Sole Survivor

‘Dear God.’

‘On the tape, Blane’s voice now loses the tremor, the fragility. There’s a bitterness that makes your skin crawl.’

BLANE:            Make them stop or when I get the chance. . . when I get the chance, I’ll kill everybody. Everybody. I will. I’ll do it. I’ll kill everybody, and I’ll like it.

The transcript rattled in Joe’s hands.

He thought of the passengers on 353: some dozing in their seats, others reading books, working on laptops, leafing through magazines, knitting, watching a movie, having a drink, making plans for the future, all of them complacent, none aware of the terrifying events occurring in the cockpit.

Maybe Nina was at the window, gazing out at the stars or down at the top of the cloud cover below them; she liked the window seat. Michelle and Chrissie might have been playing a game of Go Fish or Old Maids; they travelled with decks for various games.

He was torturing himself. He was good at it because a part of him believed that he deserved to be tortured.

Forcing those thoughts out of his mind, Joe said, ‘What was going on with Blane, for God’s sake? Drugs? Was his brain fried on something?’

‘No. That was ruled out.’

‘How?’

‘It’s always a priority to find something of the pilots’ remains to test for drugs and alcohol. It took some time in this case,’ she said, as with a sweep of one hand she indicated the scorched pines and aspens uphill, ‘because a lot of the organic debris was scattered as much as a hundred yards into the trees west and north of the impact.’

An internal darkness encroached on Joe’s field of vision, until he seemed to be looking at the world through a tunnel. He bit his tongue almost hard enough to draw blood, breathed slowly and deeply, and tried not to let Barbara see how shaken he was by these details.

She put her hands in her pockets. She kicked a stone into the crater. ‘Really need this stuff, Joe?’

‘Yes.’

She sighed. ‘We found a portion of a hand we suspected was Blane’s because of a half-melted wedding band that was fused to the ring finger, a relatively unique gold band. There was some other tissue as well. With that we identified—’

‘Fingerprints?’

‘No, those were burned off. But his father’s still alive, so the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory was able to confirm it was Blane’s tissue through a DNA match with a blood sample that his dad supplied.’

‘Reliable?’

A hundred percent. Then the remains went to the toxicologists. There were minute amounts of ethanol in both Blane and Santorelli, but that was just the consequences of putrefaction. Blane’s partial hand was in those woods more than seventy-two hours before we found it. Santorelli’s remains — four days. Some ethanol related to tissue decay was to be expected. But otherwise, they both passed all the toxicologicals. They were clean and sober.’

Joe tried to reconcile the words on the transcript with the toxicological findings. He couldn’t.

He said, ‘What’re the other possibilities? A stroke?’

‘No, it just didn’t sound that way on the tape I listened to,’ Barbara said. ‘Blane speaks clearly, with no slurring of the voice whatsoever. And although what he’s saying is damn bizarre, it’s nevertheless coherent — no transposition of words, no substitution of inappropriate words.’

Frustrated, Joe said, ‘Then what the hell? A nervous breakdown, psychotic episode?’

barbara’s frustration was no less than Joe’s: ‘But where the hell

did it come from? Captain Delroy Michael Blane was the most rock-solid psychological specimen you’d ever want to meet. Totally stable guy.’

‘Not totally.’

‘Totally stable guy,’ she insisted. ‘Passed all the company psy­chological exams. Loyal family man. Faithful husband. A Mormon, active in his church. No drinking, no drugs, no gambling. Joe, you can’t find one person out there who ever saw him in a single moment of aberrant behaviour. By all accounts he wasn’t just a good man, not just a solid man — but a happy man.’

Lightning glimmered. Wheels of rolling thunder clattered along steel rails in the high east.

Pointing to the transcript, Barbara showed Joe where the 747 made the first sudden three-degree heading change, nose right, which precipitated a yaw. At that point, Santorelli was groaning but not fully conscious yet. And just before the manoeuvre, Captain Blane said, “This is fun.” There are these other sounds on the tape —here, the rattle and clink of small loose objects being flung around by the sudden lateral acceleration.’

