He stored the impression against comparison with other cockpit fires.
How much fuel had there been? There should have been more damage. This fire would only have helped kill Pat Hollis and his co-pilot and flight engineer, if they had even been alive after the impact. He wondered who they had been Lowell, maybe, Hollis' shadow and idolater… and the flight engineer had probably been Paluzzi. Which meant that three women had been widowed, nine no, ten children orphaned. He shuddered, remembering cockpit fires in other places, other times. This crew hadn't had the option to eject as he had done twice in his life with the airplane on fire. They'd had to sit in their seats and burn… like the Vietnamese girl who now, so many years later, hardly ever intruded on his dreams.
Almost every instrument from the pilot's centre panel, which had housed the engine instruments, was missing. What remained was labelled or tagged. Name tapes, neatly computer-typed, fluttered from the overhead panels, from the flight engineer's panel. Each one, he knew from their colour, offered a negative no explanation of the cause of the crash. He turned his head and stared through the flight deck's shattered side window.
Through the cobweb pattern reminiscent of bullet damage, he glowered at the engine that was beached some yards from the broken fragments and spars of the port wing. Its position, in a kind of ominous isolation, suggested guilt. Fuel, fuel computer, booster pumps, fuel flow monitoring, the tanks, the lines, the compressors… Check, check, check, check, the team would tell him, again and again. The Tucson NTSB Inquiry Office had as good a reputation as any other.
He heard a noise behind him and half-turned at once surprised and unsurprised to see Vance heaving his bulk into the cramped, crushed tin can of the flight deck. His breathing was that of an old, asthmatic man as if the accident had aged him, cleaned the dye from his hair and given him instead dark stains beneath the blue eyes.
"Well you cosied up enough to your wreckage?" Vance was impatient. No one interrupted a senior investigator in his or her meditative first exploration of a crash site, or of a reconstructed wreck, or of a single piece of wreckage. They left you alone until you wanted to talk… but Vance was hurting and Vance was an egoist and a bully and Gant had once been his son-in-law. He assumed he still had rights of demand, of appropriation.
"Any feelings?"
"Cold. Melancholy."
"You know what I—" Vance choked the words off.
"Sure. I know," Gant snarled.
"You're hurting in your billfold, Alan, and you need an answer quick!
Don't crowd me, Alan — don't push…" His own words faded. It was obscene, the continuation of their guerrilla war in that confined, damaged space where people they had both known and respected had burned to death.
"Just take it easy," he forced out.
"OK sure. I apologise. What can I tell you? Is there any—?"
The engine. Before I talk to the Pratt & Whitney guy who is going to fire off in defence of his baby."
"The engine was perfect. So far. Your people are almost through with it with both engines."
"Which one stopped first?"
"Port-that one."
"Seconds later, the starboard engine suffered flame-out. Right?"
Vance nodded in a sullen, aggrieved way.
"Right."
"Hollis didn't make a mistake and cut the other engine?" Vance shook his head.
From the pocket of his jacket he produced a small tape recorder.
"You want to hear it? It's on here the fragments that were left of the cockpit voice recorder after the cabin fire." He proffered the machine but Gant shook his head.
"Later," he murmured, as if he had been offered the portfolio of an atrocity.
Vance must have been carrying his copy around, listening to it constantly, tormenting himself with it… or maybe just hoping that Hollis or Lowell or whoever else was on the flight deck had screwed up and he, like everyone else hustling for a buck in the airplane business, could cry pilot error.
"Later," he repeated.
Something…?
"How much of the cockpit record tape survived?"
"Not much. The fire was pretty intense in here…" First to arrive at the scene of an accident was how pilots tried to laugh the prospect of a crash into un importance Intense… IF ire-!
His mind wandered back down the twisted, scorched passenger compartment, between the leaning or lurching seats and the dangling wires and masks… not much fire, not that much. Not as badly damaged as here-glanced to one side, through the starred window, to where the broken wing lay like smashed planking beside the huge engine. Other crashes, other scenes, had a lot of fire damage, but the images on the TV news of the 494 taken from a helicopter… dulled metal, untarnished flaps… didn't show much fire damage not enough fire damage?
He concentrated on the flight deck.
"What else was there?" he asked.
"Before flame-out in both engines?"
"What—? It's hard to tell. Hollis was a tight-ass. You knew him. He was above keeping in radio contact with the ground on a routine flight.
He reported the failure of both engines but nothing before that…"
There was something, though.
"What else, Alan?" His voice was icily calm.
"Instability. There's some exchange about the ship becoming unstable—"
Vance threw up his hands, as if he had been made to admit to minor fraud.
"Look, Gant—"
"Suddenly, I'm Gant what happened to Mitchell?" His eyes held no amusement.
"What happened!"
"OK, so there was some instability difficulty handling the plane, and controlling the trim—" Not enough fire damage. His stare hardened, as if he were dredging Vance's recollection by means of hypnotism, willing the answer.
"It's impossible to say how bad, for how long… The computer realisation of the pilot's instruments shows it must have been pretty violent. I don't know what caused it."
"Fuel?"
"Uh?"
"Fuel flow, fuel management?"
Vance shook his head vehemently.
"All the readings for the fuel flow, the booster pumps, the lines, the management system, the fuel computer they're all normal.
Nothing was happening to the fuel to make the ship unstable. And the weather didn't do it, either. Look we're agreed, all of us, that the instability problem isn't linked to the flame-out in both engines!"
"OK. For now." He had no insight. Hollis may, or may not, have exacerbated the instability by over-correction, by distraction. He'd have to study the computer realisation and judge for himself, as a pilot. He owed that and a great deal more to Hollis, who had listened to him too often, as they had gotten drunk together, on the subjects of Vance and Vance's daughter and the bitter taste of his life after the airforce and the combat and the heroics with the MiG-31 and the operation they had code named Winter Hawk. It wasn't going to be pilot error except as the coldest of cold facts. He owed Hollis' patience with his own self-pity that much at least.
"Did you find anything wrong with the engines?"
"Not with either one. They just didn't restart. There was cactus and sagebrush ground to dust in each one, so they were rotating. But there was nothing burnt so, no flame. Neither engine relit. They tried—"