I nodded reflexively, then—when his words sank in—I narrowed my eyes and stared at him. “Wait. Are you saying Richard Janus’s plane was brought down by terrorists?”
“God, no,” he replied, then hedged, “I’m not saying it wasn’t, either. All I’m saying is, when the G5 isn’t needed for a national security mission, we can deploy it for other high-priority investigations.”
“And an accident involving a private plane is a high-priority investigation because . . . ?” He didn’t answer, so after a moment’s thought, I answered my own question: “. . . because the accident wasn’t actually an accident?”
He shrugged. “Too soon to know.”
“But you have reason to think Richard Janus was murdered?”
He shrugged again.
I’d worked on enough FBI cases over the years to know that the Bureau liked to hold its investigative cards close to the vest. So I wasn’t surprised that McCready didn’t seem inclined to show his hand. Nor was I surprised, a moment later, when he pulled a laptop from the briefcase beneath his seat, mumbled something about catching up on paperwork, and busied himself with the computer.
I opened the outer compartment of my bag and took out a fat three-ring binder, which Kathleen had handed me on my way out the door. It was a collection of monthly newsletters and annual fund-raising appeals from Airlift Relief International, Richard Janus’s nonprofit organization. Kathleen had first learned about Airlift Relief three years before, when she’d decided to create a nonprofit organization of her own. At the time, she was teaching a course on nutrition in developing countries, and she’d been astonished and appalled to learn that five hundred thousand children a year go blind simply from vitamin A deficiency—a deficiency that can be remedied for less than a dollar per child. Never one to sit idly by, Kathleen had created the Food for Sight Foundation—and she had modeled her newsletters and fund-raising appeals on materials from Janus’s agency, Airlift Relief International. Janus had built an organization that was lean and agile; virtually every dollar he raised went toward direct services; his mission was clear and compelling; and his agency’s communications were informative and inspiring. Kathleen’s binder on Airlift Relief was thick—four inches, at least—and contained newsletters dating back five years, all the way to the organization’s founding. The inaugural issue featured a large photo of Janus and Jimmy Carter and a slew of other dignitaries lined up on the tarmac of an airport in Georgia. Above them loomed a battered DC-3 cargo plane, given by an anonymous donor. The caption proclaimed, “Airlift Relief is ready for takeoff!”
As I began leafing through the binder, I found myself captivated anew by the newsletters, which recounted dreadful disasters and daring relief missions. When a pair of powerful earthquakes killed more than twelve hundred people in El Salvador in 2001, for instance, Janus made a dozen flights to devastated villages, delivering food, antibiotics, water purifiers, volunteer doctors and nurses, even portable field hospitals. By the time the bigger relief agencies got into gear, Janus had already delivered tons of supplies—and had also survived two minor crashes: one when his landing gear collapsed, another when a child had darted onto the airstrip, forcing Janus to veer into the bush. Luckily, neither mishap was serious, and he and a mechanic had managed to make temporary repairs in the field. The series of photographs documenting the landing-gear collapse and repair was remarkable: First, the crippled plane sat lopsided and askew on the ground, beside a deep furrow plowed by the broken gear leg. Next, dozens of villagers pitched in to hoist one of the DC-3’s wings up onto a makeshift scaffold of crisscrossed tree trunks. Then Janus and his mechanic wrestled and welded the mangled gear leg, their labors lit by a pyrotechnic shower of sparks. In the final photo, the villagers all sat perched atop the airplane’s wing, their faces grimy, greasy, and grinning with pride. No one grinned more broadly than the pilot at the center of the crowd.
I was only halfway through the newsletters when I felt my ears popping from the Gulfstream’s swift descent. As I tucked the binder back in my bag, I felt the plane bank sharply. Looking out my window, I saw a rocky peak below the right wingtip, and for one brief, disorienting moment—perhaps because of my immersion in accounts of cataclysms—I had the startling impression that we were circling an active volcano, one that had just erupted and sent a plume of smoke roiling skyward. Not until I saw the emergency vehicles clustered along the ridgeline of the peak did my brain register the fact that I was looking down on a plane crash—the crash I had just flown across the country to work. From the television footage I’d seen, I’d expected the entire mountainside to be ablaze, but luckily—or thanks to the trucks spraying water around the margins of the site—the fire had been confined to a narrow section of slope, at the blackened center of which now smoldered a tangle of wreckage. A line from a James Taylor song popped into my head: Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground.
