Flashback

Chapter Eighteen

Near Regensburg

Hrafn Óskarson lifted the peak of his yellow baseball cap and looked at the wall of the school’s assembly room. On it, Little Red Riding Hood fled through a paper forest. Hrafn turned away from the display and crossed the hall. He wondered why the memories of his childhood in Iceland quickened as he entered middle age. He could remember a morning in his tenth year when he and his younger brother Ragnar had raced to their aunt’s farm near Akureyri hoping to dissuade her from making their beloved rabbits into gloves. She had laughed at their naïvety, at the last of their childhood. This was not news. The rabbits had been born for gloves. Ragnar had cried all the long trip home while Hrafn had framed the experience as his first dose of adult medicine. Children petted rabbits; men wore rabbit gloves.

Why that? he thought. Why remember that, here, when I haven’t thought about it in years?

Hrafn took the passport from his jacket and rubbed away the blood from the gold-stamped title, which read Unione Europea Repubblica Italiana. Inside, the photograph showed a pretty woman with shoulder length, auburn hair. He let her eyes imprint his vision.

In the hours following the loss of DFU323, the Regensburg authorities had sent requests for assistance to the Federal Ministry of Transport, who in turn engaged the Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accident Investigation. The Gold Group of Dr Hrafn Óskarson—a veteran of sixteen inquiries—had been instructed to fly from Lower Saxony to Munich and rendezvous with specialists from Europe and the United States: external field investigation experts, psychologists, and engineers from Boeing. Meanwhile, disaster management teams in Regensburg set about requisitioning administrative offices for Gold Group, hangar space for wreckage, and, as an emergency morgue, a local primary school, where the dead now lay.

Hrafn crouched. Gently, he selected one of the two-dozen recovery bags that covered a third of the floorspace. Its zip moved with a low, throaty sound.

The smell: raw hamburger meat, aviation fuel, soil.

The smell recalled the closed investigations of his career. They formed a crossing, each like a stone in a brook, back to the night his Boeing 747 experienced an uncommanded rudder hardover on the approach to Singapore Changi Airport. The anxiety of the memory stung him even now. That roaring thought: No; not on my watch. The full starboard rudder lock would have put the 747 into the Singapore Strait in the time it took to take ten breaths. Only a rapid turn using the ailerons and a sudden push on the stick had saved the aircraft and its three hundred passengers. His luck had been astounding. He had repeated the manoeuvre a dozen times in the simulator and failed to bring her home.

The next day, during the pauses in his interview with safety investigators, Hrafn had composed his resignation letter. He returned, by land and sea, to that cold farm near Akureyri, where his aunt was preparing for the last months of her life. He went back to school and recovered his love of engineering. Five years later, having gained his PhD from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, he joined the FBAAI.

On a whiteboard next to the assembly hall door—here, among the art of children—a doctor had written, Mortui Vivis Praecipant.

Let the dead teach the living.

As Hrafn left the assembly room for the open air, he realised why he had recalled the memory of Ragnar and him hurrying to save the rabbits. Tomorrow would be his brother’s birthday.

Flurries of snow blazed in the glow of the temporary lights that ringed the playground. He passed police disaster cabins, parked fire engines, and the skyward satellite dishes of the media village. Nobody else was around. He stopped, just to appreciate the quiet. Then he pushed on. He was late for a meeting with Human Factors.

Hrafn, and the small audience, leaned forward to scrutinise the photograph that Marcus Bower of Human Factors projected on the screen. The image had been recovered from a charred digital camera. It was pixellated and oddly coloured. It showed a woman in mid sprint. She was running down the aisle of the aircraft. A blur in her hand might have been a gun. Hrafn studied the object as Marcus zoomed into it and resumed his interpretation. There was a Holmesian touch to the fervour with which the psychologists and engineers swooped on the slightest of details. Did the shape of her hair indicate acceleration, and thus the aircraft’s movement? Did lighting inconsistencies imply electrical problems? And, at root, was this person working for the good of the passengers, or had she precipitated the crash? Both? Hrafn accepted a coffee as Marcus wrapped up his presentation. It was midnight, and he had a 6 a.m. appointment with Chancellor Schröder. He said, ‘Marcus, I just came from the morgue. Nicolleta Valli has red hair in her passport photograph, but she recently dyed it blond. That leaves Saskia Dorfer as our candidate for Ms X.’

