Millennium (18 page)

I’d been opposed to the slow schedule. I wanted to get them all replaced within a year, and the hell with next year’s models. But it wasn’t something worth losing my job over.

If you look hard enough, you’ll find the person responsible.

*    *    *

When we got back they were ready to play the copy of the tape from the 747 CVR.

We all gathered around again—more people this time; I don’t know how it happens, but an investigation accumulates people like a dog picks up fleas—and the tape was started. There was a bad hiss that came and went, but we were able to hear most of it.

There were four people in this cockpit. They were having a good time, chattering back and forth, telling jokes.

Gil Crain, the pilot, was the easiest voice for me to place. I’d known him, and besides, he had a strong Southern accent. A legitimate accent, by the way. Half the commercial airline pilots in the sky affect a West Virginia drawl over the radio, pretending they’re Chuck Yeager, who started the whole thing back in the ’50s. The rest of them use a bored sing-song patois I’ve started to call Vietnam Jet Jockey. Sometimes you’d think you were listening to a lot of interstate truckers on their CB’s. But Gil Crain was born and raised on Dixie soil. He’d soon be buried in it.

He spent a lot of his time talking about his kids. That wasn’t easy to listen to, considering what was about to happen to him. I recall the cockpit tape from the San Diego crash. They were
discussing life insurance, little knowing how badly they’d need it in a few minutes.

The guy with the giggle was Lloyd Whitmore, the engineer. John Sianis, the copilot, had a faint foreign accent—something Middle Eastern, I thought—and a crisp, precise way of talking.

The last guy up there was Wayne DeLisle. He was listed as an observer, but it would be more accurate to call him a deadhead. He was a Pan Am pilot hitching a ride in the cockpit jumpseat. He’d been due to take a flight out of San Francisco the next day, bound for Hong Kong. He hadn’t been too close to the mike and his voice wasn’t very distinctive, but he talked so much I soon had no trouble picking him out from the rest.

The trouble started in pretty much the same way. Captain Crain tried to protest Janz’s order, since it didn’t make any sense to him, but I knew he wouldn’t have hesitated long. He had to assume the ground controller looking at his radar display knew a lot more about the situation than he, Crain, flying through a cloud layer with nothing but fog outside his windshield.

The cockpit got quiet and businesslike instantly.

Crain said, “I wonder what he’s got in mind?” He started to say something else, and stopped. It got noisy as the planes hit. Apparently the cockpit crew never even got a glimpse of the other plane, or at least they never mentioned seeing it.

Somebody shouted something, then they got down to the business of flying the disabled plane.

We listened to the activity as three of them went to work. It was by the book. Crain was testing to see what he had left, reporting everything he did, and gradually began to sound optimistic. The aircraft was still going down but he was wrestling the nose up and thought he still had enough control to get it level. I agreed with him, from what I knew, but I also knew something he didn’t, which was that he didn’t have any rudder left at all and that there was a mountain down there waiting for him that he couldn’t turn away from. Then I heard DeLisle.

“Back it up a minute,” I said. “What did he say?”

“Sounded like ‘see the passengers,’” somebody suggested.
The tape started again, and we heard Gil talking about rudder function. I was leaning forward to catch the next line, which would be DeLisle’s, when a voice spoke close to my ear.

“Would you like some coffee, Mr. Smith?”

I had missed it again. I turned, furious, ready to shout something about getting this bitch out of here…and found myself looking into the face of my movie star/stewardess from the hangar. She had a beautiful smile, and it was as guileless and innocent as a saint’s. I thought it a little odd for somebody who’d run like a thief the last time I saw her, no more than a few hours ago.

“What are you doing over—”

“He said ‘I’m going to see to the passengers,’” Jerry said at my other side. “Why would he…Bill? Are you listening?”

Part of me had been, but the rest had been wrapped up in the woman. I was torn two ways. I looked at Jerry, then back to the woman and she was already walking away with her tray of coffee.

“Why do you think he’d say that?” Jerry repeated. “Things must have been pretty grim in there.”

