chapter 1

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My name is Michael Francis O'Hara. I am an engineer.

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I read a poem once, in high school. It was written by a dead Englishman sometime before the invention of the integrated circuit, and it went on at length about a small piece of pottery. The poet said that in beauty one could find truth, and in truth, beauty.

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I didn't get much out of this. Truth is not an absolute, at least not in Washington DC. I work in my nation's capital, and in DC the truth is often adjusted or recalibrated to fit a situation. You can't adjust physics for your own convenience, though. An engineer tries to build a perfect system, to achieve a sort of truth or beauty in perfection: Perfect reliability, or perfect safety, or whatever.

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Of course, engineers work in the physical world, and our products are never really perfect. The reliability or safety of a machine made by human hands is always finite, no matter how much time or money is spent on its creation. When the limits of safety or reliability are exceeded, society demands to learn causes and place blame.

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I work for the NTSB, the National Transportation Safety Board, and my job is to do those things. I did nine years out of college on active duty as an officer in the Navy. I signed up for Navy flight school because I thought women would be impressed. It turned out they weren't, or at least not that I noticed.

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The Navy gave me two tests when I got to flight school, one for technical aptitude and one for vision. I got the highest score ever recorded in the technical test, but my right eye was 20/35. They had plenty of pilots at the time, so instead of being a Naval Aviator I was designated a Naval Flight Officer, or navigator. I was sent to radar intercept control school and into the back of a Hawkeye airborne radar plane. The pilots in the front seats looked out large windows and got the glory while I chased green dots around a radar screen in a dark cabin and told people in other planes where to go.

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As a part of my regular squadron duties I was sent to crash investigator training. After a full tour on sea duty I was assigned to the Navy's postgraduate school, where I took a master's degree in engineering physics. People were impressed, but it seemed pretty easy to me. I graduated summa cum laude and gained eight pounds.

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A guy I knew a couple of classes ahead of me was selected by NASA to be an astronaut and said I should give it a try. To my surprise I got picked up for that, too, but after my second week in Houston the head of the astronaut office took me aside. There had been a massive budget cut and I should not expect to fly in space for the next century. So much for NASA. Things happen, I guess.

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I saw an opening for an investigator advertised at the National Transportation Safety Board and applied, showing them my degree and background. It turned out the NTSB knew who I was and after a day of interviews I was offered a position. I left the astronaut office the next month. To my slightly guilty satisfaction none of the others in my astronaut class at NASA had flown in space the last time I checked.

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I have not led a completely blameless life. I was ticketed for stopping my car on the Memorial Bridge leaving DC one hot July midnight, and I received a traffic conviction from the State of Virginia for reckless driving. I'd had been forced to stop there so I could throw an unneeded engagement ring in the Potomac River and the police had taken exception. I pled nolo contendere. It screwed up my car insurance for a while, but it was worth it.

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I had been with the NTSB for six years when I flew south to Colorado Springs. My aptitude for technical things was a blessing and a curse. I had an interesting job with steady pay. But I was on the road all the time, living out of a suitcase, smelling like burned jet fuel and unable to keep a relationship or a goldfish alive. I had gone through life like an electron in a wire, following the path of least resistance and repelling others. I was thirty-five years old, and all my close friends were machines.

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"It's not damaged too bad but it's totally burned out. They must have stalled and spun in." The pilot had turned to talk to me as I sat alone in the rear passenger cabin. The landscape reflected in his mirror-finish sunglasses while he pointed out Peterson Field in the distance. We were beginning a descent into the airport, still a few miles away but easily visible in the impossibly clear western air that had followed the previous night's cold front.

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I nodded and yawned as Colorado slid past the window of the Cessna. I was alone in the back of a Caravan turboprop that belonged to the Colorado state government. I'd scammed a ride down from Denver International Airport to Petersen Field in Colorado Springs and had almost an hour to sleep, but the bright sun and low-altitude turbulence kept me awake. I looked at my shoes six feet away and moved them in a circle to keep blood flowing.

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It was noon on a bright day in late September. I stretched again in my seat, fighting the fatigue that had been hammering at my forehead since my phone had rung two time zones in the past.

