I didn’t say anything after that, but it was a cold ride back to the station.
Damned cold.
Death Flight
Squak Mountain was cold at this time of the year. The wind groaned around Davis, and the trees trembled bare limbs, and even at this distance he could hear the low rumble of planes letting down at Boeing and Renton. He found the tree about a half-mile east of the summit. The DC-4 had struck the tree and then continued flying. He looked at the jagged, splintered wood and then his eyes covered the surrounding terrain. Parts of the DC-4 were scattered all over the ridge in a fifteen-hundred-foot radius. He saw the upper portion of the plane’s vertical fin, the number-two propeller, and a major portion of the rudder. He examined these very briefly, and then he began walking toward the canyon into which the plane had finally dropped.
Davis turned his head sharply once, thinking he had heard a sound. He stood stock-still, listening, but the only sounds that came to him were the sullen moan of the wind and the muted hum of aircraft in the distant sky.
He continued walking.
When he found the plane, it made him a little sick. The Civil Aeronautics Board report had told him that the plane was demolished by fire. The crash was what had obviously caused the real demolition. But the report had only been typed words. He saw impact now, and causing fire, and even though the plane had been moved by the investigating board, he could imagine something of what had happened.
It had been in nearly vertical position when it struck the ground, and the engines and cockpit had bedded deep in soft, muddy loam. Wreckage had been scattered like shrapnel from a hand grenade burst, and fire had consumed most of the plane, leaving a ghostlike skeleton that confronted him mutely. He stood watching it for a time, then made his way down to the charred ruins.
The landing gear was fully retracted, as the report had said. The wings flaps were in the twenty-five-degree down position.
He studied these briefly and then climbed up to the cockpit. The plane still stank of scorched skin and blistered paint. When he entered the cockpit, he was faced with complete havoc. It was impossible to obtain a control setting or an instrument reading from the demolished instrument panel. The seats were twisted and tangled. Metal jutted into the cockpit and cabin at grotesque angles. The windshield had shattered into a million jagged shards.
He shook his head and continued looking through the plane, the stench becoming more overpowering. He was silently grateful that he had not been here when the bodies were still in the plane, and he still wondered what he was doing here anyway, even now.
He knew that the report had proved indication of an explosion prior to the crash. There had been no structural failure or malfunctioning of the aircraft itself. The explosion had occurred in the cabin, and the remnants of the bomb had shown it to be a home-made job. He’d learned all this in the past few days, with the co-operation of the CAB. He also knew that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Military Police were investigating the accident, and the knowledge had convinced him that this was not a job for him. Yet here he was.
Five people had been killed. Three pilots, the stewardess, and Janet Carruthers, the married daughter of his client, George Ellison. It could not have been a pleasant death.
Davis climbed out of the plane and started toward the ridge. The sun was high on the mountain, and it cast a feeble, pale yellow tint on the white pine and spruce. There was a hard grey winter sky overhead. He walked swiftly, with his head bent against the wind.
When the shots came, they were hard and brittle, shattering the stillness as effectively as twin-mortar explosions.
He dropped to the ground, wriggling sideways toward a high out-cropping of quartz. The echo of the shots hung on the air and then the wind carried it toward the canyon and he waited and listened, with his own breathing the loudest sound on the mountain.
I’m out of my league, he thought. I’m way out of my league. I’m just a small-time detective, and this is something big...
The third shot came abruptly. It came from some high-powered rifle, and he heard the sharp twang of the bullet when it struck the quartz and ricocheted into the trees.
He pressed his check to the ground, and he kept very still, and he could feel the hammering of his heart against the hard earth. His hands trembled and he waited for the next shot.
The next shot never came. He waited for a half-hour, and then he bundled his coat and thrust it up over the rock, hoping to draw fire if the sniper was still with him. He waited for several minutes after that, and then he backed away from the rock on his belly, not venturing to get to his feet until he was well into the trees.
Slowly, he made his way down the mountain.
‘You say you want to know more about the accident?’ Arthur Porchek said. ‘I thought it was all covered in the CAB report.’
‘It was,’ Davis said. ‘I’m checking further. I’m trying to find out who set that bomb.’
Porchek drew in on his cigarette. He leaned against the wall and the busy hum of radios in Seattle Approach Control was loud around them. ‘I’ve only told this story a dozen times already.’
‘I’d appreciate it if you could tell it once more,’ Davis said.
‘Well,’ Porchek said heavily, ‘it was about twenty-thirty-six or so.’ He paused. ‘All our time is based on a twenty-four-hour check, like the Army.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘The flight had been cleared to maintain seven thousand feet. When they contacted us, we told them to make a standard range approach to Boeing Field and requested that they report leaving each one-thousand-foot level during the descent. That’s standard, you know.’
‘Were you doing all the talking to the plane?’ Davis asked.
‘Yes.’
‘All right, what happened?’
‘First I gave them the weather.’
‘And what was that?’
Porchek shrugged, a man weary of repeating information over and over again. ‘Boeing Field,’ he said by rote. ‘Eighteen hundred scattered, twenty-two hundred overcast, eight-miles, wind south-southeast, gusts to thirty, altimeter twenty-nine, twenty-five; Seattle-Tacoma, measured nineteen hundred broken with thirty-one hundred overcast.’
‘Did the flight acknowledge?’
‘Yes, it did. And it reported leaving seven thousand feet at twenty-forty. About two minutes later, it reported being over the outer marker and leaving the six-thousand-foot level.’
‘Go on.’ Davis said.
‘Well, it didn’t report leaving five thousand and then at twenty-forty-five, it reported leaving four thousand feet. I acknowledged that and told them what to do. I said, “If you’re not VFR by the time you reach the range, you can shuttle on the northwest course at two thousand feet. It’s possible you’ll break out in the vicinity of Boeing Field for a south landing.”
‘What’s VFR?’ Davis asked, once again feeling his inadequacy to cope with the job.
“Visual Flight Rules. You see, it was overcast at twenty-two hundred feet. The flight was on instruments above that. They’ve got to report to us whether they’re on IFR or VFR.’
‘I see. What happened next?’
‘The aircraft reported at twenty-fifty that it was leaving three thousand feet, and I told them they were to contact Boeing Tower on one eighteen, point three for landing instructions. They acknowledged with “Roger,” and that’s the last I heard of them.’
‘Did you hear the explosion?’
‘I heard something, but I figured it for static. Ground witnesses heard it, though.’