Day of Wrath

The tall, gaunt head of the NTSB investigative team, Robert Nielsen, was in one of those small groups. Nielsen turned his head when Thorn and the others came in. He immediately broke away from his colleagues and came over to meet them.

Nielsen looked tired and irritated. The higher-ups in Washington and Moscow were all over the investigation, demanding answers instantly.

Thorn, Helen, and Koniev had been careful not to joggle his elbow, because they understood the difficulties the crash team was operating under. Distant bureaucrats were not as understanding — or as patient.

Still, Thorn and the others needed something, if only a status report.

“Do you have any theories about what went wrong yet?” Helen asked softly.

“Theories, yes. Proof, no.” Nielsen hesitated. “The pilot’s Mayday calls show he lost both props — one right after the other before the plane augered in. So right now we’re looking pretty hard at some kind of catastrophic engine or fuel system failure. That seems the most likely scenario anyway.”

“But you don’t have any hard data that would confirm that?”

Koniev pressed.

Nielsen shook his head wearily. “No, Major, we don’t.” He pointed to two marked sections on the floor. Both were nearly empty. “That’s where we’re going to reconstruct the engines … when we find them. So far we’ve only recovered twenty to thirty percent of the wreck.”

Thorn cut in with a question of his own — one that had been bothering him ever since he’d read the English-language transcripts of the An-3”-s last radio calls. “What are the odds of something going wrong with both engines like that? Accidentally, I mean?”

Nielsen chewed his lower lip for a moment, plainly reluctant to give them a hard and fast answer. Finally, he said slowly, “If this were an American plane flying from an American airport, I’d tell you the odds against losing both props accidentally were high — very high.”

Then the NTSB chief glanced quickly at Koniev and said quietly, “But a Russian aircraft? With Russian maintenance? Well, that puts us in a whole new ballpark, Colonel. I can’t rule anything out. Not a thing.”

_{FBI/MVD Evidence Holding Area, Crash Investigation Base Camp}

Colonel Peter Thorn slid the contents of yet another black plastic bag out onto a folding table and began carefully sorting through the pile.

Scorched wallets. Broken watches. Torn clothing.

Razors. Other toiletries. Mangled paperback books. They were all personal effects recovered from the crash site — the belongings of the dozen men who had died when the doomed An32 fell out of the sky.

He sighed. Cataloging the victims’ possessions was a necessary and important part of any investigation. But that didn’t make it any easier. It raised too many ghosts. He flipped one of the wallets open and stared down at the happy faces of a man and woman surrounded by four smiling children — three adolescent boys and a much younger girl.

It was a picture of Marv Wright, one of John Avery’s team members, and his family.

Thorn shut the wallet and closed his eyes for an instant. He’d met Wright just before the ex-Navy diver shipped out for Moscow. The man had been eager and willing — ready for a new start, a new adventure.

Now what was left of him was lying on a slab inside the morgue tent … “Peter?”

Thorn looked across the tent to where Helen Gray sat sorting through her own pile of personal effects. “Yes?”

“Can you take a look at these for a second?” She held up a pair of battered leather-bound notebooks.

Thorn was at her side in seconds. He leaned over her shoulder and gently touched the front cover of one of the notebooks. Despite the scorch marks and mud stains, he could still make out the gold embossed seal of O.S.I.A. It was an arms inspection team logbook.

He nodded. “You just hit the jackpot, Helen.”

Helen opened the other logbook, carefully peeling torn and charred pages away from each other. She scanned one page and then another.

Her eyes narrowed.

“What’s up?” Thorn asked, leaning closer.

She showed him a page filled with row after row of eightdigit numbers.

All of them had a check mark beside them. “Are these what I think they are?”

“Bomb identifier codes? Yeah, they are,” Thorn agreed.

“Then what do you make of this?” Helen asked, turning the page.

Thorn stared down at more rows of serial numbers. Again, all were checked off. But this time one of the bomb ID codes was also circled boldly. Why? He looked at Helen. “Whose logbook is this?”

“It belonged to John Avery, Peter.”

Avery.

Thorn frowned. He’d known the inspection team leader for years — long before either of them wound up working for O.S.I.A.