“Yeah.” Fisher took a long pull on his cigarette. “You think your guys ran into each other?” asked Fisher.
“Of course not.”
“So what else could’ve happened?”
“Crashes happen for a lot of reasons.”
Fisher shrugged. Bonham couldn’t tell whether he was blowing smoke — literally — about the accident not being an accident or not.
“How do you know the metal piece isn’t from the plane?” asked Bonham.
“Oh, it is. It definitely is,” said Fisher. “I just think somebody put it out here for you to find.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Look at it: It’s not banged up enough to have fallen from, what, thirty thousand feet? Forty?”
“Try three or four hundred over the mountain,” said Bonham, now fairly sure the FBI agent was an idiot. “And you can’t go by how banged up something is in a crash.”
“True. I’ve seen weird things.” Fisher shrugged. “I think it’s bullshit.”
“How many crashes have you investigated?”
“A couple.” The agent took a very long drag on his cigarette, bringing it down to his fingertips. “Maybe a few more than that. I don’t really like crashes, though. Pretty much the technical people run the show.”
“Well, we have plenty of technical people,” said Bonham. “Why aren’t you back at the base?”
“This is more interesting than staring at Jemma Gorman’s tight ass all day.” Fisher took a long draw and then threw away the cigarette.
“Thank you for your opinion,” said Bonham sarcastically. Gorman actually wasn’t that bad-looking, but she was definitely a tight-ass.
“Hey, it’s free,” he said, walking back down the hill.
“Sir?” asked the sergeant who had been following Fisher.
“Stick with him,” said Bonham. “Make sure he gets the hell back where he belongs.”
“Yes, sir.” The sergeant scrambled down to follow.
“Double the search assets in this sector. Use this point as a starting point and assume the plane broke up as it went north,” Bonham told the major when he returned to where he was standing.
“Sir, uh, with respect, Colonel Gorman is in charge.”
Bonham glared at him.
“Yes, sir,” said the major.
One of the crew members from the Pave Hawk came hustling down the hill toward them. “General! Search teams are reporting a find about a hundred and fifty miles from here, due east.”
“A hundred and fifty miles?”
“Yes, sir. They think it’s the F/A-22V.”
“Let’s go,” said Bonham, starting back toward the landing area.
One of the other helicopters had just brought in a small ATV with a plow on it, and a pair of airmen were using it to cut a narrow zigzag trail down to the mountain crevice where the airplane had been found. The trail looked to be about wide enough for a shopping cart, but the two men certainly seemed to be having a hell of a time running the vehicle, and Fisher saw no reason to tell them their effort was probably a waste of time, since a heavy-duty lift helicopter was already en route from the base. Crushing personal initiative was a military job, and besides, one of the airmen had lent him a lighter.
Fisher also saw no need to go down and look at the wreck; it would be fairly jumbled, and his naked eye wasn’t going to tell him anything the technical people couldn’t. Besides, the one person worth talking to about it wasn’t going to answer any more questions in this lifetime.
What was interesting, however, was watching Bonham direct the response teams down toward the wreckage. Though well into his fifties, the ex-general hustled around as if he were in his mid-twenties. He wasn’t a stay-on-the-top administrator: The arms of the denim shirt were covered with grime, and his work shoes were well scuffed. Fisher had had a boss like that once, a real pain in the ass who basically wanted to solve every case himself. Had it ended there, it wouldn’t have been bad, but he was such a control freak that he had informants in every diner in the city, making it difficult to cop a cup and a smoke on Bureau time. And as far as he was concerned, every minute you breathed was Bureau time.
A doctor had gone down to check on the pilot’s body before it was removed. He trudged up the hill now, his green T-shirt soaked with sweat. As soon as he got to the apex of the trail, he collapsed on the pile of rocks there. Fisher slid down from his vantage point and went over to him.
“Hey, Doc. Hot down there?”
The doctor grunted something. It was summer, but it was probably only about sixty degrees.
“So, it was Williams, right?” asked Fisher, taking out his cigarettes. “Still strapped in, right?”
“You’re Fisher.”
“That’s what the cred says,” said Fisher. “Picture kind of looks like me, if you squint.”
The doctor grimaced. “Those things’ll kill you.”
Fisher held out the pack. “Want one?”
The doctor hesitated, then reached for the pack.
“Pretty gruesome, huh?”
“Let’s just say severe trauma,” said the doctor. He took a long breath on the cigarette, held it nearly thirty seconds, then exhaled. “Autopsy’ll have the details.”
“You think he was dead before the crash?” asked Fisher.
The doctor’s hand shook as he brought the cigarette to his mouth and took a drag.
“Was his body bruised?” Fisher prompted. “I’m kind of wondering, because if he was dead, well, then obviously that’s one line of expectations, and if he was alive, well, that’s another. It’d be pretty obvious on the face—”
The physician turned abruptly and began to vomit. Fisher had never met a weak-stomached doctor before, and looked on with scientific interest.
“You all right?” Fisher asked when the doctor finally stopped retching. He appeared to have had some sort of meat dish for lunch.
“Ugh,” muttered the man. Fisher took out a handkerchief and gave it to him.
“Not much left of the face,” managed the doctor.
“Warm?”
“I think he was alive at impact, yes,” said the doctor. “My g-guess would be unconscious. I’ve never seen such, such — The impact tore—”
He turned away and began to retch again.
“Fisher, what the hell are you doing? Why are you bothering my people?” demanded Bonham. “Why are you even here?”
“You commandeered my helicopter, remember?”
“Your helicopter?”
“I’m a taxpayer. When I remember to file.”
“There’s a time and place for everything. Show some respect.”
Fisher put his cigarette into his mouth, considering Bonham’s words. They seemed almost biblical.
Psalm-like, actually.
“So how do you figure the plane got so far north?” he asked Bonham.
The general gave him as exasperated look.
“Blacks out like Colonel Howe’s did, but then keeps flying?” asked Fisher. “Two hundred miles?”
“It’s probably less than one-fifty,” said Bonham. “I’m sure the crash experts will be able to compute it.”
“Yeah, they’re whizzes at this stuff. God bless ’em.” Fisher heard a helicopter arriving at the LZ and decided to see if he could hitch a ride back. “Keep the handkerchief,” he told the doctor. He looked up the hill for his bodyguard. “Come on, Johnson. Time for us to head home. I’m down to my last pack of cigarettes.”
Flying back on the helicopter, Fisher got involved in a philosophical discussion with the crew chief about whether the inventor of lite beer ought to be hanged or simply jailed for life. Because of that, he wasn’t prepared for the attack that met him on the tarmac.