"Darwin's Blade" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons Dan)1 “A is for Hole”The phone rang a few minutes after four in the morning. “You like accidents, Dar. You owe it to yourself to come see this one.” “I don’t like accidents,” said Dar. He did not ask who was calling. He recognized Paul Cameron’s voice even though he and Cameron had not been in touch for over a year. Cameron was a CHP officer working out of Palm Springs. “All right, then,” said Cameron, “you like Dar swiveled to read his clock. “Not at four-oh-eight A.M.,” he said. “This one’s worth it.” The connection sounded hollow, as if it were a radio patch or a cell phone. “Where?” “Montezuma Valley Road,” said Cameron. “Just a mile inside the canyon, where S22 comes out of the hills into the desert.” “Jesus Christ,” muttered Dar. “You’re talking Borrego Springs. It would take me more than ninety minutes to get there.” “Not if you drive your black car,” said Cameron, his chuckle blending with the rasp and static of the poor connection. “What kind of accident would bring me almost all the way to Borrego Springs before breakfast?” said Dar, sitting up now. “Multiple vehicle?” “We don’t know,” said Officer Cameron. His voice still sounded amused. “What do you mean you don’t know? Don’t you have anyone at the scene yet?” “I’m “And you can’t tell how many vehicles were involved?” Dar found himself wishing that he had a cigarette in the drawer of his bedside table. He had given up smoking ten years earlier, just after the death of his wife, but he still got the craving at odd times. “We can’t even ascertain beyond a reasonable doubt what “You mean what make?” said Dar. He rubbed his chin, heard the sandpaper scratch there, and shook his head. He had seen plenty of high-speed vehicular accidents where the make and model of the car were not immediately apparent. Especially at night. “I mean we don’t know if this is a car, more than one car, a plane, or a fucking UFO crash,” said Cameron. “If you don’t see this one, Darwin, you’ll regret it for the rest of your days.” “What do you…” Dar began, and stopped. Cameron had broken the connection. Dar swung his legs over the edge of the bed, looked out at the dark beyond the glass of his tall condo windows, muttered, “Shit,” and got up to take a fast shower. It took him two minutes less than an hour to drive there from San Diego, pushing the Acura NSX hard through the canyon turns, slamming it into high gear on the long straights, and leaving the radar detector in the tiny glove compartment because he assumed that all of the highway patrol cars working S22 would be at the scene of the accident. It was paling toward sunrise as he began the long 6-percent grade, four-thousand-foot descent past Ranchita toward Borrega Springs and the Anza-Borrega Desert. A little more than five years ago, Dar had arrived at that point only thirty-five minutes after a school bus had struck that stretch of old guardrail, scraped along it for more than sixty feet, and plunged over the embankment, rolled three times down the steep, boulder-strewn hillside, and had come to rest on its side, with its shattered roof in the narrow stream below. The bus had been owned by the Desert Springs School District and was returning from an “Eco-Week” overnight camping trip in the mountains, carrying forty-one sixth-grade students and two teachers. When Dar arrived, ambulances and Flight-For-Life helicopters were still carrying off seriously injured children, a mob of rescue workers was handing litters hand over hand up the rocky slope, and yellow plastic tarps covered at least three small bodies on the rocks below. When the final tally came in, six children and one teacher were dead, twenty-four students were seriously injured—including one boy who would be a paraplegic for the rest of his life—and the bus driver received cuts, bruises, and a broken left arm. Dar was working for the NTSB then—it was the year before he quit the National Transportation Safety Board to go to work as an independent accident reconstruction specialist. That time the call came to his condo in Palm Springs. For days after the accident, Dar watched the media coverage of the “terrible tragedy.” The L.A. television stations and newspapers had decided early on that the bus driver was a heroine—and their coverage reflected that stance. The driver’s postcrash interview and other eyewitness testimony, including that of the teacher who had been sitting directly behind one of the children who had perished, certainly suggested as much. All agreed that the brakes had failed about one mile after the bus began its long, steep descent. The driver, a forty-one-year-old divorced mother of two, had shouted at everyone to hang on. What followed was a terrifying six-mile Mad Mouse ride with the driver doing her best to keep the careening bus on the road, the brakes smoking but obviously not slowing the vehicle enough, children flying out of their seats on the sharp turns, and then the final crash, grinding, and