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The call had startled me awake in my bachelor apartment in suburban Virginia, just outside the Washington beltway. My boss, the head of the NTSB's aviation incident response unit, or Go-Team, was calling from New Orleans, where he was investigating the spectacular failure of a huge natural gas pipeline where it crossed the Mississippi River. He had worked a pipeline job somewhere in the past, and was on loan for that investigation.

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"Get out there as fast as you can," he'd said. "I'll be stuck here for three or four more days at least. A business jet crashed on the airport at Colorado Springs. Three fatalities. You handle the show, Mike. You're in charge. You've got enough experience now. It'll be a good one for you to go solo on."

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I took notes as he rapped out instructions. Five hours later I boarded a United 787 at Dulles International Airport for the flight to Denver. The heavy jet was climbing through choppy turbulence over southern Ohio before I realized that I had just been promoted to a higher level of responsibility. But not pay.

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The Cessna's pilot had been cleared by Peterson Field's controller for a pass over the crash impact zone in the airport's far-southeast corner. We descended to eight hundred feet above the ground and flew the length of the runway so I could get a clear look at the wreckage from the air. I snapped several pictures with my phone, and then took the last few seconds before we entered the normal landing pattern to memorize the local terrain and the layout of the wreckage.

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What was left of the Aries GlobalMax business jet sat in the dirt just off the end of runway one-seven left. It was two hundred yards past the end of the pavement and to the right of the centerline of the two-mile-long runway. A wide skid mark slashed through the dry native grass for fifty yards, leading from an area of disturbed earth and small bits of wreckage where the initial impact had probably occurred, pointing to the wreckage itself like a big arrow stamped in the scrub.

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The wreckage was still obviously the remains of an airplane, burned and broken but nearly intact, and the tail assembly stood tall above the rest of the wreckage. The inner two-thirds of the wings and much of the fuselage were burned black and a rough area of blackened vegetation surrounded the wreck.

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The cockpit area had smashed into a small outbuilding of some sort as the plane slid across the ground. The nose section was crushed back to the first row of cabin windows. The pilots had died quickly, I thought to myself.

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We circled back to land in the same direction as the GlobalMax's fatal takeoff. The pilot turned off the runway at its end and onto a taxiway that led near the wreckage. He braked to a stop and slowed the engine to idle.

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"Close as I can take you," he called back over his shoulder.

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I grabbed my bag of gear, opened the cabin door and jumped down into the prop wash, noise and cool mountain air. As soon as I was clear, the Cessna taxied away, and I had to shield my eyes from the dust blown up by the prop wash. I stood there holding my bag beside the taxiway like a hitchhiker dropped off on a lonely roadside.

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The scene was less crowded than the aftermath of an airliner crash would be. An airliner meant more bodies, more grieving loved ones, more lawyers, more press.

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A hundred yards away I could see a gray airport sedan, a state police car with its roof lights flashing blue and white, and a large white van. All three were parked at random angles, arrayed around the wreckage at a respectful distance from the wreckage. Two people were speaking to each other while other individuals poked at the remains of the plane I skirted the impact area I had seen from the air and followed the skid path toward the wreck. A heavy vehicle of some sort, probably a fire truck, had driven over the path more than once sometime during the night.

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The impact area and skid path told me things as I walked past. Impact had left an oval depression about five by twenty feet, oriented along the same direction as the skid. Farther on, flanking the skid mark about twenty-five feet on either side, were two deep scars. Just past the two marks, the main path became indistinct for twenty yards.

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A picture of the impact began form in my mind like an incomplete puzzle. I had seen a lot of pictures like this, and I knew when enough puzzle pieces showed up, they would snap together in my head to let me imagine what the crash looked like as it happened.

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From what I saw, impact must have been very hard and at a low forward speed. As the investigation shaped up, my team would have to analyze the geometry of the marks on the ground to determine exactly how the GlobalMax's hit the ground, but dirt didn't lie. For now, I needed more pieces.

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I snapped another picture and dropped my gear next to the airport sedan as I walked toward the two men I had seen when I arrived. One man, a tall, trim figure in a state police uniform, held back slightly. The other, a civilian in a short-sleeved white shirt, held out a hand as he eyed my NTSB ball cap.

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He looked me up and down with a quizzical expression. "Are you Lew Hills?"

