Passenger 19

SIX

An hour later Davis was riding to the same crash site in the same helicopter. Through the open door he saw the same metal skid, and made a silent promise not to jump when they arrived.

A morning mist hung heavy, restricting visibility to no more than two miles. As the Huey clattered onward, the forest ahead resolved and everything behind disappeared, making it seem as if they were traveling in a bubble — a sensation that was both disorienting and isolating.

When they arrived, he saw that the grass in the clearing had been flattened by dozens of takeoffs and landings, and a new path had been worn through the jungle, connecting to the wreckage field. He’d been told the nearest town with a name was an hour away, more when the weather turned disagreeable. In the coming days trucks would begin to roll in over logging roads, makeshift thoroughfares that would prove indispensable as loads of debris were hoisted from the jungle and hauled away, the final inglorious journey of TAC-Air Flight 223. Until then, every bit of evidence would be plotted and recorded for future reference. The most delicate work, that of recovering remains, was already under way.

The Huey set down in a flurry of dust, and before the rotors stopped spinning, a lieutenant trotted up to the chopper and began a lengthy discussion with Marquez. He handed over a hand-drawn diagram before turning away.

The colonel studied the drawing, and announced, “We have recovered nearly all the bodies. They will be transported by helicopter to Bogotá and kept temporarily in a hospital morgue.” He rattled the paper, his attention still divided. “This is a preliminary seating chart. We began with the assigned seating information provided by the airline, and then searched each body for documents — wallets, passports, boarding passes. Anything to confirm identity. Of course, we also cross-checked the basic information already on file, things like age and gender. All findings must be consistent.”

The professional in Davis tried to be impressed. The father in him wanted to tear the diagram out of the colonel’s hand. “Are you still two passengers short?” He didn’t breathe waiting for the answer.

“Yes. And one of the empty seats was assigned to your daughter.”

The weight of the world shifted ever so slightly — still on Davis’ shoulders, but perhaps at a more comfortable angle. The odds were only abysmal now, one in a hundred thousand. It was progress, of sorts.

“You understand,” said Marquez, “that seating charts are often misleading.”

“I know,” Davis said.

The colonel’s acumen was again on display. Like Davis, he’d been born a military investigator, yet had acquired a working knowledge of airline operations. Commercial airlines were not as closely moored to precision or regulation, instead taking a more customer friendly, laissez-faire approach. When it came to seating, passengers freely traded places with friends and relatives. They might move to a vacant seat after takeoff to get a window view, or to avoid a captive conversation with a boorish seatmate. Flight attendants often reseated passengers to manage practical matters, such as language barriers in emergency exit rows, or weight and balance issues on small aircraft. Flight attendants also moved customers to suit their own objectives, shunting a drunk to someone else’s serving section, or upgrading an attractive traveler to their own. The bottom line: people changed seats on airplanes like they did in church, and for nearly as many reasons. Which meant airline seating diagrams had to be taken with a grain of salt.

“How many passengers have you positively identified?” Davis asked.

“Of the twenty-one on record, twelve with a high degree of confidence. Four others are reasonably certain, and of course we have the two disappearances — if the seating chart is accurate, one being your daughter.”

“That still leaves three.”

Marquez handed over the diagram.

Davis saw a well-traced outline of the cabin, and depicted inside were seven rows of three seats. The seats were split by an aisle, arranged with two to port and one to starboard along the length of the cabin.

While Davis studied the drawing, Marquez said, “The front row of seats was severely damaged — all of the occupants were thrown clear. We found one body on the floor of the forward cabin, and another near the left wing root — both are in poor condition. We will sort them out in time, but judging by dress and build both are certainly male, which is consistent with the seating assignment for that row.”

Davis nearly argued this assumption. He had once encountered a passenger manifest with one extra female, and a deficit of one on the male side of the ledger. That mystery went all the way to the medical examiner who settled things with one word: transgender. That was the thing about sudden death — it kept a recklessly intimate relationship with truth.

Davis decided to stay his objection. “And the third body from the front row?”

Marquez hesitated. “Seat 2A. This was also a man, however… it would be better to show you where he came to rest.”

“What about the pilots?” Davis asked.

“Both remain in the cockpit. We are taking our time with their recovery — you will better understand when you see the circumstances.”