plummet over the embankment. All agreed that there was nothing the driver could have done, that once the brakes had failed it had been a miracle that she had kept the bus on the road as long as she had. Dar read the editorials proclaiming that the driver was the kind of hero for whom no tribute could be too great. Two Los Angeles TV stations carried live coverage of the school board meeting during which parents of the surviving children gave testimonials to the driver’s heroic attempts to save the bus under “impossible circumstances.” The Meanwhile, Dar gathered information. The school bus was a 1989 model TC-2000 manufactured by the Blue Bird Body Company and purchased new by the Desert Springs School District. It had power steering, a diesel engine, and a model AT 545 four-speed automatic transmission from the Allison Transmission Division of General Motors. It was also equipped with a Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) 121-approved dual air-mechanical, cam-and-drum brake system that had front axle clamp type-20 brake chambers and rear axle clamp type-24/30 and emergency/parking brake chambers. All of the brakes had 5.5-inch manual slack adjusters. The driver seat was lap-belt-equipped; the passenger seats were not. Dar knew that this was standard design for school buses. Parents who would never allow their children to ride unrestrained in their family vehicles happily waved good-bye to their children each morning in buses carrying fifty children and no passenger belts or harnesses. The estimated gross weight of this bus, the passengers, and their camping baggage was 22,848 pounds. The driver had—as the newspapers and TV reports had put it—“a perfect safety record with the district.” Blood tests taken at the hospital immediately after the accident showed no evidence of drugs or alcohol. Dar interviewed her two days after the accident, and her account was almost word for word the same as the deposition she had given the CHP the evening of the crash. She reported that about one mile from their starting point, on a slight downhill grade, the bus brakes had “seemed weird and mushy.” She had pumped the brake pedal. A warning light had come on, indicating low brake pressure. At that point, the driver told him, the grade had changed from the downhill grade to a two-mile uphill climb and the bus began to slow. The automatic transmission had shifted to a lower gear and the brake warning light went off and then blinked a few times. The driver said that she assumed the problem had fixed itself at this point and that there was no reason not to continue. Shortly thereafter, she reported, they entered the long downhill grade and the brakes “just failed completely.” The bus began picking up speed. The driver said that she could not slow it by using either the service or emergency brakes. Brake odor was strong. The rear wheels began smoking. She said that she had overridden the automatic transmission and shifted down to second gear, but that did not help. She said that she had then grabbed the radio to call her dispatcher, but had to drop the microphone in order to wrestle the wheel to keep the bus on the road. For six miles she succeeded, shouting at the students and teachers to “lean left!” and “lean right!” Finally the bus had contacted the outside guardrail, run along it, and gone over the embankment. “I don’t know what else I could have done!” said the driver during the interview. She was weeping at that point. Her report agreed with the interview testimony Dar had taken from the surviving teacher and students. The driver—overweight, pasty-faced, and thin-lipped—seemed stupid and somewhat bovine to Dar, but he had to discount his own perceptions. The older he got and the longer he worked in accident investigation, the more stupid most people seemed to him. And more and more women tended to appear bovine in the years since the death of his wife. His people checked the driver’s record. The TV stations and papers had reported that she had “a perfect safety record with the district,” and this was true, but it was also true that she had only worked for the district for six months prior to the accident. According to DMV reports from Tennessee, where the driver had lived before moving to California, she’d been issued one DUI citation and two moving violations in five years. In California the bus driver held a school bus certificate (passenger transportation endorsement) issued two days before her employment by the district and had a valid California class B (commercial driver) license restricted to conventional buses with automatic transmissions only. The California DMV records also indicated that ten days before the accident, the driver had two violations: failure to provide financial responsibility and failure to properly display license plates. CHP records showed that because of these violations, her regular driver’s license had been suspended. It had been reinstated the day before the accident after she had filed an SR-22 (proof of