Free Fall at Angel Creek, page 3
They all assembled in a large, empty hangar with terrain maps on the walls and tables set up labeled Airframe, Engines, Avionics, Weather, Cargo, Air Traffic Control, Reports/Test Results, Press, and Pax/HR. No one went near the Pax/HR table. A pilot in a green military flight suit with a Civil Air Patrol patch on his sleeve came up to her.
“What’s at the Pax/HR table?” he asked River.
“It stands for ‘passengers and human remains,’ although it’s primarily for human remains. That’s why no one wants to be near it.”
“Oh. I see. Thanks for explaining that. I’m Mike Bowers.” He extended his hand.
She shook it. “I’m River Dawson. Have you worked a crash site before?”
“No. I’m a fairly new volunteer pilot with the Civil Air Patrol. This is my first accident.”
“Are you flying the search-and-rescue missions?”
“Not so far. We have two crews flying the grid search pattern right now. I’m the backup pilot.”
This was important information. River might need this man’s skills down the road.
“Here’s my card, Mike. I’ve worked on several aircraft accidents, so if you have any questions, please call me.”
“Thanks. This is all very overwhelming. I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to be doing right now.”
“Just listen to the briefing and be ready to help out. You’ll do fine.”
The different team members stowed their gear, then sat down for a status briefing from the incident commander. He was a senior Oregon State Police commander wearing a bright-red jacket, so everyone knew who he was.
“Folks, we have a big job before us, so here’s what we know so far.”
River sat next to her new buddy Mike for the briefing, handing him an extra spiral notebook from her pack.
“Thanks,” he whispered.
“Based on the last reported position, the heading assigned by ATC, and their projected fuel remaining, our best guess on their location is this here.” He pointed to a large area outlined in red on a US Geological Survey map. Rumblings emerged from the team. “I know it’s a big zone, but we’ll be refining the search area as we receive more information.”
“Wow. That’s going to take forever. It’s huge. We’ll be here for days, won’t we?” Mike asked.
“Yes. We will,” River said.
The incident commander went on. “We just received a report from a local farmer that he found an object on his land. We have a team en route to the farm now to retrieve it. We’ll know more after they inspect it in the field. It may be an engine.”
“Do you have the location, Boss?” A man in the back of the room shouted his question.
He pointed to a spot about forty miles southeast of the Redmond airport. “This is where we’ll start our search today. The Civil Air Patrol is currently flying a low-altitude grid search over that area. We have two F-15s from the Portland Air National Guard to fly the high-altitude search. Load up your gear in the trucks outside. We depart for the search area in fifteen minutes.”
Everyone scrambled to grab their gear and hurry to the trucks. Instead, River went to the front of the hangar to study the map where the farmer had reported the object. She took a ruler out of her pack, laid it horizontally, then vertically, on the map, and wrote down the latitude and longitude of the possible engine’s position. She studied the terrain around the engine’s location, which was mostly flat. “That’s good,” she said to herself.
“What’s good?” Mike asked. He’d followed behind her, probably to see what she was looking at on the map.
“The land around the engine is reasonably flat, since it’s farmland, so that makes it easier to find the small metal pieces if it broke up on impact.”
“What if it didn’t? What if it disintegrated in flight? Or what if it caught on fire?”
“We won’t know that until after we can see it and inspect it in person.”
“Hey, aren’t you going with everyone else to the crash site? They’re leaving soon.”
“That’s not the crash site. It’s just where one of the three engines may have landed. The main crash site is still out there somewhere.”
This information from the incident commander confirmed River’s first instincts about this accident. If the airplane had diverted to an emergency airport, they would have reported in by now. The fact that the crew never declared an emergency, never even said another word after their last ATC transmission, made River conclude that the airplane had blown up in midair.
This DC-10 aircraft, with two hundred and seventy people on board, had exploded into a million pieces. The fiery debris rained down on a vast area of the ground. The engines were often the first pieces found because they were big, heavy, and tended to stay intact. The real question was, why did this DC-10 blow up?
Chapter Four
After dropping off her police vehicle and picking up her personal car, Dee drove along the winding mountain road to Redmond. She worried about making the phone call she was dreading. She had to try to get in touch with Naomi’s husband and family. Her husband and children needed to know the truth that her plane was missing and she was most likely dead.
Dee’s eyes burned with tears. She was numb and exhausted. No sleep, no food, and constant stress made her feel like she was a hundred years old.
When she’d gotten the text message from Naomi after so many years of silence, she allowed herself to hope, which was something she rarely did. She’d learned over the years to assume the worst, so she was never disappointed. This philosophy had served her well since she was on her own at age seventeen, but it failed her now. She and Naomi needed to talk about so much after not speaking to each other for so long.
