Airframe (24 page)

"Oh my God," Harmon said, staring at the tape.

On the monitor, everything seemed to be crazy angles. The baby slid forward on the mother's lap; she grabbed at the kid, clutched it to her chest. The camera was shaking and twisting.

Passengers in the background were yelling, grabbing the armrests, as the plane went into a steep descent.

Then the camera twisted again, and everybody seemed to sink in the seats, the mother slumping down under the G-force, her cheeks sagging, shoulders falling, baby crying. Then the man shouted, "What the hell?" and the wife rose into the air, restrained only by the seat belt.

Then the camera flew up in the air, and there was an abrupt, crunching sound, after which the image began to spiral rapidly. When the image became steady again, it showed something white, with lines. Before she could register what it was, the camera moved and she saw an armrest from below, fingers gripping the pad. The camera had fallen in the aisle and was shooting straight up. The screams continued.

"My God," Harmon said again.

The video image began to slide, gaining speed, moving past seat after seat. But it was going aft, she realized: the plane must be climbing again. Before she could get her bearings, the camera lifted into the air.

Weightless, she thought. The plane must have reached the end of the climb, and now it was 132

nosing over again, for a moment of weightlessness before—

The image crashed down, twisting and tumbling rapidly. There was a thunkl and she glimpsed a blurred gaping mouth, teeth. Then it was moving again, and apparently landed on a seat. A large shoe swung toward the lens, kicked it.

The image spun rapidly, settled again. It was back in the aisle, facing the rear of the plane.

The briefly steady image was horrifying: arms and legs stuck out into the aisle from the rows of seats. People were screaming, clutching anything they could. The camera immediately began to slide again, this time forward.

The plane was in a dive.

The camera slid faster and faster, banging into a midships bulkhead, spinning so it was now facing forward. It raced : toward a body lying in the aisle. An elderly Chinese woman looked up in time for the camera to strike her in the forehead, and then the camera flew into the air, tumbling crazily, and came down again.

There was a close view of something shiny, like a belt buckle, and then it was sliding forward once more, into the forward compartment, still going, banging into a woman's shoe in the aisle, twisting, racing forward.

It went into the forward galley, where it lodged for a moment. A wine bottle rolled across the floor, banged into it, and the camera spun several times, then began to fall end over end, the image flipping as the camera went all the way past the forward galley to the cockpit.

The cockpit door was open; she had a brief glimpse of sky through the flight deck windows, blue shoulders and a cap, and then with a crash the camera came to rest, giving a steady view of a uniform gray field. After a moment, she realized the camera had at this point lodged beneath the cockpit door, right where Casey had found it, and it was taping the carpet There was nothing more to see, just the gray blur of carpet, but she could hear the alarms in the cockpit, the electronic warnings, and the voice reminders coming one after another, "Airspeed ...

Airspeed," and "Stall ... Stall." More electronic warnings, excited voices shouting in Chinese.

"Stop the tape," she said.

Harmon stopped it.

"Jesus Christ," he said.

She ran through the tape once more, and then did it in slow motion. But even in slow motion, she realized, much of the movement was an indistinguishable blur. She kept saying, "I can't see, I can't see what's happening."

Harmon, who had by now become accustomed to the sequence, said, "I can do an enhanced frame analysis for you."

"What's that?'

"I can use the computers to go in and interpolate frames where the movement is too fast."

"Interpolate?"

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"The computer looks at the first frame, and the frame following, and generates an intermediate frame between the two. It's a point-mapping decision, basically. But it will slow down—"

"No," she said. "I don't want anything added by the computers. What else can you do?"

"I can double or triple the frames. In fast segments, it would give you a little jerkiness, but at least you'd be able to see. Here, look." He went to one segment, where the camera was tumbling through the air, then slowed it down. "Now here, all these frames are just a blur—it's camera movement, not subject movement—but here. See this one frame here? You get a readable image."

It showed a view looking back down the aircraft. Passengers falling over the seats, their arms and legs streaks from swift movement.

"So that's a usable frame," Harmon said. She saw what he was driving at. Even in rapid movement the camera was steady enough to create a useful image, every dozen frames or so.

"Okay," she said, "do it."

"We can do more," he said. "We can send it out, and—"

She shook her head. "Under no circumstances does this tape leave this building," she said.

"Okay."

"I need you to run me two copies of this videotape," she said. "And make sure you run it all the way to the end."

IAA/HANGAR 4

5:25 P.M.

The RAMS team was still swarming over the Transpacific aircraft in Hangar 5. Casey walked past to the next hangar in the line, and went inside. There, working in near silence in the cavernous space, Mary Ringer's team was doing Interior Artifact Analysis.

Across the concrete floor, strips of orange tape nearly three hundred feet long marked the interior walls of the Transpacific N-22. Crosswise strips indicated the principal bulkheads; parallel strips were placed for each row of seats. Here and there, white flags stood in wooden blocks, indicating various critical points.

Six feet overhead, still more strips had been pulled taut, demarcating the ceiling and upper luggage compartments of the aircraft. The total effect was a ghostly orange outline of the dimensions of the passenger cabin.

Within this outline, five women, all psychologists and engineers, moved carefully and quietly.

The women were placing articles of clothing, carry-on bags, cameras, children's toys, and other personal objects on the floor. In some cases, thin blue tape ran from the object to some other location, indicating how the object had moved during the accident.

All around them on the hangar walls hung large, blowup photographs of the interior, taken on 134

Monday. The IAA team worked in near silence, thoughtfully, referring to the photos and notes.

Interior Artifact Analysis was rarely done. It was a desperation effort, seldom yielding useful information. In the case of TPA 545, Ringer's team had been brought in from the start, because the large number of injuries carried with it the threat of litigation. Passengers literally would not know what happened to them; assertions were often wild. IAA attempted to make sense of the movement of people and objects within the cabin. But it was a slow and difficult undertaking.

