Back in the room I walked around the bed and opened the drawer in the sidetable. I stood for a moment, looking down at the three cassettes lying there, willing them to speak or move or do some damn thing, but of course they didn’t. They just lay there.
The scrub suit had two deep pockets and I scooped up the cassettes and shoved them down into the left- hand one. Then I slipped on my watch, buckled the band, and walked out to where CW and Kate were waiting for me in the hallway.
FORTY EIGHT
If you have never been at the scene of a plane crash, I can tell you now your first encounter with one will be the most horrifying and unsettling experience of your lifetime.
The world never lacks for terrible images: a subway car reduced to a smoking skeleton by a suicide bomber; bodies piled one on another in a shallow ditch alongside a nameless road; the rubble of a village bombed into oblivion by mistake, or perhaps on purpose. Still, there is some particular revulsion that comes with contemplating the destruction brought about by a plane crash. Perhaps it is because the impact is always so violent; perhaps it is because some parthe bodies of the human beings who were on the aircraft are so grotesquely mutilated; or perhaps it is just because the dead are so easy for us to identify with.
People who die in plane crashes are generally healthy and prosperous people with no notion their lives are about to end in sudden terror. When the corpses are found, they have usually been torn to pieces by the massive impact and the body parts scattered over the ground with the most mundane sort of litter: books, newspapers, bits of fabric, pieces of wire, and shoes. There are always so many shoes. It always adds up to the same picture. Right up until the moment of impact, these were people very much like us, people living altogether normal lives, lives not unlike our own.
It may be the smell that gets to you first rather than the sight. The combination of burning jet fuel, melted plastic, singed fabric, and charred flesh is like nothing else you have ever smelled. Or it may be a recognizable piece of the aircraft or even the sight of pieces of human bodies that causes your stomach to begin churning, but churn it will. You will feel dizzy and faint, and you will fight back nausea. I know all this is true for the simplest of reasons: that was exactly how it was for me when we reached the wreckage of Plato Karsarkis’ plane.
It had stopped raining and the morning had turned bright blue and nearly cloudless. Kate took barely twenty minutes to race north on the main road from the hospital to the airport. We were opposite the east end of Phuket’s only runway when I spoke the first words any of us had spoken since we got into Kate’s car.
“Where the hell is it?” I asked, looking around at a scene that appeared so utterly normal it was almost disconcerting.
Kate pointed vaguely ahead of us and continued driving north. CW was in the back and he leaned forward, pushing his head up between our seats. “What kind of plane was it?”
“Plato had a Gulfstream in Bangkok,” Kate said. “His pilots brought it to Phuket to pick him up.”
There it was again, I thought to myself. Not Karsarkis. Not even Plato Karsarkis. Kate referred to him simply as Plato. It probably meant nothing, but I noticed it nevertheless.
“He boarded and the plane took off to the east, over the island,” Kate continued. “There was an explosion of some kind.”
“Were there any survivors?” I asked.
Kate glanced briefly at me without expression.
We continued northward on what I knew was the main highway leading to the twin bridges that were Phuket’s only connection to the mainland. Just where the highway made a sharp bend to the west, I saw a large sign set in the median strip between the lanes. In white lettering on a blue background, it said,
Kate pulled out her mobile phone and pushed a button. The conversation was short and I missed what she said, but right after that she slowed the car and turned off at an open wooden shed that was painted bright green. We bumped over a rough dirt track in the general direction of the airport, but I still saw no sign of anything unusual. No fire, no smoke. There was no noise either. The world around us seemed almost unnaturally quiet.
We came to a junction where the track we were driving on intersected another, but there was a closed gate to our left so clearly no one had gone that way. People racing to the site of an airplane crash do not stop to close gates behind themselves. Kate paused briefly, but then she continued straight on.
After another mile or two, I saw cloit.
Off to our left a grove of rubber trees was hacked and mangled as if a giant lawnmower had sliced through them. Chunks of metal, brightly-colored wiring, scattered papers, pieces of cloth, and lumps of beige plastic were everywhere.
Kate pulled the car to the side of the road. The blue pickup truck and the clutch of motorcycles parked there looked as if they had been abandoned in haste. We all got out without saying a word.
There was a scar through the trees about five hundred yards long and at least thirty or forty yards across. It ran away from the road and between two low hills, bisecting a narrow gully that still had a shallow layer of water in the bottom from the morning rain. On the other side of the gully the trees were more severely hacked and the concentration of debris was greater.
All along the scar a gruesome mixture of wreckage and human remains coated the landscape. Apart from the plane’s engines that were indestructible masses of hardened steel, there were few pieces of wreckage of any size at all. But worse by far was what I could plainly see entangled in the orange life jackets, fragments of metal, and endless loops of colored wire. Half-buried here and there in the sandy ground, even hanging from the limbs of trees, were what had unmistakably once been parts of human beings.
There were a half-dozen brown-uniformed police down near the main body of debris, but they seemed to be in shock and were hardly moving at all. Two other men in short-sleeved white shirts and nondescript dark pants appeared from somewhere and Kate walked over to meet them. The three of them stood in a tight little knot, just out of earshot, and they murmured in low voices. Otherwise, the whole panorama was oddly silent.
When I could bear looking at the wreckage no more, I glanced away and looked down at my feet. A red toothbrush lay in the dirt just in front of my left foot. I hesitated a moment, then bent down and picked it up. It was an Oral B, the same brand I used.
“Goddamn, Slick,” CW breathed out. “I ain’t never seen nothing like this before in my whole fucking life.”
I turned the red toothbrush over and over in my hands and nodded to CW. But I said nothing at all.
“It was Plato’s Gulfstream,” Kate said when she returned from talking to the two men. “No doubt about it. The explosion occurred while the aircraft was climbing away from the airport. It wasn’t a big enough explosion to destroy the plane. Just big enough to cripple and crash it.”
“Could it have been an accident?” I asked, knowing of course that it wasn’t.
Kate glanced at me. “You don’t think so and neither do I.”
“I don’t get it,” CW said. “If somebody wanted to kill Karsarkis, why a small explosion? Why not just blast him right out of the sky?”
“My guess is they were trying to do just enough damage to make certain the plane went down more or less intact,” Kate said. “Normally planes take off from Phuket out over the sea. That’s deep water out there. If the plane went down there, and it went down intact, we would have never found any wreckage.”
“But it didn’t go down at sea,” I said. “Because the pilot took off in the opposite direction.”
Kate nodded.
“Why would anyone…” I started to ask, but then I trailed off.
I realized the answer was pretty obvious. The only rea amp;ldquson somebody would want the wreckage intact and at the bottom of the sea was because they didn’t want the wreckage found, and the reason they wouldn’t want the wreckage found was they expected something to be
Kate had obviously figured it out, too. “What was Plato carrying, Jack?” she asked me right on cue. “What did he have with him that somebody wanted lost forever?”
“Got me,” I shrugged.
