The depression of the early morning had been eased just a fraction. They had a significant souvenir, confirmation that a helicopter had come down here and, as a bonus, a registration stamp inside the equipment that could be tied to a specific craft. They decided that they needed no more wreckage and would spend the remainder of the day looking for human remains.
While the others were unwrapping their packed lunches, Phosy noticed Madame Daeng kneeling beside the winch. He put on his shirt as he walked over to her.
“See something?” he asked.
“Not really,” she said.
“Come on, get it off your chest.”
“I was just wondering how easily these things come unraveled.” She noticed his smile. “You were wondering the same thing, weren’t you?”
“And you weren’t alone,” came Peach’s voice from behind them.
The interpreter was standing with John Johnson.
“The sergeant was just telling me his thoughts on that same subject,” she said.
“If the whole thing was blown to smithereens,” Johnson said, “the cable might have been dislodged from the winch. But apart from a bit of charring, the unit looks in pretty good shape. The winch is hardly touched.”
“So does that mean what I think it means?” Daeng asked.
“The cable was down when the chopper exploded,” said Johnson.
“And how common is it for a helicopter to fly with its cable down?” Phosy asked.
“It doesn’t happen,” Peach translated. “It’s against regulations and just plain dangerous.”
They all exchanged knowing looks.
“Peach, do you think the sergeant might be persuaded to give us all a crash course in … well, crashes?” Daeng asked.
“I think he’d be delighted.”
They invited Civilai to join them and sat together eating their space lunches. Judge Haeng and his cousin slept under a tree. Sergeant Johnson was a very knowledgeable man. They’d covered the most obvious reason for a helicopter crashing in war time-being shot down. But because very few missions were flown at night, anti-aircraft batteries weren’t manned after dark. On the night Boyd crashed there was reportedly a full moon. It was possible an infantryman with insomnia might have shot him down with a lucky bullet but very unlikely.
If the pilot was drunk and stoned as reported, he could easily have passed out and lost control of his ship. Most of the professional advice garnered for the report pointed to this as the most likely cause. The only problem here was that the team was certain they’d found the crash site yet they hadn’t turned up so much as a toenail in evidence. It was obvious that the craft had exploded above the ground, probably at the tree line. This fact was dubiously corroborated by the sorceress eyewitness who claimed to have seen the explosion. There was one hell of a bang sending helicopter parts far and wide, but something other than a mere engine fire had destroyed the surrounding jungle. This brought them to the cable.
“Could he have been so out of his mind he let down the cable just for the hell of it?” Madame Daeng asked.
Johnson explained that the controls for the cable were in the cabin beside the hatch. The pilot would have to leave the cockpit and climb down to the body of the helicopter to operate the winch from there.
“Helicopters aren’t exactly gliders,” he said. “They’re very temperamental. You can’t just take your hands off the controls and float. You abandon the joy stick and the craft will likely toss you all over the place. You wouldn’t make it to the hatch.”
The Lao considered this news.
“OK, my turn,” said Civilai. He hadn’t spoken for a while and he would probably have asked a question just for the pleasure of hearing his own voice. But he had a serious query. “Let us imagine for a second that our young pilot had neither been shot nor overcome by drugs. Let’s imagine he was merely on a joy ride, enjoying the moonlight and the beautiful mountains of Xiang Khouang province. What un-extraordinary disasters might befall him?”
Peach and the sergeant went through the options together.
“The two most common reasons for coming down are running out of fuel and a mechanical fault. But Boyd’s chopper would have been checked by his mechanic, Sebastian, and refueled the moment they arrived in Long Cheng that afternoon. That was standard practice.”
“Any chance of sabotage?” Phosy asked. “A fight with the mechanic?”
“Unlikely. First, the mechanic usually flies with the pilot so that would be more like a suicide mission. Second, they were pretty good friends. It was the mechanic he’d chosen to get drunk with that night. Third, all the aircraft were double-checked by the head flight mechanic, an ex-pilot called Leon. I knew him when he was still with the marines. He was a bit of a deadbeat socially. I heard he lost his flying license for inappropriate behaviour. I was surprised to hear he was in Laos. But he’d been a good flyer and he was serious at his job. He wouldn’t have let anything untoward go by. Once they were checked, the helicopters were guarded all night.”
“And the guard let a drunk climb into a helicopter and fly it away?” asked Madame Daeng.
“He would have known Boyd was the pilot of H32. There weren’t that many American pilots in Spook City at any one time. Most of the planes were flown by Hmong pilots. And most of the guards were around twelve years of age so he wasn’t about to stop a hundred and ninety pounds of muscle from getting into his own chopper.”
“So, a mechanical fault?” Phosy asked.
“A mechanical fault is more likely than sabotage. There are a million things that could go wrong in a war- battered chopper. They’ve been shot at, flown badly and overloaded. That’s why every helicopter pilot flies with his own mechanic.”
“So if the pilot was up there by himself and something went wrong, he wouldn’t know what to do,” said Lit.
“Some do. A lot of pilots are pretty good mechanics too.”
“What about Boyd?”
“I don’t know.”
“So, what happens when you’re dropping out of the sky in a big metal box?” Civilai asked. “I assume an ejector seat’s out of the question?”
“The pilot might have a chance to operate the autorotate,” Johnson told Peach. “What that means is that you disengage the rotor from the engine and control the rate of descent by changing the pitch of the free-turning blades. It’s quite possible to land a craft on autorotate without any damage at all. A few of us back home have done it without causing any injuries. That’s why I was asking how long the gap was from when Boyd’s engine cut out to when the village woman heard the explosion. Depending on his altitude when the engine died, those extra few seconds could mean that the pilot controlled his dive rather than just drop.”
Phosy asked, “What are the chances of him getting out alive in thick bush even if he did autorotate?”
“You’d have to pick an open spot and aim for it. It was night. The jungle was dense. His chopper exploded so he probably collided with the trees.”
“But how long would he have had before the crash?”
“Judging from the woman’s description, I don’t know, about thirty seconds?”
“Could he have bailed out before the chopper blew up?” Daeng asked.
“You know, they used to put chutes in helicopters in the early days,” Johnson told her. “But they turned out to be more messy than helpful. A lot of guys got tangled up in the blades. Most fliers I know don’t even bother to bring one along.”
“So, back to autorotate,” said Civilai. “Once you’ve disengaged the rotors you presumably know the trajectory of the fall. Am I right?”
“You’d be traveling at about a forty-five degree angle. But, yes, you’d be kind of swaying down in a straight line. You’d be at a ground speed of about sixty to seventy knots.”
“More control than say just letting go of the joy stick when you’re flying normally?”
“Yes.”
“And how long does it take to release the steel cable from the spool?”
“Pretty slow if it’s working through the pneumatics. But there’s a release catch you can use if that doesn’t work. The cogs disengage and the cable drops at its own pace.”
“And how long would that take to be fully extended?”
