Darwin's Blade (2 page)

Dar drove the vehicle down the first grade, up the two-mile uphill section, and then down the long canyon road—the worst grade was 10.5 percent—finally bringing the vehicle to a full stop at a pullout ten yards beyond where the accident vehicle had plunged off the highway. He turned the vehicle around and drove it back to the summit.

“The brakes worked,” said Dar to the assembled School Board members and CHP patrolmen. “There was no brake warning light. No smoke or smell of burning brake linings.”

He explained what had happened on the day of the accident.

The bus driver had left the national forest campsite with both of her emergency parking brakes set. After the first downhill stretch where they could smell the brakes burning, the next two miles had been uphill. “Brakes give off an odor,” explained Dar, “when the brake drum and shoes reach temperatures above approximately 600 degrees Fahrenheit.” The teachers, students, and driver had smelled the burning odor during both the first couple of downhill and uphill miles on the return journey. The driver had ignored the smell.

The brake warning light had gone off briefly and then started blinking again as the bus approached the top of the last rise before the long descent toward Borrego Springs. The surviving teacher, sitting in the first row on the right side, had seen it blinking.

“There's only one engineering explanation for the brake warning light to signal brake overheating during this portion of the trip,” said Dar. “The emergency brakes had been applied continuously from the time the bus had left the campsite parking lot.” In addition, he explained, the surviving passengers told of the bus “handling poorly” and “surging slightly” during the first two uphill miles of the trip. The driver had ignored all of these warning signs and had begun the long, downhill section of the canyon road.

Dar explained that on the day of the accident, he had noted that the front wheels of the bus were freewheeling but that the rear wheels were locked. He explained further that this type of bus had automatic brakes that would be applied without driver input when air pressure in the system drops below 30 pounds per square inch. The locked rear wheels had told him that low air pressure in the brake system had caused the automatic brakes to be applied, and their Safety Board tests had shown that the system had not leaked and that the air compressor was sound. But the automatic brakes could not stop the bus because they had been overheated prior to their application.

At this point Dar got back in the bus, set the parking brake, and drove away from the campsite again. A convoy of CHP vehicles and private cars followed.

The bus surged slightly going uphill. Both Dar and his assistant manning the video camera commented on tape that they could smell the brakes burning. CHP vehicles trailing the bus reported over their radios that they could clearly see smoke coming from the rear wheels. The brake warning light came on. Dar paused briefly where the accident-bus driver had paused, pumped the brakes as she had, and then started down the long incline.

The brakes failed 1.3 miles down the steep canyon road. The automatic brakes deployed but then also failed due to overheating. The bus began to accelerate.

When the bus reached 46 miles per hour, Dar shifted from D-3 to D-2, slowing it, and then shifted to D-1, causing the bus to lurch but also to slow quickly. Still moving 11 miles per hour, he selected a sandy patch of hillside on the inside stretch of the next curve and nosed the bus into it, bringing it to a halt with only the smallest of bumps. A second later, the armada of CHP cruisers and School Board members' cars converged on the bus. Dar got in one of the highway patrol cars and they drove down to the accident site.

“The driver left the campsite with her parking brake on, which meant that both emergency brakes were set, thus overheating the entire system for the first two miles and dropping the air pressure below thirty psi,” he said to the crowd gathered around the point where the bus had left the highway. “The automatic brakes deployed, but their efficiency was low because of the overheating. Still, that should have been enough to slow the bus to below twenty-eight miles per hour. It did in this reenactment.”

“But you were going faster than that,” said the superintendent of schools.

Dar nodded. “I manually shifted from second gear into third gear and then to fourth,” said Dar.

“But the driver said that she shifted
down,
” said the president of the School Board.

Dar nodded. “I know. But she didn't. When we inspected the transmission after the accident, it was locked in fourth gear. The Allison automatic transmission is programmed to automatically shift
down
in the event of such sudden acceleration. The driver overrode the automatic transmission and shifted into fourth gear.”

The crowd stared at him.

