Four hours later, we were still on our knees, but my prayers of finding Richard Janus had gone unanswered. Over the course of the afternoon, our plywood platform had been filled, hoisted, emptied, and lowered time and again. The two wider-ranging agents had also sent up load after load of bigger pieces on their rack — turbine blades; wheels; sections of wing and tail — and my four assistants and I had contributed plenty of smaller pieces as we’d picked our way into the central pile of debris. But the five-gallon bucket designated for human material remained empty — stubbornly, frustratingly, accusingly empty — and I’d begun to feel less like an anthropologist than like a miner, or a trash picker in a scrapyard. Kathleen and I had recently watched a documentary about poverty-stricken Brazilians who lived beside an immense landfill in Rio de Janeiro, and the people — men, women, even children — spent ten hours a day, every day, picking through load after load of garbage dumped at the landfill — some seeking plastic bottles, others seeking circuit boards, still others in search of scraps of wire: lifetimes of drudgery, dredging through the detritus of modern materialism. Not long before — less than twenty-four hours before, in fact — these bits of smoldering scrap had been a multimillion-dollar jet aircraft. But in one catastrophic instant the Citation had been reduced to trash, and we had been reduced to trash pickers.
Hour by tedious hour, the shadows grew long, and the mountainside began to cool. When the freshly emptied rack descended once more, demanding to be filled again — for the fifteenth time, or the fiftieth? — McCready leaned over the rim and called down to us. “Hey, guys. Six o’clock. Quittin’ time. Come on up.” He didn’t have to tell us twice. Hours before, I had rappelled down, but now that we had an elevator, I would ride up. The ERT techs and I clambered aboard the swaying platform. They sat around the perimeter, legs dangling into space; I stood at the center, straddling the still-empty bucket, and braced myself by holding the cables bolted to the platform’s four corners.
Overhead, the crane rumbled and whined, and with a slight lurch we began rising up the rock face. After we cleared the rim, the crane’s boom pivoted and began easing us down toward the concrete pad — my third landing of the day, I realized, this one a bit more primitive than the prior ones in the Gulfstream and the helicopter. As we hovered briefly, McCready threw us a mock salute, then called out, “You guys look like that painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware.” Glancing around, I saw the visual resemblance — the aging general, my stance wide, surrounded by a boatload of loyal troops. But Washington’s boat had been carrying the Stars and Stripes, while all we had was a plastic bucket. As the platform settled, the cables I was holding went slack, and I staggered forward; only the quick reflexes of the closest agents kept me from falling. “More like Brockton going overboard,” I said, but the joke came out sounding bitter, and it fell as flat as I had nearly done. As I disentangled myself from agents and cables, I said what was really on my mind. “So what if there was nobody in the plane?” Everyone turned, eyeing me intently. “We haven’t found any remains so far. Is it possible he jumped? Maybe he was having engine trouble and bailed out?”
Maddox spoke before McCready or Prescott had a chance. “Jump?” he said. “From a Citation? At four hundred miles an hour?” He gave an amused, dismissive grunt. “First off, you can’t do it,” he said. “The cabin door pivots forward to open; can’t be done in flight — too much air pressure. Second, even if you could do it, which you can’t, it’d be guaranteed suicide to bail out — you’d hit the left engine about a millisecond after you did. Easier to stay on the ground and just blow your brains out. Third, he didn’t do it — that cabin door was sealed tight as a drum.”
“You sure about that?” asked McCready. Prescott was listening closely.
“Here, I’ll show you.” Maddox crooked a finger, beckoning, and led us across the cracked concrete pad to one of the shipping containers, which by now was half filled with mangled metal. Tugging at a wadded-up chunk that was leaning against one wall, he laid it flat and dragged it toward the container’s opening, where the light was better. “This came up a couple hours ago,” he said. “It’s the cabin door. Some of it, anyhow.” He pointed to a crumpled lever. “This is the latch. Banged up and burned, but you can still tell that it was in the ‘closed’ position. Also”—he pointed to one edge of the door, which was fringed with torn metal—“here’s a piece of the door frame, which got ripped apart by the impact. See these bolts?” He tapped two metal rods, which — despite their thickness — were bent, their ends crowned with jagged aluminum. “When the door latches, a dozen of those bolts — spaced around the rim of the door — slide out and lock into the frame.”
“Like the door of a bank vault?”
He nodded. “Or a watertight door on a ship. The whole hull is pressurized, so the latches and seals have to be really robust.” I could feel myself starting to recalibrate — to get interested in the puzzle pieces again — when he added, “Look, he’s gotta be in there. You’ll find him. You just gotta keep digging.”
He was right — in my heart of hearts, I knew he was right — but I was tired, and my back hurt, and his confidence and encouragement seemed slightly condescending, so my frustration returned, this time as annoyance. Prescott didn’t help my mood any when he said, “Maybe you’re looking too close, you know what I mean?”
I turned and stared at him. “No,” I said. “I have no idea what you mean.”
If he sensed my anger, he didn’t let on. “You know how, if you look at a photograph through a microscope, you might not be able to recognize the picture?”
I stared at him. “So you think maybe we’ve all been stumbling over a body down there, but nobody’s noticed it, because we’re too close to see the shape of the arms and legs and head?”
“No, I don’t mean that,” he hedged. “I’m just wondering if you might get a better feel for the bigger picture — for how things are… arranged—if you take a step back, get into a groove, and get some momentum going.”
“Three years ago — after 9/11—I spent ten days sifting through rubble from the World Trade Center,” I told him. “In those ten days, I saw four intact long bones. Four.” I held up my right hand, fingers splayed, for digital emphasis. “I didn’t see a single complete skull. Mostly what I saw were shreds and splinters. Even the teeth were in bits and pieces. I could be wrong — Pat, please correct me if I am — but I’m guessing this crash is like a scaled-down version of that rubble. Yes? No?”
Maddox hesitated, looking reluctant to choose sides. “Well, I hadn’t thought about it in those terms. But a straight-on impact at that velocity?” He considered it only for a moment. “The pilot probably fragments from the initial impact. Then the rest of the plane slams into him like a pile driver. Then comes the fire.” He shrugged at Prescott in what seemed a sort of apology. “This reminds me of some military crashes I’ve seen. Fighter jets. Sometimes all they leave is a smokin’ hole.” He gave us all a conciliatory smile. “But hey, tomorrow’s another day, right? A juicy steak and a good night’s sleep, and we’ll be raring to go again.”