“More like a millimeter — less than a tenth of an inch.”
“Amazing.”
From across the way, Kimball called to Boatman. “Yo, pard, you ’bout ready to rock and roll?”
“Ready. Gimme that broken branch right over your head, would you? The one with the big rattlesnake on it?”
“Ha ha,” Kimball said drily, but all the same, I saw him sneak a glance at the branch before raising the prism.
Boatman punched the “save” button, then scrolled down and clicked on a caption. Tree strike, I read over his shoulder. “Got it,” he called. “You want to work that whole side first? Come back up to the base of the bluff, then go across and down the far side?”
“Work the edges first, then go in? Makes sense,” said Kimball. “Gonna be some backing and forthing, though, any way we do it.”
“Not for me,” chuckled Boatman.
“Your job does seem a bit cushier,” I remarked. “All you have to do is swivel that thing around and push some buttons.”
At the moment, I would have killed for a button-pushing job — for any job that would have helped me feel productive. As it was, I felt like a fifth wheel; the young agents treated me with politeness, respect, and possibly a bit of misplaced awe, but clearly this was the FBI’s show, and I was an outsider, waiting for my cue. And I hated waiting.
“Hey, Boat-Man,” came Kimball’s voice from across the way, as if to confirm my glum thoughts. “Less talk, more action. There’s a wingtip here.”
“Got it,” called Boatman, and with that, the pair settled into a smooth routine, Kimball scampering around the edges of the debris field, pausing just long enough to hold the prism and call out a description of the object he was marking. He didn’t mark everything — that would’ve taken forever; instead, he sought out large, recognizable components (“engine cowling”; “turbine blades”; “wheel and strut”) and concentrations of debris (“structural members”; “aluminum skin”; “hydraulic lines”).
After an hour — an hour in which the temperature climbed from eighty degrees to an unseasonably hot ninetysomething — they’d mapped the crash scene’s entire perimeter. Kimball rejoined Boatman and me on the ledge long enough to chug a bottle of water and scarf down a nut bar. “Okay,” he said, looking at the central pile of wreckage. “You ready?”
Boatman nodded. “I’m always ready.”
“Wasn’t asking you, Mr. Button-Pusher,” scoffed Kimball. “I was asking Doc, the one who’s got some real work ahead.” He looked at me. “You ready to get dirty?”
“That’s what I’m here for,” I said.
“Okay, I’ll talk to the man upstairs.” He tapped a shoulder-mounted radio mike. “Hey, Mac, it’s Kimbo. We’ve got the first layer mapped. Doc says he’s ready to dig in. You want to send down the other guys, so we can start moving some metal?” He listened, nodded, and gave me a thumbs-up. I took a deep breath and blew it out, relieved that the standing and waiting was over, glad to be getting into the game.
Kimball and I started back toward the blasted base of the bluff. As we neared it, a shadow flowed across the ground toward us, then enveloped us, eclipsing the sun. I looked up to see a large rectangular silhouette, rotating slowly beneath the outstretched boom of the crane. As I watched, the rectangle grew larger, and larger still, descending toward us: a wooden platform, suspended from the steel cable. It was framed of stout lumber; it was decked with heavy-duty plywood; and it was laden with six FBI evidence-recovery specialists. As it came down, I stepped to one side to avoid being crushed.
Our system for retrieving and removing wreckage was simple — primitive, even — but it made sense, given the challenging terrain. Four of the evidence techs were assigned to work directly with me, combing the central debris field for human remains and other potential evidence. Kimball and Boatman would float: using the Total Station to map significant or unusual finds, but also photographing and logging our progress. The other two would fan out across the crash site to scan for evidence of explosive devices, retrieve scattered wreckage, and load it onto the platform. The platform had a foot-high plywood rim all the way around it, to keep pieces of debris from falling off. In addition, at its center was a sort of corral or fence, sized to hold a five-gallon plastic bucket securely in place. The bucket would be the repository for whatever pieces of bone and soft tissue we could find and bag, as well as any small objects the agents considered forensically significant. As soon as either the rack or the bucket was filled, the crane would haul up the load. Topside, Maddox and two other FBI evidence techs would transfer the aircraft wreckage to a pair of shipping containers that had arrived shortly after the crane: one container for large chunks, the other — in which shelves had been hastily installed — for the countless small pieces. Whatever human material we found, on the other hand, would be taken from the bucket and stored in coolers in the command center, for transport to the San Diego County medical examiner at the end of each day. The FBI might trump the locals when it came to crime-scene investigation, but it was the M.E., not the Bureau, who had the authority to issue death certificates.
Apart from the crane and the high-tech nature of the artifacts we were collecting, our system reminded me of my early summers in field archaeology: field digs where local workers had hauled dirt in buckets, and graduate students had placed potsherds in baskets. Like most physical anthropologists, I had paid my grad-school dues in the trenches of archaeology, excavating sites that were hundreds or thousands of years old, unearthing the past year by year, century by century, burrowing deeper and deeper into the basement of time. In every dig, the topmost layer is “now”; the deeper you dig, the farther back in time you travel, inch by inch, foot by foot — and sometimes skull by skull.
Excavating the Janus crash would likewise mean traveling back, but through a far, far thinner slice of time. The surface layer of debris—“now”—was the tail, the final part of the plane to hit, and the deeper we dug, the earlier in the crash event we’d be. But the interval we would cover, from end to beginning — from the uppermost scrap of tail debris down to the lowermost layer of nose cone — would span only a single second. Not even, I realized. A fraction of a second. I did some rough, quick calculations in my head. Four hundred miles an hour was… upwards of five hundred feet a second, if my math was right. Maddox had told us the Citation was about fifty feet long. That meant the entire plane, nose to tail, had crumpled in less than one-tenth of a second. I blinked. The blink of an eye, I realized. That’s how quick it can all come crashing down.
All these things ran through my mind as I approached the main debris field. Its center appeared to be a spot near the base of the cliff — a wide, shallow crater now — where the nose of the jet must have first hit, followed — a hundredth or a thousandth of a second later — by the nose of the pilot himself.
Shards of twisted metal and tangled wires radiated outward from the ground beneath the crater. Mixed and mingled throughout, I assumed, were cinders of flesh and bits of burnt bone. The only way to find them would be bit by bit, piece by piece — removing the metal, shaking and perhaps even scraping the scraps, scouring everything for bone shards and teeth.
McCready had assigned two of the ERT techs to work the perimeter of the debris field, gathering scattered wreckage to load onto the rack and hoist up at intervals. Four more — plus Boatman and Kimball, when they weren’t mapping things with the Total Station — would help me dissect the heart of the debris, in search of human remains. Before we began, I reiterated what I’d said earlier, up top, in my minilecture on osteology. “We won’t find much that’s recognizable,” I reminded them. “Look for bone shards and tissue, but teeth are the big prize. The soft tissue — even the bones — might be too burned for DNA testing. But teeth are tough. Our best shot at a DNA profile is inside the teeth — the molars, especially. But even if we can’t get DNA out of the teeth, we can still make an identification, if we can find fillings or bridgework or something that matches our guy’s dental records.” They nodded and fanned out, and in near-perfect synchrony — as if we’d all been transported to a church service in the smoldering shell of a ruined cathedral — we dropped to our knees.