Cross down, p.31
Cross Down, page 31
“I don’t know how we’re going to get there or why they called us in,” Sampson said. “And why the FBI? This is NTSB’s show all the way.”
“Unless the plane didn’t crash on its own.”
“I’m not hearing them say that,” he said, gesturing to the radio. “And we’re driving into a mess.”
I put on the AM station WTOP and learned that all air traffic bound for Reagan was being diverted to Dulles International. My cell phone rang: supervising special agent Edward Mahoney, my former partner at the FBI and one of the Bureau’s top crisis managers.
“Ned,” I said, putting him on speaker. “Did you call us in?”
“I did,” he said, panting. He sounded like he was running. “Where are you?”
I told him.
“Don’t go to the bridge,” he said. “It’s a parking lot. Get to the wharf opposite Nationals Park on the Anacostia River. We’ll pick you up in ten minutes.”
He hung up, and Sampson hit the gas.
Five minutes later, John was running out to the wharf, passing the empty slips of the DC Sailing Club; I followed him, although I couldn’t move as quickly, given my recent chest injury. When we reached the water’s edge, a big MPD Harbor Patrol Zodiac-style boat was coming hard up the river at us, searchlights on, blue bubbles flaring but thankfully quiet.
John and I looked beyond the boat, farther down the Anacostia and across the Potomac, and saw wind-whipped flames, the flash of many lights, and a great billowing plume of black smoke rising above the runway’s south end.
“Reminds me of when the Pentagon got hit,” Sampson said. “I thought we were done with that crap.”
“We were. And now we aren’t,” I said.
Mahoney stood in the bow of the approaching police boat, a lean, intense man with a remarkable ability to plan and execute large, complex investigations for the FBI. He was also one of my closest friends, someone I trusted as completely as I trusted Sampson.
I don’t think I’d ever seen Ned as sober or grim as he was when we climbed aboard, joining a team of twenty agents from the FBI, NTSB, and ATF.
“What’s going on?” Sampson said. “We were told it’s a crash.”
“American Airlines flight coming in from West Palm Beach. A hundred plus were on board,” Mahoney said. “They’re searching for survivors. And we’re getting unconfirmed reports of gunfire just before the jet went down.”
“Unconfirmed?” I said as the boat turned and headed toward the Potomac and the airport.
“Affirmative, but something very big definitely exploded right afterward in Gravelly Point Park, off the north end of the runway.”
Sampson said, “I’m calling Willow.”
I said, “She’s safe with Jannie and Nana Mama at my house.”
“Still,” he said and he turned away to phone his young daughter, who was in the care of my eighteen-year-old daughter and ninety-something grandmother. His wife had died a while back, and Willow was his pride and joy.
“Terrorism?” I said to Mahoney.
“Looking that way.”
I said, “You’re running the show?”
“For now. Lucky me.”
I sent a text to my wife, Bree, who used to be chief of detectives for MPD and would know well what my life was about to become: a single-minded, all-consuming search for hard evidence amid the chaos, suspicion, and rumor that was sure to whirl around the hunt for the killer or killers of one hundred innocent people.
As we left the Anacostia and headed into the Potomac, the sky began to weep and drizzle, which made the lights and the fire and that black plume of smoke even more surreal and nightmarish.
Big searchlights slashed the river. Above us and circling around the airport were five helicopters. The one closest to us was from a local television station.
Mahoney barked into his radio, “Get the goddamned press back. I want a no-fly bubble around that runway a mile in every direction. If they give you any guff, tell them I’ll shoot them down.”
The television choppers had backed off by the time the bow of the Harbor Patrol boat nudged the riprap along the riverbank, some three hundred yards from the wreckage. We jumped off one by one and scrambled up the bank to find a hellish scene playing out, the soundtrack a deafening symphony of sirens that seemed to be wailing near and far and coming from every angle.
Five fire engines surrounded the biggest piece of the fuselage. Through hoses, firefighters were shooting foam at it and the scorched tail section. More fire engines were blaring and braying as they and several ambulances sped down the runway from the north toward the mangled nose and forward fuselage.