financial responsibility) with the DMV. She had no outstanding traffic warrants at the time of the accident. She had received 54 hours of instruction that included 21 hours of behind-the-wheel training in a bus similar to the crash vehicle, but the curriculum had no requirement for mountain-driving training. Dar’s report on the physical damage to the bus ran to four single-spaced pages. Essentially, the bus body had separated from the chassis, the roof had collapsed and crushed inward from just behind the driver’s seat to the third row, the left side had crushed inboard, buckling and fracturing all of the window-frame supports and popping the glass out all along the left side, and the bumpers were missing. The fuel tank had been damaged in several places, one rubber fuel line had been cut, but the tank hadn’t been breached and its guard remained securely fastened to the chassis. Dar reviewed the inspection and repair orders for the bus and found that the brakes had been adjusted every 1,500 miles and that the vehicle was inspected on a monthly basis. Although the last inspection had been only two days before the accident and the mechanic had stated that he found the brakes slightly out of adjustment and had ordered them to be adjusted, there was no record of the mechanics having adjusted the brakes. Safety Board tests of the accident vehicle’s brakes showed that they had been out of adjustment on the day of the crash. Further investigation showed that the school district had only recently switched over from the CHP California Code of Regulations inspection form to a company-developed form (1040-008 Rev. 5/91), and the chief mechanic had checked both the “OK” box and the “Repair” boxes on the form, initialing the “Repair” boxes. But unlike the older inspection form on which the order for further service was written in a space under the “Repair” box, the chief mechanic’s written work order had been scrawled on the back of the new form. The five mechanics working under him—there was one mechanic for every eighteen buses, as per school district and industry guidelines—had missed the handwritten work order. “Well, that’s it, then,” said the superintendent of the Desert Springs School District. “Not quite,” said Dar. Three weeks after the accident, Dar staged a reenactment of the accident. An identical 1989 model TC-2000 school bus, loaded with 5,000 pounds of sandbags to simulate the weight of the students, teachers, and their luggage, was brought to the summit of Montezuma Valley Road at the national forest area where the classes had carried out their “Eco-Week” overnight camping trip. The brakes of this TC-2000 had been misadjusted to precisely the degree of error found on the accident vehicle. Dar designated himself as driver of the test vehicle and accepted one NTSB volunteer to ride along to videotape the reenactment. The California Highway Patrol closed the highway for the duration of the test. School Board members were present at the exercise. None volunteered to ride in the test bus. Dar drove the vehicle down the first grade, up the two-mile uphill section, and then down the long canyon road—the worst grade was 10.5 percent—finally bringing the vehicle to a full stop at a pullout ten yards beyond where the accident vehicle had plunged off the highway. He turned the vehicle around and drove it back to the summit. “The brakes worked,” said Dar to the assembled School Board members and CHP patrolmen. “There was no brake warning light. No smoke or smell of burning brake linings.” He explained what had happened on the day of the accident. The bus driver had left the national forest campsite with both of her emergency parking brakes set. After the first downhill stretch where they could smell the brakes burning, the next two miles had been uphill. “Brakes give off an odor,” explained Dar, “when the brake drum and shoes reach temperatures above approximately 600 degrees Fahrenheit.” The teachers, students, and driver had smelled the burning odor during both the first couple of downhill and uphill miles on the return journey. The driver had ignored the smell. The brake warning light had gone off briefly and then started blinking again as the bus approached the top of the last rise before the long descent toward Borrega Springs. The surviving teacher, sitting in the first row on the right side, had seen it blinking. “There’s only one engineering explanation for the brake warning light to signal brake overheating during this portion of the trip,” said Dar. “The emergency brakes had been applied continuously from the time the bus had left the campsite parking lot.” In addition, he explained, the surviving passengers told of the bus “handling poorly” and “surging slightly” during the first two uphill miles of the trip. The driver had ignored all of these warning signs and had begun the long, downhill section of the canyon road. Dar explained that on the day of the accident, he had noted that the front wheels of the bus were freewheeling but that