It was late Sunday night or early Monday morning--depending on how you look at it--just past midnight. The small hours of the morning--when the skies around New York City were about as quiet as they ever get. It was an ideal time for the newest controller on board North Bay Tracon to pull watch as Controller-In-Charge.

In the darkened operations area of the North Bay Tracon, I had settled in at the supervisor’s desk and made my initial entries in the facility log. From the slightly raised dais of the desk, I could look across the dim quiet of the workspace and hear the muted voices of my team as they guided aircraft into and out of our airspace. We were just easing into the pace of the night when a sudden movement caught my eye down the bank of radar scopes.

Terry "Crash" Torres, formerly of Albuquerque Approach, was working West Sector with Pete "Slo-Draw" McGraw on as his radar assistant. That sector was normally pretty quiet until about four am, so what I saw alerted my instincts.

Terry rose abruptly to his feet, gazed blindly around the ops floor, then sank back into his chair, hands clenched in front of his mouth. In the hushed intensity, no one else seemed to noticed, but I was at his side in seconds.

"Oh shit, oh shit..." Terry chanted.

"What’s the matter, Crash?"

"I think I just lost one... Oh, shit..."

Pete, coming back from the printer with some flight strips in his hand, overheard that. He leaned over Terry’s shoulder, eyes on the scope. "Where? Which one?"

Terry pointed to an empty spot near the edge of the screen. "I--I lost him there. He said he blew an engine." He took a shuddering breath as he struggle for control. "I was trying to vector him back to Barrens when I lost him."

I squinted at the screen. "Barrens? Glen Cove is closer…"

"He wanted to go back to Barrens," Terry said.

"Well, let me check with Westbury and see if they got anything on him." I reached for the interphone but Pete knocked my hand away.

"He wanted to go back to Barrens--—" Pete repeated with a weird insistence.

"Barrens? So what--?" At his intense expression, realization dawned on me. "Oh-- —no. You mean he was one of those?"

"Yeah, he was one of those. Damn, this could get sticky--."

"Pete, I need to call someone--—" I was almost pleading. "He could still be alive out there."

"In a King Air? Over the water? Don’t kid yourself, Dara--—it’s too late for him. He’s already gone."

“You gotta do something," Terry looked shattered. “I--—I think I turned him the wrong way—”

Pete squatted next to Terry’s chair, his voice pitched to penetrate the fog of panic Terry radiated. “You hadn’t talked to him, right? He didn’t make any calls when he was going down?”

“He called--—it was Cordell. He said his engine had swallowed a piston… Oh, shit--—I think--—I turned him the wrong way--—”

“Calm down, Crash--—calm down--—" I tried to collect my thoughts and comfort Terry at the same time. “The turn didn’t matter--—if he’d just departed Barrens it would have been almost a one-eighty which ever way he went. He couldn’t have made it either way.”

“Oh shit, oh shit…” Terry gulped. “I am so screwed…”

Pete straightened and ran his hands through his hair. “This is gonna look so bad--—especially when they find out the plane was stolen. Gonna raise all sorts of questions.”

“Damn--—” I forced myself to relax my fingers--—which had been digging into the back of Terry’s chair. “They start poking around, we could all go down. You assholes--—”

Pete cut me off. “Look--—this is one of those cases where we have to hang together, “ he said. "The NTSB’s gonna be all over us." He leaned over and grabbed the arms of Terry’s chair, his face just inches from Terry’s. “No matter what happens--—we didn’t talk to this guy," he said stubbornly.

He turned and caught hold of my arm. “You got to erase the tape. And do something about the position log.” When I opened my mouth to protest, he raised a warning finger. “We never talked to the guy and can’t determine who was working this sector.” He gave a theatrical shrug. “Records get lost--—maybe the computer went down. It happens all the time.”

“They aren’t going to buy that…”

“They’ll have to--—at least publicly. They won’t be able to prove otherwise.”

