9
MARCEL CALLED ME after the hearing and asked me to meet him the next morning at six thirty at the hangar where the wreckage was being stored. He was concerned about Blankenship's announcement on worldwide television.
As I was leaving for the hangar, my wife, Debbie, asked me if I'd seen the headline of the morning's newspaper.
'What does it say?'
She turned it around and held it up to me and read it: ' 'WorldCopter in the Crosshairs.' '
'Perfect.'
She glanced at the story that she'd already read, looking for a particular sentence: ' 'According to sources inside the government, the lead investigator for the NTSB is focusing on a specific cause that she thinks will explain the crash. The sources were unwilling to disclose the cause, but said the things under consideration all pointed to WorldCopter.' '
I put my coffee down. 'That is unbelievably irresponsible. Does anyone think it was a coincidence that the NTSB 'Preliminary Assessment,' whatever that is, was released while the president of WorldCopter was on the hot seat of a Senate inquisition? Somebody at the NTSB owed Blankenship big-time. What total bullshit this is. Who inside the NTSB would talk to him and then the press like that? That
I headed for the hangar, which was on an old army air base. I had been there on occasion when it was still actively operating. It had been closed in one of Congress's base realignments. The NTSB was there twenty-four hours a day, but most of the team were there from 6 AM to 10 PM.
The hangars now stood empty, surrounded by weeds. The NTSB had cleaned up one of the hangars and mowed around it. It was easy to pick it out from the others by its appearance and the activity around it.
I turned into the army base, which now had a guard at the gate again. He took my driver's license and turned to check it against his access list. I looked in my rearview mirror and saw a car go by a little too slowly to just be driving by on the country road behind me. The car was unremarkable and I couldn't see the driver, but I thought I'd seen the same car earlier, on the way to the army base from my house. I couldn't imagine who it would be. It had to be either a coincidence or my imagination.
I parked at the side of the hangar in what was once a pilots' parking lot and walked through the side door. The concrete floor was spotless, and portable light stands all over the massive space illuminated the charred, mud-covered wreckage from Marine One that had been trucked to the hangar. The investigators had spread the pieces out on the floor to represent the places where the pieces had been in the helicopter when it was intact.
Each subgroup of the NTSB investigation had its own table: engines, blades, airframe, maintenance, pilots, everyone. Participants such as WorldCopter had their own areas and tables. Some had put up signs so everyone would know where they were. WorldCopter's logo hung from a now defunct fire sprinkler high above their table.
I quickly spotted Marcel, who was also one of the first people in the hangar that morning. He had scrounged a desk and was sitting behind it with innumerable photographs and pieces of metal in front of him. He was looking at one with a magnifying glass as I approached. 'Morning, Marcel.'
He looked up over his reading glasses. 'Good morning, Mike. I am glad that you came.' He jumped up and turned to face the wall behind him. He turned back to me. 'Would you like some coffee? We have brought our own coffee machine out here. The coffee that was being made was not too good. Let me get you some.'
'Sure.' Marcel took a large bowl-like cup out of a stack, poured coffee into it from an impressive coffeemaker, then reached under the desk and pulled out a quart of milk from a cooler and poured some into the coffee. 'Thanks,' I said as he smiled widely and handed me the cup. 'So what you got, Marcel?'
Marcel ripped off his reading glasses and looked around to make sure nobody was listening. He lowered his voice and spoke to me quietly. 'As you know, we are here as part of the investigation. To help the NTSB. I am looking at many things and am not making any conclusions. That's their job. I answer questions. But I think I also notice a few things that we have to deal with in the future.
'Come around here.' He indicated for me to walk to his side of the desk. 'I want to show you these photographs.' He picked up one eight-and-a-half-by-eleven, glossy color print and handed it to me. He put his glasses back on, picked up a pen, and began pointing to a portion of the photo.
I couldn't tell what it was. 'What are we looking at?'
'It is the inside threads of the main rotor blade that we found lying on the ground.'
'Where it attaches to the rotor hub?'
'Exactly. Look closely.'
I looked as closely as I could, but nothing jumped out at me.
'Here.' He handed me the magnifying glass.
