Executive orders - Tom Clancy [25]
Hutchins nodded tentative agreement. Explosives are fairly light. Even a few tons, given the carrying capacity of the 747-400, would not have compromised the mission at all, and the payoff would have been enormous. What we have here is a fairly straightforward crash. The residual damage was done by about half a load of jet fuel-upwards of eighty tons. That was plenty, he concluded. Hutchins had been investigating airplane accidents for almost thirty years.
It's much too early to draw conclusions, Price warned.
Scott?
If this was-hell, Adler shook his head. This was not an act by their government. They're frantic over there. The newspapers are calling for the heads of the people who suborned the government in the first place, and Prime Minister Koga was nearly in tears over the phone. Put it this way, if somebody over there planned this, they'll find out for us.
Their idea of due process isn't quite as stringent as ours, Murray added. Andrea is right. It is too early to draw conclusions, but all of the indications so far point to a random act, not a planned one. Murray paused for a moment. For that matter, we know the other side developed nuclear weapons, remember? Even the coffee turned cold with that remark.
THIS ONE HE found under a bush while moving a ladder from one part of the west face to another. The firefighter had been on duty for seven straight hours. He was numb by now. You can take only so much horror before the mind starts regarding the bodies and pieces as mere things. The remains of a child might have shaken him, or even a particularly pretty female, since this fireman was still young and single, but the body he'd accidentally stepped on wasn't one of those. The torso was headless, and parts of both legs were missing, but it was clearly the body of a man, wearing the shredded remains of a white shirt, with epaulets at the shoulders. Three stripes on each of them, he saw. He wondered what that meant, too tired to do much in the way of thinking. The fireman turned and waved to his lieutenant, who in turn tapped the arm of a woman wearing a vinyl FBI windbreaker.
This agent walked over, sipping at a plastic cup and wishing she could light a cigarette-still too many lingering fumes for that, she grumbled.
Just found this one. Funny place, but-
Yeah, funny. The agent lifted her camera and snapped a couple of pictures which would have the exact time electronically preserved on the frame. Next she took a pad from her pocket and noted the placement for body number four on her personal list. She hadn't seen many for her particular area of responsibility. Some plastic stakes and yellow tape would further mark the site; she started writing the tag for it. You can turn him over.
Under the body, they saw, was an irregularly shaped piece of flat glass-or glass-like plastic. The agent snapped another photo, and through the viewfinder things somehow looked more interesting than with the naked eye. A glance up showed a gap in the marble balustrade. Another look around revealed a lot of small metallic objects, which an hour earlier she'd decided were aircraft parts, and which had attracted the attention of an NTSB investigator, who was now conferring with the same fire-department officer with whom she'd been conferring a minute earlier. The agent had to wave three times to get his attention.
What is it? The NTSB investigator was cleaning his glasses with a handkerchief.
The agent pointed. Check the shirt out.
Crew, the man said, after putting them back on. Maybe a driver. What's this? It was his turn to point.
There was a strange delicacy to it. The white uniform shirt had a hole in it just to the right of the pocket. The hole was surrounded by a red-rust stain. The FBI agent held her flashlight close, and that showed that the stain was dried. The current temperature was just under twenty degrees. The body had been thrown into this harsh environment virtually at the moment of impact, and the blood about the severed neck was frozen, the purple-red color of some horrid plum sherbet. The blood on the