Kate watched me, her face as flat as a dinner plate. “From the moment I walked into your hospital room and told you what happened,” she said, “you never expressed the slightest surprise Plato was leaving Phuket today.”
I thought about it, eyes half closed. “Okay,” I said after a moment, “so I knew Karsarkis was leaving. He came to the hospital this morning and told me.”
“Why did he do that?” Kate asked.
“He said he wanted me to know he was sorry he had gotten me into all this.”
“Where was he going?”
“I don’t know.”
“You weren’t curious enough to ask?”
“I wasn’t.”
Kate didn’t even try to be polite about it. “I don’t believe you, Jack.”
“Hey, I understand,” I said, spreading my hands in the universal gesture of innocence. “Sometimes I have a little trouble believing me, too.”
Kate shook her head and looked away. We all fell silent.
“The American ambassador called the prime minister about the time the first reports of the crash came in,” Kate said after a few moments. “How do you suppose he found out about it so fast?”
“Beats me,” I said.
“He demanded the crash site be completely locked down until American personnel could get here. I figure in about another hour the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, the DEA, the military spooks, and God only knows who else will be crawling all over this place and carting away everything you see. After they’re done, we probably won’t even have to clean up.”
“Probably not,” I agreed.
“Jack, if there might be anything out there…” Kate waved her arms vaguely over the devastation, “anything at all that it might be better for us-or you-your fellow countrymen don’t find when they take over the site, this is the only chance you’re going to have to tell me about it.”
“If I knew of anything like that, I would tell you, Kate, but I don’t.”
“Why don’t I believe you?”
“Because you’re a deeply cynical woman with a suspicious nature who is professionally paranoid about nearly everything?”
Kate said nothing. She just walked away, picking a cautious path forward through the field of wreckage. Not really knowing what else to do, CW and I followed.
After about twenty yards, Kate stopped and pointed at the mangled rubber trees lining both sides of the swath the dying aircraft had dug through the landscape. “When there is a crash right after take-off,” she said, “there’s generally a large fire because the plane is fully loaded with fuel.”
I could see most of the rubber trees were scorched and blackened although not really burned. A number of them were still damp from the morning rain and looked to be wholly untouched.
“There was no fire here,” Kate said. “Plato’s Gulfstream would have had thirty thousand pounds of jet fuel in its tanks when it hit, but there was no fire.”
She looked at me to see if I understood the significance of that.
“You’re saying the impact was so great the fuel vaporized before it could catch fire,” I said.
She nodded.
“Then the explosion was probably just large enough to shear off the tail section and cut the control cables,” I said. “Most of the plane would have been left intact. Those poor bastards rode it all the way down, didn’t they?”
“Yes,” Kate said. “I think they did.”
“Son of a bitch,” CW muttered to himself.
The three of us continued to walk slowly south, picking our way through things I did not want to examine too closely. After another fifty or sixty yards, we reached what appeared to be the center of the horror.
“Do you know exactly who was on the plane?” I asked Kate.
“Just Plato,” she said, “and two pilots and two cabin attendants. No one else we know of.”
“But you are absolutely sure Plato Karsarkis was on this airplane?”
“Yes,” Kate said. “We had the airport under surveillance. We watched him board, and we watched the plane take off.”
“Some people aren’t going to believe he’s dead, you know.”
“Maybe not, but he is.”
“There’s no doubt in your mind?”
“None at all. Whoever it was, they finally got him.”
I nodded at that, but I didn’t say anything.
One of the two men in short-sleeved white shirts caught up with Kate again. He began to murmur into Kate’s ear and she turned away from us, listening.
“What do you think, Slick?” CW asked me under his breath.
“I don’t know.”
“You figure it was foreign terrorists?”
“No.”
“Than who the fuck was it?”
I took a deep breath. “I think it was you, C.W, or somebody a lot like you.”
“Ah, shit, Slick, you couldn’t really think…” CW trailed off. He took a couple of steps away from me and half turned his back. Then he just stood there, his hands jammed in his pockets, shaking his head.
The sightseers were already starting to gather. Men, women, and children had materialized through the trees from nearly every direction and the noise level was rising with each new group of arrivals. Some people picked through the debris looking for things of value, while others shoved and jostled to get a better look at the devastation.
I noticed a whole family pushing eagerly forward. There was a mother, a father, and two little children who couldn’t have been more than four or five. The mother had one child, the father had the other, and they held both of them high above the cr/p filepos-id='filepos673029'›owd so the children could see as much of the horror as possible.
A few uniformed police moved around the debris making ineffectual efforts to keep sightseers away, but they were overwhelmed and disoriented men and they accomplished nothing. I watched one policeman climb into the lower branches of a badly mangled rubber tree about twenty yards away. He reached up above his head and began pushing with his hands, trying to dislodge something tangled there. Although it took me a few moments, I eventually realized the policeman was heaving at a headless human torso.
The torso had been wedged so tightly into the tree’s branches that the policeman couldn’t move it regardless of how hard he pushed. Shifting his weight slightly and holding the trunk with one hand, he reached up again and tried tugging at it instead.
Almost immediately the torso disintegrated. A flood of yellow fluid poured down over the policeman’s head, followed by strips of gray flesh and coils of pinkish intestines.
The man slid backwards out of the tree, fell to his knees on the ground, and vomited down the front of his shirt.
FIVE MONTHS LATER
“America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets…It’s