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"Ah, no," I answered. My boss was a legend in the crash investigation business, known by aviation authorities from Afghanistan to El Paso County, Colorado. "I'm Mike O'Hara from the DC office. Lew's in New Orleans on another job. I'll be handling this one."

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He shrugged, containing his disappointment. He introduced himself as Joe Gilles from Colorado Transportation, and pointed to the wreckage. "One of your guys is already here."

 

I had seen one figure in the distance with a ball cap like the one I wore, and guessed he was from the Denver field office.

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"There'll be one more guy coming in from Washington," I said. "Not sure who. I haven't been in the office for three weeks, so I don't know who's on call. I'd like to get a look at the wreckage myself. What do we know about the accident?" I pulled a notebook and mechanical pencil from my pocket. I am mostly old school and have not fully mind-melded with digital equipment.

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"The wreckage is cool," he said. "There was a hell of a fire, but the fire department guys had it out in about five minutes."

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"Who'd the plane belong to?"

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"A company called ZYCO. Z-Y-C-O. They're a big employer in this area. Big money, too. Something high tech. Software, I think. Their world headquarters is here in town. We think the passenger was the CEO of the firm. His name was on the passenger manifest. A couple of ZYCO guys were here at about dawn and then left."

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I excused myself and walked to the remains of the business jet. A heavy smell of kerosene, scorched earth and a touch of burned flesh filled the still air.

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Ten yards from the wreckage I stopped and surveyed the scene, trying to take it all in at once. The small orange-and-white sheet-metal outbuilding it had hit was destroyed, wrapped around the mangled nose.

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I read what the crushed metal of the wreckage looked like. All the plane's Plexiglas windows had melted in the fire, leaving gaping holes on both sides of what remained of the cabin, but the gracefully pointed tube of the fuselage was mostly intact. The nose was deformed a little by impact with the building, but of the rest, only the bottom of the tube was crushed and deformed by impact. There were deep dented scrapes on the bottoms of the wingtips. The impact had smashed the wheel struts upward into the tops of the wings leaving large irregular bulges.

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I stood for a second to let the puzzle click together. The shape of the scrapes and length of the pattern on the ground confirmed that the plane had dropped steeply to Earth at low forward speed, probably less than 75 knots. It was nearly level when it hit. The nose was not smashed by ground impact, judging by the angle of crushing I could see. It hit hard enough that the wings flexed down, and their tips had gouged the ground alongside the skid mark from the fuselage. The wheels were still down at impact. It had all happened so quickly that the pilots hadn't had time to retract them after takeoff.

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The puzzle formed itself into a picture in my head with an almost-audible click. A normal takeoff, followed immediately by something that made the plane go out of control. Next came impact, leaving a smear of gouged ground and scattered bits of airplane junk. Then fire and death. I could visualize the plane dropping out of the clouds and sliding to a stop in front of me. We would squeeze more details out of the rest of the data, but that was the picture the dirt gave me. My goal from that point on was the find out why, to fit any other parts of the puzzle we found into the picture.

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Three figures came around the smashed nose section, one in a blue NTSB cap like the one I wore, the others dressed in paramedics' uniforms. The medics headed for the white van, and the third man walked to meet me, wiping his hands on a rag.

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The NTSB man pulled down his surgical mask and removed his rubber gloves, jamming them in his belt. I recognized him as Steve Penney, a GS-12 from Denver. I knew Penney vaguely from other jobs, but I couldn't remember which one. He was usually on call for the Western region.

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"Where's Big Lew?" he asked as we shook hands. I mumbled another explanation about the boss's absence and introduced myself. He looked disappointed, too, and not too happy to have a guy from DC looking over his shoulder.

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I looked into his eyes and saw heavy fatigue. "Been here all night?"

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"Most of it. I drove down from Denver and got here at 3:00 a.m." He yawned and stretched. "I photographed the site after dawn." His speech was the typical short staccato of an official in charge, tired, puzzled and trying to get the effort organized and moving. "I was just helping the medical examiner's people get the passenger's body ready to move." He looked at me.

 

"You're going to run the show?"

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"Yes, Lew put me in charge. I'll handle the accident file."

