Sole Survivor

hundred and twenty were the pathologists finally able to identify… to find at least a few teeth from, body parts, something, anything, to tell who they were?”
        Her voice was flat, studiedly emotionless, but almost a whisper. “I think slightly more than a hundred.”
        “Broken, severed, mangled,” he said, hammering himself with the hard words.
        “Far worse. All that immense hurtling energy released in an instant… you don't even recognize most of the biological debris as being human. The risk of infectious disease was high from blood and tissue contamination, so we had to pull out and revisit the site only in biologically secure gear. Every piece of wreckage had to be carted away and documented by the structural specialists, of course-so to protect them we had to set up four decontamination stations out along the gravel road. Most of the wreckage had to be processed there before it moved on to a hangar at Pueblo Airport.”
        Being brutal to prove to himself that his anguish would never again get the better of his anger until this quest was completed, Joe said, “It was pretty much like putting them through one of those tree-grinding machines.”
        “Enough, Joe. Knowing more details can't ever help you.”
        The meadow was so utterly soundless that it might have been the ignition point of all Creation, from which God's energies had long ago flowed toward the farthest ends of the universe, leaving only a mute vacuum.
        A few fat bees, enervated by the August heat that was unable to penetrate Joe's chill, forsook their usual darting urgency and travelled languidly across the meadow from wildflower to wildflower, as though flying in their sleep and acting out a shared dream about collecting nectar. He could hear no buzzing as the torpid gatherers went about their work.
        “And the cause,” he asked, “was hydraulic-control failure-that stuff with the rudder, the yawing and then the roll?”
        “You really haven't read about it, have you?”
        “Couldn't.”
        She said, “The possibility of a bomb, anomalous weather, the wake vortex from another aircraft, and various other factors were eliminated pretty early. And the structures group, twenty-nine specialists in that division of the investigation alone, studied the wreckage in the hangar in Pueblo for eight months without being able to pin down a probable cause. They suspected lots of different things at one time or another. Malfunctioning yaw dampers, for one. Or an electronics-bay door failure. Engine mount failure looked good to them for a while. And malfunctioning thrust reversers. But they eliminated each suspicion, and no official probable cause was found.”
        “How unusual is that?”
        “Unusual. But sometimes we can't pin it down. Like Hopewell in ninety-four. And, in fact, another 737 that went down on its approach to Colorado Springs in ninety-one, killing everyone aboard. So it happens, we get stumped.”
        Joe realized there had been a disturbing qualifier in what she had said: no official probable cause.
        Then a second realization struck him: “You took early retirement from the Safety Board about seven months ago. That's what Mario Oliveri told me.”
        “Mario. Good man. He headed the human-performance group in this investigation. But it's been almost nine months since I quit.”
        “If the structures group was still sifting the wreckage eight months after the crash… then you didn't stay to oversee the entire inquiry, even though you were the original IIC on it.”
        “Bailed out,” she acknowledged. “When it all turned sour, when evidence disappeared, when I started to make some noise about it… they put the squeeze on me. At first I tried to stay on, but I just couldn't handle being part of a fraud. Couldn't do the right thing and spill the beans, either, so I bailed. Not proud of it. But I've got a hostage to fortune, Joe.”
        “Hostage to fortune. A child?”
        “Denny. He's twenty-three now, not a baby any more, but if I ever lost him…”
        Joe knew too well how she would have finished that sentence. “They threatened your son?”
        Although Barbara stared into the crater before her, she was seeing a potential disaster rather than the aftermath of a real one, a personal catastrophe rather than one involving three hundred and twenty deaths.
        “It happened two weeks after the crash,” she said.