Fly By Wire Page 2

  “Dad—” she sniffled, “I want you to stop the bad language.”

  “Bad language?” Davis tried to remember what the hell he’d said. “Baby, you hear worse than that a hundred times every day in school.”

  “No! Mom never allowed it in the house, and with her gone, it’s up to me to keep you in line.”

  In a reflex probably born from some long-ago martial arts training, Davis took a deep, deep breath. “Your Mom was a strong woman, Jen. I’m glad you are too. I promise to mind my tongue.”

  Her head came up and she used the corner of a bed sheet to wipe her eyes. As she did, Davis noticed the framed picture on the night-stand next to her bed, the three of them with arms around shoulders, smiling on a ski slope. At least that hadn’t been stuffed in a drawer.

  He said, “And you have to promise not to throw any more hair care products at me.”

  She smiled. “Sorry.”

  He gave her a lopsided grin—the one that Diane had always said was roguish. The one that Jen said made him look like a big doofus. All a matter of perspective, he figured. “Okay. Let’s get ready.”

  “But I still need something for my hair.”

  Davis got up and headed toward the door. “I’ll go down to the kitchen and get you a twisty tie—you know, the ones we use for the garbage bags.” Davis bolted for the stairs. Too slow. Just before he rounded the corner, a flying hairbrush smacked him in the hip. He heard the giggle, her mood having completed its one-eighty.

  With no small amount of pride Davis thought, That’s my daughter. Her hormones might be in a blender. But her aim was dead sure.

  Ten minutes later, Jen was waiting in the car.

  Davis was still in the kitchen poking buttons on the dishwasher, trying to get it out of the damned “potscrubber” cycle, when the phone rang. Davis wanted to ignore it. Should have ignored it. He picked up.

  “Jammer here.”

  There was a pause at the other end of the line, then, “Hello, Frank.”

  Aside from the occasional phone solicitor or census taker—people he didn’t want to talk to anyway—there was only one person in the world who called Davis by his given name. “Hello, Sparky.”

  Only one person in the world called Rita McCracken anything but Mrs. McCracken. Or Assistant Supervisor McCracken of the National Transportation Safety Board. Davis had given her the name on the spot when they’d first met, a not so subtle jibe at her fiery red hair. Davis often gave call signs to his friends, but in her case it was more like naming a hurricane. After first impressions had gone south, he’d kept at it just to torque her off. Not good form with the boss, but that’s how Davis was. And probably why he’d never made it past the rank of major in the Air Force.

  “Pack your bags,” she said.

  “Pack? Why?”

  “Haven’t you seen the news?”

  “No, I’m a busy guy.”

  “Well, you just got busier. A World Express C-500 went down in France yesterday. I need you to go to Houston this afternoon for a seventy-two-hour on the captain.”

  Davis frowned. Much of the information gathered in aircraft accident investigations was a simple matter of reviewing records. Maintenance logbooks, flight plans, and air traffic control data were all documented, either electronically or on paper. But some of the most pertinent history was perishable—the short-term personal background of crewmembers. A seventy-two-hour look-back was standard procedure.

  “You know my situation, Rita. I can’t—”

  “I know that you are on the ‘go team,’ Davis! Now pack your bags and get in here. I’ll brief you myself.” She hung up.

  The horn honked in the garage.

  Davis seethed. He had an urge to crack the phone across the counter. That would feel good. But then he’d just have to go out and buy a new one. He hurried into his room and slammed some clothes into a suitcase. As a member of the “go team” he was supposed to have his bag already packed, available on a moment’s notice. One minute was all he needed. Davis traveled light.

  The drive to school was quiet. Davis tried to think of a good way to break it to Jen that he had to go out of town for a couple of days. She interrupted his mission planning.

  “You know, Dad, for a big-shot investigator you’re not very observant.”

  “How’s that?”

  “We need gas.”

  He looked down at the gauge. One eighth. Davis never filled up until he had to. “Don’t worry, baby. I keep up with these things.”

  “Go to Mel’s. It’s always five cents cheaper than that other place you use.”

  He considered explaining that a six-pack of his preferred beer at “that other place” was a buck less, which made for a wash. Now probably wasn’t the time.

  She said, “I’ll be driving soon, you know.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  But he was reminded—a whole new set of worries, right around the pubescent corner. Jen was going to take driver’s ed over the summer, learn to merge and parallel park, keep her hands at ten and two. Right then, Davis decided he’d brake hard for any yellow traffic lights. Not step on the gas. Like she’d been watching him do for the last fifteen years.

  “Your hair looks cool, Dad.”

  “Huh?”

  “Your hair, it’s getting longer. That tight military cut was getting pretty tired.”

  Davis looked in the rearview mirror. He needed a trim.

  Jen said, “And we still have to work on your wardrobe.”

  He looked down. For twenty years it had been a uniform, something he’d never really minded. One less decision each day. Now that he was a civilian, Davis tried to keep things simple. He had on khaki pants and a brown polo shirt. He owned six polo shirts. Three were in a suitcase in the trunk. His leather shoes were old and comfortable, strung with the second pair of laces. A long time ago they’d been expensive. Davis didn’t mind buying expensive stuff—not because he cared a whit about style, but because it usually wore well. Fewer shopping trips.

