Passenger 19

THIRTEEN

Larry Green was slogging through his next year’s budget request when the phone on his desk rang. He saw the caller ID and picked up immediately.

“Talk to me, Jammer.”

“Hey, Larry. It’s good to hear a familiar voice.”

“Tell me about Jen.”

Green heard a heavy sigh. “It’s not bad, not good. We have two bodies unaccounted for, and she’s one of them. They’re searching a marshy area where the tail separated. The two missing passengers were sitting in the last row, so the standing theory is that they were ejected.”

“What do you think?”

A pause. “I don’t know… it’s possible, but I’m not giving up.”

“You never do. I’m glad you called, the chairman is getting pressure for an update.”

“Chairman… as in the chairman of NTSB? Since when is an RJ going down in South America such big a deal?”

“Maybe things are slow. Then again, it’s that time of year. Congressmen always get nervous around election time, not to mention all the agencies fighting for next year’s funding. Maybe NTSB didn’t have enough high-profile crashes this fiscal year to justify our budget.”

“Speaking of budget, am I getting paid for this?”

Green chuckled. “Let me guess — you ran out of cash and you’re getting hungry. Let’s call it your usual consulting deal. I’ll push the paperwork through. So what’s the latest on the crash?”

“The latest is that our investigator-in-charge, Colonel Marquez, is convinced we’re looking at a hijacking.”

“Hijacking?” The retired general went stiff in his seat.

“The cockpit door appears to have been forced open. And the first officer was killed execution style, a bullet to the back of his head.”

“Jesus. What about the captain?”

“His story is a little less clear. I’m working on it.”

“Do we know who’s responsible?”

“No idea. But one of the passengers was found in the copilot’s seat.”

“That’s not good. The feds over at JTTF will want to know about this. Any idea who the alleged hijacker was? Any terrorist ties? Did he have any flying experience?”

“Marquez has just started looking into his background, but so far there’s nothing of note. Before Saturday he was a sixty-two-year-old chef from Cartagena.”

Green stared blankly at the wall. “A chef.”

“Pastries, apparently. You know—éclairs and cream puffs.”

“Cream puffs? That’s my briefing point to the directors of Homeland Security and National Intelligence? I’m telling you, Jammer, for reasons I do not understand this crash is raising a shitstorm, and I’d sure like a little more than that when I dance on their carpets this afternoon.”

“I could give you some lessons.”

“No thanks, I’ve seen your moves and they’re not pretty.” Green blew out a long breath. “This hijacking theory — you say it’s being put out there by Marquez. Do you buy it?”

The pause was too long.

“Jammer?”

“I don’t know. Just trust me, skipper. I can tell you that Marquez is keeping the hijacking angle quiet for now. We need time to confirm some things. Oh, and one of the passengers was also shot.”

“Do you have a name?”

Another hesitation. “No, there was some confusion in the seating assignments — you know how that goes. I’ll pass the name along when we have a firm ID.”

“All right,” Green said.

“I should also tell you that the Colombian Police have gotten involved.”

“That’s never good, but I suppose it’s no surprise given that bullets were flying.”

“Right. Listen, Larry, I gotta get back to work. I’ll call again when I have more.”

“All right, Jammer. Good luck finding Jen.”

“Yeah… thanks.”

After the click Green sat still, his hand glued to the phone. Davis had told him a great deal, yet one sentence lodged in his head.

Just trust me, skipper.

Four words that could not have been more carefully crafted.

It took him back eighteen years, to a mission over Spangdahlem, Germany. Green had been a rising major, an instructor pilot, and Davis a green first lieutenant. They were flying a pair of F-16s, tearing through the sky on a five-hundred-knot low-level run, three hundred feet above the ground. The world was rocketing past, a Star Wars onrush in the front windscreen, nothing but a blur in the periphery. Green’s job as flight lead was to navigate to the target, masking behind terrain and watching for obstacles. As the wingman, Davis had but one sacred duty — hang tight.