Sixteen years, almost half her life, Dee was denied any contact with her little sister because of her father. The old resentment toward him bubbled up inside her like foul garbage covered with dirt. She tried her best never to think of him, but on rare occasions, he still snuck into her consciousness to torment her again. It was as if somehow beyond the grave he was still trying to keep them apart.
Dee’s father had died one month ago. The end of his life was why Naomi reached out to her after so long. When she’d received a text message from an unknown phone number one week ago, it changed her life. That message opened a door for her that had been locked closed for years.
She was initially suspicious when she received the strange text out of the blue. She and her partner, Marcus, had just finished their report on a big case involving illegal weapons and were on their way to the local cop bar to celebrate when her phone buzzed. She remembered every detail of that moment: feeling annoyed at the buzzing phone, the weight of it in her hand, being frozen in place when she read the words.
The image of that text was burned into her brain.
Hi Sissy. It’s Squirt. I hope this is your number. Daddy passed away two weeks ago, and I need to come see you. This is too involved for a phone call, so I need to talk to you in person. Please let me know if this is really you, Sissy. Love, Squirt.
Dee had to turn off the road because she couldn’t see. After she stopped, she put her head in her hands and sobbed. Waves of pain washed over her. It was difficult to catch her breath between racking sobs. After what felt like an eternity, she was able to stop crying. She shook her head, straightened her back, and said, “Come on, Dee. Get it together. We have a job to do.”
She started the car, revved the engine, and took off again down the mountain road to her objective. She focused her mind and body on one thing: she would track down Dr. River Dawson and get the answers she needed.
* * *
River had a theory and needed transportation to check it out. Everyone else was on their way to inspect the engine in the field, but it wasn’t the main crash site. If the airplane had broken up in flight from a midair collision, an explosion, or from flying into a thunderstorm, the major parts of the jet would be scattered along their route of flight.
She spread out her aeronautical section chart and used her plotter to carefully mark the last known position of the aircraft before air traffic control lost radar contact. Then she marked the position of the found engine and drew a line to connect the points. This was the track of the plane on the ground. She had to adjust for the effect of wind at altitude, plus correct their ground speed to determine their predicted position. She took out her beat-up old pilot’s “whiz wheel” flight computer from her backpack.
“What are you doing?” Mike Bowers had been watching her make calculations.
“I’m figuring out their real ground track and speed so I can better estimate their flight path.”
“So you don’t think the team is going to the right place?”
“They’re going to the beginning of the debris field, not the main part. I’m interested in the flight deck and the major parts of the fuselage. Those pieces will be found along the corrected flight path but still in a large area.”
River spun the circular dials of her whiz wheel, flipped it over, and used the wind-correction dial, then wrote down her figures. “Look at this, Mike. From their flight plan, they were supposed to have a fifty-knot headwind at flight level three-six-zero, but another aircraft in the area reported winds from the southeast at ninety-five knots, so they actually had a tailwind.”
She took out an orange highlighter, laid her plotter on the chart, and drew a line. “This is the real track, and based on their corrected speed, I think this is the location of the main debris.”
“That is way different from where everyone else is looking. How do you know this is right?”
“Just a few years of doing this.”
River extended her orange line forward, then drew a box around it and examined the terrain in the box. Parts of it were fairly flat, and then it rose sharply into the foothills of the mountain range. She needed to get there and look around. A small municipal airport was located in her search area that she could stage out of.
“Do you have any Civil Air Patrol planes available now, Mike?”
“Yeah. Our two search planes just landed a few minutes ago. They’re getting refueled. We have to wait until the Air Guard F-15s complete their high-altitude search before we can fly again.”
“Can you fly me to this airport and drop me off?”
“Madras Municipal? Sure, but it’s in the opposite direction of where everyone else is heading.”
“That’s why we’re going there.”
It was a short flight to Madras, and the weather was clear. They climbed into the red, white, and blue CAP Cessna 172, and River watched Mike program their route of flight. It was a four-seat, single-engine propeller plane, well equipped for search-and-rescue operations with GPS navigation and multiple radios. They took off from Redmond, and Mike turned the Cessna to the north.
“Please fly a heading of three-two-five and climb to four thousand five hundred feet.”
River took out her aeronautical chart, folded it so she could see her area outlined in orange, and started scanning outside the window. She wasn’t looking for anything in particular. Instead, she was trying to find something that appeared out of place, like an odd shape or something glinting in the sun. Nothing stood out.
“Can you fly us past Madras first? I’d like to see the area around the airport.”
“Sure thing,” Mike said.
From forty-five hundred feet in the air, River was high enough to clearly see the terrain features depicted on her chart and also close enough to make out the details. The land was lush and green, with no burning fires nearby, no big chunks of airplane, just open space. A flash of light caught River’s attention. She took out the binoculars for a better look. The sun reflected on a slender, meandering ribbon of gold, a small river right in the middle of her search area.
“That’s where I’m going. You can land and drop me off at Madras now.”