She saw Mary Ringer, a heavyset, gray-haired woman of fifty, near the aft section of the plane. "Mary," she said. "Where are we on cameras?"

"I figured you'd want to know." Mary consulted her notes. "We found nineteen cameras.

Thirteen still and six video. Of the thirteen still cameras, five were broken, the film exposed. Two others had no film. The remaining six were developed, and three had shots, all taken before the incident. But we're using the pictures to try and place passengers, because Transpacific still hasn't provided a seating chart."

"And videos?"

"Uh, let's see ..." She consulted her notes, sighing again. "Six video cameras, two with footage on board the aircraft, none during the incident. I heard about the video on television. I don't know where that came from. Passenger must have carried it off at LAX."

"Probably."

"What about the flight data recorder? We really need it to—"

"You and everybody else," Casey said. "I'm working on it." She glanced around the aft compartment, laid out by tape. She saw the pilot's cap lying on the concrete, in the corner.

"Wasn't there a name in that cap?"

"Yeah, on the inside," Mary said. "It's Zen Ching, or something like that. We got the label translated."

"Who translated it?"

"Eileen Han, in Marder's office. She reads and writes Mandarin, helps us out. Why?"

"I just had a question. Not important." Casey headed for the door.

"Casey," Mary said. "We need that flight recorder." "I know," Casey said. "I know."

She called Norma. "Who can translate Chinese for me?"

"You mean, besides Eileen?"

"Right. Besides her." She felt she should keep this away from Marder's office.

"Let me see," Norma said. "How about Ellen Fong, in Accounting? She used to work for the FAA, as a translator."

"Isn't her husband in Structure with Doherty?"

"Yeah, but Ellen's discreet."

"You sure?"

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"I know," Norma said, in a certain tone.

BLDG 1O2/ACCOUNTING

5:50 P.M.

She went to the accounting department, in the basement of Building 102, arriving just before six. She found Ellen Fong getting ready to go home.

"Ellen," she said, "I need a favor."

"Sure." Ellen was a perpetually cheerful woman of forty, a mother of three.

"Didn't you used to work for the FAA as a translator?"

"A long time ago," Ellen said.

"I need something translated."

"Casey, you can get a much better translator—"

"I'd rather you do it," she said. "This is confidential."

She handed Ellen the tape. "I need the voices in the last nine minutes."

"Okay..."

"And I'd prefer you not mention this to anybody."

"Including Bill?" That was her husband.

Casey nodded. "Is that a problem?"

"Not at all." She looked at the tape in her hand. "When?"

'Tomorrow? Friday at the latest?"

"Done," Ellen Fong said.

NAIL

5:55 P.M.

Casey took the second copy of the tape to the Norton Audio Interpretation Lab, in the back of Building 24. NAIL was run by a former CIA guy from Omaha, a paranoid electronics genius named Jay Ziegler, who built his own audio filter boards and playback equipment because, he said, he didn't trust anyone to do it for him.

Norton had constructed NAIL to help the government agencies interpret cockpit voice recorder tapes. After an accident, the government took CVRs and analyzed them in Washington. This was done to prevent them from being leaked to the press before an investigation was completed. But although the agencies had experienced staff to transcribe the tapes, they were less skilled at interpreting sounds inside the cockpit—the alarms and audio reminders that often went off. These sounds represented proprietary Norton systems, so Norton had built a facility to analyze them.

The heavy soundproof door, as always, was locked. Casey pounded on it, and after a while a voice on the speaker said, "Give the password."

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"It's Casey Singleton, Jay."

"Give the password."

"Jay, for Christ's sake. Open the door."

There was a click, and silence. She waited. The thick door pushed open a crack. She saw Jay Ziegler, hair down to his shoulders, wearing dark sunglasses. He said, "Oh. All right. Come ahead, Singleton. You're cleared for this station."

He opened the door a fraction wider, and she squeezed past him into a darkened room.

Ziegler immediately slammed the door shut, threw three bolts in succession.

"Better if you call first, Singleton. We have a secure line in. Four-level scramble encoded."

"I'm sorry, Jay, but something's come up."

"Security's everybody's business."

She handed him the spool of magnetic tape. He glanced at it. "This is one-inch mag, Singleton."

"We don't often see this, at this station."

"Can you read it?"

Ziegler nodded. "Can read anything, Singleton. Anything you throw at us." He put the tape on a horizontal drum and threaded it. Then he glanced over his shoulder. "Are you cleared for the contents of this?"

"It's my tape, Jay."

"Just asking."

She said, "I should tell you that this tape is—"

"Don't tell me anything, Singleton. Better that way."

On all the monitors in the room, she saw oscilloscope squiggles, green lines jumping against black, as the tape began to play. "Uh ... okay," Ziegler said. "We got high-eight audio track, Dolby D encoded, got to be a home video camera ..." Over the speaker, she heard a rhythmic crunching sound.

Ziegler stared at his monitors. Some of them were now generating fancy data, building three-dimensional models of the sound, which looked like shimmering multicolored beads on a string.

The programs were also generating slices at various hertz.

"Footsteps," Ziegler announced "Rubber-soled feet on grass or dirt. Countryside, no urban signature. Footsteps probably male. And, uh, slight dysrhythmic, he's probably carrying something. Not too heavy. But consistently off-balance."

Casey remembered the first image on the videotape: a man walking up the path, away from a Chinese village, with the child on his shoulder.

"You're right," she said, impressed.

Now there was a tweeting sound—some sort of birdcall. "Hold on, hold on," Ziegler said, punching buttons. The tweet replayed, again and again, the beads jumping on the string. "Huh,"