Page 12 of Gryphon

She’d done what she could and now walked away to start circling the perimeter of the debris field. Was the orange tape pinned to the snow with ski poles a standard Swedish methodology or did they avail themselves of multiple practices, which in turn implied possible inconsistences in other areas of the investigation?

As she followed the perimeter, she observed that whatever the markup method, it was highly accurate. The impact of the plane at a steep angle to the slope had severely limited debris dispersal. And while the impact and short slide had churned up the snow, where it hadn’t, the ski slope was well packed and scattered debris lay on the surface with only the larger pieces penetrating deeper.

The only disruptions were where teams were digging along the edges of the fuselage and wings. They were not being very careful about where they were tossing the snow.

Before she could complain, she saw them drag a body out from under the starboard wing. The corpse still wore parka, ski goggles, and parts of a ski clipped to her boot. They took a photograph, the flash more blinding than the floodlights, removed the ski, then shifted the woman into a body bag.

Miranda made a note in her crash notebook to personally inspect the areas of the debris field covered by this disturbed snow.

The orange tape created a very efficient perimeter: like a chalk outline around a dead body, a tape outline around a dead plane. She considered it compared to the small flags that the NTSB used. For a larger wreckage area, miles of tape might be required. Perhaps she’d stick with her reusable perimeter flags.

Meg was light enough to trot over the packed snow surface that she herself kept sinking into. If she’d known she was headed here, she’d have brought her snowshoes. Her first-ever crash investigation had been in deep snow in the high Idaho wilderness. She had sorely missed having snowshoes. She now kept a pair in every plane. But in the whirlwind of the afternoon, she’d left them strapped into her jet’s rear luggage compartment.

I’m your new rotorcraft specialist. It was a horrible phrase. She missed the old one. She’d loved the old one. Andi hadn’t called, written, or simply dropped in since her abrupt departure.

Miranda’s chest hurt even more than before. It felt as if her heart cried and the tears burned her insides.

7

“What the hell, Kurt?” Rolm turned on him. The two of them had been mechanics together a lifetime ago. As Kurt had risen to lead the SHK, they often ran into each other at industry dinners. “Sorry. Long day. Thanks for coming out yourself. But what the hell?”

“Biggest accident ever on Swedish soil, of course I’d be here.” Then Kurt glanced toward the departing woman and shook his head. “I’m not sure what’s up there. Didn’t even offer me a hello. Or want to look at the plane. Brought quite the team with her though.” He pointed out the other four who had come with her—already in and out among the shadows—each marked with a bright headlamp.

Rolm couldn’t tell anything about them from here. “They any good?”

“Haven’t seen enough to tell. NTSB’s dispatcher said they were sending their best. My people are still working with fire and rescue, pulling out the bodies. She comes in with her little dog and dispatches her team to tasks without so much as a by your leave. Never seen anything quite like it.”

“Damned Yankee arrogance.” Exactly what he didn’t want. They’d find a way to hang this on his maintenance or flight crews—he had no idea which was the worse scenario. But he knew an American team would never hang the fault on an American aircraft.

“No, Rolm,” Kurt beat his hands together to keep up circulation.

Rolm’s own hands and head were getting cold despite it only being a few degrees below freezing. They’d become office jockeys, losing…lost the edge that had them working on cold planes in frigid hangars with only normal amounts of griping.

“Whatever it is, it isn’t arrogance.”

“Just do me a personal favor, Kurt. For old time’s sake.”

“Will if I can, Rolm, but I’m not going to mess with the report if it’s your guys who screwed the pooch on this.”

“No, nothing like that. Just keep a damn close eye on them.”

“That I can do for you. You know that a determination, if we can make one out of this mess at all, might take months? Or longer?”

Rolm felt sick to his stomach. He definitely shouldn’t have stopped at Günter’s Korvar for a double Polish sausage on baguette on his way north. But they’d always been one of his weaknesses whenever he was passing through that part of North Stockholm.

“If that’s the case, then it becomes Hanna’s problem.”

And he hated himself hoping for that. If it did turn out to be his guys’ fault, he didn’t want to have to see it and report it firsthand. And definitely not be the one to hand down any form of blame or justice. Yeah, you just killed an entire planeload of folks with your negligence. Live with that, why don’t you? Oh, and I have to fire you, which means you’ll never be employable in the industry again.

Kurt headed off.

With nothing else to do, just as useless as an airline president always seemed to be, Rolm stood at the base of the ski run and stared upslope at the shattered pile of steel, aluminum, and people that had been the last Boeing in his fleet. He spotted the first of the news vans pulling into the lot behind him. He zipped his parka and pulled up his hood to delay the inevitable. Once he’d been recognized, there’d be a thousand questions, all blasted out nationwide.

He hadn’t visited the wreck in Italy twenty-five years ago; there hadn’t been time. The incident had been in the middle of an active airport. The authorities cleared the bodies and wreckage before even the Italian investigators arrived because it had closed the main runway and crashed into the luggage-handling building. In fact, the cleanup happened so fast that the flight recorder wasn’t found for a week, mixed in with the wreckage taken offsite for disposal. There’d certainly been nothing left to salvage—everyone forward of the wings dead from blunt trauma of the plane shredding, and everyone aft by a fire that had raged through that portion of the plane.

This crash was different. It spread over only a very small area of the ski slope.

Lying on the snow, it looked too improbable to be real. The black sky above, the bright lights and the hum of activity all around it; almost as busy as if it sat parked at an airport gate and teams were preparing it for a departure that would never happen.

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