Unprofessional.
His thoughts were interrupted when a pair of uniformed men arrived with three body bags.
“We clean up, okay?” the lead man said in strongly accented English.
Davis backed away. “Yeah, go ahead.”
NINE
They call it rain forest for a reason. Moments after Marquez departed in the Huey the sky began to darken, and in a matter of minutes, the great slabs of cumulonimbus overhead reached their saturation point. It wasn’t as much a rain shower as a regional waterfall. The treetops were barely visible, and gusts whipped foliage into undulating emerald curtains.
Rather too late, Davis took shelter under an open-sided tent. Thick raindrops peppered the roof, a thousand tiny explosions meshing into a low-frequency white noise, the overhanging canvas flaps snapping wildly in the wind. Davis was more wet than dry, and in the pulsing gusts he had the peculiar sensation of being hot and cold at the same time. He stood alongside a dozen Colombians, a mix of army enlisted men and the colonel’s field technicians. There was also an exhausted powerplant expert from Pratt & Whitney, a man who’d flown in overnight from Miami and caught the first available chopper. Davis doubted the engines had anything to do with this crash — one of the few points he and Marquez agreed upon — but the big manufacturers always liked to have an ear to the ground while blame remained an open question.
There were three folding tables, and all had been turned into seating. Someone opened a cooler full of food and soft drinks, music began playing, and a spontaneous midday siesta began in earnest. Attacking a sandwich that might have been beef and cheese, Davis struck up a chat with the soldier standing next to him.
“How long is your duty out here?” he asked the cabo primero, or first corporal.
The young man smiled amiably. “We come last Friday. Stay three, maybe four days. More if our jefe say.”
“It was lucky you were so close to the crash site.”
“Two other squads were near, but we were closest.”
“Sounds like a big exercise. What kind of training were you doing?”
“Training? I don’t know about training.”
Davis foraged in the cooler for a second sandwich. “So what… you were just out here waiting for an airplane to crash?” Davis’ stab at humor was lost, the corporal only giving him an odd look.
“Sorry,” said the soldier. “English no so good.” He walked to the other side of the tent and began talking to a captain.
The rain began sweeping sideways, marginalizing the tent’s usefulness. Nobody seemed to care, least of all Davis who had far more pressing things on his mind. Raindrops pelted his face as he downed his second sandwich, ham and avocado on thick-sliced bread. He was determined not to waste a moment. If field work was impractical, he’d use the time for sustenance and to organize his thoughts.
Davis tried to tear apart the hijacking theory, but to shoot down such a circumstantial premise was like firing an air-to-air missile at a ghost. Moving on, he rehashed the rest, and one detail tugged at him again and again. The jet had ended up well off course. What at first had seemed an oddity now appeared vital. Hijacking or not, someone had been at the controls of Flight 223, and they’d brought it here. But who had been flying, and what was their intention? He was virtually certain Marquez would find that their pastry chef, Umbriz, had no flying experience. If that was the case, there were only two scenarios in which the man would have killed the pilots and taken over the jet. One was a suicide mission, perhaps with a political agenda. The second was that he was flat out deranged. Neither seemed likely.
But what then?
He checked his watch to note the exact time of each clap of thunder that seemed near. On reaching the first ten-minute interval of silence, Davis headed outside. His example was not followed — the party kept going strong. It was undeniably irritating, yet he decided to let it play out. Davis knew his level of commitment was unique, and could not be expected of the others. The rain tapered quickly, falling to a steady drizzle, and the jungle acquired a new heaviness. He stepped over streams of fresh runoff, forded through puddles of muck, and soon his clothes were riding his skin like a suit of wet rags.
He circled the fuselage, ending near the tip of the aircraft’s nose. An engineer would refer to it as station zero, the baseline longitudinal location. From that point, moving aft, the numbers increased, serving as reference units by which to gauge modifications, repairs, and weight and balance measurements. Davis would use station zero as his own starting point, thinking it the most methodical way to proceed.
He poked and prodded the radome, and under the cracked fiberglass housing he noted a damaged weather radar antenna. Climbing briefly onto the spine two feet farther aft, he saw nothing of interest. An unidentifiable piece of debris jutted from the ground along the port side, and Davis went down on his knees. With bare hands he dug through dirt and peat, and soon identified the part as a valve connected to a pencil-thin hydraulic line, almost certainly part of the nose gear assembly underneath. Not a noteworthy find, but one more thing to be logged and accounted for. That was how 99 percent of an investigator’s time was spent — documenting what wasn’t important in order to find what was.
An hour later he stopped for a water break.
After two, Davis stole a glance at his watch.
It was noon on Monday.
The second worst day of his life.
Which meant things were getting better.
The last helicopter to Bogotá from the crash site was set to leave at 6:45 that evening. Davis was given a ten-minute warning to be ready. He’d spent the entire day combing through wreckage, from nose to tail — or at least where the tail used to be. He’d found little to inspire him, and nothing to counter Marquez’ theory that they were looking at a hijacking. But then, there was also nothing to support it. Bent metal gave little inference as to what might have distilled in one man’s mind.
He reached the final row of seats shortly before the chopper was to arrive, and for the last time that day Davis stared at seat 7B. He’d been avoiding it, of course, like an elderly passerby might pretend to ignore a graveyard, yet he couldn’t return to Bogotá without one last look.
The seat appeared much the same, unblemished upholstery and cushions over an unbent frame. He realized that after finding Jen’s iPod he’d ventured no further into the seatback pocket. Davis slipped his hand in again, forcing the pocket wide, and behind an emergency evacuation card he saw something else. It was instantly recognizable — a dark-blue passport issued by the United States of America.
Davis made sure there was nothing more, then pulled the passport clear. It had to be Jen’s, and on the second page he found her picture. The document was four years old, the photo taken in her early high school years. Davis saw a passport smile less muted than most, captured before her spirit had been flattened by the death of her mother, and long before she would leave home for college at that double-edged age of independence.
The sound of the Huey rattling overhead brought Davis back to the present. It was time to go, but on a sudden impulse he checked the pocket in front of the window seat, 7A. There was no iPod, but to his surprise he found a second passport. This too was an American-issued item, and inside he found a picture of a girl Jen’s age. She had the same color hair and similar features. They could have passed for sisters. He remembered the final message Jen had left on his phone. She’d been at the airport in Bogotá and had already made a friend.