Lummis elbowed Upton Barlow so hard that Barlow dropped his glass of bourbon. It crashed against the hard plank floor and shattered into a hundred shards.
A few minutes later, as we all filed into the great room for dinner, Hank Bodine put a hand on my shoulder. Upton Barlow was at his side. "So you have some information for me," Bodine said. He'd cooled off some, though his tone was curt.
"I'm pretty sure I've figured out why the E-336 crashed," I said.
"Well, let's hear it." His hand came off my shoulder.
Barlow's raisin eyes regarded me curiously.
"Maybe we can talk in private, later on," I said.
"Nonsense. We have no secrets. Let's hear it." To Barlow, Bodine said, "Jake here says he knows why that Eurospatiale plane wiped out at Le Bourget." There was something smug, almost defiant in his tone, as if he didn't believe me, or was daring me, or something.
I paused. Cheryl and Ali were approaching from behind Bodine. "How about later?" I said.
"How about now?" said Cheryl. "I'd like to hear all about it." She extended her hand. "I don't believe we've met, actually. I'm Cheryl Tobin. Will you sit next to me at dinner?"
Bodine gave me a look of pure, unadulterated loathing.
22
A long table had been set up in a bay of the great room that overlooked the ocean. Night had fallen, and the windowpanes had become polished obsidian, reflecting the amber glow of the room. You couldn't see the ocean, but you could hear the waves of Rivers Inlet lapping gently against the shore.
Cheryl Tobin was seated at the head of the table. I was at her immediate left. On my other side was Upton Barlow, then Hugo Lummis, whose potbelly was so big he had to push his chair way back from the table to make room for it.
Lummis was telling some long-winded anecdote to Barlow. Meanwhile, Cheryl was talking with her CFO, Ron Slattery. His bald head shone: oddly vulnerable, a baby's. He was saying, "I thought your speech was absolutely masterful."
The table was covered with a stiff white linen cloth and set with expensive-looking gold-rimmed china and gleaming silverware. An armada of cut-glass wine and water glasses. Next to each place setting was a narrow printed menu listing six courses. A white linen napkin, folded into a fan, on each plate. A little card with each person's name written in calligraphy.
There was nothing spontaneous about Cheryl's decision to seat me next to her. If she wanted me to spy for her, I really didn't get it.
I buttered a hot, crusty dinner roll that was studded with olives, and wolfed it down.
Hank Bodine was down near my end of the table, but in no-man's-land, if you believed in close readings of dinner-table placement. Ali was on the other side, between Kevin Bross and Clive Rylance. Both Alpha Males seemed to be putting the moves on her, double-teaming her. She smiled politely. I caught her eye, and she gave me a look that conveyed a lot: amusement, embarrassment, maybe even a secret enjoyment.
A couple of Mexican waiters ladled lobster bisque into every-one's bowls. Another waiter poured a French white wine. I took a sip. It tasted fine to me. Not that I had any idea.
Barlow took a sip, grunted in satisfaction, and pursed his moist red lips. He said out of the side of his mouth, "I don't have my reading glasses-this a Meursault or a Sancerre?"
I shrugged. "White wine, I think."
"Guess you're more the jug-wine-with-a-screwtop type."
"Me? Not at all. I like the gallon boxes, actually." Might as well give him what he wanted to hear.
He laughed politely, turned away.
Ron Slattery was keeping up his line of sock-puppet patter. "Well, you've got the entire division running scared, and that's a good thing." His mouth was a thin slash, barely any lips. The small fringe around his shiny dome was shaved close. His heavy black-framed eyeglasses might have looked funky, ironic, on someone like Zoл, but on him they were just nerdy.
"Not too scared, I hope," Cheryl said. "Too much fear is counterproductive."
"Don't forget, a jet won't fly unless its fuel is under pressure and at high temperature," he replied.
"Ah, but without a cooling system, you get parts failure, right?"
"Good point," he chortled.
Then she turned to me, raised her voice. "Speaking of which, why'd it crash?"
How had she put it before? I know all about it, believe me. She knew the reason; she had to. But she wanted me to tell her in public, in front of everyone else.
"An inboard flap ripped off the wing at cruise speed and hit the fuselage."
"Explain, please." She really didn't need to speak so loudly. Her eyes glittered.
"A three-hundred-pound projectile flying at three hundred miles an hour is going to do some serious damage."
"Obviously." Exasperated. "But why'd it rip off?"
"Chicken rivets."
"Chicken rivets," she repeated. "I don't follow." People around us were listening now.
Maybe she didn't know as much about the crash as she'd claimed. But whether she did or not, she wanted me to explain, which was tricky: even though she'd been the EVP for Commercial Airplanes at Boeing before she came to Hammond, I had no idea how much she actually knew about building airplanes. Lots of executives rely on their experts to tell them what to think. I didn't want to talk over her head, but I also didn't want to condescend.
"Well, so Eurospatiale's new plane is mostly made out of plastic, right?"
She gave me a look. "If you want to call carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer 'plastic' instead of composite."
You got me there, I thought. So she did know a thing or two. "Most of the senior guys still don't trust the stuff."
"The 'senior guys' at Hammond?"
"Everywhere."
She knew what I meant, I was pretty sure-the senior execs at all the airplane manufacturers were inevitably older, and what they knew was metal, not composites.
"So?"
"So all the flaps on the wings are made of composite, too," I said. "But the hinges are aluminum. On the wing side, they're bolted to the aluminum rib lattice, but on the flaps, they're cut in."
"The hinges are glued on?"
"No, they're co-cured-basically glued and baked together. A sort of metal sandwich on composite bread, I guess you could say. And obviously Eurospatiale's designers didn't quite trust the adhesive bond, so they also put rivets into the hinges, right through the composite skin."
"The 'chicken rivets,'" she repeated, unnecessarily loud, I thought. "Called that why?"
I glanced up and saw that more and more people around the table were watching us. I tried not to smile. "Because you only do it if you're 'chicken'-scared the bond won't hold. Like wearing belts and suspenders."
"But why are 'chicken rivets' a problem?"
"When you put rivets through composites, you introduce micro-cracks. Means you run the risk of introducing moisture. Which is clearly what happened in Paris."
Barlow signaled one of the waiters over and told him he wanted to try whatever red wine they were pouring.
"How can you be so sure?" she said.
"The photographs. You can see cracks at the stress concentration points. You can also see the brooming, the-"
"Where the composites absorbed water," she said impatiently. "But the plane was new."
"It made maybe twenty test flights before the show. Flew out of warm, rainy London up to subzero temps at forty thousand feet. So the damage spread fast. Weakened the joints. Then the flap tore off its hinge and hit the fuselage."
"You're sure."
"I saw the pictures. Nothing else it can be." Ali looked at me, a glint of amusement in her eyes. Kevin Bross put his hand over hers, making some point, and she delicately slid hers away.
The younger of the two Mexican waiters poured red wine into Barlow's glass. It was deep red, almost blood-red, and even at a distance it gave off the smell of a horse barn. I guessed that meant it was good.