  “Maybe some baggy gangsta pants and a Hawaiian-print shirt,” she prodded.

  He looked at her sourly, saw the grin. “You’re yankin’ my chain again.”

  “I’m the only one who can.”

  He nodded. “Yep.”

  Davis slowed as they came to the school drop-off loop. He still hadn’t thought of an easy way to break it to Jen that he had to leave town. That being the case, he laced his voice in parental graveness and just said it. “Baby, I have to go away for a couple of days on business. You’ll need to stay at Aunt Laura’s. I’ll set everything up.”

  Davis looked at his daughter, expecting concern or anxiety. She looked positively giddy. He tracked her gaze to the campus entrance.

  “It’s Bobby Taylor!” she gushed. “Red shirt.”

  A tall young boy leaned on a pole. The kid was rail thin and gawky, all elbows and knees and pointed shoulders. He was cutting up with his friends.

  “Did you hear me?” he asked.

  “What? Oh, yeah. You gotta go away.” She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “Have a good time, Daddy.”

  “A good time? It’s a crash investigation.”

  “Oh, right. Well, you’ll figure it out, Daddy. You always do.”

  Davis watched his daughter get out of the car like she was arriving at the Academy Awards. “Aunt Laura will pick you up,” he called out. The door closed in his face and Jen gave a finger wave behind her back. She strutted by the Taylor kid like a runway model.

  If he looks at her butt, Davis thought, I’ll break his skinny neck.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Headquarters of the NTSB was centrally located, two blocks from the National Mall in L’Enfant Plaza. It was very nearly, and perhaps should have been, in the shadow of the FAA building, a far more imposing mountain of gray roughly a block away. The NTSB structure was demure by D.C. standards, a modernist undertaking rife with raw concrete and glass that blended to the point of invisibility among an ocean of the
same. Unpretentious and anonymous. Which suited Davis just fine.

  He crossed the lobby, his soft soles having minimal impact on an overpolished marble floor. Davis approached the elevator just as the door slid open. A pair of men had been waiting—perfectly Wind-sored ties, starch-stiffened collars, venti Starbucks lattes. They stepped inside and turned toward the opening, gave him an inquisitive look.

  Davis shook his head. “No thanks, guys.”

  As soon as the door closed, Davis hit the adjacent stairwell and started out hard, taking three steps at a time. On the fifth floor he burst into the hallway and checked the numbers over the elevator. Just passing four. Davis grinned.

  He turned into the office labeled ASSISTANT DIRECTOR MCCRACKEN. Davis passed the vacant receptionist’s desk and walked straight into his boss’s office without knocking.

  It was a room Davis had never liked, the furniture more expensive and plush than a mid-level bureaucrat deserved. Rita McCracken, all five feet two of her, was standing behind her desk trimming perfectly green foliage from a leggy, anemic-looking indoor plant. Davis knew she fancied herself as something of a gardener, but he pictured her as one of those people whose time in the yard was all digging and cutting and pulling things up by the roots. More anger management than horticulture.

  She dumped her clippings in the trash, stashed the clippers, and then planted herself in an oversized leather chair. When McCracken looked up, she didn’t bother with a greeting. “What have you heard about the crash?” she asked.

  “There was a short blurb on NPR as I drove in. Not much in the way of details.”

  She held out a collection of faxes. Davis took them and began skimming as he sat down. He’d been working under McCracken for two years now, ever since retiring from the Air Force and hiring on with the NTSB. They had never gotten along. She was a baseline feminist, a red-headed locomotive who didn’t think much of ex-fighter pilots. And Davis didn’t think much of fifty-something bureaucrats who’d never had their hand on a control stick, but were sure you could find the cause to any crash by organizing the right ad hoc committee.

  “The lead page is a twenty-four-hour update,” she said. “A C-500, near Lyon, France. It went straight down from thirty-eight thousand.”

  Davis scanned the cover document. There wasn’t much. The aircraft in question was brand new, a factory delivery for World Express, one of the three big overnight package delivery companies.

  She said, “The second page is a plot of the radar data. From the first sign of trouble to estimated impact, not much more than two minutes. This thing fell like a brick. The air traffic controllers heard one ‘Mayday’ on the way down, but that was it.”

  He looked over the data. Radar stuff was okay, but incomplete. It was essentially a series of snapshots—Davis had always likened it to those clay animation movies where the character movement was so awkward and choppy. The data flow had stopped abruptly as the aircraft dove through ten thousand feet. Which was odd. “Do you have any pictures?” he asked.

  McCracken pulled an eight-by-ten from her desk. “This just came in, commercial satellite imagery. It won’t tell you much.”

  Davis stared intently at the photograph. It was grainy, but right away told him a lot. A lot that didn’t make sense.

  “It hit in a farmer’s field,” McCracken declared.

  Davis took his eyes off the photograph. “There were just two pilots on board? No mechanics or lawyers?”

  “Lawyers? Why on earth would there be lawyers?”

  “It was a delivery from the factory. Sometimes the airlines and manufacturers sign the papers airborne, once they’re over international waters—big tax breaks.”

