He nodded, tucking back part of a smile. “I’ll send Kimball and Boatman down first, with the Total Station,” he said. “They’ll stomp around and scare off the varmints.”
He turned toward the two agents, who were uncoiling a pair of ropes and tying them to their gear — a hard-shell tripod case, about the size of a golf bag, plus a suitcase-sized aluminum box containing the electronics. “Yo, Kimball,” McCready yelled. The ever-eager agent looked up. “Got a job for you.”
“Instead of the Total Station?”
“In addition. You’re on snake-bait duty.”
“Snakebite duty?” The young agent cocked his head. “You want me to take the antivenom kit with us?”
“Not snake bite. Snake bait. You’re the designated snake bait.”
“Boss. Seriously? Did you really just call me snake bait?”
“I did. Doc here is snake-phobic. Your job is to run interference. If he gets bit, you get transferred. To Fargo.”
Kimball pondered this for a fraction of a second. “Hey, Doc,” he said. “Do me a favor, will you?”
“If I can.”
“If you get bit, chuck that snake over at me, so it’ll bite me, too. I’m Fargo-phobic.” He turned to his partner. “Hey, Boat-Man, toss me that figure eight, would you?” A piece of polished metal arced through the air toward Kimball; he caught it deftly, looped the rope through it, and then clipped it to his climbing harness. Then, easing the tripod case over the rim, he lowered it down the bluff, feeding the rope smoothly through the figure eight until the line went slack. Boatman did the same with the aluminum case.
Once the hardware was down, the two men clipped themselves to the rappelling ropes, backed off the precipice in sync, and dropped from sight. “Look out, all you rattlers and cottonmouths and king cobras,” I heard Kimball call out as he descended. “I’m coming down, and I am one snake-stompin’ son-of-a-mongoose badass!”
“Yeah, right,” I heard Boatman taunting as he slithered down the other rope. “You proved your badassedness in Baton Rouge, didn’t you? How many times did you hurl at that scene? Four? Or was it five?”
“I told you, man, that was food poisoning from the night before. Toxic gumbo. Tainted crawdads. A lesser man — you, for instance — woulda keeled over and died.”
“Yeah,” mocked Boatman. “You just keep on telling yourself that, Mr. Badass.”
I was the last to rappel down. If any snakes remained nearby, they were doing a good job of hiding. As I unclipped, though, I changed my assessment: If any snakes were in the immediate vicinity, they were thoroughly cooked. The earth was scorched, and heat continued to radiate from the rocks.
Unclipping from the rope, I stepped back and studied the rock face I had just descended. Some thirty feet high by fifty feet wide, it was unremarkable, at least geologically: merely the upper terminus of a long valley; a vertical transition up to the mountain’s ridgeline. In human terms, though, it was momentous: the rocky hand of death, smashing Richard Janus’s hurtling aircraft as effortlessly and heedlessly as I might reflexively crush a gnat in midair.
Head high above the base of the bluff was a shallow crater, rough and raw, six or eight feet in diameter, with additional fracture lines radiating beyond the edges of the depression. Mangled debris was piled almost as high as the crater’s center, and it sprawled outward to either side in approximately equal measures. “Must’ve impacted right there,” I said to Kimball and Boatman.
“Sure looks like it,” Kimball agreed. He shook his head. “Man. A hundred feet higher, he’d’ve cleared it. A flick of the wrist — that’s all it would’ve taken.” He scanned the debris scattered behind and to the sides, then turned to Boatman. “So, Boat-Man. I’m thinking we ought to set the station off to one side, so we’re not standing right on ground zero.” He pointed to a narrow shelf of rock at one edge of the draw, just outside the zone of destruction. “How about that flat spot?”
Boatman studied the shelf. “Works for me,” he said. “Gives us a clear view of the whole debris field, far as I can tell. Also a line of sight to those trees”—he pointed at a swath of broken branches a short ways down the valley. “Looks like the wings clipped ’em on the way in.” He hoisted one of the gear cases and started across the slope to the shelf. I snagged the tripod case and began following him.
“Hang on, Doc,” Kimball called after me.
“Might as well make myself useful,” I said, trudging on. “I hate just standing around. Besides, I want to look over your partner’s shoulder while he sets that thing up.”
Kimball caught up just as I reached the rock shelf. He took the tripod case from me and set it down carefully. Unlatching it, he lifted out the tripod, extended and unfolded the legs, and set it on the flattest spot, then made a few adjustments to level it. Then, reaching into the case again, he removed a telescoping rod marked with twelve-inch bands of red and white, one end topped by a jewel-like prism. “You made off with my piece of the gear, Doc,” he squawked good-naturedly, waving the rod like a scepter.
“Oh. Sorry. No wonder you were trying to stop me. I thought you were just afraid I would break something.”
“That too.” He grinned, then turned and headed across the draw, toward the broken branches that marked the beginning of the end of the Citation’s flight.
Boatman, meanwhile, had opened the aluminum case that contained the system’s brains: a boxy yellow instrument that looked like a cross between a fish finder, a surveyor’s transit, and an overgrown camera. Bolting it to the head of the tripod, he powered it up, leveled it, and began scrolling through menus on a small digital screen. I edged closer and leaned in. “Mind if I look over your shoulder? I saw y’all using this at the Body Farm, but I didn’t have a chance to pay much attention.”
“Be my guest.” Boatman leaned back a bit so I could see the screen. “A Total Station’s like a cross between a GPS receiver and a surveyor’s rig, with a laser pointer and a microcomputer thrown in. The way it works is, first you mark your reference point — this point right here, where we’ve set it up.” He pressed a button. “Okay, so we have our reference point; ground zero. Guess I shouldn’t call it that anymore — not since 9/11. Anyhow. Now we can measure the position of any other point or object out here — those broken branches; that wheel over there; whatever — in relation to the reference point. All we need to know is the distance, the heading, and the angle up or down. Kimball holds the prism beside whatever we want to map, I bounce the laser off the prism, and I hit this button to capture the data. Easy as pie.”
“Don’t you have to label it somehow?”
“Ah. Good question. Yeah. I’ve got a bunch of captions preloaded — we worked a plane crash about six months ago — so mostly I’ll just scroll down the list and click on whatever caption I need. But I can add new ones, if I need to, using this.” He tapped a small keyboard. “Then Kimbo moves the reflector to the next point, I hit the button again, and so on. All those coordinates get stored in memory, and when we dump everything onto the computer up there in the command center, we can spit out maps in 3-D, from any angle we want to.”
“Cool,” I said. “And that’s accurate to within, what — a few feet? a few inches?”