LACKING VIRTUES (6 page)

Chapter Six

Looking at it from the NTSB work area in the abandoned hangar, the mock-up of the 767 made Warner think of the dinosaur skeleton in the main hall of the Natural History Museum. He had first seen that impressive behemoth when he was on a science trip in the sixth grade, and had been instantly fascinated by stories of the men and women who had found the bones and put them together.

Later that year Warner built a dinosaur skeleton of his own, making the bones of baked clay and fitting them together with an ingenious system of holes and wires. His parents persuaded him to enter the model along with his accompanying sketches in a contest. He remembered the moment fondly. It had set in motion a chain of events that made him the first, and perhaps the only, elementary school student from Winnemucca, Nevada, to win a national science competition.

Warner’s prize had been another trip to Washington. Now he lived in D.C. and spent a lot of time assembling skeletons of dead aircraft.

Most of the skeletons Warner worked on these days eventually managed to look pretty realistic, thanks to the expertise and total devotion of his staff. They carted thousands of chunks of wreckage from swamps and forests and parking lots, and painstakingly pieced them together in rented hangars and warehouses. When the mock-ups were completed, you could see that the skeletons had once been airplanes healthy and graceful enough to fly. With any luck you could also see what had killed them.

Most of the pieces available for the present reconstruction, which had taken the team over a month to complete, were charred and deformed beyond recognition. But not everything had gone badly. The engine that separated at take-off had landed in soft earth and had not burned. The wing that ripped off on the final approach had come down flat, remaining in large pieces. And the unburned hunk of tail section, when joined with the shards and scraps found along a swath of torn-up parking lot, looked almost as if it could fly again.

By chance, evidence of a serious flaw had survived intact on the number one engine. The team had put a rolling scaffold beside the engine from which one could view the aft mount. A piece of a broken pin was clearly visible.

Beside the suspect part, Warner had taped a typewritten note on 3ʺ x 5ʺ card. It read, “Preliminary finding: Defective aft engine mount. As engine broke away from aft mount due to failure of horizontal pin, it took an upward trajectory, ripping off front engine mount and a segment of pylon. Departing mass or associated debris struck the leading edge of wing, where it punctured a fuel tank and severed the electrical lines to the left main fuel tank forward boost pump, as confirmed by CVR tapes.”

Tomorrow the mock-up was scheduled to come down so that the analyzable parts, such as the broken pin in the mount, could be sent to laboratories all over the country. Over 60 experts had worked under Warner’s guidance in this initial phase of the crash investigation. There were professional investigators from Delta, Boeing, Pratt & Whitney and Warner’s own Go Team; agents of the FBI, FAA, and a dozen other government entities; representatives of the pilots’ association; and specialists in everything from metal fatigue to autopsy analysis whom the chief had hustled in from the private sector.

From what Warner could tell they were all here tonight, going over the wreckage a final time in search of that one elusive clue that might change everybody’s thinking about what had gone wrong. These investigations, he thought, had become as complicated as the machines whose failure they sought to understand. It was a miracle they ever managed to isolate the cause of a crash; and yet they did so with a remarkably high rate of success.

Of course, not everything was technical. Amid all of this space age wizardry, it was easy to forget that the human factor played a role in each air disaster, be it in the manufacturing process or in maintenance, in the control tower or in the cockpit. Even the most high-tech parts were conceived and tested by humans. When machines broke, it meant that someone, somewhere, at some point in time, had not done his job. One of Warner’s priorities was to make sure his people, and the hundreds of thousands of men and women whose work affected the safety of air travel, remembered this fundamental and easily overlooked fact.

As he prepared to gather up his team for a final closed NTSB briefing before the flight back to Washington, Warner noticed that Hal Larsen, Boeing’s 62-year-old CEO, had returned to the hangar. Larsen stood at the top of the scaffold examining the broken engine mount that his company had manufactured, a faulty part suspected of killing 1,239 people. His face clouded over with sadness, then incomprehension and, finally, anger. It was as if he had just been told that a stranger had murdered his family.

Of all the big shots Warner worked with in the line of duty, Larsen was his favorite. The others, good men though they were, had the same instinctive reaction to a disaster: how to avoid the blame. Larsen’s attitude was refreshingly different. If there was something Boeing had done wrong, he wanted to “hear about it, face it and fix it.”

He was facing it now. Confronted with condemning evidence, he was personally shouldering the responsibility for the worst air disaster in history. When that man got over his grief, thought Warner, someone at Boeing would have hell to pay.

***

At five after eleven in the evening, Warner walked into the generic conference room of the Atlanta Airport Sheraton. Could have been anywhere, he thought, New York, L.A., Toronto. If they ever got around to requiring that level of standardization in airport layout, he thought, he would get a lot fewer telephone calls in the middle of the night.

Remaining on his feet at the head of the table with both hands gripping the edge, he stared off into space. “Good work, all of you. It’s been a long month, properly capped off by a small victory most of you don’t know about yet. Yesterday afternoon, while taking a run in those fields out around the Ford plant, Simmons had the good fortune to stumble onto the missing CVR. Hence my comment on the note card beside the engine mount that may have confused some of you.”