“The road marks here showed five hundred and fifty feet of striated, curved tire marks on the day of the accident,” he said, pointing. The marks were still visible. All eyes followed his pointing finger. “The automatic braking system, although degraded by loss of air pressure due to overheating, was still trying to stop the bus when it hit the guardrail up there.” Everyone turned to see the bent and battered guardrail. “The bus was going sixty-four miles per hour when it contacted the guardrail,” said Dar. “It was doing approximately forty-eight miles per hour when it left the road and became airborne about
here.
”

All heads turned back.

“The bus was in fourth gear when it hit the guardrail because the driver had selected that gear,” said Dar, “not because the transmission had failed or automatically upshifted. She was in a panic. After burning out the brakes, ignoring the burning brake odor and the unusual handling of the bus going uphill, then after ignoring the brake-pressure warning light and deciding to continue down the steep grade despite the fact that the brakes felt ‘weird and mushy' at the top of the pass, the driver overrode the automatic transmission at approximately twenty-eight miles per hour and shifted into fourth gear by mistake.”

Two months after the accident, Dar had read in the back pages of a local paper that the driver had been found guilty of reckless driving resulting in the wrongful death of seven persons. She had received a one-year suspended sentence and her class B commercial driver's license had been suspended indefinitely. None of the Los Angeles TV stations or newspapers that had hailed her as an unsung hero covered this aspect of the story in anything more than a passing mention, perhaps out of embarrassment at their earlier enthusiasm.

It was light enough to drive without headlights when Dar reached the accident scene. Cameron had been slightly off in his location; it was a little less than a mile from where the canyon opened out into desert. The twisting road showed all of the accoutrements of modern highway death: highway patrol cars parked along the shoulder, flares sizzling, cones set up, patrolmen herding what traffic there was up and down the left, uphill lane, two ambulances, even a helicopter buzzing above. Everything except wreckage.

Dar ignored the patrolman's waving baton and pulled off on the broad right shoulder where the official vehicles were parked. Red and blue lights painted the canyon walls with pulsing light.

The patrolman strode over to the NSX. “Hey! You can't park there. This is an accident scene.”

“Sergeant Cameron sent for me.”

“Cameron?” The officer was still pissed off at Dar's disregard for his baton. “Why? You from Accident Detail? Got ID?”

Dar shook his head. “Just tell Sergeant Cameron that Dar Minor is here.”

The patrolman glowered but pulled a radio from his belt, stepped a few paces away for privacy, and spoke into it.

Dar waited. He realized that the CHP cops on the shoulder were all staring up at the canyon wall. Dar got out of the NSX and squinted up at the red rock. Several hundred feet higher, on a broad setback up there, lights glared and people and machines moved. There was no road or trail up that steep cliff to the setback, no way down from the cliff top hundreds of feet higher. A small, green and white helicopter lifted off from the ledge and dropped carefully into the canyon.

Dar felt his stomach sink as he watched the chopper land in a cleared area along the shoulder.
LOH,
he thought. Light Observation Helicopters, they had called them in Vietnam, lo those many years ago. Dar remembered that the officers loved buzzing around in them. Now they used this type for traffic reports and police work. Probably a Hughes 55.

“Darwin!” Sergeant Cameron and another patrolman jumped out of the helicopter and moved out from under the whirling blades in a half crouch.

Paul Cameron was about Dar's age, in his late forties. The sergeant was large and quite black, barrel-chested, and sported a neatly trimmed mustache. Dar knew that Cameron would have retired years earlier if he had not started late in his police career. He had joined the Marines just when Dar was leaving the Corps.

There was a younger patrolman with him: white, in his early twenties, baby-faced, with a mouth that reminded Dar of Elvis.

“Dr. Darwin Minor, this is Patrolman Mickey Elroy. We were just talking about you, Dar.”

The younger patrolman squinted at Dar. “You really a doctor?”

“Not a medical doctor. A Ph.D. Physics.”