the rear wheels were locked. He explained further that this type of bus had automatic brakes that would be applied without driver input when air pressure in the system drops below 30 pounds per square inch. The locked rear wheels had told him that low air pressure in the brake system had caused the automatic brakes to be applied, and their Safety Board tests had shown that the system had not leaked and that the air compressor was sound. But the automatic brakes could not stop the bus because they had been overheated prior to their application. At this point Dar got back in the bus, set the parking brake, and drove away from the campsite again. A convoy of CHP vehicles and private cars followed. The bus surged slightly going uphill. Both Dar and his assistant manning the video camera commented on tape that they could smell the brakes burning. CHP vehicles trailing the bus reported over their radios that they could clearly see smoke coming from the rear wheels. The brake warning light came on. Dar paused briefly where the accident-bus driver had paused, pumped the brakes as she had, and then started down the long incline. The brakes failed 1.3 miles down the steep canyon road. The automatic brakes deployed but then also failed due to overheating. The bus began to accelerate. When the bus reached 46 miles per hour, Dar shifted from D-3 to D-2, slowing it, and then shifted to D-1, causing the bus to lurch but also to slow quickly. Still moving 11 miles per hour, he selected a sandy patch of hillside on the inside stretch of the next curve and nosed the bus into it, bringing it to a halt with only the smallest of bumps. A second later, the armada of CHP cruisers and School Board members’ cars converged on the bus. Dar got in one of the highway patrol cars and they drove down to the accident site. “The driver left the campsite with her parking brake on, which meant that both emergency brakes were set, thus overheating the entire system for the first two miles and dropping the air pressure below thirty psi,” he said to the crowd gathered around the point where the bus had left the highway. “The automatic brakes deployed, but their efficiency was low because of the overheating. Still, that should have been enough to slow the bus to below twenty-eight miles per hour. It did in this reenactment.” “But you were going faster than that,” said the superintendent of schools. Dar nodded. “I manually shifted from second gear into third gear and then to fourth,” said Dar. “But the driver said that she shifted Dar nodded. “I know. But she didn’t. When we inspected the transmission after the accident, it was locked in fourth gear. The Alison automatic transmission is programmed to automatically shift The crowd stared at him. “The road marks here showed five hundred and fifty feet of striated, curved tire marks on the day of the accident,” he said, pointing. The marks were still visible. All eyes followed his pointing finger. “The automatic braking system, although degraded by loss of air pressure due to overheating, was still trying to stop the bus when it hit the guardrail up there.” Everyone turned to see the bent and battered guardrail. “The bus was going sixty-four miles per hour when it contacted the guardrail,” said Dar. “It was doing approximately forty-eight miles per hour when it left the road and became airborne about All heads turned back. “The bus was in fourth gear when it hit the guardrail because the driver had selected that gear,” said Dar, “not because the transmission had failed or automatically upshifted. She was in a panic. After burning out the brakes, ignoring the burning brake odor and the unusual handling of the bus going uphill, then after ignoring the brake-pressure warning light and deciding to continue down the steep grade despite the fact that the brakes felt ‘weird and mushy’ at the top of the pass, the driver overrode the automatic transmission at approximately twenty-eight miles per hour and shifted into fourth gear by mistake.” Two months after the accident, Dar had read in the back pages of a local paper that the driver had been found guilty of reckless driving resulting in the wrongful death of seven persons. She had received a one-year suspended sentence and her class B commercial driver’s license had been suspended indefinitely. None of the Los Angeles TV stations or newspapers that had hailed her as an unsung hero covered this aspect of the story in anything more than a passing mention, perhaps out of embarrassment at their earlier enthusiasm. It was light enough to drive without headlights when Dar reached the accident scene. Cameron had been slightly off in his location; it was a little less than a mile from where the canyon opened out into desert. The twisting road showed all of the accoutrements of modern highway death: highway patrol cars parked along the shoulder, flares sizzling, cones set up, patrolmen herding what traffic there was up and down the left, uphill lane, two ambulances, even a helicopter buzzing