Forcing those thoughts out of his mind, Joe said, “What was going on with Blane, for God’s sake? Drugs? Was his brain fried on something?”
“No. That was ruled out.”
“How?”
“It’s always a priority to find something of the pilots’ remains to test for drugs and alcohol. It took some time in this case,” she said, as with a sweep of one hand she indicated the scorched pines and aspens uphill, “because a lot of the organic debris was scattered as much as a hundred yards into the trees west and north of the impact.”
An internal darkness encroached on Joe’s field of vision, until he seemed to be looking at the world through a tunnel. He bit his tongue almost hard enough to draw blood, breathed slowly and deeply, and tried not to let Barbara see how shaken he was by these details.
She put her hands in her pockets. She kicked a stone into the crater. “Really need this stuff, Joe?”
“Yes.”
She sighed. “We found a portion of a hand we suspected was Blane’s because of a half-melted wedding band that was fused to the ring finger, a relatively unique gold band. There was some other tissue as well. With that we identified—”
“Fingerprints?”
“No, those were burned off. But his father’s still alive, so the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory was able to confirm it was Blane’s tissue through a DNA match with a blood sample that his dad supplied.”
“Reliable?”
“A hundred percent. Then the remains went to the toxicologists. There were minute amounts of ethanol in both Blane and Santorelli, but that was just the consequences of putrefaction. Blane’s partial hand was in those woods more than seventy-two hours before we found it. Santorelli’s remains—four days. Some ethanol related to tissue decay was to be expected. But otherwise, they both passed all the toxicologicals. They were clean and sober.”
Joe tried to reconcile the words on the transcript with the toxicological findings. He couldn’t.
He said, “What’re the other possibilities? A stroke?”
“No, it just didn’t sound that way on the tape I listened to,” Barbara said. “Blane speaks clearly, with no slurring of the voice whatsoever. And although what he’s saying is damn bizarre, it’s nevertheless coherent—no transposition of words, no substitution of inappropriate words.”
Frustrated, Joe said, “Then what the hell? A nervous breakdown, psychotic episode?”
Barbara’s frustration was no less than Joe’s: “But where the hell did it come from? Captain Delroy Michael Blane was the most rock-solid psychological specimen you’d ever want to meet. Totally stable guy.”
“Not totally.”
“Totally stable guy,” she insisted. “Passed all the company psychological exams. Loyal family man. Faithful husband. A Mormon, active in his church. No drinking, no drugs, no gambling. Joe, you can’t find one person out there who ever saw him in a single moment of aberrant behaviour. By all accounts he wasn’t just a good man, not just a solid man—but a happy man.”
Lightning glimmered. Wheels of rolling thunder clattered along steel rails in the high east.
Pointing to the transcript, Barbara showed Joe where the 747 made the first sudden three-degree heading change, nose right, which precipitated a yaw. At that point, Santorelli was groaning but not fully conscious yet. And just before the manoeuvre, Captain Blane said, “This is fun.” There are these other sounds on the tape—here, the rattle and clink of small loose objects being flung around by the sudden lateral acceleration.”
This is fun.
Joe couldn’t take his eyes off those words.
Barbara turned the page for him. “Three seconds later, the aircraft made another violent heading change of four degrees, nose left. In addition to the previous clatter, there were now sounds from the aircraft—a thump and a low shuddery noise. And Captain Blane is laughing.”
“Laughing,” Joe said with incomprehension. “He was going to go down with them, and he was laughing?”
“It wasn’t anything you’d think of as a mad laugh, either. It was a pleasant laugh, as if he were genuinely enjoying himself.”
This is fun.
Eight seconds after the first yawing incident, there was another abrupt heading change of three degrees, nose left, followed just two seconds later by a severe shift of seven degrees, nose right. Blane laughed as he executed the first manoeuvre and, with the second, said, Oh, Wow!