Fly by Wire: A Novel (8 page)

^{He went back to the drums and flicked his lighter again. Moustafa worked quickly now, an effort to keep the explosions nearly simultaneous. He had been told this was not critical, but Moustafa took pride in his work. The six fuses, two for each package, were simplicity itself -- a cigarette, and secured around it with plastic cable ties, four matches, the phosphorous tips grouped at mid-length. He had practiced at the apartment and found the configuration to be incredibly reliable, the cigarettes turning to ash at a rate that would give him between four and five minutes. In an idle moment, the accountant in him had calculated that each complete fuse had cost twenty-eight cents, most of this going to the American government as a tobacco tax. A delicious irony.}

^{Moustafa lit the fuses in a flurry and ran out the same way he had entered -- the back door and the hole in the fence. Once in the street, he slowed to a quick walk and did not pause to admire his work. Not yet. Two blocks away he heard the explosion. Still, he did not look back. Instructions. Get away immediately. Soon Moustafa would be needed for another task, his martyrs mission, and nothing could jeopardize this.}

^{Only upon reaching his car, near a deserted warehouse four blocks away, did he venture a look back. Colson Industries, whatever it was, was out of business. Flames licked high above the roof, their pulsing orange glow reflected in the thick haze above. Moustafa felt pride in his success. But he also felt a tugging sorrow, apprehension. In a matter of days there would be another fire, similar he supposed. And that spectacle would represent his funeral pyre, his departure from this world.}

^{Moustafa turned away, not wanting to watch. He would do his sacred duty. Allah would give him the strength. He began driving carefully toward the safe house. There, Moustafa would check his computer for any last instructions from Caliph. There, Moustafa would pray.}

^.

^{London, England}

^{High in a Fleet Street skyscraper, two Barclays financial analysts were seated at adjacent desks. Each had two computer terminals, and the man and woman multitasked nimbly between their screens, deciphering information from one machine while the other spun through commands, then vice versa. As if this was not enough of an overload, stock tickers ran a sliding banner on the wall in front of them, all the major movers and indices represented.}

^{The trading day was about to commence and, as was their custom, the man and woman scoured the Internet for traces of bad luck, disaster, or scandal, anything that could sway their specialized sector--energy. The problems usually came from the Middle East--pipeline attacks in Iraq, seaborne tanker politics in the Straits of Hormuz. Lately, Nigeria and Venezuela had been doing their share of damage, and pirates around the Horn of Africa had been acting up again. But this morning was quiet. No petro-tragedies, and little activity from Hong Kong, where the overnight volatility coefficients had been unusually low.}

^{It was the young woman who spotted the first article, a quick blurb on the
Houston Chronicles Web
site. She said, "Olson Industries had a fire last night. Their primary furnace manufacturing operation has been decimated. It's going to be down for six to nine months."}

^{The man, older and more experienced, did not even reply. He typed the name of a Russian corporation into his own computer. The results came immediately. "Bloody hell!" he said. "Petrov I. A. burned to the ground!"}

^{The woman's voice took an edge. "There's one other manufacturer, right? Isn't it Dutch --"}

^{"DSR," the man spat, having already typed the full name. The wait seemed interminable, but when the computer finally gave its answer, the man exhaled a deep, controlled sigh. "No, nothing there. DSR is fine."}

^{The two looked at one another. If they had been corporate planners they might have viewed the events in strategic terms, a market opportunity worth targeting. If they had been policemen they might have been curious about the coincidence on a criminal level. As it was, the two financial analysts did their job. They got on the phone.}

^{In the first thirty minutes after the London market's opening gavel, Barclays was on the leading edge of a small wave. Futures indices for gas oil, heating oil, and unleaded gasoline blendstock rose three percent. DSR traded up twelve.}

^{Some people had trouble sleeping on airplanes. Davis could sleep anywhere. He had snoozed on a metal pallet in a C-130 transport, crashed on the deck of an Aegis class missile cruiser in the Red Sea, and slept like a baby in an ice cave during Arctic survival training. So when he got to France after a long night in a Boeing 777 first-class sleeper, he was fully rested.}

^{His first stop was the airport restroom where he ran an electric razor over his face and splashed cold water on the back of his neck. He also donned a fresh polo shirt--dark green and dull, just how he liked it. Diane had bought him a pink shirt once, tried to tell him the color was something called "salmon." Jammer Davis knew pink when he saw it.}

^{From Paris he caught the TGV, a high-speed train that would deliver him to Lyon in less than two hours. He took a window seat in an empty row, settled back as the train began its smooth, quiet acceleration. Not like a Boeing, he reckoned, but quick all the same. In no time, the urban center of Paris gave way to soft brown pastures. Trees vacant of foliage and tawny hedges waited patiently for the coming of spring. Davis watched the countryside roll by, a misty morning blur at almost two hundred miles an hour.}

^{He had spent three years in France as a teenager. His father, a sergeant in the army and a linguist, had been assigned embassy duty in Paris, and so Davis had attended a high school for Foreign Service dependents. He'd grown to like the country, enjoy the people. In the course of it all he had picked up a new language -- and a new sport. Davis had played high school football in the States. In France he'd seen the local kids playing something similar, only without the pads. Davis liked the idea, and rugby had become his game.}

