“Yeah, that’s not a bad idea. Thanks.”
He took the mask and snapped the white cup over his face. Davis stepped into the cabin carefully, planning each footfall and handhold onto the bones of what looked solid. A fall into jagged metal or razor-edged shards of composite could ruin your day, and of course it was always good form to avoid trampling evidence. He saw personal effects scattered across the floor. A half-knitted sweater and a pink tube of lip gloss — or was it lipstick? He’d never known the difference. A romance novel with the bookmark still in place, a story that would never reach its end.
There was never a question of where he would go first. Row 7 was all the way in back, adjacent to the gaping hole where the tail had once been. The A and B seats were on the port side, and across the narrow aisle was the C seat. Set tight against the starboard window, 7C was the only seat in the row from which a body had been recovered.
According to the seating chart, Jen had been assigned the center B seat, and Davis felt an inner tightening as it came into view. The upholstery looked almost pristine, the seatback straight and unbent. Just as Marquez had said, the seat belt was unfastened. Unfastened. That was the tenuous thread from which his hopes had been hanging. Yet now Davis saw a second indicator that Jen had not been here at the moment of impact — seat 6B, directly in front, displayed minimal damage. His daughter weighed in at one hundred and twenty pounds — as she often reminded him, exactly half his own weight. In a crash as severe as this one, even a small unrestrained body would have hurled forward with devastating force. Assuming a typical thirty-G deceleration, without the constraint of a seat belt, a one-hundred-and-twenty-pound body became a projectile weighing nearly two tons. Davis, however, saw no sign of damage to the seat in front, no dents or misshapen frame.
He went down onto his hands and knees, and studied the bases of the seats. Each pair of port seats were anchored by six bolts, three forward and three aft on the frame. Davis pushed and pulled on Row 6 and found the aft anchors slightly loose. This was the classic signature of occupied seats that had pitched forward in a sudden deceleration, yet held fast because an engineer somewhere had done his calculations perfectly. Davis checked the aft anchors on Row 7 and did not find a similar looseness — a third indicator that this pair of seats had not been occupied at the moment of impact.
He pushed up off the tilted floor and, just as his spirits were rising, his gaze was seized like a magnet to metal. It was the smallest of details, barely noticeable amid the chaos and ruin. Hanging a few inches out of the seatback pocket facing 7B was a delicate white earbud. He hesitated, then reached carefully into the pocket and felt blindly. Searching for what he hoped would not be there.
Davis felt something and pulled it clear, and what he saw capsized his tiny lifeboat of hope. In his hand, stylish in its tiger-striped protective sleeve, was the iPod Touch he’d given to Jen last year for Christmas.
Ten minutes later Davis stood statuelike near the remains of the jet, Jen’s iPod in his hand. He was staring at the device as if it were a lost relic, some kind of great archaeological find, when Colonel Marquez arrived. The Colombian stopped in front of him and said something, but Davis didn’t hear. Marquez said it again.
“What is that?”
Davis blinked, then met the colonel’s gaze. “It’s an iPod… you know, for playing music.”
“Where did you find it?”
“In the seatback pocket at 7B.”
“Your daughter’s,” Marquez said.
Davis nodded.
The colonel let out a long breath as a pair of workers walked past. One held some kind of electronic device with a wand, its beeping tone guiding him into the brush. Even after the man disappeared behind the evergreen wall, the machine’s chirp remained steady. Like a distant digital heartbeat.
“Then there can be no doubt,” said Marquez. “She was in that seat.”
As he’d been doing for the last ten minutes, Davis tried to think of an escape, a logical argument against the idea. There wasn’t one. “Yeah,” he said, more to himself than to Marquez, “she was definitely there.”
Davis sat down on a log, a freshly snapped timber fully one foot thick that had come to rest where the port wing should have been. He wondered how much longer he could keep this up — one minute clinging to the idea that Jen had survived, and the next proving otherwise. He knew he was filtering every sight and sound and smell, first and foremost, through the lens of his daughter’s fate. But in that process, what was he blotting out? What was he not seeing? Somewhere in the distance the chirping increased in frequency, rising until it became a staccato buzz. Something new had been located, most likely a piece of metal from an engine cowling or a separated wing flap, some fragment of marginal significance. It didn’t matter.
How much longer can I go on?
Marquez sat next to him and put his hands on his knees. It was a markedly fraternal move, and after a moment’s contemplation, he said, “You were once a military pilot?”
“Yeah, USAF. F-16s most of my career.”
Marquez nodded. “Lucky you. I was doomed to fly A-37s, a version of your Air Force’s old primary trainer. I am told it was referred to there as a two-ton dog whistle. A poor country like mine cannot afford the best, but we trained hard, and fought when the order came. I lost my share of friends to crashes over the years, and many times I was involved in the investigations that followed. That was hard to do.”
“I’ve lost friends too.”
“I’m sure. But losing a daughter… that is a very different thing. Fighter pilots assume a certain amount of risk. It is expected some will pay the ultimate price.”
“What are you trying to say?”
Marquez cocked his head. “I think being so close to this inquiry — it will be difficult for you. I need help, expertise, and I am not sure you can give it. Perhaps it would be better if you went back home to grieve.”
Davis shot back a hard look. “Is this your idea of a motivational speech? My daughter was on that aircraft, but counting the crew there were twenty-three other people involved. Each of them has a family and friends, decent people who are feeling exactly what I’m feeling right now. In the next few days they’ll be identifying bodies, making funeral arrangements, and calling long-lost brothers to deliver the bad news.” Davis paused for a moment, then continued in level tone, “There is nobody on your team who will kick as much metal and stay up as late as I will to find out what the hell happened. If you want to send a message to Washington or throw me back in that cell, go ahead and try. But understand that I’ll fight you every inch of the way. In my opinion, neither of us has time for that right now.”
The colonel stared into the distance, his face a tight mask. He was not used to being challenged. “You know where she is,” he finally said.
Davis didn’t reply. In the pause, the jungle suddenly came alive with the sound of unseen birds scattering and squawking. A feral screech echoed as some creature in the distance succumbed to nature’s way. It was a short-lived drama, and soon everything returned to what it had been. Steady beeping. The brush of wind through treetops.
Marquez nodded over his shoulder, toward the thickest stand of forest. “Your daughter was thrown clear when the tail broke off. It pains me to say it, but she is one thousand meters behind us in the swamp.”
Again, Davis said nothing.