Sole Survivor

her jeans, she took a folded paper but didn't immediately hand it to Joe.
        She said, “When Minh Tran and the others listened, they found that some portions of the tape were clearly audible and others were so full of scratchy static, so garbled, they could only discern one out of four or five words.”
        “What about the last minute?”
        “That was one of the worst segments. It was decided that the tape would have to be cleaned and rehabilitated. Then the recording would be electronically enhanced to whatever extent possible. Bruce Laceroth, head of the Major Investigations Division, had been there to listen to the whole tape, and he called me in Pueblo, at a quarter past seven, Eastern time, to tell me the status of the recording. They were stowing it for the night, going to start work with it again in the morning. It was depressing.”
        High above them, the eagle returned from the east, pale against the pregnant bellies of the clouds, still flying straight and true with the weight of the pending storm on its wings.
        “Of course that whole day had been depressing,” Barbara said. “We'd brought in refrigerated trucks from Denver to collect all the human remains from the site, which had to be completed before we could begin to deal with the pieces of the plane itself. There was the usual organizational meeting, which is always exhausting, because so many interest groups-the airline, the manufacturer of the plane, the supplier of the powerplants, the Airline Pilots' Association, lots of others-all want to bend the proceedings to serve their interests as much as possible. Human nature-and not the prettier part of it. So you have to be reasonably diplomatic but also damn tough to keep the process truly impartial.”
        “And there was the media,” he said, condemning his own kind so she wouldn't have to do it.
        “Everywhere. Anyway, I'd only slept less than three hours the previous night, before I'd been awakened by the Go-Team call, and there was no chance even to doze on the Gulfstream from National to Pueblo. I was like the walking dead when I hit the sheets a little before midnight -but back there in Washington, Minh Tran was still at it.”
        “The electronics engineer who cut open the recorder?”
        Staring at the folded white paper that she had taken from her hip pocket, turning it over and over in her hands, Barbara said, “You have to understand about Minh. His family were Vietnamese boat people. Survived the Communists after the fall of Saigon and then pirates at sea, even a typhoon. He was ten at the time, so he knew early that life was a struggle. To survive and prosper, he expected to give a hundred and ten percent.”
        “I have friends… had friends who were Vietnamese immigrants,” Joe said. “Quite a culture. A lot of them have a work ethic that would break a plough horse.”
        “Exactly. When everyone else went home from the labs that night at a quarter past seven, they'd put in a long day. People at the Safety Board are pretty dedi- cated… but Minh more so. He didn't leave. He made a dinner of whatever he could get out of the vending machines, and he stayed to clean the tape and then to work on the last minute of it. Digitise the sound, load it in a computer, and then try to separate the static and other extraneous noises from the voices of the pilots and from the actual sounds that occurred aboard the aircraft. The layers of static proved to be so specifically patterned that the computer was able to help strip them away fairly quickly. Because the boom mikes had delivered strong signals to the recorder, Minh was able to clarify the pilots' voices under the junk noise. What he heard was extraordinary. Bizarre.”
        She handed the folded white paper to Joe.
        He accepted but didn't open it. He was half afraid to see what it contained.
        “At ten minutes till four in the morning Washington time, ten till two in Pueblo, Minh called me,” Barbara said. “I'd told the hotel operator to hold all calls, I needed my sleep, but Minh talked his way through. He played the tape for me… and we discussed it. I always have a cassette recorder with me, because I like to tape all meetings myself and have my own transcripts prepared. So I got my machine and held it to the phone to make my own copy. I didn't want to wait until Minh got a clean tape to me by courier. After Minh hung up, I sat at the desk in my room and listened