Crashers Read online

“I’ve got a— Whoa!”

  The cockpit began shaking madly.

  “Shit!” Meghan barked, the avionics monitors dancing so badly in front of her eyes that she couldn’t get a read on them. “Trimming rudder to the left! What’ve we got?”

  “I— Dammit!” The bucking grew worse. Above their heads, four electronic caution tones sounded, followed by a siren.

  “What’ve we got!” she barked.

  “I dunno! Wait, check the— This doesn’t make sense!”

  The tones chimed again. The siren was going nonstop.

  “Call it in!”

  Russ toggled his transceiver. “Uh, PDX flight control, this is CascadeAir Eight One Eight! Mayday! We are declaring an emergency!”

  In economy class, passengers gripped their seat arms or one another. The air masks deployed, just as they had in the safety video everyone had ignored.

  . . .

  The West Virginian drawl from the tower answered back immediately. “Roger, Eight One Eight. Do you wish to return to Portland?”

  “Affirmative,” Meghan cut in. She was holding the controls with both hands, the small clusters of muscles around her knuckles standing taut. A vein pulsed visibly at her throat.

  “What is the nature of your emergency?”

  “Unknown, Portland! Engine trouble! We’re shaking apart!”

  “Understood, Eight One Eight. Runway one zero romeo is available. We’re clearing airspace for you. Contact one zero five point four for your lineup.”

  Russ fought down the urge to puke, switched the secondary communication array to frequency 105.4. He flicked a glance toward the captain, who didn’t look frightened. She looked positively pissed off.

  “One zero five point four, roger,” he said.

  “Ah, good, Eight One Eight. Come about one eight zero, altitude at your discretion. Would you like fire crews on scene?”

  “One eight zero confirmed. Affirmative on the fire crews. We don’t know what’s wrong!” Meghan shouted to be heard over the warning sounds and the rattling of her vessel. She began the 180-degree turn as directed.

  “Eight One Eight, you are, ah, seven miles from the first localizer.”

  “Meg, we got— Christ!”

  The airliner yawed madly. Russ’s coffee cup and saucer went flying, a clipboard rattled to the deck. The ship began rolling to the left. Meghan gripped the yoke, hauled with all her might to the right. The ship bucked like a bronco.

  Both Meghan and Russ looked up as the “stick shaker” sounded; they were perilously close to stalling an engine.

  Meghan reached down beneath her legs, toggled a switch. They heard a gurgling sound as fuel began dumping from the emergency vents, raining down on the farmland of Marion County, Oregon.

  Something deep inside the plane snapped. The stick in Meghan’s hands whipsawed to the left. She was holding on so hard, the sudden movement broke two bones in her left wrist.

  “Dammit!” she shouted.

  “Jesus, God,” Russ muttered.

  The Vermeer jetliner shrieked. It howled and jerked like a wounded animal, as the starboard wing began ripping away from the body. The ship rolled, pivoted, began its death dive.

  “Nooooooo!” Meghan roared, demanding the beast do her bidding.

  The negative g force hammered them into their restraints. Russ’s face went white as his clavicle cracked under the pressure.

  CascadeAir Flight 818 screamed toward the ground. Meghan Danvers pressed her feet to the floor, lifted her butt off the chair, and hauled back on the stick with all her might. She screamed as her broken wrist protested, the bones grinding together. She pulled and pulled, back arched, legs vibrating. The jet howled and she howled back, one wild animal challenging another.

  Less than a hundred feet from the ground, the overworked elevators began responding to Meghan’s herculean effort. The pitch leveled out, at least a little. When the giant aircraft hit the ground, it was belly, not nose, first.

  Meghan Danvers wouldn’t live long enough to realize how many lives she’d saved.

  3

  WEST LOS ANGELES: ANOTHER happy hour, another club.

  The scene was a blend of nouveau riche and Eurotrash, corporate risers and high-end call girls. Half the room were players, and the other half had fucked the first half. The music was low and sensuous for now—with a promise of something rougher as the night wore on. The place was a ragout of money and hormones and booze and meth and coke. A high-octane cocktail of adrenaline and endorphins.

