them warm. They used powerful flashlights to probe the jagged edge of
the wing where it had been torn loose from the in-fated airliner. The
nacelle housing the starboard engine was partially crushed and the
right-side cowling was caved in. The flaps on the trailing edge of the
wing had been ripped off on impact, but these had been recovered nearby.
Examination of the engine had shown severe blade shingling, clear
evidence of a major airflow disturbance while the engine was delivering
power. The “disturbance” was easy to pinpoint. A great deal of debris
had been ingested into the engine, essentially destroying its
functionality even had it remained attached to the fuselage.
However, the attention of the men gathered around the wing was centered
on where it had detached from the plane. The jagged edges of the metal
were burned and blackened and, most telling, the metal was bent outward,
away from the surface of the wing, with clear signs of indentation and
pitting on the metal’s surface. There was a short list of events that
could have caused that; a bomb was clearly on that list. When Lee
Sawyer had examined the wing earlier, his eyes had riveted on that area.
George Kaplan shook his head in disgust. “You’re right, Lee. The
changes in the metallurgy I’m seeing could only have been caused by a
shock wave exerting immense but short-lived overpressure.
Something exploded here, all right. It’s the damnedest thing. We put
detectors in airports so some crazy assholes with an agenda can’t
smuggle a gun or bomb on board, and now this. Jesus!”
Lee Sawyer moved forward and knelt down next to the edge of the wing.
Here he was, nearly fifty years old, half of those years spent with the
bureau, and again he was sifting through the catastrophic results of
human pollution.
He had worked on the Lockerbie disaster, an investigation of mammoth
proportion that had brought together a damned near airtight case culled
from what bordered on microscopic evidence unearthed from the shattered
remains of Pan Am Flight 103. With plane bombings there were usually
never any “big” clues. At least Special Agent Sawyer had thought so up
until now.
His observant eyes swept over the wreckage before they came to rest on
the NTSB man. “What’s your best list of possible scenarios right now,
George?”
Kaplan rubbed his chin, scratching absently at the stubble.
“We’ll know a lot more when we recover the black boxes, but we do have a
clear result: The wing came off a jetliner. However, those things don’t
just happen. We’re not exactly sure when it happened, but radar
indicates that a large part of the plane–now we know it was the
wing–came off in-flight. When that occurred, of course, there was no
possibility of recovery. The first thought is some type of catastrophic
structural failure based on a faulty design. But the L500 is a
state-of-the-art model from a top manufacturer, so the chances of that
kind of structural failure are so remote that I wouldn’t waste much time
on that angle. So maybe you think it’s metal fatigue.
But this plane barely had two thousand cycles–takeoffs and
landings–it’s practically brand-new. Besides that, the metal fatigue
accidents we’ve seen in the past all involved the fuselage because the
constant contraction-expansion of cabin pressurization and
depressurization seems to contribute to the problem. Aircraft wings are
not pressurized. So you rule out metal fatigue. Next, you look at the
environment. Lightning strike? Planes get hit by lightning more often
than people think. However, planes are equipped to deal with that and
because lightning needs to be grounded to do real damage, a plane up in
the sky may suffer, at worst, some burning of the skin.
Besides, there were no reports of lightning in the area on the morning
of the crash. Birds? Show me a bird that flies at thirty-five thousand
feet and is large enough to take off an L500’s wing and then maybe we’ll
discuss it. It sure as hell didn’t collide with another plane. It sure
as hell didn’t.”
Kaplan’s voice was rising with each word. He paused to catch his breath
and to look once more at the metal remains.