“This is where the starboard wing lifted, forcing the port wing down,” Barbara said. “In twenty-two seconds the craft was banking at a hundred and forty-six degrees with a downward nose pitch of eighty-four degrees.”
“They were finished.”
“It was deep trouble but not hopeless. There was still a chance they might have pulled out of it. Remember, they were above twenty thousand feet. Room for recovery.”
Because he had never read about the crash or watched television reports of it, Joe had always pictured fire in the aircraft and smoke filling the cabin. A short while ago, when he had realized that the passengers were spared that particular terror, he’d hoped that the long journey down had been less terrifying than the imaginary plunge that he experienced in some of his anxiety attacks. Now, however, he wondered which would have been worse: the gush of smoke and the instant recognition of impending doom that would have come with it—or clean air and the hideously attenuated false hope of a last-minute correction, salvation.
The transcript indicated the sounding of alarms in the cockpit. An altitude alert tone. A recorded voice repeatedly warning Traffic! because they were descending through air corridors assigned to other craft.
Joe asked, “What’s this reference to the stick-shaker alarm?”
“It makes a loud rattling, a scary sound nobody’s going to overlook, warning the pilots that the plane has lost lift. They’re going into a stall.”
Gripped in the fist of fate punching toward the earth, First Officer Victor Santorelli abruptly stopped mumbling. He regained consciousness. Perhaps he saw clouds whipping past the windshield. Or perhaps the 747 was already below the high overcast, affording him a ghostly panorama of onrushing Colorado landscape, faintly luminous in shades of grey from dusty pearl to charcoal, with the golden glow of Pueblo scintillant to the south. Or maybe the cacophony of alarms and the radical data flashing on the six big display screens told him in an instant all that he needed to know. He had said, Oh, Jesus.
“His voice was wet and nasal,” Barbara said, “which might have meant that Blane broke his nose.”
Even reading the transcript, Joe could hear Santorelli’s terror and his frantic determination to survive.
SANTORELLI: Oh, Jesus. No, Jesus, no.
BLANE: (laughter) Whoooaaaa. Here we go, Dr. Ramlock. Dr. Blom, here we go.
SANTORELLI: Pull!
BLANE: (laughter) Whoooaaa. (laughter) Are we recording?
SANTORELLI: Pull up!
Santorelli is breathing rapidly, wheezing. He’s grunting, struggling with something, maybe with Blane, but it sounds more like he’s fighting the control wheel. If Blane’s respiration rate is elevated at all, it’s not registering on the tape.
SANTORELLI: Shit, shit!
BLANE: Are we recording?
Baffled, Joe said, “Why does he keep asking about it being recorded?”
Barbara shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“He’s a pilot for how long?”
“Over twenty years.”
“He’d know the cockpit voice recorder is always working. Right?”
“He should know. Yeah. But he’s not exactly in his right mind, is he?”
Joe read the final words of the two men.
SANTORELLI: Pull!
BLANE: Oh, wow.
SANTORELLI: Mother of God
BLANE: Oh, yeah.
SANTORELLI: No.
BLANE: (childlike excitement) Oh, yeah.
SANTORELLI: Susan.
BLANE: Now. Look.
Santorelli begins to scream.
BLANE: Cool.
Santorelli’s scream is three and a half seconds long, lasting to the end of the recording, which is terminated by impact.
Wind swept the meadow grass. The sky was swollen with a waiting deluge. Nature was in a cleansing mood.
Joe folded the three sheets of paper. He tucked them into a jacket pocket.
For a while he couldn’t speak.
Distant lightning. Thunder. Clouds in motion.
Finally, gazing into the crater, Joe said, “Santorelli’s last word was a name.”
“Susan.”
“Who is she?”
“His wife.”
“I thought so.”
At the end, no more entreaties to God, no more pleas for divine mercy. At the end, a bleak acceptance. A name said lovingly, with regret and terrible longing but perhaps also with a measure of hope. And in the mind’s eye not the cruel earth hurtling nearer or the darkness after, but a cherished face.
Again, for a while, Joe could not speak.
3
From the impact crater, Barbara Christman led Joe farther up the sloping meadow and to the north, to a spot no more than twenty yards from the cluster of dead, charred aspens.