Final Approach (15 page)

“You're no bimbo, honey.”

They had slipped back into normal conversation, he realized, normal bantering, her sharp sense of humor teasing and enticing him. Normal, but not completely so. There was still reserve in her voice.

“No, I'm not a bimbo … but I'm not your wife, either, Senator Martinson.”

He couldn't quite find a reply for that, just a silent promise to change that fact as fast as the law would allow.

“Will you call me when you're ready?” he asked.

“Not until Tuesday, Kell.”

“I love you, Cindy.”

She heard his voice break as he said the words, yet she choked on her reply. It was the one phrase she had prayed he'd use someday. Why did it scare her so now?

“I know,” she said simply, replacing the receiver as gently as if she were caressing his face, personal and professional worries competing furiously in her mind.

She had tried to defuse the controversy a year ago, but Kell had become firmly entrenched as Wilkins's most outspoken critic on the Hill. Wilkins had publicly slandered a valued friend of Kell's in the House—a former Vietnam POW who happened to be black—questioning his patriotism. Not even Cindy could control Kell's outrage at Wilkins's attack, and though his statements on the floor of the Senate had been eloquent and gentlemenly rebukes, one unguarded comment to the media had been the lead story on the national news and had propelled the Martinson camp into an unnecessary battle. “This man is a racist and an insult to the Congress,” Kell had said. “While the voters have the right to send anyone they choose to represent them, the Congress has the right to reject those who are unfit to serve, and Mr. Wilkins is morally unfit for any public office. I'm going to do everything I can to get rid of him.”

Suddenly the weekend's TV images of burning airplane wreckage and voice-overs regarding Larry Wilkins's extremist positions merged with Cindy's mental picture of Kell sitting mere yards away from the runway as his perceived archenemy had died in a crash that some reports were already claiming was sabotage. The implications were all too clear. There was a disastrous possibility—however remote—that Kell's Friday night whereabouts might somehow become public knowledge, and there was only one word that seemed to sum it up. Cynthia Elizabeth Collins plunked herself into an armchair and addressed the far wall.

“Shit!”

It was 11
A.M.
Sunday morning in Washington, yet the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board had already logged four hours of pacing around his den, keeping an eye on the television coverage from Kansas City. Now the face of a CBS anchor filled the screen before the scene cut to Kansas City International Airport and a brief interview with the NTSB's Joe Wallingford. Dean Farris stopped his pacing to stand in front of the set, quietly studying his subordinate's performance with suspicion. His wife, looking on from the kitchen, had seen him upset over Wallingford before. “A loose cannon on a rolling deck,” Dean had called him.

Wilma Farris put down her coffee cup for a moment and watched her husband, concerned as usual at his preoccupation. They had been in academic heaven just three years ago, he a full, tenured professor of management at the Stanford Business School, and she a contented homemaker happily raising two kids. She had never begrudged his interest in politics, though he had spent far too much time helping the local Republican party for over a decade. But when the Republican occupying the White House had needed a panel of respected and ideologically trustworthy businessmen and academics for a blue-ribbon panel on deregulation and airline safety, Dean Farris had been in the right place at the right time, and a building political debt of many years was partially repaid with the appointment.

She had seen little of him for the next nine months as he took to the project with immense seriousness. It was ironic that he hated to fly, but his theory of management transcended technical knowledge: a good manager could manage anything, including a blue-ribbon panel, or so he believed. With the final report's release, she had prepared herself for a return to California and normalcy. Instead, the White House had called again, flushed with pride over the fact that Farris and his commission had absolved the administration's free-market-at-any-cost policies of any blame for declines in the airline industry's safety margins under deregulation. This time, they said, the President wanted him to move to Washington to take over as chairman of the NTSB. Dean was thrilled, but Wilma had come to regard their new Reston, Virginia, home as a prison, her friends and family three thousand miles away.

What frightened Wilma Farris the most was the change in her husband, and his sudden lust for greater position someday. They had not discussed it, but she knew he was eyeing a cabinet post in a future administration. And whether her energetic fifty-two-year-old spouse could achieve it or not was never a question in her mind.

