Marine One

25

I FELT EXPOSED and Hackett felt invulnerable. I was trying desperately to develop a nonexistent case while looking over my shoulder, yet I had to produce my experts for depositions.

At the conclusion of Bradley's deposition, Hackett tried not to gloat. The court reporter and the rest of the attorneys left the conference room; Hackett and I were standing there with Bradley, who was putting his papers back into his lopsided briefcase. Hackett put the cap back on his expensive fountain pen and put the pen in his shirt pocket. He looked at me. "Mike, help me here. You have refused to settle this case, and I had assumed it was because you had something to say in the defense of WorldCopter. But now we're done with the experts." He looked confused. "You don't have anything."

I tried to answer a little more quickly then I would otherwise have so as to look defensive. "They're going to show that the NTSB's conclusions-and your experts-are wrong. They're just speculating."

Hackett shook his head. "Mike. You know if you don't tell the jury a story better than mine, you're going to lose. Mine not only is right, but everybody has heard about it in the newspaper since the NTSB announced it. How in the hell do you expect to win?"

I looked at him somewhat smugly. "Maybe something will break between now and trial. Maybe some witness will come out of the woodwork."

Hackett bit. "A surprise witness? Surely you mean somebody on the witness list then? And we've deposed virtually all of those who have anything to say about anything. Plus, if it was an actual surprise, I don't know how you could anticipate it now." He adjusted his coat. "You're not planning on pulling something, are you, Mike? Because that would be unethical."

"I'm not saying anything. I'm just going to go back to my office."

He said to my back, "I've got your witness list, Mike. I'm going to hold you to it."

Bradley and Will met me at the crash site like we had planned. The FBI agents recognized my car and didn't even ask me to stop. I stopped anyway to tell them who else was coming. I parked and dragged my lawn chair to where the helicopter had hit the ground. I unfolded it and sat in the still morning. A slight chill was in the air as I sipped from my coffee travel mug and looked at the trees. This was just a hunch really, and unlikely to produce much, but I had to know.

I could hear a van approaching over the hill. Wayne Bradley no doubt, with Karl Will.

After a few minutes they appeared at the crest of the ridge and came down to where I was sitting. Bradley was breathing hard. Will said, "I see you took my advice. Brought your chair."

"Of course. Where's yours?"

"Right here." He unfolded his chair and sat next to me.

Bradley said, "We don't have time to sit around in lawn chairs and talk about our grandchildren. This trial is on us. We're already on the record as not knowing anything. If we don't come up with something pretty quick, frankly we're going to look silly."

Karl had stopped listening. "So what are we going to look at, Mike?"

We could hear a truck approaching. Bradley asked, "Expecting someone?"

"Yeah. They'll be here in a minute. What I wanted to take a look at is that limb that was broken during the accident." We looked up. "That one," I said, pointing. They both looked up into the gray sky and could just make out the brown branch that was still attached to the tree. "I think we need to go up and look. You and me, Karl. I've got this feeling that branch is trying to tell us a story, and we need to go up there and listen to it."

Will asked, "What are you thinking?"

I looked at the hill as the truck struggled over it behind us.

Will looked at the truck. "Who is this?"

"My tree trimmers. I asked them to bring their cherry-picker truck out here so we could go up and look at that branch. Bring your camera, Karl. If we find anything interesting up there, I want to document every step we take and exactly where everything was."

The truck parked where I showed it to go, lowered its outriggers for stability, and freed the bucket. Will and I climbed in and started up. I wasn't sure the truck's extension arm would take us high enough, nor was I sure what I would do if it did. We passed quickly by the fattest portion of the tree, and I moved us closer to the brown, broken branches. Only one large branch had broken, but numerous smaller branches were attached. It had broken close to the trunk and in the direction that I had suspected. The helicopter's blade had clearly smacked this branch on the way by, and by the direction of the break the helicopter had to have been upside down.

Will pointed at the location of the break. "I thought we'd see a cut or some other blade impact point. This just looks like it was hit. I don't see anything cut at all."

I inched us closer and we could both see where the blade had hit the branch. It had knocked off several small branches and taken the bark off the three-inch-thick branch where it had broken-not been cut, but broken. Violently. Bark held the branch on and kept it from plunging to the ground like the other branches.

"Hit it pretty hard," Will said.

We looked down to where the others were standing, trying to imagine Marine One passing by in the crashing storm.

Will looked around. "So if the blade hit this branch hard enough to do this kind of damage, maybe a tip weight came off here, Mike. Where would it have gone?"

