Free Fall

Twenty-Six

La Laguna, Tenerife, Canary Islands

At the site on Mesa Mota Mountain, the young American tourist Veyda Hyde shaded her eyes and took in the sweeping view of the city below, the airport and the Atlantic Ocean.

Breezes with a hint of sea salt rolled up the mountainside and lifted strands of her hair.

“It’s so glorious up here, so tranquil.”

“Calming, almost spiritual. As it should be.” Seth, her boyfriend, turned to photograph the monument again. The couple was traveling with a local sightseeing bus, and the memorial on Mesa Mota was its most solemn stop. Seth marveled at the structure, a modern piece of artwork depicting a towering spiral staircase that ascended sixty feet, representing the connection between the earth and the sky.

The memorial plaque at its base said that it was erected in memory of the people killed in the aircraft accident at the Los Rodeos Airport below, where, in 1977, two 747 jumbo jets collided in the world’s worst aviation accident. Veyda and Seth were familiar with the history. Events leading up to the tragedy had unfolded when a bomb planted by a separatist terror group had exploded at Gran Canaria Airport on a nearby island. It had forced the diversion of a number of large international jetliners to the smaller Los Rodeos Airport at Tenerife. A sudden fog had enshrouded the area, reducing visibility as an airliner from Los Angeles taxied and another from Amsterdam prepared to lift off on the same runway. The poor weather and problematic radio communications with the air traffic control tower resulted in the two jets colliding on the runway, killing 583 people.

Veyda and Seth had joined the other tourists, studying the plaque, running their fingers over it, then touching the staircase and admiring the memorial wreathes, some of which were in various stages of decay.

Veyda covered a yawn with her hand.

Their pilgrimage to Tenerife was the latest among several others they’d made.

In recent weeks, they’d traveled to Japan, where they’d visited the site of the world’s second-worst aviation disaster, that of Japan Airlines Flight 123.

The aircraft, a 747 jumbo jet, was doomed some ten minutes after the plane had lifted off from Tokyo International Airport for Osaka, when the rear pressure bulkhead tore open due to a maintenance error. The incident had ruptured the hydraulic lines and led to the failure of the vertical stabilizer, making the plane impossible to control. The jet stayed aloft for half an hour before it crashed into Mount Takamagahara, some sixty miles northeast of Tokyo, killing 520 people.

As part of their pilgrimage to Japan, Veyda and Seth had rented a car and navigated their way to the village of Ueno-mura in Gunma Prefecture. Then they’d trekked to Osutaka, the mountainous crash site. There, they’d observed the memorial stone, the bell and the religious statue representing mercy. They’d also taken in the metal-wood-and-stone memorial posts that had been erected by victims’ families. The structures held the remains of those victims. Veyda had crouched for a closer look at the photographs, toys and notes families had left at the posts.

Afterward, they’d gone to Tokyo International Airport and visited the Safety Promotion Center, which housed a memorial to the tragedy. It displayed pieces of the wreckage and a history of events leading up to the accident. From the moment the bulkhead tore open, sealing the flight’s fate, it had remained airborne for half an hour before it crashed, giving some passengers time to write final messages to their families.

These were respectfully presented for viewing at the memorial.

“I don’t think we will survive. Thank you for a good life,” one note had read, while another passenger had written, “Always take care of each other. I’ll always love you. Please don’t forget me.”

Tears had rolled down Veyda’s face as she’d read more notes.

She was intimate with loss.

After their visit to Japan, Veyda and Seth had flown to India and made their way to the location of the world’s third-worst air accident-in 1996, a Kazakhstan Airlines Ilyushin Il-76 had struck a Saudi Arabian Airlines 747.

The Kazakh charter flight, with twenty-seven passengers and ten crew, had originated in Kazakhstan. It had been on its descent to Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport where the Saudi jumbo jet, with 289 passengers and twenty-three crew, had departed for Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The Kazakh jet had wrongly descended lower than its assigned altitude and had collided midair with the Saudi plane, killing 349 people.

Wreckage had fallen from the skies to the fields below, nearly one hundred miles west of Delhi. Pieces of the charter jet had scattered near the village of Birohar, while remains of the Saudi 747 had fallen to the earth near the village of Charkhi Dadri. Enduring the heat, Veyda and Seth had walked among the fields where debris and bodies had rained down from the heavens.

They were aware that upon recovering the cockpit voice recorder from the Saudi plane, investigators had learned that the pilots had recited the Islamic prayer for believers when they face death.

Veyda was well acquainted with death.

She felt a deep, spiritual connection to the disaster sites in Japan, India and the Canary Islands, and was glad that she and Seth had seen them, felt them, breathed them, firsthand.

I need to bear witness to what we’re doing.

She tugged at Seth and they stepped away from the Tenerife memorial at Mesa Mota to be alone. While Seth took pictures, Veyda checked her phone. She took a fast look at Newslead’s stories on EastCloud Flight 4990, and then reviewed Newslead’s stories filed from London on the Shikra Airlines tragedy.

“Have you read them, Seth?”

“I have. I’m disappointed, because she’s by far the best.”

“Still nothing, nothing showing reverence to Zarathustra.” Veyda shook her head. “Does this Kate Page realize the gravity of her failure?”

“Perhaps she needs to be enlightened?”

“This entire sad world needs to be enlightened.”

Veyda tapped her phone to her chin as she took in the airport below, her face stone-cold behind her dark glasses.

“What happened on this island was a tragedy,” she said.

“An epic tragedy. A record number of deaths.”

“Records are made to be broken.”