  Daria Gibron had come there for a couple of reasons: one was to translate for a junior-junior member of the Saudi royal family in the market for a French chateau. The work had been easy enough, the negotiations simple and the vodka martini dry. The job complete, Daria bade both foreigners adieu and drifted deeper into the crowd, finding a place at the long teak bar and ordering another.

  There wasn’t much chance of going home alone, and that suited Daria just fine. She wore Dolce & Gabbana: a little black tank top with a matching jacket and a short skirt, with strappy spikes to show off her muscular calves. She’d spent lots of money to give her hair that poorly cut, haphazard look, very short in back, much longer in front, which looked as good in a boardroom or business luncheon as it did on the dance floor. She accepted the Belvedere martini and spent the next hour turning down invitations to “get the hell out of here” from men in Armani suits and women in Gucci.

  The one who finally caught her eye was out of place. Faded blue jeans, lace-up military boots, and a maroon pullover sweater that was neither stylish nor weathered enough to be chic. Blond with blue eyes, he wore his sleeves pushed up to reveal tattoos on both sculpted forearms.

  “How d’you do?” he asked, his accent Irish and rough-hewn.

  “Well enough.” Daria went with noncommittal. This man, with a half-day’s stubble and lopsided smile, was far from the best-looking man in the room. But there was something about him, she thought, as he ordered a beer. It arrived and he took one sip, all but spitting it back out. Daria let loose a laugh that surprised the Irishman and herself.

  “God, and that’s rat piss,” he said, and she laughed again.

  “American beer? Undrinkable.”

  “Aye. Give us some of that, then.” Without waiting for an okay, the Irishman took a sip of her martini, their hands brushing as he took the glass.

  “That’s passable. Name’s Jack.”

  “Hallo, Jack. Daria,” she replied, leaning toward him and speaking for his ears only. Her accent was Middle Eastern, but that’s all he could tell.

  He glanced into the mirror behind the bar and Daria realized what it was about Jack that had attracted her, in a room full of gorgeous men and women. He was scanning the room the way a pro does. He’d chosen his position to give him a view of both doors, and his eyes strayed to Daria’s face only in passing, a touch-and-go before scanning the room again.

  Much as Daria herself had been doing.

  “What brings you to the United States?” she asked.

  “Was hoping to get laid,” Jack replied, his blue eyes gliding to hers for a moment, then sliding away to scan the room again.

  She nodded.

  “The table to your left,” she said, catching Jack’s eyes and locking them onto hers. “Seven o’clock. Two men and two women.”

  He squinted a little, but kept his eyes on hers. She stared straight back.

  “Aye?”

  “The man facing us is left-handed and is drinking red wine.”

  He smiled, sandy eyebrows rising in mild surprise. “Am I that obvious?”

  She nodded.

  “Lass with her back to us is wearing a houndstooth coat and has a cocktail with ice,” he said. “Why do Americans drink cocktails with ice?”

  “I’ve no idea,” she said, and slid off her stool. “Shall we?”

  Jack was with two other men, both of whom had Irish accents; they had secured a table in another room of the restaurant and were watching a horse race on a gi
gantic TV screen. A fourth Irishman sauntered their way, making a big show of counting out the twenties he’d just won from some lawyer-types at the bar.

  “Having fun, are we?” Jack approached, his fingers barely touching Daria’s left elbow.

  “Aye, tha’.” The big man winked. “I’m winning. What’ll yez have, then? ’Son me.”

  Jack turned to the big guy, nodded at the money he’d won. “Less of that, you. We’re on the clock here. I need your head in the fucking game.”

  Daria noticed that the three other men treated Jack as their boss.

  “Now,” Jack said. “Be lucky, my lads. The lady is about to show me a good time.”

  It was almost 9 P.M. when Daria unlocked the door to her flat and escorted Jack through the door. Inside, she knelt and swept away a Persian rug, revealing a trapdoor. She opened the door. Beneath it was the face of a safe with a ten-digit keypad. She tapped in a code, then cranked the handle and hauled open the door.

  Within was a stash of handguns. Glock 9s, a couple of Colt Pythons and a Colt Defender, three Springfield Armory V-10s, a brace of Para-Ordnance P10s, and an PDA P14.

