Airframe Read Free Page A

recently. Who were these men? They weren't gang bangers; they were in their twenties with a clean-cut, vaguely military appearance.
    Casey was thinking about taking down the license plate when her beeper went off, with an electronic squeal. She undipped it from her shorts and read:
    She sighed. Three stars signaled an urgent message: John Marder, who ran the factory, was calling an IRT meeting for 7 A.M. in the War Room. That was a full hour before the regular Morning Call; something was up. The final notation confirmed it, in plant slang—BTOYA. Be There Or It's Your Ass.

    BURBANK AIRPORT

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    6:32 A.M.
    Rush hour traffic crept forward in the pale morning light. Casey twisted her rearview mirror, and leaned over to check her makeup. With her short dark hair, she was appealing in a tomboyish sort of way—long limbed and athletic. She played first base on the plant softball team. Men were comfortable around her; they treated her like a kid sister, which served her well at the plant.
    In fact, Casey had had few problems there. She had grown up in the suburbs of Detroit, the only daughter of an editor at the Detroit News. Her two older brothers were both engineers at Ford. Her mother died when she was an infant, so she had been raised in a household of men.
    She had never been what her father used to call "a girly girl."
    After she graduated from Southern Illinois in journalism, Casey had followed her brothers to Ford. But she found writing press releases uninteresting, so she took advantage of the company's continuing education program to get an MBA from Wayne State. Along the way, she married Jim, a Ford engineer, and had a child.
    But Allison's arrival had ended the marriage: confronted by diapers and feeding schedules, Jim started drinking, staying out late. Eventually they separated. When Jim announced he was moving to the West Coast to work for Toyota, she decided to move out, too. Casey wanted Allison to grow up seeing her father. She was tired of the politics at Ford, and the bleak Detroit winters. California offered a fresh start: she imagined herself driving a convertible, living in a sunny house near the beach, with palm trees outside her window; she imagined her daughter growing up tanned and healthy.
    Instead, she lived in Glendale, an hour and a half inland from the beach. Casey had indeed bought a convertible, but she never put the top down. And although the section of Glendale where they lived was charming, gang territories began only a few blocks away. Sometimes at night, while her daughter slept, she heard the faint pop of gunfire. Casey worried about Allison's safety. She worried about her education in a school system where fifty languages were spoken.
    And she worried about the future, because the California economy was still depressed, jobs scarce. Jim had been out of work for two years now, since Toyota fired him for drinking. And Casey had survived wave after wave of layoffs at Norton, where production had slumped thanks to the global recession.
    She had never imagined she would work for an aircraft company, but to her surprise she had found that her plain-spoken, midwestern pragmatism was perfectly suited to the culture of engineers that dominated the company. Jim considered her rigid and "by the book," but her attention to detail had served her well at Norton, where she had for the last year been a vice-president of Quality Assurance.
    She liked QA, even though the division had a nearly impossible mission. Norton Aircraft was divided into two great factions—production and engineering—which were perpetually at war.

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    Quality Assurance stood uneasily between the two. QA was involved in all aspects of production; the division signed off every step of fabrication and assembly. When a problem emerged, QA was expected to get to the bottom of it. That rarely endeared them to mechanics on the line, or the engineers.
    At the same time, QA was expected to deal with customer support problems. Customers