‘Sure you looked at the right body?’

‘Certain.’

‘If we go for Saskia, then there’s a Berlin angle.’

‘How?’

One of the group leaned into the coloured beam of the projector. ‘Dr Óskarson, a passenger called Jem Shaw, a Brit, failed to board. Shaw’s ticket was bought using the same EC card as Dorfer. The Berlin police report that Dorfer’s apartment was destroyed by fire several hours after she boarded the plane.’

‘Interesting.’

‘One more thing,’ said Marcus, ‘Petersen, the hiker who filmed the crash, told me about a camouflaged man he saw hanging around the scene. We think the guy is a reclusive woodsman called Tolsdorf. Some kind of Boo Radley figure to the locals, I understand. He only comes down to the village at Christmas for a good feed. But he robbed the local Aldi this morning. Beer.’

‘So? It must get lonely up in the woods.’

Marcus smiled. ‘He left the beer.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Emptied the bottles before he left the car park, then took the bottles with him.’

‘Why?’

‘That is the question.’

‘OK. Goodnight, everyone. Tomorrow, we’ll talk to Shaw.’

In the hallway, Hrafn found a cleaner mopping the floor. He smiled apologetically and stepped across the wet laminate. He entered the adjacent classroom. Its walls were covered with circuit whiteprints and telemetry plots. Beneath them, partly obscured, were lists of English verbs and pictures of Tony Blair and Big Ben. Trays of wiring and smashed equipment had been laid across the low tables. A dozen men probed the avionics with their pencils, delicate as watchmakers. Hrafn found a warmish coffee near a stack of miniature chairs and touched the shoulder of William Daker, who straightened. He was an old-school Boeing engineer. Gone were the days, told his weary expression, of analogue flight instruments whose dials held their readings at the point of impact.

‘What do you have?’

‘Bad news,’ said William. He indicated a blackened, curved piece of metal. ‘Here are the docking pins for the cockpit CVR/FDR breaker. The short version? The fuse was deliberately removed before impact. I think we can forget the flight recorder data. It’ll be blank.’

Hrafn sighed. If he were abandoned by his primary diagnostic tools—the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder—he might never file a worthwhile report. The solid-state recording chips in each engine were poor substitutes for the parameterised data of the dedicated recorders.

‘Walk me through it. And slowly; it’s late.’

‘If the fuse had been present at impact, we’d expect damage between the pins, where the fuse scoured the housing. But the damage is uniform. The very fact that we haven’t found the fuse is also telling. It should have been near this breaker. We can give you a ninety per cent certainty that the fuse was not on the flight deck at impact. I’ll know when it turns up.’

‘Maybe the pilots were trying to isolate an electrical fire.’

‘Come on, Hrafn.’

‘Come on what?’

William tapped the fuse housing with his pencil. ‘Someone cut the power in a deliberate attempt to obscure the last moments of that flight. We know the flaps were not deployed at impact, so the pilots had not begun the emergency landing procedure. The crash either came without warning, or they were not in control of the aircraft when it happened.’

‘You’re getting way ahead of yourself. Let’s just assemble the data.’

‘At least we got the pilot’s last transmission—‘Stentec.’ What does Human Factors think of that?’

‘It’s STENDEC, and not much,’ said Hrafn. He yawned and twisted his neck. Around him, the men studied their jigsaw. One had a jeweller’s loupe. Another had a shard of plastic in tweezers, which he waggled in saline solution to rinse off the last of the fuel, soil, soot, and human remains. ‘An anagram of ‘descent’. Also, ‘scented’. And ‘send etc’. There’s not much else to say.’

‘I wonder what the woman in the photograph has to do with all of this.’

‘I wonder too.’

‘Night, Hrafn.’

‘Yeah, sleep tight.’

Outside, Hrafn looked into the eddies of snow and saw the sleepy eyes of a beautiful Italian woman. He pictured zipping up the airtight recovery bag to quarantine inside himself the image, the hamburger smell, and the tears of a young co-pilot just happy to bring his 747 in to Singapore. Absently, he zipped his coat as he walked. He would buy Ragnar a book for his birthday. Something funny. With rabbits.

