Fly by Wire

Chapter FIFTEEN

He spotted Sorensen at the controlled entry point. She was standing between a pair of orange barricades, signing an entry log. The rain had been on and off. Right now it was on. Not the fat drops of summer, but a cool, caressing midwinter drizzle, the air and water seeming to combine as a kind of intermediate element.

Sorensen was dressed appropriately — jeans and well-worn running shoes acting as foundation for a gray raincoat. The coat was a little on the stylish side, but had a hood hanging loose at the back. It would do the job. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail again. Davis liked ponytails — there was something youthful and bouncy about them, but more to the point, he knew it was a style women preferred when they were in the mind-set of exercise or manual labor. Sorensen had come ready to work.

When she looked up and saw him, there was the trace of a smile. Just a trace. He found himself wondering if it was real or contrived. Now that he knew she was CIA, Davis would doubt everything. Every adamant word, every skeptical frown, every careless shrug. He tried not to get too wrapped around the thought.

"Hi," he said.

"Hello, Jammer." Her tone was flat. The smile gone. Still pissed. "So have you had a productive morning?" she asked.

"The usual." He pointed to her shoes, New Balance cross-trainers. "Good choice. Its pretty muddy out here."

"I figured as much. Let s get to work."

"Fair enough."

Davis led the way. They slogged toward the debris field using a rut some heavy vehicle had left behind as a path. Ahead, he watched a man wearing a blue BEA windbreaker blaze a new trail across fresh ground. It was a nuance Davis had picked up on before, in the course of other investigations. If this crash had involved a passenger jet, with hundreds of fatalities, the field would be hallowed ground, given the same gentle deference as a cemetery. On the other hand, if it had been a military fighter crash where the pilot had ejected safely, the place would be trod over like an automobile junkyard. As it was, with two pilots dead, this accident fell into a middle ground. Everyone would show respect, but a year from now there would be no somber memorial service, no stone marker surrounded by flowers. It would just be another field.

From the corner of his eye, Davis watched Sorensen take everything in.

He said, "So has the CIA found Caliph yet?"

"No. But did you hear about the bombings?"

"Bombings?" He shook his head. "No. I saw some smoke and fire on TV as I left the hotel, but I've been out here all morning."

"Over twenty strikes back in the States. Oil refineries."

"Oil refineries?" He paused. "And you guys think it was Caliph?"

"That's the consensus. My boss says there's a real full-court press to find him now."

"And we have to do our part?" Davis eyed her for a moment, saw no reaction. He started off again, skirting around a freshly sheared tree stump. "So tell me, where is your boss? Back at Langley?"

"Yes."

"Nice arrangement, isn't it? Mine's in D. C." He gave this some thought. "Although, I'm not even sure who my boss is right now. I fired my last one."

"Why does that not surprise me?"

"I like being independent."

"Me too."

Davis pulled her to a stop, put his hands on his hips. "You really want to get into this, Honeywell? Alone?"

"I'll do what I have to do."

Davis nodded and thought, Good answer. He said, "Okay, we'll start here. This is simple detective work. And Monsieur Bastien's theories aside, the culprits aren't generally deranged people. It involves weather, poor maintenance, faulty design, bad decisions." He arced out a hand toward the crash site, the debris field only fifty meters away. "Remember, I'm a visual guy. Our wreckage pattern here is long, at least fifteen hundred meters."

"Almost a mile," she remarked.

Davis pointed to a deep scar in the earth at one end. "That's the primary impact point. She hit there, then broke up. Probably a million pieces now. Hopefully the big chunks will tell us what happened so that we won't have to dig out every little fragment."

"How do you know where to start? Surely you've got some theories about what happened — now that you've had a good look."

"I had theories before I saw any of this." Davis began walking again. "The radar data was interrupted, but it gave me a good place to start. This airplane was at 38,000 feet, and without warning it pitched over and went nearly straight down. There's only a few things that will cause that to happen."

"Speaking as a frequent flyer, I'm happy to hear it."

He couldn't contain a slight grin. "First, you have to consider structural failure. It's a relatively new design, so maybe the engineers screwed up somewhere — very rare, but certification and testing these days rely a great deal on computer models and wind tunnel testing. Harmonic vibrations at certain speeds, weak points in the pressure hull. It's possible that something slipped through the simulation and flight test program. But the thing is, if an airplane has some kind of catastrophic failure at altitude, there's generally one telltale sign."