They were twenty miles from the target that day when the weather began to deteriorate. The ceiling above was a hard deck, a thousand feet over their heads at the beginning of the route. Yet slowly, insidiously, the clouds crept lower, and when their canopies began skimming the bottoms at three hundred feet, Green did the only sage thing. He rocked his wings, bringing Davis into close formation, and aborted the run, the two fighters climbing into the gray overcast as one.

It was a standard contingency plan — a weather route abort. Everything pre-briefed and by the book. Davis was rock solid, his wingtip two feet from Green’s as they climbed at full thrust into the soup. Then everything went wrong. Green became distracted. He tried to raise air traffic control on the radio for a new clearance, tried to enter new navigation points in his jet’s computer, all while flying a smooth platform for his wingman. With so much to do, he never noticed the problem.

In military aviation it is referred to as spatial disorientation, or spatial-D. When the horizon disappears and clouds take over, sight naturally becomes secondary to seat-of-the-pants sensory inputs. Vestibular and tactile responses try to take over, but they are unreliable for orientation. That being the case, pilots are trained to fly on instruments, exactly as Green had done that day. But they are also trained to cross-check gauges, and in those very busy moments Green had come up short. He didn’t recognize that his primary artificial horizon had failed — a one-in-a-million anomaly the mechanics later told him.

Fortunately, on that morning, he had a one-in-a-million wingman.

When flying close formation in the weather, a wingman has but one inviolate duty — don’t ding your multimillion dollar wing-tip on the other only inches away. It is a time for absolute focus, for constant small corrections and hand-eye coordination, allowing only the briefest of moments to glance at anything else in the world. But Davis did glance.

The radio exchange remained fixed in Green’s mind like it was yesterday.

Davis in a calm voice, “Bones 21, 22.”

Green replied with slight irritation. He was a busy man. “Go ahead 22.”

“I’m showing a ninety-degree left bank.”

A lengthy pause.

Green remembered looking at his primary attitude indicator, and seeing everything straight and level. But then a glance at his standby instrument showed them turning on their heads. “Uh… standby, Bones 22.”

There is perhaps no more sickening feeling in the world than to be rocketing though the clouds at four hundred knots, only to realize you have no idea which way is up.

Davis’ voice again, as still as a mountain, “You okay, Bones 21? We’re nearly inverted, nose coming down.”

“My ADI is messed up!” Green recalled the terrible feeling, his head uncaged and spinning like a top as he tried to cross-check and correlate conflicting information. Airspeed, heading, rate of descent. Big rate of descent. And most important of all, altitude — the precise distance between two fragile jets and some very hard German countryside. A distance that was fast approaching zero.

“Give me the lead, Bones 21!” Not a fault in the mountain — but definite urgency.

“Bones 22, you have the lead!”

Davis’ sleek fighter edged forward and the transition came. Green became the wingman, Davis his only reference to the misty outside world.

Later that night in a quiet debriefing in the squadron bar, and with both men less than sober, they talked about the recovery. Davis had referenced his instruments and confirmed they were screaming toward the ground. There was no time for calculation, no time to estimate the rate of pull-up necessary for survival. Davis could have pulled for all he was worth, a nine-G panic-yank on the controls that would have left a hopelessly disoriented Green alone and pointed toward the earth’s mantle at just over the speed of sound. If he had done that, Davis would have saved his own ass, and no accident board in the world would have faulted him. He told Green after their third Jäger shot that he really didn’t know the elevation in that area. The ground might have been twenty feet above sea level, might have been two thousand. But Davis, in his first ever maneuver as a flight lead, didn’t leave his wingman for dead.

He’d gone for a metered pull-up, a smooth and steady acceleration that began like a kid’s roller coaster and finished like an orbital reentry. On the initial pull, with his orientation still sideways, Green had bobbled in formation for just an instant. That was when he heard the voice again. Steady and true.

“Just trust me, skipper.”

And Green had.