above. Everything except wreckage. Dar ignored the patrolman’s waving baton and pulled off on the broad right shoulder where the official vehicles were parked. Red and blue lights painted the canyon walls with pulsing light. The patrolman strode over to the NSX. “Hey! You can’t park there. This is an accident scene.” “Sergeant Cameron sent for me.” “Cameron?” The officer was still pissed off at Dar’s disregard for his baton. “Why? You from Accident Detail? Got ID?” Dar shook his head. “Just tell Sergeant Cameron that Dar Minor is here.” The patrolman glowered but pulled a radio from his belt, stepped a few paces away for privacy, and spoke into it. Dar waited. He realized that the CHP cops on the shoulder were all staring up at the canyon wall. Dar got out of the NSX and squinted up at the red rock. Several hundred feet higher, on a broad setback up there, lights glared and people and machines moved. There was no road or trail up that steep cliff to the setback, no way down from the cliff top hundreds of feet higher. A small, green and white helicopter lifted off from the ledge and dropped carefully into the canyon. Dar felt his stomach sink as he watched the chopper land in a cleared area along the shoulder. “Darwin!” Sergeant Cameron and another patrolman jumped out of the helicopter and moved out from under the whirling blades in a half crouch. Paul Cameron was about Dar’s age, in his late forties. The sergeant was large and quite black, barrel-chested, and sported a neatly trimmed mustache. Dar knew that Cameron would have retired years earlier if he had not started late in his police career. He had joined the Marines just when Dar was leaving the Corps. There was a younger patrolman with him: white, in his early twenties, baby-faced, with a mouth that reminded Dar of Elvis. “Dr. Darwin Minor, this is Patrolman Mickey Elroy. We were just talking about you, Dar.” The younger patrolman squinted at Dar. “You really a doctor?” “Not a medical doctor. A Ph.D. Physics.” While Patrolman Elroy thought about that, Cameron said, “You ready to ride up and see the puzzle, Dar?” “Ride up.” Dar didn’t bother to hide his lack of enthusiasm. “That’s right, you don’t like to fly, do you?” Cameron’s voice only had two tones—amused and outraged. He was in his amused mode now. “But hey, you have a pilot’s license, don’t you, Dar? Gliders or somesuch?” “I don’t like to be The pilot made sure that they were all strapped in and then twisted one stick and pulled up on another. The little chopper lifted, fluttered, and then tilted forward, climbing for altitude at the mouth of the canyon before buzzing back, hovering a minute over the wide shelf of stone and sagebrush, and then settling down carefully, the rotors no more than twenty feet from the vertical rock wall. Dar walked away from the thing with shaky legs. He wondered if Cameron would let him rappel down the canyon wall back to the highway when it was time to go. “So is it true what the sergeant says about you and the space shuttle?” said Patrolman Elroy with a slight twist of his Elvis lips. “What?” said Dar, crouching and covering his ears as the chopper took off again. “That you were the one that figured out what made it blow up? Dar shook his head. “No, I was just an NTSB flunky on the investigatory committee.” “A flunky who got his ass fired by NASA,” said Cameron, tugging on his Smokey hat and securing it. Elroy looked puzzled. “Why’d they fire you?” “For telling them what they didn’t want to hear,” said Dar. He could see the crater here on the ledge now. It was about thirty feet across and perhaps three feet deep at the deepest. Whatever had struck here had burned, flared against the inner rock wall, and started a small fire in the grass and sagebrush that grew along the ledge. A dozen or so CHP people and forensics men stood and crouched near or in the crater. “What didn’t they want to hear?” asked Elroy, hurrying to keep up. Dar stepped at the edge of the impact crater. “That the The kid stopped. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “That isn’t true, is it? I never heard that. I mean…” “What is this, Paul?” said Dar. “You know I don’t do airplane accidents anymore.” “Yeah,” said Cameron, showing strong white teeth as he grinned. He crouched, rooted around in the burned grass, and tossed a scorched fragment of metal to Dar. “Can you ID that?” “Door handle,” said Dar. “Chevy.” “The guys think it was an ’82 El Camino,” said Cameron, gesturing toward the forensics men in the smoldering pit. Dar looked at the vertical rock wall to his right and at the highway hundreds of feet below. “Nice,” he said. “I don’t suppose there are tire marks at the top of the cliff.” “Nope. Just rock,” said the sergeant. “No way up from the backside, either.” “When did this happen?” “Sometime last night. Civilian reported the fire about two A.M.” “You guys got right on it.” “Had to. The first CHP boys here thought it was a military plane down.” Dar nodded and walked to the line of yellow accident-scene tape around