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He inhaled heavily, crossed his arms across his chest and looked at the ground. "What do you know so far?"

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"What the State DOT guy told me." I summarized briefly.

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"You have that much about right. They were cleared for takeoff at twenty-two-eighteen hours local, on an instrument flight plan, non-stop to Paris."

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"France or Texas?"

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Penney gave a thin smile. "France. They rolled normally, and lifted off about where they should have according to the witnesses. Observers said they climbed pretty fast into the overcast. Ceiling was measured about three hundred feet, and these things climb like crazy, even here." He motioned toward the plane. "The next thing anybody saw was the aircraft's lights coming back out of the clouds a few seconds later, with the nose about level in pitch. I expect the wings were fully stalled. The left wing was a little low, rolling right and descending almost vertically."

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"Hmm. Any reports of unusual engine noises, or compressor stalls, that sort of thing?" A malfunctioning jet engine could emit loud bangs that could be heard from a long distance.

Penney shook his head. "No. The pilot waiting to take off said he heard the ship's engines above his own. He said the jet sounded normal, right up to impact. I haven't heard anybody report anything else, either."

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I considered the information for a second. "Doesn't seem too likely to me that the crew would just screw up a takeoff that badly."

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"We'll have to check out their qualifications, but yeah, you're right." He hesitated. "There's one other thing. I know I may have been jumping the gun, but I called Aries, in France--the company that builds these things. I met their chief engineer a couple months ago at a conference in Washington. He went crazy when I told him about the crash. He yelled at me in French for about thirty seconds, and then he said this really weird thing."

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Penney's eyes narrowed, and his voice became quiet, almost a whisper. "He said, 'That is not possible.' He was absolutely freaked out, almost panicked. At first he just denied that it happened. Then he calmed down and said that Aries had designed the flight control system to not allow the airplane to act like that, and ZYCO must have made a mistake on the control software.

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I looked at him with a question.

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"Yeah, the plane's owner, ZYCO, built the flight control software."

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I nodded in understanding. "Nice. We haven't found the problem yet and they are already trying to finger the other guys." I ran the scenario again in my mind. "Maybe the witnesses are wrong about the engines."

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"No. The engines look like they were running OK at impact. They sucked in lots of dirt and brush when the plane hit the ground, and the brush in the combustors is burned. I reached in and got some." Penny pointed to grime on a sweatshirt sleeve. "You'd need to be at full power to get that kind of scorching."

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"Um, how about thrust reversers? Maybe they opened them accidentally."

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"No. No, that's the whole point. The chief engineer said it couldn't happen. I asked about that. He said that the flight control system watches everything--control inputs, engine conditions, air data, speed, altitude, everything. The computers are in charge and they won't allow the pilot to do anything to put the airplane in danger. Even if the engines quit cold or went into reverse, the airplane would level itself out and just glide down. This thing looks like it was totally outside the controlled flight envelope. They shouldn't have been able to screw things up that badly. He called it 'pilot proof.'"

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I frowned. "'Pilot proof.' Interesting choice of words."

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"Yeah." He didn't sound amused. "He said the only way to crash this airplane is to run it into terrain, and even that can be programmed out of the autopilot." He stopped and squinted into the sun, stretching his back, fighting fatigue. "These airplanes are getting too damned complicated. You have to be smarter than the equipment to be safe. That's what I always thought."

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I heard a car approach. I turned and saw a block-long Mercedes-Benz sedan slowing to a halt just a few feet from the wreckage, straddling the skid path. I swore under my breath for not getting the area cordoned off and waved the police officer over. He walked past the Mercedes and I spoke as soon as he was in earshot.

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"Sergeant, could you get some crime scene tape or something up around the wreckage to keep everybody out? Right away, please." He nodded and headed for his car. "And keep everybody off the big skid mark in the dirt until we can examine it," I shouted after him. He waved over his shoulder as he left.

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The driver-side door of the Mercedes opened and a silver-haired man stepped out, looking around importantly. He was athletically slim, a little taller than me, had a hundred dollar haircut, and wore Italian-looking shoes that must have cost five hundred bucks. He looked like he had paid so much for his suit they could have hired a new Brooks Brother. Mr. Big, I guessed, come to kick butt and get results.

