Passenger 19 Read online

  Davis cocked a half smile. It was uncanny how he and the general held the same outlook on things. “The colonel seems okay … so far.”

  “Thank God. You never know what you’re going to get at zero latitude.” It was a running joke between them—the closer you got to the equator, the greater the chance you’d end up as the de facto investigator-in-charge.

  “Listen, I need one thing fast—some imagery. We’re looking at a really big search box, mostly deep forest.” Davis referenced the wall map and dictated the coordinates of a search area with plenty of slop built in. After Green read everything back, Davis added, “I also need IR pictures, and maybe some radar.”

  “Enough resolution to see a small fire under the canopy?”

  “Exactly. And we need time contrast data for any radar stuff—pictures within the last twenty-four hours, then something older to compare it to. We have to look for changes in the canopy that can’t be explained by logging or clear cutting by farmers. I think the DEA does some comparative imagery along those lines.”

  “They do, I’ve seen it before.”

  “Can you tell if this phone I’m using is secure?”

  “I show a padlock on my end—but I never trust that kind of thing.”

  “Me neither. Speed, Larry, speed. We really need this yesterday, just in case …” Davis checked himself, not wanting to say the wrong words, “in case there are any survivors out there.”

  “I’m on it now. Bye.”

  FOUR

  The general didn’t waste time.

  The first wave of images arrived at El Centro forty-five minutes later, infrared data blanketing the entire search box. It would take time to sort, so two junior officers from the colonel’s staff were put under Davis’ command. In a mix of English and broken Spanish he told them what to look for, and soon all three were scanning the images on a bank of computers that Marquez had ordered installed in the operations center. To Davis’ eye, El Centro was running smoothly. There was no wasted motion, and nearly all the equipment seemed operational. So far, the investigator-in-charge appeared eminently capable, and at the very least was a top-flight organizer.

  Finally having something to work with, Davis hammered the keyboard, working with the manic intensity of a condemned man searching for a lost pardon. After an hour he was blinking to keep his eyes focused. At the two-hour point, with night having taken a grip outside, he drafted two more technicians, a pair of enlisted men spotted idling near the entrance. It was nearly midnight when Marquez gave a shout from the adjoining room.

  “I have something!” He emerged with two printed images in hand. “This came in from Washington moments ago!”

  Marquez dropped the pictures on a table, twin radar images of the same plot of forest. One was dated last week, the other thirty minutes ago. The older image showed virgin forest, the more recent a two-thousand-foot-long scar of broken timber and disturbed earth. It was exactly what they’d been looking for. Exactly what Davis feared they would find.

  The new development brought excitement all around. Davis straightened beside the table, subtly holding onto the edge. “Okay,” he managed, “that’s probably what we’re after.”

  Marquez said, “We didn’t see it sooner because this area is fifty miles south of our search box. The airplane must have drifted far off course.” One of his lieutenants hurried forward and dropped a new photo on the table. He said in halting English, “Another is here, Colonel. Infrared, the same place.”

  Marquez cross-checked the reference grids. “The coordinates match.” He pointed to a cluster of white blobs, obvious hot spots, and checked the time-stamp. “There was a very recent fire. Sections remain warm even now.”

  Davis stared blankly but said nothing.

  “There can be no question,” Marquez said. He turned to a lieutenant and issued the obvious order. “Give these coordinates to the helicopter crew on alert. Tell them to be ready in ten minutes.”

  Davis wasn’t looking at the photos anymore. There was no need—the colonel was right. There can be no question. An aircraft had crashed in this isolated stand of Colombian rain forest, almost certainly TAC-Air Flight 223, wreckage that had been simmering for over twenty-four hours. During his flight across the Caribbean, Davis had tried to prepare for this moment. He’d wondered if he could keep his feelings in check. Then, after arriving in Colombia he’d become preoccupied, so focused on finding the airplane that he’d overlooked the end game. Ignored what would happen when their search succeeded. Now they had located the crash site, and the truth came down like a wrecking ball. What were the chances Jen had survived? He knew better than anyone.