The drive to his temporary office in Wallhalla would take half an hour, but, given an empty road, Hrafn could shorten his journey by several minutes, thus banking some bonus sleep. A single windscreen wiper slung the snow clumps aside as he pulled onto the road. He searched the passenger seat for his pocket computer and put a headphone bud into his ear. His eyes switched between the road and the screen. He thumbed through the audio files and hit ‘play’.

‘Hi, this is Siggi,’ said a female voice. ‘I found something after all. Most of it is from the Ministry of Civil Aviation crash report and a book called ‘Star Dust Falling’. There’s a copy in your glove box. I’ve e-mailed you the report.’

Hrafn leaned across and opened the glove box. The rust-coloured paperback rested atop the car’s rental documents. He looked up and corrected his position on the road.

‘Star Dust,’ continued Siggi, ‘was an Avro Lancastrian Mk. III, which is basically a Lancaster bomber without the guns. This flight was designated CS-59. Chilean South, service fifty-nine. The operator was British South American Airways. It was merged with the British Overseas Airways Corporation in 1949.’

He watched the curving banks of snow.

‘Star Dust left Buenos Aires, Argentina, on the morning of August 2nd, 1947, for a short flight across the Andes to Santiago in Chile. It carried four crew and six passengers. They included a Palestinian businessman with a diamond stitched in his suit. A self-made–’

Hrafn paused the audio. He tapped his forehead. Remember the diamond. Then he pressed ‘play’ again.

‘–British businessman, a Swiss playboy, another Brit, an elderly German émigré returning to Chile with her dead husband’s ashes, and a British government agent escorting secret diplomatic documents. As for the flight itself, Star Dust made regular reports throughout its three-hour trip. The journey should have been straightforward from the perspective of the former RAF personnel, though the route was so high that oxygen canisters had to be used. Their navigation techniques were primitive. Advanced American navigation equipment was available, but Don Bennett, the boss of BSAA, refused to install it on patriotic grounds. The crew had to navigate by ‘dead reckoning’ and star fixes.’

Hrafn pushed his thumb into the book and held it to the light of the glove box. He looked at the monochrome photographs of RAF pilots and dapper civilians.

‘At 17:33 GMT, Star Dust radioed to Santiago that their estimated time of arrival was 17:45. It is understood that Star Dust had cleared the Andes and begun its final descent. At 17:41, the aircraft confirmed its ETA of 17:45, but the Morse code transmission was appended with the letters S, T, E, N, D, E, and C. The radio operator at Santiago Tower questioned it, and the letters S, T, E, N, D, E, C were repeated ‘loud and clear but rapid’. That was the last message sent from Star Dust. Some wreckage–’

Hrafn stopped Siggi’s briefing as the floodlit prominence of Walhalla rose above the trees. He waved to the security officer at the gate. The car slewed into the approach road, which had not been cleared since the last snowfall, and stopped on the quiet flatness in front of the building. Hrafn knew he should turn his mind to the meetings and their agendas, the crash and its lines of evidence—but seven letters stubbornly occupied his attention.

S, T, E, N, D, E, C.

He opened the driver’s door so the interior light would help him gather his belongings. As he reached for the PDA, he heard footsteps crunch to a halt behind him. Hrafn turned to the blackness.

‘Na, und?’

Two black shapes interrupted the bluish snow. Men. Hrafn stepped from the car and raised his torch. The first man wore designer glasses and a black greatcoat with shoulder-boards of snow. One sleeve was empty, and Hrafn could see the edge of a sling at his collar. The second man was taller and well built.

‘Guten Morgen, Herr Dr Óskarson. I am Inspector Karel Duczyński with the BKA. I must speak English in deference to my companion. Please don’t be afraid.’

‘Good morning,’ said Hrafn.

‘Hi, I’m Danny Shaw.’

‘Perhaps we could talk inside,’ said the policeman. ‘We’ve driven a long way.’

‘Duczyński, is it? I read about the disturbance at the Fernsehturm. Weren’t you suspended?’

‘Look,’ said Shaw, ‘my sister didn’t board the flight. She travelled down here and she may be in danger. It’s vital that we speak to you.’

