Blackout

CHAPTER 24

It was too much to absorb in a single pass.

Kat Bronsky rubbed her eyes and asked the helicopter pilot to circle the perimeter of the wreckage a second time. What had appeared at first as a dark gash in the midst of a verdant jungle had grown rapidly as they approached, becoming an ugly expanse of blackened vegetation, coalescing into a gut-wrenching killing field of twisted aluminum, shredded seats, and human bodies.

The Vietnamese Air Force major nodded and banked the craft to one side.

“My God!” Kat said to herself, the contrast of clear blue skies overhead and total destruction below an upheaval in her mind. She felt a tap on her shoulder and turned to find the government interpreter she’d been assigned leaning in her direction.

“I’m sorry, Agent Bronsky. I did not hear you.”

What was his name? Kat asked herself, remembering at the same moment. Phu Minh. That’s right. And his western name is Pete.

She shook her head. “I was just talking to myself, Pete.” She looked back at the wreckage and gestured toward it. “I just can’t believe this.” Her stomach was hovering on the edge of nausea.

The helicopter flew slowly over the narrow point of first impact and the broad swath of destruction plowed by the disintegrating jumbo jet to the final resting place of the upper deck and cockpit area. It was twisted and shattered but recognizable, as it sat in a natural clearing over a mile distant from the point where the jungle first snagged the wings of the huge Boeing.

She snapped several pictures, knowing they could never transmit the full effect of the horror laid out before her in three dimensions. Once again she tried to put out of her mind the prospect of seeing Robert MacCabe’s body.

“Again?” the pilot asked in English.

Kat shook her head no and motioned toward the area around the forward section of the jumbo where a small group of men was waiting. She watched the pilot set the Huey on the ground with effortless precision, remembering the two hours of dual instruction she’d had in a much smaller helicopter back home. The memory was a momentary escape from the carnage spread out before her.

The on-scene commander was a Vietnamese colonel with an ashen face who met her at the door of the Huey.

Kat greeted him and stepped out, gesturing to the wreckage. “Did… did anyone survive?”

She felt herself go cold when he shook his head no.

“No one alive here,” he said. “I am waiting for our aviation ministry from Hanoi. I understand you are from the American accident agency?”

She nodded. “Technically, Colonel, I’m a special agent with the FBI, but I’m here to take a first look while all the other investigators are on the way.”

“You will not… disturb anything?”

“Of course not.”

“Please tell me if we can help.”

“Just let me walk around and get a feel for this accident,” Kat said.

The colonel nodded and turned away.

Kat walked quickly toward the main wreckage of the 747’s upper deck, the only large part still discernible. She climbed carefully over the sharp, ragged sides and stepped into the main aisle of the first-class upper-deck cabin. She felt suddenly light-headed as she spotted her seat.

She moved carefully toward it, then stopped in shock. The window seat where MacCabe had been sitting was completely intact and devoid of blood stains. The aisle seat where she would have been sitting was a different story. The seat itself was intact, but a jagged piece of aluminum had been propelled through the seat back. It would have passed through her chest.

My God! Kat said to herself. There’s no question. I would be dead now.

She shook herself back to the present and looked around. MacCabe’s body was nowhere to be seen.

So where is he?

The break in the cabin was behind the fourth row of seats, and Kat searched carefully both inside and behind the wreckage. Anyone back there would be gone, but anyone strapped in up here might have survived. The impact forces were obviously low.

There was a torn sheet of black plastic draped over one side of the wreckage where the left side windows had been. Kat moved carefully toward it. All her work as a police intern during college years had left her hardened to the ravaged bodies accidents could produce. She braced for the worst, her memory replaying some of the more gruesome things she had seen: indelible images of small aircraft victims, auto accident victims, suicides involving twelve-gauge shotguns, and one woman who chose to dive through a ten-story window, reducing herself to a mound of drained, gelatinous flesh on the concrete below.

Kat pulled the plastic back, somehow expecting to find Robert MacCabe, but there was no body beneath it. Instead, copious amounts of blood and some human tissue were embedded in the razor-sharp metal. They must have already started removing the bodies. That’s the only reasonable explanation.

