Tom was used to the three-ring circus that was ‘the team’ around any big air crash in the US. NTSB would have a team of fifteen to twenty investigators and support staff and then there were assorted airline officials, aircraft manufacturer’s investigators keen to deflect blame from their plane, union representatives from ALPA keen to deflect blame from their pilots, media hounds keen to deflect blame somewhere new every day to make for fresh headlines, and grieving relatives, who didn’t care who was to blame, but wanted them blamed fast.
Therefore Tom was astonished to see that Pam’s team consisted of four youngish men dressed smart-casual in khakis and shirts, all wearing their badges – appropriately clothed, even all the way out here, Tom noted. Each of them also had a brightly coloured flyswatter hooked into his belt, hanging down his thigh like a six-shooter.
Tom thought seriously about emigrating to join the SACAA. Being stuck with a skeleton crew and a wrecked 737 out in the middle of a desert was his idea of Paradise.
Paul Baputo, Clint Lenyani, September Sikeli and Rian Botha shook hands and smiled, and Rian handed them both ice-cold Cokes.
Tom had never felt so welcome anywhere. He hoped it wasn’t because they were expecting him to be of any help whatsoever.
The hum of a generator was the only sound for miles, and he noted that its sole purpose seemed to be to keep a large ice-chest running for the sodas. He liked Pam more and more.
The seven of them walked to the barn, which was merely a vast roof on steel supports. No walls. So, as they approached, Tom could see the outline of the 737 emerging from the deep shade, the nose cone and tail fin pretty much intact, the rest just bumpy lumps of metal and grey-green upholstery, like the tufty Karoo between the mountains.
His throat actually tightened at the sight.
Ten thousand miles he’d travelled across the world to a foreign and exotic continent, yet this was a homecoming of sorts, and it felt like for ever since he’d been here.
*
Tom stood at what would have been the leading edge of the port wing of Flight SA77. Flies hummed somewhere, not near him, but in the desert stillness he could hear one twenty or thirty yards away. Still, he idly flicked the yellow plastic swatter in front of his face in a pre-emptive strike, and took another gulp of Coke.
A cold soda and a thirty-nine-cent fly-swatter. He knew his flyswatter cost thirty-nine cents because the price tag was still on it. They’d bought it specially for him, and even put a little spring-loaded hook on the end so he could fix it to his belt loops. Paul had given his fly-swatter to Ness with an insistent smile.
Tom had spent two hours wandering about in the wreckage with Pam and the team. They had been thorough: pieces smaller than a quarter had been recovered and carefully positioned. The 737 and the fly-swatter smacked of the same attention to detail without pressure of time – an unusual situation for an air-crash investigator to be in.
‘We don’t get that many,’ said Pam, when he mentioned it. ‘We don’t have the volume of traffic you do, and we have pretty stringent safety laws for our own jets and for those entering our airspace.’
‘How many teams have you led?’
‘This is my third.’
Tom’s eyebrows shot up. Pam was obviously a natural. He didn’t say so, but she smiled at his expression, confident enough in her own ability to know he wasn’t being critical.
‘You must be good.’ They turned to look at Ness. She must’ve read his mind, thought Tom.
‘Well, we try,’ said Pam, modestly. She laughed generously and added, ‘Hard!’
Tom was surprised that Ness had stuck with them this long. She hadn’t said much, for which he was grateful. There was nothing worse than someone babbling on about something they knew nothing about. She’d stayed at the tail of the group, lazily flicking Paul’s red fly-swatter around her, listening with apparent interest every time they stopped to discuss something. The only time she’d spoken before now was to offer to get fresh Cokes. She’d come back with a can for each of them, even remembering that September preferred a weird green cream soda, although he’d been too polite to ask for it specifically. It gave Tom a little twitch of proprietorial pride. He was glad he’d brought her along, even if she hadn’t slept with him.
They passed a hand-painted sign in three languages. In English it read PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE ANY PARTS. Tom smiled, as did Ness. He caught Pam’s eye. ‘Isn’t that like having an honesty box at Fort Knox?’ he asked.