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I was suddenly very aware that I had dressed before waking fully, and that my cotton trousers probably should have been laundered before being worn again.

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I was put back at ease by the figure that got out of the passenger side of the Merc. He was younger than the driver, of medium height, painfully thin through the shoulders and running to fat elsewhere. His cotton pants looked worse than mine and his dress shirt was open at the collar. A thick brush of dirty-brown hair hung over his forehead, and he wore thick glasses and a vaguely distracted expression. His face was familiar, like I had seen him before, but I couldn't place him. He stood beside the car and looked the wreckage over, showing no sign of a reaction to the destruction.

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The Brooks Brothers suit walked toward me, glancing at the medics as they carried equipment past us to the plane.

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"Are you in charge here?" He fixed me with an Ivy League stare.

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I stared back. "Yes." A weak breeze stirred the scrub brush around us while I silently looked up the car's path and then back at the Brooks Brother. "You just drove your car through my evidence field." It wasn't an attack, just a fact and a mild assertion of authority.

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It worked. He immediately backed down a step and made a perfunctory apology.

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"You'll need to back out and try not to go over anything."

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"Certainly. Of course." He paused and then spoke, more politely this time. "May I ask your name?"

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"My name is O'Hara. I just got in from NTSB headquarters in Washington." I pointed at Steve Penney. "That is Mr. Penney from our Denver field office, who has been working the case before my arrival. May I have your name please?"

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He cleared his throat. "Harrison Randall. I'm chief financial officer of ZYCO. I take it you don't know what caused the crash yet."

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"No. Right now we're getting the bodies out of the plane."

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Randall's face changed a little, moving from tension and anger to something else that I couldn't read. "I'm sorry. Of course, I'm sure you're doing everything you can. Mr. Corso was a friend, you see. This is all a terrible shock."

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"Sure, I can imagine. Corso was the passenger?"

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"Oh, yes. He was going to Paris to consult on future business with Aries--the company that built the airplane--as a matter of fact. Terrible..." He shook his head, and allowed himself to look a little less in control. It made him seem slightly more human to me, and he was obviously disturbed by the death so close to him. People usually were, even kings of the world. Different people had different ways of handling such things, and I'd seen them all.

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"We'll do our best to find the cause, and you'll be informed about what we find." I cleared my throat. "Could I ask you to move your car now?"

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He was in the process of apologizing again when his casually dressed companion called to me. "Do you have his body?"

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Where had I seen him? "The passenger?"

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"Wes Corso's, I mean." Mr. Casual pointed to the M.E. van.

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"The body from the passenger cabin is being removed now," I said. "The medical examiner will have to identify it."

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His face showed an odd mixture of sorrow and impatience. "OK, OK." He shifted his attention to Randall. "C'mon, Harry. Let's get out of here and let them work." He turned back to me. "Sorry to interrupt you."

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He abruptly opened the car door and got back into the Mercedes without waiting for an answer. Randall turned back to me and reached into a pocket of his perfectly cut suit jacket, pulling out a business card. "My personal numbers are on this. Please let me know how it's going, if you can. The company is ready to help you, of course. If you need any assistance at all, please call me direct. Twenty-four hours a day."

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Before I could answer, he turned and walked briskly back to the car, entering and closing the door in one quick movement. Randall backed the Mercedes slowly several yards away from the wreckage before turning around and driving back onto the taxiway. The state trooper saluted the car as it passed.

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I slipped the business card in my pocket, noticing the heavy embossed paper's satin smooth finish.

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As the car departed Steve Penney walked up behind me. "Wow. Royalty."

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"Who? Them?"

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"Yeah," Penney answered. "I think that was Zygler himself."

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I felt for the card in my pocket. "He said his name was Randall."

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"No, the other guy. That was Eric Zygler. One of the richest men on Earth. Top hundred anyway. He used to own ZYCO, before they went public. I think he's their Chairman of the Board or something now."

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That was it. I'd seen him online and on magazine covers, including that morning while walking past a newsstand in the Denver airport terminal. He was famous all over the world for being the smartest, nerdiest--and richest--of all technology entrepreneurs. He was the personification of the modern geek/billionaire/celebrity.

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I watched the limo disappear in the distance.