I glanced around the room feeling like I was about to do something improper and placed the photograph flat on the desk where there was good light. Marcel placed his pen where he wanted me to look. I looked carefully, moving the four-inch magnifying glass in and out until it was perfectly focused on the threads that held the main rotor blade to the rotor hub. The threads looked odd, like they weren't as clean or as precise as you would expect them to be. The threads showed slight bending, some discoloration, and a softness that I couldn't really understand. I placed the magnifying glass down and stood up straight. 'What am I looking at here, Marcel?'
He almost whispered, 'The threads. The threads are bent.'
I shook my head indicating my complete lack of understanding. 'And?'
'The threads are bent, you can see the force? The stress?'
'Sure. But I would assume they all have that. When the helicopter hits the ground, the blades flex down, putting a huge amount of force on their attachment to the rotor hub. That
'No,' he said. 'This blade came off in the air. It was not attached when the helicopter hit the ground, remember?'
'Yeah, but we don't know where.'
He shook his head as if I didn't understand, which was accurate. He said, 'I do not know if this got the right chemical, the right coating. I'm afraid the coating for corrosion did not get put on this blade. If it didn't, and the blade came off in the air because it had corroded, it could explain everything! It landed by the crashed helicopter, yes, true. It would be one of those… 'ironies'?'
'That would be an irony. An unpleasant one. You think that's possible?'
Marcel shrugged and put out his chin. 'You see, the blade threads are bent as if it came off going down, away from the helicopter. It probably came off while the helicopter was in the air.'
I sat down in the chair Marcel had been sitting in. This case could be over a lot faster than I thought. 'You tell the NTSB about this?'
'They haven't focused on the blade yet, they're too busy with other things.'
'You gonna tell them?'
'I will answer whatever questions they ask.'
'We need to get our own metallurgist to look at this as soon as we can.'
'I don't want somebody from WorldCopter,' Marcel said.
'I know just the guy. Used to be the head of the NTSB metallurgy lab.'
'They will probably like that here,' he said, glancing at the NTSB people.
'I don't think so. He thinks the people who work in the NTSB lab now are second-stringers. We'll have to play it very carefully.'
'What about the tip weights? Any of them recovered yet?'
'No. This same blade is the one missing its end cap and tip weights. They could have come off in the air, which would cause a terrible vibration. The helicopter would come apart. That could make this blade come off in any direction.'
'Well, exactly. If they don't find those tip weights, everyone will think that's exactly what happened.'
'Yes, they could.' I looked at him. 'We have to find those tip weights. We have to show they're intact and they didn't cause the accident.'
'If the NTSB didn't find them, it will be hard for us to find them.'
'We have to. Otherwise this thing is going to land on our heads.' I thought about the assembly of the tip weights. The small washers that balanced the rotating blade. 'What about the nut that held the tip weights on? How can we prove there even was a nut?'
'Well, you couldn't rotate that blade for even thirty seconds without the nut holding on the tip weights. It would be out of balance immediately. The bolt at the end, where the tip weights go and the nut holds them on is bent. This blade hit something.'
'So the nut and the tip weights could have come off when the blade hit whatever it hit.'
'Yes, or the bolt could have been bent after they came off and as it fell. And the NTSB has not found any of these parts. If it was near the crash, they would be on the ground, in the mud. They have looked everywhere. They are not there.'
'Oh, yes, they are. And we're going to find them.'
I worked at my office late that night reviewing the Senate transcript that Morton had e-mailed me. As I paused for a moment and looked at the ceiling to soothe my burning eyes, the phone rang. I recognized Byrd's number. I put him on the speakerphone. 'Hey, Tinny.'
'Nolan, you came to the right place. Guess what I've got?'
'What?'
'A fine lady at the Pentagon who just happens to have access to all of Collins's personnel records. Turns out she went to Howard with my son. Used to go to his Omega Psi Phi parties, where he, of course, was the life of the party, just like his old man. She said she owed him. And since he wasn't around right now, his old man would just have to do. You believe that shit?'
'Tinny, you didn't ask her to take any federal documents, did you?'
Tinny responded as if he'd been hurt. 'That would be wrong. I couldn't ask her to do that.'
'You'd better not.'
'Right. Just leave these things to me. You do your lawyer shit. You just don't like the dirty work. You probably let your gunnery sergeant take care of all the shitbirds