"Something missing!"

"Good, Honeywell. You've been paying attention. If she came apart at 38,000 feet, we'd find the suspect piece thirty miles from here embedded in some poor farmers bean patch." He kept moving. 'This morning I partnered up with some people from the structures and design group. We used engineering diagrams, pictures of factory parts — we can't find anything missing. All the primary flight control surfaces are accounted for. And since this airplane is a flying wing design, there aren't the usual secondary controls — no flaps or slats. As a passenger, those are the panels you see moving on the front and back of the wings during takeoff and landing."

"So no structural failure."

"We'll rule it out for now. And no midair collision. If that was the case, we'd not only have found missing parts, but there would have been some extra pieces from a different kind of airplane."

"Okay. What about the engines? Could they have quit?"

"A reasonable question." Davis led to a pile of metal the size of a delivery truck. Sorensen didn't recognize it until she saw it from a better angle.

"That's an engine?"

"That's an engine."

Huge fan blades the size of surfboards were still attached to a central core. The metal duct around the fan was crumpled and dirt had sprayed everywhere — it looked like some huge mixer that had been turned loose on the wet earth.

She said, "It's pretty torn up."

"Check the fan blades. What do you notice?"

Sorensen cocked her head sideways as she examined the circular array. "Every one is bent, near the outer tips."

"Exactly. Uniform rotational damage tells us that this engine was running at impact. The powerplant guys will eventually calculate a precise speed, but the point is that it was turning. The other three engines show the same kind of damage. And aside from that, even if all the engines had quit, say from a contaminated fuel supply, this airplane would have turned into a glider. Take away all power, and a C-500 will still fly a hundred miles from that altitude."

"Okay," Sorensen said, "so no structural failure and the engines were fine. What else?"

Davis said, "As a pilot, there's one thing that came straight to mind when I saw the severe descent profile — fire. If Earl Moore had been facing a fire up there, he'd have wanted to get on the deck fast. Really fast."

"That fits the rapid descent."

"Yes, but—" Davis moved to a new section of wreckage and found what he wanted under a twisted cargo deck floor panel. He bent down and put a forearm across one knee. Sorensen followed suit, and he pointed to a lump of molten metal. It was shaped like a mound of wet sand that had dripped into a pile.

"That was from a fire!" she said excitedly.

"Yes. But it doesn't help us." He tossed his head in a looping motion. "You'll find these all over the place. For any fire you need three things."

"Fuel, oxygen, and ignition."

"Right. Now when this thing hit the ground, about thirty thousand gallons of Jet A fuel — which is basically kerosene — sprayed everywhere. Lots of ignition too. There's fire damage all around this field, but as far as I can tell, it was all postcrash."

"It's such a mess — how can you know that?"

Davis stood straight. "In-flight fires have one telltale feature. They begin burning inside a pressure vessel and, at some point, will typically breach and get exposed to the wind stream. That's an extremely high-oxygen environment, acts like a blowtorch." He pointed again to the molten lump. "This fire was probably about fifteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit, give or take. In-flight fires get twice as hot. Over three thousand degrees. Metals burn differently in that kind of heat. Also, if there was a fire in flight, we'd see liquid metal sprayed in a splashing pattern along with a soot stain somewhere on the aircraft's outer skin."

Sorensen nodded.

"On the ground," he continued, "molten metal pools, soot goes up. That's the only kind of fire evidence I've seen this morning. And I've been looking."

"Okay, I get the idea. Check off all these things that didn't bring the aircraft down. But any idea what did?"

"This is day one, Honeywell. These investigations can take years."

The rain had stopped, but a look at the sky, charcoal gray curtains all around, suggested it would be a brief reprieve. Sorensen stood straight and took a deep breath.

"This is surreal," she said.

Davis gave no reply, but watched her as she surveyed the disaster. Sorensen squinted, and Davis registered gentle, thin creases at the corners of her eyes. She was the kind of woman who would age well. But then, he had always thought the same about Diane.

Sorensen shifted her gaze, caught him looking in a way that had nothing to do with soot or fires.

"So will you do it, Jammer?"

"What?"

"Help us?"

He found himself wishing she'd used the singular pronoun. "Us" implied helping the CIA — just the kind of big, faceless Washington bureaucracy that drove him crazy. Davis didn't answer. He simply turned away and began to walk.