  “No. Two pilots. Both fatalities,” she said matter-of-factly. “Their licenses and medicals are there.”

  Davis shuffled through and found two FAA pilot’s licenses, two airman medical certificates. The faxes were simple reproductions of the original boilerplate documents, what the FAA spit out at a rate of 180,000 every year. Properly trimmed and with the right bond, the medical certificates could have passed as originals. It had always amazed him—you couldn’t get into Sam’s Club without a photo ID, yet to command an airliner with five hundred passengers or tons of hazardous cargo, all you needed were two documents any bozo could replicate on a home computer.

  He studied it all. The captain was a guy named Earl Moore, Houston address. Forty-two years old, six foot one, one hundred ninety pounds. Airline transport pilot with five type ratings, including the C-500. First officer Melinda Hendricks, Dallas. Thirty-six, five foot five, weighing in at one twenty. ATP, typed on the Boeing 737 and C-500. Standard stuff.

  “No evidence of a midair collision?” he asked.

  “No. At that altitude any other aircraft would have been under positive air traffic control. The French tell us there was nothing else in the area.”

  Davis wasn’t convinced. “Air traffic control can only see what’s on their scopes. A military fighter with its transponder off, screwing around, going vertical. Stranger things have happened.”

  “Is that the kind of thing you did in the Air Force, Davis? Screw around in your jet?”

  “You know me,” he said with an easy glare. “Everything by the book.”

  McCracken frowned. “What do you know about the C-500?”

  “CargoAir’s had them in full-scale production for about three years now. Selling like crazy. Maybe a hundred in service.”

  “One hundred and fifty-six,” McCracken corrected like a dog marking its territory. She loved her numbers. The woman was an engineer by training, basted with a few years of safety work at one of the big defense contractors. Davis had never quite figured how she’d gotten into a supervisory post in the Major Investigations Division of the NTSB. Politics, probably. But he never dwelled on stuff like that.

  He said, “The C-500 is a great idea, a flying wing airplane specialized for cargo. Ever since FedEx proved there was money to be made in flying packages, all the cargo airlines have used bastardized versions of passenger airframes—long tubes with wings, the windows covered over. But the flying wing design, similar to the B-2 bomber, is a lot more aerodynamically efficient. It gives a roughly twenty percent advantage in fuel burn. And with jet fuel going for three bucks a gallon, the big cargo operators are tripping over themselves to get orders on the books.”

  “Exactly. So when one mysteriously falls out of the sky, people start watching. This is high profile. A lot of countries have an interest in the outcome of this investigation—Italy, Germany, Egypt, Dubai, China. It might be assembled in France, but that airplane is a global collection of components.”

  “I think some of our own aerospace companies are involved too,” Davis added.

  “Tell me about it. I’ve already had calls from three congressmen this morning concerned about jobs in their districts. With the C-500 being a launch airframe, CargoAir’s corporate life could be at stake here.”

  Davis deadpanned, “The lives of a lot of pilots too.” He never missed a chance to get in a dig that she wasn’t an operator. Childish, really, but he kept it up.

  McCracken ignored the taunt. “Your flight to Houston leaves Reagan National in two hours. Michael has already made the arrangements,” she said, referring to her assistant in the outer office.

  Now there’s a guy whose life has to be hell, Davis thought. He said, “So you want a standard seventy-two-hour profile on the pilots?”

  McCracken stood and began to wander. She stopped in front of a painting, a big oil rendition of a battle-damaged B-17 bomber limping home across the English Channel. McCracken stared at it and contemplated, as if searching for insight that could be applied to the more contemporary air tragedy they now faced. It was probably the best spot in the room to appear thoughtful. There was a window on the opposite wall, but Davis had checked the view once, on a day when she’d kept him waiting. It was hardly inspirational—the roof of an adjacent building, and, if you looked straight down, three Dumpsters
with open lids.

  She said, “I talked to the World Express chief pilot this morning. The first officer on the flight had been at the factory for a week. She was kept in France after another delivery fell through. The French are working her profile. The captain,” she paused, “had some issues.”

  “Issues?”

  “He was going through a divorce.”

  Davis didn’t like where this was headed. “Lots of people get divorced.”

  McCracken turned away from her painting. “And he went through alcohol rehab last year.”

  His eyes narrowed further, but he said nothing.

  “Go to Houston and talk to his widow. Then you head straight to France.”

  “France? You’ve got to be kidding!”

  “None of your smart-ass crap!” she shot back. “You are employed by the NTSB to investigate aircraft accidents. I’m sorry about what happened to your wife, Davis, but that was a long time ago. I have bent over backward to keep you local. Sooner or later this was bound to happen.”

  He fumed. “Why do I have to brief them in person? What’s wrong with just writing up a report on my findings?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the French have asked for an NTSB liaison. You will be part of the investigation team.”

  “On the investigation? That could take a year! Maybe more!”

  “It won’t be continuous—a few weeks there, a few weeks back home.”

  “No way! Find somebody else!”

  McCracken moved behind her fancy desk and leaned forward on stubby, freckled arms. “You take this assignment, or I’ll have your resignation.”