Simmons received a round of applause. “Do you want me to talk about what’s on the tape, chief?”

Warner said, “Thank you, Simmons, I’ll do it. The captain was everything his records indicated. When he stabilized the aircraft after the loss of the engine, he immediately sent the relief pilot back to check for damage to the wing. We learned an important thing from the tape. When the relief pilot returned to the flight deck, he knew there was a fuel leak and a hot wire whipping around near it.

“However,
there was no fire at this point
. The instant he reported his findings, the captain shut down electrical power from engine number two generator, and did so with exemplary speed. But we know his actions were too late. So what does this mean?
That the fire ignited while the relief pilot was delivering his message.
There you have it. That’s how close the crew came to bringing this one home safely.”

“When did the captain find out about the fire?” Johnson asked.

“A few seconds later.”

“How did he react then?”

“With healthy frustration,” Simmons said. “To quote the transcript, ‘Shit, anything else gonna go wrong tonight?’ But he remained cool and proceeded to make the proper choices. From this point on, Flight Twenty appears to have been doomed.”

“What strikes me, though,” Warner said, “is that there was a window of opportunity, a few seconds, in which a severed electrical lead remained live. If electricity had been shut down in that period, we would be researching an incident here rather than an accident. Please understand I’m not suggesting pilot error. The pilot behaved swiftly and reasonably. However, if there had been some sort of warning of a live wire in conjunction with a fuel leak, the electricity could have been shut down automatically in time to prevent the fire.

“One of my conclusions as we return to Washington is this: we need to study closely the critical period of the flight when fuel was leaking out and a hot wire was flapping around but the fire had not yet ignited. I want us to come up with solid recommendations in warning system coverage, pilot training procedures and possible mechanical revisions to prevent a repeat of what happened here in Atlanta.

“Now, I’d like to turn to summations of your findings in the specific areas to which you were assigned. Clifton, would you or Ward begin with engine number one.”

Chapter Seven

Delors composed himself. “Georges,” he said, “do you recall the first time I asked you for a contribution?”

“Yes, of course. It was to help defray the costs of bugging Mitterrand’s office.”

“That’s right. Did you think I kept the money?”

“I didn’t think about it, Paul. If you kept it, so what? I needed privileged information to build my movement. You were able to get that information for me, at great risk to yourself. A man has a right to compensate himself in such cases.”

“That money, Georges, and all of your generous contributions since, went to finance the source of whom I spoke. I wasn’t yet deputy director of the intelligence services; I didn’t have access to discretionary funds. I was afraid that if I revealed my source, someone higher up would take credit; or terminate our involvement for ethical reasons. You see, Georges, the information crucial to our military programs came from the United States. It was stolen from them by a Soviet spy experimenting with private enterprise on the side. Your contributions helped to pay him. In a sense, you have worked with this man before.”

Michelet ground out his cigar and laughed a rare laugh. “You don’t say? Incredible that it took a Russian to get the Americans to share with their allies. They really are hypocritical and self-righteous bastards, aren’t they?”

“Yes, they are. But it wasn’t a Russian, Georges, it was an East German named Walter Claussen.”

“Stasi?”

“No, KGB. He was personally recruited by General Volkov while he was finishing his post-graduate work in aeronautical engineering in Moscow. Hand-picked, as it were, to set up the most ambitious fifth column operation of the postwar era.

“Georges, the operation was meticulously disguised on both sides of the Atlantic, so much so that not even Claussen’s KGB colleagues knew of it. This was Volkov’s wish. He evidently feared betrayal.

“Claussen moved to the States, where his papers showed him to be an emigrant from West Germany. He took on American citizenship, even married an American woman. He built a successful consulting practice in aerospace related metallurgy.

“His front never cracked. He recruited all of his spies from the ranks of his host country – Americans who had no idea for whom they were working. For specialty jobs, he relied on several high-ranking Stasi agents, all of whom have since died or been disposed of. Volkov, as you are aware, took over intelligence for the Russian Federation. He passed away in March.”

“And Claussen? What did he do?”

“He stayed in the West while the USSR disintegrated and returned to Germany sometime after reunification. Because of these extraordinary circumstances, there is no one alive today who knows of the existence of Operation Litvyak. No one, that is, other than myself, Claussen, you and a minor player scheduled for termination.”

“Litvyak?”

“Some fighter ace from the war. It seems that Volkov’s obsession with obscurity carried over to the name.”

Michelet lit another cigar and grunted. “It sounds like this man has been trying to sell you a bill of goods. I’d like to know what this supposed magic economic weapon is?”

Delors didn’t flinch at Michelet’s initial skepticism. How else could an intelligent man respond before he knew all of the facts?

He said, “The weapon is a scheme to benefit the fortunes of Airbus. By ‘benefit’ I mean an increase in our market share to at least 60 percent.