“You trying to justify your mistake, Mitch?” The voice came from behind Pace. He recognized it as a television network reporter’s.
Gabriel nodded his head reluctantly. “I guess you could say that, Pete. The bird-strike theory was a mistake, an incredible, unbelievable mistake, created by an equally incredible and unbelievable conspiracy to mislead us. Unintentionally, the crew of Flight 1117 compounded the error, and we’re here today to give you all an opportunity to hear how it happened.”
“Were there shortcomings in the investigatory procedures, Mitch?” Jeff Hines asked.
Gabriel turned to Sachs with a look that asked the chairman if he wanted to handle it. Sachs stepped back to the cluster of microphones.
Sachs didn’t pull his punches although the wounds were self-inflicted. “That’s something we’re looking at very hard, Mr. Hines. The idea that someone would—or could—divert an investigation of this nature by planting phony evidence never occurred to us. And that’s one of the reasons it almost worked.”
“And now you believe it?” Jeff Hines doggedly slipped in one last question. Gabriel started to intervene, but before he could, Sachs gave Hines a stunning one-word answer:
“Yes.”
Clerks from the public-information office came into the room carrying huge stacks of stapled transcripts. They walked to the center aisle, one by the first row on the right, the other by the first row on the left. Each counted the number of people in the row, counted off an identical number of transcripts and handed a small pile to the nearest reporter, who took one and passed the rest along.
Gabriel watched until the process was half-finished. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “you know what this is about, and I suggest we get on with it without further delay. Each of you has or soon will have a copy of the transcript of the last minutes of ConPac Flight 1117, scheduled for a nonstop flight from Dulles to LAX on Thursday, April 17th. The cockpit voice recorder contains a thirty-minute tape loop, so at any given instant, the last thirty minutes of what happened on the flight deck can be recreated. Most of the tape from the Sexton is taken up with ground-to-ground communications—the cockpit crew talking to ground controllers, copying clearances, and so on. We had a sterile cockpit. The CVR picked up no extraneous conversation. The preflight checklist was followed in every detail. In short, in the light of what we know today, there is nothing about what you will hear that points to a deficiency by the crew. I have a copy of the actual voice tape here—”
He nodded toward a tape player set up on a low table to his right. It was wired to two speakers at the back of the podium.
“—and those of you who want actualities are hooked in, I understand. We’ll begin.”
The room was deathly quiet. Each journalist had a pen in hand, ready to make margin notes, but even their collective breathing was inaudible. There was the feeling they had gathered to witness an execution.
Gabriel switched on the player, and the room was filled with the voices of men who did not know they were about to die.
The early portion of the tape was routine. The crew got takeoff clearance, and the big ship began to roll. First Officer Jeremy Dodds called off the Sexton’s rising ground speed as it raced down Runway 19R toward the velocity that would permit the transition—the rotation—from earthbound bus to flying machine.
“One hundred knots.” Dodds’ voice was flat, unemotional. “One-ten… one-twenty… one-forty…”
Suddenly the mood changed from the monotony of routine takeoff to uncertainty and apprehension. Pace followed the transcript:
DODDS: EPR’s nominal.
PECK: It’s Number Three. Abort!
PECK: Dulles tower, this is ConPac heavy—
DODDS: Past the point. Not enough room.
PECK (to Dulles tower): Stand by, we’ve got a problem.
PECK: Shutting down Number Three. Full power to One and Two!
PECK: What was that?
DODDS: No clue.
PECK: Go-Go-Go!
DODDS: It’s shaking us apart! Breaking up! Must a sucked in something. A bird.
PECK: Haul it up. Get her nose up! Get it up!
DODDS: It’s gone!
(Unintelligible.)
UNIDENTIFIABLE VOICE: Gonna need help.
DODDS: More than help. My God, she’s going over!
PECK: No! Dammit, NO!
DODDS: Starboard wing—cracking. We’re killing—
UNIDENTIFIABLE VOICE: We’re dead!
DODDS: —everyone.
PECK: Who the hell is that? Move it, man. Get it outta there!
CARSON: Oh, shit!
UNIDENTIFIABLE VOICE: Good-bye, honey.
There was an unearthly roar, and then there was silence.
Mitch Gabriel reached over and clicked off the tape deck. Except for someone’s soft sobbing, it was the only sound in the room. For a full minute, no one spoke, no papers rattled, no pens scratched. Except for a few who were openly emotional, no one moved.
Then, from somewhere in the middle of the room, a man’s voice spoke an epitaph: “God rest their souls.”
“Amen,” said Gabriel, his voice quavering. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ll take your questions now.”
41
“And they bought it?”
George Thomas Greenwood, CEO of the Converse Corporation, sounded at once amazed and angry. “I don’t believe they bought it like that,” he said.
“It sure looked that way to me, G.T.,” Chapman Davis replied, his voice sounding as though it were coming from a deep well. He was on a speakerphone in Harold Marshall’s office with Marshall. If he could outlaw one thing in the world besides the free press, Greenwood thought it would be speakerphones. Davis was elaborating. “Sachs’s denial was believable. And the damned tape had them all so shook up they didn’t have the energy to go for his jugular.”
Davis had invited himself to the NTSB news conference and stood behind some cameramen in the back of the room so he wouldn’t be noticed. He slipped out as soon as Mitch Gabriel cut off questions and was long gone before any journalists left. He came back and briefed Marshall, who placed the call to Greenwood.
“Is that Chronicle reporter behind the new investigation?” Greenwood asked.
“I don’t know,” Davis said. “His first story came out of the blue.”
“I saw it,” Greenwood said.
“I didn’t get any feeling from it or from what followed what started all this up again.”
“Nor did I, G.T.,” Marshall added.
“Didn’t anybody ask at the press conference?”
Davis nodded at the blind phone. “Yes, as a matter of fact, somebody did ask what prompted the computer runs—” he began flipping through some pages of his notebook “—and, uh… oh, here it is… Sachs said it was, uh, he said—quote—in the process of analyzing the performance of the engine, it came to our attention there was something irregular in the quantity and dispersal of the bird remains throughout the engine—unquote.”
They heard Greenwood exhale heavily at the other end of the line. No one said anything for a long moment, and then Marshall asked the question that was on Davis’s mind, too.
“G.T., I went out on a pretty slim limb when I called those newspaper editors this morning and accused Sachs of a conflict of interest. When you asked me to do it, I took you at your word that you had evidence to support the charge. But now, with the media buying Sachs’s denial, I feel like somebody sawed off the limb behind me.”