  One in a million.

  All the same, he had to be sure. Had to see it with his own eyes. Davis pushed away from the table, checked that his Maglite was in his pocket, and was the first one out the door.

  * * *

  The helicopter swept fast and true through an obsidian sky. The craft was a Bell UH-1 Huey, and it rattled and shook as it sliced the Colombian night. The pilots struck out on a southwesterly heading, and for the first few minutes civilization ruled. Beneath them a sea of lights was blurred by the mix of speed and low altitude, until gradually the amber jewels of Bogotá fell away and the world beneath went to a void.

  There was room for four in the chopper’s cramped passenger cabin; Davis, Marquez, and two enlisted men riding shoulder to shoulder. Having ridden on many such birds through the years, he was accustomed to the noise and vibration. Less familiar was the way his hands clenched his thighs, and the way his back pressed rigidly against the metal wall. He shifted his hands underneath his legs, gripped the webbing on his seat and squeezed for all he was worth. Bile rose in his throat, and Davis choked it down as best he could. He remembered this sensation all too well—impending doom, just like four years ago when he’d driven to the morgue to identify his wife’s body. Until this moment, the longest twenty minutes of his life.

  Now he was there again, at that barren cliff, the last tendrils of hope snapping one by one. Long shots and slim likelihoods, all gone, sunk by a few irrefutable satellite images taken from a hundred miles above the earth. Images as cold and lifeless as the vacuum of space itself. The airplane carrying his daughter had crashed in a jungle. His and Diane’s only child, the love of their life. Nineteen years old.

  Nineteen!

  The bile again. He gripped the seat harder, so hard that something gave in the tubular frame. Davis was seated next to the open door, strapped into a seat near an unloaded machine gun. The equatorial air rushed past a few feet away, a hurricane whose swirling wake buffeted his face and whipped his hair, asynchronously cool and bleak. But not nearly as bleak as his defeatist thoughts. Disjointed recollections of going through photo albums after Diane’s death. Of giving her clothes to Goodwill and closing her account with the phone company. He would do it all again. Only this time he would do it alone.

  His self-immolation paused when Marquez began shouting, a rapid-fire exchange with the pilots in Spanish. The colonel turned to Davis, his expression more somber than ever.

  “We’ve received a message from the defense ministry command center. An army ground unit was working nearby, and they’ve already arrived at the scene. The crash has been confirmed. I ordered them to approach the aircraft and check for survivors. They will also set up a perimeter. I’ve given strict orders not to touch anything. We should hear back in a moment.”

  Amazingly, Davis shrugged it off—he could be no nearer the edge than he already was. He stared vacantly into the night, until minutes later when Marquez had a second exchange with the copilot. Then, with all the decency he could muster, the colonel gave one shake of his head.

  No survivors.

  Davis nodded back numbly, the first nine-inch nails of acceptance having already taken hold. Ten minutes later the crash site was in view, the headlights of two big army trucks trained on the area. It was a surreal scene. In a jungle violated by knives of white light, Davis saw the main section
of fuselage, and around it far-strewn bits of wreckage. More than a day after impact, wisps of smoke still curled through the foliage, dissolving into darkness. He could make out a half dozen soldiers staking out the perimeter.

  With irony that seemed almost divine, Davis saw a perfect clearing nearby in the light of the full moon, a grassy half acre that was made to order as a place to land a rescue helicopter. Only rescue was no longer the operative word. It was now a recovery operation. The Huey sank lower and dropped toward the clearing, the crash site gaining detail as the chopper’s landing lights danced over debris. Davis unbuckled his seat belt, his hands finding new life.

  If Jen is in there she needs me, he thought. She needs me now.

  Davis rotated his body, putting one leg outside the open door and stepping onto the Huey’s landing skid. His heart was racing as the rotor downwash snapped at his clothing and whipped his hair.

  Marquez shouted something across the cramped passenger cabin, but Davis couldn’t make it out. Or maybe he didn’t want to.