I glanced around the floor. The rest of our team seemed blithely unaware of our plight. Two scopes away, “Lightenin’ Bob” Coles watched his screen, a pencil clutched in one hand, waving it as if conducting an orchestra. Farther on, Loretta Rossetti and Doug Stewart, working East Sector, were huddled over their scope, dealing with some minor issue of their own.

“Okay--—okay--—I can fix the tapes and the logs, but the radar data has to go away. I don’t know how to do that…”

“I do,” Pete said. “I’ll talk to Roger--—maybe we can arrange a retroactive radar outage.” He jerked his head toward the sup’s desk. “You need to get on the phone before the plane’s reported down and tell the MCC we have a radar outage that started about fifteen minutes ago…”

“Okay--—I’ll see what I can do.” I didn’t like it, but I was in this too far to back out now. It would look suspicious of course, but outages weren’t all that uncommon, and as Pete had said, if we all stuck to our story, the investigators would have to believe us.

Hell of a way to start the week.

“The aircraft hit the water about a hundred yards out,” Mike Culhane explained. His hands sketched the details in the cool morning air. “The NTSB thinks the plane cartwheeled for about fifty feet before the wings separated from the fuselage. The plane ended up on the rocks here, just above the high-tide mark.”

“He almost made it,” Detective Eames observed. The slight off-shore breeze ruffled her dark blonde hair. She kept her hands deep in the pockets of her coat—despite the clear morning, the sun had not yet warmed the air.

“Yeah, a couple more feet of altitude and he might have been able to walk away from this,” Culhane said.

“So, Mike, why’d you call us in on this? Shouldn’t this be a Federal investigation?" asked Detective Goren, arching one eyebrow.

"Yeah, normally, but our unit had been developing leads on a possible drug running operation based here. Cocaine. This pilot, this Dan Cordell—we’d been putting pressure on him and he’d just agreed to cooperate with our investigation." He sighed. "So when the NTSB released his name as the fatality, I called their inspector."

The three regarded the impact site silently for a moment. Though the wreckage had been removed, the gray rocks bore evidence of impact—pale scars and paint smears that testified to the violence.

"The NTSB guy thinks the plane was rigged," Culhane said. "One of the piston rods may have been partially cut through—we’ll know more later in the week after the lab tests come back." He shook his head. "But either way--—Cordell’s gone. If he had been just a few seconds further away from shore, we may never have recovered the plane."

"Looks like someone was trying to silence him," Eames offered.

"Someone did," Goren said.

"What’s kinda strange is--—the Feds say when the pilot got in trouble, he didn’t call for help. At least they have no record of it. No record he ever talked to anyone, not the controllers--—no one." The stocky detective dropped to his haunches beside a large rock bearing a streak of white paint across one side. He rubbed it thoughtfully. "You would someone going down like that would be hollering for help."

"Maybe not--—if he had a load of illegal drugs on board," Goren said.

"Nah—the plane was clean," Culhane replied. He rose and dusted off his hands. "No stash on board—though the lab thinks it found traces—signs there may have been drugs carried at one time." He sighed, frustrated. "Another thing--—the number painted on the plane--—the N-number--—isn’t the one assigned to this plane. It belongs to a single-engine Cessna aircraft in Idaho, according to the FAA records. The serial numbers on this plane match those of a Beechcraft stolen six months previously from California. "

"So the plane was stolen and given a bogus number?" Eames said.

"Looks that way," Culhane said. "Once we started sniffing around the airfield here, we found a couple more airplanes that appear to have been stolen, and a set-up that looks like they are being repainted, given new numbers… We were hoping to develop more information from Cordell on who’s behind this whole set up, but now he’s gone--—conveniently.”

He turned to regard his two colleagues. "Getting information from the Feds is like pulling teeth. There’s some problem with the FAA—they are giving us the run-around. I don’t know what’s going on with them. So we thought we’d get Major Case involved in the investigation—you guys have the experience and clout. Maybe you can shake something loose here."

Continue to Chapter Two

Glossary