Mr. Siben said to me, “And stay away from the conspiracy theory idiots and their books, their videotapes, and their Internet lunacy.”
Time to cool down Mr. Siben. I said, “Well, I’ve never read or seen the conspiracy stuff, and I have no plans to. I’m also not likely to read your report, which I’m sure is well reasoned and convincing. In fact, I only expressed a mild-and as it turns out, uninformed-opinion to Ms. Mayfield, my wife and superior, which caused her some professional and personal concern, and thus my presence here tonight. And your presence as well. So, I thank you, Mr. Siben, for taking the time to brief me, which I’m sure must be tedious for you by now. It’s my opinion that you and everyone who worked on this case have done an outstanding job and reached the correct conclusion.”
He eyed me for a moment, wondering, I’m sure, if I was pulling his chain. He glanced at Kate, who nodded reassuringly to him.
I extended my hand to Mr. Siben, who took it and gave me a firm shake. He shook hands with Kate, who thanked him, then he turned, and walked into the darkness.
He then did a Jimmy Durante, turned, and walked back into the light. I thought he was going to say, “Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.” But instead he called out to me, “Mr. Corey. Can you explain that streak of light?”
I replied, “No, I can’t. Can you?”
“Optical illusion.”
“That’s it.”
He turned and disappeared again into the shadows. As he reached the door, his voice carried over the quiet hangar, and he said, “No, that’s not it. Damn it.”
CHAPTER TEN
Kate and I stood in the quiet hangar with Mr. Siben’s parting words still echoing in my mind. I mean, the guy had me half convinced, then he has a brain fart on his way out, and I’m back where I started.
Kate moved toward the aircraft and said, “Let’s see the interior.”
The reconstructed 747 sat on a wooden trestle and at several points along the trestle were steps, which led to the open doors of the fuselage. I followed her up a set of steps into the rear passenger cabin.
Kate said, “This interior cabin was reassembled in the fuselage as an investigative tool to match fuselage damage with cabin damage.”
I looked down the length of the cabin toward where the forward section and cockpit should have been, but the cockpit sat separately in another part of the hangar, leaving a huge opening through which I could see the far wall of the hangar.
I realized that at the moment of separation, the passengers saw the cockpit falling away, and the sky appearing in front of them, followed by a howling wind that must have ripped the cabin apart.
And in the falling cockpit the captain, co-pilot, and flight engineer were at the controls of an aircraft that was no longer attached to their cockpit. What did they think? What did they do? I felt my heart racing.
The main cabin of the huge 747 was a nightmarish semblance of the interior of an airliner-cracked ceilings and lights, hanging luggage bins, open portholes, pieced-together bulkheads, mangled lavatories and galleys, shredded and burned divider curtains, rows of tilted and ripped seats, and carpet patched together on the floor. Everything was held in place by a framework of wooden beams and wire netting. There was still the faint odor of something unpleasant in the air.
Kate said, in a quiet voice, “As the pieces emerged from the ocean, people from Boeing and the NTSB directed the reconstruction. The people who volunteered to do the actual work included pilots, flight attendants, and machinists-airline people who had intimate knowledge of the interior of a Boeing 747.” She continued, “Every piece of the aircraft has a factory number, so, difficult as this was, it wasn’t impossible.”
I commented, “This took a lot of patience.”
“A lot of dedication, and a lot of love. About forty of the passengers were TWA employees.”
I nodded.
She continued, “From the TWA seating chart, we had a good idea where each passenger sat. Using that, the pathologists created a computer database and digitalized photographs, and matched the injuries sustained by each passenger to damage on their seats, trying to determine if those injuries and the seat damage was consistent with a bomb or missile.”
“Amazing.”
“It is. No one can fault any of the work done by any group on this project. It went beyond state-of-the-art. It broke new ground and wrote the book on aircraft accident investigations. That was the only good thing to come out of this tragedy.” She added, “No one found a smoking gun, but they did prove a lot of negatives, the most important of which was that there were no explosive residues on board.”
“I thought they found some chemical evidence of an explosive substance. I remember that caused a big stir.”
Kate replied, “They got some false positives, such as the glue used in the seat and carpet fabrics, which was chemically close to a plastique-type explosive. Also, they got a few real hits inside this cabin, but as it turned out, this plane had been used a month before the crash in St. Louis to train bomb-sniffing dogs.”
“Are we sure about that?”
“Yes. The dog handler was interviewed by the FBI, and he stated that some SEMTEX residue may have been left behind.”
We walked up the right-hand aisle, between the scorched and ripped seats, and there were stains on some of the seats, which I didn’t ask about. There were also carnations and roses on some of the seats, and Kate said to me, “Some of the people who you saw at the memorial service came this morning to visit, and to be close to the last place where their loved ones sat… I came one year… and people knelt by the seats and spoke to…”
I put my hand on her shoulder, and we stood silently awhile, then continued down the aisle.
We stopped in the center of the cabin, the area right over the center fuel tank, between where the wings would have been. The fuselage around this center section below the fuel tank explosion was extensively damaged, but all the seats had been recovered and so had most of the carpeting.
Kate said, “If a missile, with or without an explosive warhead, passed through here, there should be some sign of it, but there isn’t. Not here in the cabin, not on the fuselage skin, not in the center fuel tank, and not in the air-conditioning units below the fuel tank.”
I looked at the floor, then at the seats, the ceiling, and at the hanging luggage bins. I said, “Still, there are lots of missing pieces.”
“There are… but you’d think that Captain Spruck’s missile would leave some trace of its entry and exit as it passed through all that mass.” She looked quietly around at the mangled remains of the cabin’s interior, then said, “But itcould have passed through, and all evidence of its passing was destroyed in the explosion and the subsequent crash from thirteen thousand feet.” She looked at me.
I thought a moment, then said, “That’s why we’re here.”
We walked toward the front of the cabin and passed into the First Class section where the seats were wider. The aircraft had separated here, halfway through this forward section, and through the reconstructed dome section overhead. A twisted spiral staircase rose up into the dome, surrounded by the shattered plastic bulkheads.
Kate was quiet for some time, then said, “TWA Flight 800, bound for Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, ten minutes out of Kennedy Airport, climbing at eleven thousand feet, about eight miles off the southern coast of Long Island, speed about four hundred miles per hour.”
She took a deep breath and continued, “We know from passengers who were still strapped to their seats that at least twelve of them switched seats-the usual scramble on a night flight to find empty center rows where they could stretch out.”
I turned and looked back at the rows of seats in the Coach cabin. On the night of July 17, 1996, this aircraft was only about half filled with passengers-a small blessing-so there would be plenty of empty rows with three seats across. Tonight, they were all empty.