Professionally, the thought was worrisome. The NTSB couldn’t control an investigation of a crash in a foreign nation, but they could provide expert professional advice, including the universal recommendation that bodies and wreckage be left wholly untouched until a preliminary examination had been completed. Nations unsophisticated in accident investigation often let bodies and wreckage be moved far too early, obscuring major clues, and sometimes hiding the true causes of the crash.

She replaced the plastic sheet and began moving carefully around the tortured floor of the upper deck, looking for clues. There was a general lack of blood on all but one of the passenger seats. Even in the cockpit, the only sign of severe body impact was around the forward windscreen, and that victim — a man in civilian clothes — was still draped over the center throttle console, his neck obviously snapped. The copilot’s body, however, was nowhere to be found.

Wait a minute. A blinded copilot would have had others in this cockpit, not just the one guy on the glareshield. So where are the rest of them? There was no blood on either of the pilot seats or the two observer seats, even though all of them had been partially dislodged from the buckled cockpit floor.

Kat snapped a series of pictures before finding the small sleeping compartment behind the cockpit. The captain’s body was crammed against the forward bulkhead of the compartment, but without major wounds. She reached past the buckled wall and turned him over. He appeared uninjured, though as she looked more closely at his face, there was something about his eyes — his pupils — that looked very odd. It was as if he had cataracts in each eye. Probably related to the explosion, Kat thought. It must have been terribly intense. We desperately need an ophthalmologist on the autopsy. She took note of the torn uniform shirt and several marks on his chest. CPR, I’ll bet.

Kat emerged from the cockpit and moved back through the truncated upper deck before climbing down. She glanced at the ground she had stepped on, noticing the unusual number of footprints emanating from the wreckage of the upper deck where stepping to the ground was the easiest. The ground was muddy, and many of the footprints were deep. A few led back toward the main debris field, but several people had moved around to the west and the north, heading into the jungle.

Kat knelt to read the prints more closely. Two were clearly women’s pumps, the small heel unmistakable confirmation that a woman had stepped from the wreckage. And a third, even smaller woman’s heel led off in a different direction.

Kat walked to the Vietnamese commander as her interpreter rushed over. “Colonel, have there been any other women up here on the rescue force?”

The colonel frowned and shook his head. “Only men.”

“One more question, please,” Kat replied. “Have any bodies been removed from the forward section?”

“No. None. May I ask why?”

Kat pursed her lips and nodded. “I’m wondering where the rest of the flight crew and the passengers in the upper deck are.”

The colonel frowned again. “I do not know. This is how we found it several hours ago.”

Kat returned rapidly to the same spot, making mental note of the number of different shoes impressed into the muddy soil along with several sets of men’s footprints moving toward the west, one of them walking backward, the prints deep enough to indicate something heavy was being carried.

She spotted something else in a small puddle alongside the prints and knelt down with a stick, poking at the substance.

Blood! Lots of it. Someone was carrying a body, and it was bleeding out.

Kat reentered the wreckage of the upper deck and sat in one of the intact passenger seats.

Okay, what went on here? There should have been survivors up here. Were there? Did Robert make it?

She remembered her question to Jake about the Global Express. The Company had said nothing about NROs seeing evidence that the Global Express was shadowing the 747, but had they been? Could they have reached the crash site first?

The footprints told a tale. At least three females must have survived, and several males. But where were they?

Kat got to her feet and looked back to the east, toward Da Nang. If I found myself alive and knew there was a city back there, would I walk out?

Kat moved to the black plastic sheet and looked underneath. Someone impacted this spot at substantial speed. She could read the bent metal now: The crushed beams held a completely different damage pattern than the rest of the wreckage. Is there a way a body could have catapulted here in the crash?

Something shiny was visible at the corner of one piece of bent aluminum. Kat had to crawl up to get to it, reaching carefully into the tangle and moving aside a piece of human tissue to retrieve it. She stood up again and looked at what was unmistakably a woman’s pierced earring.

Oh my God!

