The thunderous impact of six simultaneous explosions fifteen feet away rocked the jungle as it sprayed shrapnel and vegetation and Britta just inches over their heads, the blast dissipating before reaching the others.
Robert angrily shoved Dallas off him and scrambled to his feet, tears in his eyes, his mind disoriented as he stumbled toward the scorched spot where Britta had stood. He couldn’t believe she was really dead, but everywhere he looked, his eyes confirmed it in gruesome detail.
“GOD DAMN YOU, DALLAS!” His voice, a guttural cry through gritted teeth, partially covered the sounds of someone running through the brush.
Steve skidded to a halt by Dallas, his eyes looking at the torn and ravaged portion of the trail where Britta had been. “Oh God! Where is she?” he asked, his voice shaking.
“Steve,” Dallas said, trying to put her arm around him. Steve pushed her away and stepped forward, his eyes scanning frantically to the right and left, trying to find an explanation for the explosion that would still leave her alive. Instead, his eyes fell to the spot where she had stood and slowly focused on the shredded pieces of flesh and bone, and one identifiable portion of a foot.
Steve leaned past Dallas and began throwing up violently. Dallas held him, tears coursing down her cheeks as she tried to comfort both of them.
“It’s okay, Honey. It’s okay. It’s okay.”
CHAPTER 24
It was too much to absorb in a single pass.
Kat Bronsky rubbed her eyes and asked the helicopter pilot to circle the perimeter of the wreckage a second time. What had appeared at first as a dark gash in the midst of a verdant jungle had grown rapidly as they approached, becoming an ugly expanse of blackened vegetation, coalescing into a gut-wrenching killing field of twisted aluminum, shredded seats, and human bodies.
The Vietnamese Air Force major nodded and banked the craft to one side.
“My God!” Kat said to herself, the contrast of clear blue skies overhead and total destruction below an upheaval in her mind. She felt a tap on her shoulder and turned to find the government interpreter she’d been assigned leaning in her direction.
“I’m sorry, Agent Bronsky. I did not hear you.”
What was his name? Kat asked herself, remembering at the same moment. Phu Minh. That’s right. And his western name is Pete.
She shook her head. “I was just talking to myself, Pete.” She looked back at the wreckage and gestured toward it. “I just can’t believe this.” Her stomach was hovering on the edge of nausea.
The helicopter flew slowly over the narrow point of first impact and the broad swath of destruction plowed by the disintegrating jumbo jet to the final resting place of the upper deck and cockpit area. It was twisted and shattered but recognizable, as it sat in a natural clearing over a mile distant from the point where the jungle first snagged the wings of the huge Boeing.
She snapped several pictures, knowing they could never transmit the full effect of the horror laid out before her in three dimensions. Once again she tried to put out of her mind the prospect of seeing Robert MacCabe’s body.
“Again?” the pilot asked in English.
Kat shook her head no and motioned toward the area around the forward section of the jumbo where a small group of men was waiting. She watched the pilot set the Huey on the ground with effortless precision, remembering the two hours of dual instruction she’d had in a much smaller helicopter back home. The memory was a momentary escape from the carnage spread out before her.
The on-scene commander was a Vietnamese colonel with an ashen face who met her at the door of the Huey.
Kat greeted him and stepped out, gesturing to the wreckage. “Did… did anyone survive?”
She felt herself go cold when he shook his head no.
“No one alive here,” he said. “I am waiting for our aviation ministry from Hanoi. I understand you are from the American accident agency?”
She nodded. “Technically, Colonel, I’m a special agent with the FBI, but I’m here to take a first look while all the other investigators are on the way.”
“You will not… disturb anything?”
“Of course not.”
“Please tell me if we can help.”
“Just let me walk around and get a feel for this accident,” Kat said.
The colonel nodded and turned away.
Kat walked quickly toward the main wreckage of the 747’s upper deck, the only large part still discernible. She climbed carefully over the sharp, ragged sides and stepped into the main aisle of the first-class upper-deck cabin. She felt suddenly light-headed as she spotted her seat.
She moved carefully toward it, then stopped in shock. The window seat where MacCabe had been sitting was completely intact and devoid of blood stains. The aisle seat where she would have been sitting was a different story. The seat itself was intact, but a jagged piece of aluminum had been propelled through the seat back. It would have passed through her chest.
My God! Kat said to herself. There’s no question. I would be dead now.
She shook herself back to the present and looked around. MacCabe’s body was nowhere to be seen.
So where is he?
The break in the cabin was behind the fourth row of seats, and Kat searched carefully both inside and behind the wreckage. Anyone back there would be gone, but anyone strapped in up here might have survived. The impact forces were obviously low.
There was a torn sheet of black plastic draped over one side of the wreckage where the left side windows had been. Kat moved carefully toward it. All her work as a police intern during college years had left her hardened to the ravaged bodies accidents could produce. She braced for the worst, her memory replaying some of the more gruesome things she had seen: indelible images of small aircraft victims, auto accident victims, suicides involving twelve-gauge shotguns, and one woman who chose to dive through a ten-story window, reducing herself to a mound of drained, gelatinous flesh on the concrete below.
Kat pulled the plastic back, somehow expecting to find Robert MacCabe, but there was no body beneath it. Instead, copious amounts of blood and some human tissue were embedded in the razor-sharp metal. They must have already started removing the bodies. That’s the only reasonable explanation.
Professionally, the thought was worrisome. The NTSB couldn’t control an investigation of a crash in a foreign nation, but they could provide expert professional advice, including the universal recommendation that bodies and wreckage be left wholly untouched until a preliminary examination had been completed. Nations unsophisticated in accident investigation often let bodies and wreckage be moved far too early, obscuring major clues, and sometimes hiding the true causes of the crash.
She replaced the plastic sheet and began moving carefully around the tortured floor of the upper deck, looking for clues. There was a general lack of blood on all but one of the passenger seats. Even in the cockpit, the only sign of severe body impact was around the forward windscreen, and that victim — a man in civilian clothes — was still draped over the center throttle console, his neck obviously snapped. The copilot’s body, however, was nowhere to be found.
Wait a minute. A blinded copilot would have had others in this cockpit, not just the one guy on the glareshield. So where are the rest of them? There was no blood on either of the pilot seats or the two observer seats, even though all of them had been partially dislodged from the buckled cockpit floor.