I went back to the previous subject and said, “The more you tell me about Flight 800, the more inner peace you’ll find.”
“I’ve told you everything I know. Please drop the subject.”
“I can’t testify against you. I’m your husband. That’s the law.”
“No, it isn’t. We’ll talk later. This car could be bugged.”
“This car is not bugged.”
“You could be wearing a wire,” she said. “I’ll need to strip-search you later.”
“Okay.”
We both laughed. Ha ha. End of discussion.
In truth, I had no personal or professional interest in the Flight 800 case beyond what any normal person would have who had followed this very tragic and peculiar accident in the news. The case had problems and inconsistencies from the beginning, which was why, five years later, it was still a hot, newsworthy topic.
In fact, two nights earlier, Kate had tuned in to several news programs to follow the story of a group called FIRO-Flight 800 Independent Researchers Organization-who’d just released some of their new findings, which did not match those of the government’s official conclusion.
This group was made up mostly of credible people who worked on the accident investigation for various civilian agencies, plus friends and family of the dead passengers and crew. Plus, of course, the usual conspiracy theory nuts.
FIRO was basically giving the government a hard time, which I appreciated on a visceral level.
They were also media-savvy, so, to coincide with this fifth anniversary of the crash, FIRO taped interviews with eight eyewitnesses to the crash, some of whom I’d seen on TV with my channel-surfing wife two nights earlier. The witnesses made a very compelling case that TWA Flight 800 had been blown out of the sky by a missile. The government had no comment, except to remind everyone that the case was solved and closed. Mechanical failure. End of story.
I continued south toward the Atlantic Ocean. It was a little after 7P.M., and the memorial service, according to Kate, started at 7:30 and ended at 8:31, the time of the crash.
I asked Kate, “Did you know anyone who died?”
“No.” After a moment, she added, “I got to know some of the family members.”
“I see.” Kate Mayfield, as best as I can tell after a year of marriage, keeps her job and her personal feelings separate. Therefore, her taking half a day AL-which is FBI talk for annual leave, and which everyone else calls vacation-to attend a memorial service for people she didn’t know seemed not completely understandable.
Kate caught the drift of my questions and my silence and said, “Sometimes I need to feel human. This job… sometimes it’s comforting to discover that what you thought was an act of evil was just a tragic accident.”
“Right.”
I won’t say at this point that I was getting a lot more curious about this case, but having spent the better part of my life nosing around for a living, I made a mental note to call a guy named Dick Kearns.
Dick was a homicide cop I’d worked with for years before he retired from the NYPD, then went over to the Anti-Terrorist Task Force as a contract agent, which is what I am. Dick, like Kate, worked the TWA case as a witness interviewer.
The FBI started this joint task force back in 1980 as a response to bombings in New York City by the Puerto Rican group called the FALN as well as bombings by the Black Liberation Army. The world has changed, and now probably ninety percent of the Anti-Terrorist Task Force is involved with Mideast terrorism. That’s where the action is, and that’s where I am, and where Kate is. I had a great second career ahead of me if I lived long enough.
The way this joint task force works is that the FBI is able to tap into the manpower of the NYPD, getting retired and active-duty cops to do a lot of the legwork, surveillance, and routine stuff for the FBI so that their overpaid and over-educated agents could be free to do really clever stuff.
The mixing of these two very different cultures did not work well at first, but over the years a sort of working relationship has developed. I mean, look, Kate and I fell in love and got married. We’re the poster couple for the ATTF.
Point is, when the Feds let the cops in the house to do manual labor, the cops got access to lots of information that used to be shared only among the FBI people. Ergo, Dick Kearns, my brother in blue, would be willing to give me more information than my FBI wife.
And why, one might ask, would I want that information? Certainly I didn’t think I was going to solve the mystery of what happened to TWA Flight 800. Half a thousand men and women had worked on the case for years, the case was five years old, it was closed, and the official conclusion actually seemed the most logicaclass="underline" a loose or frayed electrical wire in a fuel indicator, located in the center fuel tank, sparked and ignited jet fuel vapors that blew the tank and destroyed the aircraft. All the forensic evidence pointed to this conclusion.
Almost all.
And then there was that streak of light seen by too many people.
We crossed a short bridge that connected the mainland of Long Island to Fire Island, a long barrier island that had a reputation of attracting an interesting summer crowd.
The road led into Smith Point County Park, an area of scrub pine and oak, grassy sand dunes, and maybe some wildlife, which I don’t like. I’m a city boy.
We came to where the bridge road intersected with a beach road that ran parallel to the ocean. Nearby, in a sandy field, was a big tent whose side flaps were open to the sea breeze. A few hundred people were gathered in and around the tent.
I turned toward a small parking lot, which was completely filled with official-looking cars. I continued on in four-wheel drive down a sand road and made myself a parking space by crushing a pathetic scrub pine.
Kate said, “You ran over that tree.”
“What tree?” I put my “Official Police Business” placard in the windshield, got out, and we walked back toward the parking area. The parked cars were either chauffeur-driven or had some sort of “Official Business” placards in their windshields.
We continued on toward the open tent, which was silhouetted against the ocean.
Kate and I were wearing khakis and a knit shirt, and as per Kate, I wore good walking shoes. As we walked toward the tent, Kate said, “We may run into a few other agents who worked the case.”
Criminals may or may not return to the scene of their crime, but I know for a fact that cops often return to the scenes of their unsolved cases. Sometimes obsessively. But this wasn’t a criminal case, as I had to remind myself; it was a tragic accident.
The sun was low on the southwestern horizon, the sky was clear, and a cool breeze blew in from the ocean. Nature’s okay sometimes.
We walked to the open tent where about three hundred people were gathered. I’ve been to too many memorial services and funerals in my professional life, and I don’t volunteer to go to ones that I don’t have to go to. But here I was.
Kate said, “Most of the family members wear photos of their loved ones who died. But even if they didn’t, you’d know who they were.” She took my hand, and we walked toward the tent. She said, “They’re not here to find closure. There is no closure. They’re here to support and comfort one another. To share their loss.”
Someone handed us a program. There were no chairs left so we stood alongside the tent on the side that opened to the ocean.
Just about opposite this spot, maybe eight miles out, a giant airliner had exploded and fallen into the sea. Aircraft debris and personal effects washed ashore on that beach for weeks afterward. Some people said that body parts also washed up, but that was never reported by the news media.
I recalled thinking at the time that this was the first American aircraft to be destroyed by enemy action within the United States. And also that this was the second foreign-directed terrorist attack on American soil-the first being the bombing of the North Tower of the World Trade Center in February 1993.