“You’d think he’d be afraid to unstrap,” somebody else contributed.

My attention was back on the problem.

“There’s not much point in asking why he’d leave,” I said. “He didn’t have any duties in the cockpit, so we can’t fault him for it. He was dead weight, but maybe he thought he could help out the flight attendants in the cabin.”

“I’m just surprised he thought of it so soon,” Craig said.

“I’m not,” said Carole. “Think about it. He’s a pilot in a cockpit and he’s useless. Everything in his training is telling him to do something, but that’s the captain’s job. So he’s been trained to save the passengers, so he gets out of the cockpit where he can’t do anything to help and goes back into the cabin where maybe he can.”

I nodded at her. It made sense. Tom thought so, too.

“That would do it,” he said. “But from an Operations standpoint, he’s not part of the crew and his impulse should have
been to do what the crew told him to do, not take off on his own initiative. He should have waited for orders from Crain.”

“Crain was pretty busy to be bothered with suggestions.”

It was batted around some more, until I called it off.

“Turn it back on.”

This one went on a little longer than the other had. It was worse, in a way. You could tell that Gil really thought he had it. He reported his altimeter readings and they were looking better. His angle of attack was improving. He had his copilot calling around, asking about places they might ditch, wondering if they could reach the shallows of the Bay or the Sacramento River or something, they were talking about fields and country roads…and suddenly his ground avoidance alarm started to shout at him. And there was the mountain.

It would have been hard to miss even with a rudder. He tried everything he had, all his control surfaces, spoilers, ailerons, flaps, elevators, trying to wrestle the big beast into a turn. The talk in the cockpit became even more rapid, but still ordered, as Crain and his crew worked on it.

He decided to get the nose up, flaps down, pull back on the engines, and try to stall into the ground, pancake it on that hillside and hope it wouldn’t slide too far. By then he was out of good options and seemed to be thinking in terms of minimizing the violence.

Then we heard a most surprising sound. Someone was screaming in the cockpit. I was pretty sure it was a man, and he sounded hysterical.

The words were tumbling out almost too fast to be understood. I found myself on the edge of my seat, my eyes squeezed shut, in an effort to hear what the voice was saying. I had by then identified it as DeLisle. He’d come back.

But why? And what was he saying?

That’s when the tape stopped abruptly and something heavy bumped into my side. I jerked in surprise and opened my eyes and looked down at my lap. There was a foam coffee cup there, on its side. Warm brown liquid was soaking into my pants.

“I’m so
sorry
, oh my goodness, here, let me help you with that. I’m such a klutz, no wonder they didn’t want me for a stewardess.”

She went on like that for a while, crouching at my side and dabbing my lap with a tiny handkerchief.

For a while there I was at a loss. I had been jerked away from total concentration on those dead guys in the cockpit, and then all this fell, literally, into my lap. She was inches away from me, looking up at my face with a strange expression, and she was stroking my thighs with a wet handkerchief. All I could do was stare at her.

“It’s okay,” I said, finally. “Accidents will happen.”

“But always to
me
,” she said, plaintively.

*    *    *

It had been quite an accident, really.

She had tripped over the power cord on the floor, which is why the tape machine went off. Her tray of coffee cups went one way and she, holding a cup in her hand, had gone the other. She’d ended up on the floor beside me, and the tray had ended up all over the tape machine.

I went over to assess the damage.

“I’ll have to get another machine,” the operator said. “Goddam stupid bitch. This is a five-thousand-dollar set-up here, and coffee’s not going to—”

“How about the tape?” I’d had a chilling thought. Once, I played the original CVR tape before sending it on to the Washington lab. I was damn lucky this was only a copy. Nobody at the Board would be too amused if a tape came through a crash and then got ruined by spilled coffee.

“It ought to be okay. I’ll put it on a reel and dry it by hand.” He glanced at his watch. “Give me half an hour.”

I nodded at him and turned to go find the girl, but she was gone.