  Jack knelt, ran his hand lovingly along the profile of the Colt Python. “You do know how to show a lad a good time.”

  4

  THE MEDICAL EXAMINER ACROSS the table said something that Dr. Leonard Tomzak disagreed with. In typical “Tommy” Tomzak fashion, he wadded up a napkin and threw it at the medical examiner’s head.

  “Stu?” he said. “That there is twenty pounds of horseshit in a ten-pound bag.”

  The medical conference had begun in a sterile, white-on-white conference room at Portland’s Oregon Health & Science University, complete with PowerPoint presentations and color-coded handouts. The topic—blunt abdominal trauma and the effects on hollow viscus—had drawn specialists from throughout the United States. The panel discussion had been gentlemanly, collegial. The audience in the stadium seating had applauded at the right times, laughed at the right anecdotes, and hadn’t seemed surprised that there would be laughing points in a discussion of blunt abdominal trauma.

  In short, it was a perfectly dull seminar.

  Later, a half dozen of the top specialists moved the conference to a brew pub in downtown Portland. They sat at a thick, varnished wooden table, cluttered with beer mugs and pitchers, and greasy baskets of homemade corn chips and salsa that could melt the enamel off your teeth. Tommy drank seltzer with a wedge of lime.

  The bartender, when asked, had provided vast sheets of butcher paper. The physicians drank and marveled over the salsa and drew rough diagrams of spines and skulls and vector analyses. They argued and drew over one another’s chicken scratches.

  “There seems no doubt whatsoever,” said the most scholarly of the group, a professor of emergency surgery at the Truman Center, University of Missouri. “Concussive damage is the most dangerous, period. The studies have been done again and again.”

  Which is when Tommy finished off the last of his seltzer and did the wadding-up-and-throwing thing.

  “Tommy! How can you argue with the facts?”

  “I’m not,” Tommy drawled. He was leaning back, the front legs of his chair off the floor, his cowboy boots on the edge of the table. “I’m arguing with a guy who hasn’t seen a real, live patient since Reagan was in office. Y’all got the American studies, sure, but the WHO stuff that’s out right now points to the linear shearing of deceleration trauma. That there’s your real killer.”

  The professor removed his glasses and smiled kindly. “For a pathologist, you seem to hold an awful lot of interest in live patients, Tommy.”

  Tommy brushed back an unruly hank of hair that fell near his left eyebrow. He wasn’t really dressed for the professional lecture circuit, favoring khaki trousers, cowboy boots, and a blue denim shirt with a red-and-white-striped tie, loosened, the top shirt button undone. He also didn’t make any effort to hide his Texas twang. “A whole lotta dead folks get carted into my operating room, Prof. I’m the guy digging around inside these folks. You can trust me on this.”

  One of the trauma specialists—a woman who’d come down from Seattle for the conference—watched Tommy carefully and tried not to make it obvious. He wasn’t classically handsome, but he had a tight, leathery roughness to his skin, as if he had spent a lot of time working or playing in the sun. His hair was black but turning gray around his neckline, and it was cut poorly, a straight, black hank hanging over his forehead and occasionally scraping his eyebrows. Five-eight and wiry. Also, no wedding ring. The Seattle trauma specialist checked her watch and wondered when this confab would end. She definitely planned to ask him out for a drink.

  Before the argument could come around—for the fifth time—to the same points, a pediatric trauma specialist from New Orleans stepped out of the women’s restroom, her eyes darting to the TV screen behind the bar. She stepped closer, peered up at the screen. She waved down the bartender, asked him to turn up the audio, then turned to the debate. “Tommy? You better see this.”

  Tommy craned his neck around, wondering why they always put TVs so damn high in bars. The picture was grainy, a bouncy image taken from the air, probably from a helicopter. A banner in the upper corner read SPECIAL REPORT, along with the station’s call letters.

  Tommy squinted; he wasn’t wearing the glasses he needed to drive and play golf. But he could make out the image well enough. The helicopter was hovering over a scorched, burning field of grass. A long, rough trench had been gouged into the earth. The camera shifted to the right and revealed the smoldering tail of a jetliner.

