“We’re looking for inconsistencies,” said Sachs. “Anything that doesn’t look right.”
“None of it looks right.”
“You know what I mean.”
And so they looked. A half-hour turned into an hour and then into ninety minutes, and they found nothing that didn’t have a reasonable explanation. They talked about possibilities. The conversations were increasingly technical, and eventually beyond Pace’s knowledge of jet-engineering technology. If there was anything there, it was little wonder the experts didn’t spot it.
And it wasn’t pleasant work. Some of the remains of the bird had been removed for identification that ultimately showed the unfortunate creature to have been a hawk. But most of the bits and pieces of feather, flesh and bone—many of them burned—still adhered on flat surfaces and in crevasses beyond reach. Dried blood was sprayed widely.
Pace stepped back from the engine to stretch neck and shoulder muscles cramped by the odd angles at which he’d been twisted as he looked over as much of the inside of the engine carcass as he could reach. The intake looked like the mouth of an old man with most of his teeth missing. Many of the fan blades had been shattered by the impacts, first with the hawk, then with the ground. Of the surviving blades, seven were smeared or dotted with blood. The bird probably died on initial impact, a millisecond before its body was chopped to bits. It never knew what hit it.
Sachs stepped back to join him, also rubbing cramped muscles.
“You see anything at all?” Pace asked with some hope but no expectations.
“Not really,” Sachs said. “But I’ve got to tell you, something doesn’t feel right.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. I can’t put my finger on it. I expected to find inconsistencies. If I believed this bird strike was real, as our investigators did, nothing would look out of the ordinary. But looking at this mess with doubts in my mind… oh, hell, I don’t know. Something is reinforcing those doubts, but I don’t know what it is.”
“I’ll be damned if I see it, either,” Pace admitted. He turned his back on the engine. “I keep thinking, what should Dave Terrell have seen that night if this was a bird strike? I look at the blood on those blades up there, and I think, shouldn’t he have seen that? But maybe the dried, burned blood looked like dried mud. Who could tell? And now, after the investigators have been all through the engine and cleaned it up some, who knows how much bird gore there was to see? A hawk is a big bird, but its pieces could get lost pretty easily in an engine this size. Maybe Terrell didn’t see anything because the evidence wasn’t all that obvious.”
“Maybe,” Sachs agreed. He moved back to the engine, beckoning Pace to follow him. He continued his thought. “But look here, around the stumps of the broken blades. There’s more blood. Out here, in the front of the engine, where the bird hit. It looks obvious to me.”
“When you know what you’re looking at, it’s obvious. To a casual observer—”
“Under no circumstance would you describe Terrell as a casual observer.”
Ken Sachs continued to stare at the engine’s front rim. Pace started to say something, but Sachs waved him quiet. So, for the next twenty seconds or so, Pace watched Sachs watching the engine. Finally, the NTSB chairman turned around slowly.
“I know what’s bothering me,” he said. “You helped me define it.”
Pace gave him a questioning shrug. “What?”
“This plane is doing 160 knots or more and here comes the hawk.” Sachs began pacing back and forth in front of the intake, his hands doing graphics for his speech. “Splat. Hawk meets spinning fan blades. End of hawk.”
“So?”
“A lot of the mass of the bird should have been dissipated by the initial impact, shouldn’t it? I mean, suppose you’ve got a twelve-pound bird to begin with. After the impact and the blade action, the pieces sucked in shouldn’t weigh anything more than a few ounces at most, and those should have been easily diverted around the turbine housing and out the back of the engine pod.”
Pace tried to anticipate where Sachs was going. “That’s been the question, whether the Converse diversion design works,” he said. “All of it, including the fan blades, should have been diverted—”
“No, no, no,” Sachs interrupted. “You’re not following me. The ingestion of the fan blades is something else. You’re talking about huge pieces of alloy. I’m talking about tiny pieces of bird. The dynamics of the fan blades would be on the opposite end of the scale from the dynamics of little pieces of flesh and bone and feathers.”
“And?” Pace waited.
“Most of the bird should have blown around the turbine housings, right?”
“I guess so,” Pace replied. “Yes.”
“Then why is there so much fucking bird gore in this engine?” Sachs asked. “Where in hell did it all come from?”
Pace stared at Sachs in silence for a moment. They were on the same track, at last. “Playing devil’s advocate,” he said, “what if the bird was somehow impaled on a broken blade, so it got sucked into the turbine area more or less whole, and then got shredded by a rotating disk?”
“Then why is there so much blood on the front of the intake?” Sachs asked, shaking his head. “The impact and the ingestion would have happened too fast for the bird to have bled all over everything like this.”
Pace looked back at the maw of the engine, at the unbroken fan blades hanging from their mountings. “Ken, where are the blades that broke away?”
Now it was Sachs’s turn not to understand. “I don’t know. They were recovered. They’ve got to be around here somewhere. Why?”
Pace moved off quickly, his head turning left and right. “Just help me find them.”
It was the easiest task of the afternoon. The splintered, shredded fan blades were stacked in a corner of the hangar, stored there without apparent purpose. Eventually they would be shipped back to Converse, where engineers would assess their failure and try to improve the blades’ design and, perhaps, their tolerance for bird strikes.
“Can I touch these things?” Pace asked excitedly.
“Tell me why?” Sachs ordered.
“Blood. I’m looking for blood. There’s blood all over the goddamned place, all over the guts of the engine, all over the surviving fan blades, all over the rim of the intake. There should be blood on these things, too, shouldn’t there? Somewhere in here are the blades the bird hit. Shouldn’t there be some trace of blood here?”
Sachs nodded, seeing exactly where Pace was leading. “Let’s look together,” he said. “They’re heavy as hell, and the edges are sharp as razors.”
The job took more than an hour, largely because of a dramatic interruption.
Pace and Sachs had examined about a third of the broken fan blades when Jim Padgett walked into the hangar. Sachs introduced him to Pace.
“I know who he is,” Padgett said coolly. “He has a phone call.”
“Here?” Pace asked.
“Right here,” said Padgett. “It’s your office.”
Pace took the call at an extension in the hangar. “I didn’t think you’d want to wait for this one,” Glenn Brennan said at the other end. “Dr. Jackson called for you. I was sitting at your desk when the call came. He is very agitated. He wants you to call him right away.”
“How’d you find me?” Pace asked.
“Paul knew where you could be reached.”
Pace smiled. And it was Paul, he thought, who’d given him all the crap about asking for comp time forty-eight hours in advance. He must have loved that little charade.
Pace took the number from Brennan and called the medical examiner. Jackson came to the phone immediately. “You still haven’t called the police,” he said.