* * *
Dee made good time driving through the mountains to the Redmond airport. There, she noticed two county deputy sheriffs controlling an airport ramp access point near a big hangar. She pulled out her badge, hoping they wouldn’t ask her any questions. They glanced at her credentials, then waved her through.
She had to size up this situation before she made her next move. She was way out of her jurisdiction as a police officer here, but she needed to look like she fit in. Fortunately, when she’d picked up her own car at the station, she had her gym bag in the back. She drove around the corner out of view, then changed in her car out of her detective’s business suit into jeans, tennis shoes, an Oregon State Beavers tee shirt, and her well-worn leather jacket. Finally, she placed her police lanyard around her neck to display her badge.
In a chaotic emergency situation, you had to be able to figure out who was who quickly. Everyone had to recognize the symbols and uniforms of others to know their jobs. She would simply blend in with the other various law-enforcement officers, hope no one looked too closely at her, then stalk her prey.
She gathered up some discarded papers from the back seat and tried to make them appear to be something official. She observed people going into the hangar, surprised that more weren’t working, especially since this was such a big case. She saw only twenty or so walking around the hangar, so she decided to slip in undetected.
“You can drop that off here, officer,” a woman called out to her from behind a big table.
It looked like a registration table, except it had a sign on it. Reports/Test Results.
“Is this the local eyewitness list? We’ve been waiting for it.” The woman behind the table held out her hand, obviously expecting Dee to turn over her worthless papers.
“Uh, no, ma’am. This is for Dr. River Dawson. Do you know where I can find her?”
“She’s probably out in the field with the other investigators at the engine site. I’m not sure when they’re getting back, but I can take it and make sure she gets it when they return.”
“She’s not with everyone else.” Dee turned to see a pilot in a green military flight suit speaking to her.
“Do you know where she is?” she asked.
“She asked me to fly her to Madras Municipal. I dropped her off there about an hour ago.”
“What’s in Madras?”
“I’m not sure. She had me fly around it to the north, and then she saw something, and we landed.”
“Do you know what she saw?”
“Not really, but it looked like a small river to me. I’m picking her up at five, and we should be back here by five thirty, if you want to wait.”
“No. I can’t. Thanks for your help. I have to go.”
Dee rushed back to her car and started down the road to Madras, enjoying the familiar tingle in her spine when she was following a good lead. So many were dead ends, but when she was chasing one, and it took her to another lead, the thrill of the hunt consumed her.
She felt great satisfaction when a perpetrator was convicted and sentenced, like she was doing her part for justice. But, above all, she loved to interview witnesses, find evidence, and build a strong case. She knew what to do and was comfortable in her role. This lead was her chance to do something productive and not be just another helpless victim.
Chapter Five
Mike dropped River off in front of the small terminal building at Madras airport. She took in the panoramic view around the airport and inhaled deeply. It smelled of fresh air and pine trees, with a hint of aviation gas mixed in. She loved small airports and the happy memories they brought back. These places were busy with small planes flying around on the weekends, but usually during the week they were fairly quiet, with only one or two aircraft in the traffic pattern. River walked around the parking ramp admiring the airplanes.
It was a nice hodgepodge of aviation, with a sleek business jet parked next to an open-cockpit Stearman biplane, next to a little two-seat trainer. River looked into the two-seater through the Plexiglas canopy. The instruments were modern glass panels on a cool-looking interior. Very plush compared to the tiny Cessna 150 she’d learned to fly on.
The sound of an engine revving up made her turn to watch a yellow single-engine Piper roll down the runway and gracefully lift into the air. It was magic. No other way to describe it other than just pure magic. She could explain aerodynamics and calculate a coefficient of lift as well as anyone, but she didn’t have the words to explain her love of flying.
It was out of that love that she became an aircraft accident investigator. Once again, she found herself in the middle of nowhere searching for what was left of an airliner and the hundreds of lives ended too soon. Taking a last look at the airplanes around her, she focused on the harsh reality of her purpose here. She would tuck her happy memories in a safe place in her mind, then get down to business.
She walked into the small terminal and found the local airport fixed-base operator. It provided a flight-planning room, a lounge area, fuel, repair services, and anything else a pilot might need.
“Hi. I need to get a car, preferably four-wheel drive. Where can I rent one?”
The young woman behind the reception desk said, “We don’t have any rental cars here, but we have a shop truck you can borrow, if that will work for you.”
“That’d be great. How much is it?”
“Don’t worry about it. You’re here looking for the missing plane, aren’t you?”
“Yes. I am. Do you know anything about it, or has anyone here at the airport seen anything?”
“We had a couple of training flights go out this morning, but no one’s seen anything so far.”
She pulled out her aeronautical chart and pointed to the orange section so the receptionist could see. “I’m trying to find this area with the stream. Can you tell me how to get there?”