the pit. “Lot of shards in there. Anything not belonging to an El Camino?” “Bones and bits,” said Cameron, still smiling. “One person, we’re pretty sure. Male, they think. Scattered because of the impact and explosion. Oh, and fragments of aluminum and alloy casings that don’t have anything to do with the El Camino.” “Another vehicle?” “They don’t think so. Something that was in the car, maybe.” “Curious,” said Dar. Patrolman Elroy was still eyeing him suspiciously, as if Dar were a joke the sergeant was pulling on him. “And are you really the guy they named the Darwin Award after?” “No,” said Dar. He walked around the crater, making sure not to get too close to the edge of the cliff. He did not like heights. Some of the Accident Investigation men nodded and said hello. Dar took his camera out of the bag and began imaging from different angles. The rising sun glinted on the many thousands of pieces of scattered, scorched metal. “What’s that?” said Elroy. “I’ve never seen a camera like that before.” “Digital,” said Dar. He quit shooting pictures and video and looked back down the highway. The entrance to the canyon was visible from up here, directly in line with the highway stretching out east toward Borrego Springs. He looked at the tiny viewfinder monitor on the camera and shot some stills and video of the highway and desert lined up with the crater. “Well, if the Darwin Award isn’t named for you,” persisted the young patrolman, “who is it named for?” “Charles Darwin,” said Dar. “You know, survival of the fittest?” The boy looked blank. Dar sighed. “The society of insurance investigators gives the award to the person who does the human race the biggest favor each year by removing his or her DNA from the gene pool.” The boy nodded slowly, but obviously did not understand. Cameron chuckled. “Whoever kills himself in the dumbest way,” he translated, and looked at Dar. “Last year it was that guy in Sacramento who shook the Pepsi machine until it fell on him and squashed him, wasn’t it?” “That was two years ago,” said Dar. “Last year it was the farmer up in Oregon who got nervous shingling the roof of his barn and tossed the rope over the peak of the roof and had his grown son tie it to something solid. Turned out the something solid was the rear bumper of their pickup truck.” Cameron laughed out loud. “Yeah, yeah. And then his wife came out of the house and drove to town. Did the car insurance people ever pay the widow?” “Had to,” said Dar. “He was attached to the vehicle at the time. Under policy rules, he was covered.” Patrolman Elroy quirked his Elvis smile, but he obviously did not understand the point of the story. “So you going to solve this one for us, or what?” said Cameron. Dar scratched his head. “You guys have any theories?” “Accident Investigation thinks it was a drug deal gone wrong,” said Cameron. “Yeah,” said Elroy, eagerly. “You know. The El Camino was in the back of one of those big military, freighter kind of planes…” “C-130?” said Dar. “Yeah.” Patrolman Elroy grinned. “And the dudes had a falling out, shoved the El Camino out the back…bingo.” He gestured toward the crater like a maître d’ awarding patrons a table. Dar nodded. “Good theory. Except where would drug runners get a C-130? And why haul an El Camino in it? And why shove the whole vehicle out? And why did it explode and burn?” “Don’t cars always do that when they go off cliffs and things?” said Elroy, his twist of a smile fading. “Only in the movies, Mickey, my boy,” said Cameron. He turned to Dar. “Well? You want to get started on this before it gets hot up here?” Dar nodded. “On two conditions.” Cameron raised his heavy eyebrows. “Get me back down to my car and loan me your radio.” Dar drove the NSX out of the canyon and into the desert, stopped, looked around for a while, drove farther, looked a bit longer, drove back to his first stopping point, and walked out into the desert, gathering pebbles and other small items and putting them into his pocket. He shot some images of the Joshua trees and the sand, then walked back to the car and took a few more images of the asphalt road. It was still early and the traffic was light—a few vans and pickups—so there was no backup from the single-lane closing in the canyon. But it was already eighty degrees in the desert and Dar took off his jacket and kept the air-conditioning going as he sat in the idling black Acura on a gravel turnout two miles from the entrance to the canyon. Dar powered up his IBM ThinkPad, downloaded the stored images from the Hitachi digital camera via a flash card, and scrolled through them for a few minutes. He ran the short video segments he had shot. Then he enabled his numeric keypad and tapped in equations for several minutes, exiting once to activate map software and the GPS unit he carried in the glove box. He double-checked distances, angles, and elevations, and then finished his arithmetic, shut down the computer, stowed it away, and called Cameron on the radio he had borrowed. It had been