This is fun.

Joe couldn’t take his eyes off those words.

Barbara turned the page for him. ‘Three seconds later, the aircraft made another violent heading change of four degrees, nose left. In addition to the previous clatter, there were now sounds from the aircraft - a thump and a low shuddery noise. And Captain Blane is laughing.’

‘Laughing,’ Joe said with incomprehension. ‘He was going to go down with them, and he was laughing?’

‘It wasn’t anything you’d think of as a mad laugh, either. It was

a pleasant laugh, as if he were genuinely enjoying himself.’

This is fun.

Eight seconds after the first yawing incident, there was another abrupt heading change of three degrees, nose left, followed just two seconds later by a severe shift of seven degrees, nose right. Blane laughed as he executed the first manoeuvre and, with the second, said, Oh, Wow!

‘This is where the starboard wing lifted, forcing the port wing down,’ Barbara said. ‘In twenty-two seconds the craft was banking at a hundred and forty-six degrees with a downward nose pitch of eighty-four degrees.’

‘They were finished.’

‘It was deep trouble but not hopeless. There was still a chance

they might have pulled out of it. Remember, they were above twenty thousand feet. Room for recovery.’

Because he had never read about the crash or watched television reports of it, Joe had always pictured fire in the aircraft and smoke filling the cabin. A short while ago, when he had realized that the passengers were spared that particular terror, he’d hoped that the long journey down had been less terrifying than the imaginary plunge that he experienced in some of his anxiety attacks. Now, however, he wondered which would have been worse: the gush of smoke and the instant recognition of impending doom that would have come with it — or clean air and the hideously attenuated false hope of a last-minute correction, salvation.

The transcript indicated the sounding of alarms in the cockpit. An altitude alert tone. A recorded voice repeatedly warning Traffic! because they were descending through air corridors assigned to other craft.

Joe asked, ‘What’s this reference to the “stick-shaker alarm?”

‘It makes a loud rattling, a scary sound nobody’s going to overlook, warning the pilots that the plane has lost lift. They’re going into a stall.’

Gripped in the fist of fate punching toward the earth, First Officer Victor Santorelli abruptly stopped mumbling. He regained con­sciousness. Perhaps he saw clouds whipping past the windshield. Or perhaps the 747 was already below the high overcast, affording him a ghostly panorama of onrushing Colorado landscape, faintly luminous in shades of grey from dusty pearl to charcoal, with the golden glow of Pueblo scintillant to the south. Or maybe the cacophony of alarms and the radical data flashing on the six big display screens told him in an instant all that he needed to know. He had said, Oh, Jesus.

‘His voice was wet and nasal,’ Barbara said, ‘which might have meant that Blanc broke his nose.’

Even reading the transcript, Joe could hear Santorelli’s terror and his frantic determination to survive.

SANTORELLI:            Oh, Jesus. No, Jesus, no.

BLANE:            (laughter) Whoooaaaa. Here we go, Dr. Ramlock. Dr. Blom, here we go.

SANTORELLI:            Pull!

BLANE:            (laughter) Whoooaaa. (laughter) Are we record­ing?

SANTORELLI: Pull up!

Santorelli is breathing rapidly, wheezing. He’s grunting, strug­gling with something, maybe with Blane, but it sounds more like he’s fighting the control wheel. If Blane’s respiration rate is elevated at all, it’s not registering on the tape.

SANTORELLI:            Shit, shit!

BLANE:            Are we recording?

Baffled, Joe said, ‘Why does he keep asking about it being recorded?’

Barbara shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’

‘He’s a pilot for how long?’

‘Over twenty years.’

‘He’d know the cockpit voice recorder is always working. Right?’

‘He should know. Yeah. But he’s not exactly in his right mind, is he?’

Joe read the final words of the two men.

SANTORELLI:            Pull!

BLANE:            Oh, wow.

SANTORELLI:            Mother of God

BLANE:            Oh, yeah.

