So as Davis stood leaning against a tree, a fizzing Coke in his hand, he knew things could have been worse. The jungle was the main impediment here, thick and impenetrable in sections, a high canopy of hardwood trees overlaying dense vegetation. Bits of wreckage would be embedded in the soft organic floor, snagged high in the upper canopy, and speared into softwood timber. Yet the very foliage that would bedevil recovery efforts had also done Colonel Marquez and his team a great favor.
Davis saw it from where he stood, to his left along the horizon — the point where TAC-Air Flight 223 had first clipped the trees, and then sheared off tops at progressively lower levels. This slanted pruning gave a good indication of strike angle. The jet had not been locked in a steep dive, nor had it been fluttering through a flat spin. It had been gliding in a shallow, controlled descent — still flying until the bitter end. From the clipped treetops, Davis could also infer the direction of flight, roughly to the southwest. Precise heading and strike angle would be eventually calculated, confirmed by flight data recorder information and a survey using proper GPS equipment. But that would take time.
He next worked out distance, estimating that from the first sign of impact, at the crest of the canopy, to the spot where the main wreckage now rested, was roughly eight hundred meters. This gave an approximation of the energy state of the aircraft when it went in — essentially, a reflection of speed and weight — and Davis decided that the jet had been traveling at a moderate speed on impact. Not fast, not slow. Two hundred knots, two fifty at the top end. Again, an indication of an airplane flying within its normal performance envelope.
Surveying the debris field, his eye went first to the halved main fuselage, a shattered centerpiece to the fragments of airliner all around. Some of the strewn parts were recognizable, others less so. The tail was the most distant parcel, or so Marquez had said — Davis saw no sign of it behind umbrellalike stands of vegetation. The earth in that direction looked wet and swampy, suggesting a difficult recovery effort.
The tip of the right wing had broken off and was basking in full sun at the edge of the clearing. The left wing had separated completely — one of the few details he remembered from last night — and although Davis couldn’t see it from where he stood, he knew it had been accounted for. Also not connected were the engines. The ARJ-35’s twin turbofans were mounted aft, beneath the T-tail in a classic regional jet design. Both powerplants had separated on impact and pitched into the undergrowth. This was not by chance. Because jet engines are heavy, the most dense parts on any aircraft, engineers intentionally design fracture points in the mounts to allow them to separate in the event of a severe deceleration, thereby minimizing damage to the fuselage body and all that is precious within. Marquez, like Davis, would know where to find them — at the forward reaches of the debris footprint.
This was one of the things Davis had grown to appreciate about his discipline. For all the apparent chaos and randomness, when airplanes hit the ground, they break apart with striking uniformity. A professor somewhere had once devised a model that predicted with 90 percent accuracy, or so he claimed, where any given subsection of an aircraft would end up after a crash. Davis thought it might be true, at least under laboratory conditions.
The problem was the other 10 percent. When a long metal tube careens through the air at hundreds of miles an hour, enough variables are introduced to implode any semblance of certainty. There are mechanical issues and weather, air traffic that ranges from jumbo jets to turkey vultures, and what safety specialists refer to as “human factors.” This last variable was always the most difficult to derive from wreckage. It was also the most common primary cause. Everything from old-fashioned screwups to intentional acts of terrorism. Marquez had concerns about something in the cockpit, where the two most vital humans in this tragedy were seated in the critical moments thirty-six hours ago. As far as Davis was concerned, everything remained on the table.
He took one last look at his wide-angle panorama. In the surrounding jungle were a hundred yellow flags hanging limp in the stagnant air, makeshift headstones to mark the fragments of TAC-Air Flight 223. In time every piece would be mapped, photographed, identified, and ultimately moved to a final resting place. He saw fifteen men and women already working the site and a dozen soldiers guarding the perimeter. Guarding against who or what Davis couldn’t say.
He drained his Coke and started off toward the site. The Motrin hadn’t kicked in yet, and with the equatorial sun nearing its apex, brewing and pounding, Davis squinted as he left the protection of the shade. It was time to see the seat Jen should have been sitting in.
It was time to kill questions with answers.
SEVEN
Davis walked across the clearing, but it felt more like a swim, the air viscous and heavy. As he approached the wall of jungle, he encountered a soldier with a cigarette dangling from his lips. The smoke rose unbothered, a perfect straight line to the sky, and the young man smiled, causing Davis to think that his promise of a case of rum had swept through the ranks like wildfire.
He smiled back, as if to say, Enjoy.
Closing in on the wreckage, Davis got his first look in the light of day, and he was immediately struck by one thing — in a departure from most high-energy crashes, there was little evidence of fire. He saw a few singe marks, one wing root blackened by soot, but nothing like the usual inferno. No melted plastic panels or molten pools of aluminum. No trees or grass gone up like tinder. Fire required three things — fuel, air, and ignition. There was always ignition in a high-speed impact, tearing metal and arcing wires, and air was a given. So Flight 223 had gone down low on fuel. Possibly out of fuel. He made a mental note to check the flight plan, fuel truck logs, and estimated flight time. Somewhere in that chain, the aircraft had gotten critically low on Jet-A.
He arrived at the midpoint of the fuselage, where the hull was fractured, and Davis leaned his head inside much as he had last night. The bodies in the passenger cabin had been removed, a scant ray of light in his otherwise bleak day. Davis was sure the remains had been recovered with decorum, or at least all the decorum possible when working in the middle of a primeval jungle. If anybody was up to that job, it was the soldiers around him. All military units took casualties, and those in Colombia had seen their share. Narco-terrorists, paramilitary groups, the occasional border skirmish. Marquez and his squad would know how to deal with the aftermath of traumatic death.
Looking aft into the cabin Davis noted two smaller, secondary breaks in the ceiling that weren’t obvious from outside. Just behind the last row of seats was the foot of a bulkhead, and behind that nothing but ferns and uprooted brush. This was the point where the tail had separated, the aft fifteen feet of jet coming to rest somewhere upstream in the impact sequence.
Owing to the dense canopy overhead, little light penetrated to the forest floor, and someone had strung a line of battery-powered work lights all along the shattered ceiling. The whole interior world was canted at roughly a ten-degree angle to port, which wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Davis had worked before in completely inverted hulls, forced to wade over spilled carry-on luggage and crumpled beverage carts.
Comfortable with the general layout, he steeled himself to go inside. Davis had one leg through the jagged gap when someone said, “You want this one, Señor?”
Davis turned and saw the smiling soldier. He was holding out a cheap fabric respirator, the kind a house painter would use when spraying a bedroom wall. It was probably the only protective gear he was going to be issued. No gloves or booties. Certainly no hard hat or biohazard suit.