thirty-five minutes since he’d left the ledge. The green and white chopper buzzed by once and landed five minutes later. The pilot stayed inside his bubble while Cameron got out, adjusted his hat, and walked over to the NSX. “Where’s young Elvis?” said Dar. “Elroy,” said the sergeant. “Whatever.” “I left him behind. He’s had enough excitement this morning. Besides, he was being disrespectful of his elders.” “Oh?” “He called you an arrogant A-hole after you left,” said Cameron. Dar raised one eyebrow. “A-hole?” The fellow ex-Marine shrugged. “Sorry, Darwin. It’s the best the boy could do. He’s never been in the military. Generation Xer and all that. And he’s white. Linguistically deprived. I apologize for him.” “What do you have for me?” Cameron was obviously tired and edging out of his amused mode into his more habitual pissed-off attitude. “What do I get for having anything for you?” said Dar. “The eternal gratitude of the California Highway Patrol,” growled Cameron. “I guess it’ll have to do.” Dar squinted at the little helicopter that seemed to shimmer as heat waves rose from the highway between it and the NSX. “As much as I hate to get in that goddamn thing again, I think it’ll be easier to show you if we go back up for a couple of minutes.” Cameron shrugged. “Crash site?” “Uh-uh. I’m not flying in that canyon again. Just tell your man to follow my directions and to keep it under five hundred feet.” They hovered above the highway half a mile east of where the NSX was parked. “Did you see that scorched, rippled pattern on the asphalt here near the turnout?” said Dar through his headset microphone. “Yeah, sure, now I do. Not when I drove this way in the dark this morning. So what? Highway’s fucked up like that in a thousand places. Shitty maintenance out here.” “Yes,” said Dar, “but stretches of the road here look as if they’ve been melted and then resolidified.” Cameron shrugged, “Desert, man. Going to be what today?” He turned to the pilot. “A hundred and twelve,” said the pilot, never moving his sunglasses in their direction, his attention on the instruments and the horizon. “Fahrenheit.” “OK,” said Dar. “Let’s head back toward the NSX.” “That’s “Patience.” They hovered three hundred feet above the highway. A station wagon rushed past headed west, kids’ heads poking out of both rear windows, goggling at the helicopter. The Acura looked like a black, wax candle that had melted in the heat. “Notice those skid marks?” said Dar. “When we flew down, sure,” said Cameron. “But they’re a mile and a half from the canyon. More than two miles from the crash site. You saying that somebody ran out of control, left skid marks here, and crashed almost three miles away, two hundred feet up a canyon wall? Fast motherfucker.” The sergeant was smiling, but he was not amused. “Long skid marks,” said Dar, pointing to the parallel tracks heading off west. “Kids burning rubber. Find tire marks every few hundred meters out here. You know that, Dar. Just lucky if we don’t find the kids in the wreckage the next morning.” “I measured them,” said Dar. “One thousand eight hundred and thirty-eight feet of nonstriated road marks. If it was a kid doing peel-outs, he did one hell of a long wheelie and left most of his tires on the asphalt. If it’s skid marks…” “What are you saying?” said Cameron. “Simple matter of friction coefficient. Our El Camino tried to stop here and couldn’t. Brakes melted.” Dar fished in his pocket and handed Cameron several tiny pellets and spheres of what looked to be melted rubber. “Brake pads?” said Cameron. “What’s left of them,” Dar said, and handed the sergeant several more tiny droplets. These were tiny pellets of metal. “These are from the surfaces of the actual brake drums melting,” he said. “The Joshua trees along this stretch are dusted with both powdered rubber and melted steel.” “El Caminos never had brakes worth shit,” said Cameron, shifting the pellets in his dark palm. “No,” agreed Dar. “Especially when you’re trying to haul your speed down from somewhere around three hundred miles per hour.” “Land this thing,” said Dar. “I’ll explain outside.” “I think he did it after dark because he didn’t want anyone seeing him attach the JATO units back at that turnout,” said Dar. “And then—” “JATO units!” said Cameron, taking his hat off and rubbing the sweat liner with his fingers. “Jet Assist Take Off units,” said Dar. “They’re essentially just large, strap-on, solid-fuel rockets that the Air Force once used to get heavy cargo planes off the ground when the runway was too short or the load was too—” “I know what the fuck JATO stands for,” snapped Cameron. “I was in the Corps, man. But where would some dickweed with an ’82 El Camino get two of those?” Dar shrugged. “Andrews Air Force Base just north of here. Twelve Palms just down the road. More military bases around here than any other comparable patch of real estate in the United States. Who the hell knows what military surplus they sell for scrap or whatever.” “JATO units!” said