn.”
He doesn’t tell them that his second thought was that someone played a hoax. He avoids using the word hoax in front of the Congressional Subcommittee for Aviation Affairs. He hopes to keep the word hoax out of the public record, since the resolution of this story itself remains in doubt. He wants to provide no headlines for the evening news. He won’t say the word, not to these men and women, even if that was the exact word that ran through his mind all the way to the barn.
“So, you approached the barn with skepticism?”
“I tried to approach the barn the way I approached any other piece of wreckage. Whatever I found would be part of the story, and whoever was alive had a story to tell. My job was to ask the right questions.”
On a screen behind the congressmen, a photo appears, an aerial shot of the farm, the now-famous red-clapboard barn center left, a few dozen acres of feed corn, more rows of soy, a modest-sized ranch house, two huge bur oak trees. Other photos are projected onto the screen: open barn doors, a John Deere tractor parked inside, bailers, shelves stuffed with tools and chemicals. Radford remembers walking past a traffic jam of emergency vehicles to get to the barn. He remembers the fireman, the cops, the sheer chaos of that moment, and everyone looking to him for an explanation. They all answered an emergency call, but apparently the woman was no longer there when any of them arrived.
Then another photo flashes: Shep Ellsworth and his bushy ponytail, tattooed forearms, standing next to Radford, both men in blue NTSB windbreakers, staring up at the barn’s roof. Just over their shoulders, the dark sky and threatening storms. This photo appeared on the front page of the New York Times. In the distance, Radford can almost see again the lightning flashes.
“Mr. Radford, what happened next?”
“I went into the barn,” he says. “More than twenty uniformed men and women were inside. Cops, firemen, paramedics.” Even now, over a year later, Radford remembers the town names on the back of the firemen’s coats: Murdock, Cheney, Goddard, Kingman.
The final photo now appears behind the congressmen. This one Radford took with his phone’s camera. A huge, jagged hole between two rafters in the ceiling. Splinters of wood and light. Clouds moving past the open timbers.
“Was the woman still there?”
“No,” Radford says. “They’d already taken her to a hospital.”
“How badly was she hurt?”
/> “Apparently, a number of abrasions,” he says. “No significant trauma. As I said, they took her to the hospital.”
There is a long pause before the next question is asked, this one from an Alabama congressman. Until now, this man has been quiet. Radford recognizes the man from television. He is old, black, with a ring of bone-white hair. The man’s jowls are wide, and he is hard to understand at first, the thick Alabama drawl, an old man’s croaky voice. Radford thinks the congressman marched with King. He even may have been in Memphis.
“Mr. Radford, thank you for being here today. Let’s get to the point. Did you believe the story about the Falling Woman?”
Radford stares up at the man. It is the first good question of the hearing, the right question. He doesn’t mean to insert a dramatic pause, but one follows the congressman’s question, while Radford registers its implications.
“Belief is not part of an investigation,” Radford says. “Never try to be smarter than the evidence. This is how we work.”
“Mr. Radford,” the Alabama congressman says, “who is Alan Magee?”
A murmur rises in the room. Radford admires this congressman’s thoroughness. He would like to thank the man for doing his homework.
“Staff Sergeant Alan Magee,” Radford says.
“Can you tell us about Sergeant Magee?”
“Magee was a tail gunner on an American B-17 in World War II,” Radford says. “In 1943, while on a bombing mission over occupied France, Magee’s plane took flak and caught fire.”
The Falling Woman: A Novel Page 7