I shook my head as I looked with him. "No idea. I just wanted to look up here to put my mind at ease. Let's push this thing as far into the tree as we can."

Will looked down. "I think the men who brought the truck are already thinking we're pretty far out from the truck. I don't want to tip over-"

"I'm not going back down until I've seen everything there is to see up here."

Will bent down as we passed under another heavy branch and into the shaded inside of the tree. I drove the basket deeper still inside the tree as the small electric motor worked against the branches. It was darker than I expected. The sun was blocked by the higher branches. My eyes adjusted slowly and I looked at every twig. Karl looked above us for any sign that other branches had been involved but weren't visible from the ground.

Karl said, "I'm not seeing much. You?"

"Not yet." I pushed against the tree. I couldn't force the basket any deeper into the tree. Karl reached up and grabbed the branch directly over our heads, pulled on it to feel its strength, and pulled himself up and out of the basket. "If we're going to do this, we've got to do it right. I've got to get to the trunk. We're still five feet away."

"You'll kill yourself."

"No, I won't. These branches are strong."

He crouched on one branch while holding the other one above his head like a rope. He moved slowly to the trunk and stood up. The broken branch was directly behind and below him. He turned carefully and grabbed the two small healthy sections of the branch that were still attached to the trunk. He felt the twisted, broken turn of the branch and the small, shredded section that kept it from plummeting to the ground. He looked outward to the brown section of the branch and imagined Marine One crashing down next to the tree.

I could see the massive blade hitting the branch and tossing it aside like a plastic straw. I tried to imagine exactly where the end cap and the tip weight would have hit. I could tell Karl was wondering the same thing. He stared for several seconds considering the numerous possibilities. He hugged the trunk and stepped down to the next branch. He looked directly under where the broken branch attached to the trunk, and there it was. Something had hit the trunk and scarred it. "See this?" he asked, pointing.

I nodded.

He moved inward and looked at the mark. The light-colored mark wasn't where something had hit the trunk at all. It was a tool mark. A knife. "Somebody worked something out of the trunk here, Mike. Could have been the NTSB found a piece of metal embedded in the trunk here and worked it out."

My heart was pounding. "Tip weight?"

Karl hesitated, then said, "Could be." He touched the bark and found a small flap next to the blade mark.

"We'd better measure the impact point and mark it on our diagram. Check the depth too. Take a picture. Maybe it will help our reconstruction."

He did, then looked for anything else that could help us. Finally he said, "Let's go back down."

I couldn't. If there was one tip weight, there could be more. They had to have been stuck to the bolt in the end of the blade, or the threads. "We'll get that tip weight from the NTSB."

"No, we won't. They'll never talk about it until the docket is released, which will be years and they may not have found one. Just dug with their knife but came up empty."

"What about the branch itself?"

Karl touched the end of the branch that was still attached, where it had been exposed from the break. Nothing. He dug his finger into the stringy remains of the connection between the still living tree and the brokenness farther out. "Something…" He pulled his Leatherman out of the case on his belt and opened the needle-nose pliers. He grabbed the branch above with one hand and reached down with the pliers with the other. He found a hard point and grabbed it.

I leaned over to look, careful to brace myself. I couldn't see anything, and he found it again with the pliers. He pulled on it hard as I grabbed the camera in the bottom of the bucket and began photographing Karl and where he was pulling. It gave. He pulled it up, wrapped his left arm around the branch, and brought it up to look at it. It was a tip weight. Half a tip weight. The circular washer-shaped piece of metal, perhaps an inch and a half across, was broken completely in half. I looked closely at it in the dim light, wondering what had caused it to break. He held it where I could see it clearly and photograph it with and without the flash.

"Tip weight," I said, confirming the obvious.

He climbed back into the bucket and handed the broken tip weight to me. A frown clouded his face. "How does this help us exactly?"

"I'm not sure it does."

"Looks broken to me, Mike. Looks like it failed in fatigue somehow. Too much of a gap between it and the next one. Probably defective. We'll have to tell the NTSB about it, and Hackett."

"In due time."

"You're not going to hide it or something, are you?"

"No." I started moving the basket back out into the sunshine.

"So what's the plan?"

"I'm going to let Bradley look at it, and he can take his time. Discovery is over in our case."

"You've got to let them know about it."

"I said I would."

"Well, it looks to me like the tip weight fractured and the lost weight did what we would expect-it caused uncontrollable vibrations. It caused the crash, Mike."

I pushed the lever on the basket and drove us downward to where Marine One had hit the ground. "Maybe. And maybe not."