They’d bottomed out that day at two hundred feet — Green knew because they briefly broke out underneath the clouds before climbing back into the muck for an uneventful recovery. If Davis had pulled just a bit harder he would have lost Green. If he’d pulled a little less they would have ended up as a pair of smoking holes in perfect formation.

In that critical moment, Jammer Davis had played it perfectly.

There was never any formal report of the incident. Aside from one maintenance write-up on Green’s jet to have a faulty attitude system repaired, the events of that day remained between the two of them.

Now Green wondered what new fog he was flying into, wondered which way was up as he sat behind his desk at L’Enfant Plaza. Davis was walking a tightrope in Colombia, and Green wanted desperately to help him. Up against them were strange undercurrents. He was getting heat from above for information, and Davis’ hesitation to provide it was obvious. Stuck in between, Green knew where his allegiance lay.

Just trust me, skipper.

Between the two of them it was a private message. An inseparable bond.

Larry Green would do anything for the man who’d saved his life on that bleak autumn day over Germany. Like most who attain the rank of general, he was an action-oriented individual, a Type A who didn’t enjoy sitting on the sidelines while his troops engaged in battle. Sometimes, however, you had to do exactly that. Jammer had a daughter at stake, which meant Colombia was his war. But if a time came when he needed reinforcements, Green would be ready, because the bond worked both ways.

Jammer was trusting him as well.

At one that afternoon Davis boarded the hourly shuttle to the crash site.

Marquez demurred, remaining at headquarters in order to sling arrows at his latest targets — the identity of Captain Reyna, and the background of the accused hijacker, Umbriz. Davis knew he was useless for that campaign, his fitness for face-to-face interviews handicapped by the language barrier. All the same, when Marquez encouraged him to head back into the jungle, he wondered if that was where the colonel thought he’d be most useful, or if it was reflection of the vector their relationship had taken after the morning’s accusations. On the surface at least, professionalism ruled the day, but Davis sensed a new lens of mistrust between him and Marquez through which everything would have to be filtered.

On arriving at the crash site, the word that came to Davis’ mind was progress. The first trucks had arrived to transport wreckage, and smaller sections of debris were already being loaded up for their final journey. He saw two men in police uniforms poking through the fuselage, clearly Echevarria’s contingent, and he wondered how they had gotten here so quickly. Certainly not by way of inter-agency cooperation.

Davis bypassed the main debris field and walked east into the wetlands, the area beneath the initial impact zone where the tail had been discovered. This was where Marquez had vowed to keep up the search for the two unrecovered bodies. When he arrived Davis saw no one on the task, and he was momentarily frozen by a terrible idea.

Had the search stopped because they’d succeeded?

Then, mercifully, he spotted two men leaning against a tree, smoking cigarettes, and his panic subsided. Davis approached the pair and launched into a broken conversation in which they confirmed that no additional bodies had been located. They also told him Marquez was going to end the search if nothing was found by the end of the day.

The cigarettes ended, butts went spinning into the wall of ferns, and both men got back to work. They pulled up hip waders, shouldered equipment, and in divergent paths began sweeping their probes left and right, like a pair of electronic lawn sprinklers. They set a loose pattern in the algae-topped water, stirring vegetation and parting thick stands of weeds. It was a primitive way to go about things, but Davis supposed it was effective to a point. A cadaver dog would have been better, yet he doubted there was one within a thousand miles. The marsh seemed exceptionally still, sound dampened by thick carpets of fungus and huge waxen fronds. Visually, it was a place more suited to dinosaurs than a wrecked airliner, a Jurassic topography that would grab things and swallow them, make them disappear for a million years. Davis had an urge to help the men, suggest better ways to go about their search.

But is that what I want? Success here?

His frustration level peaking, Davis decided he needed a little truth. A few fresh, hard facts he could trust and use to make some headway. Standing ankle deep in muck, and with a flying insect the size of a sparrow orbiting his head, he knew there was only one way to get them. Davis turned on a heel, his boot making a giant sucking sound, and began walking back to the main debris field. He would have to go over everything one more time.