‘Your sister?’

Hrafn held the torch on Shaw’s face. He could have both men arrested and let others unpick the threads of their involvement. But the seven letters had not faded from his mind. S, T, E, N, D, E, C. The CVR bus: sabotaged. The landing gear: not deployed. He let his mind travel the curves of a 737-800, felt the forces on its airframe, the cracks of overspeed vibration, and the insistence of a question for its answer.

‘Dr Óskarson,’ said the inspector, ‘I must tell you that an associate of Jem Shaw, Wolfgang Weber, was arrested two days ago with bomb-making instructions in his pocket.’

Hrafn’s tiredness evaporated. ‘What kind?’

The inspector raised a hand. ‘Don’t let me mislead you, sir. I believe that the papers were put on his person by a third party to incriminate him. Further, I believe that the party in question is Saskia Dorfer, a known alias of Saskia Brandt.’

Hrafn knew that any explosion severe enough to threaten a 737 would produce a wreckage footprint kilometres in area. There was, he had to admit, the possibility that a charge could be placed at the confluence of the hydraulic lines that connected the cockpit to the control surfaces. Then a non-compromising explosion could disable the aircraft. A variation of that malfunction had caused the crash at Sioux City in 1989. But, on the heels of this thought, came another: the pilots would retain some basic attitude control through the increase and decrease of engine thrust. And the problem with the radio communications blackout would not be addressed by that hypothesis, unless the saboteur had disabled the radio too. And what about the final transmission, ‘STENDEC’?

‘Mr Óskarson?’

‘You know, blowing up an aircraft, even a large one, by detonating a bomb is easy. I would say trivially easy, given the narrow range of forces the airframe is designed to cope with. But.’

‘But what?’

‘Inspector, my line of work discourages the development of premature hypotheses. If you try enough keys in a lock, you might find one that fits, but it may not be the correct one. Between ourselves, I indulge my imagination a little in that regard. But I can give you two reasons that make me think Saskia Dorfer/Brandt did not blow up that plane with a bomb.’

‘Go on,’ said Mr Shaw. His eyes were fierce. Hrafn began to like him.

‘One, the wreckage pattern tells us that the crash was a C-FIT, or Controlled Flight Into Terrain. The aircraft was in one piece and travelling under power when it crashed.’

‘And the second?’ asked the inspector.

‘The bomber doesn’t usually board the plane.’

Hrafn opened his briefcase and removed the picture of Saskia taken mid-flight. He gave it to the inspector.

‘Is this Brandt?’ he asked. ‘You’re sure?’

‘Alias Dorfer, yes. One of the passengers had a camera. If the date stamp is correct, this was taken four minutes prior to impact.’

Mr Shaw said, ‘You know, there are plenty of bombers willing to give their lives for a cause. The terrorists who flew into the World Trade Centre seemed cool with it.’

‘I have to make decisions based on probabilities, not absolutes. A German woman in her late twenties does not fit the profile of a suicide bomber. Not these days. Besides, she’s carrying a gun in the photograph. That implies that things are, well, complicated.’

‘But whose gun is it?’ asked the inspector. ‘Did the flight have sky marshals on board?’

‘No. Current German transport policy keeps sky marshals on randomly-selected transatlantic flights, not intracontinentals. Now, gentlemen, given the late hour, I must press you. Do you have any information that might help determine the flight’s last moments?’

Again, the inspector and Mr Shaw exchanged a look. Mr Shaw, the taller man, folded his arms. ‘My sister, Jem, has some connection with Saskia Brandt. They were both due to board that flight. My sister–’ Danny faltered. ‘Look, she hasn’t done anything wrong, I promise you. She works in a hairdresser’s.’

Hrafn’s reply was interrupted by the overture to The Marriage of Figaro, which played when Siggi, his assistant, called. As he reached for his phone, he heard the chirrups of two more. Danny Shaw and Inspector Duczyński, each with trepidation, answered their mobiles too. The three men stood in the snow and listened. Their expressions questioned one another.

‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ said a voice in Hrafn’s ear. ‘Call me Mr Self. I’ve taken the precaution of speaking to you simultaneously. I wish to avoid misunderstandings. Now, please listen. We don’t have much time.’