“No! Goddamn it, Joe,
no!”
Dean Farris's voice echoed off the televised picture of Joe Wallingford and rang through the house, startling their golden retriever, who jumped up from the kitchen floor to stand, quivering, at attention.

“What is it, Dean?”

He turned around to face her, pointing at the offending screen, his bony, angular features screwed up in disgust, an unkempt forelock of dark hair hanging down to his right eyebrow. With a beard, a frock coat, and a stovepipe hat, he could have played President Lincoln, she thought. Several reporters had made the observation, and it amused him.

“Last night I specifically told Wallingford to make it clear we were investigating sabotage along with everything else, and this morning he makes the statement I told him to make, but then tells the world one more time—as if they hadn't heard it the first time—that there is absolutely no evidence that would lead anyone to believe there was any sabotage.”

The dog was standing in the kitchen doorway now, tail wagging furiously, looking mightily confused as he watched his master for the slightest hint of a command. Dean Farris dropped his arm and walked around the sofa toward Wilma, shaking his head, his deep baritone voice tinged with a reminder of his Oklahoma youth.

“Now you just watch, Willie, that phone will ring again within the hour with someone else on the Hill worried that I may be losing control and letting my people play politics with a crash investigation.”

“I don't follow you.”

“We have to put on a good show. As long as Wilkins's supporters are riled up, we have
got
to look like we're taking sabotage seriously. Wallingford—damn his hide—makes it sound like we're
not
.”

“You think it
was
sabotage?”

“It doesn't matter whether it was or wasn't. We've just got to look like we're kicking over all the rocks at the same time. Wilkins's people are repulsive, but they're a powerful group in the South.”

“I think I'd better contact Susan Kelly. I trusted her to baby-sit Wallingford and she isn't doing the job.”

Consciousness had come hard for Dick Timson all weekend. He had barely achieved it at all during Saturday, and then only for short periods. Sunday morning was no exception.

He had a memory of banking an airplane into a final turn for an airport runway somewhere, but there was nothing else—until the walls and ceiling of an operating room had come into focus in the dark hours before dawn after the accident. Then the images had dissolved into a fitful sleep of sorts. That was … when?

“What day is it?” The husky-voiced words startled Louise Timson, who had been dozing in a chair next to his bed.

“Dick?”

“What … where am I again?” He put a tentative hand to his left temple, which was throbbing. This was a hospital, he remembered that. There had been a crash. There were nightmarish scenes he couldn't identify which had passed for dreams, and he had wobbled in and out of semiconsciousness it seemed for an eternity.

“It … it's Sunday morning, Dick. You're in a Kansas City hospital—Truman Medical Center.” Her voice seemed tremulous, but he hardly noticed. Eyes squinting, head pounding, he lay back into the pillow and tried to focus, realizing it was his wife's face hovering before him, a distraught look in her eyes.

“My God, Louise, what's happened? I … I know there … there was a crash. You told me. I don't remember …”

“Do you recall anything?”

“No.” He lied to her on purpose, wanting desperately to know what she knew first. His memories were unreliable.

Louise Timson wiped her eyes and stroked his forehead, being careful not to disturb the white turban of bandages.

“The doctor says you'll be all right. Your hand was hurt, and you have a skull fracture, but you'll be okay.”

That explains the headache, he thought, realizing suddenly that his right hand was sheathed in gauze and hurting too.

“But what happened?”

Louise Timson stopped stroking him, her hand dropping, her gaze averted downward. God, he thought, was it that bad?

“You crashed while trying to land in a storm at Kansas City Friday night, Dick. I don't know why. Your plane hit another plane on the ground.” The words left a cold, empty feeling in his middle. Crashed. Hit another plane. How on earth …? Oh Lord, and I was captain … chief pilot. How on earth did this happen?

He noticed her delivery, then. Her words were slow and metered, as if painful to pronounce, her eyes fixed on her hands as she held them tightly together in her lap, sitting uncomfortably on the edge of the bed. Dick could see she had been at loose ends for some time. Her hair was a stringy mess, she wore no makeup, and the deep bags under her eyes looked awful. She looked like hell warmed over, he concluded.