  The Huey’s controlled descent paused ten feet in the air, and Davis’ legs seemed to act on their own. He stepped out and rode the skid, the Huey rocking as two hundred and forty pounds transferred to the port side.

  Marquez was screaming now, his voice clear above the roar of the engine. “No! Don’t—”

  Davis dropped into the night.

  He hit the ground hard, rolled onto his hip, and quickly jumped to his feet. He broke into a sprint, the wreckage beckoning in its sickly yellow hue. He saw a shattered fuselage that was breached at its midpoint, the two halves clinging to one another at a noticeably odd angle. Davis was halfway to the wreckage when a soldier stepped into his path. The young man held out a flat palm, the way a traffic cop would to bring a car to a stop.

  Davis brushed past him without a glance.

  A second soldier, this one with a rifle on his shoulder, put out two hands. Davis put him on his ass with a stiff arm. He was running full steam, stumbling over vines and tree roots. After thousands of miles he was almost there.

  He had to know!

  More shouting behind him. Spanish? English? He didn’t care. The entire Colombian Army couldn’t stop him now.

  One last soldier remained, a big man with a machine pistol hanging loose across his chest. He’d been inspecting the interior at the breach in the fuselage, and was heading back to join his squad. His eyes opened wide as he regarded the onrushing American who’d fallen out of the sky.

  Probably on instinct, his hands went to his weapon, and he stood squarely in Davis’ path. He was a considerable obstacle, a two-hundred-pound man dressed in fifty pounds of fighting gear. There was no way to go around him, so Davis didn’t try. In the broken shafts of light, the soldier suddenly seemed to take flight, his wide frame sailing into the brush like a discarded rag doll.

  Five steps later, Davis was there.

  He thrust his head into the jagged breach at midcabin and stared in horror at the terrible scene inside. It was a sight he’d seen many times before, but never with tonight’s perspective.

  Davis was staring at the face of death itself.

  A primal howl rose in his throat but was never delivered, because in the next instant everything went black.

  FIVE

  Larry Green arrived for work the next morning and went through the motions of his daily routine. Tall coffee in hand, he nodded to familiar faces in the lobby of L’Enfant Plaza, and took the stairs to his fifth-floor suite. In the anteroom of his office he said hello to Rebecca, his able assistant of five years.

  “Good morning, sir.”

  “How was your weekend?”

  “Great! Charlie and I got engaged!” She wagged an ice-laden finger at him.

  “Really?” Green walked around the desk and gave her a heartfelt embrace. “I’m so happy for you! Charlie’s a lucky man—let me know if you need any time off to plan the big day.”

  Rebecca gushed for a full two minutes about her fiancé’s prospects—he was a junior attorney at the Department of Justice—and Green listened with all the enthusiasm he could muster. Only when he reached his office, behind a gently closed door, did his expression fall to reflect the grim mood he’d been battling all morning. He immediately checked his e-mail, but saw nothing new that would help Jammer. To the contrary, he found a message from his boss, Janet Cirrillo, Managing Director of the NTSB.

  Larry, please keep me up to date on Cali crash of TAC-Air Flight 223. 2x a day minimum and any breaking developments. Sorry—heat from above. Bogotá embassy has issued Davis sat-phone: 011-57-9439220676.

  Green took a long sip of coffee. For Cirrillo, heat from above had only two sources: the Office of the Chairman of the NTSB or the White House itself. On its face, neither seemed likely, and Green decided something else was at play. It wasn’t unusual to get interest in crashes from outside the official food chain. It could come from a senator from the Midwest whose hometown built the hydraulic pumps used on the downed aircraft, or perhaps a manufacturer’s lobbyist whose client had a big sale pending to China, and who didn’t want bad press at a critical moment in negotiations. For Green it was a delicate dance—theories and evidence from investigations were privileged information. He supposed that in a day or two the source of the pressure would become clear, telegraphed when Cirrillo began asking more specific questions. He would respond as he always did, metering a few generic details, while gently reminding his boss that the integrity of the process was paramount.