  The front legs of Tommy’s chair hit the floor with a thunk. “Ah, shit.”

  The peds expert at the bar took the remote from the bartender, upped the audio even more. “It just happened,” she said. “It’s near Salem, south of here. I know you’re with those air-crash people, I figured—”

  Tommy’s face reddened. “I was. I quit.”

  One of the doctors at the table turned to him. “Crash people?”

  “NTSB, yeah.”

  Someone said, “NT . . . ?” and the peds specialist said, “National Transportation Safety Board.”

  A neurosurgeon from Shanghai said, “When did you quit? I hadn’t heard that.”

  Tommy watched the screen. “Three, four months ago.”

  The professor’s eyebrows rose. “You’re fifteen minutes away by helicopter. I always thought time was of the essence in these situations.”

  Tommy said, “You got a helicopter?”

  The woman who had been checking Tommy out was one of the hosting physicians from OHSU. She reached for her purse and produced a cell phone. “We’re a level-one trauma center. We’ve got one, sure.”

  Tommy watched the smoldering scene for a moment, then checked his watch. Almost 9 P.M. He felt his stomach tightening up and wondered if his ulcer was making a comeback. He nodded without looking at the woman beside him. “Get me there.”

  L’ENFANT PLAZA, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Susan Tanaka dashed through the darkened halls of the National Transportation and Safety Board building, empty except for the night cleaning crew. The clocks showed midnight, Eastern Standard Time. She zigged around two guys with floor waxers. “Excuse me,” she shouted. “Coming through. Pardon.”

  Susan was a small woman, only five-two, and she probably didn’t weigh 110 pounds soaking wet. The men got out of her way all the same.

  Her BlackBerry chirped. Susan wore it in a holster attached to the belt of her wool, camel-brown pin-striped trousers. She swept back the matching Max Mara jacket and snapped up the phone with the fast draw of an Old West gunslinger.

  “Tanaka. Sorry, look out!” She zoomed past another janitor.

  “Susan?” The shouting voice on the other end was tinny and hollow, the call definitely long distance. There also was an odd whooshing noise in the background.

  “Who is this?”

  “Tommy Tomzak. You heard?” She realized that he was shouting to be hea
rd over that whooshing noise.

  Susan rounded a corner, barely missed knocking over a security guard. “Oops. Sorry. The Vermeer in Oregon? We’re on it. Where are you?”

  “About five minutes from the site!” Tommy said.

  Susan screeched to a dead stop, her Prada heels almost skittering out from beneath her. “What!”

  “I was in Portland, at a conference! They’re flying me out! I’ll be on site in a couple of minutes! I can keep the site pristine until you build a crew! Susan? Can you fucking hear me over this racket?”

  Susan swiped back her pitch-black hair, which she wore straight and shoulder length. Her suit was impeccably cut and her silk blouse was the color of brandy. She was a senior incident investigator. In a field dominated by men who wore jeans and steel-toed boots, Susan Tanaka had a reputation for her taste in clothes, wine, art; in short, in everything.

  “Are you un-quitting?”

  “Hell no! I’ll handle the rescue work until your crew leaders get here.”

  Susan shook her head in awe. “Tommy, the eastern seaboard is socked in. There’s a tropical depression off the coast of Georgia. We won’t get out of here for hours. If you want in, you’re in, but I’m going to make you my Investigator in Charge.”

  “Tanaka! You’re as crazy as any five people I ever met!” he hollered. “No way, no how!”

  “Tommy, this will be your fourth major crash investigation; one as part of the pathology team, one as leader of the pathology team, and one as Investigator in Charge! At your age, that’s incredible.”

  “Yeah, but that last one was Kentucky,” he replied darkly, “and that was a clusterfuck! Look, I’m not the guy for this work and we both know it. Get out here fast as you can.”

  And he hung up.

  She closed her BlackBerry, started running again. She made it to her office just as one of her assistants arrived, wearing sweats and sneakers, pillow creases evident on her cheek. Susan waved a sheet of paper in front of her.

  “We’ve got a liner on the ground. You call the names on the left, I’ve got the right. Hurry up; we’re building a Go-Team.”