Soon I would sift through those smoldering pieces, seeking the shattered remains of a man whose dreams I had long supported—and whose actions I had deeply admired.
THE GULFSTREAM STRAIGHTENED AND LEVELED OFF, leaving the crash scene behind. A minute later we streaked low over the coastline, then made a U-turn back toward the east, back toward Brown Field, the airport from which Janus had taken off just nine hours before. A thousand feet below us, the Pacific glittered in the morning sun like polished pewter. When the waves reached shore—a pristine stretch of sand and grass—they curled into a white line of surf, broken only, at a single point, by a high, blank wall, dividing one featureless stretch of sand from another, splitting wave after wave of the ceaseless surf. I was puzzled for a moment, then I realized that the wall must be the border fence separating the United States from Mexico.
A few hundred yards inland, on the Tijuana side of the fence, I noticed a large, circular structure, like a high-sided bowl—it appeared to be a stadium of some sort, but it was proportioned more like Rome’s Colosseum than Knoxville’s Neyland Stadium. Encircled by the steep grandstands was a small patch of bare, brown dirt, barely a hundred feet across. “Hey, Mac,” I called across the aisle to McCready, “what’s this stadium-looking thing? Looks way too small for soccer, and I know that’s not a football field.”
“That would be the Plaza de Toros,” he said, without even looking. “The ‘Bullring by the Sea.’ Holds twenty thousand people. If it’s a big festival, every seat will be filled, and more people hanging over the railings. We should go, once we finish working this crash scene.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think I’d have the stomach for it. I’m no animal-rights crusader, but a bullfight seems just plain cruel.”
“Nothing plain about it,” he said. “Very elaborate. But cruel? Define ‘cruel.’ You eat beef?” I nodded, knowing he was leading me into a trap. “Beef cattle get castrated,” he said, “force-fed growth hormones, crammed into feedlots and trucks, and then carried by conveyor belts into the slaughterhouse to have their brains knocked out. Me, I’d rather hang on to my cojones, service some heifers, and go out with a splash—maybe even take a matador down with me, just to even the scales. Sure, it’s a raw deal. But bulls make lousy house pets, Doc. And none of us gets out alive, remember.”
Just then I heard a click in the overhead speaker, followed by the pilot’s drawl. “Guys, we’re on final. Touchdown in about thirty seconds.”
I checked my watch. I had kissed Kathleen good-bye in my kitchen in Knoxville, two thousand miles to the east, at 7:30 A.M.. It was now 8:55. The Gulfstream wasn’t quite as swift as the transporter beam on Star Trek, but it would do in a pinch. It would definitely do.
WE WERE ON THE GROUND AT BROWN FIELD FOR LESS than ten minutes—just long enough for the group to make a pit stop and then cross the tarmac to our next vehicle, a helicopter labeled SAN DIEGO COUNTY SHERIFF. It was parked near a twin-engined cargo plane—a battered DC-3 that had seen not just better days, but better decades, and a fair number of better decades, at that. Faded paint along the side of th
e fuselage read AIRLIFT RELIEF INTERNATIONAL, and I recognized it as the same plane I’d seen in many of the newsletters I’d read on the flight from Knoxville. Crime-scene tape was stretched between stanchions placed around the plane’s perimeter, creating the odd impression that the aircraft was an exhibit in some bizarre history museum devoted to aviation outlaws. The same tape was stretched across the front of a large metal hangar, which was considerably newer and less battered than the DC-3. The hangar, too, bore the organization’s name.