“All right. And the flight attendant?”

Marquez pointed to an X outside the diagram. “The flight attendant was thrown clear — she does not appear to have been strapped into the forward cabin jumpseat. Positively identified as Mercedes Fuentes, age twenty-six. She’d been working for TAC-Air for twelve months.”

Davis nodded. “A hell of a way to end your probationary period. One more question — when your people removed the bodies from the seats, were all the seat belts cinched tightly?”

Marquez looked at him questioningly. “You seem very concerned with safety belts.”

“Little things can tell you a lot. If all the seat belts were pulled tight, then the crew knew there was a problem. It means the flight attendant was screaming at them in the final minutes to tighten their belts and assume the brace position. The passengers would have done it, every last one. On the other hand, if you found all the seat belts loosened casually… it would suggest the airplane hit without warning.”

“Yes, I see your point. I will ask my team for an answer. Earlier you asked whether the belts on the empty seats were latched. Why?”

“If the belts on that last row of seats were loosely latched,” Davis hesitated for a long moment, “then I’d say those occupants were forcibly ejected in the crash.”

“But they were unlatched. What do you take from that?”

“I don’t know. This was a one-hour flight in an aircraft that had no lavatory. That doesn’t leave many reasons to get up. If those two belts were truly undone, I’d say you’re looking at two empty seats on an airplane whose paperwork shows a full boat.”

“That is extremely speculative,” Marquez said quickly. “The video footage was clear. Every passenger boarded that airplane. I must caution you again, Mr. Davis — if you raise your hopes too high, there is only one place to go.”

“Nobody knows that better than me.”

Marquez stepped down from the Huey, the chopper’s stilled rotor blades sagging in the building heat. Davis followed, noting a lone vulture wheeling overhead on some unseen updraft — an apt marker for what he knew was to come. They came upon a soldier that Davis thought looked vaguely familiar. The man eyed him cautiously.

Davis stopped and said to Marquez, “Please tell him I apologize for my bad behavior last night.”

Marquez provided the translation, and the corporal gave Davis an indifferent sideways nod.

“Tell him I’m going to send his squad a case of rum.”

Marquez did, and the soldier lit a smile and slapped Davis on the shoulder.

That settled, Marquez set off toward the crash site. Davis stayed where he was, and called out, “Give me a couple of minutes. I’d like to take a look at the big picture first.”

“Very well. Take as long as you need, but when you are done please come find me. I would like your opinion on what we’ve found in the cockpit.” Marquez walked away on a freshly worn path through the knee-high grass.

Davis went the other way. He backtracked to the far side of the clearing and found a spot in the shade. He liked to begin every case in this same way, taking a distant viewpoint. He leaned against the trunk of a hardwood tree and pulled out a warm Coke and a bottle of Motrin — the restorative vitamin M — that had been given to him mercifully by the helicopter crew. He used one to wash down a handful of the other.

From that vantage point, in torpid jungle heat at the end of the earth, Davis went to work.

Not by chance, the vast majority of aircraft accidents take place within ten miles of an airport. The simple reason is that most mishaps occur during the business of either takeoff or landing. Such airfield accidents, on balance, present largely intact airframes, unfortunate vessels that have strayed from final approach, landed hard in a crosswind, or skidded off a slick runway during a rejected takeoff. In all these circumstances, the meeting of metal and earth takes place at a relatively low speed, and as Newton so elegantly proved, the force of any impact is a matter of mass multiplied by acceleration. Or in the case of air crashes, deceleration.

Unfortunately, deep in the south-central jungle of Colombia, Davis was looking at the other kind of crash. He was looking at the aftermath of a mid-flight interruption, one in which a reliable and tested airframe, for reasons undetermined, had fallen from normal cruise flight and struck the earth at a random point. It is the rarest kind of accident, and with few exceptions, the most catastrophic. To begin, there are no first responders. In many cases the loss is not even recognized until a flight becomes long overdue. The very location of such disasters can take days, weeks, even years to pinpoint. Some go lost for eternity. That they’d been able to locate this crash within a day put them well ahead of that curve. But as any investigator would tell you, such an accident site is to be approached with profound trepidation. You can end up staring at a hole in a swamp two hundred feet deep, or climbing the side of a mountain glacier. Even diving into the depths of a ten-thousand-foot ocean trench.