Kat jumped out of the wreckage and carefully followed the footprints to the south, to the edge of the clearing, and then to the east, toward Da Nang. She was about to turn back when a disturbed area of soil and brush caught her eye, an area filled with footprints heading in the opposite direction, to the west, into the heart of the jungle and mountains. She knelt to examine the footprints carefully.

At least four males, but only two females. One’s missing. The one with the smallest heel.

Once more she returned to the plastic sheet. Beneath the twisted metal she had recalled seeing a flash of yellow. It took several minutes of digging, but the search finally yielded a woman’s yellow pump, ripped and blood-soaked — a shoe that matched perfectly one set of footprints by the wreckage, footprints missing from the group that had headed west from the edge of the clearing.

Kat left the shoe in the wreckage as she fought a primal urge to run to her helicopter and get out of there. The woman with the yellow shoes had been alive and walking just after the crash. Later, she had fallen from a great height into the wreckage. Had a helicopter rescue attempt gone bad?

Or was she dropped intentionally?

The survivors running into the jungle undoubtedly knew, and they wouldn’t be running, she concluded, unless they had seen something that panicked them. The bad guys got here first! Whoever was in that Global Express was here.

Kat motioned to the interpreter and headed for the helicopter. “I need you to fly slow and low directly to the east,” she told the pilot, “following the same path anyone would follow if they tried to walk out of here.”

She saw the question in his eyes. “Don’t ask. Just please, let’s go.”

“I will need to refuel in Da Nang,” the pilot said, “but okay for a while.”

Pete Phu jumped aboard as the rotor blades began to turn. Kat settled in the cloth seat nearest the open door, snugly buckling her seat belt, well aware that she was breathing hard.

It was MacCabe. Wherever he is, this whole disaster was to get him.

It was an illogical conclusion on one level, but on another, it was something she should have seen in Hong Kong, and the thought made her sick.

The five remaining survivors of Meridian Flight 5 sat huddled together in shock on a mossy log in a pouring rainstorm, slightly more than a hundred yards from the spot where Britta had died.

The cloudburst had begun several minutes before, but they sat wordlessly until Dallas Nielson finally looked skyward, blinking back the water flowing into her eyes. “Thank God for small favors. At least the flies are gone.”

Robert MacCabe shook his head and sighed as he straightened up and took inventory. Dallas was coping, as was he, but he could tell that Dan was convulsed with agony and blaming himself for not warning about the dangers of booby traps.

Young Steve Delaney sat staring at the ground, his shoulders shaking slightly as he tried to come to grips with the nightmare he’d seen.

And then there was Graham Tash, whose expressionless face and wordless demeanor reflected the unfathomable shock of watching his wife murdered. MacCabe wasn’t sure if Britta’s death had truly penetrated Graham’s consciousness.

I’ve got to get us moving! Robert concluded as he got to his feet. “I think it’s time,” he said, inclining his head toward the west.

One by one they rose from the log and followed.

The jungle vegetation was unbelievably slippery beneath their street shoes, and all of them fought a constant struggle to stay upright as they tried to ignore the misery of being soaked to the skin.

The expensive beige silk and brocade outfit Dallas had worn from her Hong Kong hotel now lay plastered to her body. Her hair was soaked, giving her the appearance of a moving apparition emerging from a swamp. She kept losing her wet shoes in the underbrush and thought longingly of the comfort of her dry, soft satin slippers at home.

“Robert?” Dallas called. “What’s the plan?”

He stopped and turned. “Get to that road, I guess, and then trigger Steve’s radio to call for help.”

For what seemed like hours they moved steadily downslope as the storm passed and the sun came out, filtering through an overhead jungle canopy that was sometimes sparse, sometimes heavy. Steam rose from their bodies as their clothes slowly dried, and as the patina of moisture evaporated from the ferns and plants of the jungle floor, their footing improved. Noises flowing through the underbrush from unseen creatures were a constant companion, as was the sound of hands slapping at the returning clouds of flies and mosquitoes — a steady, annoying counterpoint to the footfalls of five terrified people pushing through the underbrush.