  He was disappointed to find no reports from Davis, but then the man had only arrived last night. He hoped the imagery he’d sent had been useful in locating the crash. Jammer had never been the best communicator, and given Jen’s involvement, Green expected the information flow to be even more stunted than usual. With nothing new to report, he happily said so in a polite reply to Cirrillo and launched it into cyberspace.

  He was tempted to dial the sat-phone, but then realized it was an hour earlier in Bogotá. Even so, he’d lay money on Jammer being awake. Given the circumstances, he doubted the man would sleep a minute until Jen was found—for better or worse.

  Green decided a text best suited the situation: Call with an update when possible. Hope all is going well.

  He paused, then hit send.

  * * *

  If misery on Earth kept an address, Jammer Davis had arrived.

  His head throbbed, every heartbeat a systolic hammer, and his joints seemed rusted in place. Wretched as that all was, none of it touched the ache in his chest, a dull pressure without source that seemed acutely physical. A manifestation of lost hope.

  The idea of movement was overwhelming, so with considerable effort Davis opened one eye. What he saw was confusing at first—the world, such as it was, appeared to be presented sideways. His brain processed the view, summed it with the rough texture grating against his right cheek, and he decided he was lying face down on a concrete floor. Not the most dazzling deduction of his career, but useful in that moment.

  Davis took his time, an arm inching one way, a leg twisting another. It took a full two minutes to reach a sitting position, and from there he put a hand to the back of his head and felt a massive knot, along with the oozing warmth of coagulated blood. Everything came back slowly, frame by frame, like a PowerPoint horror show. Larry Green giving him the bad news on the seaplane dock. A five-hour flight from Andrews that seemed to take five days. Dashing over moonlit forest in a helicopter and jumping out before the skids hit the ground. Running for all he was worth toward the charred wreckage. It seemed like a nightmare, every wretched snapshot. Except for the final image that was stamped indelibly in his brain—the inside of the shattered jet. A sight so vivid and intense it could only be true.

  Davis had seen the aftermath of crashes before. He’d seen blood and debris and unrecognizable human parts. He’d smelled the stench of rotting flesh days after impact, riding on air further desecrated by the vapor of melted plastic and spent kerosene. But never had he experien
ced it all on such a personal level. There was nothing explicitly damning in that picture in his head—he hadn’t seen the birthmark on Jen’s ankle, hadn’t recognized a bracelet or a shirt he’d given her as a birthday present. Yet none of that was necessary. Not when the greater picture was so utterly overwhelming.

  The crash of TAC-Air Flight 223 had been a typical impact—which was to say, a devastating event. A twenty-one passenger regional jet had struck the earth and been cast in a thousand directions. The results were predictable, and there could be no survivors.

  He massaged the back of his head and tried to stand, but failed miserably. So, with his backside on cold concrete, he studied his surroundings. Four cinder block walls predominated. There was a barred window behind him, and a sturdy iron door in front with a slot at the bottom. Simple enough. He’d found his way to a prison cell, probably with good reason.

  Davis was still on the floor, thinking about getting up but not really caring, when a familiar voice sounded from behind the heavy door. The lock rattled and Colonel Marquez stepped in. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, scrutinizing Davis as if he were looking at a dog who’d bitten a neighbor. The guard gave him a look that asked if he should stay. Davis was sure the story of his crazed assault at the crash site had made the rounds, so perhaps he was considered dangerous. A threat to himself and others—even if he couldn’t stand up.

  Marquez dismissed the man.

  “Sorry if I don’t get up,” Davis said.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “A bottle of ibuprofen would go a long way toward advancing relations between our two nations.”

  Marquez may have smiled, but he had the kind of face that made it hard to tell. “What you did last night did nothing to advance relations.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “An apology might be in order?” Marquez suggested.

  Davis rubbed the front of his head, which throbbed less than the back. “Do you have children, Colonel?”