Final Approach (18 page)

As he tried to focus, the distant aroma of aviation kerosene wafted around his head, propelled by the window air-conditioning unit. Most likely the source of the nightmare, he figured, or a contributing factor.

Joe strained to read the offending clock as it continued to buzz, locating the control switch by feel and sliding it into silence as he noticed the digits indicating it was 6:30
A.M.
Monday. He had called a meeting of the entire team for 7:45
A.M.
, and it wouldn't do for the leader to be late. At 9
A.M.
they were to interview Captain Timson.

Joe fought his sleepiness with thoughts of relaxing in the shower, snapping lamps on one by one as he headed for the bathroom, wolfing down the piece of hotel chocolate left on his pillow the evening before, and finally resigning himself to sustained consciousness.

The dream might be gone, but the memories of last night were there. Joe began the practiced rituals of morning, thinking about the litany of problems that had kept sleep at bay for hours.

Cobwebs still filled his head as he adjusted the streams of water, letting the stinging sensation reacquaint him with a network of nerve endings numbed by fatigue and inadequate sleep. There had been no alcohol last night—he never drank a drop while on a field investigation—but it felt like a morning after. Moving deliberately with slippery feet, he stepped out of the shower at last, toweling dry as he appraised his browned but slightly shopworn body in the mirror, noting with pleasure the flatness of his stomach. Still a lot of muscle there, he assured himself, though he should get back to regular workouts. Ever since high school football he had been in reasonably good shape. His face bore the signs of weathering, a small network of lines and creases providing character of sorts, the flesh under his eyes beginning to sag a bit. Five foot eleven, one hundred sixty-five pounds, and about 80 percent of the originally issued crop of hair left up top. Not too bad for a guy of forty-five.

Joe threw a towel around his shoulders and padded out to the TV, flipping it on and shoving the movie control box to one side in order to find the listing for the local network stations. It was 7:03
A.M.
and the morning shows from New York would be focusing on the crash. He was still rummaging around in his bag for a fresh pair of undershorts when the overly familiar backdrop of the Kansas City Airport appeared on screen, a network aviation correspondent explaining the progress of the investigation. Sabotage was the main and growing theme, and the media was worrying it like a pit bull on a pet chicken.

Joe listened briefly to a report on the Manning children, the four-year-old girl now described as permanently crippled and still in critical condition, the seven-year-old boy physically intact but fighting infection and internal injuries. The two orphaned little children were the focus of an outpouring of sentiment from all over the nation, with funds established and background stories playing on each newscast. The young college student who had helped keep the brother and sister alive was being touted as a heroine.

A new image on the screen caught his attention suddenly, an artist's diagram of the Airbus 320 control system with the outline of a small dish antenna pointed at the cartoonish airplane from one corner of the screen, lines representing radio waves radiating from the antenna to the plane. “What now?” Joe reached across to turn up the volume.

“… investigative efforts have revealed disturbing information this morning regarding the control system of the foreign-built jetliner. Critics charge that it might be possible to freeze the controls—take control away from the pilots—by using radio waves aimed at the airplane. And indeed, investigative efforts over the weekend have turned up FAA reports which set certain limits on how close this airplane should be allowed to fly to radio transmitters.”

Good Lord, Joe thought to himself. This was getting way out of hand. The uninformed speculation he'd just heard from the blow-dried young reporter on the screen could do real damage to Airbus's reputation. Yet what could
he
do about it? The future of the 320 might already hang in the balance, considering Bill Caldwell's attitude.

Joe wished he could get the reporter's nose into a recent report on radio interference, but it would be too technical for him. There were far too few knowledgeable aviation people willing to speak to the cameras, so in their absence, the uninformed and misinformed ended up telling the nation things that were, quite often, simply wrong. The radio limits the reporter was referring to concerned extremely powerful ship-mounted transmitters throwing out thousands and thousands of watts of radio energy, and there were only a few places on earth where such transmitters came anywhere close to airports that the A320 could use. Kansas City was not one of them.