“A storm?” he managed.

“I was told it was a windshear storm, or something like that,” she said slowly.

He remembered the microburst. But that had been their initial approach, hadn't it? Could he have dreamed a second approach?

“How … how many were hurt?”

She swallowed again, nodding and shaking her head alternately. “At least a hundred dead. Terrible injuries. Terrible. A little girl …” Her hand gestured to one side as she closed her eyes and shook her head slightly before looking at him again. “Oh Dick …” Louise sat quietly for a few seconds and he let her alone, confusion filling his drug-numbed mind.

“Are they sure it was windshear? Louise, do you know for sure?” His voice was low and strained. He could manage no more volume, but he had to know what he had done.

She looked up at him then. “No, I'm not sure.”

“Why? Wasn't I captain?” Now
his
voice was tremulous, the enormity of the nightmare he had awakened to beginning to overwhelm him.

Dick saw his wife clenching her teeth, her chin trembling. But he had to know.

“You just weren't … at fault. I'm sure.” She looked at him again then as a soft knock sounded on the door and a nurse stuck her head inside.

“You're awake! Mr. Timson, do you feel up to a visitor for a few moments? He's insisting, and the doctor said it was okay if you agreed.”

Dick looked at her in confusion. The nurse had said “mister,” not “captain.” Had he already been fired? That would be unbearable, the worst blow of all. He was panicking, though. They wouldn't do such a thing. Stop panicking! He issued the order to himself without moving, staring quietly at the nurse as she stood in the doorway.

“Sir? You want to wait?”

Dick recovered some composure finally and shook his head. “It's okay. Send him in.”

Louise had already left the bedside, moving behind him, probably sitting in the corner, he figured, his head hurting too bad to risk looking around to be sure. At first Dick didn't recognize the man in a hospital gown who walked slowly into the room, his sad eyes surveying the room with great distrust, as if he were ready to run at the slightest indication the welcome had been withdrawn. He looked familiar, and from somewhere in Dick's mind the image of the big man and the name Pete Kaminsky, one of his pilots and an old acquaintance, came together.

“Pete?”

“Yes. I came to … see how you were doing.”

“What are you doing here?” There was no rancor behind the question, just puzzlement, but it struck Pete like a challenge, for which he must have a defense.

“Uh, I'm … down the hall. My room.” He gestured awkwardly over his left shoulder.

“Were you aboard my airplane?” Dick asked quietly.

“No. Uh, the 737 your flight hit? That was mine.”

The two men stared at each other for a few seconds while that sank in. “Oh, Lord. You were in a 737? We hit you?”

Pete nodded, slowly, watching his reaction carefully. “You remember I called you on the radio on your first approach?”

So there
had
been a first approach, Dick thought, his mind trying to come up to speed. He raised up slightly from the pillow, a wave of pain in his head limiting the process, his view of Pete wavering for a second as if a TV picture had been disturbed.

“It's all very hazy, Pete,” he began. “Could you … tell me what happened? Please. I need to fill in the gaps.”

Pete Kaminsky pulled up a small, gray metal chair and sat down a foot away from Dick's bedside, saying nothing for awhile as he thought back over the crash sequence and tried to choose his words carefully. Dick Timson listened in horror, remembering almost everything up to his turn to final approach on the second landing attempt. Somewhere in there the memory was erased … gone. It had to be the concussion, but it panicked him.

“Pete, you say we stopped turning and started sinking?”

“Yeah.” In a halting voice, Pete Kaminsky filled in the details for Timson, looking up finally at the battered chief pilot. “I killed a lot of people trying to move, Dick. I saved myself, but you hit us in the middle. If I'd stayed put, more of my people …” He stopped, unable to continue, and Dick Timson wanted to reach out and reassure him, but knew he couldn't do it physically. Every time he moved, his head swam with unbelievable pain. His stomach was a cold block of ice now, hearing the details. Something had happened as they turned the last few degrees. Was it windshear? Had the controls malfunctioned? Something had pitched them down, and he couldn't remember what it had been … what it might have been. That wasn't unusual, was it? Loss of memory with a head injury?