While Patrolman Elroy thought about that, Cameron said, “You ready to ride up and see the puzzle, Dar?”

“Ride up.” Dar didn't bother to hide his lack of enthusiasm.

“That's right, you don't like to fly, do you?” Cameron's voice only had two tones—amused and outraged. He was in his amused mode now. “But hey, you have a pilot's license, don't you, Dar? Gliders or some such?”

“I don't like to be
flown,
” said Dar, but he grabbed his camera bag out of the NSX and followed the other two men toward the helicopter. Cameron sat in the front copilot's seat and there was just room on the back bench for Dar and the young patrolman. They buckled in.

The last time I flew in one of these goddamned things,
thought Dar,
it was on a Sea Stallion leaving the Dalat Reactor.

The pilot made sure that they were all strapped in and then twisted one stick and pulled up on another. The little chopper lifted, fluttered, and then tilted forward, climbing for altitude at the mouth of the canyon before buzzing back, hovering a minute over the wide shelf of stone and sagebrush, and then settling down carefully, the rotors no more than twenty feet from the vertical rock wall.

Dar walked away from the thing with shaky legs. He wondered if Cameron would let him rappel down the canyon wall back to the highway when it was time to go.

“So is it true what the sergeant says about you and the space shuttle?” said Patrolman Elroy with a slight twist of his Elvis lips.

“What?” said Dar, crouching and covering his ears as the chopper took off again.

“That you were the one that figured out what made it blow up?
Challenger,
I mean. I was twelve when that happened.”

Dar shook his head. “No, I was just an NTSB flunky on the investigatory committee.”

“A flunky who got his ass fired by NASA,” said Cameron, tugging on his Smokey hat and securing it.

Elroy looked puzzled. “Why'd they fire you?”

“For telling them what they didn't want to hear,” said Dar. He could see the crater here on the ledge now. It was about thirty feet across and perhaps three feet deep at the deepest. Whatever had struck here had burned, flared against the inner rock wall, and started a small fire in the grass and sagebrush that grew along the ledge. A dozen or so CHP people and forensics men stood and crouched near or in the crater.

“What didn't they want to hear?” asked Elroy, hurrying to keep up.

Dar stepped at the edge of the impact crater. “That the
Challenger
astronauts hadn't died in the explosion,” he said, not really paying attention to the conversation. “I told them that the human body is an amazingly resilient organism. I told them that the seven astronauts had survived until their cabin hit the ocean. Two minutes and forty-five seconds of falling.”

The kid stopped. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “That isn't true, is it? I never heard that. I mean…”

“What is this, Paul?” said Dar. “You know I don't do airplane accidents anymore.”

“Yeah,” said Cameron, showing strong white teeth as he grinned. He crouched, rooted around in the burned grass, and tossed a scorched fragment of metal to Dar. “Can you ID that?”

“Door handle,” said Dar. “Chevy.”

“The guys think it was an '82 El Camino,” said Cameron, gesturing toward the forensics men in the smoldering pit.

Dar looked at the vertical rock wall to his right and at the highway hundreds of feet below. “Nice,” he said. “I don't suppose there are tire marks at the top of the cliff.”

“Nope. Just rock,” said the sergeant. “No way up from the back side, either.”

“When did this happen?”

“Sometime last night. Civilian reported the fire about two
A.M.
”

“You guys got right on it.”

“Had to. The first CHP boys here thought it was a military plane down.”

Dar nodded and walked to the line of yellow accident-scene tape around the pit. “Lot of shards in there. Anything not belonging to an El Camino?”

“Bones and bits,” said Cameron, still smiling. “One person, we're pretty sure. Male, they think. Scattered because of the impact and explosion. Oh, and fragments of aluminum and alloy casings that don't have anything to do with the El Camino.”

“Another vehicle?”

“They don't think so. Something that was in the car, maybe.”

“Curious,” said Dar.

Patrolman Elroy was still eyeing him suspiciously, as if Dar were a joke the sergeant was pulling on him. “And are you really the guy they named the Darwin Award after?”