The helicopter that awaited us, its turbine whining and its rotor spinning, was painted white, with blue lettering, but the paint did little to camouflage the craft’s military lineage: It was clearly a plainclothes version of the Huey, the U.S. Army’s helicopter workhorse during the Vietnam War. Nearing the whirling rotor, I ducked into a crouch—probably unnecessary; as far as I knew, no one had ever been decapitated because of good posture—but why take chances? Kimball and Boatman stashed their equipment and our bags in the back of the cabin, then clambered into the middle seats, leaving the seats directly behind the pilot to McCready and me. As we settled in, the pilot—a leathery deputy in aviator sunglasses—tapped his ear, then pointed to a pair of headsets hanging beside us. We nodded and tugged them on, their rubber seals shushing the urgent whine of the turbine and the jackhammer thud of the rotor. “Welcome, gentlemen,” he said. “Strap in and we’ll hop on up there.”
The FBI’s jet had been equipped with simple lap belts, like a commercial jetliner—as if a lap belt would have done any good if we’d hit the ground at almost the speed of sound. The sheriff’s helicopter, on the other hand, was equipped with five-point, military-style harnesses. As I struggled with the fittings, McCready leaned over to help, tugging the straps so tight I could scarcely move. The instant I was clipped in we took off—an upward leap and a forward tilt so swift that I decided the pilot, like the aircraft, probably had some links to Vietnam service. Two minutes later we reached Otay Mountain, which lay only a few miles beyond the end of the runway. “There it is, gents,” said the pilot. “Want to look it over before we land?”
“If it doesn’t cost extra,” McCready answered.
Without another word, the pilot put the helicopter into a bank so steep the rotor blades were almost vertical; if not for the centrifugal force, and the harnesses holding us in our seats, we might have tumbled down against the cabin door. For the second time in a quarter hour, I found myself circling the column of black smoke. This time, though, I was much lower and closer, and the helicopter bucked in the vortex of turbulence generated by the fire, the wind, and the rocky terrain.
Just as I was getting used to the steep bank, the helicopter plunged downward, dropping into a hover below the ridgeline, crabbing sideways, closer and closer to the mountainside. Looking out the right-side windows, I found myself at eye level with the wreckage of Richard Janus’s jet—a mess of mangled metal that appeared to have been run through a junkyard shredder, doused with gasoline, and then set ablaze. “Damn,” came McCready’s voice through the headset. “That’s what I call a crash.”
“Nobody walked away from that one,” agreed the pilot. “I don’t get it. Richard was a damn good pilot.”
“Friend of yours?”
“I knew him. Flew with him a few times. He was too good a pilot to just auger in like that. Unless something went bad wrong. Or unless he did it on purpose.”
“Why would he do it on purpose?” asked McCready, his voice neutral.
“No clue. Beautiful wife, high-minded work, plenty of adventure. The perfect life, seems like. I guess you just never know.”
I didn’t join the conversation; I was too busy wondering how the hell I’d recover a victim—or even identifiable parts—from the devastation that lay just beyond my window. Almost as if he’d read my mind, the pilot added, “I don’t reckon you guys’ll be needing a body bag. Couple sandwich bags, more like it.”
Years before, I’d helped recover and identify remains from the wreckage of an air force transport that had hit a cloud-shrouded ridge in the Great Smoky Mountains at high speed. The debris from that crash had been strewn for half a mile, and—on the basis of that experience—I’d expected a similar debris field here. Instead, everything seemed to be contained within a narrow wedge of valley, which sloped away to the north. The valley stretched for miles, but the debris seemed confined to its final, highest hundred yards or so. Judging by the tightness of the wreckage, the center of impact appeared to be the base of the bluff that formed the valley’s upper terminus—a bluff that rose all the way to the mountain’s ridgeline, where a long line of emergency vehicles was perched. Fire trucks at either end of the line sprayed feathery plumes of water onto the evergreen trees at the margins of the smoldering debris field.
As I studied the destruction, I heard and felt a boom as the mountainside erupted. Chunks of metal and rock hurtled against the shuddering helicopter, and with a crack like a rifle shot, my window shattered into thousands of shards, held together only by a thin film of plastic embedded in the glass. With a yank on the control stick, the pilot spun us away from the mountainside. “Dam-nation,” he yelled. “Thought for a minute I was back in ’Nam. Oxygen cylinder blew, I guess. Sorry. Anybody hurt?”
“I’m all right,” I said. “Nothing a quick shower and a clean pair of pants won’t fix.”