SANTORELLI:            No.

BLANE:            (childlike excitement) Oh, yeah.

SANTORELLI:            Susan.

BLANE:            Now. Look.

Santorelli begins to scream.

BLANE:            Cool.

Santorelli’s scream is three and a half seconds long, lasting to the end of the recording, which is terminated by impact.

Wind swept the meadow grass. The sky was swollen with a waiting deluge. Nature was in a cleansing mood.

Joe folded the three sheets of paper. He tucked them into a jacket pocket.

For a while he couldn’t speak.

Distant lightning. Thunder. Clouds in motion.

Finally, gazing into the crater, Joe said, ‘Santorelli’s last word was a name.’

‘Susan.’

‘Who is she?’

‘His wife.’

‘I thought so.’

At the end, no more entreaties to God, no more pleas for divine mercy. At the end, a bleak acceptance. A name said lovingly, with regret and terrible longing but perhaps also with a measure of hope. And in the mind’s eye not the cruel earth hurtling nearer or the darkness after, but a cherished face.

Again, for a while, Joe could not speak.

3

From the impact crater, Barbara Christman led Joe farther up the sloping meadow and to the north, to a spot no more than twenty yards from the cluster of dead, charred aspens.

‘Here somewhere, in this general area, if I remember right,’ she said. ‘But what does it matter?’

When they had first stood together in this field, she had told him that on her arrival the morning after the crash, the debris was so finely chopped it didn’t appear to be the wreckage of an airliner. Virtually no piece was larger than a car door. Only two objects were immediately recognizable — a portion of one of the engines and a three-unit passenger-seat module.

He said, ‘Three seats, side by side?’

‘Yes.’

‘Upright?’

‘Yes. What’s your point?’

‘Could you identify what part of the plane the seats were from?’

‘Joe—’

‘From what part of the plane?’ he repeated patiently.

‘Couldn’t have been from first class, and not from business class on either the main deck or the upper, because those are all two-seat modules. The centre rows in economy class have four seats, so it had to come from the port or starboard rows in economy.’

‘Damaged?’

‘Of course.’

‘Badly?’

‘Not as badly as you’d expect.’

‘Burned?’

‘Not entirely.’

‘Burned at all?’

As I remember . . . there were just a few small scorch marks, a little soot.’

‘In fact, wasn’t the upholstery virtually intact?’

Her broad clear face now clouded with concern. ‘Joe, no one survived this crash.’

‘Was the upholstery intact?’ he pressed.

‘As I remember, it Was slightly torn. Nothing serious.’

‘Blood on the upholstery?’ ‘I don’t recall.’

Any bodies in the seats?’ ‘No.’

‘Body parts?’

‘No.’

‘Lap belts still attached?’

‘I don’t remember. I suppose so.’ ‘If the lap belts were attached—’ ‘No, it’s ridiculous to think—’

‘Michelle and the girls were in economy,’ he said.

Barbara chewed on her lip, looked away from him, and stared toward the oncoming storm. ‘Joe, your family wasn’t in those seats.’

‘I know that,’ he assured her. ‘I know.’ But how he wished.

She met his eyes again.

He said, ‘They’re dead. They’re gone. I’m not in denial here, Barbara.’

‘So you’re back to this Rose Tucker.’

‘If I can find out where she was sitting on the plane, and if it was either the port or starboard side in economy — that’s at least some small corroboration.’

‘Of what?’

‘Her story.’

‘Corroboration,’ Barbara said disbelievingly.

‘That she survived.’

Barbara shook her head.

‘You didn’t meet Rose,’ he said. ‘She’s not a flake. I don’t think she’s a liar. She has such . . . power, presence.’

On the wind came the ozone smell of the eastern lightning, that theatre-curtain scent which always rises immediately before the rain makes its entrance.

In a tone of tender exasperation, Barbara said, ‘They came down four miles, straight in, nose in, no hit-and-skip, the whole damn plane shattering around Rose Tucker, unbelievable explosive

‘I understand that.’