Joe left the room on time, holding the 7:45
A.M.
meeting down to thirty minutes as the team compared notes, then motoring toward Truman Medical Center with a sleepy Andy Wallace.

“Joe, I had a visit late last night after we got back—he was waiting in the lobby, a fellow whose wife and two little boys were killed in the 737. He's a clinical psychologist, and someone I've heard of … one of the people working on the stress profiles of employees of failing airlines.”

Joe nodded and Andy continued.

“Joe, he's not hysterical, but he's determined.”

“About what?”

“I'm … I'm working up to that. This is unprecedented, so I wanted to lay the groundwork for you. He is a pilot and a qualified aviation-oriented psychologist. No, he's not totally objective, but he's determined to help, and I wanted to get your thoughts on a suggestion he had.”

“Which is?”

“He wants to become a formal party to the investigation.”

Joe was startled and showed it. “A what? A party of one? You know we can't do that, Andy, we …”

“Yes we can, Joe. We can grant that status legally.”

Joe looked at the crowded roadway ahead, thinking it through.

“My Lord, that poor fellow,” he said at last.

“There …,” began Andy, “there could go any of us.”

“That's true, Andy, but we'd never be able to maintain control of someone who's lost so much. We need objectivity, not emotional dedication. I feel terrible for him, but we cannot compromise an investigation to help him stay busy.”

“Joe … Joe, believe me, if I'm any judge of character, whether we say yea or nay, this guy's gonna be in there at every turn. He is absolutely determined.”

“What does he think this is, a human-error accident?”

“Aren't most of them?”

Joe looked at Andy Wallace, half-irritated. They had gone through the human-failure—mechanical-failure debate many times, and though Joe was not about to admit it, Andy had opened his eyes to aspects of human failure he had never considered. This request, however, was out of line. Andy saw Joe's head shaking vigorously from side to side.

“No. We can't, even if it is a pilot error …”

“Human error, not pilot error,” Andy said sternly, index finger in the air, eyebrows contracted for emphasis.

“Okay, okay.
Human
error. He's liable to turn into an inquisitor rather than a professional interviewer. We can't do it, Andy. I'm sorry.”

“Get used to him being around, then.”

Joe considered that in silence for a moment as he changed lanes, appreciating the visibility from the driver's seat of the sleek minivan with its huge windows.

“What's his name?” Joe said at last.

“Dr. Mark Weiss.”

“His entire family, Andy?”

Andy Wallace nodded, biting his lower lip. “Yeah. I don't know if I could handle something like that, Joe. He had just put them on the plane. Found them himself in the wreckage.”

“Good God.”

“Amen to that, sir.”

Hospitals unleashed special fears in Joe Wallingford. Perhaps it was memories of his appendicitis as a boy, or perhaps the waiting-room trauma of the car wreck which almost took Brenda from him—before divorce effectively accomplished the same thing. Regardless of the reason, the inner sanctum of Truman Medical Center at 8:50
A.M.
triggered all the wrong feelings as Joe flipped his NTSB credentials at a private security guard hired to enforce privacy for the crash victims and watched the man respectfully melt to the sidelines.

Andy Wallace walked silently in tight formation with Joe as they approached Captain Timson's room, well aware of the importance of the mission. What did the pilot remember? What did he know? The stakes were high, which made the presence of an unfamiliar, stern-faced man in a three-piece suit outside Timson's room an instant threat.

“Just a minute.” The man moved protectively in front of the door, blocking them, as Joe repeated his artful sweep of the badge wallet, his hand coming to rest in midair twelve inches in front of the man's face, the logo of the NTSB impressively visible.

“Joe Wallingford and Andy Wallace of the NTSB. We had Captain Timson's agreement to a nine
A.M.
interview.”

The man nodded but had barely looked at the identification. He knew who they were. “We need to talk first, Mr. Wallingford. I'm John Walters, vice-president of operations for North America. I want some ground rules here.” He did not offer his hand.

