TOM’S HEAD HURT from thinking so he took two Valium and slept until a perky attendant woke him on an almost-empty plane in Los Angeles. He stumbled through Arrivals and caught a fifty-five-dollar cab ride home, where he dived onto his bed and slept again.
He didn’t hear the phone, but when he finally woke, the machine blinked two new messages at him. The first was a halting silence and then a gruff, faintly familiar voice, saying, ‘You there, Patrick?’ before hanging up.
The other message was from Kitty, who told him she was sending him the forms he needed to finalize the termination of his employment with the NTSB. Then she paused and said, ‘I’m so sorry, Tom,’ in a rush.
The phone rang and Tom picked up.
‘Patrick?’ The same voice as on the first message.
‘Yes?’
‘It’s Lenny Munro.’
Tom said nothing. He had nothing to say to Munro until he knew what Munro had to say to him. Maybe not even then.
The silence thrummed between them.
‘That bolt,’ said Munro. ‘It’s a big help.’
Tom was stunned that Munro had apparently called to thank him. He wasn’t sure he could have done as much. ‘Good,’ he said, sincerely. ‘Is that what your incident’s looking like?’
Munro gave a humourless snort. ‘This incident’s looking like a nightmare.’
‘I noticed.’
‘Yeah, well. Can’t say for sure yet but it looks like the number-two engine disintegrated without warning and before impact. We haven’t found the fan disc yet but when we do we’ll take a real close look.’
‘I hope that’s it.’
‘Yeah. Me too. Shit.’
There was a weary silence and Tom felt hollow. This was what he’d given up: a job he loved so much that, even when he was talking about a shitty detail with a man he thought was an asshole, he was still captured by the quest, heart and soul.
Eventually Munro spoke awkwardly: ‘You busy?’
‘I quit,’ he said flatly. It covered everything.
‘Yeah,’ said Munro, but didn’t do the little dance on his grave that Tom had expected. Then he sighed. ‘Still. I could use your help on this one. Even unofficially.’
Tom didn’t even repack his bags. He stuffed $2,300 in hundreds into his jeans – all that was left of his winnings, all that was left of his savings – and got back to LAX less than twelve hours after he’d left it.
He bought a ticket to Tulsa and a pre-pay phone. He called his service and arranged to have his calls forwarded to the new number. Then he entered Ness’s number on the contacts list.
He should call her to let her know he couldn’t play tonight.
But he didn’t.
34
IT HAD RAINED in Oklahoma, and what brought relief and free irrigation to most brought mud and misery to the site where Flight 823 had come down. The ashes had turned to black soup, and slick-shiny pools hid inch-deep shallows, or trenches: the unwary could only tell one from the other when they fell in them up to their hips.
Tom parked much closer to the action this time because the rubberneckers had packed up their picnics and gone home, although there were still plenty of bereaved family members left to keep vigil over the cornfield. They mostly stayed in their cars, though, leaving only the investigators to brave the weather in slick raingear, dripping ball-caps and shiny rubber boots.
Tom hadn’t brought his raingear so he just zipped his jacket up to his chin and hunched his shoulders as he splashed through the blackened muck, past whippy red and green marker flags, to Munro.
The man looked up from under the peak of his cap, his face lined with tiredness. A long way from the last time they’d seen each other in Pete LaBello’s office. There was a moment’s hesitation and Tom could see Munro was thinking the same uncomfortable thing. Then the man stuck out his hand. ‘Tom,’ he said, ‘thanks for coming.’
And that was all it took.
Munro led him to the bogged-down trailer he was using as an on-site command centre. ‘Fucking place,’ he said. ‘Ninety-five degrees in the fucking shade for a week and now this.’
It could have rained for forty days and forty nights and Tom would still have been happier than he had been since the Learjet.
Munro caught him up as they walked. ‘Command centre’s at the Holiday Inn in Glenpool. There’s a room reserved for you, if Kitty’s done her job. Debrief every night at six, then show and tell at seven. You might want to give that a miss.’
He didn’t look at Tom and his voice held no judgement but Tom understood. He was welcome to get together with the team to discuss the day’s progress; less welcome to have any contact whatsoever with the public and press at the subsequent meeting. Couldn’t blame Munro for that. ‘Sure,’ he agreed easily.
It hadn’t escaped him that Munro had said Kitty had made a reservation for him: that meant he was on expenses that must have been okayed by Pete when requested by Munro. He wondered if he should acknowledge that in some way, but Munro had moved on.
‘Boeing’s playing it close to their chest but I don’t think they’re hiding anything. Alpa’s being a pain in the ass as usual. So I didn’t tell them about the bolt.’
At that, Tom grinned: the manufacturers and airline companies always hoped it was pilot error, while the pilots’ union was rabid in defence of its members, alive or dead. The Airline Pilots’ Association sent representatives to every crash investigation, just as determined to establish mechanical or systems failure. The NTSB investigators were often more like referees at a boxing match, caught in the middle, trying to hold the two adversaries at arm’s length. Except this referee also had to keep the press and bereaved families in the picture, deal with any local issues the crash may have thrown up, and all while conducting an investigation into why the hell the plane had fallen out of the sky in the first place.
Not telling the Alpa representatives about the bolt was technically justified until it had been thoroughly investigated. But it was also a mean little bit of payback that Tom heartily endorsed.
They climbed the two muddy metal steps into the draughty trailer and stood for a moment, dripping onto the filthy linoleum.
‘This is Mike Carling and Bryce Potts from Arlington, and you know Jan. Tom Patrick.’
From their surprised, stilted greetings, Tom was left in no doubt that they all knew he was already halfway out of the door. But even that realization wasn’t enough to burst his happy bubble. Wherever he might be in a week’s time, he was here now.
He trailed into the office after Munro and took the seat he waved at, then pulled it up to the Formica desk where Munro clicked a laptop into life.
There was a grid map on the screen: the crash site showing clusters of numbered green blocks, wreckage spread in a rough fan-shape covering about four square miles. A simple depiction of what must already have amounted to thousands of man-hours picking through dirt and corn, bush and trees.
Munro leaned across Tom to fire up the laptop in front of him too. Another grid map, this one with red triangles spread over a similarly wide area.
Bodies. And parts of bodies.
‘How many’d you find?’ Tom nodded at the triangles.
‘There were seventy-eight souls on board. We got about two hundred and twenty bits so far. Thirty-four whole, or nearly whole, bodies, and the rest everything from heads and legs right down to dog food.’
Tom thought of Lucia and Louis and their mother in her little white gloves, waiting for news of Candice and Carlo.
Dog food.
‘There’s a bunch of trees here maybe a mile long, a quarter wide.’ Munro tapped the screen. ‘Chopper’s no good for that. Sure to be more in there but we haven’t had the manpower yet. I’ve asked the state police to lend a hand but they’re taking their time putting it together.’