So as Davis stood leaning against a tree, a fizzing Coke in his hand, he knew things could have been worse. The jungle was the main impediment here, thick and impenetrable in sections, a high canopy of hardwood trees overlaying dense vegetation. Bits of wreckage would be embedded in the soft organic floor, snagged high in the upper canopy, and speared into softwood timber. Yet the very foliage that would bedevil recovery efforts had also done Colonel Marquez and his team a great favor.

Davis saw it from where he stood, to his left along the horizon — the point where TAC-Air Flight 223 had first clipped the trees, and then sheared off tops at progressively lower levels. This slanted pruning gave a good indication of strike angle. The jet had not been locked in a steep dive, nor had it been fluttering through a flat spin. It had been gliding in a shallow, controlled descent — still flying until the bitter end. From the clipped treetops, Davis could also infer the direction of flight, roughly to the southwest. Precise heading and strike angle would be eventually calculated, confirmed by flight data recorder information and a survey using proper GPS equipment. But that would take time.

He next worked out distance, estimating that from the first sign of impact, at the crest of the canopy, to the spot where the main wreckage now rested, was roughly eight hundred meters. This gave an approximation of the energy state of the aircraft when it went in — essentially, a reflection of speed and weight — and Davis decided that the jet had been traveling at a moderate speed on impact. Not fast, not slow. Two hundred knots, two fifty at the top end. Again, an indication of an airplane flying within its normal performance envelope.

Surveying the debris field, his eye went first to the halved main fuselage, a shattered centerpiece to the fragments of airliner all around. Some of the strewn parts were recognizable, others less so. The tail was the most distant parcel, or so Marquez had said — Davis saw no sign of it behind umbrellalike stands of vegetation. The earth in that direction looked wet and swampy, suggesting a difficult recovery effort.

The tip of the right wing had broken off and was basking in full sun at the edge of the clearing. The left wing had separated completely — one of the few details he remembered from last night — and although Davis couldn’t see it from where he stood, he knew it had been accounted for. Also not connected were the engines. The ARJ-35’s twin turbofans were mounted aft, beneath the T-tail in a classic regional jet design. Both powerplants had separated on impact and pitched into the undergrowth. This was not by chance. Because jet engines are heavy, the most dense parts on any aircraft, engineers intentionally design fracture points in the mounts to allow them to separate in the event of a severe deceleration, thereby minimizing damage to the fuselage body and all that is precious within. Marquez, like Davis, would know where to find them — at the forward reaches of the debris footprint.

This was one of the things Davis had grown to appreciate about his discipline. For all the apparent chaos and randomness, when airplanes hit the ground, they break apart with striking uniformity. A professor somewhere had once devised a model that predicted with 90 percent accuracy, or so he claimed, where any given subsection of an aircraft would end up after a crash. Davis thought it might be true, at least under laboratory conditions.

The problem was the other 10 percent. When a long metal tube careens through the air at hundreds of miles an hour, enough variables are introduced to implode any semblance of certainty. There are mechanical issues and weather, air traffic that ranges from jumbo jets to turkey vultures, and what safety specialists refer to as “human factors.” This last variable was always the most difficult to derive from wreckage. It was also the most common primary cause. Everything from old-fashioned screwups to intentional acts of terrorism. Marquez had concerns about something in the cockpit, where the two most vital humans in this tragedy were seated in the critical moments thirty-six hours ago. As far as Davis was concerned, everything remained on the table.

He took one last look at his wide-angle panorama. In the surrounding jungle were a hundred yellow flags hanging limp in the stagnant air, makeshift headstones to mark the fragments of TAC-Air Flight 223. In time every piece would be mapped, photographed, identified, and ultimately moved to a final resting place. He saw fifteen men and women already working the site and a dozen soldiers guarding the perimeter. Guarding against who or what Davis couldn’t say.

He drained his Coke and started off toward the site. The Motrin hadn’t kicked in yet, and with the equatorial sun nearing its apex, brewing and pounding, Davis squinted as he left the protection of the shade. It was time to see the seat Jen should have been sitting in.

It was time to kill questions with answers.