^{The train flowed over the track easy and quick. Davis closed his eyes, tried to let his mind go blank. It didn't work. The upcoming investigation was already there, cluttering his mental screen like hard rain on a windshield. He had experience in both military and civilian investigations. The military versions were close to the vest -- clipped press releases, no-nonsense colonels staring down cameras. But what most people didn't see in the military boards was the infighting, the flag-grade politics that went on behind the scene. Colonels and generals trying to pitch blame and catch credit. But at least the military inquiries were quick. A month, two at the outside. Civilian accident boards, like the one he was about to wrestle, could take a year or more. And Davis, by nature, was not a patient man.}

^{Aside from the time involved, there were other differences. Since 1947, the business of investigating civil aircraft accidents had been regulated by an agreement known as the Chicago Convention, or more specifically, an obscure subsection called Annex 13. Among the more important provisions was the tricky terrain of jurisdiction. Aircraft, by nature, were transient beasts -- they could crash in one country, be registered in another, and owned by a party in a third. Annex 13 declared that the "state of occurrence" governed the authority to investigate a crash, falling back on registration should an airplane go down in international waters. So it was, the investigation of World Express 801 would be administered by France. More specifically, the Bureau Enquetes-Accidents, or BEA.}

^{Davis would have preferred that World Express 801 had gone down elsewhere. England, Ireland. Or Lichtenstein, for that matter. France was peculiar, one of the few countries that always ran dual investigations-- the traditional safety side that he would help guide, but also a parallel criminal version where prosecutors tried to make names for themselves, tried to tie someone to a post for cobblestone target practice. In the case of World Express 801, they might go after individuals who worked for the manufacturer, CargoAir; or the operator, World Express. Captain Earl Moore and First Officer Melinda Hendricks, posthumously, would at least be spared that indignity.}

^{Davis dozed for the last hour of the trip. The TGV dropped him right at Lyon s Saint Exupery International Airport. He exited through the rail terminal's high, fan-shaped arches. From there he could have walked to the investigation command center. Instead, Davis found a cab.}

^{It was late morning when he arrived at the crash site.}

^{Chapter SEVEN}

^{Solaize, France}

^{The weather was hard winter, a gunmetal gray sky blurred by darker veils of rain in the distance. Light drizzle swirled on an arbitrary breeze that blustered back and forth, never seeming to settle on a direction. A French breeze, Davis mused.}

^{He knew he wasn't going by the book. He should have checked in first at the investigation's headquarters. Signed off paperwork, gotten somebody's approval. But he always liked one initial look at a crash without distraction, without people pulling him by the elbow to places he didn't want to go.}

^{The cab was at least a half mile from the crash site when an array of barricades and police cordoned off the road. A fleet of forklifts and sturdy flatbed trucks were parked nearby, lying in wait for the awkward task of moving the wreckage to a secure location. It was a difficult undertaking, as the pieces were often huge, some weighing tons. Through all the shifting and manhandling, evidence was invariably lost, damaged, and altered. There should have been a more delicate, clinical way to do it. There wasn't.}

^{A helicopter was hovering beneath the overcast clouds. The craft was almost stationary, side slipping now and again to give the men inside new lines of sight. The aerial photographers had likely been shooting since first light. There would be more photographers on the ground, and nothing on the site would be moved until every angle had been recorded, documented. Davis noticed a line of reporters and civilians standing at the best vantage point, the top of a nearby ridge.}

^{They were all pointing and exchanging comments. Vulture's row. Something like it materialized at all aircraft crashes, onlookers drawn by the same morbid allure, Davis supposed, that made automobile wrecks so interesting.}

^{He paid the cab and sent it away, figuring he wouldn't have any trouble getting a ride later -- there had to be a constant flow of vehicles between the crash site and the center of operations. Following a rise in the road, Davis reached a perimeter that was marked with police tape. Probably four miles of it. Five men and two women, all wearing yellow vests marked policier stood firm at the entry point. When they saw him coming, two of the men moved to stand in his path. That's how things worked when you were a wide six foot four.}

^{One of the policemen held up an arm.}

^{Davis came to a halt.}

^{"This area is closed to the public," the gatekeeper said in French.}

^{Davis pulled out his NTSB identification, said nothing.}

^{The lead man eyed him critically, but stepped away to reference a clipboard. Next he got out his mobile phone. It took two minutes. When he spoke again it was in English. "Very well, monsieur. But you must soon find your proper credentials."}

^{Davis nodded. "
Merci beaucoupy."}

^{He started walking again. Fifty steps later he crested the hill.}

^{And there it was.}

^{Davis stood still.}

^{It always hit him this way. The first time he saw any accident site he could only stare. Even now, two days after the crash, a few thin currents of smoke drifted up from the charred earth, like the last wisps of steam escaping a once-boiling pot. Everywhere he looked, the colors and textures were those of death. Brown earth, slick and damp from the rain. Blackened, jagged clumps of wreckage strewn in a seemingly random pattern. He had seen the aerial photos, but from ground level the crash site looked different. It always did. The individual pieces of debris seemed incredibly still, an impression at odds with what the sum implied to the contrary -- noise, fire, turmoil.}

^{He shifted his gaze to the horizon. In the midwinter distance, dormant grass and leafless trees gave a dismal frame to the apocalyptic scene. A few broken clumps of mist hovered in the valleys, soft pools to cradle the chaos. Davis began walking again, steering toward the main debris field. A large downed tree was lying prone amid the wreckage, testament to the physical forces that had engaged in one cataclysmic moment. He navigated through a minefield of metal, composite, wire, glass, and fabric. Most was from World Express 801, but a few things had probably already been lying around. An old car tire, beer bottles, a discarded compact disc. That much more for the investigators to sift through.}