Halfway around the impact crater, Barbara and Joe stopped, now facing east toward beetling thunderheads, less concerned about the pending storm than about the brief thunder of that year-ago night.
Three hours after the crash, the headquarters contingent of the investigating team departed Washington from National Airport. They made the journey in a Gulfstream jet owned by the Federal Aviation Administration.
During the night, Pueblo County fire and police officials had quickly ascertained that there were no survivors. They pulled back so as not to disturb evidence that might help the NTSB arrive at an understanding of the cause of the disaster, and they secured the perimeter of the crash site.
By dawn, the Go-Team arrived in Pueblo, Colorado, which was closer to the incident than Colorado Springs. They were met by regional FAA officials who were already in possession of the flight-data recorder and cockpit-voice recorder from Nationwide 353. Both devices emitted signals by which they could be located; therefore, swift retrieval from the wreckage had been possible even in darkness and even from the relative remoteness of the site.
“The recorders were put on the Gulfstream and flown back to the Safety Board’s labs in Washington,” Barbara said. “The steel jackets were badly battered, even breached, but we were hopeful the data could be extracted.”
In a caravan of four-wheel-drive vehicles driven by county emergency-response personnel, the Safety Board team was conveyed to the crash site for its initial survey. The secured perimeter extended to the gravel road that turned off State Route 115, and gathered along both sides of the paved highway in that vicinity were fire trucks, black-and-whites, ambulances, drab sedans from federal and state agencies, coroner’s vans, as well as scores of cars and pickups belonging to the genuinely concerned, the curious, and the ghoulish.
“It’s always chaos,” Barbara said. “Lots of television vans with satellite dishes. Nearly a hundred and fifty members of the press. They clamoured for statements when they saw us arrive, but we didn’t have anything to say yet, and we came directly up here to the site.”
Her voice trailed away. She shoved her hands into the pockets of her jeans.
No wind was at play. No bees moved among the wildflowers. The surrounding woods were full of motionless monk trees that had taken vows of silence.
Joe lowered his gaze from the silent storm clouds black with throttled thunder to the crater where the thunder of Flight 353 was now only a memory held deep in fractured stone.
“I’m okay,” he assured Barbara, though his voice was thick. “Go on. I need to know what it was like.”
After another half minute of silence during which she gathered her thoughts and decided how much to tell him, Barbara said, “When you arrive with the Go-Team, the first impression is always the same. Always. The smell. You never ever forget the stench. Jet fuel. Smouldering vinyl and plastic—even the new blended thermoplastics and the phenolic plastics burn under extreme conditions. There’s the stink of seared insulation, melted rubber, and… roasted flesh, biological wastes from the ruptured lavatory holding tanks and from the bodies.”
Joe forced himself to continue looking into the pit, because he would need to go away from this place with a new strength that would make it possible for him to seek justice against all odds, regardless of the power of his adversaries.
“Ordinarily,” Barbara said, “in even terribly violent crashes, you see some pieces of wreckage large enough to allow you to envision the aircraft as it once was. A wing. The empennage. A long section of fuselage. Depending on the angle of impact, you sometimes even have the nose and cockpit mostly intact.”
“In the case of Flight 353?”
“The debris was so finely chopped, so gnarled, so compacted that on first look it was impossible to see that it had been a plane. It seemed to us that a huge portion of the mass must be missing. But it was all here in the meadow and scattered some distance into the trees uphill, west and north. All here… but for the most part there was nothing bigger than a car door. All I saw that I could identify at first glance was a portion of an engine and a three-unit passenger-seat module.”