Millennium Read Free

almost deserted, but the lights slow you down. You’d think the Investigator In Charge of a National Transportation Safety Board Go-Team on his way to the biggest aviation disaster in history would have a red light he could mount on top of his car and just zip through the intersections. Sad to say, the D.C. police would take a dim view of that.
    Most of the team lived in Virginia and would get to the airport before me, whatever route I took. But the plane wouldn’t leave without me.
    *    *    *
    I hate National Airport. It’s an affront to everything the NTSB stands for. A few years back, when the news of the Air Florida hitting the 14th Street bridge first came in, a couple of us hoped (but not out loud) we might finally be able to shut it down. It didn’t turn out that way, but I still hoped.
    As it was, National was just too damn convenient. To most Washingtonians, Dulles International might as well be in Dakota. As for Baltimore…
    Even the Board bases its planes at National. We have a few, the biggest being a Lockheed JetStar that can take us anywhere in the continental U.S. without refueling. Normally we take commercial flights, but that doesn’t always work. This time it was too early in the morning to find enough seats going west. There was also the possibility, if this really was as big as Gordysaid, that a second team would follow us as soon as the sun came up. We might have to treat this as two crashes.
    Everybody but George Sheppard was already there by the time I boarded the JetStar. Tom Stanley had been in contact with Gordy Petcher. While I stowed my gear Tom filled me in on the things Petcher either had not known or could not bring himself to tell me when we talked.
    No survivors. We didn’t have an exact count yet from either airline, but it was sure to be over six hundred dead.
    It had happened at five thousand feet. The DC-10 had gone almost straight down. The 747 flew a little, but the end result was the same. The Ten was not far from a major highway; local police and fire units were at the scene. The Pan Am Boeing was up in the hills somewhere. Rescue workers had reached it, but the only word back was that there were no survivors.
    Roger Keane, the head of the NTSB field office in Los Angeles, was still on his way to the Bay Area and should be landing soon. Roger had been in contact with the Contra Costa and Alameda County Sheriffs offices, advising them on crash site procedures.
    “Who’s running the show at LAX?” I asked.
    “His name’s Kevin Briley,” said Tom. “I don’t know him. Do you?”
    “I think I shook his hand once. I’ll feel better when Rog Keane gets to the site.”
    “Briley said he was told to grab the next flight to Oakland and meet us there. He’ll be in L.A. a little bit longer, if you want to talk to him.”
    I glanced at my watch.
    “In a minute. Where’s George?”
    “I don’t know. He got the call. We tried him five minutes ago and there was no answer.”
    George Sheppard is the weather specialist. We could take off without him, since his presence at the crash site wasn’t absolutely necessary.
    And I was ready to go. More: I was aching to go, like a skittishracehorse in the starting gate. I could feel it building all around me, and all around the nation. The interior of the JetStar was dark and calm, but from Washington to Los Angeles and Seattle, and soon all around the world, forces were gathering that would produce the goddamest electronic circus anyone ever saw. The nation slept, but the wire service and the coaxial cables and synchronous satellites were humming with the news. A thousand reporters and editors were being roused from bed, booking flights to Oakland. A hundred government agencies were going to be involved before this thing was over. Foreign governments would send representatives. Everyone from Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas to the manufacturer of the smallest rivet in an airframe would be on edge, wondering if their factory had