Joe fixed Walters with a steady, neutral gaze. Usually they slammed into a protective contingent from ALPA, but in their absence, Timson's boss apparently was going to play the role of protector.

“What, exactly, do you mean, Mr. Walters?”

Walters kept his voice low, as if muttering at a funeral. “What I mean is, our man in there is still in bad shape and under medication. He doesn't remember a great deal at this point. The doctors tell me his memory has been affected by the skull fracture he received, as well as the emotional trauma. I want to make sure you fellows aren't planning on taking a major deposition at this early stage. You know, his memory doesn't click on some point, then you beat us to death with it later on?”

Joe was rapidly developing a distaste for the North America executive, but he had to be evenhanded.

“We do the formal deposition with a court reporter later. All we use here is a tape recorder. There has never been, in my nearly twenty years with the Board, any reason for an honest man to fear correcting the record later if there's something he forgot or misstated in the informal interview, Mr. Walters. But right now we need as much information from him as we can get.”

“Well, Dick Timson's an honest man, but an injured one. I'd rather you called this off,” Walters said.

“You're joking?”

“No, I'm not. He's in no condition to be interviewed.”

Joe shook his head and stared at John Walters. He could feel Andy's temperature rising as well. “You mind telling me why you didn't contact us before with this request? We just drove 12 miles from the airport with important business going begging behind us.”

“I just got here late last night.”

“It's no mystery where we're staying.…”

“Look, it's only been this morning that I've had a chance to talk with Dick myself. I didn't have a chance to call you.”

Joe sighed and dropped his head, studying his shoes for a moment, trying to decide between diplomacy and force. He snapped his head back up then, looking Walters in the eye. “We have scores of people dead and injured, two aircraft destroyed, lives ruined, the media in an uproar, the fate of a sophisticated airplane—which, by the way, you people own a lot of—in the balance, the Congress upset, the FAA worried, and a runway at the airport closed, and I need information as fast as I can get it. I don't care if your captain can only hear every third word and communicate in sign language, we're not here to prosecute him or anyone else. We're here to talk to an eyewitness to a major accident, and that is precisely, Mr. Walters, what we intend to do.”

“I'm not going to block you—”

“You couldn't anyway, without a court order.”

“Well, that remains to be seen, Mr. Wallingford. But the fact is, I'm not here to make your life difficult, I just want you gentlemen to realize that whatever Dick says to you may be grossly inaccurate until he's recovered his faculties. I want this kept private.”

“This ends up as public record, you know that,” Joe said.

“I do, but you don't have to run to the media immediately.”

Temper, Joe, temper, he cautioned himself. The pompous little ass.

“Mr. Wallingford, I must go on record as protesting this interview.”

“So noted,” Joe said, pushing past Walters, “and so rejected.” Walters stepped aside reluctantly, then followed them into the room.

Dick Timson was far more conscious and alert than Joe had expected after the exchange with Walters. They spent ten minutes trying to defuse the tension, Mrs. Timson hovering nervously behind her husband's bed, and Walters staying near the door, a position which irritated Joe even more. Timson could see Walters's every expression. Joe and Andy, concentrating on their subject, could not.

“Okay, Captain, I have the tape recorder on so that we can prepare accurate notes of what is said here. Please tell me everything you can remember from the beginning of your first approach to the impact.”

The captain nodded, his expression serious, his face very sad. Joe felt himself softening in spite of the encounter in the hallway, which in any event was quite probably none of the poor captain's doing.

“I don't recall the impact itself,” Timson began. “I'm having a hard time putting everything in focus, you know?” He tried then, honestly, it seemed to Joe, to piece together the windshear encounter and the subsequent decision to make a quick visual, closed pattern back to the runway after their go-around. Yes, he admitted, the windshear encounter was very serious. They had been low enough at one point to crash. No, he had had no indication of windshear, and the tower never used the word. He had no warning.