Two ambulances were already there. EMTs were running to the largest unburned section of the jet. Other EMTs and firefighters were walking both sides of the runway, scanning for survivors. No one was stopping.
“This is going to get rough,” Sampson said, gesturing ahead of us at a small human leg clad in denim, the foot in a red sneaker, lying in the low wet grass.
From that point on and with every step we took, the scene turned so horrific and macabre that I could process it only by seeing it as a battlefield rather than a crash site. Chunks of twisted airplane wing, jagged strips of metal, and human body parts were strewn around the runway north and south of where the aircraft had exploded. You could see the scorch line where that had happened.
And still the sirens wailed.
“Goddamn it, I can’t think,” Mahoney said and barked an order into the radio. Over the next minute, the wails and din slowed and faded until there was only the shouting of the firefighters working on the wreckage. The flames were gone. The plume of smoke was thinning. But the air was still acrid with the smell of spent jet fuel, seared metal, the foam, and charred flesh when Ned gathered us and the top law enforcement commanders.
“We are processing this as a crime scene until further notice,” Ned said. “NTSB?”
“Supervising investigator Bob Holland,” a man in his forties said, raising his hand.
“Thanks, Bob. You will control the collection of all physical evidence relating to the crash, but your people will work alongside my agents, who will document the remains so we can get them removed, identified, and returned to their loved ones as soon as possible. ATF?”
A tall redheaded woman in a blue windbreaker raised her hand. “Agent Alice Kershaw.”
“Glad to have you, Alice. I want your people in that park north of the runway,” Mahoney said. “Tell me what blew up out there and see if there’s evidence of weapon fire prior to that explosion.”
Calvin Stetson, a captain with the Virginia State Police, said, “At least fifteen people who were outside the terminal told us they heard automatic-weapon fire.”
“Can a machine gun bring down a jet like that?” Sampson asked.
Kershaw said, “Taliban has brought down jets and choppers with them.”
I said, “Why not a surface-to-air missile or something like it?”
Mahoney said, “Because there are hardly any Stingers out there that are not accounted for or destroyed or so old that they can’t be fired. The Bureau and DIA are vigilant about tracking them down if they get the slightest rumor of one anywhere in the world. Even the Chinese SA-seven knockoffs.”
“But a machine gun?” Sampson asked.
“Easier to find and obtain,” Ned said. “Especially if you’re willing to skip the federal licensing process and go to the black market.”
“Or the dark web,” Kershaw said. “There are plenty of heavy guns available if you know where to look.”
“We’ll figure that out later,” Mahoney said, and he clapped his hands. “Let’s do this right, people. The victims and families deserve nothing less.”
We were there all night while Mahoney’s team of investigators grew and fanned out under his direction. Scaffolding was helicoptered in. Within three hours of the crash, a bank of spotlights had turned sections of the runway as bright as a baseball park.
Over the years, Sampson, Mahoney, and I had worked closely on dozens of cases. We were all fine investigators on our own, but together we were far more than the sum of our parts. Knowing that, Ned had John and me shadow him as he moved among agents and officers from seven different law enforcement agencies, listening to their concerns, giving them guidance, and asking question after question after question. He reported in to the FBI director on the half hour.
We heard that the media was giving the crash blanket coverage. We didn’t need to hear or see it to know that Washington was on edge and in shock. You could feel it coming off almost everyone who was at the crash site that evening.
John and I stayed quiet for the most part, listening, inhaling information as Mahoney got it. Around ten in the evening, we learned that more than fifty charred corpses remained in the largest section of the fuselage.
Fifteen of those on board, including the pilot, copilot, and the first-class passengers, had been inside the forward fuselage. The violent energy of the crash had snapped spines and skulls.
The rest of the passengers had been cut apart and hurled free as the plane flipped and smashed and broke into fourteen large, ragged pieces. It quickly became clear there would be no survivors of AA 839.
Shortly after midnight, dozens of officers and emergency workers from four different states donned full hazmat gear and began removing the remains that an army of crime scene techs had photographed, bagged, and coded based on their GPS locations. The gruesome job of recovery was so complicated that the last bodies would not leave the airport grounds for another thirty-two hours.
Around three a.m., NTSB supervising investigator Bob Holland showed us bullet holes in the forward foil of the right wing and in the housing of the right engine.