Cameron, looking at the endless skid marks again. They weaved in several places, but recovered and then headed straight as a double-shafted, black arrow for the distant canyon. “Why’d he use two?” “One wouldn’t have done him much good unless he sat on it,” said Dar. “If he lit off just one and it wasn’t positioned perfectly on the El Camino’s exact center of mass, the vehicle would’ve just spun like a Catherine wheel until the rocket dug or melted him a hole in the desert.” “All right,” said Cameron. “He strapped or bolted or cinched on Dar rubbed his chin; he had neglected to shave in the rush to get going. “Then he waited for a break in traffic and lit them. Probably a simple battery circuit. Once they’re lit, you can’t shut them off. They’re essentially just oversized skyrockets, like miniature versions of the two strap-on boosters that the space shuttle uses. Light ’em and go. No turning back.” “So he turned into a space shuttle,” said Cameron, his expression strange. He looked at the mountains two miles away. “Airborne all the way into that rock wall.” “Not all the way,” said Dar, turning on the ThinkPad and pointing to some delta-v estimates. “I can only guess at the thrust those things put out, but the rocket flare melted those patches of the highway back there and probably got him up to about two hundred and eighty-five miles per hour at just the point these skid marks begin, about twelve seconds after ignition.” “Helluva ride,” said Cameron. “Maybe the kid was going for a land speed record,” agreed Dar. “About this point, with the telephone poles flashing past in the dark like a picket fence—the rocket blast would’ve illuminated them—our boy had second thoughts. He slammed on the brakes.” “Lot of good it did him,” said Cameron. The sergeant was almost whispering now. “Brake linings melted,” agreed Dar. “Brake drums melted. Tires started coming apart. You notice that just the last hundred meters or so of road marks are intermittent.” “Brakes going on and off?” said Cameron, his voice filling now with the future pleasure of telling and retelling this story. Cops loved roadkill. Dar shook his head. “Nope. These are just tire-melt patches at this point. The El Camino is taking thirty and forty-foot hops before becoming completely airborne.” “Holy shit,” said Cameron, sounding almost gleeful. “Yes,” said Dar. “There’s a final melt point just beyond where the tire marks cease. That’s where the JATO units were burning down at a nice healthy thirty-six-degree takeoff angle. The El Camino’s climb ratio must have been impressive.” “Fuck me.” The sergeant grinned. “So those candles burned all the way to the cliff wall?” Dar shook his head. “My guess is that they burned out about fifteen seconds after takeoff. The rest of his ride was pure ballistics.” He pointed to the GPS map on the ThinkPad’s screen, with the simple equations to the right of the arching trajectory from desert to canyon wall. “The road turns and starts climbing where he impacted,” said Cameron. Dar winced slightly. He hated the verb-use of nouns such as “Like a rifle bullet.” “Precisely.” “What do you think his…can’t think of the word…high point was?” “Apogee?” said Dar. He looked at the computer screen. “Probably no less than two thousand and no more than twenty-eight hundred feet above the desert floor.” “Holy shit,” whispered Cameron again. “It was a short trip, but it must have been one hell of a ride.” Dar rubbed his ear. “I figure that after the first fifteen seconds or so, our guy was just a passive bystander, no longer a participant.” “What do you mean?” Dar touched the screen again. “I mean that even at the lowest boost rates I can plot to get him from here to there, he was pulling about eighteen g’s when he left the asphalt. A two hundred pound guy would have…” “Had the equivalent of three thousand four hundred extra pounds sitting on his face and chest,” said Cameron. “Ouch.” The sergeant’s radio squawked. “Sorry,” he said. “Gotta take this.” He stepped away to listen to the rasping and squawking while Dar turned off his computer and stored it in the cabin of the NSX. The car was idling again to keep the air-conditioning going. Cameron stepped closer. His expression was a queer mixture of a grin and a grimace. “Forensics boys just excavated the steering wheel of the El Camino from the crater,” he said softly. Dar waited. “Finger bones were embedded in the plastic,” finished Cameron. “Deeply embedded.” Dar shrugged. His phone chirped. He flipped it open, saying to the CHP sergeant, “This is what I love about California, Paul. Never out of a cell. Never out of touch.” He listened for a minute, said, “I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” and flipped the phone shut. “Time to go to work for real?” said Cameron, grinning now, obviously phrasing the telling and retelling of this for future days. Dar nodded. “That was Lawrence Stewart, my boss. He’s got something for me that sounds weirder than this shit.” |
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