Testimony of Louise Baltimore

I got a taste of what the Council must have felt. I had told those nine pitiful geniuses that my mission was vital to the success of the Gate Project, and they had fallen over like ninepins. Now Sherman was doing the same thing to me. I suspected his authority was as spurious as mine had been, but didn’t dare say it, and…he could have been right. I felt the same superstitious dread of disobeying a message from the future.

At that, I had healthy self-interest—one might call it fear—pushing me to argue against the proposal. Lawrence and Martin didn’t even have that. It was fine with them if, assuming anyone had to go back at all, I lead a commando raid into that fateful hangar on that fateful night. They could sit safely uptime and have the great pleasure of second-guessing me when I came back with another failure.

I had a very unscientific, very primitive premonition. I was going to fail again. I think Sherman knew it.

*    *    *

It went off very quickly. There were details to iron out.

Lawrence was horrified to learn how far he had deposited me
from my goal. He set his teams to work on the problem, and shortly was able to assure me that he could get me to within ten inches of my intended destination. I didn’t believe it, but why tell him that?

The practical details, on my end, were a lot less complicated. It
would
be a commando raid. I picked a team of my three best operatives to go back with me: Mandy Djakarta, Tony Louisville, and Minoru Hanoi. There would be no masquerade this time. We’d go back as thieves in the night. Our objective would be to get into that hangar, find the stunner, and get out without being seen.

I put Tony in charge of equipment selection and planning.

I guess Tony had been subjected to the same data-dump I had. At least he’d seen the same films. The uniforms he picked for us to wear wouldn’t have been out of place in a World War II movie. We were dressed all in black, with gloves and soft black shoes, and he even had soot for us to smear on our faces—except for Mandy, who didn’t need any.

We had equipment belts, but all we wore on them was detection gear that we hoped would help us locate the stunner. No weapons on this trip. Stunning someone would only magnify our problems.

Martin Coventry hovered over us like a nervous stage mother as we stood in line waiting for Gate congruency. He was full of last-minute bits of advice.

“You’ll be there from eleven to midnight,” he was saying. “We show Smith arriving at 11:30 and leaving an hour later. So for half an hour you’ll be there in the hangar with him, and—”

“We’ll walk on tippy-toe,” Minoru finished for him. “We’ve been through this, Martin. You want to come along and hold our hands?”

“It never hurts to go over these things.”

“We have, Martin,” I assured him. “It’s a big hangar. There’s a million places for us to hide, and it won’t be lit very well.”

“I’m more worried about your end,” Tony said. “If we’re going to get out of there while he’s snooping around, you’d better ease that Gate in real slow and real quiet.”

“I don’t like it,” Mandy said. “Why don’t we put the Gate outside the hangar and break in?”

Martin looked pained. “Because there were guards around it that night.”

“I don’t like
that
,” Tony said, darkly.

“It can’t be helped. You just trust us. Lawrence and I will have all the suppressors operating. The Gate will show where we planned, and it will come in without any noise.”

*    *    *

Be that as it may, the Gate didn’t
arrive
all that quietly.

I could hear echoes reverberating in the empty hangar as we stepped out. I wasn’t worried, because we knew we were alone in there and the noise wasn’t loud enough to carry outside the building. But I remember thinking Lawrence had better do a better job on the pick-up.

“Right on the button,” Mandy whispered, pointing to the concrete floor.

She was right. My brief excursion through the building a few hours ago—or about thirty-nine hours ago, depending on how you looked at it—had been useful in selecting an entry and exit point for the Gate. We’d selected the northwest corner, behind what was left of the 747 tail section and other large pieces of Boeing fuselage. It was shadowy enough that we had to get out our pencil-beams for a few quick looks around or we might have stumbled over something.

When I had my bearings I gestured silently to the team to spread out and start looking around. Myself, I got out my detector and headed toward where the stunner had been the last time I was in the hangar.

All the trash bags had been moved. It made sense. They’d had almost two days to sort the junk, and they’d made a lot of progress. So I started searching, creeping silently as any cat through the nightmarish mounds of wreckage.

Fifteen minutes later I was still creeping, and the indicator dial hadn’t jiggled half a millimeter.