“Fifty-caliber,” Holland said. “Looks like he chewed up the left side, nose, and the forward landing gear, which is over there on the other side of the runway.”
“How many rounds?” I asked.
“I’m thinking a full belt. Two hundred at close range.”
“Lot of destruction fast,” Sampson said.
“Enough to say this is now officially a mass murder,” Mahoney said grimly.
“You going to announce that?” Holland asked, looking pale.
“In the morning. I want to see what ATF finds in Gravelly Point Park first.”
But before we could go there, Ned came under more pressure. A media horde and scores of relatives and friends of passengers on American Airlines Flight 839 had gathered during the night in front of the closed airport and were demanding answers.
Worse, airport managers were demanding to know when flights could resume. Reagan’s closure was causing a travel nightmare up and down the East Coast.
After identifying himself, Mahoney had the brutal job of publicly announcing that there were no survivors of the crash, the cause of which was still under investigation. People began to wail and sob. A pregnant woman collapsed into another woman’s arms.
“People are saying there was machine-gun fire!” one cable news reporter yelled.
“We’re still working to confirm that,” Mahoney said. “We’ll have more for you later.”
“Did the jet crash on its own or was it shot down?”
“We’ll know more in the morning,” he said, and we left.
It was nearly four a.m. when we finally got to the crime scene perimeter around Gravelly Point Park, which had its own bank of lights shining on it; at least fifteen agents in hazmat suits were there, all wearing big headlamps that they trained on a twisted skeleton of charred steel in the parking lot.
“Hard to say what kind of vehicle it was. Probably a van,” said ATF supervising special agent Alice Kershaw, who was also clad in hazmat gear. “Looks like he was doing his best to disintegrate whatever was inside.”
“Did he succeed?” Mahoney said.
“He blew a lot of it to smithereens, but we’re good at putting puzzle pieces together.”
“What do you know so far?”
“I don’t know how it was detonated yet, but it was a fertilizer bomb. A big one.”
I said, “What about a machine gun?”
“There was one here,” Kershaw said. “Still is, in parts. My guys found pieces of the receiver and barrel. And fifty-caliber casings, a lot of them in a spray north from the van. They think it’s an old Browning M two. Vietnam era.”
Sampson said, “Let me get this straight. You think this guy was in the back of the van with his fifty-cal waiting specifically for this flight?”
The ATF agent shook her head. “I can’t tell you if he was waiting for that particular plane or not, but I know for certain he was not in the van with the machine gun.”
“How?” I asked.
“We’ve found no body parts here, for one thing. That bomb was huge and threw a lot of metal, but no flesh so far. And we have witnesses who said the bomb went off within seconds of the plane going down, so he had to have been far away when he triggered it. We also found other pieces of the gun that were attached to brackets and fittings that suggest it might have been remotely controlled, probably hydraulically by a computer program of some kind.”
She showed us a piece of tripod with melted plastic hydraulic lines fused to it and to part of the barrel, a section of a scorched track that she thought was used to position the rear of the gun, and pieces of the housing of a Dell laptop.
I said, “Did he control the laptop with a phone?”
“Maybe,” Kershaw said. “Probably. But I think he would have been too far away to do it by Bluetooth. It would be cellular.”
Mahoney said, “Or satellite. Either way, we should be able to find a data record.”
“That’s out of my wheelhouse,” she said and yawned. “We will know after my metal detectors get—” Kershaw paused when a female ATF agent came up with a bent, twisted, and punctured chunk of metal that looked like a crumpled magazine. “What have you got, Burns?”
“Can’t get it open, boss, but I think it’s one of those thin metal clipboard boxes construction guys carry with their estimate forms inside. My dad used to have one.”
“Okay.”
Burns turned her flashlight beam on the metal box and into those punctures and gashes, revealing paper inside that had been more baked than incinerated, coal black in places but the rest of it the color of cured tobacco leaves.
“You can read some of what’s on it through the big hole there,” the ATF agent said and she altered the angle of her flashlight.
We all peered into the hole. Sampson got it first.
“Avis,” he said. “The van was a rental.”
James Patterson, Cross Down