McCready glanced back at Kimball and Boatman, who gave him thumbs-up signals. “We’re all fine,” he told the pilot. His words sounded calm, but I noticed that his voice was pitched half an octave higher than normal.
The pilot lofted us above the ridge and then eased down toward a flat, rectangular surface—a concrete pad, I saw as we descended, its surface weather-beaten and cracking, a cluster of battered meteorological instruments huddled at one corner. He landed the big machine softly—tenderly, almost—as if to make up for his earlier recklessness and our near-death experience.
I heard the inner echo of Kathleen’s recent words—carpe diem—and also heard myself adding a silent “thank you.” But for what, and to whom? To the helicopter pilot, for not quite killing us just now? To Kathleen, for being a loving wife and loyal friend for thirty years? To God, for blessing me—far beyond all deserving—with a fine family, good health, and work that I loved doing?
Maybe all of them, I realized as the turbine spooled down. All of those, and more besides. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
THE ROTOR WAS STILL SPINNING AS A MAN APPROACHED the helicopter with a limp in his stride, a scowl on his face, and a pair of outstretched arms that silently shouted the question “What the hell?!?” Tight on his head was a navy blue baseball cap, monogrammed NTSB in large letters. He made a beeline for the cockpit door, but the pilot pointed a thumb over his shoulder, indicating that McCready was the one he should talk to. A moment later the cabin door was yanked open. “Who are you,” shouted the man in the cap, “and what the hell did you think you were doing, besides jeopardizing my crash scene?”
“Actually, it’s my crash scene now,” McCready said, flashing his badge. “Supervisory Special Agent Clint McCready. Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
“FBI?” The man in the cap glowered, but he dialed back the anger a few clicks. “What brings the Bureau up here?”
“We’re . . . investigating,” McCready said drily. “We’ll be working this as a crime scene. I’ve got an identification expert and a mapping team with me, and an eight-man Evidence Response Team is headed up the mountain now from our local field office.” McCready clambered out of the cabin and extended a hand. “We appreciate your help, Mr. . . . ?” The final sentence was more than just a way of asking who the pissed-off guy in the cap was; it was also McCready’s efficient way of putting the guy in his place, of showing him whose jurisdictional penis was larger. McCready’s smile, as he waited for an answer, was polite but tight, underscoring the message that the Bureau was running the show now.
“Maddox,” said the man in the NTSB cap. “Patrick Maddox, National Transpor
tation Safety Board.” He unfolded his arms and shook McCready’s hand with understandable coolness. In less than thirty seconds, Maddox had been demoted from head honcho to hired help. Henceforth, he was a consultant who might provide useful insights, but his investigative procedures and priorities now carried far less weight than they had before our arrival.
Wriggling out of my harness, I lurched out of the cabin with my bag. Kimball and Boatman were close on my heels, nimble despite their load of gear and baggage.
As the rotor spun up again, Maddox surveyed the lot of us, then shrugged. “It’s all yours,” he shouted. “Knock yourself out.” The helicopter lifted off and spun away, wheeling westward and dropping down toward Brown Field. Maddox watched it, then turned to McCready again. “By the way,” he added, as the rotor’s noise faded in the distance, “do you realize that you guys nearly made history?”
“How’s that?” asked McCready.
“First crash ever witnessed—in person, in real time—by an NTSB investigator. You’d’ve been famous at the Safety Board. Legends, all of you.”
I had to admit, he had a point—and maybe a sense of humor, too. “No offense,” I chimed in, “but I’d much rather be a living legend.”
McCready and Maddox both smiled, and I hoped I’d helped ease the tension.
McCready pointed at me. “Mr. Maddox, this—”
“Call me Pat,” said Maddox.
“Okay, Pat. Call me Special Supervisory Agent McCready.” Maddox stiffened again, but then McCready laughed. “I’m kidding, Pat. Call me Mac. Sorry to get in your business here.” He gestured at the two young agents. “Pat, meet Agents Kimball and Boatman. They’ll use a Total Station to map the site.” He indicated me. “And this is Dr. Bill Brockton, a forensic anthropologist from the University of Tennessee. Doc here specializes in human identification and skeletal trauma.”