‘It works,’ she said. ‘People understand what we’re trying to do.’
As they walked, Tom said little. The few questions he had were brief, and were answered just as succinctly. If they didn’t know something, Pam said so.
To Tom, the walk around the wreckage was two hours of foreplay. He knew where he wanted to end up, but he had to go through the motions to get there – had to make a show of objectivity, of open-mindedness. Investigators were trained to work crashes from the outside in, but all the time he stepped slowly and gently around the wreckage, he had only one destination in mind: one target that sucked at him like a black hole.
Finally they reached the number-two engine.
The number one was one of the more complete pieces of wreckage, stuck in the sand like a beached whale. But number two looked as if it had gone through a shredder. What was left of its smooth, round bulk was now splayed into a dozen jagged aluminium fingers.
The fan disc was laid out flat in the dust, like a giant’s ring, twisted and broken open. A half-dozen fan blades were still whole and attached via their machined dovetails; others had snapped or torn free.
‘Can we turn it over?’
September and Paul helped him, and Rian bent over it with a brush to clear the fine desert sand off the now-exposed face that had once bolted onto the matching flange on the shaft.
‘See here?’
He walked round to see what Pam was pointing at with her swatter. He got down low, finally dropping onto his stomach to get the best angle. He patted his ass and slid a credit-card flashlight out of his pocket. In the shade afforded by the barn roof, it made a big difference.
The fan disc had been split open by the forces exerted by the blades tearing free, leaving the metal twisted and jagged.
The face of the flange was smooth almost all the way round. Then it wasn’t. Here, in this one place, were the two shallow score marks, maybe half an inch long, that he’d seen in the emailed photos. They were almost parallel but connected at one point, running with the grain of the alloy. ‘Witness marks’, they called them. Imperfections that told a story. The story they told was still secret, and might never be known, but they teased him like a cinema preview of forthcoming attractions.
He shifted the flashlight and – just for an instant – saw something else. He played the sharp white beam over a shallow angle across the metal and saw it again. He got even closer and ran his thumb across the metal in case his eyes were playing tricks.
He frowned and Pam saw it.
‘What?’
‘Got a graze here too. Under the scores.’
Pam was flat on her belly in a second, her shoulder nudging his. He watched her manicured thumb run gently across the metal surface. She looked over her shoulder at the rest of the team, who leaned forward in anticipation. ‘Grazing,’ she said to Tom. ‘What made that?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. She opened her mouth, then saw his closed look, and left it.
Tom noticed that the holes for the ring of bolts that had once held the disc to the shaft were all empty. ‘Find any flange bolts?’ He knew the answer would be no. If they’d found them, they’d be here.
‘Not yet,’ said Pam. ‘Small things like that …’ She trailed off.
Tom switched his attention to the curled and spiked surface of the once-perfect fan disc. Everywhere there was evidence of where the blades had torn free of the metal disc – jagged edges, virgin shards of metal exposed suddenly to the air for the first time since manufacture.
He examined what was left of the assembly, waiting for something to come to him.
The Karoo faded around him as he let his mind drift idly, like a child in a hayfield, wandering and meandering, brushing his hands through the high grass of information around him, plucking at seed-heads, then letting them fall and scatter.
He could feel himself coming close and let the idea take him there, following, not chasing.
The fan blades that were still attached to the disc were clustered together right over the place where the graze and the score marks were.
He rolled onto his side in the dust, away from the disc, and propped himself on his elbow. A fly buzzed close to his ear. Rian leaned down and casually flicked it away with a swatter.
Nobody spoke to him or asked him anything, and the silence of the Karoo fell softly over them all, like a shady veil.
Tom’s mind raced in short, tight circles. Scoring and grazing; scoring and grazing. It meant something but he couldn’t think what. He tried to let go and get back to the hayfield of discovery, but his mind felt more like a combine harvester, churning about noisily. There was too much to process right now: he couldn’t do it. Scoring and grazing were important. He just didn’t know why.
He looked up into five hopeful faces, got to his feet and brushed the desert from his jeans. He should’ve worn shorts – or chinos at least: jeans were like Bacofoil in this heat.
